30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format

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• Hacker News
• > "beginner friendly format" > looks inside > math
  by brachkow
• Why on earth would you deliberately choose to do whatever the fuck it is you did with the scroll and the animations for each paper when scrolling through the landing page? What are those animations supposed to be? I use firefox but I also visited on chrome, and the page is even more broken there. Scroll doesn't "take" unless I scroll hard enough, otherwise it bounces back. But on chrome, at least, it seems like the animation for each paper is clearer - it's supposed to be animating the scale of the paper as you scroll to it.. but it seems that your background animation is lagging everything so much it just doesn't work.
  by IceDane
• Myspace and 5th grader PowerPoint presentations had a vibe coded child.
  by elictronic
• Main page UX is terrible. If you go for quirky, fine, but I would not want to use it.
  by lostmsu
• Indeed. It's very bad.
  by mattmatheus
• Indeed. I scoffed at your comment and went to the website. After scrolling a bit, I find myself having a mild headache and slight dizziness.

  I would request the author to consider something that does not distract us from this educational and informative website ( I have bookmarked it ).

  by solarengineer
• Yes, normally wouldn't ever say anything, but I could even read the text things were just flying around. (On firefox)
  by soperj
• The formatting of the articles on this website is bad. I've opened the first one and all the LaTeX formulas are messed up. The subscripts and superscripts are all flattened rendering the math hard to comprehend. Did the author actually try to read any of the articles?

  >∏ plocal(x|z) = i p(xi|z,xWindowAround(i))

  Images and tables are not rendered at all. What is the point of this? Just keep the links to arxiv and leave it at that, otherwise render the articles properly

  by renyicircle
• the format is not friendly at all...
  by mmiao
• Anyone got a list for the agentic LLM age?
  by eachro
• This is a beautiful way to present extremely high quality information. I sometimes lament the unpleasant friction involved in finding and reading academic papers (the overly formal style is a necessary evil, but the irritating paywalls, followed by inevitable searches for '%{title} filetype:pdf' feel like unnecessary ones).
  by nomilk
• How is this a beginner friendly format?
  by nitin7
• Thanks for the effort; I have a little feedback: - Very few of these are labeled with a clear reference to source and date (think APA style). - They don't seem to be in order chronologically. I would think "essential" papers would be read from the earlier "foundational" works up to the more recent ones that work on them. - The oldest ones seem to date to the 2010s. I think it would be hard to jump in at such a recent point. The basics of machine learning come from the 1960s-70s.

  If you want to improve it I would recommend coming up with a sequential "reading list" including a few classic papers, some intermediate advancements (frequently referenced), and then a few new, cutting edge articles.

  by joeclark77
• Its interesting seeing how many of these researchers became the heads of frontier labs!
  by lwarfield
• Where did you get the list? AFAIK, list was never shared
  by throwaw12
• Is this meant to be read in order?
  by david_shi
• Kolmogorov Complexity looks interesting. It seems to formalize Occam’s Razor and the notion that intelligence = compression.
  by prideout
• I wouldn't say so about Occam's Razor which is a heuristic.

  The relationship between compression and intelligence, while not equal is definitely there. It looks like 3Blue1Brown is going to be doing some videos on this aspect.

  by Lerc
• If you find this interesting, you should look into Solomonoff induction. It combines Kolmogorov complexity with Bayes rule to provide a general framework for inductive inference, and naturally formalizes Occam's razor.
  by Destructotor
• Is there a way to download them all in one go?
  by aperrien
• https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/

  https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436... https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2012/file/c399862d3...

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.03385

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.07122

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.05027

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.2329

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02595

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0473

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03134

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762

  https://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/annotated-transformer/

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5401

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01427

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.01822

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01212

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.06965

  https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/colt93.pdf

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0406077

  https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.6903

  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/047174882X.ch14 https://github.com/Bladefidz/information-theory/blob/master/...

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02731

  https://www.vetta.org/documents/Machine_Super_Intelligence.p...

  https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

  https://cs231n.github.io/

  by gooob
• Delete the two options in the upper right hand corner of the homepage and Bob's your uncle.
  by bookofjoe
• So the styling and animation work looks really cool (when isolated), but they distract from the content itself, IMO.

  I think it'd work better if you featured the animated background effect toward the top of the page and shifted toward static graphics (or much subtler animations) as the user scrolls.

  And I don't think the zoom-out effect on the listing cards has the intended effect; I found myself wanting to get a better look at the papers and was a little disappointed/annoyed when they got smaller and harder to see as I pulled them into view.

  The colors/shadows/layout all looks really nice, but I feel like the animations (as-is) ultimately detract from the experience rather than add to it. Thanks for sharing, though!

  by jackp96
• I wonder how up to date these papers are because I imagine this list came out >6 years ago
  by upmind
• It’s very easy to check & see there’s at least one paper from 2023. Also it takes time to know which papers are influential. But better to contribute than speculate… what are the seminal ML papers from the last 6 years that should be on the list?
  by dahart
• I thought the actual 30 papers have never been disclosed. Do you have a source tying the recommendations back to Ilya, or did you come up with this list?
  by omneity
• This list was made by some guy on twitter. https://x.com/keshavchan/status/1787861946173186062

  It's unknown whether it has anything to do with Ilya Sutskever.

  by renyicircle
• The list I got was from ex-OpenAI employee Andrew Carr on X. I believe he said in his post however that the list he uploaded is not the full list they were provided at OpenAI however.
  by notmcrowley
• I think someone on Twitter made it up. It was also 40 papers, not 30. https://dallasinnovates.com/exclusive-qa-john-carmacks-diffe...
  by ayhanfuat
• Someone posts on X, "These are Ilya’s 30 papers", gives no source, doesn't say where he got it from, and isn't connected to either Ilya or Carmack (Ilya gave him the list).

  Then someone vibe codes a barely usable website based on that, and it lands on the HN front page? Is this correct?

  by HAL3000