There is no substantive content about any of Knuth's books in this article. I don't believe the author has read any of the books - most people commenting on Knuth haven't. The piece is just incoherent rambling about how math is hard - NOT something that should be voted to #1 on the front page of anywhere, especially HN.yc.

The following excerpt sums it up:

"...I am an average man, with an average IQ. I could have have failed the Mathematics exam of 10th class in 1996. I was very poor at Mathematics and I was expecting only 22 or 34 marks out of 100 and anything less than 33 means you have failed the exam but I purchased 2 very heavy-books of Mathematics, which our teacher called best references books for 10th class and studied them at the cost of my health for 2 months and then I got 83 marks but those health problems, the pain in the neck are still with me after 12 years ) . Since I was weak in Mathematics may be thats why I don’t like Knuth’s style ..."

I think what you are proposing is a false choice but I understand why you want to frame it this way.

Having been an entrepreneur for the last fifteen years, I have come to learn that my job description as an entrepreneur is simple, "if I could describe it, it ain't my job".

In other words, in the beginning of the startup, you have to do whatever it takes (be an engineer, be a salesman, be a negotiator, etc.) but once the company gets off the ground, then you need to give that responsibility to someone else. But by then, there will be other tasks that are not well defined that require your attention. And the cycle continues until the company is no longer a startup and the entrepreneur has lost his/her place in the company (or he/she matures into a manager).

At the end of the day, an entrepreneur's job is to connect the dots. It is a deceptively simple description of what we do.

Not unsurprisingly, articles like this say more about the author than about Knuth.

Knuth is not for everybody. No question about that. But for people who are interested in the area he covers, there is no one better.

Why blog? You can launch an entire media empire by calling celebrities fat.

Help, I can't find the hide link or down arrow for this post.

This article may apply to those who are building the next "killer app", but for the other 99% of us, it never mentions the two most important questions:

- Is the product any good?

- Does anyone want it?

If you can't answer "yes" to both of these, all the money in the world probably won't help you.

I've worked for three well-funded startups that failed for another reason, though all of them ended up making the same mistake: they couldn't develop software.

All three made some of the most common mistakes in software development, and tried to hide those mistakes behind a sweatshop.

1) Hire lots of people. Silly... hiring people doesn't get work done if you can't actually tell those people what you want their product to do.

2) Assume that hours = productivity. In every case, the competent folks among us spent a lot of time cleaning up problems caused by the folks working the extremely long hours. That contributed to my departure in every case... I hate cleaning up other people's messes, as it prevents me from doing worthwhile work. Firing those folks would have gotten us to market MORE quickly rather than less.

3) Deadlines set in stone... that just doesn't work. If you can't adjust your scope, you'll never actually hit the deadline.

4) Marketing based on the deadline... duh.

5) Perpetual crisis mode... when the requirements are poorly defined (if they're defined at all) as well as late, you have to be willing to delay launch or trim scope, or both. If instead you go into crisis mode and assume that your sweatshop will churn out a working product, you've already failed, and most of your best people will start jumping ship, leaving you with your burnouts who's primary contribution ends up being technical debt rather than working products.

I could go on, of course; I'm sure most people here have had similar experiences. So far, what I've seen of startups that made it big, they succeeded because they were either smart and did things well (e.g. 37signals), or because their software wasn't what they made their money on. Where I work now, we have hundreds of developers whose job is to pay the technical debt of the sweatshop, and one side effect of this is high turnover and low tribal knowledge. Most of our systems are in perpetual triage, and it's pretty obvious that if they were the source of our revenue, we'd be history. Fortunately, they only support the core business, so we're still around and profitable... but very inefficient.

Several government contractors I've worked for clearly survive based on the contacts within the government, because their software in many cases doesn't even meet the requirements it was developed for.

That's quite a bit more than I'd intended :)

What about all those $2.56 checks you could be getting?