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returningfory2

2,452 karma · joined June 25, 2020

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returningfory2··on It's getting harder to focus every day
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.

returningfory2··on It's getting harder to focus every day
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.
returningfory2··on New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
Nice!
returningfory2··on New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
This information about the NYT is out of date; it's now easy to unsubscribe from anywhere.
returningfory2··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
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.

returningfory2··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
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.

returningfory2··on Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship
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.

returningfory2··on Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship
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.

returningfory2··on Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship
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?
returningfory2··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
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.

returningfory2··on Show HN: Hyphenate.dev: illustration of TeX's hyphenation algorithm
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.
returningfory2··on PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you
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.
returningfory2··on Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
Recently the Supreme Court has curtailed these nationwide injuctions: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/supreme-court-sides-with-...
returningfory2··on The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf]
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.

returningfory2··on ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
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.
returningfory2··on The Importance of Being Idle
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.
returningfory2··on Bucketsquatting is finally dead
Or old code referencing the bucket _writes_ data to it, and the attacker can now read it.
returningfory2··on Decided to fly to the US to buy some hard drives
No, Karen overstayed previously by 4 years when visiting Bill, that's why she had B-2.
returningfory2··on Decided to fly to the US to buy some hard drives
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".

returningfory2··on Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
Isn't it well known that the "protestors are foreign agents" line is just extremely transparent bs that governments use to silence dissent?
returningfory2··on Leaving the U.S. for the Netherlands
Yes: E-2 visa. Though I suspect the investment amount has to be much higher than the Dutch requirement of ~$5k.
returningfory2··on Advent of Code 2025
I hope your wife is also glad!
returningfory2··on Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
There's a whole subfield of economics that studies clustering in cities ("agglomeration"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration There are lots of benefits.

Also, my own take is that the high rent in NYC is sort of proof that the quality of life is high. Or at least, NYC is desirable. People are willing to pay a premium to live there, which is a strong signal of their preference.

returningfory2··on Unexpected things that are people
> If corporations are people, then how can they be bought or sold considering the 13th amendment?

We simply pass a law saying that the act of incorporating a company is, among other things, punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, and the 13th amendment problems go away.

returningfory2··on How the Mayans were able to accurately predict solar eclipses for centuries
> Didn't the Spanish show up briefly, then come back in force later?

The end of the Incan empire is a really striking example of this dynamic. The Spanish landed on the South American mainland in ~1524, European diseases started spreading, and in 1527 the Incan emperor died from one of the diseases without an heir. This triggered a really brutal civil war of succession that weakened the empire. The Spanish started the conquest proper of the Incan empire in ~1532 and were successful in part because how weak the empire was after the civil war.

So essentially, by arriving early and (inadvertently) initiating the disease epidemics, the Spanish put in place conditions that made the conquest possible a few years later.

returningfory2··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
Nope, Biden pardoning his son was also widely condemned across the political spectrum as an abuse of the pardon power.
returningfory2··on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
Thank you so much for this comment - you've put a name ("contrarian and counter-cyclical reporting") on a phenomenon that I've observed a lot and is one of the main reasons I don't consume the media anymore.

The craziest example for me was NYC congestion pricing. When it was about to happen, all the reporting was about all of the downsides of the tolls starting. A week after the New York Governor "indefinitely paused" congestion pricing, the reporting was all about the downsides of the tolls not starting.

returningfory2··on Tiny sugar spoons are popping up on NYC fast-food menus
I think it's already happening. In bougie parts of the US (fancy parts of NYC and LA at least), artisanal lower sugar sodas are becoming ubiquitous.

E.g. https://drinkolipop.com/

returningfory2··on South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates
What is ZA? Zambia?
returningfory2··on US Passport Power Falls to Historic Low
I don't know! I do know that before ~2007 a passport wasn't needed to travel within North America, and that some of the growth since then is because of the relatively new passport requirement ("Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative").
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