If you want to go old school, Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” is one of the more prophetic moments. It was written in 1945.
1979 reprint: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1113634.1113638
Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very good recommendation. And if you can't find the preprint on the authors website, I've had good success just emailing the author and asking for a copy. That's successful in 99% of the cases where I couldn't find it officially for free or as a preprint. Most authors seems more than happy to provide you with a copy. And if that finally doesn't work out, there is always sci-hub.si and their alter egos ( http…
Are authors technically allowed to do that? (Not _should_ they be allowed, but _are_ they)? If so, where does the line get drawn? Are they allowed to have an auto-responder that responds to any specially-formatted email with a copy of the requested paper? Can they just put the paper up on their website? Can they just allow their website to be aggregated by someplace that collects all such papers? I'm sure the legal l…
Good question. I initially got told by friends in academia that this is all fine and what they all do if they can't access the paper and they would also hand it over if someone emailed them asking for a copy.
In the end, I guess it depends on who the copyright of the published paper belongs to. If it belongs to the authors, they are free to do as they please, if it belongs to the publisher, you should actually email the publisher and ask for a copy (but good luck with that).
Here are some resources with more thoughts from people in academia and outside on the subject:
- https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21440/is-it-rig...
- https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-send-requesting-email-to-res...
- https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_we_send_published_pape...
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#33My pick is Jeff Dean's The Tail At Scale (2013) [1]. If you're interested in performance of web services, it's very, very well-written and describes a counterintuitive (but crucial!) phenomenon: your p99.99 latency can drive the entire user experience because of head-of-line blocking. As microservice architectures have gotten more popular, this has only become more important. It's a fiendishly difficult problem to ge…
Could you elaborate on why this is any more crucial for microservices than it is monolith?
This a life changing video by Gil Tene on this topic. Bottom line is because of the number requests to support a single customer "request", the high percentiles are the ones that actually matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU&list=WL&index=22...
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#34Don't have any particular recommendations, but I do have a way of browsing that made me find a lot of interesting stuff. Go to https://dl.acm.org/conferences Click on the Conference with the subject area that interest you, like "Hypertext and Hypermedia" ( https://dl.acm.org/conference/ht ) Scroll down to "Most Popular" and sort by either Downloads or Cited. Go bananas with reading everything.
Nice find! Appreciate it.
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#35If you are a Ruby programmer or interested in Ruby I maintain a list of Ruby papers, some of which are only now freely available due to this open access, at https://rubybib.org
This is awesome. Thanks. I found libmesh which looks very interesting: https://github.com/plasma-umass/Mesh
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#36From a previous thread https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3335772
Another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783645 recommended Verified Functional Programming in Agda (https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/2841316). I was just thrilled to notice that the HOPL proceedings (https://dl.acm.org/conference/hopl) are there!
EDIT 1: HOPL was pointed out earlier by spdegabrielle (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795488).
EDIT 2: I was just downloading, and got my IP address blocked. Nothing crazy or automated, just manually clicking through to all the articles in HOPLs I–III. Hopefully it'll clear up eventually, but just a warning to anyone else trying to build a library in a day.
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intuitively, if your request is handled by 1 service you have 1 chance that your request lands at the extreme end of the latency distribution. If your requests require 20 services, that's 20 chances. In reality maybe someone is able to make each microservice so much more performant and is able to deal with slow or failed requests gracefully in the UX. Some sites do, but it doesn't automatically by any means.
A couple weeks ago someone brought up High Frequency Trading and while in theory it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, I’ve been chewing on the thesis of the linked article ever since: that the real trick to doing things quickly is to do them consistently. That variance causes far more kinds of practical problems than does average response time.
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#38From a network/system perspective:
- MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters by Jeff Dean et al.
- The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols by David D. Clark
- Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications by Ion Stoica et al.
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#39Basically the entire internet is built on TCP. But TCP wasn't always very good. There was a time when congestion nearly killed the early internet. Congestion avoidance and control talks about how they fixed it. It's light hearted, accessible and one of my all time favourite reads:
Re: Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?
#40Don't have any particular recommendations, but I do have a way of browsing that made me find a lot of interesting stuff. Go to https://dl.acm.org/conferences Click on the Conference with the subject area that interest you, like "Hypertext and Hypermedia" ( https://dl.acm.org/conference/ht ) Scroll down to "Most Popular" and sort by either Downloads or Cited. Go bananas with reading everything.
Communications of the ACM (https://dl.acm.org/magazine/cacm) also has some "must-reads" for anyone in computer science or software engineering.