Most of the reasons and benefits apply to other papers of course, not just those authored by McCarthy.<p>I used to collect PDFs of CS papers to read, and try to read them while sitting at my laptop, but I never actually finished reading a single one of them. I would start them, get slightly distracted or bored, and switch away to something else, whether HN, or programming, or almost anything else on the computer.<p>If you have similar tendencies, and you're going to try reading some papers, may I suggest an approach which may be obvious to some but was not to me, that I recently adopted to great success: print them out and read them away from the computer.<p>For me, this was a bit counter to how I normally work. I usually loathe having hard copies of anything that I'm not legally required to. I would much rather have a PDF somewhere on a hard drive than keep documents in folders and filing cabinets. I expect many HN readers are similar.<p>However, I've found that printing out papers and reading them somewhere away from the computer is just so much more productive. For me, it's really almost infinitely so, since I never finished a single paper while reading the PDF in Preview.app but have finished many in the past couple of months that I printed out. Somehow, sitting somewhere with a hard copy both allows me more focus, and gives me more pleasure. With a PDF, it's often a bit hard to gauge how much there is left to read, while if you have a stack of paper in a binder clip, it's obvious in a tactile way. I bet it's also better for my eyes, or at least it feels that way.<p>This is not a new or innovative strategy, but I thought I'd share my experience since it might not be the first choice for many programmers.<p>One other tip is to avoid printing papers out of at home, if you don't have a fast laser printer but instead some sluggish old inkjet as I do. Print them out at a print shop, which is faster and likely even cheaper (Fedex/kinkos in NYC charges 12c/page B&W.