Hacker News: returningfory2

New comment by returningfory2 in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

returningfory2 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:12:09 +0000

Yes the night before you look at your calendar and figure out what time you need to be online at.

In general if you want a no-internet 1 hour in the morning, organize yourself to wake up 1 hour earlier (maybe going to sleep 1 hour earlier). You sleeping until 8am, and you sleeping until 7am and having no internet for 1 hour, is equivalent to the outside world.

New comment by returningfory2 in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

returningfory2 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:14:53 +0000

Consider turning off the internet before you go to bed and not turning it on for at least 1 hour after you wake up. I think I got this idea from Craig Mod (who I believe does no internet until after lunch). I've been doing this for a few months. The initial hour is really good (very easy to e.g. read or work calmly on some software projects without distraction) but I also find it puts me in the right mindset for the rest of the day.

New comment by returningfory2 in "New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices"

returningfory2 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:18:35 +0000

Nice!

New comment by returningfory2 in "New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices"

returningfory2 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 22:32:08 +0000

This information about the NYT is out of date; it's now easy to unsubscribe from anywhere.

New comment by returningfory2 in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"

returningfory2 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:37:05 +0000

Same with leap days though?

The point is that it's weird that we handle a day every 4 years off in a different way to a couple of second being off.

New comment by returningfory2 in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"

returningfory2 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:08:41 +0000

As one HN comment said years ago: I feel leap seconds have always lived in the wrong abstraction layer.

They should live in the same abstraction layer that does leap days and daylight savings: the time zones.

New comment by returningfory2 in "Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship"

returningfory2 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:45:57 +0000

Fair point. Mainly I agree with the sibling comment: the revealed preference of many people around the world, including many people from the richest countries in Europe, is to move the United States and then settle permanently. I think that means a lot.

Obviously you can also say that the US is geopolitically successful because of its global military and diplomatic dominance, but I account zero value to this.

New comment by returningfory2 in "Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship"

returningfory2 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:42:52 +0000

But the success hasn't ended since the unused land became taken; in fact, the US became a superpower after the westward expansion era. My point is that looking at conditions today, the US still continues to succeed (by some definition of success) and other countries should try to emulate the aspects of the country that leads to that success. IMO one of the big factors is how well immigrants assimilate in the country, and birthright citizenship is a part of that.

I do agree with you that US success in the 19th century was due to many factors that are not relevant today.

New comment by returningfory2 in "Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship"

returningfory2 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:15:00 +0000

Given the US is one of the most (the most?) successful countries in recent human history, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the 95% be looking at the US and seeing what to copy?

New comment by returningfory2 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

returningfory2 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:34:35 +0000

I've been building a bunch of UIs for my project Texcraft: https://hyphenate.dev and https://ligkern.dev.

Texcraft is an attempt to re-implement TeX with a modular/LLVM software architecture. These UIs take the same code in Texcraft that has identical behavior to TeX, and illustrates some of the inner workings of TeX. The lig/kern one is missing instructions :)

I have also found at least one bug in Knuth's TeX recently and am currently writing it up.

New comment by returningfory2 in "Show HN: Hyphenate.dev: illustration of TeX's hyphenation algorithm"

returningfory2 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:31:29 +0000

Thank for the suggestion, implemented it! Now all suggestions have at least one hyphen and one position where the patterns disagree (one pattern says hyphenate, another to not hyphenate). I discovered you don't necessarily need long words to get "interesting" hyphenation results; e.g. https://hyphenate.dev/zero.

Show HN: Hyphenate.dev: illustration of TeX's hyphenation algorithm

returningfory2 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:13:25 +0000

As part of the Texcraft project I've been re-implementing Donald Knuth's TeX in a modular way. One of the goals of Texcraft is to be able to use these modular pieces in different contexts. hyphenate.dev is a website that uses my re-implementation of TeX's hyphenation algorithm to visually illustrate how the algorithm chooses hyphens.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482798

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by returningfory2 in "PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you"

returningfory2 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:25:20 +0000

This product is for Postgres deployments that are so large they need to be sharded. For these use cases, I think 20TB is about normal.

New comment by returningfory2 in "Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee"

returningfory2 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 02:25:35 +0000

Recently the Supreme Court has curtailed these nationwide injuctions: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/supreme-court-sides-with-...

New comment by returningfory2 in "The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf]"

returningfory2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:16:31 +0000

Thanks for this great comment!

The motivation behind METAFONT is amusing to me because it seems to have some of the same hubris of the most extreme AI proponents nowadays: we can replace art by technology. I'm fascinated with TeX (and have spent a lot of my life rewriting it http://github.com/jamespfennell/texcraft) but I always found the situation with fonts in the TeX ecosystem a bit odd. There are people in our society whose vocation is font design (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Slimbach). But the TeX ecosystem landed in a place where we use fonts created by computer scientists rather than font designers.

New comment by returningfory2 in "ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline"

returningfory2 — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:20:47 +0000

Your annoyance is understandable, but it's worth remembering: he is not your slave. He does not exist to do things for you. His providing you with something good for a time does not obligate him to provide it to you forever. Because he is not your slave.

New comment by returningfory2 in "The Importance of Being Idle"

returningfory2 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:51:02 +0000

In my experience turning off my phone solves the temptation to check it. The friction of having to turn on my phone is small but apparently enough.

New comment by returningfory2 in "Bucketsquatting is finally dead"

returningfory2 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:26:58 +0000

Or old code referencing the bucket _writes_ data to it, and the attacker can now read it.

New comment by returningfory2 in "Decided to fly to the US to buy some hard drives"

returningfory2 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 23:47:22 +0000

No, Karen overstayed previously by 4 years when visiting Bill, that's why she had B-2.

New comment by returningfory2 in "Decided to fly to the US to buy some hard drives"

returningfory2 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:51:12 +0000

These stories usually have some non-trivial factor that is missing in the article. In this case there's a small visible red flag: the two tourists are British but traveling on B visas, rather than using the visa waiver program. Why? Well according the DHS they both have multi-year overstays in the US.

This doesn't justify the detention they went through. But it also means the lesson of the story is not "random tourists are being detained".