Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS

Re:Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals o... by pfarrell on Thursday December 09, 2021 @12:48PM (#29500578)

I have no idea if this is current info, but Don Knuth's website describes what happened. He now issues checks from the fictional Bank of San Serriffe [0].

This line is classic Knuth:

  only 9 of the first 275 checks that I've sent out since the beginning of 2006 have actually been cashed. The others have apparently been cached.

0: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

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Re:Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals o... by samhw on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:14PM (#29500889)

That's the current info, though it sounds like he didn't always do that:

> Knuth offers monetary awards to people who find and report a bug in TeX. The award per bug started at US$2.56 (one "hexadecimal dollar"[41]) and doubled every year until it was frozen at its current value of $327.68. ... Due to scammers finding scanned copies of his checks on the internet and using them to try to drain his bank account, Knuth no longer sends out real checks, but those who submit bug reports can get credit at The Bank of San Serriffe instead.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX - this is about TeX, though most of it is generic over all his various cheque schemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check)

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