This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002) | Hacker News Reader

This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)

larry.denenberg.com

139 pointssigna1129 comments

> 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.

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.

(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.

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..."

> 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?

Yes, that’s the joke

> 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.

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.

Upon reading the word "was", be sure to check the page's source...

This scared me - I thought he died for a minute.

Death is usually permanent.

Ha! I think this is what he meant to say - "This scared me - I thought for a minute he died."

For what it's worth, Dr. Knuth believes otherwise.

I learned from Dr. Knuth that you can put a tombstone on something, without burying it, and save yourself the hassle. It's very effective! Especially if you're just going to plow that area and move all the live ones eventually anyway.

On the scale of minutes, not at all, no.

I've had half a dozen major surgeries and spent nearly 2 days on life support in 1994. I probably died for a minute or so more than once. Thanks to skilled surgery and anaesthesia teams, I came back.

> 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.

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.

For anyone who hasn’t stumbled upon it, this is an amazing read.

Donald Knuth - The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves

- https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/

Discussions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861678

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381

From the "TeX -yak shaves":

> The Moral of the Story Whenever you feel like “can’t we just replace this whole thing, it can’t be so hard” when handling TeX, don’t forget...

To bring a razor.

Knuth 3:16 (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049530 - Feb 2016 (20 comments)

> Of those who find the first page of this satire, a shockingly high percentage (yourself included?) immediately click on "The Story of O", skipping the other books. What do you think it means?

Were we to arrange our bookshelves, not by title nor by author, but by principle of composition, DEK's 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated and ACD's Histoire d'O would wind up adjacent, for they are both collections of "per verse" chapters.

CHAPTER 3: Random Numbers VERSE 16: In a sense, there is no such thing as a random number; for example, is 2 a random number?

Oh my sides.

BTW that one isn't a joke made up for this site: it's a verbatim quote from The Art of Computer Programming (Volume 2, page 2). TAOCP is full of silly-but-serious jokes like that.

I was expecting something like:

"For Knuth so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Life to write The Art of Computer Programming, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish in ignorance, but have everlasting wisdom."

http://www.larry.denenberg.com/Knuth-3-16/visual-basic.html

still makes me laugh out loud, (23) 24! years later

That's been on my office door for years. And I am not a software person by any means. Knuth transcends disciplines!

Love it. This has a strong Emperor Kennedy Legend feeling to it.

If you like the genre, I believe this was the progenitor: http://www.joshpachter.com/pages/weans.pdf

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