311–320 of 357 posts
A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Knuth in his home, my wife was doing some photography for him. He took me to his room and showed me his setup, he was researching Soduku algorithms at the time. His hands were blisteringly quick, moving between EMacs panes, triggering evaluations and printing of results, as fast as any 20 year old. In his 80s , he hasn’t seemed to suffer any mental decline. I started talk…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is however a terrible effect on productivity and self-respect when you have to switch keyboard layout for any reason. I'm still one month into switching to a macbook, and I now dread cutting and pasting. Oh, and typing "pipe", too. I wonder how long it will take my 40+ years old brain and hands to get their act together...
I feel this in my soul. My work uses Mac and I'm not used to it. Fn and cmd keys block my reach for alt and control in my vim sessions and make it awkward to go through tabs in the browser with the keyboard.
https://javascript.plainenglish.io/heres-donald-knuth-s-advi...
404 Not Found
https://javascript.plainenglish.io/heres-donald-knuth-s-advi...
https://javascript.plainenglish.io/heres-donald-knuth-s-advi...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel this in my soul. My work uses Mac and I'm not used to it. Fn and cmd keys block my reach for alt and control in my vim sessions and make it awkward to go through tabs in the browser with the keyboard.
Why not just use an external keyboard? I had the opposite problem until I bought a Magic Keyboard to use at work.
Very cool. I own the originals and the 4th but sadly I have to admit that even though I am a reasonably accomplished developer with a couple of CS degrees I have a hard time understanding this work and have not yet really read it. I feel like I am publicly admitting failure just posting this. I still have time to make sure these are not just bookshelf decorations though.
Honestly, despite everyone's claims of how "beautiful" the books are, I think they are rather terribly formatted. For example, the first volume consists of 2 "chapters". Each chapter spans about 250 pages on its own. So actually not a chapter, but a section, or maybe even a book in its own right. Then, each chapter is broken into sections and subsections that flow one into the next. There's a fundamental lack of whit…
These books are not really programming books, they are math books. There are oodles of "programming" books out there that teach algorithms, like how to implement a quicksort and why X algorithm is better than Y for problem Z. Knuth's books are more like a graduate level algorithms or discrete math course.
>then spews dense mathematical notation when he gets into details
Because the Art of Computer Programming isn't really about programming per se, it's about the theory and analysis of programming IMHO. I'd say O'Reilly books for more famous for learning programming.
Very cool. I own the originals and the 4th but sadly I have to admit that even though I am a reasonably accomplished developer with a couple of CS degrees I have a hard time understanding this work and have not yet really read it. I feel like I am publicly admitting failure just posting this. I still have time to make sure these are not just bookshelf decorations though.
I've felt exactly like this about NKS. I have tried many times to understand it, but I come up empty. Half the time I think "well, maybe IT IS just nonsense?" and half the time I think I'm probably just not mentally sharp enough to get it. But I try every couple years or so, but the activity has yielded little more than being a paperweight in my house and a quiet exercise in looking at pretty pictures for me.
Also, there couldn't be a bigger contrast between Stephen Wolfram and Donald Knuth. Knuth rightly should have a big ego, but he is a very humble, generous man. Wolfram seems to have a chip on his shoulder, fights with other academics, seems to want to be given credit for being "first!" on things.
I love Mathematica, but Wolfram himself is a controversial figure who often gets in the way of his own work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TAOCP was invaluable for a couple of jobs I had. One job involved indexing arbitrarily large books (gigabyte+ was not uncommon) on an embedded CPU with less than 1MB of RAM available to the indexer (this is 15+ years ago, before smart phones). It also involved searching hundreds of those books in a few seconds with ~8MB of RAM available. Indexing was taking place on a single core CPU while the user was using the devi…
How on earth do you even find work like this? I would love to have a career working on problems like this but can't imagine how I'd get a job doing anything but commonplace back-end work.
My path involved working at a series of tiny startups through the first 15 years of my career - the 1990s and early 2000s. At the smallest, I was the only engineer. At the largest, there were 8. At that scale, you learn to do everything (seriously: front end, back end, databases, assembling servers, networking the office, setting literal rat traps, cleaning the cat litter after "upgrading" the rat traps, ...). You also get an opportunity to get to know people very well and build a lot of mutual trust with some of them.
In 2005, the head of engineering from the "big" startup was helping to start a new subsidiary of an established tech company and needed someone to develop indexing and search for the device mentioned above. He asked me to join.
In 2010, the head of marketing at one of those startups was now an executive at a soon-to-IPO company who needed to scale their ad delivery system. She asked me to join.
Both of those relationships had turned into friendships long before they asked me to join their newer endeavors. They knew what I was good at and what motivated me. That resulting in me being deeply trusted the day I joined and being given a lot of freedom to create solutions. So, I guess one way to get this kind of work is experience, relationship building, and some luck.
Can someone honestly tell me if they have actually read these books AND found them useful ON TGE JOB? What do you guys do for work? I tried reading part 1?? Like ten years ago and it was pretty much assembly language or something I believe. And gave up since it wasnt something that I needed in academia back then and there were far better ways to learn DSA
I've been randomly skipping around inside these books for a long, long time. They're full of little gems that you won't find elsewhere. For example, in Volume 4A there's a simple technique for comparing two pointers in bit-reversed form. This technique was patented by Hewlett-Packard as a method of randomizing search trees (treaps): https://bugfix-66.com/fdb8bb4fa84cf810aa25ff40c88a13c1874410... From Volume 3, here i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting! A small correction: "innumerate" means "incapable of doing arithmetic"; perhaps you meant "innumerable", which means "incapable of being counted". Also you have "wuthor" for "author", "bible" for "Bible", "donÄt" for "don’t", "WHat" for "What", and "theologician" for "theologian".
Thank you!