HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are the best papers you read in your life?

237 points by toombowoombo ↗ HN
I'm trying to get an understanding on what quality means in terms of publishing research and I learn best through examples. Any recommendation is highly appreciated ^^.

I'm also interested in papers from many disciplines, so the wider the range of domains, the higher the value!

109 comments

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napona7405
The Bitcoin whitepaper. It started my curiosity in the computer security industry (employed for 5 years now) and the rabbithole of trying to understand every design decision behind the cryptosystem.
pyb
Agreed, this is a must-read, very well-written paper. Even though it turned out the world didn't really need cryptocurrencies.
lowkey
Agree with your assessment of cryptocurrencies in general but having seen the adoption of Bitcoin in authoritarian and inflationary regimes, the world most certainly does need access to a digital peer-to-peer currency that is censorship-resistant and virtually immune to debasement.

Even if you argue that Bitcoin as it has evolved has flaws, it is the best implementation we’ve come up with so far. Like democracy, it isn’t perfect but it is much better for its use case than anything else we have come up with to date.

sowbug
It took a while for the tinfoil-hat stance on privacy to catch on, but it's safe to say that today it has lost its fringe status. Similarly, it might still be years before we see widespread acceptance of the importance of an unrestricted, global value-transfer mechanism.

You miss something only when it's gone.

madphilosopher
The Bitcoin whitepaper is one of my cherished reads. The other is the BitTorrent whitepaper. Both technologies changed the technical and non-technical worlds, and the fundamental protocols are clearly explained in their respective papers.
aggsigme
If you like bittorrent and bitcoin's white papers, you're gonna love chia's green paper. (It was created by the bit torrent guy)
amadsen
If you are looking for quality I suggest you look at the IPCC reports. Each word is carefully chosen, every claim backed by mountains of evidence. They're written to be read and understood by non-experts. They exist to inform decision making that will literally determine the fate of our species. As such, they may be failing at their goal, but not for a lack of effort by the authors.
froggychairs
One of the best pitches I’ve ever read for an IPCC report. They are good reads too! Maybe not very joyful.
juujian
Agreed, with one caveat. Over time governments have more and more been trying to influence the reports. It all came to a head with the last one, where a set of researchers released their draft ahead of time in protest over undue influence. They still synthesize relevant research from past years, but there are some problems now. Research published after the first draft cannot be included, so the report is somewhat outdated by the time it's released. Beautifully crafted though.
mif
I disagree. The IPCC may contain a lot of scientific evidence but the way it is presented is highly political. Every word in it had to be negotiated and that is not the same as “carefully chosen”. If you want to dive into climate change I’d suggest to take a look at “The Warming Papers” [1], an edited compilation by David Archer and Raymond Pierrehumbert.

[1] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Warming+Papers%3A+The+Scient...

juujian
Not sure anybody here appreciates social science, but I will never not give a shout-out to "Decoupling Rape" by Whiteman and Cooper. Such an authentic account, while still managing to stay relevant to abstract and higher-order debates in my field. I suspect many have not read it because it is so heart-wrenching though.
xwowsersx
That's Whiteman*, not white man ;)
juujian
Autocorrect strikes again :)
rolandog
One I particularly liked: "FastDTW: Toward Accurate Dynamic Time Warping in Linear Time and Space" by Stan Salvador and Philip Chan.

[0] https://cs.fit.edu/~pkc/papers/tdm04.pdf

_gmax0
Didn't think I'd come across a DTW paper here.

Have you seen anything worth reading in that line of literature which addresses a more practical issue of segment sizing and segment overlap on accuracy?

FullyFunctional
Like Kleobis and Biton, we won't know until I am dead.

However thus far, a paper that literally changed my life: "Value Dependence Graphs: Representation Without Taxation", D. Weise, R. F. Crew, M. Ernst, B. Steensgaard, POPL 1994. (This was the proverbial butterfly flap that moved me through three countries).

There are many many other good papers and it's not a one-dimension metric so it's hard to pick out winners.

owlbite
The Conjugate Gradient Method without the Agonizing Pain https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake-papers/painless-conjugate-grad...

Presents a really nice conceptual/intuitive explanation of how/why it works, rather than the traditional algebra based definition/proof you get in many linear algebra courses.

samvher
Thanks a lot for the recommendation, read this over the weekend and learned a bunch. If you have other papers to recommend in similar categories I'm all ears :)
VikingCoder
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

Their methodology is brilliant. I want this research replicated, all over the place, all the time, with different variables.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

PaulRobinson
Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"[1] is often considered a classic. I think this is because:

1. It's quite readable as a narrative.

2. The maths is not pages of first principle derivations as if the reader is not familiar with the basics of algebraic substitution.

3. The diagrams and graphs are genuinely useful and remove the need for many, many thousands of words that others may have used instead of, or in addition to, the core narrative.

4. It deals with an abstract concept but roots it in concrete mathematical and physical terms. He touches on specific examples.

5. It's quite short given the breadth of subject area.

[1] https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

b33j0r
His easily-understandable yet mind-blowing ideas of hyperspheres of information (and a reliable communications channel having a definition!? What?) changed my brain permanently.

This is the paper I was going to cite as well.

cvwright
His “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems”, from a few years prior, is right up there too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Theory_of_Secr...

IMO Shannon does an amazing job laying out the foundational ideas behind cryptographic security in a way that is very accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of probability.

The clarity and simplicity that he achieves is especially striking when you compare his approach to what you’ll see from modern cryptographers. No offense to those guys - they’re amazing - but accessible their stuff is not.

tnecniv
I agree with you but what’s so amazing is that it is a first principles analysis. He postulates a few criteria information must satisfy and generates a whole field of study as a consequence
onco
"Retinoic Acid and Arsenic Trioxide for Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia" by Lo-Coco et al. from 2013.[0]

This paper presents a cure for an extremely aggressive cancer using vitamin A and arsenic. Its a unique, relatively benign treatment strategy that completely avoids chemotherapy. As far as I know this is the best result in all of oncology, though the cancer it treats is very rare.

The most well known paper in oncology that is probably more interesting to a general audience is "The Hallmarks of Cancer" by Hanahan and Weinberg.[1]

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1300874

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(00)81683-9?_re...

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Kelamir
"Brain over body"-A study on the willful regulation of autonomic function during cold exposure
hprotagonist
“What is it like to be a bat” (Nagel)

“The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm”, (Gould et al)

“ A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve” (hodgkin and huxley)

a few other that don’t come to mind right now

galkk
I can give example of one of worst papers.

Original IPFS paper is one of worst papers that I had read.

throwaway14356
worse sounds like a topic. You haven't explained why btw.
Thoeu388
Gillian Russell, “Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts,”

It is about traditional martial arts masters, trapped in their echo chamber, sniffing their own farts. The whole industry gets its ass kicked by mixed martial arts. Basically street thugs versus shaolin kung fu masters.

it describes in-group bias, echo chambers, and cognitive dissonance in large groups. Very applicable in modern science, politics and so on.

rramadass
Interesting; something off the beaten track.

While i agree that many treat "Traditional Martial Arts" almost like a "Religion" (i.e. The Ancients knew everything and thou shalt not question) we also need to be careful that we don't throw the "baby out with the bathwater". Almost all of current-day martial arts are "Sports" (including MMA etc.) with rules and refereeing in place to avoid serious injury/death. Thus while we have a lot of modern knowledge w.r.t. Anatomy/Physiology etc. much of the mental training needed for "life-or-death" situations have been lost. A technique by itself is nothing; it is the "killing mentality" needed to go with it that is everything. I think that is what we need to refocus on from "Traditional Martial Arts" while at the same time interpreting them in the light of Modern Science/Psychology.

solardev
I think most traditional martial arts are also practiced, taught, and competed in as sports these days. They're not gladiators.

Specialized people (military, self defense contractors, etc.) might optimize for lethality. Maybe Krav Maga has a greater focus on that than most. But most of the famous Eastern arts aren't delaying with life and death stuff anymore either. It's not Kill Bill.

rramadass
That was my point.

The paper bemoans the BS in "Traditional Martial Arts" but misses the point that they are no longer taught with the same level of intensity/seriousness/viciousness/ruthlessness that it was originally developed with. Lacking this training mindset the "Martial" art becomes merely a "Sport". But many of the ancient texts cover these principles quite well and are worth learning and interpreting in modern physiological/psychological terms.

runald
I haven't read the whole paper, but isn't one reason MMA wins because it has less restrictions on what moves you can do? Other martial arts have strict rules on what kind of moves you do, so a practitioner of Taekwondo will be at a disadvantage against MMA practitioner, for obvious reasons. This doesn't mean one martial art is necessarily better, they just have different rules. It seems silly to compare them that way.

Imagine a hypothetical new martial arts that allows all the moves of MMA, but with biting and eye poke allowed, so practitioners of this arts is at a definite advantage against MMA. Would you say that this martial art is any better?

boppo1
I think the generally accepted context most people evaluate martial arts in is "How well does it allow one to weaponize their body to defend themselves?"

In this context, some martial arts are dramatically better than others.

MMA + Eye-poking martial art: Yes.

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YeGoblynQueenne
I read this paper and it's interesting, even though I'm not interested in martial arts (but I am interested in what the author calls "epistemic vices"). I didn't see where it's saying that "The whole industry gets its ass kicked by mixed martial arts" and it seems very respectful to martial arts masters, also, saying, e.g. that:

So am I advocating scoffing at the word of your sensei or senpai? No. That’s not being an epistemically responsible agent, that’s just being an asshole. All the old constraints on your behaviour still apply. I’m arguing for the importance of being cautious in what you believe.

Instead of saying they are "trapped in their echo chamber, sniffing their own farts". Although I guess you inevitably sniff a few things you wouldn't normally chose to in a dojo (such as other peoples' sweat or foot smell).

Interestingly the author then goes on to quote "the words of the Buddha "copied from their place of honour on the wall of Harry Cook’s dojo":

Do not believe on the strength of traditions even if they have been held in honour for many generations and in many places; do not believe anything because many people speak of it; do not believe on the strength of sages of old times; do not believe that which you have yourselves imagined, thinking that a god has inspired you. Believe nothing which depends only on the authority of your masters or priests. After investigation, believe that which you have yourselves tested and found reasonable, and which is for your good and that of others.

And while that sounds very enlightened to the modern reader, there's at least this guy who thinks it's a mistranslation adjusted to that modern reader's sensibilities:

https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/do-not-believe-in-anything-simp...

Anyway an interesting read, so thanks for linking.

ryukafalz
"A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda-Calculus" by Jonathan A. Rees is pretty high up there: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5944

I read this a few years back as I was going down an object-capability rabbit hole and found it extremely compelling. (And also made me disappointed that most of the systems we use today do not work like this! Code execution vulnerabilities would be so much less immediately hazardous if they did.)