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yakshav.es
Personal blog · yakshav.esprogrammingculture
yakshav.es is a personal blog at yakshav.es about programming and culture. Since 2017, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link yakshav.es mainly for "The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves", an essay on Donald Knuth building his own tooling, including TeX and literate programming, while writing TAOCP. Commenters call it a favourite.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017)9 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-09-05
- Non-Thoughts on the Open Source Initiative3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-08-26
- Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-11-15
What Hacker News says?
Donald Knuth seems to have got it right. On the way to writing a book, he wrote all the tooling including a typesetting system, a programming paradigm, a font, a font authoring tool, and so on. https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
Comment linking /the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
on “The Tools I Use to Write Books”Submitted Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017) as a story · 431 points
HN discussionFor anyone who hasn’t stumbled upon it, this is an amazing read. Donald Knuth - The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves - https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/ Discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861678 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381
Comment linking /the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
on “This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)”Submitted Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves as a story · 93 points
HN discussion> When the book’s plates required an illustrator, and he was unable to find a satisfactory one, he taught himself perspective drawing, then published a 1770 tutorial for aspiring artists titled A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective . Shades of Knuth. (For anyone unfamiliar with Donald Knuth’s prodigious dives into mathematical topography and related subjects, https://yakshav.es/the-patron…
Comment linking /the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
on “Joseph Priestley created revolutionary "maps" of time”Submitted Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017) as a story · 27 points
HN discussionDo note[1] that TeX itself was written as a result of Knuth being unsatisfied with the typesetting of his newly written volume 2 of TAoCP. I don’t know if Lamport encountered the same yak with LaTeX, but I do know he’s a distributed systems researcher, not a programmer in a relevant area :) [1] https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
Comment linking /the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
on “Typst, a modern alternative to LaTeX, is now open source”Submitted Non-Thoughts on the Open Source Initiative as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThanks for adding some sober reality. And now for perhaps my favorite web page on the Internet: https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
Comment linking /the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
on “Writing First, Tooling Second”Submitted Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2015) as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> TeX was also built for TAOCP. Crazy stuff. If you haven't yet, read "Donald Knuth - The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves" at https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/ For TAOCP Knuth also creates a new assembly language, for illustration purposes. TeX was written in WEB, a programming language Knuth made which transpiles to Pascal. It's based on literate programming, a programming paradigm Knuth introduced. And…
Comment linking /the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
on “SQLite doesn't use Git, they wrote their own VCS”Submitted Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWhenever somebody says something, one has to consider their Competency, Context and Time to read between the lines and try and get at the gist of what is being intended rather then the mere words themselves. This is orders of magnitude more important when we try to understand "The Greats" (in any field) because they have a certain insight into things, a huge knowledge base to draw upon and are aware of myriads of nu…
Comment linking /the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
on a deleted threadSubmitted Non-Thoughts on the Open Source Initiative as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Non-Thoughts on the Open Source Initiative as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Positivity in Coding as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Save Co.up as a story · 1 points
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