svat

Your comment makes it sound as though the mistake was introduced by an inexperienced contributor who did not read the guide, when in fact it was introduced by the founder/editor-in-chief of the project. :) And in case it wasn't clear, only one of the mistakes was reverted, and the other one I quoted is still present in the book even as of this moment.

More broadly, the position of Standard Ebooks is that a modern reader would be distracted by spellings like "some one" and "every thing", and by time written like "2.30" instead of "2:30", and that books in British quotation style must be converted to American quotation style. I think most readers can in fact tolerate such small differences, and this position is frankly insulting — the punctuation and spelling of works are part of their character, and if anything, I'm more distracted by such anachronisms in style introduced as part of the Standard Ebooks process.

An Applied Mathematician's Apology by Nick Trefethen[1] has a chapter (a couple of pages) titled "Cleve Moler and Matlab".

> I first met Cleve Moler when I was a graduate student and he visited Stanford, where his loud and friendly voice reverberated around Serra House. Moler is the antithesis of a European, and as a transatlantic soul, I love both Europeans and their antitheses. A room with Moler in it is a no-nonsense zone. He has no interest in showing you how your problem is connected with the theory of pseudodifferential operators. He just wants to get things done computationally, and nobody has done it better. Moler is about the same age as Knuth, and while Knuth was writing his great books on the analysis of discrete algorithms, Moler was creating the modern era of numerical software. He was an author of both of the foundational software packages of the 1970s, EISPACK and LINPACK, and he also published two influential software-based numerical analysis textbooks. And then, in around 1977 in the Computer Science department at the University of New Mexico, he invented Matlab, which changed the world.

I never liked using Matlab (the little I used it), but after reading this I understood better what its innovation was: “All the right algorithms would be invoked in all the right places, without the user needing to know the details.”

A footnote I found interesting:

> For me `eig(A)` epitomizes the successful contribution of numerical analysis to our technological world. Physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians know that computing eigenvalues of matrices is a solved problem. Simply invoke `eig(A)`, or its equivalent in whatever language you are using, and you tap into the work of generations of numerical analysts. The algorithm involved, the QR algorithm, is completely reliable, utterly nonobvious, and amazingly fast. On my laptop, for a 1000 × 1000 matrix A, `eig(A)` computes all 1000 eigenvalues in half a second.

[1]: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/akherim/NickApology...

Hi (looks like I've already starred your repo at some point months/years ago)!

The motivation was not to replace art with technology, but to preserve/resurrect an art that was going away, by truly capturing the human understanding[^1]. When the rest of the industry was perfectly content with the deterioration of typesetting, Knuth set out to capture the aesthetics of the best journals of the past. A quote from the Mathematical Typography paper I linked above (https://websites.umich.edu/~millerpd//docs/501_Winter13/Knut...):

> At this point I regretfully stopped submitting papers to the American Mathematical Society, since the finished product was just too painful for me to look at. Similar fluctuations of typographical quality have appeared recently in all technical fields, especially in physics where the situation has gotten even worse.

Frankly, I think the "replace art by technology" impression is a very shallow one, that I alluded to earlier. When Knuth wrote his “The Concept of a Meta-Font” in a journal (Visible Language) mostly read by designers/typographers, many of them wrote letters in response (https://shreevatsa.net/tex/metafont/concept#reactions). What you can see is that the best of them were supportive (even bringing up new points like how it could be useful in educating the next generation of font designers), but some were sharply critical, more or less resenting this intrusion of technology into their art medium. But now a few decades later, basically all fonts are distributed and stored digitally anyway, except that (without METAFONT) the shapes of letters are now basically just stored as binary blobs / sequences of numbers, without any METAFONT-like understanding of typographically relevant quantities like (say) x-height, comma depth, slab thickness, etc. Which one is truer to the art?

(Not a rhetorical question BTW: as in the Bigelow/Southall quote above, one could say that Knuth's approach is to achieve typographical/artistic excellence through understanding, but the artistic approach is visual and intuitive without a cognitive component. But this is a different complaint from the "replace art by technology" take.)

(BTW apart from the default Computer Modern fonts designed by Knuth, who based them on earlier Monotype fonts, almost all fonts used by people with TeX too are designed by font designers, not computer scientists.)

[1]: Related quote from Knuth (sorry paraphrasing from memory): “People say that the best way to understand something is to teach it. I say no: the best way to understand something is to teach it to a computer.” But then again he has also said: "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."

Actually:

• He had already published the first editions of Volume 1, 2, 3, and the second edition of Volume 1, by 1973. It was in 1977 when the publishers sent him galley proofs for the second edition of Volume 2, having switched to phototypesetting (away from hot-metal typesetting a la Linotype, though IIRC it was actually Monotype) that he was disappointed with the results. And he had some back-and-forth with them and they did improve their fonts (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133/48), but he was still dissatisfied.

> I didn't know what to do. I had spent 15 years writing those books, but if they were going to look awful I didn't want to write any more.

• At this time he came to know of the existence of digital typesetters. Typesetting with computers had existed before, but it had always seemed a crude toy, rather than something suitable for “real books”. But he saw Patrick Winston's Artificial Intelligence that had been just published (I think he got an early proof copy to review or something), and he realized for the first time that digital typesetting was an option (apparently Winston's book was printed at >1000dpi, and Knuth later got his hands on a machine that claimed a resolution of 5333 dpi: see this wonderful comment from Knuth's student and “right-hand man”, David Fuchs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20009875)

• In fact it was the fonts that he was dissatisfied with rather than the typesetting, so METAFONT was in some sense the primary/motivating project and TeX was only written in order to be able to use METAFONT.

• Actually his first idea was to simply take the old fonts, get high-resolution scans of them (not easy to obtain at that time) and use them directly. He approached Xerox Research Center but:

> I asked if I could use Xerox's lab facilities to create my fonts. The answer was yes, but there was a catch: Xerox insisted on all rights to the use of any fonts that I developed with their equipment. Of course that was their privilege, but such a deal was unacceptable to me: A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belongs to God.

• So he went home and (after trying a bit with TV cameras) tried projecting photographs of the pages onto the wall and tracing the outlines, and it was while staring at these images that he realized that the shapes of letters were not arbitrary but there was some logic to them (e.g. in the font he was using, the spacing between the vertical strokes in 'm' was equal, and equal to that in 'n'), and he decided (as a computer programmer) to capture this design in code — something that had never before been done. The hardest letter to capture this way is S, hence the paper in the OP.

> Finally, a simple thought struck me. Those letters were designed by people. If I could understand what those people had in their minds when they were drawing the letters, then I could program a computer to carry out the same ideas. Instead of merely copying the form of the letters my new goal was therefore to copy the intelligence underlying that form. I decided to learn what type designers knew, and to teach that knowledge to a computer.

• This is also why METAFONT never really caught on among typographers: as Charles Bigelow (quoted by Richard Southall, https://luc.devroye.org/Southall-METAFONT1986.pdf) observed, “the designer thinks with images, not about images”. Knuth did not want crude “geometric” constructions of letters (as some prior 16th century typographers had attempted: https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1979-01-02/S0273-0979-1979... and as some typographers only passingly familiar with METAFONT think!). He wanted actual real typographically beautiful shapes, but to be able to generate those shapes with code. This is obviously much harder than simply drawing the shapes using visual intuition, even if it enables variation. (See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf — again, many people in the typography world confuse the abstract concept of a meta-font introduced in this paper with (their incorrect impressions of) the METAFONT program, and omit crediting Knuth for variable fonts).

• The second edition of Volume 2 was not printed with Linotype. Yes the machines still existed in Europe and he talked to typesetters (he mentions in particular a person from Belfast), but it was in fact published using TeX (the first version, TeX77 and MF78). He was still unhappy with the results, though, and spent a few more years learning more about typography and working with people like Bigelow and Hermann Zapf, before the rewrite into the current TeX82 and MF84 (and current version of Computer Modern). I think it's only with the third edition (1997) that he's finally satisfied.

I was hoping to reply to this in detail but as I never got around to it, I'll keep it short: mostly it's about the editorial changes they make to the text, modernizing spelling etc. Many of the changes are unjustified IMO, and often detract from the charm of the original, and I'm uncomfortable reading a text I know has been tampered with in this way. Of course it's their project and they can do whatever they want, and they clearly love books, so with strong opinions there will be some that I may disagree with. I'd much rather read books from Project Gutenberg or Wikisource, both of which don't even correct obvious typos without marking up in some way that they've done so.

I also have many positive things to say about Standard Ebooks, but I don't think you were asking about those. :)

----

Edit: Without going into what I think are the most egregious sort of changes they introduce (which I think will require a longer post) and limiting myself to ones easy to find immediately:

See the earlier discussion (linked in a sibling comment here) where the editor-in-chief says it's ok to change punctuation because "The sounds out of his mouth do not include an apostrophe whether it's there in the spelling or not." (a very American view IMO): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16956931

And looking at a recent commit on one of their books, here's a recent (https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret...) revert of one of their aggressive "modernizations" from 2024 (https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret...), that had, in line with their usual practice, changed "every one" to "everyone" (in one place even when referring to "a good many risks"), and the same commit made other changes (including one still present) like "they ought to have it lithographed. It must be a frightful nuisance doing every one separately." having the last four words turned into "doing everyone separately."!

Have you considered having a detailed version history for each book (etext)? The process of submitting fixes to typos etc in books involves sending an email (https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html) and although the last time I did this (2011) the fixes did get applied reasonably quickly (couple of days), it all felt a bit opaque. The version history could also include the project (usually PGDP correct?) the etext originated from; that way one would be able to compare against the actual page scans.

I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.

In what way? And from what sources? (Wikipedia as a tertiary source is supposed to be a summary of information present in reliable secondary sources — see for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Based_upon. So if the information on the Wikipedia article is incomplete or out of date, where is the correct information available?)

Curious, what are the advantages you see in each relative to the other?

Also one should probably compare the former to the single-page version on standardebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...

I don't know whether I'm missing something obvious, but with a patent, only the patenting company would use their patented idea. In your post you say:

> If you disclose your brilliant idea, everyone will copy it and your advantage in the marketplace will be transitory.

but that is the very point that patents are supposed to prevent. So why do you say that?

The post you're replying to says:

> I don't think the money would have been spent if our competition could immediately copy what we figured out. Customers did benefit then, and now, 20 years later, anyone can do it

so clearly the patent worked for them: they were able to use their simple and intuitive UI, while the competition could not copy it till 20 years later. So what is the question?

There is another version of this book that includes the illustrations missing from this version, at https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/cs1193.pdf or http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/88/1193/CS-TR-8... -- would be good to combine the two (keep the figures/inserts from the scanned version, and the rest from this version).

See also the videos of the lectures of which these are the notes (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/klr.html), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mert0kmZvVM + https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOdeqCXq1tXihn5KmyB2Y...

Someone should make a webpage which has the list of videos (ideally without relying on YouTube), and next to each of them the corresponding notes chapter.

Here is a table I just made (edit: changed to list as HN wraps code blocks now), of iOS vs Android (now) vs Android (after Sep 2026 or 2027 or whenever these announced changes take effect):

•1. Where most users can install software from:

↠↠ iOS: official store (App Store) + (in EU) other stores

↠↠ Android (now): official store (Play Store), other stores (e.g. F-Droid), arbitrary APKs

↠↠ Android (after changes): official store (Play Store), other stores (e.g. F-Droid), arbitrary APKs

•2. Who the developers of software can be:

↠↠ iOS: registered developers ($99/year)

↠↠ Android (now): any developer

↠↠ Android (after changes): registered developers ($25 one-time) + hobbyists (small distribution) + any developers (for advanced users)

•3. Installing your own apps on your own phone, without becoming a registered developer:

↠↠ iOS: using XCode: need to reinstall every 7 days.

↠↠ Android (now): using ADB

↠↠ Android (after changes): using ADB

The second row (•2) is what is changing in Android. I think "the ability to run my own code on my own device", narrowly speaking, is closest to the third row, which is not changing.

Yes but if you read the article closely, what it's saying is that Waymo, which launched in London earlier this month, told cycling campaigners in San Francisco that it is normal practice (and this is according to the campaigners, not a direct statement from Waymo). The article has a lot of useful information and context, but the headline framing is misleading IMO. The article at least does not suggest any data on whether this is actually happening in London. The closest it gets is "remains to be seen":

> “Waymo claims they’re far safer in the US than traditional taxi services. But whether that is still the case on London’s infamously complex, congested and contested streets, remains to be seen.”

For perspective closer to the topic here, these are the approximate word counts of the books currently listed at "George Orwell bibliography" under "Novels":

• Burmese Days (1934): 97000

• A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935): 94000

• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936): 87000

• Coming Up for Air (1939): 83000 (?)

• Animal Farm (1945): 30000 (just over 30k)

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): 103000 (or 99000 without the “The Principles of Newspeak” appendix).

Incidentally, in 1946 when the British public had been turned against Wodehouse because of the (entirely innocuous) radio broadcasts he had made as a German prisoner (I imagine Lord Haw-Haw was on their mind, which influenced their opinion), Orwell wrote “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse”: https://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/plum/english/e_plum

> Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

This essay was written in 1946. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell_bibliography#Nov... consecutive books he published were:

* Coming Up for Air (1939)

* Animal Farm (1945)

Given the "seven years", it appears considered "Coming Up for Air" his previous novel, and "Animal Farm" not a novel. I wonder why?

In any case, the novel that he next wrote “fairly soon”, and which he predicted would be a failure, was:

* Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

> The bet is not “are you 100% sure a CRQC [cryptographically-relevant quantum computer] will exist in 2030?”, the bet is “are you 100% sure a CRQC will NOT exist in 2030?”

— from https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/ "A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines", the OP's blog post from two weeks ago, and the first link in this one. [HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662234]

Yes today's quantum computers cannot factor 21, but enough progress is happening fast enough that now there's a >1% chance they will go much further in (say) five years.

More broadly (outside of relevance to cryptography), quantum computers already can (almost certainly) beat classical computers on certain contrived (useless) problems: see https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09901 "Has quantum advantage been achieved?" for a summary of the current state.

It's a bug in the website's preview mode — if you look at the full essay, it has (if I've counted correctly) 25 paragraphs. There are also three paragraphs that start with "BC" for some reason, which seem to be bigger breaks.

There should be 7 paragraphs in the preview shown, with paragraph breaks after ‘reigns.”’, ‘on Amazon.’, ‘Well, yes.’ and so on.

It's not obvious from the webpage, but if you are a subscriber or enter your email address you can read the whole essay, which is 4849 words long. And though it does not mention Goodreads explicitly, it does mention "Amazon reviews" as a category (close enough, with Goodreads reviews sometimes? showing up on Amazon) quite a bit at the beginning, for example:

> user reviews exert ever more influence compared to serious criticism […] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics

To clarify, the talk is by an Anthropic researcher, though given the subject of LLMs, "entropic researcher" also makes some kind of sense.

> I’ve read many articles on the same topic but never found it presented this way - hopefully N + 1 is of help to someone.

Can confirm; yes it was helpful! I've never thought seriously about parsing and I've read occasionally (casually) about Pratt parsing, but this is the first time it seemed like an intuitive idea I'll remember.

(Then I confused myself by following some references and remembering the term "precedence climbing" and reading e.g. https://www.engr.mun.ca/~theo/Misc/pratt_parsing.htm by the person who coined that term, but nevermind — the original post here has still given me an idea I think I'll remember.)

The short blog post announcing this paper: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/03/29/mathematical-metho...

In particular:

> This is an unabridged version of a solicited article for a forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mathematics. […] took over a year to write – which means, at the current pace of development in the field, that some of it is already slightly out of date.

----

Edit: The post at https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116319186983426174 mentions also an (entirely unrelated) popular-math presentation titled “What does it mean to think like a mathematician?” https://terrytao.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ta... which is interesting too (despite the ChatGPT-generated illustrations and repeating stuff Tao has said before, on his blog etc.)

> There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later.

As an adversarial/worst-case model, it can be useful to think of every service as potentially storing forever all the data that you ever give it access to. As a practical matter, services have terms of service that they follow. If your Claude Code terms say that your data will not be used for training, you can be reasonably confident that they will not be, and storing the raw inputs forever (as suggested by “significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later”) would be even more unlikely. (For example, Google has entire teams dedicated to compliance with users' “wipeout” settings. You can take a look at https://myactivity.google.com and https://myadcenter.google.com to see some of what Google knows and thinks about you, and if you've chosen "Auto-Delete after 3 months" or whatever, you can be very sure it will be gone after that time. Every single team that stores user data is required to comply with this.)

I do think the services make it harder than it should be, to find out what the terms are — for a given usage of their services whether and for how long the details will be stored by them. Just saying that you can find this out and generally rely on it at least at the time (at a reasonable threat model, e.g. not treating the service as a malicious adversary having a giant law-breaking conspiracy that has never been exposed).

> “Non-denial denial” is a term of art in PR. Never read one? They’re fun.

— patio11 about this response (https://x.com/patio11/status/2035115379169677717)

Whether or not one can tell it's AI generated, one can certainly tell it's not Knuth. For one thing, the writing style is very different. Not that there haven't been other great computer scientists who may have written in this style, but it definitely doesn't sound like Knuth (there is no "being a bit cheeky" for sure). But also, the ideas it has produced are simply more of the same; kind of a natural progression / what a typical grad student may write. Knuth always has something new and surprising to say in every paragraph, he wouldn't harp on a theme like this. Also he mixes “levels” between very high and very low, while the paragraphs you quoted stay at a uniform level.

But of course, writing as good as a grad student's (just not the particular delightful idiosyncratic style of a specific person) is still very impressive and amazing, so your concerns are still valid.

I think it's also a privacy thing; you have to go into the Waymo app and “connect” your YouTube Music account (even though both have the same @gmail.com address), because otherwise the terms of service of one do not allow sharing data with the other without user consent. (Contrary to popular perception Google is very finicky about privacy, at least privacy as defined as conforming to the terms of service.)

Thank you. Yeah given the caveat I think it's probably hard then, unfortunately. (For context, I'm someone who's generally very uncoordinated, didn't play any sports growing up, etc, and a few months ago at 39 I fell from kitchen-counter height or possibly even just footstool-height and somehow managed to fall awkwardly on my side and fracture my hip (acetabulum), which took a couple of months to heal. I'm told that this kind of fracture is unlikely in people this age unless there's high-speed impact or osteoporosis involved, but well, I have a talent for awkwardness.)

The broader point of the post I actually agree with though, but the lesson I'd take away is to engineer environments such that it's ok to fall/fail safely.

This post rests on:

> Falling doesn't have to be dangerous. You can fall a lot without getting hurt, if you learn to fall safely. With inline skating, you have protective gear (helmet, knee/elbow pads, wrist guards) which protect you, and you have techniques for falling which let you use this gear to its fullest potential.

Is that actually true? Is it possible with enough protective gear, that falling can be safe, even for older people? Doesn't your own body weight come into the picture, despite helmets and knee pads? (Genuinely curious!)

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230710

The issue is not of low resolution exactly, but font format.

Knuth uses bitmap fonts, rather than vector fonts like everyone else. This is because his entire motivation for creating TeX and METAFONT was to not be reliant on the font technology of others, but to have full control over every dot on the page. METAFONT generates raster (bitmap) fonts. The [.tex] --TeX--> [.dvi] --dvips--> [.ps] --Distiller--> [.pdf] pipeline uses these fonts on the page. They look bad on screen because they're not accompanied by hinting for screens' low resolution (this could in principle be fixed!), but if you print them on paper (at typical resolution like 300/600 dpi, or higher of typesetters) they'll look fine.

Everyone else uses TrueType/OpenType (or Type 3: in any case, vector) fonts that only describe the shape and leave the rasterization up to the renderer (but with hinting for low resolutions like screens), which looks better on screen (and perfectly fine on paper too, but technically one doesn't have control over all the details of rasterization).