[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are the best papers you read in your life?
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Ask HN: What are the best papers you read in your life?
I'm trying to get an understanding on what quality means in terms
of publishing research and I learn best through examples. Any
recommendation is highly appreciated ^^. I'm also interested in
papers from many disciplines, so the wider the range of domains,
the higher the value!
Author : toombowoombo
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-07-21 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
| croisillon wrote:
| there was one about meter and rhyme that was written in meter and
| rhyme, can't find it anymore
| mekanotubo wrote:
| https://www.kith.org/words/2022/06/11/best-linguistics-paper...
| croisillon wrote:
| thank you <3
| jekude wrote:
| Computers and Automata by Claude Shannon -
| https://fermatslibrary.com/s/computers-and-automata.
|
| Absolutely fantastic paper summarizing the field of automata in
| the 1950s. Amazing how amazing of a surveyor Shannon was. I wish
| there was a present-day analog for the field now.
| peanutcrisis wrote:
| Whatever you think the Sokal Squared hoax[0] does or does not
| demonstrate, you have to admit the papers are pretty humorous:
|
| Who Are They to Judge?: Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework
| for Fat Bodybuilding [1]
|
| Separately, Alan Sokal has written a measured take on Robin
| DiAngelo's best selling book on "White Fragility"[2], which
| thrived on the mania post-George Floyd.
|
| [0] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-
| studi...
|
| [1]
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21604851.2018.14...
|
| [2] https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/white_fragility_FINAL2.pdf
| jacobgorm wrote:
| Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System
|
| Is the paper that has influenced me the most.
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/35037.35059
| suprjami wrote:
| Congestion Avoidance and Control (1988) by Van Jacobson:
| https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf
|
| Often called "the paper which saved the internet" due to solving
| congestion collapse on the ARPANET, and inventing the
| fundamentals of TCP Congestion Control still used countless times
| every single day on all computers everywhere. It's very readable
| and presents complex math in easily understood graphs for non-
| math people.
| brudgers wrote:
| _Proof of an external world_ , G.E. Moore, 1939.
|
| https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Moore1.pdf
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A
| Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
|
| Their methodology is brilliant. I want this research replicated,
| all over the place, all the time, with different variables.
|
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
| jlebar wrote:
| Two classics as relevant today as ever:
|
| End to end principle:
| https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoe...
|
| The rise of "worse is better": https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-
| better.html
| Kelamir wrote:
| "Brain over body"-A study on the willful regulation of autonomic
| function during cold exposure
| lairv wrote:
| Paths, Trees, and Flowers from Jack Edmonds (1965)
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-...
|
| Presents a beautiful algorithm (maximum matching in general
| graphs) and is very well written
| optimalsolver wrote:
| The Universe Of Minds:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.0369.pdf
|
| Possible Girls:
|
| https://philpapers.org/archive/SINPG
| DicIfTEx wrote:
| I remember seeing "Possible Girls" cited somewhere as an
| example of the pointlessness of contemporary academic
| philosophy, but for years I couldn't find it again. A very
| entertaining re-read, thanks for sharing.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"[1] is
| often considered a classic. I think this is because:
|
| 1. It's quite readable as a narrative.
|
| 2. The maths is not pages of first principle derivations as if
| the reader is not familiar with the basics of algebraic
| substitution.
|
| 3. The diagrams and graphs are genuinely useful and remove the
| need for many, many thousands of words that others may have used
| instead of, or in addition to, the core narrative.
|
| 4. It deals with an abstract concept but roots it in concrete
| mathematical and physical terms. He touches on specific examples.
|
| 5. It's quite short given the breadth of subject area.
|
| [1]
| https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...
| b33j0r wrote:
| His easily-understandable yet mind-blowing ideas of
| hyperspheres of information (and a reliable communications
| channel having a definition!? What?) changed my brain
| permanently.
|
| This is the paper I was going to cite as well.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| "What is it like to be a bat" (Nagel)
|
| "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm", (Gould
| et al)
|
| " A quantitative description of membrane current and its
| application to conduction and excitation in nerve" (hodgkin and
| huxley)
|
| a few other that don't come to mind right now
| galkk wrote:
| I can give example of one of worst papers.
|
| Original IPFS paper is one of worst papers that I had read.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| worse sounds like a topic. You haven't explained why btw.
| omgmajk wrote:
| This was a very interesting read for me: "WhoTracks .Me: Shedding
| light on the opaque world of online tracking (2018)"
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08959
|
| Also this one: "The Internet (Never) Forgets (2017) PDF"
| https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1037&con...
| Thoeu388 wrote:
| Gillian Russell, "Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts,"
|
| It is about traditional martial arts masters, trapped in their
| echo chamber, sniffing their own farts. The whole industry gets
| its ass kicked by mixed martial arts. Basically street thugs
| versus shaolin kung fu masters.
|
| it describes in-group bias, echo chambers, and cognitive
| dissonance in large groups. Very applicable in modern science,
| politics and so on.
| SebRollen wrote:
| A few fun ones from finance:
|
| https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/simon-peyton-jone...
|
| http://www.thierry-roncalli.com/download/smart-beta-minimum-...
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3211951
| cyrillite wrote:
| I would really love more recommendations in this area if you
| have them
| ryukafalz wrote:
| "A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda-Calculus" by Jonathan A.
| Rees is pretty high up there:
| https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5944
|
| I read this a few years back as I was going down an object-
| capability rabbit hole and found it extremely compelling. (And
| also made me disappointed that most of the systems we use today
| do not work like this! Code execution vulnerabilities would be so
| much less immediately hazardous if they did.)
| henrydark wrote:
| My idea of being explicit and clear changed dramatically after I
| was exposed to D. Harel's "Statecharts: a visual formalism for
| complex systems".
|
| Ironically, I think the paper presents more than just the idea
| and examples of statecharts, rather it also _implicitly_ contains
| a _method_ for discovering mechanism - the long winded example of
| the author's digital watch, in my eyes, is a marvel.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Lisanne Bainbridge, Ironies of Automation. Especially timely now
| when every company is bolting a LLM onto the side of their
| software.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697
|
| Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes
| in dyadic games:
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
|
| Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237005499_Simple_Ma...
| ely-s wrote:
| In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russel
| kleiba wrote:
| I'm originally from CS but have an interest in linguistics. I can
| highly recommend any paper by the late Charles J. Fillmore who
| over many decaded developed ideas that rivaled the standard
| Chomskian school of thought.
|
| His wikipedia page lists a few publications that could serve as
| starting points:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Fillmore#Publicatio...
| snowstormsun wrote:
| New Directions in Cryptography (WHITFIELD DIFFIE AND MARTIN E.
| HELLMAN, MEMBER, IEEE), https://www-
| ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf
| nucatus wrote:
| Probably this paper [1] is very well known among the classic HN
| audience, but I dare to leave this link here for the ones who
| missed it. It is an easy read and it just explains with plain
| words the backbone of the UNIX system as it was envisioned 50
| years ago.
|
| [1] https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Not a paper, but _The Extravagant Universe_ by Robert Kirschner
| describes decades worth of observation and data collection in
| astronomy, coming together with experimental discoveries from
| particle colliders and evolving theory in order to eventually
| converge upon the now-standard LCDM model in cosmology. Also
| includes an enormous background on the century worth of
| discoveries that eventually resulted in the type-1A supernova
| becoming a sufficiently reliable standard candle to measure the
| distance to galaxies far enough away that the redshift
| demonstrated accelerating expansion of the universe. So many
| things they needed to work out, from dust diffraction patterns to
| the differences in how spectrum evolves over the two weeks or so
| from the initial explosion event to figure out exactly when in
| the timeline each observation is taking place. Combine that with
| the logistics of telescope scheduling and the sparsity of
| observations when you 're looking at something as large as the
| entire universe and your telescope can only cover so much at any
| one time. It gives you a tremendous appreciation for the sheer
| amount of work and patience that goes into this, slowly
| collecting evidence over decades, waiting for technology to
| develop before certain evidence is even possible to collect, and
| eventually seeing lines of evidence all point in the same
| direction, but only after a literal lifetime of work to get
| there.
|
| Nothing else has ever made me appreciate how hard science really
| is and how little the general public understands it.
| bradly wrote:
| Have most people read a paper? I see threads like these with some
| many interesting suggestion, but are they read by people outside
| of their general area of study or expertise? I read quite a bit
| of fiction, but I've never really been able to read anything much
| past an abstract which much understanding. I have no science
| background. Am I missout on something?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Generally you need background knowledge to read papers. A quick
| way to gain necessary background knowledge is to read
| literature reviews or surveys. If you can't understand even
| reviews, surveys, or introductions, it is time to read
| textbooks.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| Of course we are missing out. Why would one make the effort to
| study if there was nothing to gain?
| imtringued wrote:
| This is probably among the best I have read:
| https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1462&co...
|
| In a system with growing inequality where the rich benefit at the
| expense of the poor, this artificial redistribution can go on for
| some time, but once the inequality gets so bad that people
| revolt, then the amount of "guard labor" that needs to be
| performed goes up. Poverty and desperation makes people more
| likely to perform "guard labor" because it gives them a chance to
| escape poverty and avoid being targeted themselves which further
| feeds into authoritarian politicians gaining more power as they
| have no trouble finding soldiers willing to maintain the
| inequality. This works but only until guard labor reaches such a
| critical mass that half the population engages in it. Once that
| point is crossed, guard labor will start defecting against the
| current political leadership and conduct a military coup.
| owlbite wrote:
| The Conjugate Gradient Method without the Agonizing Pain
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake-papers/painless-conjugate-grad...
|
| Presents a really nice conceptual/intuitive explanation of
| how/why it works, rather than the traditional algebra based
| definition/proof you get in many linear algebra courses.
| napona7405 wrote:
| The Bitcoin whitepaper. It started my curiosity in the computer
| security industry (employed for 5 years now) and the rabbithole
| of trying to understand every design decision behind the
| cryptosystem.
| pyb wrote:
| Agreed, this is a must-read, very well-written paper. Even
| though it turned out the world didn't really need
| cryptocurrencies.
| lowkey wrote:
| Agree with your assessment of cryptocurrencies in general but
| having seen the adoption of Bitcoin in authoritarian and
| inflationary regimes, the world most certainly does need
| access to a digital peer-to-peer currency that is censorship-
| resistant and virtually immune to debasement.
|
| Even if you argue that Bitcoin as it has evolved has flaws,
| it is the best implementation we've come up with so far. Like
| democracy, it isn't perfect but it is much better for its use
| case than anything else we have come up with to date.
| madphilosopher wrote:
| The Bitcoin whitepaper is one of my cherished reads. The other
| is the BitTorrent whitepaper. Both technologies changed the
| technical and non-technical worlds, and the fundamental
| protocols are clearly explained in their respective papers.
| rolandog wrote:
| Nice! It's really well written. I have followed a similar path,
| but for me, the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" [0] paper was
| the one that sent me down the rabbit-hole.
|
| [0]
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
| amadsen wrote:
| If you are looking for quality I suggest you look at the IPCC
| reports. Each word is carefully chosen, every claim backed by
| mountains of evidence. They're written to be read and understood
| by non-experts. They exist to inform decision making that will
| literally determine the fate of our species. As such, they may be
| failing at their goal, but not for a lack of effort by the
| authors.
| froggychairs wrote:
| One of the best pitches I've ever read for an IPCC report. They
| are good reads too! Maybe not very joyful.
| juujian wrote:
| Agreed, with one caveat. Over time governments have more and
| more been trying to influence the reports. It all came to a
| head with the last one, where a set of researchers released
| their draft ahead of time in protest over undue influence. They
| still synthesize relevant research from past years, but there
| are some problems now. Research published after the first draft
| cannot be included, so the report is somewhat outdated by the
| time it's released. Beautifully crafted though.
| imakwana wrote:
| My favorite: Herbert Simon & Alan Newell's ACM Turing Award
| Lecture - "Computer Science as an empirical inquiry: Symbols &
| Search" :
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/360018.360022
|
| Their work on list processing was an inspiration for John
| McCarthy's famous paper on Lisp:
|
| http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Principles of Design (1998) by Tim Berners-Lee. Especially its
| Principle of Least Power.
|
| https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html
| juujian wrote:
| Not sure anybody here appreciates social science, but I will
| never not give a shout-out to "Decoupling Rape" by Whiteman and
| Cooper. Such an authentic account, while still managing to stay
| relevant to abstract and higher-order debates in my field. I
| suspect many have not read it because it is so heart-wrenching
| though.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| That's Whiteman*, not white man ;)
| juujian wrote:
| Autocorrect strikes again :)
| rolandog wrote:
| One I particularly liked: "FastDTW: Toward Accurate Dynamic Time
| Warping in Linear Time and Space" by Stan Salvador and Philip
| Chan.
|
| [0] https://cs.fit.edu/~pkc/papers/tdm04.pdf
| _gmax0 wrote:
| Didn't think I'd come across a DTW paper here.
|
| Have you seen anything worth reading in that line of literature
| which addresses a more practical issue of segment sizing and
| segment overlap on accuracy?
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Like Kleobis and Biton, we won't know until I am dead.
|
| However thus far, a paper that literally changed my life: "Value
| Dependence Graphs: Representation Without Taxation", D. Weise, R.
| F. Crew, M. Ernst, B. Steensgaard, POPL 1994. (This was the
| proverbial butterfly flap that moved me through three countries).
|
| There are many many other good papers and it's not a one-
| dimension metric so it's hard to pick out winners.
| gtsnexp wrote:
| A quantitative description of membrane current and its
| application to conduction and excitation in nerve A L HODGKIN, A
| F HUXLEY J Physiol. 1952 Aug;117(4):500-44.
| lp251 wrote:
| "On Bandwidth"-- a paper version of a Shannon Lecture by Slepian.
|
| The abstract begins with "It is easy to argue that real signals
| must be bandlimited. It is also easy to argue they cannot be so.
| This paper presents one possible resolution of this paradox"
|
| http://web.eng.ucsd.edu/~massimo/ECE287C/Handouts_files/On-B...
| onco wrote:
| "Retinoic Acid and Arsenic Trioxide for Acute Promyelocytic
| Leukemia" by Lo-Coco et al. from 2013.[0]
|
| This paper presents a cure for an extremely aggressive cancer
| using vitamin A and arsenic. Its a unique, relatively benign
| treatment strategy that completely avoids chemotherapy. As far as
| I know this is the best result in all of oncology, though the
| cancer it treats is very rare.
|
| The most well known paper in oncology that is probably more
| interesting to a general audience is "The Hallmarks of Cancer" by
| Hanahan and Weinberg.[1]
|
| [0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1300874
|
| [1]
| https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(00)81683-9?_re...
| [deleted]
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