Ok, 37 comments so far and NOT ONE is about the talk itself? Come on, people!
I went to the talk and frankly I didn't follow most of it. I also didn't get any connection to trees. But it was interesting to learn that people have studied sequences (codes) and have proven theorems about properties of such codes. I had no idea that this was an area of study.
Tidbits:
Knuth's Commafree Eastman prover is written in C (actually CWEB, a literate programming toolset).
Knuth has memorized a bunch of digits of pi in binary using a mnemonic for remembering pi in octal.
You probably know that the PC == Windows and Mac == Apple association dates back decades and while I know where you are coming from I don't see much value in pointing it out. Everybody knows that saying PC for a Windows Machine is not correct, but that terminology somehow sticks
It's like pointing out that it should be GNU/Linux instead of Linux every time (I do sympathize with the GNU Project in some way though), or that Linux is not an OS but a kernel and so forth...
We all here know the truth(s) but you won't change what terminology the public uses, so we should be somewhat relaxed about it (imo)
It doesn't date that far back, really. Mac people used to be very keen on lecturing others that they were also using a "PC", as recently as the late 90s. One swift ad campaign in mid-00s changed that completely.
Are these events very popular? I'm thinking of going to the live event but not sure if it will be really packed, if so I would prefer to just watch it online.
Pardon my language, but FUCK. Seeing Dr. Knuth lecture in person has been one of my things-to-do since arriving on campus last year. This lecture is happening 5 minutes away from me but I didn't know about it until now. Until next Christmas I guess.
edit: in the meantime, speaking of his past lectures on YouTube -- a few years ago someone asked Dr. Knuth if he reads HackerNews (or Reddit)...he didn't actually answer the question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDokMxVtB3k&t=18m39s
I'm trying to figure out how to actually "wait in the lobby" for the webinar. Is there going to be a link provided on the page right at the minute it starts? If so, that's a bit concerning.
edit: Perhaps they will send info in an email. According to a confirmation email I received "Log-in information will be emailed out 24 hours and one hour before the webinar begins."
Heh. I submitted the Steam hardware survey again last week and one of the questions asked what my connection speed was. The fastest entry was "LAN>10M"
I'm willing to bet their initial set of data from that form was accurate, but now it's probably a joke because people have been lying just to mess around. Besides some satellites very far from Earth and intentionally imposing a bandwidth threshold on oneself, who even has a 33.6 kbps connection these days?
I stopped using steam because it seems to expect a broadband internet connection. It will often (sometimes without prompting) overwrite and re-download gigabytes of data
Recently it seems to be better about respecting download settings. The download size also seems to be an upper limit, for example Team Fortress 2 pretty much always showed up as a 10gb update download, but spent less than 5 minutes actually downloading files. Not sure if that estimation has been fixed recently, but it used to be the case.
see my comment above: "even though it's Stanford, it still is an large academic institution, not a fast-paced San Francisco startup." You have to expect issues like these to still persist. Slow moving orgs.
Put yourself in the shoes of a dev at a large academic institution, you think you are going write a new feature for a third party system to support free webinars? Or just set the price to $0.00 and not have to code anything? Or rather the dev was probably never even contacted, the prof or admin just set it up and the easiest way was to set the price as 0.
Huh? Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder of NVIDIA donated the money for the building. It's named after him and one of the auditoriums is named after NVIDIA. It's not like they offered up the naming rights to an auditorium for corporate bidding.
"It's not like they offered up the naming rights to an auditorium for corporate bidding."
Isn't that exactly what they did? "Give us $30M and we'll name a building after you". The only difference is that when you donate enough to build a building, you get your name on it in perpetuity, not just a fixed term. Oracle reportedly paid $20M - $30M over 10 years for naming rights to the Oakland Coliseum.
Not that there's anything wrong with it as naming academic buildings after donors has a long history.
> Not that there's anything wrong with it as naming academic buildings after donors has a long history.
A Jen-Hsun Huang Auditorium would have been infinitely preferable to NVIDIA Auditorium.
One points concretely to a mortal man whose efforts benefited the school during a specific time in history. The other is a context-free, effectively-indefinite tie to a faceless, immortal corporation.
In 100 years, which might retain more meaning? Or even in twenty? ;)
How about the Christmas tree lectures folks? Any anecdotes or your favorites? :)
Discussion on previous lecture https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718875