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Posted by Curiositry 7 hours ago

Knuth reward check(www.thomas-huehn.com)
117 points | 46 commentspage 2
msuniverse2026 2 hours ago|
Just FYI for HN - if there is anyone looking to make big money in the coming years there are no fully signed TAOCP first editions anywhere. You would honestly print so much money if you could get all the first edition volumes signed.
mococa 6 hours ago||
I know a guy (ricbit) who have 4 or more
jdw64 6 hours ago||
But what's the most Reward checks anyone has ever held?
jacquesm 6 hours ago|
Top entry:

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

zimpenfish 5 hours ago|||
Is that necessarily accurate?

> "These account balances reflect only the rewards for errors reported since the beginning of 2006. Many reward checks were issued during 1968--2005, too numerous to mention here."

There's 20 years on that chart vs 37 not on it.

Also that's "account balance" rather than "the most Reward checks" which I take to mean "the most [number of] reward checks" -- there's probably a correlation, yes, but [0] shows a variety of ways where check values are non-constant.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check#Reward_amou...

gucci-on-fleek 48 minutes ago|||
> Is that necessarily accurate?

Udo's knowledge of TeX is absolutely stunning, so I would be very surprised if he weren't in first place. And DRF [0] [1] seemed to agree with the ranking in a sibling comment [2], which is also suggests that it's accurate.

> There's 20 years on that chart vs 37 not on it.

The reward values have increased exponentially over the years (I think?), so the older years should be relatively insignificant to the overall balances.

[0]: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/618-an-interview-with-david-fu...

[1]: https://tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50037551

jacquesm 5 hours ago|||
There is only one person that can rule that out, but since this is their statement on the subject I would take it as authoritative unless there is a better source.

You probably have a substantial subset of the people on that list on HN, so it might be possible to recover a chunk of the 'paper era'.

blltprfmnk 5 hours ago|||
I received two checks in the very early 2000s and my name isn’t on this list.

For the record I cashed both and have zero regrets. At the time it definitely felt like the right thing to do as I am not into collecting tokens.

BellsOnSunday 2 hours ago||
Most rock and roll thing I heard today :)
zimpenfish 4 hours ago|||
> I would take it as authoritative unless there is a better source.

I'm not doubting the authority on the balances; it's the correlation to the number of checks I'm querying - high balance doesn't necessarily mean high number of checks, especially since the checks can have different values.

jacquesm 1 hour ago||
I doubt even Knuth has those records, so this is as good as it gets until someone sets off to compile a list of the 'paper past' that has enough proof to back the numbers.
drfuchs 1 hour ago||||
Well, I'm #4, but it's all from TeX stuff (where I'm kind of a ringer), and not The Art Of Computer Programming. The beyond-amazing Udo Wermuth is also all TeX, I believe, and did it without having a home team advantage; everyone else high on the list looks to be strictly TAOCP.
dhosek 5 hours ago||||
Although that omits the paper check era.

My guess for the top slot off the top of my head was actually #4.

jdw64 6 hours ago|||
thanks!
nice_byte 4 hours ago||
i was expecting an article about farming these with claude.

thank god it wasn't that lol

blatherard 7 hours ago||
Images weren't loading for me, here's a Wayback Machine link https://web.archive.org/web/20260412143311/https://www.thoma...
deathanatos 3 hours ago||
The HN URL is missing the trailing slash; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036221
TimK65 4 hours ago|||
Thank you for this! Images weren't loading for me, either.
tomhow 3 hours ago||
We updated the URL to add the slash, thanks!
deathanatos 3 hours ago||
Can we adjust the URL to have a final trailing slash? The HN URL points to,

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check
But this means the images, whose hrefs are like,

  src="./bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg"
Don't load; that relative-ref results in a URL of

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg
Which is a 404.

One can infer that the post's URI is like a "directory" of the subresources for the post, including those images; the URL of

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check/
(n.b. the trailing slash) adjusts the resolution of the image's relative-ref now to:

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check/bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg
And the images load. Yes, trailing slashes in URLs are significant in the case of resolving a relative ref like that.

If the author is here, you might consider redirecting the non-slash to the slash.

> But why will you find me there with the entry “0x$1.20”, i.e. decimal $2.88?

I know Knuth has his own notation here, (it is clearly noted at the bottom of the BOSS page) but 0x1.20 should really be decimal 1.125.

tomhow 3 hours ago|
Done, thanks!
evann-dev 4 hours ago||
[flagged]
simonebrunozzi 2 hours ago|
True AGI will arrive when an LLM will be able to provide ALL remaining mistakes in Donald Knuth's books. And kill one more amazing thing in the process.