Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Tree Lecture | Hacker News Reader

Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Tree Lecture

scpd.stanford.edu

121 pointsSanderMak47 comments

The criticism on this thread is just incredible!

How about the Christmas tree lectures folks? Any anecdotes or your favorites? :)

Discussion on previous lecture https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718875

Sorry, my bad. I think seeing actual university platforms can bring us back to the student habits we all deny having had.

I'm enjoying the previous one on youtube, and am looking forward to seeing this one soon.

Live broadcast is now on youtube. Forget waiting for Stanford to email you a link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTGDG4Ge_xU

Sadly, for me all that appears is a Stanford University slate.

Are you sure of the URL?

Yup. That URL worked during the broadcast, but doesn't seem to be able to replay it. I haven't been able to find a replayable copy.

Ok, 37 comments so far and NOT ONE is about the talk itself? Come on, people!

I went to the talk and frankly I didn't follow most of it. I also didn't get any connection to trees. But it was interesting to learn that people have studied sequences (codes) and have proven theorems about properties of such codes. I had no idea that this was an area of study.

Tidbits:

Knuth's Commafree Eastman prover is written in C (actually CWEB, a literate programming toolset).

Knuth has memorized a bunch of digits of pi in binary using a mnemonic for remembering pi in octal.

>A computer that supports streaming media files

>PC & Mac Users: Download and install the latest version of Silverlight

And the rest of us?

Install pipelight, then install the silverlight plugin

http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html

Wait, is it only a PC if it runs Windows?

You probably know that the PC == Windows and Mac == Apple association dates back decades and while I know where you are coming from I don't see much value in pointing it out. Everybody knows that saying PC for a Windows Machine is not correct, but that terminology somehow sticks

It's like pointing out that it should be GNU/Linux instead of Linux every time (I do sympathize with the GNU Project in some way though), or that Linux is not an OS but a kernel and so forth...

We all here know the truth(s) but you won't change what terminology the public uses, so we should be somewhat relaxed about it (imo)

It doesn't date that far back, really. Mac people used to be very keen on lecturing others that they were also using a "PC", as recently as the late 90s. One swift ad campaign in mid-00s changed that completely.

Are these events very popular? I'm thinking of going to the live event but not sure if it will be really packed, if so I would prefer to just watch it online.

I don't think you'll have any trouble finding a seat. They do this every year and they'd pick a bigger venue if people have to stand.

The auditorium was about 75% full. Well attended but not packed. About the same as last year IIRC.

Pardon my language, but FUCK. Seeing Dr. Knuth lecture in person has been one of my things-to-do since arriving on campus last year. This lecture is happening 5 minutes away from me but I didn't know about it until now. Until next Christmas I guess.

edit: in the meantime, speaking of his past lectures on YouTube -- a few years ago someone asked Dr. Knuth if he reads HackerNews (or Reddit)...he didn't actually answer the question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDokMxVtB3k&t=18m39s

Yeah, it's about 45 minutes from me (plus however long the walk is from the train station), wish I'd known about it sooner too.

I'm trying to figure out how to actually "wait in the lobby" for the webinar. Is there going to be a link provided on the page right at the minute it starts? If so, that's a bit concerning.

edit: Perhaps they will send info in an email. According to a confirmation email I received "Log-in information will be emailed out 24 hours and one hour before the webinar begins."

neat shirt! https://twitter.com/LostOracle/status/672618627191857153

You can watch the previous ones here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsnG4UoaN6hfvW_YRYqIN...

Technical Requirements

Before the live event, ensure that you have the following equipment and software:

A computer that supports streaming media files

PC & Mac Users: Download and install the latest version of Silverlight

DSL or a fast Internet connection to view the video session.

Will my ISDN 64k work?

Heh. I submitted the Steam hardware survey again last week and one of the questions asked what my connection speed was. The fastest entry was "LAN>10M"

https://i.imgur.com/aU1oQQS.png

I'm willing to bet their initial set of data from that form was accurate, but now it's probably a joke because people have been lying just to mess around. Besides some satellites very far from Earth and intentionally imposing a bandwidth threshold on oneself, who even has a 33.6 kbps connection these days?

They publish the results[0], which show 40% Unspecified, 24% >10M, and 19% >2M. That still leaves ~15% in <2M speeds.

[0]: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I stopped using steam because it seems to expect a broadband internet connection. It will often (sometimes without prompting) overwrite and re-download gigabytes of data

Recently it seems to be better about respecting download settings. The download size also seems to be an upper limit, for example Team Fortress 2 pretty much always showed up as a 10gb update download, but spent less than 5 minutes actually downloading files. Not sure if that estimation has been fixed recently, but it used to be the case.

Give them a break, even though it's Stanford, it still is an large academic institution, not a fast-paced San Francisco startup.

Has anyone found the recorded version of the lecture? Missed it last night... Thanks.

This was the first talk given for Christmas that was not about trees.

I have to say their registration form is one of the most awful I've ever had to fill.

Not only are they asking for an extraordinarily large amount of information, but it's 2015 and they have encoding issues.

see my comment above: "even though it's Stanford, it still is an large academic institution, not a fast-paced San Francisco startup." You have to expect issues like these to still persist. Slow moving orgs.

Didn't realize until today, that when I try to install Silverlight on Linux from Microsoft's website, it redirects me to Moonlight...

When it was a maintained project is was more stable for me than Flash on Linux. I used to have major problems using Flash on Linux.

Is this right? You need to purchase a $0.00 "Webinar" to watch it?

Put yourself in the shoes of a dev at a large academic institution, you think you are going write a new feature for a third party system to support free webinars? Or just set the price to $0.00 and not have to code anything? Or rather the dev was probably never even contacted, the prof or admin just set it up and the easiest way was to set the price as 0.

Why is Stanford University charging for any lectures/webinars at all?

You'll also notice that I said nothing about the person who programmed the site.

Just because they have a $20B+ endowment doesn't mean they're going to start giving stuff away.

"NVIDIA Auditorium"? It's bad enough in sports, is there no place sacred enough for no corporate sponsorship?

Huh? Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder of NVIDIA donated the money for the building. It's named after him and one of the auditoriums is named after NVIDIA. It's not like they offered up the naming rights to an auditorium for corporate bidding.

"It's not like they offered up the naming rights to an auditorium for corporate bidding."

Isn't that exactly what they did? "Give us $30M and we'll name a building after you". The only difference is that when you donate enough to build a building, you get your name on it in perpetuity, not just a fixed term. Oracle reportedly paid $20M - $30M over 10 years for naming rights to the Oakland Coliseum.

Not that there's anything wrong with it as naming academic buildings after donors has a long history.

> Not that there's anything wrong with it as naming academic buildings after donors has a long history.

A Jen-Hsun Huang Auditorium would have been infinitely preferable to NVIDIA Auditorium.

One points concretely to a mortal man whose efforts benefited the school during a specific time in history. The other is a context-free, effectively-indefinite tie to a faceless, immortal corporation.

In 100 years, which might retain more meaning? Or even in twenty? ;)

Hah, turns out there's a "Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center" at Stanford. That's much nicer.

Not coincidentally, the NVIDIA Auditorium is in the Huang Engineering Center.

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