Good question. Most people read the paper on their own time, and we meet over lunch. The meetings themselves are just an hour, so it's not a massive time block. I've found that the people who show up are the ones who are genuinely curious and would be reading this stuff anyway (and sometimes just need a commitment/accountability to do it). Having a group gives them a reason to do it on a schedule.
We usually start with quick overall impressions, then go around with a few prompts: "what's something new you learned?", "what didn't you like?", and "what didn't you fully understand?" (every paper has something, whether it's the evaluation methodology or some algorithm detail). That last question tends to drive most of the discussion because people chime in and build on each other's answers. Sometimes you get lucky with domain expertise in the room. For example, when we read "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory"[1], one of the attendees was a former Intel engineer who spent their career in memory systems. They answered questions the rest of us wouldn't have even known to ask.
That implies that you have a fixed time for lunch and also chat during lunch. I may be the minority but I prefer to eat when I'm hungry and focus on the food instead of chatting. And there is also allergies, as a celiac, I have big troubles eating together with others - they may accidently contaminate my food
I’m actually curious here, not trying to question your experience but does other people’s food regularly contaminate your food when you eat at the same table as them?
I’ve lived with a celiac sufferer before and I’ve never heard of something that extreme, but everyone’s different.
The degree of sensitivity of allergies varies widely. For example there are people who only have a problem after consuming a large scoop of peanut butter but there are also those who will end up in the hospital from trace amounts that you'd have difficulty spotting with the naked eye.
I dated a woman with celiac sprue (which I guess was extreme.. her mother had to have a bowel resection due to celiac related issues) and she had sudden anaphylaxis at a restaurant that required the use of an epi-pen and an ambulance.
The reaction was caused by the micro-brewery that had opened next door and all the wheat dust in the ventilation system.
It sounds like you could get very high ROI from chilling out a little bit. If one social lunch per month is an unfathomable hardship then you're probably leaving a lot of other opportunities on the table. Do you have OCD or social anxiety or something?
Hi HN, I've been organizing a systems reading group at Microsoft for five years now. I wrote down some takeaways on what worked (and what didn't). I'd love to hear if anyone else has successfully kept an engineering reading group alive at their company, or if you have any favorite systems papers we should add to our list!
I gave a long post at the top level about running a book-focused reading group at a company, but your group sounds more like a Papers We Love[1] chapter.
I used to co-host the San Diego chapter of Papers We Love[2], and here's my secret sauce: I offered to meet with every presenter in advance for a dry run of their presentation. Probably two thirds of the presenters took me up on the offer.
For the group and the presenter, going through a dry run had the positive impact you would expect on presentation quality.
The benefit for me was that I got one-on-one discussion/learning with a wide variety of people passionate about a broad range of papers, and I also got to go through the material twice. So I learned much more and retained it better.
The dry run idea is really smart. We've done something similar, where we had Niv Dayan[1] lead a session on Diva[2] (before it won Best Paper at VLDB 2025!). I had worked with him in the past and thought it would be cool to have him present to the group. Having the author in the room completely changed the quality of the discussion. Most of our sessions right now aren't presenter-led, but I'd like to do more of that.
This is great and congrats on the success. Many years ago I tried starting a cybersecurity reading group in my city since the startup I was working at was small and people there weren’t interested in that topic. I got a lot of very green, aspiring and non-professionals to show up. We couldn’t really agree on where to start and people had different ideas of where to focus or even how much they wanted to contribute. Mostly people wanted to hear a summary and didn’t really put in the kind of effort that I had hoped. It didn’t last long. Congrats again on making it 5 years and covering so much ground.
Thank you! I think the biggest factor for us was that most attendees already had some technical baseline. That makes it way easier to pick papers and have productive discussions. A cross-experience group sounds much harder. We occasionally have non-technical people who attend (e.g., designers), but they usually are very eager to learn. The guided series format might have helped in your case, where you pick the topic and sequence upfront so there's less debate about direction each meeting. Honestly, just getting people to show up is hard at first, so the fact that you got it off the ground at all says something.
> I think the biggest factor for us was that most attendees already had some technical baseline. That makes it way easier to pick papers and have productive discussions.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
How do you suss out peoples technical aptitude, and what was the minimum level you were looking for?
The group is open to anyone at Microsoft and I don't gatekeep. The papers themselves act as a natural filter. If someone finds the material interesting, they attend and keep coming back. If it's not their thing, they self-select out. Over time, it's led to a core group of regular attendees as well as many who will join ad-hoc.
There are other groups within Microsoft, but they usually follow a presentation format rather than a collaborative discussion. Off the top of my head, Phil Bernstein[1] and Hanuma Kodavalla[2] run great database seminars for invited speakers. I regularly attend and have presented in both forums; Phil's crowd is mostly researchers, while Hanuma's is mostly full of SQL engineers. Different from a small reading group, but still great.
Appreciate the paper link! We like going back to the basics sometimes, so I'll definitely take a look.
It depends on the theme. If we're picking something in a space the group already knows well, like databases, I'll look at "Best Papers" from recent VLDB/ICDE/SIGMOD conferences. If we're exploring a topic most people are unfamiliar with, we'll go with something more foundational instead. For example, we're starting an arc on datacenters (servers, racks, networking, load balancing, power, cooling, failures, etc.), and most attendees don't have deep background there, so I found a book on the topic that we're going to read through[1].
Not author, but in the past I was just going through papers on biggest conferences for the last year and checked what sounded interesting for my own education. But it was a bit of a chore. What I tried now is use gemini thinking research and asked it to do just that, go through main software/hardware conferences for last 3 years, find me papers on the topics of interest and give summary and links. The result is pretty good!
It's not a tutorial series, but you may get something out of browsing the source for https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity in the meantime. I'm also curious if there are any recent/relevant C++ OS development guides.
Weird, actually none of them. I remember the video being about small children in school presenting wirelessly to a bigger screen using a laptop, and people using a small handheld device to pay in stores wirelessly and at the same time contain digital versions of pictures.
Yes, and hidden therein is an important distinction - basically all of the previous games that looked quite close to real life (from relatively close to the ground, that is) did it by extensive handcrafting.
In a very large part, the "level designer" for FS 2020 is an AI, or more exactly, a team of humans who use AI as a tool to increase their productivity and reach by orders of magnitude. This is particularly visible in open-world games, where it is not feasible to hand craft everything. The results do seem quite spectacular, and put similar games to shame.
It's early days yet, but I'm quite excited about the prospect of using code to fill in the blanks and generate content like this; it could be a great way to limit game development costs in the future.
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