Knuth's Bank of San Serriffe

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

29 points·DanielRibeiro··9 comments

I love how so many of the most distinguished names in computer science have absolutely austere websites. No tricky CSS, no javascript, just raw content.

Knuth is too busy "getting to the bottom of things."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

Are you doing a deep dive or just tinkering with lots of things? Which one is the path to success?

Depends: when you "tinker with lots of things" you may end up connecting them in nontrivial ways, which is a win. But deep diving is the more usual path, I think.

as far as I know Knuth does not even have an email account, how about that for austerity.

My favourite part: "... only 9 of the first 275 checks that I've sent out since the beginning of 2006 have actually been cashed. The others have apparently been cached."

Partly because it's a good pun, but also because it relies on the reader knowing how to pronounce 'cache' correctly. (I've heard talks given by presenters who say "catch," "cashay," or even "catchay.")

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348683

It's a geeky solution, but nowhere near as geeky as the original cheques for $2.56. As an update, I was expecting bitcoins or something similar.

What about money orders?

I think his solution addresses the fact that people don't cash the financial instruments but keep them for posterity. Money orders are a suitable response to "...I shall do my best to find a suitable way to send money to anyone who really prefers legal tender."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com