People of ACM: Donald Knuth | Hacker News Reader

People of ACM: Donald Knuth

acm.org

25 pointstjr11 comments

The starkness with which he divides geeks from non-geeks makes me a little sad. People can learn to reason at multiple levels of abstraction.

It's unfortunate to see this, but there are so many constantly reinforced stereotypes regarding geeks and 'geek culture' that very few want to embrace it.

Take a look at the (terrible, imo) TV show Big Bang Theory. The main characters are purposely socially awkward and distant.

Real-world geeks are typically far from that: far more exist on the socialable side of the spectrum than those who are constantly portrayed in the media. :(

The Big Bang Theory got on my nerves until I started reading a biography of Oppenheimer. Sheldon is not an appropriate symbol of whatever all geeks are. He might be an Oppenheimer though. He is certainly a Sheldon. I can appreciate that.

The idea that some people are more technically focused than others works for me as a definition of "geek". Especially I like when people use the word in a way that accepts that some people are simply like that, and that that's OK for them even if it's foreign to a majority of the populace.

Like you, I'd prefer to consider "geek" a category with a permeable boundary. I'd argue however that there are many people who spend practically their entire lives inside the category and others outside the category.

Donald Knuth seems admirably sensible about many things, one of which is publicity. I see him putting himself before the public where he is thereby able to accomplish something that he considers worthwhile, profitable. So I think that there's a side we don't see and that the side we see should surprise us if we imagined that geek behavior is whimsically self-indulgent. Nevertheless the word "geek" fits his activity that we see. He concentrates his attention as much as he can in a delineated technical arena where he seems unlikely to meet with conflict. Look at the good that he does and the grace with which he does it. If that's being a geek, it must be a really good thing.

Once they can reason at multiple levels of abstraction, they (we, presumably) are geeks. All that's left is learning when not to do that out loud.

It's ai'ight. It might be like unto a superpower.

To be fair, he also said that reasoning at multiple levels of abstraction is an acquired skill, albeit a difficult one to acquire.

Fully Agree

"I think the most common fault in general is to teach students how to pass exams instead of teaching them the science."

pretty neat to see this rendered in a site i built years ago. :)

Then why is so much whitespace in the .html? I mean, there doesn't seem to be a Easteregg encoded in Whitespace …

staff designers provided me with an html template to make it render, then because they made me threaten legal action to get paid for the contract where about 80% of the work was performed as a volunteer in the first place, i lost my volunteer access.

the acm are actually a bunch of assholes who mostly spend their members' dues buying hardware and software licenses, much like the government, but it's nice to see that at least they have kept around the work i did which was focused on making the site performant and reliable, which seems to have stuck around for the better part of a decade.

but they are at times a beacon, and it's neat to just be surfing the web and stumble into something you've built.

That's a sad story … but thank you for sharing it.

the cool part was that i got to have an e-mail exchange with steve bourne, because he was at the time the past president of the ACM. i mean, we'll obviously never be friends because i had to throw a fucking tantrum over an entire year of income, but it was kind of like:

hey, steve, thanks for writing that unix shell we all use a clone of. by the way, i would fucking really like to get paid since i was living on the couch in fema housing babysitting my friends' kid after katrina the entire time i worked for you guys.

what's great is that i started doing the work as a volunteer and was aggressively pushed into a contract, which they later didn't want to pay, though they had no issues paying for piles of HP servers that went unused or oracle licenses to solve problems that could probably have been solved with mysql.

but hey, i'm still alive, so: yo, motherfucker, wheee!

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