Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read?

"Reflections on Trusting Trust"[1] (Ken Thompson, 1984) is up there - it's a brief read, with high information density, and fairly profound implications.

[1] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/358198.358210

I really like the Raft paper, just because it was one of the first papers I read out of curiosity.

Also, not what you asked, bur there's a fellow on YouTube who reads many classic CS papers while providing context. Great content! https://youtube.com/c/VivekHaldar

Max Tegmark's "The Mathematical Universe". https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646.pdf

Yeah he does write really good papers. Another about a program we both wrote independently, the brute-forcer in AI Feynman.

bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Good in theory, problematic in practice.

Anything is problematic in practice.

Sometimes it’s worth it, though!