Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 90 posts

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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

lambdaphage wrote: post #80
EthanHeilman wrote: post #8

Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, 1979 "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme" Some biologists may cringe (especially the Gould haters), but I don't think I've ever been so engrossed by any other scholarly paper. It is a joy to read. Very approachable for non-biologists. The papers critique of sloppy "just so" reasoning, could easily be extended to…

I am cringing. Gould was a classic case of projection, having been guilty of everything he accused his opponents of: misreading one's opponents, proneness to ideological bias, and experimental technique so sloppy that deliberate fraud starts to look like the simpler explanation. ( http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo... ) There are other bones to pick with Gould, but these are the ones that ma…

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by tel »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #67

"On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism" (Luca Cardelli, Peter Wegner) http://lucacardelli.name/papers/onunderstanding.a4.pdf Very nice intro to type systems. "A Language-based Approach to Unifying Events and Threads" (Peng Li, Steve Zdancewic) http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~stevez/papers/LZ06b.pdf For showing that if you have a sufficiently powerful programming language, the answer to the question "as…

Koen Claessens's A Poor Man's Concurrency Monad [0] is perhaps easier reading than Li and Zdancewic here.

[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.8...

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

#83

Post by nitishmd »

chromejs10 wrote: post #2

The papers published on the Google File System (GFS) and Map Reduce are still some of my all time favorite papers. It gives really good inside into how GFS/Map Reduce was built, but explains it in a very straight forward way. We actually implemented an in memory version of GFS/MapReduce in my graduate operating systems class. It remains as one of my favorite projects I've ever done. http://research.google.com/archive…

That sounds like an interesting project to do in spare time. Can you link to the project description? or your universities class notes?

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

#84

Post by chromejs10 »

nitishmd wrote: post #83
chromejs10 wrote: post #2

The papers published on the Google File System (GFS) and Map Reduce are still some of my all time favorite papers. It gives really good inside into how GFS/Map Reduce was built, but explains it in a very straight forward way. We actually implemented an in memory version of GFS/MapReduce in my graduate operating systems class. It remains as one of my favorite projects I've ever done. http://research.google.com/archive…

That sounds like an interesting project to do in spare time. Can you link to the project description? or your universities class notes?

Yeah sure. Here is the project page: https://sites.google.com/a/cs.usfca.edu/cs-636-2011s/project...

All notes and stuff can be found here: https://sites.google.com/a/cs.usfca.edu/cs-636-2011s/schedul...

I learned a ton about MapReduce and GFS. It was a great learning experience.

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

#85

Post by nitishmd »

chromejs10 wrote: post #84
nitishmd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an interesting project to do in spare time. Can you link to the project description? or your universities class notes?

Yeah sure. Here is the project page: https://sites.google.com/a/cs.usfca.edu/cs-636-2011s/project... All notes and stuff can be found here: https://sites.google.com/a/cs.usfca.edu/cs-636-2011s/schedul... I learned a ton about MapReduce and GFS. It was a great learning experience.

great thank you!

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

#86

Post by ShinyElena »

t seems to me that you are trying to create a formula of successful scholarly paper. The success depends on the uniqueness. But it's hard to write good paper without using cliché or other writers' works. Here is http://myessaywritersonline.com/ a reliable original essay writing service that provides with all the required tools and knowledge to perform a high-end college essay, as well as samples of the best essay papers, it worth visiting!

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

#88

Post by deong »

dmd wrote: post #69
deong wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know with a PhD has a 10-page journal article they recommend you read instead of the thesis. For whatever reason, this is the way PhD theses tend to work these days.

My PhD thesis (U of Penn, cognitive neuroscience) is two of my 5 page journal articles, stapled together, with an introduction and conclusion added on mostly as an afterthought. I'm not sure why other schools don't do the same.

I do get why some people dislike the sandwich thesis. From the standpoint of providing evidence that you deserve the PhD, it's fine. We judge research performance by published papers, so publish two or three good ones, print them out, and graduate.

If we're talking about the quality of the actual thesis as a separate document that has value on its own, the sandwich thesis isn't great though. No one would argue that it needs to be an entirely separate piece of work from your papers, but there's a legitimate case for requiring it to be pretty heavily edited into something resembling a book rather than a collection of articles on the same topic.

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

#89

Post by b_emery »

wkmeade2 wrote: post #42

John Platt "Strong Inference" SCIENCE 16 October 1964, Volume 146, Number 3642 How to think/discover with maximum advantage. A jewel of an article, the most photocopied SCIENCE article I've ever encountered in library stacks. Foundation to methodological adventures.

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhil/science64_strong_inference...

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

#90

Post by nooron »

dikek wrote: post #47
nooron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My pleasure. Shoot me an email at jordan at birnholtz dot com if you'd like any notes or supplementary texts (or just a friendly chat about the subject).
Post reply on HN