2020 Top Papers on Hacker News

1. UK COVID19 model published

imperial.ac.uk • 71 points • 63 citations

2. Linux Productivity Tools

usenix.org • 1234 points

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

docs.fcc.gov • 908 points

4. Patch Critical Cryptographic Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows

media.defense.gov • 705 points • 3 citations

5. Articles downloaded from SciHub where cited 1.72 times more

arxiv.org • 755 points • 1 citation

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

arxiv.org • 429 points • 8 citations

7. Chelsea Manning ordered to be released

courtlistener.com • 730 points

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

neildavidson.com • 481 points • 2 citations

9. Surveillance on UK council websites

brave.com • 512 points • 1 citation

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

minervanett.no • 493 points

11. Calculus Made Easy

gutenberg.org • 424 points • 1 citation

12. Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits

dol.gov • 374 points • 2 citations

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

arxiv.org • 357 points • 2 citations

14. Bayesian Data Analysis, Third Edition

users.aalto.fi • 393 points

15. How to Read a Paper

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

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

arxiv.org • 335 points • 2 citations

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

inthepublicinterest.org • 356 points • 1 citation

18. New Results on Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions

public.econ.duke.edu • 379 points

19. Dark Patterns After the GDPR

arxiv.org • 337 points • 1 citation

20. Featherweight Go (A generics design for Go)

arxiv.org • 251 points • 5 citations

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

gov.ca.gov • 250 points • 5 citations

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

biorxiv.org • 287 points • 2 citations

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

arxiv.org • 322 points

24. Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality

borsche.de • 316 points

25. Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable

supremecourt.gov • 304 points

26. 2020 Knuth Prize is awarded to Cynthia Dwork

sigact.org • 297 points

27. Looking Back at Postgres

arxiv.org • 284 points

28. Neural programmer better than Quicksort

arxiv.org • 281 points

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

arxiv.org • 277 points

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

damtp.cam.ac.uk • 276 points

31. Experimental evidence of emotional contagion through social networks

pnas.org • 275 points

32. YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection

arxiv.org • 235 points • 2 citations

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

files.eric.ed.gov • 262 points

34. Knowledge Graphs

arxiv.org • 261 points

35. Fast Differentiable Sorting and Ranking

arxiv.org • 260 points

36. A Mathematical Theory of Communication

people.math.harvard.edu • 194 points • 4 citations

37. Memory-Efficient Search Trees for Database Management Systems

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

38. Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes

web.stanford.edu • 242 points

39. Boeing 737 Max Aircraft: Preliminary Investigative Findings

transportation.house.gov • 238 points

40. Show HN: Fast Anomaly Detection in Graphs

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

41. A Novel Mechanical Ventilator Designed for Mass Scale Production

arxiv.org • 236 points

42. Running Postgres in Kubernetes

static.sched.com • 230 points

43. Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List

scs.stanford.edu • 229 points

44. Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught

ams.org • 225 points

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

akkartik.name • 206 points • 1 citation

46. Technical report into Jeff Bezos phone hack

assets.documentcloud.org • 218 points

47. Learning technical writing using the engineering method

cs.tufts.edu • 215 points

48. Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

arxiv.org • 214 points

49. Draft of Executive Order on Online Censorship

kateklonick.com • 148 points • 5 citations

50. PID Without a PhD

wescottdesign.com • 195 points • 1 citation

51. Some Fundamental Theorems in Mathematics

people.math.harvard.edu • 208 points

52. C++ Pattern Matching Proposal

open-std.org • 192 points • 1 citation

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

cattius.com • 205 points

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

coincenter.org • 204 points

55. Using Reinforcement Learning in the Algorithmic Trading Problem

arxiv.org • 201 points

56. Simple Sabotage Field Manual

cia.gov • 187 points • 1 citation

57. How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods

cslab.pepperdine.edu • 198 points

58. Millions of Tiny Databases

assets.amazon.science • 172 points • 2 citations

59. The Art of Powerful Questions

umanitoba.ca • 197 points

60. USB 4.0

usb.org • 197 points

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

iaria.org • 197 points

62. The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

arxiv.org • 196 points

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

medrxiv.org • 138 points • 5 citations

64. Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science

cs.cmu.edu • 179 points • 1 citation

65. Is a Dataframe Just a Table?

plateau-workshop.org • 189 points

66. Haskell for a New Decade

dev.stephendiehl.com • 186 points

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

arxiv.org • 184 points

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

arxiv.org • 182 points

69. On Liberty John Stuart Mill

socialsciences.mcmaster.ca • 168 points • 1 citation

70. Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages

arxiv.org • 179 points

71. Annual Letter to Berkshire Shareholders

berkshirehathaway.com • 154 points • 2 citations

72. Lean Book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to Logical Verification

github.com • 175 points

73. Proving the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Pruning is All You Need

arxiv.org • 174 points

74. How many jobs can be done at home?

bfi.uchicago.edu • 170 points

75. What changed in OpenSSL after heartbleed

arxiv.org • 157 points • 1 citation

76. Achieving reliable UDP transmission at 10 Gb/s using BSD socket

arxiv.org • 167 points

77. Windows: Interface Guidelines

ics.uci.edu • 163 points

78. ComputeDRAM: In-Memory Compute Using Off-the-Shelf DRAMs

parallel.princeton.edu • 150 points • 1 citation

79. SHA1 Is a Shambles (a practical chosen-prefix attack)

eprint.iacr.org • 130 points • 3 citations

80. Handbook of Covid-19 Prevention and Treatment from Hospital with 0% fatality

video-intl.alicdn.com • 149 points • 1 citation

81. DeepMind AI reading list

storage.googleapis.com • 157 points

82. RusTLS Formal Audit

github.com • 156 points

83. CA governor projecting 25.5M COVID19 cases in CA in 8 weeks

gov.ca.gov • 155 points

84. Must, Should, Don't Care: TCP Conformance in the Wild

arxiv.org • 154 points

85. Differential Forms and Integration

math.ucla.edu • 143 points • 1 citation

86. Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

sciencemadness.org • 143 points • 1 citation

87. FCC approves 100% foreign ownership of U.S. broadcast properties

docs.fcc.gov • 153 points

88. How to play the guitar by ear, for mathematicians and physicists

foundationwebsite.org • 148 points

89. Gated Linear Networks

arxiv.org • 148 points

90. Three typefaces for mathematics

ultrasparky.org • 147 points

91. A Plea for Lean Software

people.inf.ethz.ch • 145 points

92. An Idiot’s guide to Support vector machines

web.mit.edu • 144 points

93. Applied Thinking for Intelligence Analysis

airpower.airforce.gov.au • 144 points

94. Hand Scraping a Truly Flat Plane

galleyrack.com • 144 points

95. Reflections on Trusting Trust

cs.cmu.edu • 77 points • 9 citations

96. Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth

inf.ethz.ch • 134 points • 1 citation

97. Warren Buffett 1997 Email Exchange on Microsoft

sabercapitalmgt.com • 143 points

98. Age-Partitioned Bloom Filters

arxiv.org • 140 points

99. The strange properties of the infinite power tower

arxiv.org • 139 points

100. Unix System Programming with Standard ML

mlton.org • 127 points • 1 citation