[HN Gopher] This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)
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This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)
Author : signa11
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-03-05 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.larry.denenberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.larry.denenberg.com)
| tithe wrote:
| Upon reading the word "was", be sure to check the page's
| source...
| person3 wrote:
| This scared me - I thought he died for a minute.
| layer8 wrote:
| Death is usually permanent.
| svat wrote:
| (2002), or as it says (20002).
|
| Enjoy this set of pages. Clearly done with love. And shows how
| the 3:16 method -- "the way of the cross section" -- works.
| Unfortunate that he had to spoil the joke in the "story of O"
| page, but I guess it was necessary. Otherwise, the ending is
| quite enough:
|
| > _But a small number of unpatriotic, troublemaking skeptics now
| suggest that the "World Wide Web" may have contained tiny amounts
| of false or misleading information and should not be considered
| completely trustworthy. Some even conjecture that there were
| satirical or ironic websites, deliberate parodies of the truth.
| Such cynicism is, in our view, despicable._
| dhosek wrote:
| > It is not completely clear why Knuth felt it necessary to
| develop software not only for typesetting but also for font
| design. Probably he considered them aspects of the same problem.
| However, legend states that he insisted on creating his own fonts
| in response to the ghastly fonts that had been used in the first
| printings of his early publications. This possibility has been
| adduced as evidence that Concrete Mathematics was in fact
| published before, not after, The METAFONTbook.
|
| I laughed out loud at this one.
| tzs wrote:
| I remember after Knuth finished designing fonts that he was
| happy with and people were starting to expect he'd get back to
| work on the next volume of TAoCP now that he was happy with
| typesetting and fonts one of the major computer magazines (Dr.
| Dobb's or Byte I think) published an article in the April issue
| that said TAoCP was again delayed because Knuth was not happy
| with the ink and was designing a program to develop better ink
| formulations.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Knuth 3:16 (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049530 - Feb 2016 (20
| comments)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > It is natural to ask which book of the Bible contains relevant
| financial advice in its Chapter 11, and it is just as natural to
| focus on the First, Second, and Third Book of Buffett. However,
| Knuth's text itself shows that these three tractates were not yet
| canonical in this period. No other Biblical book is quite
| satisfactory, and the meaning of the story remains unclear.
|
| Isn't "Chapter 11" as in "File for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy" the
| financial advice?
| rhaps0dy wrote:
| Yes, that's the joke
| verisimi wrote:
| > However, Knuth's text itself shows that these three tractates
| were not yet canonical in this period. No other Biblical book
| is quite satisfactory, and the meaning of the story remains
| unclear.
|
| That's the Knuth, the whole Knuth and nothing but the Knuth.
| svat wrote:
| The fact that "Chapter 11" refers to bankruptcy is the joke in
| the quoted joke. Calling this joke a "poorly-understood
| incident from that period", referring to Warren Buffett's books
| as books of the Bible, and saying that "the meaning of the
| story remains unclear" is the joke on this satirical page, in
| keeping with the premise of being written in 20002 when details
| of the first few millennia are ancient history and neither
| "dollars" nor 20th/21st-century US laws are remembered.
| tczMUFlmoNk wrote:
| > But his concern with sin and punishment was apparent even as
| early as The TeXbook, where he imposes a wide variety of
| \penalties for poor typesetting---the worst sin of all, in his
| view.
|
| There are lots of pleasing, subtle jokes on this site, but the
| literal triple-hyphen here in place of an em dash is particularly
| brilliant.
| quercusa wrote:
| http://www.larry.denenberg.com/Knuth-3-16/visual-basic.html
|
| still makes me laugh out loud, (23) 24! years later
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| That's been on my office door for years. And I am not a
| software person by any means. Knuth transcends disciplines!
| dmccarty wrote:
| The site is a bit more enjoyable imho once you realize that even
| the satire is self-reflecting satire.
|
| (And checking html for comments in 2024? We've forgotten more
| than we ever knew.)
|
| On a more serious note, it pains me a bit that our legends are
| slowly passing into obscurity as surely as they will soon pass
| away. Donald Knuth deserves a presidential medal of freedom or
| some other high award for his many accomplishments and gifts to
| the field.
| Avicebron wrote:
| >(And checking html for comments in 2024? We've forgotten more
| than we ever knew.)
|
| One of the company careers pages I appreciated the most was Red
| Balloon Security because finding the details required looking
| at the source of the careers page
|
| view-source:https://redballoonsecurity.com/company/careers/
|
| Happily nostalgic when people had fun and cared vs shipping it
| off to an abysmal 3rd party like indeed etc..
| xamuel wrote:
| For those who enjoy Knuth's religious humor, his "Surreal
| Numbers" is a must-read. It's a novel/dialogue in which two
| characters discover an ancient stone tablet containing the Law
| which defines surreal numbers. "In the beginning, everything was
| void, and J.H.W.H. Conway began to create numbers..."
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