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Don Knuth releases Volume 4, Pre-fascicle 6A [gzipped ps]
- ScotterC 14y agoWould prefer a warning that it's a download link.
- kinleyd 14y agoAgreed. The link should have taken us to a page describing what it's about, with the option to download.
- Jach 14y agoI think the title says what's necessary. But if it did link to such a page (there is no such page that describes just this release that I found by googling the url) someone would complain that it's just blogspam, post the download link in their comment, and get upvotes. There were tweets I found that reference it, who knows what sort of anger that would have generated if the submitter linked to a tweet. (There's already discomfort on this page over Knuth just using the word 'tweet'!)
- kinleyd 14y agoI see what you mean: the link to the download is buried way deep in the OP. Though I don't think anyone would feel it's blogspam if you'd linked to it (as it is clearly Donald Knuth's), directing them to the relevant link on the page is near impossible and linking directly to the download is more efficient. I think you made the right trade-off here.
- alexanderh 14y agoMaybe i'm "out of the loop" but not a single word in that title means anything to me. Dont know who Don Knuth is, dont know why its volume 4, dont know what Pre-fascicle means... And I'm usually pretty with it on hackernews related interests. Not everyone here is part of the Ivy league school circle jerk. I would have to google pretty much all of that, which is inconvenient. It should have linked to a page describing what it is, even if OP had to make it himself. Its only blogspam if you put ads on your blog... which I'd hope anyone here doesn't.
- Jach 14y agoYou're not only out of the loop, you're under a rock if you haven't even heard of Don Knuth before and you're in the computer science world at all. (I guess if you're just a humble web programmer ignorance is understandable.) His material is not for Ivy League students, it's for anyone interested in computer science itself rather than just programming. A "fascicle" is the book-form of a new episode in a television series' season, you learned a new word! (I guess only Ivy League students like learning new words? I'm not one but I like to learn new words.) It's part of the ongoing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAOCP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAOCP You did understand "volume 4" I hope, which indicates there is a volume 1, 2, and 3. There are also other inferences you can make from the use of "volume" as opposed to another word (like "part"). For your assertion that it should link to a page describing what it is, I think you're wrong and I don't think you addressed my point about that being less efficient. Even in your case, I think it's more efficient this way. I don't think you would understand much in the submission without a lot of googling, and that's if you're even interested in understanding (which I doubt given your resistance to merely typing "define:fascicle" into Google) in the first place. A blog post describing the work would tell you as much, but since you didn't even understand the title, you already knew that you likely wouldn't understand the work. (Gods help you if you're on Windows and can't read PS files without downloading stuff from websites you've never visited.) An incomprehensible (to you) title saved you time. It's better for you this way. You did ruin your potential efficiency gains by spending time complaining about the submission type in the comments, much more time than it would take to google the parts of the title you didn't understand, but you knew that already when you ventured to the comments (which people seem to do regardless of the format of the content--I know I often get more out of the comments than the submission itself and sometimes will skip the submission entirely). Edit: I will grant that there is an additional improvement to the title. Adding to the end "on Satisfiability". Which wouldn't help anyone not inclined to google but does at least say more specifically what it's about.
- dhruvbird 14y agoFixed
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- insaneirish 14y agoChange the link.
- Shorel 14y agoHonestly, what else would you expect? Reading the TeX source online?
- ScotterC 14y agoI had no idea what it was. When I clicked, all I knew was that I had heard of Donald Knuth before.
- badcircle 14y ago... not cool
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- emddudley 14y agoOn Windows I use GSView to view PS files. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/get50.htm http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/get50.htm You must also install GhostScript in order to use it: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/GPL/gpl902.htm http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/GPL/gpl902.htm
- rat87 14y agoYou could also use evince or okular on windows.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jk 14y agoIt is not a gzipped file; open with any postscript viewer.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cshesse 14y agofile fasc6a.ps.gz fasc6a.ps.gz: gzip compressed data, was "fasc6a.ps", from Unix, last modified: Thu Jul 26 12:45:44 2012, max compression
- cnvogel 14y agoIt is gz-compressed, but (1) your browser might decompresses it on the fly after seeing the "Content-Encoding: x-gzip" and (2) most postscript viewers decompress on the fly as gzipped postscript is so prevalent. $ curl -s http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc6a.ps.gz | dd bs=16 count=1 | xxd 0000000: 1f8b 0808 689e 1150 0203 6661 7363 3661 ....h..P..fasc6a
- eru 14y ago> [...] most postscript viewers decompress on the fly as gzipped postscript is so prevalent. Not only prevalent, but also the right thing to do. PDF was an attempt to (among other aims) achieve smaller filesizes than PS. But that was premature optimization: While a PS file is usually bigger than a PDF, gzipped PS beats PDF.
- rrmm 14y agoOn page 29, Knuth says, "We can regard both variables and clauses as active agents, who continually tweet to their neighbors in this social network." This in the context of statistical physics. Seeing Knuth talk about tweets feels weird. On another note, anyone actually run into a random k-SAT problem in "real life"?
- eta_carinae 14y ago> Seeing Knuth talk about tweets feels weird. Does it make you feel better that he released the book as a .ps?
- rrmm 14y agoI would have preferred a .dvi! (font embedding issues notwithstanding).
- dunham 14y agoThe big issue for me are the bitmap fonts. Fortunately he used a modern dvips, so you can run it through "pkfix" to get a version with scalable fonts. (Once it's converted to pdf, it's more challenging to fix.)
- sp332 14y agoWhat part of it has bitmapped fonts?
- dunham 14y agoSorry for the late response, I missed your reply. All of the fonts in that postscript file are bitmaps. Knuth started with metafont, but the file he distributed only contains bitmaps. If you look inside the file, you'll find the comment "DVIPSBitmapFont". And if you convert it to PDF and zoom in, you'll see that the fonts are bitmaps. This is typical for TeX files generated by dvips prior to the widespread adoption of the Type1 equivalents for the computer modern fonts. Fortunately, the file was generated by a recent version of dvips, so the "pkfix" script can be used to rewrite it with Type1 fonts substituted for the bitmapped fonts. I'd recommend doing this before converting it to PDF. It's a bit harder to fix this after PDF conversion. A few years ago, I wrote some Java code to do it (inspired by "pkfix-helper"), but it worked off of font metric signatures so it's not very accurate for small font subsets (e.g. exponents). To fix this, I need to actually look at bitmaps (or ask the user), and I never got around to implementing that. I suppose it's a minor issue, but it is a pet peeve of mine. I've come across a lot of papers on the net in PDF or PS format that look unnecessarily bad when viewed on a computer screen.
- bulibuta 14y agoJust made my morning, thanks!
- walrus 14y agoJust curious: how did you find this? I don't see a link to it anywhere on Knuth's website. The only reference I can find to it is on Twitter[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/pervognsen/status/230892091188846592 https://twitter.com/pervognsen/status/230892091188846592
- rosh 14y agoIt was on Reddit a few days ago... http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/xb6ft/ http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/xb6ft/
- jinmingjian 14y agoa (very incomplete) draft of section 7.2.2.2...still great
- sp332 14y agoAny suggestions for software to read this on a desktop?
- trotsky 14y agohttp://projects.gnome.org/evince/ http://projects.gnome.org/evince/
- eru 14y agoGnome's standard document reader Evince works out of the box. As does Okular, KDE's standard reader. (Evince is also available for Windows, I don't know about Okular.)
- makmanalp 14y agoAlso for osx, preview works fine for the .ps.
- emmelaich 14y agoGoogle Docs^WDrive works .. eventually. Seems to take a while to process. I'd make it public, but that would be a copyright violation. I wonder if Google hashes and caches the result. If they do the next upload should be much faster for anyone.