Like I posted before here [1], it is interesting to see that Microsoft is on top of the best-paper award list with 43 points, and MIT is third on the list with 30 points. IBM and Google are way further down the list, just to name a couple.

This is why (imo) Microsoft deserves much more credit than it gets. Especially compared to Apple, which isn't even to be found on this list.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964174

Another way to look at it would be that best-paper awards deserve much LESS credit than they are given. E.g. MapReduce did not get a best paper award but has been more influential than other best paper award winners.

I'm curious why you chose to name MIT (3rd) but not UW (2nd). If anything it's more interesting to me that the top two are both based in Washington.

> If anything it's more interesting to me that the top two are both based in Washington.

Really? I thought that kinda made sense. Lots of cross-pollination between MS and UW. Most of my graduating class from UW CSE went to either Microsoft or Amazon (well, at least it felt that way), and plenty of graduate students seemed to have done a stint there as well.

I guess by that I mean: If you told me MSR is #1 at something, I'd suspect UW is pretty close behind.

I was surprised at how low University of Cambridge is. Is everyone good working next door at Microsoft Research?

It's likely the areas of focus that this list is taken from - there is a lot of AI/Software engineering/Complexity theory, but relatively little e.g. programming languages theory, or compiler optimisation

As other notes, high impact and best paper don't correlate very well.

A list of best 10 year old papers/test of time awards would be really useful for finding the high impact papers in a field. It's surprising how often best papers have very little impact down the line.

It's always funny to see the complete disconnect between "best paper awards" and papers that actually end up being important.

Not to remove any credit from the undoubtedly great work that it takes to get on that list. It's just that we're kind of bad at evaluating stuff in general and scientific work in particular.

Let's not forget that more than one good paper has received the "we are sorry to inform you" letter. An article in IEEE by Simone Santini in December 2005 even made fun of that - I recommend reading it for light hearted laughs.

Jeff Huang is an internet CS super hero.