9 ms·

Reading academic computer science papers

229 points by happy-go-lucky 5y ago

behnamoh 5y ago
the following article talks about why you shouldn’t read some scientific papers: https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-not-to-read-scientific-papers-3ae5f26b1b7f https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-not-to-read-scientific-p...
bingo_pajama 5y ago
wanderingmind 5y ago
Unless you are paid to read papers and implement cutting edge stuff, your time is better spent leetcoding that has a direct short term impact on maximizing your TC.
- aaron695 5y ago
- tomasreimers 5y ago
  Can't tell if sarcasm. If not, do you believe there is value in education beyond optimizing TC?
  - wanderingmind 5y ago
    Belief in value of education beyond TC is (1) inversely proportional to the number of mouths to feed and (2) directly proportional to the outstanding equity in trust accounts
    - rfrey 5y ago
      That's a weird thing to say on a website that values curiosity above almost everything else.
  - gautamdivgi 5y ago
    Probably after you retire or if you don't have any dependents. The moment you have dependents (kids), parents you need to take care of and the subsequent load of mortgages, university fees, medical insurance and what not... optimizing TC suddenly looks like the best investment compared to any other education. I'm speaking from experience. I got a PhD while working full-time. I enjoyed it and it gave me a lot of perspective. But - if I'd spent even 1/6th the time LC'ing I'd probably have a much higher TC at this point :). No regrets - but its an amusing thought that kinda lurks in the background.
    - nnadams 5y ago
      Any advice on doing a PhD while working? I've been considering doing that in the back of my mind.
      - gautamdivgi 5y ago
        Here you go.. I put this blog together a long time back - https://gautamdivgi.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/my-part-time-phd/ https://gautamdivgi.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/my-part-time-ph...
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  > on maximizing your TC. What's TC in this context?
  - Shugarl 5y ago
    Total compensation. It really annoyed me to not know what it meant, so I spend a bit of time finding that
- Silamoth 5y ago
  But reading papers is fun and cool. You get to learn new things. If you read recent papers, you learn things that aren't just new to you but new to the entire world; you can literally learn cutting-edge things that were discovered recently. And if you read older papers, you can better understand why the world is the way it is right now. Putting TC aside (don't most programmers make plenty anyways?), isn't it just cool to learn new and cutting-edge things? Personally, I think so. Curiosity is central to what it means to be a hacker.
lazyjeff 5y ago
If you're looking for a "menu" of papers from various subfields, I've been collecting a list of all best paper awards from a set of 30 computer science conferences for the past 25 years. This is just a personal interest of mine, and is a long page with no ads or upsell. https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards/ https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards/ These are papers that were deemed "best papers" in that year, though obviously may not have turned out to be as influential in retrospect, i.e. they're likely not the papers we consider "best" when looking back today.
- whitten 5y ago
  Did you focus on any particular sub field when you chose which CS conferences? Also, do you think ACM opening their archives will have a high impact on which ones you recommend in the future?
  - lazyjeff 5y ago
    About 13 years ago when I started this, I selected what I considered the most well-known broad conferences in each subfield (I'm trying to avoid using the words "top" or "best"), though the list is notably missing SIGGRAPH which didn't have such an award, and architecture conferences which I considered more in ECE than CS. ACM archives -- not really, I haven't added any new conferences because it makes each year even more work to update. And I find that nearly all CS papers are accessible through various sources that you can find in Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar (e.g. author homepages, course websites, arXiv, etc.).
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  That's a great resource, thanks. Looking at the list the paper titles could be be more readable, perhaps bigger and perhaps not in blue. There's a lot of information but you can always scroll.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  Yeah, I think test-of-time awards are a better indicator of which papers actually had solid impact; there's often very little overlap b/w best paper awards and test-of-time awards.
gandalfgeek 5y ago
Shameless plug but I've been making videos covering CS papers: https://youtube.com/c/VivekHaldar https://youtube.com/c/VivekHaldar Motivation is to get more people into it, and also give enough of a flavor of the paper for those who aren't used to reading academic papers, or don't have the time.
stewvsshark 5y ago
Unless you’re working on something that has the potential to be directly influenced by a paper, I’ve found trying to stumble through academic papers to be a huge waste of time. Remember that academic papers are by and large written for other academics, not for general purpose or even specialized engineers (obviously it depends how specialized you are). Take something like merge sort - I’d recommend the Khan academy video before recommending the academic paper if you want to understand how it works. I get that you should understand “why” it works from an academic perspective, but I don’t know that you really get much value from that level of understanding.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  This is generally true, but some original papers are beautiful and elegant, and give you amazing insight even with little domain knowledge. Some of my favorites in biology include Shinya Yamanakas original iPS paper (1), Sydney Brenners paper on C. elegans (2). I also like the original BLaST paper. Anyone with the money and general scientific interest should consider subscribing to Nature or Science. It’s a fun browse every week and you never know what fields interesting finding might fancy you until you look at the articles. 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16904174/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16904174/ 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1213120/?report=reader https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1213120/?report...
  - Labo333 5y ago
    Anyone with common sense will read Nature or Science from sci-hub :)
    - ramraj07 5y ago
      Couldn’t give a shit if someone pirates or pays the publisher, I like to have a book in my hand in the loo and browsing through a magazine is in some ways much better to take all of the science in fast that I’ve never managed to replicate in a computer. Except with google reader but let’s not open that wound now shall we?
    - 5y ago
armchairhacker 5y ago
I'm a PhD student. Maybe I'm not a good PhD student. But honestly, when I read most papers I usually just end up confused. The concepts are complicated enough, but then the writing style in papers is just really strange and unnecessarily verbose and over-complicates even simple concepts. I end up getting most of my knowledge through blog posts and slides which cover the papers vs. the papers themselves.
- pid-1 5y ago
  Had a similar experience when working in a research lab. I think the issue is that I have a hard time learning things without doing myself. And generally trying to reproduce stuff from a paper is really hard.
  - musicale 5y ago
    I like it when the authors provide digital artifacts including code and data to make it easier to analyze and reproduce the work.
    - substructure 5y ago
      There seems to be some improvements in this area. Machine learning papers sometimes provide their data sets and other artifacts on websites like paperswithcode.com. Have you ever contacted the authors to request their data? I personally have not.
      - chaxor 5y ago
        That should continue to increase. Hopefully it will be academic misconduct to not release code - but also further, it should be misconduct for the code not to be able to reproduce the paper's output with a one line command.
- drBonkers 5y ago
  After editing a lot of my peers papers before publication, I think the weird writing style comes from poor ESL skills.
sudosysgen 5y ago
twominutepapers on YouTube is a great resource to get an intro to some interesting CS research, though it's mostly infographics, ML, and simulation focused.
jdkee 5y ago
I found this book to be a fantastic reference of the leading papers in computer science. See https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future
galaxyLogic 5y ago
Some say you should and some say you shouldn't. But it would be nice to have a resource that explained new CS research for practicing programmers. Something like "Popular Mechanics" or "Scientific American" for programmers. Is there such a thing?
- bombcar 5y ago
  It’s called Hacker News but I can’t remember the URL - something weird about combining whys.
  - texaslonghorn5 5y ago
    Haha, though for accuracy the website is named after the Y-combinator which is a combinator in Haskell Curry's system of combinatory logic (not to be confused with combinatorial [digital] logic).
0x20cowboy 5y ago
Please correct me if I just haven’t found the right place, but when I’ve tried to read academic papers in the past I found I’d have to pay upwards of $50.00 to read anything more than just the abstract. Is there a site that gives free access to these research papers?
- Laakeri 5y ago
  arxiv.org
- uluyol 5y ago
  Some conferences are open access and the materials are freely available. Anything USENIX falls into this category. In my area (networking/distributed/operating systems) the other (non-USENIX) major venues are also open access (SOSP and SIGCOMM).
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  sci-hub, but generally most papers are available from the authors' websites, or a preprint server like ArXiv or IACR ePrint
- the_benno 5y ago
  The best source is usually authors' websites. You can find a free copy of just about any modern CS paper by googling its title in quotes with "filetype:pdf".
- Spivakov 5y ago
  Here is my kettle logic for you to not even try getting around that paywall: Old papers that are not publicly accessible on the web are very likely just a pile of craps and not worth reading; even if it was worth reading, its information should have been compiled in better ways in textbooks/blog posts; if neither were applicable, then you are supposed to be some researcher working in academia and can ask your institute to offer the access. Short answer: scihub
- anonymousDan 5y ago
  $200 a year gives you ACM membership with free access to the DL library (amongst other things including a monthly hardcopy of communications of the ACM). Great value IMHO.
substructure 5y ago
Solving problems by studying tomes of knowledge is the job description of wizards/witches. Large improvements towards optimality, for some problems, are effectively locked away in some of these papers. As the article points out, there generally isn't much benefit in the context of building CRUD apps. Some contexts have larger research communities. For example, there isn't nearly as many papers on real-time path planning for agent mutable environments vs static environments. I assume this is because we still don't have Boston Dynamics robots in people's homes. If we could get the cost low enough it may be more profitable to send mining robots to mars than people, but I guess there are other applications as well. I spent some months trying to find, understand, and implement the state-of-the-art algorithms in real-time path planning within mutable environments(Minecraft). I started with graph algorithms like A*[0] and their extensions. For my problem this was very slow. D* lite[1] seemed like an improvement, but it has issues with updates near its root. Sample based planners came next such as rrt[2], rrt*, and many others. I built a virtual reality website to visualize and interact with the rrt* algorithm. I can release this if anyone is interested. I've found that many papers do a poor job describing when their algorithms perform poorly. The best way I've found to understand an algorithm's behavior is to implement it, apply it to different problems, and visualize the execution over many problem instances. This is time consuming, but yields the best understanding in my experience. Sample based planners have issues with formations like bug traps. For my use case this was a large issue. Moving over to Monte Carlo Tree Search(MCTS)[3] worked very well given the nature of decision making when moving through an environment the agent can change. The way it builds great plans from random attempts of path planning is still shocking. Someone must incorporate these papers' best aspects into novel solutions. There exists an opportunity to extract value from the information differential between research and industry. For some reason many papers do not provide source code. A good open source implementation brings these improvements to a larger audience. Some good resources I've found are websites like Semantic Scholar[4] and arxiv[5] along with survey papers such as one for MCTS[3]. The later half of this article is what gets me excited to build new things. I would encourage people to explore the vast landscape of problems to find one that interests them then look into the research. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D\\\ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D\\\* [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidly-exploring_random_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidly-exploring_random_tree [3] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Survey-of-Monte-Carlo-Tree-Search-Methods-Browne-Powley https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Survey-of-Monte-Carl... /c37f1baac3c8ba30250084f067167ac3837cf6fd [4] semanticscholar.org [5] https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/
tchalla 5y ago
The now discontinued "Morning Paper" has a great set of Archives. https://blog.acolyer.org https://blog.acolyer.org
siraben 5y ago
I’ve been reading CS papers for a few years now (mostly FP or PL related) and wrote some summaries for a selection of them[0]. FP and PL literature is very accessible, many authors have a desire to communicate some aspect of programming languages or type systems that is readable even if you have only an introductory knowledge of the field. Also, papers are a great source for knowledge that is not easily found in books and documentation online. [0] https://github.com/siraben/fp-notes/blob/master/Papers.md https://github.com/siraben/fp-notes/blob/master/Papers.md
DeathArrow 5y ago
For someone who might be new to CS I don't think reading papers will be the optimum path towards gaining knowledge. If the concepts are new and bleeding edge, the reading papers is the only way to become familiar to them. Otherwise, time is better spend reading books and courses, where the said concepts are explained in relation with the others, forming a bigger picture.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
It's more $$$ rewarding grinding Leetcode
kklisura 5y ago
Is it legal to publish links to research papers? I was researching a lot about NASA's Mars helicopter - Ingenuity and found couple of research papers, so I though I'll publish the list on my blog. List would include title of papers with appropriate links to PDFs. The PDFs are hosted _somewhere_ and they are easily reachable if you just google the research title. I gave up eventually since I'm not sure if this is legal or not.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  although some countries have these linking rules I don't think they generally apply to research, that is to say if they research is available it is legal to link to. Research from American governmental agencies is also paid for by American tax money and thereby, under the American model, owned by the public and publicly linkable.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Why would you assume it wouldn't be ? A known counter-example was someone condemned mostly because of admitting browsing up the directory and realizing that the files were supposed to be protected by a login + password : https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalist-fined-4000-plus-for-publishing-public-documents/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalis...
briffid 5y ago
Significant part of CS papers are master-bation.
suyjuris 5y ago
Much depends on the subfield, but here are two shortcuts to understanding a dense paper: 1. Many CS papers are presented at conferences, and many of these talks are recorded and available. 2. Look for a paper citing the one you are interested in. The “related works” section often contains brief summaries, which are written with the benefit of hindsight. Somewhat related, an earlier comment of mine on how to acquire copies of a paper without resorting to unauthorised copying [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23711206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23711206
sideproject 5y ago
I read research papers often and I found reading it together with other peers quite helpful when I did research. So I recently created a small tool to read research papers together with other people with annotations and comments. https://www.scholars.io https://www.scholars.io

the following article talks about why you shouldn’t read some scientific papers: https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-not-to-read-scientific-papers-3ae5f26b1b7f https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-not-to-read-scientific-p...

bingo_pajama 5y ago

wanderingmind 5y ago

Unless you are paid to read papers and implement cutting edge stuff, your time is better spent leetcoding that has a direct short term impact on maximizing your TC.

aaron695 5y ago
tomasreimers 5y ago
Can't tell if sarcasm. If not, do you believe there is value in education beyond optimizing TC?
- wanderingmind 5y ago
  Belief in value of education beyond TC is (1) inversely proportional to the number of mouths to feed and (2) directly proportional to the outstanding equity in trust accounts
  - rfrey 5y ago
    That's a weird thing to say on a website that values curiosity above almost everything else.
- gautamdivgi 5y ago
  Probably after you retire or if you don't have any dependents. The moment you have dependents (kids), parents you need to take care of and the subsequent load of mortgages, university fees, medical insurance and what not... optimizing TC suddenly looks like the best investment compared to any other education. I'm speaking from experience. I got a PhD while working full-time. I enjoyed it and it gave me a lot of perspective. But - if I'd spent even 1/6th the time LC'ing I'd probably have a much higher TC at this point :). No regrets - but its an amusing thought that kinda lurks in the background.
  - nnadams 5y ago
    Any advice on doing a PhD while working? I've been considering doing that in the back of my mind.
    - gautamdivgi 5y ago
      Here you go.. I put this blog together a long time back - https://gautamdivgi.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/my-part-time-phd/ https://gautamdivgi.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/my-part-time-ph...
sundarurfriend 5y ago
> on maximizing your TC. What's TC in this context?
- Shugarl 5y ago
  Total compensation. It really annoyed me to not know what it meant, so I spend a bit of time finding that
Silamoth 5y ago
But reading papers is fun and cool. You get to learn new things. If you read recent papers, you learn things that aren't just new to you but new to the entire world; you can literally learn cutting-edge things that were discovered recently. And if you read older papers, you can better understand why the world is the way it is right now. Putting TC aside (don't most programmers make plenty anyways?), isn't it just cool to learn new and cutting-edge things? Personally, I think so. Curiosity is central to what it means to be a hacker.

lazyjeff 5y ago

If you're looking for a "menu" of papers from various subfields, I've been collecting a list of all best paper awards from a set of 30 computer science conferences for the past 25 years. This is just a personal interest of mine, and is a long page with no ads or upsell. https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards/ https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards/ These are papers that were deemed "best papers" in that year, though obviously may not have turned out to be as influential in retrospect, i.e. they're likely not the papers we consider "best" when looking back today.

whitten 5y ago
Did you focus on any particular sub field when you chose which CS conferences? Also, do you think ACM opening their archives will have a high impact on which ones you recommend in the future?
- lazyjeff 5y ago
  About 13 years ago when I started this, I selected what I considered the most well-known broad conferences in each subfield (I'm trying to avoid using the words "top" or "best"), though the list is notably missing SIGGRAPH which didn't have such an award, and architecture conferences which I considered more in ECE than CS. ACM archives -- not really, I haven't added any new conferences because it makes each year even more work to update. And I find that nearly all CS papers are accessible through various sources that you can find in Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar (e.g. author homepages, course websites, arXiv, etc.).
galaxyLogic 5y ago
That's a great resource, thanks. Looking at the list the paper titles could be be more readable, perhaps bigger and perhaps not in blue. There's a lot of information but you can always scroll.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
Yeah, I think test-of-time awards are a better indicator of which papers actually had solid impact; there's often very little overlap b/w best paper awards and test-of-time awards.

gandalfgeek 5y ago

Shameless plug but I've been making videos covering CS papers: https://youtube.com/c/VivekHaldar https://youtube.com/c/VivekHaldar Motivation is to get more people into it, and also give enough of a flavor of the paper for those who aren't used to reading academic papers, or don't have the time.

stewvsshark 5y ago

Unless you’re working on something that has the potential to be directly influenced by a paper, I’ve found trying to stumble through academic papers to be a huge waste of time. Remember that academic papers are by and large written for other academics, not for general purpose or even specialized engineers (obviously it depends how specialized you are). Take something like merge sort - I’d recommend the Khan academy video before recommending the academic paper if you want to understand how it works. I get that you should understand “why” it works from an academic perspective, but I don’t know that you really get much value from that level of understanding.

ramraj07 5y ago
This is generally true, but some original papers are beautiful and elegant, and give you amazing insight even with little domain knowledge. Some of my favorites in biology include Shinya Yamanakas original iPS paper (1), Sydney Brenners paper on C. elegans (2). I also like the original BLaST paper. Anyone with the money and general scientific interest should consider subscribing to Nature or Science. It’s a fun browse every week and you never know what fields interesting finding might fancy you until you look at the articles. 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16904174/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16904174/ 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1213120/?report=reader https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1213120/?report...
- Labo333 5y ago
  Anyone with common sense will read Nature or Science from sci-hub :)
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    Couldn’t give a shit if someone pirates or pays the publisher, I like to have a book in my hand in the loo and browsing through a magazine is in some ways much better to take all of the science in fast that I’ve never managed to replicate in a computer. Except with google reader but let’s not open that wound now shall we?
  - 5y ago

armchairhacker 5y ago

I'm a PhD student. Maybe I'm not a good PhD student. But honestly, when I read most papers I usually just end up confused. The concepts are complicated enough, but then the writing style in papers is just really strange and unnecessarily verbose and over-complicates even simple concepts. I end up getting most of my knowledge through blog posts and slides which cover the papers vs. the papers themselves.

pid-1 5y ago
Had a similar experience when working in a research lab. I think the issue is that I have a hard time learning things without doing myself. And generally trying to reproduce stuff from a paper is really hard.
- musicale 5y ago
  I like it when the authors provide digital artifacts including code and data to make it easier to analyze and reproduce the work.
  - substructure 5y ago
    There seems to be some improvements in this area. Machine learning papers sometimes provide their data sets and other artifacts on websites like paperswithcode.com. Have you ever contacted the authors to request their data? I personally have not.
    - chaxor 5y ago
      That should continue to increase. Hopefully it will be academic misconduct to not release code - but also further, it should be misconduct for the code not to be able to reproduce the paper's output with a one line command.
drBonkers 5y ago
After editing a lot of my peers papers before publication, I think the weird writing style comes from poor ESL skills.

sudosysgen 5y ago

twominutepapers on YouTube is a great resource to get an intro to some interesting CS research, though it's mostly infographics, ML, and simulation focused.

jdkee 5y ago

I found this book to be a fantastic reference of the leading papers in computer science. See https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future

galaxyLogic 5y ago

Some say you should and some say you shouldn't. But it would be nice to have a resource that explained new CS research for practicing programmers. Something like "Popular Mechanics" or "Scientific American" for programmers. Is there such a thing?

bombcar 5y ago
It’s called Hacker News but I can’t remember the URL - something weird about combining whys.
- texaslonghorn5 5y ago
  Haha, though for accuracy the website is named after the Y-combinator which is a combinator in Haskell Curry's system of combinatory logic (not to be confused with combinatorial [digital] logic).

0x20cowboy 5y ago

Please correct me if I just haven’t found the right place, but when I’ve tried to read academic papers in the past I found I’d have to pay upwards of $50.00 to read anything more than just the abstract. Is there a site that gives free access to these research papers?

Laakeri 5y ago
arxiv.org
uluyol 5y ago
Some conferences are open access and the materials are freely available. Anything USENIX falls into this category. In my area (networking/distributed/operating systems) the other (non-USENIX) major venues are also open access (SOSP and SIGCOMM).
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
sci-hub, but generally most papers are available from the authors' websites, or a preprint server like ArXiv or IACR ePrint
the_benno 5y ago
The best source is usually authors' websites. You can find a free copy of just about any modern CS paper by googling its title in quotes with "filetype:pdf".
Spivakov 5y ago
Here is my kettle logic for you to not even try getting around that paywall: Old papers that are not publicly accessible on the web are very likely just a pile of craps and not worth reading; even if it was worth reading, its information should have been compiled in better ways in textbooks/blog posts; if neither were applicable, then you are supposed to be some researcher working in academia and can ask your institute to offer the access. Short answer: scihub
anonymousDan 5y ago
$200 a year gives you ACM membership with free access to the DL library (amongst other things including a monthly hardcopy of communications of the ACM). Great value IMHO.

substructure 5y ago

Solving problems by studying tomes of knowledge is the job description of wizards/witches. Large improvements towards optimality, for some problems, are effectively locked away in some of these papers. As the article points out, there generally isn't much benefit in the context of building CRUD apps. Some contexts have larger research communities. For example, there isn't nearly as many papers on real-time path planning for agent mutable environments vs static environments. I assume this is because we still don't have Boston Dynamics robots in people's homes. If we could get the cost low enough it may be more profitable to send mining robots to mars than people, but I guess there are other applications as well. I spent some months trying to find, understand, and implement the state-of-the-art algorithms in real-time path planning within mutable environments(Minecraft). I started with graph algorithms like A*[0] and their extensions. For my problem this was very slow. D* lite[1] seemed like an improvement, but it has issues with updates near its root. Sample based planners came next such as rrt[2], rrt*, and many others. I built a virtual reality website to visualize and interact with the rrt* algorithm. I can release this if anyone is interested. I've found that many papers do a poor job describing when their algorithms perform poorly. The best way I've found to understand an algorithm's behavior is to implement it, apply it to different problems, and visualize the execution over many problem instances. This is time consuming, but yields the best understanding in my experience. Sample based planners have issues with formations like bug traps. For my use case this was a large issue. Moving over to Monte Carlo Tree Search(MCTS)[3] worked very well given the nature of decision making when moving through an environment the agent can change. The way it builds great plans from random attempts of path planning is still shocking. Someone must incorporate these papers' best aspects into novel solutions. There exists an opportunity to extract value from the information differential between research and industry. For some reason many papers do not provide source code. A good open source implementation brings these improvements to a larger audience. Some good resources I've found are websites like Semantic Scholar[4] and arxiv[5] along with survey papers such as one for MCTS[3]. The later half of this article is what gets me excited to build new things. I would encourage people to explore the vast landscape of problems to find one that interests them then look into the research. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D\\\ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D\\\* [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidly-exploring_random_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidly-exploring_random_tree [3] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Survey-of-Monte-Carlo-Tree-Search-Methods-Browne-Powley https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Survey-of-Monte-Carl... /c37f1baac3c8ba30250084f067167ac3837cf6fd [4] semanticscholar.org [5] https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/

tchalla 5y ago

The now discontinued "Morning Paper" has a great set of Archives. https://blog.acolyer.org https://blog.acolyer.org

siraben 5y ago

I’ve been reading CS papers for a few years now (mostly FP or PL related) and wrote some summaries for a selection of them[0]. FP and PL literature is very accessible, many authors have a desire to communicate some aspect of programming languages or type systems that is readable even if you have only an introductory knowledge of the field. Also, papers are a great source for knowledge that is not easily found in books and documentation online. [0] https://github.com/siraben/fp-notes/blob/master/Papers.md https://github.com/siraben/fp-notes/blob/master/Papers.md

DeathArrow 5y ago

For someone who might be new to CS I don't think reading papers will be the optimum path towards gaining knowledge. If the concepts are new and bleeding edge, the reading papers is the only way to become familiar to them. Otherwise, time is better spend reading books and courses, where the said concepts are explained in relation with the others, forming a bigger picture.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

It's more $$$ rewarding grinding Leetcode

kklisura 5y ago

Is it legal to publish links to research papers? I was researching a lot about NASA's Mars helicopter - Ingenuity and found couple of research papers, so I though I'll publish the list on my blog. List would include title of papers with appropriate links to PDFs. The PDFs are hosted _somewhere_ and they are easily reachable if you just google the research title. I gave up eventually since I'm not sure if this is legal or not.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
although some countries have these linking rules I don't think they generally apply to research, that is to say if they research is available it is legal to link to. Research from American governmental agencies is also paid for by American tax money and thereby, under the American model, owned by the public and publicly linkable.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
Why would you assume it wouldn't be ? A known counter-example was someone condemned mostly because of admitting browsing up the directory and realizing that the files were supposed to be protected by a login + password : https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalist-fined-4000-plus-for-publishing-public-documents/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalis...

briffid 5y ago

Significant part of CS papers are master-bation.

suyjuris 5y ago

Much depends on the subfield, but here are two shortcuts to understanding a dense paper: 1. Many CS papers are presented at conferences, and many of these talks are recorded and available. 2. Look for a paper citing the one you are interested in. The “related works” section often contains brief summaries, which are written with the benefit of hindsight. Somewhat related, an earlier comment of mine on how to acquire copies of a paper without resorting to unauthorised copying [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23711206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23711206

sideproject 5y ago

I read research papers often and I found reading it together with other peers quite helpful when I did research. So I recently created a small tool to read research papers together with other people with annotations and comments. https://www.scholars.io https://www.scholars.io