Ask HN: Best CS Research Papers to read?

10 points by bgar ↗ HN
I'm a sophomore CS student, and would like to start deepening my knowledge much more. What are some good papers to start reading (as in, not so complicated that the content will go over my head).

9 comments

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"Raft: A distributed Consensus Protocol" (https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...) would be a very valuable thing to look at for a sophomore CS student. I imagine it's a bit different than what you've studied so far, but the protocol was designed for understandability and ease of implementation above all else. As a result, it's gained quite a bit of interest from the industry, and you'll find implementations in Go, Erlang, Java, etc. to pick apart.
One favorite of mine is Danny Hillis' dissertation on the connection machine:

http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/14719/18524280...

And not really a research paper, but if you haven't read it, you'd might enjoy Guy Steele's Growing a Language:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

Thank you, Growing a Language looks especially relevant to me because I have to write a ten page paper on "computers and language" for a class on programming language history/design.