Yet another Hacker News

43 points Curiositry 2 hours ago 19 comments

blatherard 2 hours ago | parent

Images weren't loading for me, here's a Wayback Machine link https://web.archive.org/web/20260412143311/https://www.thoma...

janvdberg 1 hour ago | parent

Awesome! I know the feeling, I have two myself. https://x.com/loginn/status/1367475093719416833

(Hmm maybe I should also write a blogpost about this)

utopcell 45 minutes ago | parent

I bet the mailing cost was more than 0x$2.00 for Knuth.

jll29 5 minutes ago | parent

I also got one for catching DEK out for claiming "Alan Turing broke the Enigma".

That claim goes to the Polish cryptoanalyst Marian Rejewski instead, of course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski); what Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers did was automate the breaking, which was important because it had to be done again every day (due to the many combinations of configurations of the Enigma).

ape4 1 hour ago | parent

The error was saying that "infinitely many alphabets can be generated" but there is a finite number of parameters which have a finite range of values. If Knuth had just written "a humongous number of alphabets" he would be correct.

mococa 1 hour ago | parent

I know a guy (ricbit) who have 4 or more

CurtHagenlocher 1 hour ago | parent

The biggest shame of my life is that I had one of these and somehow managed to lose it.

utopcell 47 minutes ago | parent

If that's your biggest shame then you must have lived a good life.

jdw64 1 hour ago | parent

But what's the most Reward checks anyone has ever held?

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

Top entry:

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html

jdw64 1 hour ago | parent

thanks!

dhosek 18 minutes ago | parent

Although that omits the paper check era.

My guess for the top slot off the top of my head was actually #4.

zimpenfish 18 minutes ago | parent

Is that necessarily accurate?

> "These account balances reflect only the rewards for errors reported since the beginning of 2006. Many reward checks were issued during 1968--2005, too numerous to mention here."

There's 20 years on that chart vs 37 not on it.

Also that's "account balance" rather than "the most Reward checks" which I take to mean "the most [number of] reward checks" -- there's probably a correlation, yes, but [0] shows a variety of ways where check values are non-constant.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check#Reward_amou...

jacquesm 9 minutes ago | parent

There is only one person that can rule that out, but since this is their statement on the subject I would take it as authoritative unless there is a better source.

You probably have a substantial subset of the people on that list on HN, so it might be possible to recover a chunk of the 'paper era'.

blltprfmnk 2 minutes ago | parent

I received two checks in the very early 2000s and my name isn’t on this list.

For the record I cashed both and have zero regrets. At the time it definitely felt like the right thing to do as I am not into collecting tokens.

assumed_throwaw 1 hour ago | parent

I'm surprised we haven't heard of anyone running an AI on Donald Knuth's books to generate the largest collection of checks in existence...

largbae 1 hour ago | parent

What a brilliant teaching technique, think of how many people studied his work for bounties that they would never cash.

dhosek 20 minutes ago | parent

I’m on the mailing list where errors related to TeX are submitted and the level of scrutiny behind submissions is truly mind-boggling.

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting how no other writers in the field seem to have adopted Knuths' strategy to get their books proofread to the point of being bullet proof.