Alternatives
Products that do what Trace the history of academia does
Wikipedia often lists the doctoral advisors of famous scientists. I wanted to be able to pick a scientist and recursively find their mentors. This information has no practical value, but I thought it was interesting. John McCarthy's mentor history is especially awesome; John McCarthy (computer scientist) >> Solomon Lefschetz ... >> >> >> >> >> >> Carl Friedrich Gauss ... >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> Jakob Thomasius ... >>…
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Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one…
2024 · paulbupejr.com
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2016 · github.com
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Hello HN, Over the last 12 months, I have been building https://learnawesome.org This idea came from Danny Hillis' 2012 talk at OSCON, which itself was inspired from Neal Stepehenson's _The Diamond Age : A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_ The dream is to build a tool that matches the right learning material to the right student at the right time. Wikipedia is great, but it doesn't do a good job of leveraging the rich variety of learning resources that exist on the Web. Same applies to GoodReads - which is focused only on books, whereas these days we actually learn from videos,…
2020
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Wiki Journey tracks your daily Wikipedia rabbit holes in a tree format. Available on Firefox and Chrome: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiki-journey/ https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wiki-journey/lehenb... It's open source, feel free to contribute! https://github.com/demegire/wiki-journey
2024 · chromewebstore.google.com
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Hi, this is Andrew (arhpreston) and Ben (benjyk) from Cassyni (https://cassyni.com). We both completed PhDs in physics before going on to found Publons and Kopernio, companies that were acquired by -- and became a part of -- Web of Science, a product researchers on HN may be familiar with. It is well known how important academic seminars are for networking, promoting your research, and keeping up with latest developments. But the scale is under-appreciated: by our estimates more than 1 million academic seminars were happening every year. And then Covid came along... As a result…
2021
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Hi HN, The discussion pops up regularly about which MOOCs and courses to take so I figured I'd start a curated list of recommendations. It's by no means exhaustive (and it's just the ones I know) and is quite broad. If you had any suggestions, feel free to create a PR or Issue, or even respond to this post and I will add it. I'd love to be able to capture quality somehow, but not sure of the way to go about that just yet. https://github.com/tombasche/professional-development
2020
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2020 · csnotes.me
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Hi HN, Over past few months, some of us had been collecting links to learning resources (courses, interactive explorables, books, podcasts, apps, forums, livestreams etc) in a GitHub repository of markdown files. Since we also wanted to have features like advanced search ("Show me podcasts on machine learning which are entertaining and less than 40 minutes long"), we felt the need for an app. Give it a try: https://learnawesome.org You can think of LearnAwesome.org as a GoodReads-equivalent tool generalized to links to ALL media (not just books). Some features you might like: -…
2019
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Hey HN! Over the weekend (leaning heavily on Opus 4.5) I wrote Jargon - an AI-managed zettelkasten that reads articles, papers, and YouTube videos, extracts the key ideas, and automatically links related concepts together. Demo video: https://youtu.be/W7ejMqZ6EUQ Repo: https://github.com/schoblaska/jargon You can paste an article, PDF link, or YouTube video to parse, or ask questions directly and it'll find its own content. Sources get summarized, broken into insight cards, and embedded for semantic search. Similar ideas automatically cluster together. Each…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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2016 · liber-brunoniana.github.io
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2015 · wikifeat.com
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2012 · chrome.google.com
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The AI research assistant that cites real sources honestly
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Since medical school years ago, I have been trying to find way for long term knowledge management and retention. I finally ended up with Obsidian on the desktop, but it's still difficult to access my knowledge anywhere online, until I made my own online wiki. Things that helped me get to this step: 1. "How to Take Smart Notes" 2. Evergreen notes by Andy: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes. This website shows the culmination of my personal knowledge with search bar. The idea is that I should be able to find what I'm looking for within seconds, otherwise the title…
2023 · wiki.krxiang.com
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Interesting to see that the entrepreneurs from more recent years tend to be doing well relative to years prior. Some interesting future directions could be: - Expanding search to be global and include more competitions, like biology and chemistry - Improving search so less unknown results - Showing insights, like trends over the years Kudos to Perplexity Computer for making this
Apr 2026 · perplexity.ai
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Here is the link: http://www.wikihowtodo.com I know a lot of geeks share the same dream -- build the next kick-ass todo-list/project management system. So do I. However, as I was quite positive that my web development skill is worse than 99% of developers' in this community, I decided to build something simple, useless but unique. So I built this. Basically it's a Wikihow scraper, nothing more. It gives you a place to store interesting Wikihow articles and yes, they are converted into todo lists. I know this site is not that good, but I still need your guys' feedback. For example, as I am a…
2010
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2017 · coursefriend.com
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2012 · whodiedhere.com
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