3 ms·
Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. Perhaps it's the quality of my writing but my personal experie
by vasco 3y ago
Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. Perhaps it's the quality of my writing but my personal experience is that even being way more concise, most people wouldn't care.
- nirse 3y agoI guess you should take into account that you are not (one of) the most preeminent computer scientists in the world, right?
- debatem1 3y agoDo you listen longer when your best dairy cow moos?
- nwiswell 3y agoIf my best dairy cow was Don Knuth, my bones would be NP-Hard.
- bigbillheck 3y agoPlease don't post kink fantasies on the hacker news forums.
- irrational 3y agoI don’t know. Don’t cows moo constantly?
- thrtythreeforty 3y agoIf Don Knuth sent me a 14-page letter, you bet I'm gonna read it. I might frame it.
- anonzzzies 3y agoI would definitely frame it. I framed an email from Norvig and a note from Dijkstra. Get joy from small things.
- aryonoco 3y agoI once emailed Dijkstra. I was 14, it was the mid 90s, and I had just connected to the real internet a few months ago. I had just come across his name as a prominent computer scientist. I wanted to be one just like him, so I asked him what I should do. He replied. it was 3 full paragraphs. He told me to study algorithms and to learn python. You're right. I absolutely should frame it.
- dekhn 3y agoI have a blog post by Norvig where he gently chides me for wasting enormous amounts of CPU trying to find a counterexample to the Beale Conjecture. Not exactly frameable, and not exactly something to be proud of, but I got a chuckle nonetheless.
- WillAdams 3y agoI was fortunate enough to get one of the last physical reward checks which was accompanied by a printout of my e-mail, written on in pencil. Fortunately, it survived a house flood which destroyed the book it was in, so now the envelope it's in is prominently displayed on a rack in my living room and would be one of the things I'd grab in the event of a fire. Every so often, when a co-worker knows who Knuth is I bring it in to a workplace to show off.
- tombert 3y agoExtremely envious of this! I don't own a copy of Art of Computer Programming, so I did spend a not-insignificant amount of reading through some of Knuth's other writings trying to find mistakes that no one else has found, and I came up empty handed. There might be mistakes ripe for the picking in there, but I'm afraid I'm not quite smart enough to find them. Still, a guy can dream. If I ever pick up Art of Computer Programming I might give it a go again.
- WillAdams 3y agoI was fortunate that Knuth wrote a book on a topic which I have studied deeply, _Digital Typography_: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/dt.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/dt.html My correction is for pg. 33, and there was a minor point of improvement which I can't find.
- tombert 3y agoVery cool! He just needs to write a book on obscure cartoon history, and I'll be shoe-in. Until then I think I will just have to deal with living in envy.
- WillAdams 3y agoYou are aware that his first publication was in _Mad Magazine_? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie (scroll down to "System of Measurement") or see: https://webmadness.net/blog/?post=knuth https://webmadness.net/blog/?post=knuth
- justin66 3y agoIf a rando from hn sent me a 14-page letter, I'd probably read it. I might give it to the police afterwards.
- azangru 3y ago> Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me His addressees were members of the editorial board. Surely the editorial board should be accustomed to reading lengthy prose? Now, writing a 14-page letter, of a quality that matches published articles, is what's wild to me.
- oaiey 3y agoWell, how long do we work on some slide decks to convince management? How much we polish them aesthetically? This is a scientist working to convince a management board. So he puts effort in it and tries to make a convincing pitch. Just a different media ;)
- anonzzzies 3y agoI think times were a little different then; when I had a company begin 2000s, we used to send long emails with details before and after meetings, and there had less and more productive meetings because everyone read these emails/docs. Now I try to send only 1 liners, because people tend to literally only read the first line and then ram the reply button and blurb some studied remark like 'ok'. And then these same folks drag out meetings asking, in a pathetic show of laziness, to 'go over the email'. If there is anything I find cringe, it's 'let's go over the email together'. It's just saying; 'I couldn't be arsed to read it and I want to waste everyone's time'.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoChatGPT was imitating us, after all
- atoav 3y agoSome people think that with quantity they can paint over a lack of substance, others think writing more looks as if they did more work, yet others don't seem to think.. at all. Bottom line up. Ususally what you need the other side to grok can be summarized in two sentences. Start with that. Give details after. If you have multiple topics seperate them into sections or make a list. Any message is something the receiver needs to decode into actionable information. Often the receivers don't have any idea where your mind is, so you first need to being them there. The worst kind of message is one where you need to read all the way to the end to even figure out what the heck it is about and then read it again just to get what they want.
- master-lincoln 3y agoI think this might be true if the only goal is to convey information. Here it is more about convincing others and framing information. If you start with the condensed facts, readers who disagree might be put off already.
- kaiwen1 3y agoI bet the editors read it not once, but several times. And I bet it was even noticed years later and posted on websites where many others read it, were impressed, and commented on it. Don Knuth’s letters are special.
- gus_massa 3y agoIt's not a real letter. It's an (implicit?) open letter that is just a self published article, with the hidden threat that everyone will see it [1] so if they don't agree they will look bad. [1] And nobody will read it, and everybody agree even the publisher. The publisher want to increase the price anyway, and everyone else want a cheaper journal.
- justin66 3y ago> Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. You really cannot understand why Donald Knuth would expect the editorial board of The Journal of Algorithms to read his letter?
- bigbillheck 3y agoEditors not knowing who sent in a document is one of the pillars of the double-blind system.
- shagie 3y agohttps://www.combinatorics.org/ojs/index.php/eljc/article/view/v4i2i1/html https://www.combinatorics.org/ojs/index.php/eljc/article/vie... > Herb Wilf has co-founded two major journals, Journal of Algorithms in 1980 with Donald Knuth ... When the founder of the journal writes the editorial board (not the reviewers of papers), it is probably expected to be read.