Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

210 comments

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson is one of my favorites.

Most papers by Jon Bentley (e.g. A Sample of Brilliance) are also great reads.

I'm a frequent contributor to Fermat's Library, which posts an annotated paper (CS, Math and Physics mainly) every week. If you are looking for interesting papers to read, I would strongly recommend checking it out - http://fermatslibrary.com/

- Reflections on Trusting Trust (Annotated Version) - http://fermatslibrary.com/s/reflections-on-trusting-trust

- A Sample of Brilliance (Annotated Version) - http://fermatslibrary.com/s/a-sample-of-brilliance

cs7029년 전

I would never call it my "all-time favorite" (no paper qualifies for that title in my book), but Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" deserves a mention here, because it proposed the first-known solution to the double-spending problem in a masterless peer-to-peer network, with Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., in a manner resistant to fraudulent nodes attempting to game the rules), via a clever application of proof-of-work:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Others in this thread have already mentioned papers or opinionated essays that quickly came to mind, including "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon (incredibly well-written and easy-to-follow given the subject matter), and "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine" by John McCarthy.

I would also mention "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" by Alan Turing, "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems" by Kurt Gödel, and "The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures" by Stephen Cook, but in my view these papers are 'unnecessarily' challenging or time-consuming to read, to the point that I think it's better to read textbooks (or popular works like "Gödel, Escher, and Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter) covering the same topics instead of the original papers. Still, these papers are foundational.

Finally, I think "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks, and "Worse is Better" by Richard Gabriel merit inclusion here, given their influence.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Many -- many -- other worthy papers will surely come to mind over the course of the day that I won't have a chance to mention here.

There are many other good recommendations elsewhere in this thread, including papers/essays I have not yet read :-)

oculusthrift9년 전

maybe i'm a little stringent but if if isn't peer reviewed and in a journal, i don't consider it a paper.

majewsky9년 전

I guess that, given its impact, it's more peer-reviewed than most published papers.

joeyspn9년 전

Maybe it didn't appear in journals, but certainly has had much more impact than 99% of the papers in the last decade.

An amazing contrast: "Publish or perish" driven research vs "I don't want the fame, I just want to build something useful and practical".

the_d00d9년 전

I love that you posted that.

Fyi, the original paper by Ralph Merkle where he introduces what is later called Merkle Trees is definitely worth knowing. I wouldn't say it is my fav, but it resulted in a key component in some of my favorite technologies.

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~raluca/cs261-f15/readings/...

nikhizzle9년 전

Without a doubt.

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Leslie Lamport.

http://amturing.acm.org/p558-lamport.pdf

My first introduction to time scales as a partial ordering. Very mind opening.

e12e9년 전

A somewhat lighter take on similar issues that I also enjoyed was:

"Designing croquet's TeaTime: a real-time, temporal environment for active object cooperation", David Reed :

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1094855.1094861

navneet47359년 전

Exactly I worked my way backwards to this paper while exploring real world distributed systems like Kafka and Zookeeper and it was exceptionally well written paper that explained the basics of building distributed systems

[deleted]9년 전

lukateake9년 전

Your link is throwing a 404 for me. I found it here: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~cs230/reading/time.pdf

nikhizzle9년 전

That is not the paper. It appears to be a summary.

mikhailfranco9년 전

Never did it for me. Always seemed totally trivial. What else could it possibly be!? It seems like a direct simplification of Einstein (... no global time ... spatially separated locations communicate with signals ... signals propagate in finite time ... proper time is an ordering along a world line ... relative time depends on communication ... there are spacelike separations where events do not have a defined temporal order ...). I guess they had first access to the fruit tree in those days.

I once spoke to Henri Gouraud after he gave a talk. He was very self-deprecating and acutely embarrassed that his name was attached to a blindingly obvious first-thing-that-comes-into-your-head shading expression-that-barely-deserves-the-name-algorithm. Sometimes that low hanging stuff gives you stomach ache.

0xf89년 전

"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - Claude E. Shannon

http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...

godelmachine9년 전

All time hit paper

rhaps0dy9년 전

I like the papers that describe the OOPS and the Gödel Machine :)

ape49년 전

Definition of a fairly important term from that paper...

"If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey"

thristian9년 전

Out Of The Tarpit, by Moseley and Marks

https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...

The first half of the paper is a spot-on critique of so many things that go wrong in the process of designing and implementing large-scale software systems. The second half, where the authors propose a solution, kind of goes off the rails a bit into impracticality... but they definitely point in a promising direction, even if nobody ever uses their concrete suggestions.

nuclx9년 전

Definitely a gem. I loved their accurate comparison of the common programming paradigms, though I have to admit, that I didn't follow their idea of functional relational programming in detail.

agentm9년 전

Project:M36 is an implementation of the proposed design from the "Out of the Tarpit" paper.

https://github.com/agentm/project-m36

akkartik9년 전

Peter Naur, "Programming as theory building." (1985)

“…programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.”

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491661

defined9년 전

This really is a paper with deep implications.

One of them, as I understand it, is that in any significant software project, regardless of the volume and quality of the documentation, or quality of the code base, maintainers not involved in building the original project will not be able to build the "theory" correctly in their minds, and will consequently make changes that are clumsy or detrimental. (I'm summarizing, so some important aspects have been skipped).

I see this aspect of the paper as related to the "conceptual integrity" discussed in the Mythical Man-Month.

This paper has long been one of my favorites, and was first brought to my attention when I was reading (IIRC) one of Alistair Cockburn's books. Sadly, few of the people I shared it with found it interesting.

akkartik9년 전

It's at the core of my software life for several years now: http://akkartik.name/about

KirinDave9년 전

I've been trying to get it frontpaged because, despite it's length, it's perhaps one of the most startling papers of this decade. Sadly, it seems like the HN voting gestalt hasn't decided to upvote a paper that's the CS equivalent of breaking the speed of light:

"Generic Top-down Discrimination for Sorting and Partitioning in Linear Time" ->

http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/henglein/papers/hengl...

(if you're daunted by an 80 page paper as I am, there is also a talk on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz9ZlZIRDAg)

It is possible, with some proper insight and approaches, to sort general datastructures in linear time on modern computing hardware. The speed limit of sort is O(n) with some extra constant cost (often accrued by allocation). It works by decomposing and generalizing something akin to radix sort, leveraging a composable pass of linear discriminators to do the work.

There's a followup paper using this to make a very efficient in-memory database that one could easily generalize under something like kademelia and with care I suspect could make something like a better spark core.

http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/henglein/papers/hengl...

I keep submitting and talking about this but no one seems to pick up on it. This paper is crazy important and every runtime environment SHOULD be scrambling to get this entire approach well-integrated into their stdlib.

Unsurprisingly, Kmett has already implemented it in Haskell (it generalized neatly under the dual of the applicative+alternative functor): https://hackage.haskell.org/package/discrimination

csomar9년 전

Given that I'm an ignorant. Can you ELI5 like what is the impact of this? What does it change? What can you do with it on practical terms?

munin9년 전

Imagine that you make your living in a somewhat unorthodox but honest way: you live in a tent outside of the castle and every morning, as the king walks into the castle, he hands you a deck of cards. "I've just played cards last night," he says "and I'm going to again tonight, and I'd like these cards ordered and sorted by suite and number by this evening." Then the king goes into his castle and does whatever it is that kings do in castles all day.

So, you take this deck of cards, which is in any old order, as the king just played with it last night, and you set about sorting it. Now, you've been doing this a long time, and your methodology has improved over the years. When you started, you would just lay the cards out in the order the king gave them to you, and then start at the beginning of the line and ask "is this card greater than the next?" and move the two cards in response to the answer so that the two are in order. You would continue this process, repeating from the beginning of the line, until you made a complete pass through the line without making any changes. Sometimes, this took you all day, sometimes you would even make the king wait for you to finish, and that made him very angry, which is very bad.

Your sorting process is compounded by the limitation of your ability to read and compare the value of two cards, because you don't really know how to read or add, it takes you about ten seconds to decide if a card is greater than or less than another card. For a 52 card deck, this means your original sorting method would require 52 times 52 comparisons, or, in real time, seven and a half hours of non-stop work, leaving you no time to do anything else.

Over the years of doing this job for the king you discovered some shortcuts that would take less time but still produce a sorted deck, despite your limited ability to read and understand the values of the cards. While that still takes ten seconds, your new deck sorting approaches require 52 times 1.7 comparisons, or in real time, about fifteen minutes. This is much, much, better than before, but it would of course be better still if it took even less time, as you have discovered that you can now use this extra time to sort cards for all the other members of the court.

One day a traveling wizard observes you sorting cards and says "you know, this method that you have for sorting cards is quite clever but what if I were to tell you that you could sort these cards in 8.6 minutes flat?" This is about half the time it takes you right now, meaning that you could double the number of decks you sort in a day, doubling your income. You are very interested! "Tell me more," you tell the wizard. "Here, read this paper" the wizard replies, and they give you the paper GP linked.

KirinDave9년 전

ELI5 Edition: Basically everything uses sort (either to rank things or to set up search), so improvements to sort improve basically everything.

Explaining it in further detail like you're a fellow member of our industry:

Edge computing advances are pretty important right now, since the amount of data we're working with on the edge of the network is growing very quickly. Advances in how we compute backpropagation (essentialy using a right-recursive process for the Chain Rule) mean that we can do machine learning on 2015-level phone gpus, rather than 2015-level desktop GPUs.

This advance hints at a promise of similar gains. With care, you can sort much faster. What's more, your sorts and your merge of decomposed sorts is roughly the same cost now. And multiple, layered sorts don't require custom logic or clever functional programming (at the edge developer's model) to compose.

Essentially you pick what fields in complex (maybe even nested) data structures to sort by, in what order, and the system makes a sort.

Why does this matter? Well, it will make nearly all data structures Just Faster; many of them secretly rely on ordered and sorted arrays. It makes it easier for distributed systems authors to make queryable systems (it's pretty easy to write a discriminator or specify a discriminator function remotely and then use that on the fly, as opposed to a comparator).

One place in the client-software world where it can have big impact is offline webapps. Right now, it's almost always cheaper to call out to a remote datastore rather than use a local datastore even if you're using sqlite under the covers because of the cost of synchronizing sqlite's data model. A discriminator-based approach would let you do complex queries of data in memory, but that data could still be themselves commutative data types that are coalescing data out of a data stream (or multiple data streams) remotely.

It's also worth noting that another really cool paper from this year improving on the HAMT trie (https://michael.steindorfer.name/publications/phd-thesis-eff...) could also benefit from this approach, which means all of us using immutable data structures can continue to do so with MUCH better performance characteristics but continued thread safety.

KirinDave9년 전

I just wanted to give you a taste of how this works in an ungeneralized way before I went. Linear time algorithms are fast and feel very different. I want to stress this is not directly related to the technique in the paper, but is in the same "family" of algorithms, and is very easy to understand.

Imagine you're doing the classic "write an algorithm to determine if one word is the anagram of another". The classic solution is to sort and compare the strings to be checked.

We can do this pretty elegantly for strings without using quicksort. It goes like this: allocate a block of 26 bytes. Each byte is a counter for a letter in that position (0 -> A, 1 -> B, ...). Now sweep across the string, and each time you see a letter, increment that number. If you really care hard, you can go crazy with SIMD and other clever tricks here.

Once you're done this for 2 strings, you need only compare the two regions for equality (a constant time operation).

The worst case, average case, and minimum running time of this algorithm is O(len_word_1+len_word_2)+c, and because we can safely make assumptions about the length of the strings (no word in anym ISO-Latin-1 encoding exceeds 255 of any character), we can do it fairly compactly. This is MUCH faster and can be done with perfect memory safety (which is to say, it is optimal with mutability but all operations are commutative so they may be subdivided, done in any order, and recombined at will).

Try implementing this. It's really, really fast on modern hardware. Especially if you're working it out for a full /usr/share/dict/words file on a normal _nix/bsd installation.

We can even see that composability feature in our current problem! Imagine we have have that big dictionary file and we want to find ALL the anagrams in it. Imagine we start cutting the above technique in half and computing the byte vector for every word in the dictionary (which is O(n) time). If we sort THESE vectors, we could just pick out all the equal values and say "There are the anagram groups", right?

If we were to insert them into some very wide trie (as is the style these days), that'd be O(Numwords * log(numwords)), which is really just sorting again. We'd do it in minimum 2 passes with O(n log n) cost. But if we have composable discriminators we could do this in one big pass with O(n) cost! Our constant factors would grow because we're dealing with more memory. We could then not only sweep across the sorted list to extract groups (note the symmetry with the ABC counter approach above), but we could also pretend it's a tree structure (start at the length/2 element in the list and pretend its a binary tree) and search for new items inside the block, so we could check for new word anagrams subsequently in O(log n) time.

The paper I linked talked about generalizing this idea (a special case of radix sort) and making it composable.

learningram9년 전

You really improve your persuasion skills.

>Sadly, it seems like the HN crowd won't upvote a paper that's the CS equivalent of breaking the speed of light:

Comments like this will turn people off the rest of your post.

THE_PUN_STOPS9년 전

On the contrary, I'm of the opinion that the GP's line you referenced is nearly the perfect hook for HNers. [1]

[1]: https://xkcd.com/386/

Also, you really improve your forgetting a word skills.

KirinDave9년 전

Check my submission history. I tried twice.

I dunno how I "persuade" more.

Denzel9년 전

Different people have different reactions. That line is actually what piqued my interest.

Since AP CompSci in HS it's been hammered into students that any sort based on comparisons has a strict lower bound of O(n*log n).

And sorting is particularly important in search engines, of which I've been working on.

So, an algorithm that drastically improves the speed of sorting would actually open up a few more possibilities to consider.

Thanks for sharing the paper KirinDave, I plan to read it.

stevenschmatz9년 전

What's the catch? Are there any preconditions on the input required?

KirinDave9년 전

No. The catch is that it's hard to write it in a way that doesn't require very fiddly local mutation or explosive allocation.

The other catch is that no one has demonstrated that you can do it without a good static type system. It shouldn't be impossible, but there are a lot of challenges in an already challenging algorithm.

gbacon9년 전

What are the constants hiding inside that 𝒪(𝑛)?

kraghen9년 전

All orderings must be specified as a reduction to a primitive order using the fact that if you have an equivalence relation on some type A and a reduction f : B -> A then you have an equivalence on B defined by x = y when f(x) = f(y).

Now, take the rational numbers. For the usual binary comparison we can simply define (a/b) < (c/d) as ad < cb. It's not obvious how to express this as a reduction to a primitive ordering (the answer is to compute the continued fraction).

In fact, I'm not aware of any systematic way of deriving discrimination-suitable orderings from binary predicates -- it might be an open research problem, as far as I am aware.

kraghen9년 전

I'm happy to see this excellent paper mentioned. Fritz Henglein (the author) was my thesis supervisor last year, and I worked on developing some of his ideas further.

In particular, I generalised discrimination (and added a touch of linear algebra) to devise a simple multi-way join algorithm that computes the join of any number of relations in optimal time (in a specific technical sense). Such results have been obtained recently, but only with far more complicated algorithms.

Alas, the fully general proof of optimality eludes us, so nothing has been published yet.

KirinDave9년 전

I can only do a humble and poor job of explaining this process by analogy to other algorithms. If you've got a better explanation I could rote memorize, I'd be very appreciative.

ibdknox9년 전

Is there anything written about your multi-way join algorithm? We've done some really interesting implementations of Generic Join and the like and are always interested in hearing about other potentially better join algorithms.

nokcha9년 전

>It is possible, with some proper insight and approaches, to sort general datastructures in linear time on modern computing hardware. The speed limit of sort is O(n) with some extra constant cost (often accrued by allocation).

There is a well-known proof from information theory that the problem of sorting n distinct items has a worst-case time complexity of Ω(n log n) fixed-bitwidth operations: (1) Since each of the n items is distinct, the average number of bits needed to encode each item is Ω(log n). (2) In the worst case, in order to correctly sort the items, each bit of each item needs to be read. (3) Therefore, sorting the list requires reading Ω(n log n) bits.

So, I'm not sure how to understand the claim that their algorithm operates in "linear time". Are they saying O(n) operations where each operation operates on O(log n) bits?

[Edit: See below response from kraghen: The time is linear in the total size of the data, not in the number of items. I'll leave this comment up in case anyone has the same misunderstanding that I had.]

kraghen9년 전

Discrimination runs in linear time not in the number of items but in the total size of the data. If you have n items each of size k it takes O(kn). Conventional sorting often assumes that you can compare keys of size k in constant time and therefore gets O(n lg n) but a more honest analysis would yield O(kn log n) for (say) merge sort.

NewEntryHN9년 전

> Are they saying O(n) operations where each operation operates on O(log n) bits

Yes, as in any other claimed complexity about an algorithm. According to your proof finding the maximum in a list is Ω(n log n), which isn't the commonly used measure.

[deleted]9년 전

joatmon-snoo9년 전

> There is a well-known proof from information theory [...]

Remember that this proof is talking in terms of the number of comparisons necessary to sort n items. The moment you stop comparing data, like in radix sort (or more generally, bucket sort), that all flies out the window.

jules9년 전

This is a nice technique in theory, but in practice it isn't so fast, mainly because of the implementation details. Radix sort is actually faster than comparison sorts if implemented well.

KirinDave9년 전

Do you have benchmarks of Kmett's Implementation? I'm very curious.

Steeeve9년 전

I have mixed feelings about this one. It certainly has inspired some interesting discussion. The paper itself is obtuse and difficult to absorb.

The methodology isn't _really_ new, but it isn't used frequently. While they showed it as competitive to commonly used sorting algorithms, situationally it can really shine and show significant performance benefits. I'm surprised they didn't show this in one of the graphs (or I missed it in my brief speed-thru).

I don't really see a future for this in standard libraries. I can totally see this methodology being used in the wild in a variety of systems where time = money or entities are looking for a small proprietary distinguishing edge.

KirinDave9년 전

The follow-up paper I linked is less massive and shows a use case that were I younger I would set out with as a startup.

I'm not sure why stdlibs for some languages shouldn't take this approach though. It's difficult, sure, but so is any new foundational tech. What do you see as the barrier?

pvillano9년 전

If I understand the talk correctly, this is just a way to assign objects a lazy list of shorts, and then sort them by that list using a recursive bucket sort.

I like his system for generating these lists when there's nested data. However, it's often as simple as concatenating the lists generated by the fields of the object.

The O(n) time bound isn't surprising to me, since each byte of information in the input can lead to at most one scan through the bucket array. Actual performance is obviously a lot better.

I'd still like to see this integrated into a more mainstream language. It would be an interface where all you have to implement is a generator that concatenates the generators of the fields of your class in the desired order.

I know how to do any combination of fixed-width numbers, structs, unions, strings, but I'm not sure how to handle tree-like structures, and something with cycles... I can't even think of a regular comparator for.

I assume this isn't this simple, so what am I missing?

flavio819년 전

Automated Distributed Execution of LLVM code using SQL JIT Compilation

As collected by the SIGBOVIK group:

http://sigbovik.org/2017/proceedings.pdf

Quote:

"Following the popularity of MapReduce, a whole ecosystem of Apache Incubator Projects has emerged that all solve the same problem. Famous examples include Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Pikachu, Apache Pig, German Spark and Apache Hive [1]. However, these have proven to be unusable because they require the user to write code in Java. Another solution to distributed programming has been proposed by Microsoft with their innovative Excel system. In large companies, distributed execution can be achieved using Microsoft Excel by having hundreds of people all sitting on their own machine working with Excel spreadsheets. These hundreds of people e combined can easily do the work of a single database server."

PS: This thread is great, i'm bookmarking because here there are good (serious) papers.

jlisam139년 전

Apache Pikachu got me

rhaps0dy9년 전

The alliteration is real

godelmachine9년 전

Me, too bookmarking!

andars9년 전

I'll take a broad interpretation of 'CS' and throw out a couple of personal highlights.

C. Shannon, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" (1940): https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/3454142...

Shannon's master's thesis, which introduces boolean algebra to the field of digital circuit design.

R.W. Hamming, "Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes" (1950): https://ia801903.us.archive.org/1/items/bstj29-2-147/bstj29-...

In Hamming's own words: "Damn it, if the machine can detect an error, why can't it locate the position of the error and correct it?"

J.T. Kajiya, "The Rendering Equation" (1986): http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ravir/274/15/papers/p143-kajiya.pdf

Kajiya introduces the integral rendering equation, which is the basis for most current techniques of physically based rendering.

jasode9년 전

"The Limits of Correctness" (1985) by Bryan Cantwell Smith: https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/11public_html/p18...

I know Thompson's "Reflections on Trust" and Shannon's "Communication" papers are more famous but I believe BCS's "Correctness" paper has more immediate relevance to a wider population of programmers.

For example, I don't believe Ethereum's creator, Vitalik Buterin, is familiar with it because if he was, he would have realized that "code is law" is not possible and therefore he would have predicted the DAO hack and subsequent fork/reversal to undo the code.

Seriously, if you read BCS's paper and generalize its lessons learned, you will see that the DAO hack and its reversal as inevitable.

catnaroek9년 전

> you will see that the DAO hack and its reversal as inevitable.

Honest naïve question. What's the proof?

throwawayjava9년 전

FWIW I think this is a very fair question. Parent's post veers a bit further toward defeatism than I think Smith's paper advocates for or justifies. In particular, of course the DAO hack wasn't inevitable -- a more careful programmer could've foreseen and prevented that attack and whole other classes of attack.

LeanderK9년 전

i enjoyed skimming the paper, but i don't agree to your conclusions. It reminds me of an recent discussion i had about Dependent Types in Haskell, why not just check for termination instead of asserting it (I know about the halting problem)?

I think for many applications there is no binary answer, it's not just a good or bad idea. The question is how good can we get and is it any better than the state of the art? There are theoretical limits, but the interesting part is whether there exists a practical approximation. I don't believe in a fundamental difference between us and computers, i think everything we can reason about should be possible to algorithmically reason about. I think smart-contracts are a fundamental improvement over "non-code as law", i really believe in them. They are reproducible and exact. But it's a shame that solidity is so badly engineered, because they it is really hard to prove anything in it. I think they did the exact opposite of what would be the right language. I understand the reasoning behind "the limits of correctness", but does this means that proving anything is meaningless?

I would expect most contracts to be stupidly simpel, at least to a machine, with simpel properties that need to be proven comparable to testing Haskell with quickcheck. And i believe they are an improvement over "non-code as law", even if not provably correct.

The problem with bugs and smart-contracts is interesting. But implementing smart-contracts does not mean automating the judge.

gregors9년 전

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" - Ken Thompson

https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...

dkaoster9년 전

Seconded.

noobtube9년 전

this is the bomb.

agentultra9년 전

Most of my favourites have already been listed but one I found particularly interesting was Von Neumann's Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata [0].

[0] http://cba.mit.edu/events/03.11.ASE/docs/VonNeumann.pdf

yaseer9년 전

+1 to this. Von Neumann was well ahead of his time with his automata ideas. I found in interesting how both Von Neumann and Turing turned to analyse biological systems later in their careers.

ehudla9년 전

Some of you might be interested in an essay I wrote about von Neumann and Norbert Wiener that gives some of the background and context of this work.

http://www.ehudlamm.com/outsiders.pdf

tksfz9년 전

Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf

Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? - John Backus's Turing lecture - http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1283933

irfansharif9년 전

Diego Ongaro's Raft paper[1]. Perhaps this only speaks to my experience as a student but having surveyed some of the other papers in the domain (paxos[2] in its many variants: generalized paxos[3], fpaxos[4], epaxos[5], qleases[6]), I'm glad the author expended the effort he did in making Raft as understandable (relatively) as it is.

[1]: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf

[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[3]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[4]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[5]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/epaxos-sosp2013.pdf

[6]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/leases-socc2014.pdf

emidln9년 전

A bit cliche for HN, but I really enjoyed RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS OF SYMBOLIC EXPRESSIONS AND THEIR COMPUTATION BY MACHINE (Part I) by John McCarthy[0]. It was accessible to someone whose background at the time was not CS and convinced me of the beauty of CS -- and lisp.

[0] - http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html

chadash9년 전

It might be a cliche one to pick, but I really really really enjoy Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"[1]. This paper straddles the line between CS and philosophy, but I think it's an important read for anyone in either field. And a bonus is that it's very well-written and readable.

[1] https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf

AndrewOMartin9년 전

Thanks for picking that one, that means I don't have to choose between it and my joint favourite, the snappily titled "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian".

Where Turing's paper put us on the journey towards AI, 57 years later Dreyfus points out how the direction chosen is not only wrong, but hopelessly misguided.

[quote] As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS and AI had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes' mental representations, Leibniz's idea of a "universal characteristic" - a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed, -- Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege's formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein's postulation of logical atoms in his Tractatus. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program. [endquote]

http://leidlmair.at/doc/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf

icc979년 전

Given the far reaching importance of the Turing test, it's amazing how readable and understandable the paper is.

Retra9년 전

I really don't see how anyone would take that as a given.

twoodfin9년 전

Cheating a little, but the collected Self papers are what I'd bring to a desert island:

https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~urs/oocsb/self/papers/papers.html

zachsnow9년 전

"Self: the power of simplicity" really lives up to its name!

CobrastanJorji9년 전

Yao's minimax principle. It's not a very exciting read or a very exciting conclusion compared to some of these other papers, but it's still interesting, and the conclusion has been practically useful to me a small handful of times.

It concerns randomized algorithms, which are algorithms that try to overcome worst case performance by randomizing their behavior, so that a malicious user can't know which input will be the worst case input this time.

The principle states that the expected cost of a randomized algorithm on a single input is no better or worse than the cost of a deterministic algorithm with random input.

Yao proves this is the case by constructing two zero sum games based around the algorithms' running times and then using game theory (specifically von Neumann's minimax theorem) to show that the two approaches are equivalent. It's a really neat approach!

dvirsky9년 전

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Brin and Page.

Not only for the historical value of changing the world, and for the fact that it's very interesting and readable; It has personal value to me: the first CS paper I've ever read and it inspired me and changed the course of my life, literally.

Also, it has some very amusingly naive (in hindsight) stuff in it, like: "Google does not have any optimizations such as query caching, subindices on common terms, and other common optimizations. We intend to speed up Google considerably through distribution and hardware, software, and algorithmic improvements. Our target is to be able to handle several hundred queries per second"

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

pmiller29년 전

I was hoping this one would show up. It's a startlingly simple paper, which both made the idea easy to implement (PageRank algorithm can be implemented in around 10 lines of Python, give or take), and easy to game (viz. the rise of link farms). Recommended for anyone with the prerequisite 1 semester of linear algebra or equivalent.

brad09년 전

Kademlia, a P2P distributed hash table. DHTs are very complex from the outside but very simple once you understand the building blocks.

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/papers/maymounkov-kademlia...

zzzcpan9년 전

Hmm, I think it's important to understand Chord DHT first and only after that move on to Kademlia, then S/Kademlia and so on.

vaibhavsagar9년 전

There are a ton of fantastic Haskell papers, but if I had to pick one this would be it. It reconciles the pure and lazy functional nature of Haskell with the strict and often messy demands of the real world:

State in Haskell. John Launchbury and Simon L. Peyton Jones

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

amelius9년 전

I like Haskell papers and books but they often reference the "Core" language, for which an accessible implementation seems to be lacking, which is a missed opportunity, imho. Yes, I know it is part of GHC, but it is buried under several layers of undocumented code. GHC could have been much more open to research if they modularized and documented everything more thoroughly.

vaibhavsagar9년 전

I think SPJ would agree with you. Have you seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR_VzYxvbxg?

gens9년 전

"Communicating Sequential Processes" by Tony Hoare

http://www.usingcsp.com/

I read it multiple times and still don't quite understand it all.

There are more great papers i read but this one comes back to mind more often then others.

btilly9년 전

As We May Think https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

This paper, written during WW II (!) by someone who had around to 20 years of computing experience at that time (!!) introduced the world to the ideas like hypertext, and citation indexes. Google's PageRank algorithm can be seen as a recombining of ideas from this paper.

This is worth reading to see how much was understood how early.

romaniv9년 전

I don't have a favorite research paper, but there is a long Ph.D. thesis I've recently read in its entirety and found a lot of interesting ideas:

Programming with Agents: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mt/thesis/mt-thesis-Contents.ht...

Here is a short paper with a clear description of an ingenious idea.

Engineered Robustness by Controlled Hallucination: http://web.mit.edu/jakebeal/www/Publications/NIAI-2008.pdf

I like the simplicity of it. Most CS researches seem to be afraid of describing things that are simple, even if those things are non-obviosu and valuable.

microbie9년 전

Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm in "A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs" http://www-m3.ma.tum.de/foswiki/pub/MN0506/WebHome/dijkstra.... Pure, mathematical and a great impact on both how to prove and define algorithms as well as the problem itself.

AnimalMuppet9년 전

Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language, by Brian Kernighan http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.htm...

No Silver Bullet, by Fred Brooks http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

The original STL documentation https://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/table_of_contents.html

exelius9년 전

The Mythical Man-Month

https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~yfcai/CS451/RequiredReadings/Myth...

monocasa9년 전

And the paper that inspired it, Melvin Conway's "How Do Committees Invent?"

http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html

exelius9년 전

This is great -- I never knew about this paper but it reinforces a lot of things I learned. Namely, if you want to know how a company really works, ignore the org charts and map the systems architecture (a corollary to the author's thesis).

That it still holds true almost 50 years later is pretty amazing.

kabdib9년 전

Favorite quote: "I gave my manager two copies of this book so he could read it twice as fast."

10011019년 전

New Directions in Cryptography - Diffie + Hellman

https://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf

filereaper9년 전

Some old ones:

Jeffrey Ullman & John Hopcroft: Formal languages and their relation to automata [0]

Ted Codd: A relational model of data for large shared data banks [1]

C.A.R Hoare: Communicating Sequential Processes [2]

[0]http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1096945

[1]http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362685

[2]http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf

wsxiaoys9년 전

Cheney on the MTA http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html

Full tail recursion scheme implementation by never "return" in C

twoodfin9년 전

Such a great hack. Not only tail recursion but a complete GC implementation in (almost) platform-independent generated C code.

larkeith9년 전

The Night Watch by James Mickens is always a good read:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

xenophonf9년 전

That's a good one, but I think "This World of Ours", Mickens' treatise on the practical realities of operational security (specifically keying material handling), should take the top spot:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

larkeith9년 전

Ooh, I'll have to read that next time I have a few minutes. Thabks for the link!

Analemma_9년 전

The nice thing about this one is that it actually does have some important kernels of truth amid all the hilarity. Especially this bit about threat models:

> Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

More security researchers need to learn about that.

godelmachine9년 전

I read The Slow Winter by James Mickens. Reading that brought a revolutionary change in my thinking. Have bookmarked his Harvard profile, just in case he publishes any more articles.

ChuckMcM9년 전

I've always enjoyed Finseth's Thesis on text editing, "A cookbook for an EMACS", which he turned into a book: https://www.finseth.com/craft/ and is available in epub form for free.

mayank9년 전

The Flajolet-Martin paper on counting unique items in an infinite stream with constant space [1]: a great, well-written introduction to streaming algorithms that triggered my first "aha" moment in the field. You never forget your first.

[1] http://algo.inria.fr/flajolet/Publications/FlMa85.pdf

notaharvardmba9년 전

Andrew Tridgell's PhD Thesis: https://www.samba.org/~tridge/phd_thesis.pdf

Which documents the invention of rsync, it's a good read.

gcp9년 전

His KnightCap papers are also cool, .e.g http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.124...

AlphaGo learning from self-play? Tridgell did it in 1998.

mooneater9년 전

"On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules" by David Parnas, 1972, the seminal paper where he brings forward the key ideas that would later be called cohesion and coupling.

https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/crit...

Why it was important: you can't build big complex systems without these principles.

Some people say he was instrumental in stopping the Star Wars program, he argued it would be impossible to test outside of war (and therefore doomed).

atilimcetin9년 전

Not a single paper but Eric Veach's Ph.D. thesis 'Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation' - http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/

archagon9년 전

I haven't read a ton of academic research in general, but in trying to understand CRDTs and concurrency, gritzko's paper on "Causal Trees"[1] struck me as incredibly smart and clear in its thinking. Many of the other CRDT papers I read (even influential ones) were flawed in a number of respects: blurred lines between design and implementation, blatant mistakes and typos, hasty and unconvincing conclusions, an overabundance of newly-minted terms and acronyms, dense proofs lacking any concrete examples, unintuitive divisions between operation history and state mutation. The Causal Trees paper is also dense and also invents a bunch of new vocabulary, but the logic is completely consistent (to the point of being unified under a single metaphor) and clearly explained every step of the way. The data format is also very clever, and the paper spends a good amount of time following the practical consequences of those design decisions, e.g. the ease of displaying inline changes, or of generating a particular revision of the document.

Weirdly, the paper isn't much discussed alongside the usual contenders. (WOOT, Logoot, RGA, LSEQ, etc.)

[1]: https://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/6534/c371ef78979d7ed84b...

nrjames9년 전

Mine is "Image Quilting for Texture Synthesis and Transfer" by Efros and Freeman. It's simple enough to implement as a personal project and has some nice visual output. Plus, Wang tiles are cool and it's fun to learn more about them.

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/p...

BugsJustFindMe9년 전

On the same subject, I prefer the concurrently published "Image Analogies" paper ( http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/projects/image-analogies/ ) because their described technique, while slow, just makes so much sense.

xixixao9년 전

Notation as a Tool of Thought, Kenneth E. Iverson

http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

evanb9년 전

Also along those lines: Two notes on notation, Knuth, https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9205211

random_comment9년 전

Depixelizing Pixel Art

http://johanneskopf.de/publications/pixelart/paper/pixel.pdf

I think this paper is very cute and also technically interesting.

coherentpony9년 전

An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series

James W. Cooley and John W. Tukey

Mathematics of Computation Vol. 19, No. 90 (Apr., 1965), pp. 297-301

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2003354

jacobolus9년 전

Apparently this FFT was first discovered by Gauss (1805). http://www.cis.rit.edu/class/simg716/Gauss_History_FFT.pdf

As a follow-up, let me recommend Püschel & Moura (2006) “Algebraic Signal Processing Theory”, https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0612077.pdf and Püschel’s other papers about similar topics.

Or in a different direction, DJB (2008), “Fast multiplication and its applications”, http://cr.yp.to/lineartime/multapps-20080515.pdf

andars9년 전

Interesting to note that Fourier's two works were published in 1807 and 1822, so that work by Gauss also predates Fourier.

bluedino9년 전

"A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes"

https://www.ic.tu-berlin.de/fileadmin/fg121/Source-Coding_WS...

I'm not sure if it was the fact that I was just a kid when I read it, but it was just so obvious and simple but so complicated and amazing at the same time.

bootsz9년 전

End-To-End Arguments in System Design

http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoen...

akkartik9년 전

Hofstadter, D. R. and Mitchell, M. (1995). "The Copycat project: A model of mental fluidity and analogy-making." Chapter 5 in D. R. Hofstadter, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mm/CopycatChapter.html

"Copycat is a model of analogy making and human cognition based on the concept of the parallel terraced scan, developed in 1988 by Douglas Hofstadter, Melanie Mitchell, and others at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University Bloomington. Copycat produces answers to such problems as "abc is to abd as ijk is to what?" (abc:abd :: ijk:?). Hofstadter and Mitchell consider analogy making as the core of high-level cognition, or high-level perception, as Hofstadter calls it, basic to recognition and categorization. High-level perception emerges from the spreading activity of many independent processes, called codelets, running in parallel, competing or cooperating. They create and destroy temporary perceptual constructs, probabilistically trying out variations to eventually produce an answer. The codelets rely on an associative network, slipnet, built on pre-programmed concepts and their associations (a long-term memory). The changing activation levels of the concepts make a conceptual overlap with neighboring concepts." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_(software)

https://cogsci.indiana.edu/copycat.html

lawn9년 전

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf

taeric9년 전

"Dancing Links" by Knuth (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/dancing-col...) is still one of my favorites for my actually having understood it. :) I wish I had found it back in grade school. (Though I suspect I wouldn't have understood it, then.)

arde9년 전

All of the classic papers I can think of have already been mentioned, but even though it's too recent to pass judgment a new contender may well be "Deep Learning and Quantum Entanglement: Fundamental Connections with Implications to Network Design" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.01552

popcorncolonel9년 전

Damn, did not expect to see this paper on here. When I read it, I wasn't thinking it could be listed under the "all-time favorite CS papers", but the connections are quite interesting and (retrospectively) intuitive.

I'll be interested to see where/(if) it gets published.

kwindla9년 전

Alexia Massalin’s 1992 PhD thesis describing the Synthesis Operating System.

  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.29.4871&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Here's Valerie Aurora’s description of Synthesis:

... a completely lock-free operating system optimized using run-time code generation, written from scratch in assembly running on a homemade two-CPU SMP with a two-word compare-and-swap instruction — you know, nothing fancy.

Which (necessarily) undersells by a very large margin just how impressive, innovative, and interesting this thesis is.

If you’re interested in operating systems, or compilers, or concurrency, or data structures, or real-time programming, or benchmarking, or optimization, you should read this thesis. Twenty-five years after it was published, it still provides a wealth of general inspiration and specific food for thought. It’s also clearly and elegantly written. And, as a final bonus, it’s a snapshot from an era in which Sony made workstations and shipped its own, proprietary, version of Unix. Good times.

otakucode9년 전

Admittedly a good portion of my appreciation is due to the title alone, but the paper and contents itself are very good as well:

'The Geometry of Innocent Flesh on the Bone: Return-into-libc without function calls' by Hovav Shacham

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/geometry.pdf

Phithagoras9년 전

Not exactly CS, but the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences is one of my favourites.

protomyth9년 전

I would say An Agent-Oriented Programming by Yoav Shoham. It certainly set my mind going and made me think about how programs could be organized. I still think, agents, systems of agents, and mobile agent code has a place in computing. Even though some form of RPC over HTTP won over mobile code, I look at the spinning up of VMs and cannot help but think that agents have a place. Combined with the tuple space stuff from Yale, I still see a powerful way to go forward.

1) 1990 http://cife.stanford.edu/node/599

2) 1993 http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/ioerger/cs631-fall05/AOP.pdf

beefman9년 전

Backus - A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs

https://www.cs.ucf.edu/~dcm/Teaching/COT4810-Fall%202012/Lit...

mdhughes9년 전

Worse is Better http://wiki.c2.com/?WorseIsBetter

kwisatzh9년 전

How to share a secret by Adi Shamir. Simple, elegant, short and highly impactful.

llimllib9년 전

http://cs.jhu.edu/~sdoshi/crypto/papers/shamirturing.pdf

efferifick9년 전

Producing Wrong Data without Doing Anything Obviously Wrong.

Immediately useful for anyone measuring compiler transformations performance!

tom_mellior9년 전

Great paper, yes. Immediately useful? More like disheartening, because it doesn't really tell you how to be sure your measurements are OK.

jvilk9년 전

Our lab addressed some of the issues with Stabilizer [0], which "eliminates measurement bias by comprehensively and repeatedly randomizing the placement of functions, stack frames, and heap objects in memory".

[0] http://plasma.cs.umass.edu/emery/stabilizer.html "Stabilizer: Statistically Sound Performance Evaluation" by Charlie Curtsinger and Emery Berger, ASPLOS 2013

michaelmior9년 전

Link: https://www.eecs.northwestern.edu/~robby/courses/322-2013-sp...

chowells9년 전

The Essence of the Iterator Pattern, by Gibbons and Oliveira.

This paper develops a precise model for internal iteration of a data structure, such that exactly the necessary information is exposed and no more.

It's a fantastic exploration of improving a well-known design space with justified removal of details. I keep its lessons in mind whenever I am facing code that seems to have a lot of incidental complexity.

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/iterator...

uvatbc9년 전

One of my all time favorites has been the Jefferey Mogul paper on Receive Livelock: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2008/readings/mogul96usenix...

I read it first as a normal CS paper, but later started seeing it as a commentary on an extremely busy work life.

Right there in the first paragraph: "... receive livelock, in which the system spends all its time processing interrupts, to the exclusion of other tasks..."

Does this remind you of anything?

mrlyc9년 전

My favourite is "Targeting Safety-Related Errors During Software Requirements Analysis" by Robyn Lutz at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's available at https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/35179/93-0749...

The article provides a safety checklist for use during the analysis of software requirements for spacecraft and other safety-critical, embedded systems.

p4bl09년 전

It's not exactly a paper but I really liked "The Limits of Mathematics" by Chaitin. I wrote a blogpost about it a few years back (https://shebang.ws/the-limits-of-mathematics.html), I already submitted it to HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1725936).

mathgenius9년 전

"The Derivative of a Regular Type is its Type of One-Hole Contexts" - Conor McBride, http://strictlypositive.org/diff.pdf

This shows how you end up "differentiating" datatypes in the context of strict functional programming, in order to do things like "mutate" lists. It is essentially the same as what mathematicians call "combinatorial species".

pradn9년 전

My favorite paper in computer systems is "Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server". It identifies a problem and devises several clever solutions to the problem. I love papers that make your go "AHA!".

http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~mosharaf/Readings/ESX-Memory.pdf

ratsimihah9년 전

Deepmind's first paper on deep reinforcement learning. The beginning of a new era towards AGI : )

Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/full/nature1...

nonsince9년 전

Type Systems as Macros

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/stchang/popl2017/

It's not world-changing or even particularly novel, but it's such a simple concept explained very well that really changes how you see the typed/dynamic language divide, as well as language design in general.

rahulmehta959년 전

Trading Group Theory for Randomness by Laci Babai (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=22192) -- this beautiful paper introduced algorithmic group theory & interactive proofs (in the form of Arthur-Merlin games) to study the Graph Isomorphism problem, and introduced several groundbreaking new results. Perhaps a more approachable (and funny) version of this would be Babai's humorous essay detailing the flurry of work that broke out after his results introducing AM/MA...it's the closest thing I've seen to making theoretical CS exhilarating :P (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos522/Bab...)

jhpriestley9년 전

The Scheme papers are great http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html

"On the Translation of Languages from Left to Right", by Knuth, I found much clearer and more illuminating than any of the secondary literature on LR(k) parsing.

twoodfin9년 전

I recall finding "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO" to be mind-bending.

Jtsummers9년 전

Not a paper, and not strictly CS, but Mythical Man-Month by Brooks. It solidified the connection in my mind between systems engineering and software engineering. Other readings since then have extended and changed this understanding, but this is where my approach to software development started to mature.

monocasa9년 전

And I'd add the paper that inspired Brooks, Melvin Conway's "How Do Committees Invent?".

http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html

acoravos9년 전

"The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work" by Phillip Rogaway

Background: http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html

Paper: web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf

GeorgeTirebiter9년 전

"Hints for Computer System Design" by Butler Lampson

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Rickasaurus9년 전

"NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality" by Scott Aaronson. It relates NP-complete problems to examples in nature. Excellent paper and a fun read.

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0502072

jules9년 전

A play on regular expressions: https://sebfisch.github.io/haskell-regexp/regexp-play.pdf

This paper explains a beautiful algorithm for matching regular expressions with a Socratic dialogue.

vsrinivas9년 전

From the perspective of - 'take a fresh look at something we take for granted' - "A Preliminary Architecture for a Basic Data-Flow Processor" (Dennis & Misunas 1975)

Focusing on the flow of data between operators and greedily executing a linear program is what an out-of-order processor is.

ColonelTrick9년 전

Since I just love the impracticality of it, Bernard Chazelle's linear time triangulation is my fave.

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pubs/polygon-triang.p...

sova9년 전

"Collaborative creation of communal hierarchical taxonomies in social tagging systems"

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/775/1/2006-10.pdf

wlesieutre9년 전

"Interactive Indirect Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing" by Crassin et al.

As an architectural lighting guy, seeing realtime global illumination look this good in a game engine was fantastic. Parts of the algorithm I can understand, parts go over my head still, but the results are amazing.

A big part of what I do at work is radiosity simulations in AGI32 which is of course more accurate (because it's trying to accurately simulate real world lighting results) but much much slower.

http://research.nvidia.com/publication/interactive-indirect-...

web0079년 전

That link doesn't work for me, even though the same link is presented in a Google search. Also, for some reason I can't find it via search by DOI.

http://research.nvidia.com/publication/interactive-indirect-... has the paper plus presentation available, plus abstract and other links.

wlesieutre9년 전

Thanks! I've replaced it with your working nvidia link.

I got the citeseerx.ist.psu.edu link off google and it worked for me the first time. I'm an alum but not logged into anything, so either it was a bypass via google referrer (not sure why they'd do that, it's not looking for advertising clicks) or some usage limit.

tjr9년 전

Growing a Language

andars9년 전

Guy L. Steele.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

baddox9년 전

Scott Aaronson's "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity"

https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf

alok-g9년 전

Automated Theorem Proving, David Plaisted

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.1269/full

coldcode9년 전

Royce 1970 of course: http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/wate... wherein he did not introduce Waterfall, but for some reason the negative aspects of his article became the basis for Waterfall. The article for 1970 is surprisingly relevant although archaic in language. It's worth reading to the end. He wrote this describing leading teams in the 1960s do what I assume was actual "rocket" science.

wwarner9년 전

Probabilistic Topic Models http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~blei/papers/Blei2012.pdf

cozzyd9년 전

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf

lioeters9년 전

Love the figures and references.

di4na9년 전

"Programming with Abstract Data Types", B Liskov and S Zilles

lukego9년 전

Back To The Future (Squeak). http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.html

0xf89년 전

The Applications of Probability to Cryptography - Alan M. Turing

https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04714

kageneko9년 전

Oh man... I don't know. There's so many.

I'll need to go with

Gilbert, E., & Karahalios, K. (2009, April). Predicting tie strength with social media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 211-220). ACM.

In grad school, it was the paper that kept on giving. I think I cited it every semester for a paper or project. There's a lot of other papers and books that really inspired me, but this one was magic.

jonbaer9년 전

Anything dealing w/ "reversible computing", makes you ask "what-if" ...

http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/80_Toffoli.pdf

https://www.eng.famu.fsu.edu/~mpf/Frank-99-PhD-bookmarked.pd...

5059년 전

I see some of my favourites among other replies. I don't think I see these:

http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

codelord9년 전

ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks https://papers.nips.cc/paper/4824-imagenet-classification-wi... If not evident already, time will tell that this paper brought us to a new era.

surement9년 전

The splay trees paper by Sleator and Tarjan (1985) https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sleator/papers/self-adjusting.pdf

It's just such a cool result and the paper is very well written. Further, the dynamic optimality conjecture at the end is still an open problem.

Vervious9년 전

Paxos made simple. It's a very beautiful paper.

donquichotte9년 전

Not CS, but control theory: "Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators" by John C. Doyle. The abstract is just three words: "There are none."

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.362...

rurban9년 전

"Cache-Conscious Collision Resolution in String Hash Tables" Nikolas Askitis and Justin Zobel, SPIRE 2005

The most simple and most effective hash table scheme, and nobody is using it, or even knows about it. Fastest and least memory, but not thread-safe. After 12 years there's still nothing better on the horizon.

Though the CheneyMTA paper is also brilliant, a typical Baker paper.

dkamm9년 전

"On non-computable functions" - Tibor Rado.

Proof that the busy beaver function is not computable.

http://computation4cognitivescientists.weebly.com/uploads/6/...

phamilton9년 전

The Dynamo Paper. http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp...

One of the best practical "How can this improve our business?" technical papers, and an excellent introduction to reading papers.

djhworld9년 전

Not hardcore CS as some of the other papers on here, but I really enjoyed the BigTable paper https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

cjbprime9년 전

I'll go with an unconventional choice: Michael Kleber's _The Best Card Trick_: http://www.northeastern.edu/seigen/11Magic/Articles/Best%20C...

ddrsurvivor9년 전

I know this doesn't really count, but the "Get me off your fucking mailing list" one made me giggle - http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf

Hernanpm9년 전

I sill find this interesting, if you are familiar with Dijkstra Algorithm.

Finding the k Shortest Paths by D. Eppstein https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pubs/Epp-SJC-98.pdf

zachsnow9년 전

Olin Shivers's work on various control flow analyses, in particular the paper "CFA2: a context-free approach to control-flow analysis", is a really cool static analysis via abstract interpretation. Matt Might had a bunch of papers in a similar vein.

jules9년 전

I wonder if it is possible to express this analysis as a datalog program.

haihaibye9년 전

Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail

http://berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/Impor...

dansto9년 전

PCP theorem as explained by Bernard Chazelle , 2001 https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pubs/bourbaki.pdf

Great writing style!

ddebernardy9년 전

Knuth vs Email:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

It's not technically a CS paper, but well worth the (very short) read regardless.

totalZero9년 전

Intelligence without representation, by Rodney Brooks.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/representation.pdf

damontal9년 전

the report on the Therac-25. a good warning that bugs can have very real consequences.

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

hatred9년 전

The Byzantine Generals Problem by Lamport et al is a must read for anyone interested in distributed systems.

Some of the others that have already been mentioned on this thread:

- Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System

- Paxos Made Simple

dharness9년 전

Seam Carving!

http://perso.crans.org/frenoy/matlab2012/seamcarving.pdf

morphle9년 전

Scalability of Collaborative Environments https://sci-hub.ac/10.1109/C5.2006.32#

megahz9년 전

Smashing the stack for fun adn profit http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html

nayuki9년 전

"Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

throwaway1e1009년 전

Real programmers don't use Pascal The rise of worse is better

chajath9년 전

Delegation is Inheritance

http://wiki.c2.com/?DelegationIsInheritance

kruhft9년 전

On Formally Undecidable Propositions... by Kurt Godel.

One might argue this is not CS, but it's something everyone should read and understand.

[deleted]9년 전

johnny_10109년 전

Communicating Sequential Processes C. A. R. Hoare http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf

probinso9년 전

Relevance Vector Machines by Tipping

or

Homomorphic Encryption over the Integers

megahz9년 전

http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html

zzzcpan9년 전

Worth mentioning Joe Armstrong's "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of sodware errors" [1].

[1] http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

whateversclever9년 전

I was hoping your title wasn't a typo

bra-ket9년 전

Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory is quite remarkable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_distributed_memory

it's a book though: https://www.amazon.com/Sparse-Distributed-Memory-MIT-Press/d...

abhishekgahlot9년 전

whataretensors9년 전

The original GAN paper was pretty big for me. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.2661.pdf

gnaritas9년 전

Not a paper, but one of my favorite talks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0&t=642s

Growing a Language by Guy Steele (co-inventory of Scheme). Brilliant speech about how to grow languages and why it's necessary. Languages that can be grown by the programmer, like Lisp or Smalltalk are better than languages that fixed like most others, this is why.

[deleted]9년 전

megamindbrian9년 전

My favorite topic was from an advanced user interfaces class. Describe 3 example of a bad user experience where the input in to the system does not give you the expected output. My poor example was a Kleenex box, I try to pull on one Kleenex and it tears or two come out at a time.

Frogolocalypse9년 전

The bitcoin whitepaper.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

kendallpark9년 전

I'm surprised no one has mentioned "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" yet. Admittedly is more essay, less paper.

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