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by zitterbewegung 2213 days ago
Does this make me a hacker?

Donald Knuth was giving a presentation to celebrate someones birthday by debugging his old FORTRAN code. He was having trouble giving it since his PDF of his presentation was autoforwarding using Adobe Acrobat. I figured out that Preview would avoid this outcome. I think this is the largest contribution I will have to Computer Science.
3 comments
techopoly 2213 days ago
Nice. Mine's not so impressive, but when I was green and in college, I was casually job shadowing an older friend for a day at a major tech company, and was asked to take a look at some code that had an issue.

I spotted the bug in 30 seconds.

It was then I realized that even at the top of our profession, everyone is still human beings with their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and I have just as much potential as anyone else.

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swinglock 2213 days ago
New eyes help a lot. Haven't you glossed over something that once found is obvious, both yourself and with the help of others?

This power is only multiplied when having to answer good questions about the system and even explain it in ways that may be different from your usual model but that clicks better with the other person.

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zitterbewegung 2213 days ago
Yea, to this day though I don't know how you can configure Adobe Acrobat to autoforward slides.
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svat 2213 days ago
Pretty sure you mean this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP2D4DEQBTU — the contribution was crucial IMO :)

I've seen Knuth give other (more recent) talks out of slides like that one (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/karp80.pdf) where each PDF page is a possibly different size and he wants it displayed full screen individually, but don't recall that problem from other times… so the impact of your contribution may extend beyond that one talk!

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zitterbewegung 2213 days ago
I'm reminded of a quote from Steve Jobs about optimizing the Macintosh.

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

I must have optimized Computer Science at least maybe a minute or two. Too bad it won't change my Erdos number.

It was really cool getting a selfie with him.

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cutler 2213 days ago
Absolutely.
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