Top Papers on Hacker News in 2020

1. UK COVID19 model published

imperial.ac.uk • 71 points • 64 citations

2. EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption

statewatch.org • 1527 points • 1 citation

3. GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners

arxiv.org • 429 points • 18 citations

4. Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple

cdn2.unrealengine.com • 674 points • 11 citations

5. Linux Productivity Tools

usenix.org • 1234 points

6. I fear App Review is getting too powerful

judiciary.house.gov • 980 points • 1 citation

7. FCC will require phone carriers to authenticate calls by June 2021

docs.fcc.gov • 908 points

8. Patch Critical Cryptographic Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows

media.defense.gov • 705 points • 3 citations

9. Articles downloaded from SciHub where cited 1.72 times more

arxiv.org • 755 points • 1 citation

10. States bring action against Google under federal and state antitrust laws

texasattorneygeneral.gov • 631 points • 3 citations

11. Chelsea Manning ordered to be released

courtlistener.com • 730 points

12. Don't just roll the dice – Software pricing guide

neildavidson.com • 481 points • 2 citations

13. Surveillance on UK council websites

brave.com • 512 points • 1 citation

14. The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus

minervanett.no • 493 points

15. Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com

docs.house.gov • 434 points • 1 citation

16. Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits

dol.gov • 374 points • 3 citations

17. Calculus Made Easy

gutenberg.org • 424 points • 1 citation

18. Every Model Learned by Gradient Descent Is Approximately a Kernel Machine

arxiv.org • 411 points • 1 citation

19. Smart Algorithms beat Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale Deep Learning

arxiv.org • 357 points • 3 citations

20. Listen to Your Key: Towards Acoustics-Based Physical Key Inference

comp.nus.edu.sg • 349 points • 2 citations

21. Bayesian Data Analysis, Third Edition

users.aalto.fi • 393 points

22. How to Read a Paper

blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca • 340 points • 2 citations

23. Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?

arxiv.org • 335 points • 2 citations

24. The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service

inthepublicinterest.org • 356 points • 1 citation

25. New Results on Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions

public.econ.duke.edu • 379 points

26. Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems

static.sched.com • 377 points

27. Dark Patterns After the GDPR

arxiv.org • 337 points • 1 citation

28. Featherweight Go (A generics design for Go)

arxiv.org • 251 points • 5 citations

29. California’s Roadmap to Modify the Stay-at-Home Order

gov.ca.gov • 250 points • 5 citations

30. Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality

borsche.de • 316 points • 1 citation

31. CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

cdprojekt.com • 294 points • 2 citations

32. Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov

biorxiv.org • 287 points • 2 citations

33. Scaling Erlang Developer Experience at WhatsApp

codesync.global • 306 points • 1 citation

34. Explainable Deep Learning: A Field Guide for the Uninitiated

arxiv.org • 322 points

35. Exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers via Wi-Fi

arxiv.org • 288 points • 1 citation

36. Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable

supremecourt.gov • 304 points

37. What distinguishes great software engineers?

faculty.washington.edu • 301 points

38. Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers

encrypto.de • 280 points • 1 citation

39. 2020 Knuth Prize is awarded to Cynthia Dwork

sigact.org • 297 points

40. Google/Fitbit will monetise health data and harm consumers

cepr.org • 290 points

41. Looking Back at Postgres

arxiv.org • 284 points

42. Neural programmer better than Quicksort

arxiv.org • 281 points

43. How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers

arxiv.org • 277 points

44. Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand?

damtp.cam.ac.uk • 276 points

45. Experimental evidence of emotional contagion through social networks

pnas.org • 275 points

46. A Mathematical Theory of Communication

people.math.harvard.edu • 194 points • 5 citations

47. SpaceX Starship Users' Guide

spacex.com • 252 points • 1 citation

48. YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection

arxiv.org • 235 points • 2 citations

49. Memory-Efficient Search Trees for Database Management Systems

reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu • 250 points • 1 citation

50. Testimony to House committee by former Facebook executive Tim Kendall

energycommerce.house.gov • 265 points

51. Exceptionally gifted children: long-term outcomes of acceleration

files.eric.ed.gov • 262 points

52. Knowledge Graphs

arxiv.org • 261 points

53. Fast Differentiable Sorting and Ranking

arxiv.org • 260 points

54. Markets are efficient if and only if P=NP

arxiv.org • 210 points • 3 citations

55. Mathematics for Programmers

yurichev.com • 258 points

56. Simple Sabotage Field Manual

cia.gov • 187 points • 4 citations

57. Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court

cases.justia.com • 243 points

58. Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes

web.stanford.edu • 242 points

59. The Elements of Statistical Learning

web.stanford.edu • 225 points • 1 citation

60. Boeing 737 Max Aircraft: Preliminary Investigative Findings

transportation.house.gov • 238 points

61. Show HN: Fast Anomaly Detection in Graphs

comp.nus.edu.sg • 206 points • 2 citations

62. A Novel Mechanical Ventilator Designed for Mass Scale Production

arxiv.org • 236 points

63. Running Postgres in Kubernetes

static.sched.com • 230 points

64. Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List

scs.stanford.edu • 229 points

65. Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught

ams.org • 225 points

66. The SEC “Modernizes” the Accredited Investor Definition

sec.gov • 194 points • 2 citations

67. Bicycles for the mind have to be see-through

akkartik.name • 206 points • 1 citation

68. Technical report into Jeff Bezos phone hack

assets.documentcloud.org • 218 points

69. Low-level details of the Zen 2 microarchitecture

agner.org • 163 points • 4 citations

70. Extracting firmware from embedded devices

github.com • 215 points

71. Learning technical writing using the engineering method

cs.tufts.edu • 215 points

72. Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

arxiv.org • 214 points

73. Millions of Tiny Databases

assets.amazon.science • 172 points • 3 citations

74. Draft of Executive Order on Online Censorship

kateklonick.com • 148 points • 5 citations

75. PID Without a PhD

wescottdesign.com • 195 points • 1 citation

76. Some Fundamental Theorems in Mathematics

people.math.harvard.edu • 208 points

77. C++ Pattern Matching Proposal

open-std.org • 192 points • 1 citation

78. Undocumented CPU behavior: analyzing undocumented opcodes on Intel x86-64

cattius.com • 205 points

79. U.S. bill to exempt small virtual currency transactions from CGT

coincenter.org • 204 points

80. The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

cdar.berkeley.edu • 190 points • 1 citation

81. Using Reinforcement Learning in the Algorithmic Trading Problem

arxiv.org • 201 points

82. How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods

cslab.pepperdine.edu • 198 points

83. USB 4.0

usb.org • 197 points

84. How to build a search engine with common Unix tools

iaria.org • 197 points

85. The Art of Powerful Questions

umanitoba.ca • 197 points

86. The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

arxiv.org • 196 points

87. Adjusted age-specific case fatality ratio during the Covid-19 epidemic in Hubei

medrxiv.org • 138 points • 5 citations

88. The Silurian Hypothesis

arxiv.org • 158 points • 3 citations

89. Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science

cs.cmu.edu • 179 points • 1 citation

90. The Computational Limits of Deep Learning

arxiv.org • 190 points

91. Reflections on Trusting Trust

cs.cmu.edu • 77 points • 13 citations

92. Is a Dataframe Just a Table?

plateau-workshop.org • 189 points

93. Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages

greenlab.di.uminho.pt • 163 points • 2 citations

94. Haskell for a New Decade

dev.stephendiehl.com • 186 points

95. MLIR: A Compiler Infrastructure for the End of Moore's Law

arxiv.org • 184 points

96. Apple ordered to pay retail workers for security screening time

cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov • 171 points • 1 citation

97. Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages

arxiv.org • 182 points

98. On Liberty John Stuart Mill

socialsciences.mcmaster.ca • 168 points • 1 citation

99. Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages

arxiv.org • 179 points

100. Speculative Dereferencing of Registers: Reviving Foreshadow

arxiv.org • 167 points • 1 citation