Show HN: Back Me Up – Find papers that back your argument

A developer released Back Me Up, a tool that performs semantic search across PMC, bioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv to find published papers supporting a user-entered claim and returns a verdict. The developer states the project has no accuracy evaluations and was built as a throwaway evening project, with a frontend built using Sol and Opus. The tool was posted to Hacker News as a Show HN submission with 1 point and 0 comments.

Back Me Up is a tiny science-ish machine that finds published papers that back your argument. It stemmed from a conversation with a friend around life sciences, where we kind of landed at "surely there’s a paper confirming most arguments", i.e. coffee is bad, coffee is great, etc. You enter a claim, e.g. "drinking wine is good for the heart" - the system does a semantic search across a corpus PMC, bioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv - pulls in relevant quotes if they fit your claim, and gives you a verdict. Frontend was done with a combination of Sol + Opus, I spent a bit of time exploring different designs and landed on this slightly ridiculous printer that spits out your evidence. Some notes: - I have no accuracy evals, this was a throwaway thing I built, so no clue on reliability. It does pass the vibe test, so give it a whirl - Initially built a RAG for a tiny set of PMC, but scaling that up seemed like a lot of work for an evening project. Luckily found an API that does the semantic search across the different sources. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49709678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49709678 Points: 1 Comments: 0