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Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017) (yakshav.es)
27 points by MontagFTB on March 6, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



This looks to be a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607412 and specifically to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39610324. Usually it's best not to post follow-ups as top-level submissions right away, because they create repetition on the front page and take energy away from the original thread.

Generally speaking the good options are: (1) discuss the follow-up in the original thread while it's active; or (2) wait long enough for the hivemind caches to clear (say, a couple months for good measure) and submit the URL then.

In short, it's a good submission but not necessarily a good submission now. I hope that makes sense!


> “hivemind caches”

Are those ‘meat’ caches? Or, heretofore unknown to me, part of the HN tech stack?


This makes perfect sense. Thank you for all the value you add to HN.


TAOCP itself embodies several layers of yak shaving, since he was initially commissioned to write a book on compilers, then decided to start the book with material on more basic algorithms (with compilers relegated to later chapters), then each pair of chapters expanded to become its own volume, then volume 4 expanded to become three or more volumes. 60 years later he still hasn't gotten to the compiler part yet! (which is supposed to be volume 7)


Discussed in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861678 (99 comments)




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