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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

I hate watching videos, and the transcript as provided was just unreadable, so in 2010 I put the transcript on GitHub and started reformatting it: https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006

Pull requests welcome!

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I know I can submit a PR for this, but I feel the need to bring this up here since it was posted here for discussion.

In Chapter 2, 5th paragraph, these are the phrases you chose to bold:

> the high school I went to, again, was a Lutheran high school

> one of my teachers was a little bit prejudiced against blacks

You state earlier that the bolds are for the purpose of "pull(ing) out the main topics of each paragraph."

These two phrases you've chosen, if read together, totally misrepresent the point of the paragraph. Donald is making the point that he had a very positive experience in this Lutheran school and that it was "absolutely not the case" that "church schools are place where they teach intolerance" and that he had a "very good experience." Then he admits to one exception to his point and emphasizes that this exception was not worth paying any attention to.

I'm curious as to why you felt it was the right thing to focus on the one exception rather than the main point of this paragraph.

The transcript is very nice thank you for putting it together. You are right though, I hate the bold face. Luckily a quick trip to the developer tools took care of it. A better way to index large bodies of free form text is a topic index that points to the correct areas of the text for phrases and topics. These are sometimes known as concordances. That way the reader can decide what is important to them rather than letting you decide.

Thanks for the feedback!

Interesting, I am the opposite.

I would rather watch the video than read the transcript (although your formatted transcript was a lot better than the original).

I just enjoy watching smart people talk and explain things. I think you might lose something in a transcript vs watching the person say it themselves.

Particularly in this interview, his personality and sense of humour is evident watching it, and it might be lost just reading it.

It would be a lot better if they had posted the full video though, instead of editing it and splitting it up into small segments. Really disrupts the viewing process (especially on Chrome, where I keep needing to approve Flash to run).

Agreed. The video of him actually speaking has elements which are lost in a transcription. OTOH, if this were converted into a small book, it might be able to convey much of the same feeling.

Nice, but you should have written it in TeX :)

Thanks! Anyone know more about the following fascinating theorem? I'm guessing it's Cook's Theorem (I vaguely recollect from Ullman's Automata course), but I don't recall it the way Knuth puts it:

> Steve Cook had proved a very amazing theorem. He said that if you could, if you took a certain kind of computer that's very limited in its capability, and if you could write a program for that dumb kind of computer to solve a problem, no matter how slow that program was then there was a fast way to write a program for a real computer.

[92 - The Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm]

The KMP paper is "Fast Pattern Matching In Strings", which cites Cook's "Linear time simulation of deterministic two-way pushdown automata". The former has a neat history section that gives a little more detail than the interview.

Nice to see your post here. I've been repeatedly reading that transcript and sharing to my peers. Thank you

Thanks for the transcript!

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