Hacker News: dhosek

New comment by dhosek in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

dhosek — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:20:10 +0000

Also worth noting that unlike Arabic and Islam, the Jewish tradition is that Hebrew is in fact the language of God and was the pre-Babel language.

New comment by dhosek in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

dhosek — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:17:50 +0000

Nope, not at all. Monotype had a special system for doing math in hot metal typesetting. With handset type it was possible, but very time-consuming. You can find typeset mathematics going back centuries before the computer. There were also (somewhat impractical) systems for setting music with metal type although engraving was more common because of the interactions of lines and symbols.

New comment by dhosek in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

dhosek — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:15:05 +0000

Not really. The selective pressure really comes well before that: Tabular presentation of numbers, whether that was log/trig tables or railroad time tables, there was a preference for uniform-width and regular height characters for those contexts (this is also why there is a number-width parameter in TT typography to enable a designer to let digits be variable-width in text but still allow tabular setting if desired).

New comment by dhosek in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

dhosek — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:12:07 +0000

The complexities of mixed LR and RL text are quite astonishing since it’s not really even a case of just switching modes when switching scripts since double-nested (or more) texts can change the semantics of line breaks. This article provides a good overview: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf [1]

In college [2], when I wanted to quote some texts from Exodus in Hebrew in a paper that I wrote, I ended up avoiding the issue by hand-reversing the letter order and manually breaking lines. 8 bits is insufficient to cover all the possible combinations of letters and vowel markings so the font didn’t include any vowel markings and only did dageshim for בּ and פּ if I recall correctly.

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1. As an aside, it would have been really nice if Unicode provided a R-L mirrored Latin alphabet to make it easier for monolingual developers to grasp the complexities surrounding mixed directional typesetting. I suppose it could still be added, although Unicode tends towards conservatism on adding additional characters.

2. This was 1990, well before Unicode in the era of a hundred or so 8-bit character encodings, most of which were not implemented widely. I also had to type the text using the arbitrary ASCII-Hebrew mapping of the font I was using which, among other things, led me to discover that letter frequency in Hebrew is much more uniform than it is in English.

New comment by dhosek in "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"

dhosek — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:38:45 +0000

Huh? Overleaf supports XeTeX out of the box. The LaTeX project, incidentally has been moving towards requiring LuaTeX as the engine (also supported in Overleaf).

The pdftex engine is pretty much a dead end these days and I would only recommend its use for compiling legacy documents.

That said, the biggest problem is nothing to do with the source code of TeX. The change file mechanism is pretty straightforward and there have been tools for decades to allow application of more than one change file against the source, although with the standardization on web2c in the build process as well as better cross-platform C compilation in 2026 vs 1982, there isn’t the proliferation of platform-dependent change files that there were in the 80s when people were compiling on Pascal compilers that supported different subsets of the language.

But as I was saying before I got into that digression, the source language isn’t the issue with TeX so much as the basic architecture which is highly coupled to the limitations of computers in the late 70s/early 80s when even 7-bit ASCII couldn’t be assumed to be consistent between systems¹. As much as I enjoy writing TeX macros and can do wonderful things with them that most people would consider dark magic, it’s a cursed way to do programming and has no parallel in any other programming paradigm.

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1. The SAIL platform at Stanford where Knuth did the initial work, for example, had ↑ in the code space ASCII designates as ^, and IBM mainframes all used EBCDIC which has the complication of having | and ¦ as two separate characters both of which were typically mapped to | in EBCDIC to ASCII conversions with the reverse conversions arbitrarily choosing one of the two characters so that there was no guarantee that you’d get the expected character in your text file conversion² or your ASCII terminal controller.

2. Which is yet another reason why non-Unix operating systems would have distinct text and binary modes for opening files.

New comment by dhosek in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

dhosek — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:25:24 +0000

I don’t use Windows so I don’t have advertisements on my desktop. I have had very little friction with using MacOS for development.

New comment by dhosek in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

dhosek — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:21:01 +0000

Oh, it’s been a long time since I’ve watched the movie. Unlike I&II it does not bear rewatching, so I’m going by a memory of watching this for the first time in the 80s, probably on TV.

New comment by dhosek in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

dhosek — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:47:02 +0000

On the other hand, your “us” is not very big compared to your “not us.” I like Linux as a server OS (and would pick it over Windows or MacOS for that any day of the week that ends in y), but as a desktop OS it’s just more work than I care to exert (in fact, Windows also exceeds my tolerance for fiddliness in a desktop OS). My general preference is for “you don’t have to” over “you can” as much as possible which is the exact opposite of the Linux desktop experience.

New comment by dhosek in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

dhosek — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:40:40 +0000

One of the great onscreen code moments was in Superman III¹ where Richard Pryors’ character has written some “impossible” program and when the listing is shown on screen it’s pretty much five screens of BASIC REM statements.

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1. A movie which exists primarily to set up a joke in Office Space.

New comment by dhosek in "Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway"

dhosek — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:34:00 +0000

In case you’re not joking, London Bridge was purchased an American entrepreneur in 1968 and rebuilt in the city of Lake Havasu, Arizona. There is a persistent rumor that he thought he was buying the Tower Bridge, but in contemporaneous newspaper accounts he denied it. Nevertheless, that’s what I was expecting to see when I drove off I-40 that day—I envisioned the Tower Bridge in the middle of the desert connected to nothing which would have been something worth the trip. The actual bridge is not that much to look at.

New comment by dhosek in "Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway"

dhosek — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:42:12 +0000

I remember the day I decided to finally go see the London Bridge and I drove over it three times trying to find it.

New comment by dhosek in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

dhosek — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:05:47 +0000

This was the choice that Knuth made in TeX and Metafont although it’s also at least in part because floating point implementations in the late 70s/early 80s were so inconsistent from one platform to the next that using native floating point couldn’t satisfy his requirement of identical output on all platforms (likewise, the variations of Pascal implementations meant that he also used a highly restricted subset of Pascal features and no dynamic memory allocation).

New comment by dhosek in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

dhosek — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:02:14 +0000

The last real graphic programming¹ I’ve done was in the late 80s targeting the Tektronics graphics mode of the Kermit terminal software on the PC.² It was all pretty much clear the screen and draw solid rectangles in 1-bit black and white. One of these days I’m going to join the twenty-first century.

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1. I suppose some hand-written PostScript code might count as well, but I wouldn’t really count things like doing a simple function graph in python to explain something to my son as graphics programming.

2. This was for a DVI previewer running on an IBM mainframe running VM/CMS. As far as I know, this code is completely lost, which is probably a good thing.

New comment by dhosek in "Siri AI"

dhosek — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:09:08 +0000

Also, just to make sure that I’ve done what you wanted, I will now brick your phone. You’re welcome.

New comment by dhosek in "Siri AI"

dhosek — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:07:04 +0000

A few years ago, the ability to do anything other than a timed walk on my watch with Siri broke. I used to be able to do things like say, “start a 3 mile walk” or “start a 200 calorie walk” and then the latter stopped working and then the former stopped letting me do non-integer numbers of miles and then nothing at all and now I cannot do anything other than start an unmeasured walk or a timed walk with siri and I’m still pissed about that. I don’t want to have conversations with my watch or my phone, I want it to handle simple basic tasks reliably.

New comment by dhosek in "The new bibliomaniacs"

dhosek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:04:31 +0000

A true story: literally hours after posting this, I was with my kids at Barnes and Noble and they had records and CDs for sale by the cash register and my daughter asked what they were and when I explained it to my kids, they were skeptical and asked why someone would want such things.

New comment by dhosek in "What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)"

dhosek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:16:42 +0000

well sure, they could have named it .lost+found instead of lost+found, but you’re overestimating the value of hiding it.

New comment by dhosek in "What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)"

dhosek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:37:56 +0000

I think it’s more akin to the Recovered Items (or something like that) folder that shows up in your home directory sometimes (but maybe not anymore?)

New comment by dhosek in "What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)"

dhosek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:35:33 +0000

You greatly overestimate the capabilities of computers of the era that this originated in. Major limitations of disk space, speed and addressability combined with limited CPU power and RAM mean that your hypothetical, “it could have been done” would require a significant investment in development and runtime resources all to avoid having a directory in root that would be empty until after a post-crash recovery.

Also remember that these systems would have all been multi-user time-sharing systems, not desktop computers.

New comment by dhosek in "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring"

dhosek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:26:36 +0000

This is just one of many reasons why my current job is likely to be my last. I feel like so much of modern life is just irredeemably broken right now.