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Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

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Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#51

Post by foobarian »

edent wrote: post #17

"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist . Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libr…

I guess I'm not too surprised, this seems like a corporate tech report. Some companies were good at having public archives of these (like Bell Labs) but I'm sure it takes a lot of resources to keep that up. It's essentially some company's internal Wiki page.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#52

Post by Jalad »

"Bounding data races in space and time" was an interesting one I saw recently! It's discussing the memory models of programming languages, and how they can fail pretty horribly when data races occur, and then talks about ways to avoid those. OCaml's multicore support is based on this work, meaning it's memory safety guarantees in when data races occur are pretty interesting

https://kcsrk.info/papers/pldi18-memory.pdf

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eXXzUzt_nAY

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#53

Post by mindcrime »

edent wrote: post #17

"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist . Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libr…

Here's something that seems related. Maybe one of these authors would have a copy of the other paper? Not sure if they would be among the set of folks you've already tried or not...

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA171427.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#54

Post by antegamisou »

alexb_ wrote: post #29
edent wrote: post #17

"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist . Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libr…

This is wild if true. Surely someone has to have a copy of this. How is it even being referenced if it is non existent?

I don't know why parent comment is stirring up drama but:

1. Not available online doesn't mean the paper's existence is made up. It's a very bold claim to make for the authors that they cite work that is fabricated.

From the available information, this looks like a technical report by a, probably now defunct, company back in the 80s. If this was its only form of publication, and not on some conference proceedings for example, it would be only found available on select university libraries as a physical copy. But most important,

2. This isn't even as an impactful paper as the parent comment states. Or if its proposed concept is, the original idea is probably derived from some other paper that is indeed the one that is highly cited and most definitely available online.

Accumulative citations number from Google Scholar and IEEEXplore doesn't exceed fifteen for the particular paper though.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1491448744595502026...

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#55

Post by d-- »

"Enso: A Streaming Interface for NIC-Application Communication" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/0...

We've been using the same API to communicate with our NICs since 1994. That API severely limits network throughput and latency. By simply changing the API (no new NIC) you can get 6x higher throughput in some apps and 43% lower latency.

Code runs on FPGA NIC only for now: https://github.com/crossroadsfpga/enso

Won USENIX OSDI best paper award and best artifact award.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#56

Post by pjs_ »

edent wrote: post #17

"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist . Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libr…

Going through the bibliography of other people's papers and theses, looking for papers that you better cite "for good luck", or because "you gotta cite that one" is a classic PhD student behavior (I've done it) and it's not terribly surprising that something like this can happen. In fact I'd expect it to be much more widespread...

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#57

Post by WindyLakeReturn »

HideousKojima wrote: post #27
littlestymaar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. Wait, you mean people include papers they haven't even opened in their references?!

Happens far more than you think. It can be an innocent (sort of) mistake, where authors see the citation in a previous paper and simply copy it into their own.

This feels like something that would, at large scale, be unhealthy for science as a whole. While existing papers have already gone through their own quality checks, this enables bad, misleading, or false statements to propagate which can end up being a blow to the credibility of the entire model. Shouldn't there be an ethical duty to due one's due diligence?

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#60

Post by darkclouds »

edent wrote: post #17

"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist . Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libr…

Still searching then?

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/06/where-is-the-original-overv...

I can only find the Oracle reference to Sharding, which might be the same thing or not. https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/1...

Along with the wikipedia reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard_(database_architecture)

And a Science Direct reference. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/shardi...

Along with facebooks reference. https://engineering.fb.com/2020/08/24/production-engineering...

And Wolverhamptons reference to Oracle Sharding. http://ora-srv.wlv.ac.uk/oracle19c_doc/shard/sharding-overvi...

And Amazon's. https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/database-sharding/

So is the original paper a myth or was/is this demonstrating the closed circuit nature of the dissemination of knowledge?

How many different ways do you cut up the data?

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