Papers

The papers every engineer should know, from the classics to this decade’s, each explained in an animated video and a close-reading write-up.

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  1. 01

    Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?

    Jim Gray, 1985

    Gray reads through Tandem's outage reports, finds that operators and software cause far more failures than hardware, and shows how process pairs and transactions keep systems up.

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  2. 02

    Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks

    Patrick Lewis et al., 2020

    Lewis and colleagues pair a language model with a search index over Wikipedia so it pulls in passages before answering, the design that gave RAG its name.

    1
  3. 03

    Programming as Theory Building

    Peter Naur, 1985

    Naur argues that a program lives in its programmers' heads as a theory, and that the code and docs alone cannot hand it to a new team.

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