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Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?

https://simedw.com/2025/07/10/gemini-bounding-boxes/
95•simedw•1h ago•16 comments

How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-figure-out-how-to-prove-lies-20250709/
140•nsoonhui•4h ago•94 comments

Optimizing a Math Expression Parser in Rust

https://rpallas.xyz/math-parser/
75•serial_dev•5h ago•40 comments

Show HN: Typeform was too expensive so I built my own forms

https://www.ikiform.com/
85•preetsuthar17•5h ago•53 comments

Mini robots detect and fix water pipe leaks without digging

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/mini-robots-detect-fix-water-pipe-leaks-without-digging
29•Bluestein•2d ago•20 comments

Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/07/welcome-to-thunderbird-140-eclipse/
199•TangerineDream•2d ago•116 comments

MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

https://mcp-b.ai/
279•bustodisgusto•15h ago•143 comments

Tree Borrows

https://plf.inf.ethz.ch/research/pldi25-tree-borrows.html
528•zdw•23h ago•135 comments

A Typology of Canadianisms

https://dchp.arts.ubc.ca/how-to-use
197•gnabgib•16h ago•227 comments

Author of William the Conqueror's 'Medieval Big Data' Project Revealed

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-07-02-author-william-conqueror-s-medieval-big-data-project-revealed
22•zeristor•3d ago•0 comments

Show HN: MCP server for searching and downloading documents from Anna's Archive

https://github.com/iosifache/annas-mcp
201•iosifache•17h ago•65 comments

Show HN: FlopperZiro – A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone

https://github.com/lraton/FlopperZiro
314•iraton•21h ago•67 comments

Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

https://github.com/snap-stanford/Biomni
205•GavCo•19h ago•30 comments

The Origin of the Research University

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university
103•Petiver•3d ago•20 comments

The jank programming language

https://jank-lang.org/
372•akkad33•3d ago•100 comments

Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment
232•dmazin•1d ago•354 comments

Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/technology/linda-yaccarino-x-steps-down.html
502•donohoe•23h ago•885 comments

Koala: A benchmark suite for performance-oriented shell-optimization research

https://github.com/kbensh/koala
5•matt_d•2d ago•2 comments

Radiocarbon dating reveals Rapa Nui not as isolated as previously thought

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-radiocarbon-dating-reveals-rapa-nui.html
29•wglb•2d ago•0 comments

The death of partying in the USA

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-partying-in-the-usaand
127•tysone•17h ago•208 comments

Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS

https://github.com/kushalpandya/Petrichor
162•kushalpandya•16h ago•79 comments

A fast 3D collision detection algorithm

https://cairno.substack.com/p/improvements-to-the-separating-axis
245•OlympicMarmoto•1d ago•29 comments

Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business

https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-funding
876•jonkuipers•2d ago•237 comments

Could a Paper Plane Thrown from the ISS Survive the Flight?

https://www.sciencealert.com/could-a-paper-plane-thrown-from-the-international-space-station-survive-the-flight
12•dxs•43m ago•3 comments

Archaeologists unveil 3,500-year-old city in Peru

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c07dmx38kyeo
171•neversaydie•3d ago•61 comments

Show HN: BreakerMachines – Modern Circuit Breaker for Rails with Async Support

https://github.com/seuros/breaker_machines
36•seuros•4d ago•17 comments

Xenharmlib: A music theory library that supports non-western harmonic systems

https://xenharmlib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
183•retooth•1d ago•18 comments

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Memory Safety Sanitizers

https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/sp/2025/223600a088/21TfesaEHTy
38•signa11•2d ago•13 comments

Grok 4 Launch [video]

https://twitter.com/xai/status/1943158495588815072
299•meetpateltech•10h ago•290 comments

Large-scale DNA study maps 37,000 years of human disease history

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/large-scale-dna-study-maps-37000-years-of-human-disease-history
11•XzetaU8•6h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

The Origin of the Research University

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university
103•Petiver•3d ago

Comments

sebmellen•8h ago
Those Trailblazing Teutons…
djoldman•3h ago
> The students were menaces, given to drunkenness, gambling, dueling, and chronically skipping class.

I came across this awhile ago and thought it pretty incredible and interesting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot

bonoboTP•3h ago
Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science.

I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.

biofox•2h ago
It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head:

Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century]

Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century]

Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century]

William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century]

Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century]

Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]

bonoboTP•2h ago
Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish.

Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician.

Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.

griffzhowl•1h ago
They were all educated at universities though.
bonoboTP•1h ago
Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.
analog31•20m ago
It could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science was barely a century old when Newton came along.
oersted•1h ago
The article does state that professors did do research, but in their free time.

For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description?

Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the university was a research institution.

Earlier many philosophers and mathematicians were also priests or monks, that’s also a lifestyle that allows for research without worrying about supporting yourself. Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyist aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research.

It’s the same story with most famous artists actually, even now. Most of open-source even operates that way, and it’s an important foundation of our modern world.

I don’t really know what to do about that, it’s not like giving everyone universal income would work either, most people do not have this impulse. And grant systems are pretty flawed too. But there is some important insight in the observation of how much has been achieved by people trying to do cool things as a hobby. It’s just really hard to support that systematically, almost by definition.

bonoboTP•57m ago
> Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research.

I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest nobility. It was much more common that they secured funding through patronage from or got hired by the aristocrats. The aristocrats didn't really do the hard work themselves, again with some exceptions.

oersted•51m ago
Indeed, the way I expressed it was an oversimplification. I generally wanted to make the point that they were people that weren’t forced to have a tiring full-time job just to get by, and that research was not really their job, with patronage as middle ground.
rjsw•22m ago
One example [1] of a group that was doing stuff outside universities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham

bee_rider•4m ago
Isn’t the idea of an aristocratic scientists with a lower class sidekick (actual scientist) doing all the work part of the trope, though? Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure I can come up with any examples. But, I thought that was the whole thing.
baby-yoda•1h ago
> There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science.

Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-opening revelation for me.

https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/...

biofox•1h ago
> [Maxwell] entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him.

> “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.”

Similar to what Jeffrey Epstein did.

dr_dshiv•52m ago
The Mouseion of Alexandria (the larger institution around the more famous library) was arguably the origin of the research university. Scholars there published scholarship in the humanities and sciences — and it lasted hundreds of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouseion

analog31•33m ago
Indeed, and I suppose its worth looking into the universities of the Muslim world. I read that at one point, there were more universities in Spain than in the rest of Europe.
mistrial9•51m ago
> It had a modern academic research library, the largest in the world, which featured brand-new innovations like organizing books on shelves by subjects with reference to a catalogue

the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is!

> It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics.

this is a glib treatment of seniority

> As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers)

but some genuinely funny lines too!

> Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research.

insightful

> before any kind of institutional academic specialization

it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-summary lines that sink credibility IMHO

megaloblasto•20m ago
I am so unimpressed with research universities in the US. Most just accept and neglect undergrad students. They use them as a steady income and have very little intention of providing them with a quality education.

I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a major state university. He told me that all of his professional goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with research impact, while 100% of the money he was allocated came from student tuition. The incentives are completely out of line and the students are the ones who pay the price.

bee_rider•9m ago
Weird, most of the money my professor had to spend on grad students came from grants, and the school takes a big chunk of the grants. I dunno where the undergrad money went. The student union was pretty, I guess.