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Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#71

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 hav…

Me, too bookmarking!

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#73

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]

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#75
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 :-)

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#76
"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

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#77

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.

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

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#78

Andrew Tridgell's PhD Thesis: https://www.samba.org/~tridge/phd_thesis.pdf Which documents the invention of rsync, it's a good read.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#80
post #13

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

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

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