The best research papers, according to hackers
7 research papers were recommended on Hacker News between November 2025 and November 2026. We rank them by how many separate people recommend each one, and 2 earn the Hacker Approved badge.
Top picks
The two most recommended research papers with the badge. Each figure is one person. RecommendsCriticizes One comment
The Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge
14 recommend, 0 criticize, 100% approval
Shares rank 1 of 7 by recommenders
Applies to today's AI automation problems
A 1983 paper on the pitfalls of automation that people say still applies closely to AI and coding today.
Attention Is All You Need by Vaswani et al.
14 recommend, 2 criticize, 88% approval
Shares rank 1 of 7 by recommenders
Foundational work behind modern LLMs
Foundational paper introducing the transformer behind modern LLMs; essential reading. Critics find the presentation hard and the encoder-decoder design dated.
All 7 research papers, ranked
Select a column heading to sort. Approval share is recommenders out of everyone who gave an opinion; the tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs. Months counts the months, out of 13, in which someone recommended it.
| Rank | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tied 1 | The Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge | 14 | 0 | 100% | 7 | — | Approved |
| Tied 1 | Attention Is All You Need by Vaswani et al. | 14 | 2 | 88% | 7 | — | Approved |
| 3 | Structured Programming with go to Statementsby Donald Knuth | 7 | 1 | 88% | 4 | — | — |
| Tied 4 | MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters by Dean and Ghemawat | 6 | 1 | 86% | 5 | — | — |
| Tied 4 | The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering by Microsoft | 6 | 0 | 100% | 2 | — | — |
| Tied 6 | Transformer Circuits Thread | 5 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | — |
| Tied 6 | DeepSeek R1 paper | 5 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | — |
How we rank
Rank is the number of separate people who recommend a product in a Hacker News comment over the past year. Someone who praises the same research paper in five threads counts once.
The badge goes to research papers that at least 10 people recommend, with recommenders outnumbering critics at least 2 to 1, recommended in at least 4 of the 13 months.
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