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. Chelsea Manning ordered to be released

courtlistener.com • 730 points

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

neildavidson.com • 481 points • 2 citations

7. Surveillance on UK council websites

brave.com • 512 points • 1 citation

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

arxiv.org • 429 points • 1 citation

9. Calculus Made Easy

gutenberg.org • 424 points

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

arxiv.org • 357 points • 2 citations

11. Bayesian Data Analysis, Third Edition

users.aalto.fi • 393 points

12. How to Read a Paper

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

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

arxiv.org • 335 points • 2 citations

14. New Results on Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions

public.econ.duke.edu • 379 points

15. Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits

dol.gov • 374 points

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

gov.ca.gov • 250 points • 5 citations

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

biorxiv.org • 287 points • 2 citations

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

arxiv.org • 322 points

19. Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable

supremecourt.gov • 304 points

20. 2020 Knuth Prize is awarded to Cynthia Dwork

sigact.org • 297 points

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

damtp.cam.ac.uk • 276 points

22. Experimental evidence of emotional contagion through social networks

pnas.org • 275 points

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

files.eric.ed.gov • 262 points

24. Knowledge Graphs

arxiv.org • 261 points

25. Fast Differentiable Sorting and Ranking

arxiv.org • 260 points

26. YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection

arxiv.org • 235 points • 1 citation

27. Featherweight Go (A generics design for Go)

arxiv.org • 251 points

28. Memory-Efficient Search Trees for Database Management Systems

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

29. Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes

web.stanford.edu • 242 points

30. Boeing 737 Max Aircraft: Preliminary Investigative Findings

transportation.house.gov • 238 points

31. Show HN: Fast Anomaly Detection in Graphs

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

32. A Novel Mechanical Ventilator Designed for Mass Scale Production

arxiv.org • 236 points

33. Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List

scs.stanford.edu • 229 points

34. A Mathematical Theory of Communication

people.math.harvard.edu • 194 points • 2 citations

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

akkartik.name • 206 points • 1 citation

36. Technical report into Jeff Bezos phone hack

assets.documentcloud.org • 218 points

37. Learning technical writing using the engineering method

cs.tufts.edu • 215 points

38. Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning

arxiv.org • 214 points

39. Draft of Executive Order on Online Censorship

kateklonick.com • 148 points • 5 citations

40. PID Without a PhD

wescottdesign.com • 195 points • 1 citation

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

cattius.com • 205 points

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

coincenter.org • 204 points

43. Using Reinforcement Learning in the Algorithmic Trading Problem

arxiv.org • 201 points

44. How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods

cslab.pepperdine.edu • 198 points

45. USB 4.0

usb.org • 197 points

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

iaria.org • 197 points

47. The Art of Powerful Questions

umanitoba.ca • 197 points

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

medrxiv.org • 138 points • 5 citations

49. C++ Pattern Matching Proposal

open-std.org • 192 points

50. Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science

cs.cmu.edu • 179 points • 1 citation

51. Is a Dataframe Just a Table?

plateau-workshop.org • 189 points

52. Simple Sabotage Field Manual

cia.gov • 187 points

53. Millions of Tiny Databases

assets.amazon.science • 172 points • 1 citation

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

arxiv.org • 184 points

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

arxiv.org • 182 points

56. Annual Letter to Berkshire Shareholders

berkshirehathaway.com • 154 points • 2 citations

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

github.com • 175 points

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

arxiv.org • 174 points

59. How many jobs can be done at home?

bfi.uchicago.edu • 170 points

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

arxiv.org • 167 points

61. Windows: Interface Guidelines

ics.uci.edu • 163 points

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

parallel.princeton.edu • 150 points • 1 citation

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

eprint.iacr.org • 130 points • 3 citations

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

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

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

gov.ca.gov • 155 points

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

arxiv.org • 154 points

67. Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

sciencemadness.org • 143 points • 1 citation

68. Differential Forms and Integration

math.ucla.edu • 143 points • 1 citation

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

docs.fcc.gov • 153 points

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

foundationwebsite.org • 148 points

71. Three typefaces for mathematics

ultrasparky.org • 147 points

72. Hand Scraping a Truly Flat Plane

galleyrack.com • 144 points

73. Applied Thinking for Intelligence Analysis

airpower.airforce.gov.au • 144 points

74. An Idiot’s guide to Support vector machines

web.mit.edu • 144 points

75. Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth

inf.ethz.ch • 134 points • 1 citation

76. Age-Partitioned Bloom Filters

arxiv.org • 140 points

77. The strange properties of the infinite power tower

arxiv.org • 139 points

78. Unix System Programming with Standard ML

mlton.org • 127 points • 1 citation

79. The Argument Against Quantum Computers and the Quantum Laws of Nature

gilkalai.files.wordpress.com • 136 points

80. Aerosol and surface stability of hCoV-19 (coronavirus)

medrxiv.org • 58 points • 12 citations

81. Information Leaks via Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention

arxiv.org • 133 points

82. Backstabber's Knife Collection: A Review of Open Source Supply Chain Attacks

arxiv.org • 120 points • 1 citation

83. Deep Molecular Programming

arxiv.org • 128 points

84. Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

arxiv.org • 89 points • 5 citations

85. Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity

joshuatdean.com • 123 points

86. Why I Like Math

southparkwillie.com • 121 points

87. Surfboard: Audio Feature Extraction for Modern Machine Learning

arxiv.org • 110 points • 1 citation

88. A Survey of Deep Learning for Scientific Discovery

arxiv.org • 117 points

89. How Android developers access installed apps on user’s device

ivanomalavolta.com • 117 points

90. Supreme Court says state may enforce some restrictions on religious gatherings

supremecourt.gov • 108 points • 1 citation

91. Vortex: OpenCL Compatible RISC-V GPGPU

arxiv.org • 115 points

92. Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems

papers.nips.cc • 107 points • 1 citation

93. Zero Knowledge Proofs applied to Auctions

courses.csail.mit.edu • 113 points

94. Alphabet announces fourth quarter and fiscal year 2019 results

abc.xyz • 91 points • 3 citations

95. Snel: SQL Native Execution for LLVM

arxiv.org • 112 points

96. John McCarthy: History of Lisp

jmc.stanford.edu • 104 points • 1 citation

97. Cyborgs and Space

web.mit.edu • 102 points • 1 citation

98. Demystifying Differentiable Programming

arxiv.org • 109 points

99. A Modern Introduction to Online Learning

arxiv.org • 105 points

100. Borg: The Next Generation

eurosys2020.org • 104 points