30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format
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A site curating 27 machine learning papers allegedly from Ilya Sutskever's reading list for John Carmack.
30papers.com presents a rumored list of key ML papers, attributed to Ilya Sutskever for John Carmack, covering CNNs, RNNs, LSTMs, attention, transformers, graph networks, scaling laws, and Kolmogorov complexity. It includes 27 papers with thumbnails, author credits, and brief summaries, but lacks the full canonical list. The creator, a first-year CS student, built it to help beginners navigate research papers. The site features animated scrolling that some commenters found distracting or nauseating. It rehosts paper content with formatting issues in math rendering.
What commenters are saying
Commenters were divided. Many criticized the site's scrolling animations, calling them distracting and nausea-inducing, especially on Firefox and Chrome. Some appreciated the curated list but questioned its authenticity, noting the rumored list may have originated from Twitter (X) and is unverified. Others found the math formulas poorly rendered and the page UX broken. A few provided practical tips: suggested logical reading order, offered shell commands to bulk-download papers, and recommended Zotero for management. The author acknowledged the site is a work in progress and welcomed PRs.