Hacker News Reader

Comment by serviceberry | Hacker News Reader

I actually found this to be an odd mix. Are we selecting papers that had an influence on computer science (as in, the theory of computation), or that had an impact on technology? Or are we just using CS as a catch-all for "all things computer"?

The Turing paper is foundational for CS, but without it, would the technology have evolved differently? Probably not. Most software engineers have not read it. Conversely, the IP standard is a technological cornerstone, but there's hardly any science in it. It's just a specification of a fairly simple protocol that you need to know when doing almost anything network-adjacent.

View on HN

Something doesn't feel quite right to me seeing the PageRank paper in a short list alongside Turing and Shannon's foundational work on computability and information theory. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” is almost 90 years old at this point and just as true and relevant now as it was then. Is PageRank even as relevant today as it was in 1998, let alone another 50 years from now?

indeed this was itching me, too.

I wonder how pagerank was influential to CS as a field?

even mapreduce is more a rally clever technique than a boundary pushing or boundary identifying extension of the field. unlike, say, CSP --- which is missing in the list.

still unlike the conciseness and structure of the list. it could evolve into a nice book :-D

If you haven’t read the pagerank paper, you should. It’s not an obvious thing.

Agreed about map reduce though.

thanks for the nudge :-)

My understanding of the term "history of CS" would be "how CS evolved", as a field. How do we think about "processing 'data' with computers". what can we compute? what are limitations in how fast we can compute? how to we talk about and present algorithms, prescriptions for these computations? how do we talk about data and how we structure it (leading to SQL, and sgml/xml/JSON)?

Pagerank in contrast is a very specific type of breakthrough, a breakthrough for it's application domain. But it's not a breakthrough for how we compute or how we think about computation.

does that make sense?

Hoare's paper is in the list, no?

surprisingly it's not, indeed.

This is why I never read the links, and always go comment first.

What joke of a list :-)

We can’t estimate what will be relevant 50 years from now.

If quantum or biological computing find some success, none of these are going to be relevant.

That said, pagerank is important to understand the modern tech world. Search is something we take for granted, and it’s great there’s a deeply mathematical (and somewhat counterintuitive) theory behind it.

The foundations of computation won't change with quantum/biological computers. Turing machines stay as relevant as ever.

Will it be directly influential in 50 years from now on? Maybe no.

But, indirectly looking, it influenced establishment of Google, which influenced many thousands of innovations in this field.

So yes, PageRank is hugely influential in my opinion.

The big insight of the PageRank paper is that you can use MC integration to approximate PR, not PR itself. Hence making the problem much easier to distribute.

An important part of historiography is considering documents and artifacts in the context of their time.

We don't use cuneiform these days, but back in its day, it was as close to a standard writing system as it was possible to get.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com