Hacker News: ekelsen

New comment by ekelsen in "Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full"

ekelsen — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:36:36 +0000

Yes, my point, if the answer is that there is no way this works without every disc being different.

It was not possible to manufacture at the time at scale.

New comment by ekelsen in "Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full"

ekelsen — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:19:31 +0000

How would your scheme work? You use RSA to encrypt the entire thing? Or you use it to get a key for a block cipher and then use that?

I feel like either way, you'd need the key to be different for every CD, otherwise you could just share the shared key. But if the encryption of every CD is different, why not just share the block cipher key directly? They can have a list of CDs and the associated key(s).

What additional security or functionality does an RSA like step add here?

New comment by ekelsen in "Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full"

ekelsen — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:09:54 +0000

Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?

New comment by ekelsen in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

ekelsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:09:35 +0000

I don't see how the reduction in price from a manuscript to a gutenberg pressed book is the same as the figure I was calculating?

Anyway, feels like this is no longer a productive discussion.

New comment by ekelsen in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

ekelsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:02 +0000

Another way to phrase the question: how many copies on a Gutenberg before you're even in time with typesetting?

Random online estimates suggest 4 hours to typeset a page and 200 pages an hour. So 800 copies.

I think this makes my point that on a Gutenberg press printing the already typeset page still wasn't that fast.

New comment by ekelsen in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

ekelsen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:08:29 +0000

I think even the printing was still not _that_ fast. You needed to physically press down each page. Make sure the ink was right, replace the paper, make sure not to smudge anything, etc.

I'd be surprised if they could average more than 2 pages / minute? Which for 1000 pages is still a full days work.

New comment by ekelsen in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

ekelsen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:00:28 +0000

I know them now, the questions were rhetorical.

I agree that school curricula is often bad. I disagree that we should just accept it as hopeless and not hope it could get better.

New comment by ekelsen in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

ekelsen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:48:06 +0000

That's really awesome! Did they have you try and typeset something by hand? I feel like for us it presented as some magical thing that made producing books trivially easy, whereas in reality typesetting a page was still very labor intensive and not that fast!

New comment by ekelsen in "The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life"

ekelsen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:38:48 +0000

I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". Monks writing out manuscripts is somewhat relatable since we all (at least for now) still learn how to write. Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work? Why was it still a pain and how did later inventions fix those problems?

New comment by ekelsen in "The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)"

ekelsen — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:23:38 +0000

I said nothing about the em dash. It's the entire style of the piece, not one unit of punctuation.

New comment by ekelsen in "The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)"

ekelsen — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:57:54 +0000

I think one reason is also the style? Like you can not like the LLM style and that's a perfectly valid to reason to not like it.

Attacking the use of LLMs might just be shorthand for the style or the long-winded vacuousness that people don't like.

I agree that if someone used an LLM and the result is _good_, I'm not sure I would care. But that generally doesn't happen yet, so one is a proxy for the other.

New comment by ekelsen in "The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)"

ekelsen — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:40:09 +0000

You're bad at recognizing it, sorry to say. You might still like the content or even the style, which is fine. But know that it was mostly written by a machine, not a human.

New comment by ekelsen in "The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)"

ekelsen — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:46:05 +0000

Amen.

I'm Begging You: Never Write with AI

ekelsen — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:50:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/artificial-intelligence-ai-writing.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179414

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by ekelsen in "Read the novels and forget everything else"

ekelsen — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:43:32 +0000

I think the quoted sentence is basically saying his work is workman like and doesn't cause the chills that reading something truly great does.

(I don't agree)

New comment by ekelsen in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

ekelsen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:18:59 +0000

You do realize that in the 1500/1600s when books were incredibly rare and valuable it was extremely common to write in the margins and that such writing is now usually treasured?

Also it seems like you can buy the George Rey one for $54 new here https://www.wiley.com/en-us/shop/general-philosophy/contempo...

unless you also don't believe in paperbacks.

And the other is on amazon _new_ here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198244649?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...

New comment by ekelsen in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

ekelsen — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:59:45 +0000

It was extremely common back in the 1500/1600s, when books were far more rare and valuable to write in them. Almost every copy of these truly old books has something written in them, often by multiple people as the owners changed. That's part of the history of the book.

New comment by ekelsen in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

ekelsen — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:56:06 +0000

Then don't buy used books? They are _used_. If you want a new book, buy a new book?

New comment by ekelsen in "“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”"

ekelsen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:50:27 +0000

Reminds me of this classic line from the 1973 movie The Sting:

"What was I supposed to do? Call him for cheating better than me in front of the others?!"

Said in response to being out-cheated at a high-stakes poker game.

Except in this case, it sounds like that's exactly the path they have chosen.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7612c4ce-1077-479f-a7bf-617dbc6...

New comment by ekelsen in "I Stopped “Creating Content”"

ekelsen — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:43:56 +0000

Truly curious - why did you choose to work at a content farm?