Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?

Don'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.

My 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 get around, but Dean proposes a few mechanisms. I learned a lot and think back to this paper often when designing real software.

Reading it will probably make you a better engineer.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2408776.2408794

Check out the ACM Tech Packs. They are curated lists of papers organized by topic.

https://techpack.acm.org/

If you ever find an ACM (or IEEE) paper that you don't have access to, chances are you can find the preprint on one of the author's website.

The easiest way is to search for the paper on Google Scholar and see if there is a link that says "[PDF]" or "All X versions".