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Comment by bigcat12345678 | Hacker News Reader

> Recently, I came across a few old and new interviews of Donald Knuth

I have developed the conclusion that reading digestive summary from original source materials is ultimately ineffective for me at this stage of the life.

Unfortunately, the author did not provide links to these interviews.

For anyone who is writing a summary from other source material, please do provide references. That's one of the things I learned churning out low quality academic papers in PhD study.

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Donald Knuth interviews are so interesting, but would like to particularly highlight this little piece of advice, out of this great playlist:

"Donald Knuth - My advice to young people": https://youtu.be/75Ju0eM5T2c

Complete Playlist - "Donald Knuth (Computer scientist)" [97 videos]:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1Jq...

Also the "Oral History of Donald Knuth" from the Computer History Museum is great.

"Oral History of Donald Knuth Part 1": https://youtu.be/Wp7GAKLSGnI

"Oral History of Donald Knuth Part 2": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqPPll3uDa0

Plus..

"Donald Knuth Interview 2006": https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006

"An Interview with Donald Knuth": https://www.ntg.nl/maps/16/14.pdf

"Interview with Donald Knuth": https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

This somewhat "colourful" page also tracks a few: http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Knuth/donald_knuth_interv...

PS: The story that he told Steve Jobs he was "Full of shit" is not true.

"Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634635

There's one interview where he talks about a special sofa that he uses to read (and write, I believe), but I haven't been able to find it with all my Google-fu.

Well he says he has his special black chair...

"Donald Knuth: Writing Process": https://youtu.be/vG0D-kKTF1g

Ironically, a significant portion of Knuth's lifetime work consists of digested summaries of original source materials.

One of the quotes seems to mention to that, where he says he digests a lot of papers to add a small part to TAoCP, since his aim is to write books that cover a the breadth of computer science (which necessarily cannot be as deep as these papers go).

The complaint is not the summarization, it is the lack of citation. I see no irony in this light.

I wasn't referring to the complaint, it was a reference to the output of Knuth not being particularly accessible if you don't like reading digested summaries, because a big part of what he set out to do is to summarize academic research across a wide range of topics.

I guess it's like rain on your weeding day.

(In his digestive summaries, Knuth does provide citations, to be clear)

I guess I don't understand why someone would make the contrary assumption about famous academic work.

His citation lists at the back of each book are immense.

For sure, also I don’t assume people know much about Knuth or expectations for academic work.

Synthesizing or summarizing? There is a difference.

Do you have quick summary of Knuth stating this? Just want to know, curious.

He has indeed said that, I can confirm that much. It should be easy to find in one in the interviews.

In addition to the other post in this thread mention that it's time consuming to go through the list.

Fundamentally, that work can be saved by the original author spend negligible amount of energy to provide the reference.

When I see people hiding information, or forgot to provide links, I am thinking a bit of human intellectual energy is wasted for no good reason...

Yes it should be easy to find in 50+ hours of video content.

He doesn’t have to state this. Look at his work.

probably the Lex Fridman podcast interviews:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BdBfsXbST8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE1R8FYUJm0

the second one is definitely where the last paragraph in the article is from. Weird that the interview is dated 2021-09-09 and the post is 2020-04-30?

Wow, Lex has gotten some of the greats on his podcast. I should probably give it a go. The few episodes I've seen were more shallow than I was looking for as an engineer, but I assumed that was because he's helping bring these interviews and ideas to a wider audience.

if you're looking for more technical ones the two interviews he did with Crhis Lattner on compilers are great. Francois Chollet and Schmidhuber and other ML related interviews were good also.

But he does seem to be doing less and less of the scientific interviews which is a little bit of a shame given the unique access he seems to have.

They sometimes go deep, but that is more at the discretion of the interviewee than Lex. Lex is usually asking questions about topics he has only tangencial knowledge in but is the expertise of the interviewee.

The Chris Lattner episodes are great, and James Gosling had some fun stories in there, and Kernighan had a good interview as well.

Lex and Joscha Bach episodes were fascinating to me as well.

And he always asks them the question "What is life?"

He also did an interview for the Web of Stories project which is available on YouTube and has his thoughts on his life and various other curious topics.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1Jq...

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