
Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library? - weej
Given ACM&#x27;s Digital Library is currently free to access thru June 30, 2020 what are must read&#x2F;watch resources you recommend and why?
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;
======
capableweb
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](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](https://dl.acm.org/conference/ht))

Scroll down to "Most Popular" and sort by either Downloads or Cited.

Go bananas with reading everything.

~~~
bish0p
Communications of the ACM
([https://dl.acm.org/magazine/cacm](https://dl.acm.org/magazine/cacm)) also
has some "must-reads" for anyone in computer science or software engineering.

------
spenczar5
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](https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2408776.2408794)

~~~
Dowwie
Could you elaborate on why this is any more crucial for microservices than it
is monolith?

~~~
jrumbut
Intuitively, if your request is handled by 1 service you have 1 chance that
your request lands at the extreme end of the latency distribution. If your
requests require 20 services, that's 20 chances.

In reality maybe someone is able to make each microservice so much more
performant and is able to deal with slow or failed requests gracefully in the
UX. Some sites do, but it doesn't automatically by any means.

~~~
hinkley
A couple weeks ago someone brought up High Frequency Trading and while in
theory it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, I’ve been chewing on
the thesis of the linked article ever since: that the real trick to doing
things quickly is to do them consistently. That variance causes far more kinds
of practical problems than does average response time.

~~~
myself248
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.

~~~
hinkley
Indeed.

------
guiambros
This is a good opportunity to remind folks that an ACM subscription is very
affordable ($99/year; 25% off on first year [1]), and the benefits are more
than worth it:

\- Print and online "Communications of the ACM" magazine

\- Safari Books subscription included - all 40,000 books (!)

\- Online courses, webinars, special interest group conferences

\- Full ACM Digital Library (only with the all-access membership option -
$198)

[1]
[https://services.acm.org/public/qj/keep_inventing/qjprofm_co...](https://services.acm.org/public/qj/keep_inventing/qjprofm_control.cfm?promo=DA4SCA)

 _note: the promo code in the URL came on a Google search, and seems to give a
25% discount for first year (which is higher than on the site directly). I
have no affiliation with ACM other than being a happy subscriber_

~~~
pkaye
The access to the Safari Books is alone worth it.

------
hinkley
If you want to go old school, Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” is one of the
more prophetic moments. It was written in 1945.

1979 reprint:
[https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1113634.1113638](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1113634.1113638)

------
azhenley
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".

~~~
capableweb
That's a very good recommendation. And if you can't find the preprint on the
authors website, I've had good success just emailing the author and asking for
a copy. That's successful in 99% of the cases where I couldn't find it
officially for free or as a preprint. Most authors seems more than happy to
provide you with a copy.

And if that finally doesn't work out, there is always sci-hub.si and their
alter egos ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-
Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub))

~~~
apetresc
Are authors technically allowed to do that? (Not _should_ they be allowed, but
_are_ they)?

If so, where does the line get drawn? Are they allowed to have an auto-
responder that responds to any specially-formatted email with a copy of the
requested paper? Can they just put the paper up on their website? Can they
just allow their website to be aggregated by someplace that collects all such
papers?

I'm sure the legal line is drawn somewhere between those two extremes but I
have no idea where.

~~~
capableweb
Good question. I initially got told by friends in academia that this is all
fine and what they all do if they can't access the paper and they would also
hand it over if someone emailed them asking for a copy.

In the end, I guess it depends on who the copyright of the published paper
belongs to. If it belongs to the authors, they are free to do as they please,
if it belongs to the publisher, you should actually email the publisher and
ask for a copy (but good luck with that).

Here are some resources with more thoughts from people in academia and outside
on the subject:

\- [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21440/is-it-
rig...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21440/is-it-right-and-
polite-to-ask-for-a-free-copy-of-a-published-paper)

\- [https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-send-requesting-email-to-
res...](https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-send-requesting-email-to-researcher-
for-their-research-articles)

\-
[https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_we_send_published_pape...](https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_we_send_published_paper_to_those_who_request_for_it)

------
chrisseaton
If you are a Ruby programmer or interested in Ruby I maintain a list of Ruby
papers, some of which are only now freely available due to this open access,
at [https://rubybib.org](https://rubybib.org)

~~~
vsundar
This is awesome. Thanks. I found libmesh which looks very interesting:
[https://github.com/plasma-umass/Mesh](https://github.com/plasma-umass/Mesh)

------
EFruit
Speaking from experience here, don't go overboard trying to grab papers to
read later. Doubly so if you have a static IP. Academic resources, the ACM
included, are incredibly ban-happy, and the line between good behavior and bad
is kept secret.

~~~
capableweb
Is your experience since before or after
[https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-
access-...](https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-access-
during-covid-19) ? Seems strange they would offer Open Access and then ban
people for accessing things.

------
mesaframe
From a previous thread

[https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3335772](https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3335772)

~~~
JadeNB
Another thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783645)
recommended Verified Functional Programming in Agda
([https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/2841316](https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/2841316)).
I was just thrilled to notice that the HOPL proceedings
([https://dl.acm.org/conference/hopl](https://dl.acm.org/conference/hopl)) are
there!

EDIT 1: HOPL was pointed out earlier by spdegabrielle
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795488)).

EDIT 2: I was just downloading, and got my IP address blocked. Nothing crazy
or automated, just manually clicking through to all the articles in HOPLs
I–III. Hopefully it'll clear up eventually, but just a warning to anyone else
trying to build a library in a day.

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

[https://techpack.acm.org/](https://techpack.acm.org/)

~~~
fizwhiz
These are nice though they were last updated in 2014.

~~~
capableweb
Most of the really good and informative papers and books have no time limit. I
think the papers and resources that made the biggest impact on me would have
been easily dismissed by junior-me because of being before 2010 but
fortunately, less-junior-me read them anyway and they changed how I work in
many ways for the better.

------
deadgrey19
Basically the entire internet is built on TCP. But TCP wasn't always very
good. There was a time when congestion nearly killed the early internet.
Congestion avoidance and control talks about how they fixed it. It's light
hearted, accessible and one of my all time favourite reads:

[https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/52324.52356](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/52324.52356)

------
adaszko
[https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327)
followed by [http://varnish-
cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/notes.html](http://varnish-
cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/notes.html) have completely transformed how I view
and architect software. I basically started to strive to leave as much memory
management as possible to the kernel thus not only simplifying my code but
also making it behave better as citizens in the country that the operating
system is, if you will.

------
yangl1996
From a network/system perspective:

\- MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters by Jeff Dean et al.

\- The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols by David D. Clark

\- Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications by
Ion Stoica et al.

------
protomyth
Communications of ACM Volume 37, Issue 7 July 1994

This was an issue that came around the time I was starting my dive into agents
after reading [1] and it showed me my particular interest is a small part of
what other people label the area.

1)
[https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.123...](https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.123.5119)

------
drmajormccheese
[https://mspiegel.github.io/canon](https://mspiegel.github.io/canon)

------
spdegabrielle
HOPL papers

~~~
EamonnMR
Hopl I:
[https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025](https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025)

Hopl II:
[https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766](https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766)

Hopl III:
[https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1411838](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1411838)
(use next button on the left to proceed)

Lots of absolutely fascinating stuff in there.

------
azhenley
For novel (and sometimes wacky) user interfaces, I recommend skimming through
the annual UIST proceedings:
[https://dl.acm.org/conference/uist](https://dl.acm.org/conference/uist)

------
ioncube
I haven't read any of their book yet but I found they have page with book
collections: [https://dl.acm.org/collections](https://dl.acm.org/collections)

------
lukego
Turing award lecture papers.

~~~
sitkack
Those are available everywhere. Stuff you can't get from sci-hub would be the
recorded videos. The nicest thing about dropping the paywall is you can click
through the references.

My immediate recommendations are the onward! papers,
[https://www.sigplan.org/Conferences/Onward/](https://www.sigplan.org/Conferences/Onward/)

------
agumonkey
If anyone at the ACM reads, thanks. It's a lovely move.

