https://dl.acm.org/

If you want to US read based research papers on things related to computers and programming now is the time to do so. I've been picking over compiler and operating system related conference proceedings myself, should have everything I'd need for my hobby projects by the end of the month.

Ooh that's awesome that they're doing that. Fortunately my college gets us free access to all major research publications, but it's nice that anyone can get access to ACM works for some time. I wish the works of the academic world weren't so hidden by paywalls—everyone deserves to learn from the discoveries and insights researchers make.

What kind of projects are you looking to do and what kind of research are you looking at? I'm mostly doing research in computer architecture at the moment, but I want to get into systems (and perhaps compilers) research sometime in the near future and am curious about what's most interesting in that area right now. :)

Well lots of stuff is available elsewhere if you know where to look anyway.

Mainly saving supplementary material for personal use while I still have access is all. Looking to write my own OS and toolchain and eventually use it as a daily driver. I'm well versed in architectures already, you should look into rom hacking\reversing... the venerable gameboy is a good first cisc, and the gameboy advanced a good first risc.

Yeah, that's true.

Are you planning to write your own OS from scratch or work on top of a Linux distro? Is that objective more of a fun project to learn the underlying technology or do you have a workflow that requires specific tools that don't yet exist or accommodate your needs well enough?

I'm actually about to build an emulator for the gameboy advanced for my undergrad comp arch course, so that's funny you mentioned that haha :). Most of the actual research I've been doing in that area has been for my grad course, which focuses on designing optimal prefetching algorithms and cache replacement policies for hardware. We essentially just read and discuss research papers in the field, so it's a super fun and intriguing course. Right now I'm working on my final project which is going to be over designing and evaluating optimal cache replacement policies for software caches (useful for CDNs or in-memory database caching).

Is this research funded by tax money? If yes, it should be free anyway.

^ True that. Often the research itself is indeed funded through taxpayer money—usually through NSF grants. If the research is coming out of public universities then it's technically funded by a public institution in that aspect as well.

The reason research is usually paywalled off is because it gets published in private research journals or conferences run by nonprofit professional societies (such as ACM and IEEE) that make money off of charging for access to their publications. Most of their profits come from institutions like universities that pay money to get full-access to these publications. These institution-wide access contracts often cost exorbitant amounts of money (especially access contracts with private journal publishers like Elsevier) and some institutions have recently decided to boycott this practice by not renewing their access contracts (such as the University of California system with Elsevier).

kanssei: I know that carousel...

We have the same thing in Germany, where our standards-organizations (the most important being DIN and VDE) charge big money for their standards, while expecting everyone to follow them. The VDE (which deals mostly with electronics) for example has a document which details which colours various wires (earth-ground, phase, PE-circuit, etc.) ought to have.

We have our own rebellion here too. That is, we have a lot of "rogue electricians" who will wire your stove to the 400V or do cable-tv setups for half of which the "licensed" electricians charge.

[In continental Europe, we have 230V 50Hz power, and most flats have a 400V three-phase "plug" for electrical stoves and the like. You aren't allowed to touch this 400V wires without paying the VDE a lot of money, so that they tell you which wire carries which phase...]