It is important to know that these are books for computer scientists more than for software engineers. They are basically mathematics textbooks, about the mathematics of algorithms. They focus on proving theorems rather than implementing useful algorithms.

There is a book called concrete mathematics that is sort of an introduction to TAOCP. If you’re interested in the basics that may be a good place to start. It has a better title than TAOCP in that it explicitly mentions mathematics, but also an equally bad one because it’s very much theoretical rather than concrete.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve heard of it, but haven’t tried yet - but I will.

I gave up on Google over a decade ago - maybe two decades by now. Way back when I was using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Astalavista, and others. When Google came, it somehow beat them all at finding exactly what I was looking for.

Later they stopped searching for the exact words you typed, but it was okay because adding a plus in front of terms, or quotes around phrases, still let you search exact things. The combination of both systems was very powerful.

And then plus and quotes stopped working. Boolean operators stopped working. Their documentation still says they work, but they don’t.

Now, it seems like your input is used only as a general guideline to pick whatever popular search is closest to what it thinks you meant. Exact words you typed are often nowhere in the page, not even in the source.

I only search Google maps now, and occasionally Google translate.

Our code base is filled with “//constructor”, “//destructor”, “//assignment”, or the ever enlightening “Foo GetFoo(); // GetFoo”.

This is not what they mean by self-documenting code.

Violations of privacy. Microsoft has that too though, so unless Google has wallpapers they need to step up their game.

As a late Gen X, I was completely lost. So, I guess it’s official: I don’t get your generation.

Ah thank you. I was unaware of the matrix protocol.

I’m obviously out of the loop, because I don’t know. Can someone explain?

That’s another benefit: no more meetings.

I’ve been a proponent of this for ages. It makes no sense to cross some imaginary line and suddenly time shifts. Time should change constantly as you move east or west, up or down. Everyone has their own personal time, which is constantly updated.

Bonus: no more daylight savings switch.

Exactly! Even the indicator light of my speakers bothers me during long nightly sessions. I want to see the screen, nothing else.

That’s a misconception. Farmers lobbied heavily against DST. Their work does not abide by the clock; they milk when cows need milking, and they harvest when there’s enough light, no matter what some clock says.

In Europe, DST as we know it now was first introduced by Germany during WW1 to preserve coal, then abandoned after the war, and widely adopted again in the 70s. In the US it was established federally in the 60s.

This is all glossing over a lot of regional differences and older history. But yeah, US farmers were very much against the idea.

Arch? You’re way too nica. A bare Debian netinstall and a link to linuxfromscratch. They have wget, so they can get started.

I thought this might be an interesting read until I saw the blurb with 4 hashtags and 4 emoticons in just 4 sentences.

“This button turns on the light in the hallway. Sometimes it brings the whole house down on you, but we haven’t found a way to reliably reproduce this. If that happens just crawl from under the rubble, rebuild the house, and try again. This time the light should turn on.“

“Oh, and send us the log messages.”

Hello world.

I … Wha…. WHY??

Rewind.

It’s also ‘its’.

43 metre? Those are some real tall children.