Check Out Facebook’s Nerdy Library Of Its Research Papers

If subjects like “XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data” get you all worked up, you’ll dig the “Research Publications At Facebook” site, which collects scientific papers written by Facebook employees and researchers. Ranging from hardcore engineering to the sociology of social networks, the library puts Facebook’s open-sourced knowledge all in one place.

Now, for a site designed to show how smart Mark Zuckerberg’s crew is, I’m dumbfounded that it only offers each research paper in downloadable PDF. Perhaps it wanted to preserve the sanctity of the information. And by that I mean leave the documents in their eye-straining JSTOR academic journal format. Facebook could improve the little library by offering the abstracts upfront so you know what you’re getting into like research.google.com, and highlighting different articles like research.microsoft.com.

Still, between categories like Data Science, Databases and Machine Learning, there is plenty to read. While Facebook can sometimes be a bit aggressive protecting its social graph from both spammers and competitors, it’s quite generous with its tech advancements. It’s given away green data center schematics and energy-efficient server designs through its Open Compute Project.

As for this archive, a few articles I’m excited to dig into include:

Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion through Facebook News Feed

Social network activity and social well-being

The HipHop compiler for PHP — even though I know it’s not going to be about A Tribe Called Quest.