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Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

#41

Post by tokenadult »

aaron695 wrote: post #24

"Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability" http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf It made me realise how political science can be and how facts on large issues can be covered up for political reasons.

It made me realise how political science can be and how facts on large issues can be covered up for political reasons.

You mean all the facts that Ruston left out made you realize that? I hope that's what you mean, as that paper is a dog.

Here's a better paper on closely related topics, by authors who have advanced the research considerably:

Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67, 130-159.

doi:10.1037/a0026699

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

#44

Post by karmacondon »

A paper about making video game characters act more like real people, trained by having people simulate interactions in a restaurant setting.

http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/publications/orkin_aamas2009....

Not ground breaking by any means, but it's the only time I've genuinely laughed out loud when reading a paper.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

#45

Post by ci5er »

jgmmo wrote: post #25
hnnewguy wrote: post #23

As an economics undergraduate, Paul Krugman's paper on The Theory of Interstellar Trade was a must read, exclusively for its light-heartedness: https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf (12 pages, quick read)

Came here to say this. It really is awesome; and I hate Krugman! It's really an interesting situation; thinking about how there would no longer be an 'unambiguous' measure of time when we have faster than light travel.

I hate NYT Krugman too, but this was excellent: - http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

#46

Post by pbsd »

"Sequences of numbers generated by addition in formal groups and new primality and factorization tests", by the Chudnovsky brothers [1].

This paper is incredibly ahead of its time. While elliptic curves in cryptography are usually attributed to Hendrik Lenstra for destructive purposes (ECM factorization), and Koblitz and Miller for constructive purposes in 1985, this paper contains almost everything relevant to practical curve-based cryptography long before everyone else. Highlights include:

- Hessian, Jacobian quartic, and Jacobian intersection curves, and derivation of respective fast addition and doubling formulas; they also comment on the value of unified addition formulas for simplicity.

- The "Montgomery" ladder for "x-only" Jacobian intersections: Peter Montgomery was directly influenced by this paper to produce his curves, and it is easy to see the resemblance.

- The idea of working in genus 2, and formulas for genus 2 Kummer surface doubling. Hyperelliptic curve cryptography was only later proposed by Koblitz in 1987. Almost 3 decades later, Kummer surfaces are now the fastest way to do scalar multiplication on beefy hardware.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01968858869...

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

#47

Post by dikek »

nooron wrote: post #36
dikek wrote: post #32

Not tech related but... Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care by Kenneth Arrow (1963) [1]. This paper effectively makes the case that medical care shouldn't be treated like other goods. If you're remotely interested in health econ/health industry, I recommend reading it. 1. https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/top20/53.5.941-973.pdf

Big fan. Have you read Norm Daniels' Just Health? It's a riff off a Rawls/Social Contract world view, and it really spoke to me.

It has been on my list of books to read since I saw it on the Incidental Economist blog years ago. Thanks for giving me the push I needed to read it.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

#48

Post by rhodin »

koddsson wrote: post #40

Joe Armstrong 2003, "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors" https://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

Attended his defense of this, it was a ton of fun! "Defending the thesis"-slide had Joe, sword in hand, defending the thesis against a comic-styled dragon.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

#49

Post by swairshah »

ivansavz wrote: post #38
avinashv wrote: post #7

Claude Shannon 1948, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Commun... This paper kickstarted the concept of information theory, and was hugely influential on many fields of research. Signal-to-noise ratio, the bit, information entropy, etc. are all theories and concepts presented by Shannon.

+1! I find the whole notion of "typical set" to be absolutely amazing. I would like to share with you a few pages from the intro to my thesis which cover Shannon's channel coding theorem. There are some nice TiKZ illustrations. http://minireference.com/static/excerpts/Shannon_channel_cod... (it's not super detailed, but the definitions of all the moving parts are given)

This is really cool. I'm working in systems research, but I'm fascinated by mathematical research in CS. Did you continue with similar work after your PhD, If I may ask?

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite scholarly papers? Why?

#50

Post by boyaka »

Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28...

I've been attempting to write a paper on virtualization and other Cloud/datacenter machine managing software. This was one of the first papers I read in my Cloud Computing class, and I actually recently came back to it after becoming lost reading countless papers on more specific cloud research. It really clears up a lot of confusion on terminology regarding different forms of computing services and the challenges in the field. I wish I knew from the start how much more accurate the statements in this paper are compared to a lot of other content out there, and that I could have been warned about how misleading that other content would be due to authors trying to validate their own software creations.

Before I came back to it, I was playing with the thought that the cloud is really just corporatization of computing resources that only leaves the biggest players to survive because of profits, which really vibes with this paper. It really is just computing infrastructure as a utility and the idea is nothing new. There are several other papers out there that make the same points, but I appreciate this one for really nailing the practical terminology without any sort of vagueness. It's not surprising that it is such a highly referenced and popular paper.

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