Talks at Google
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58:34 · 450K views · Dec 12, 2007
Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, gives an Authors@Google talk in 2007 about the webcomic and his background, followed by audience Q&A. Donald Knuth and Guido van Rossum ask questions during the session.
HN refers to it for the moment where Knuth asks a question and addresses the Steve Jobs anecdote, a favorite geek moment.
10 comments from Hacker News
To me, one of the all-time great geek moments was when Munroe did a tech talk at Google, and Don Knuth gets up to ask him if he's thought about doing animated cartoons, and what is his favorite log log n sorting algorithm, about 21:30 in to this: this video
Randall wanted a unique short string associated with all his work. That way he could Google "xkcd" and find everything he ever did online. I believe he had a script that generated all possible 4-letter combinations and filtered out ones with any search results, and settled on "xkcd". But he became a victim of his own success when the comic became so popular and "xkcd" is now synonymous with the comic. Source: talk by Randall, might be this one but I'm not sure: this video .
There are many more important things about Knuth and his work, but one of my favorite stories about him is that he showed up at Randall Munroe's Google tech talk [0], and, during Q&A, asked Munroe "Have you thought about animated cartoons?" and "What is your n log n algorithm for searching?" I have a special respect for people who are both brilliant and humble, and Knuth is my poster person for that. [0] this video
Google has some pretty good software for this, thought it might be internal. When they have their "Talks at Google" events, there's a screen off to the side that provides real-time translated subtitles. There's at least one talk where the speaker addresses this system, and tries to get it to transcribe funny stuff. Can't remember which one exactly, but it might be this one with Randall Munroe (xkcd). this video
Maybe Knuth was more of a rebel back in the day, but somehow I can't imagine him having that sort of response. In Randall Munroe's Authors@Google talk [ this video ], Don Knuth asks him a question at ~21:30 and at ~25:30 Randall asks Knuth about this very anecdote. Knuth's response is "I've been told this story a number of times...but I was impressed by him more than he was impressed by me."