returningfory2

Nice!

This information about the NYT is out of date; it's now easy to unsubscribe from anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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".

Isn't it well known that the "protestors are foreign agents" line is just extremely transparent bs that governments use to silence dissent?

Yes: E-2 visa. Though I suspect the investment amount has to be much higher than the Dutch requirement of ~$5k.

I hope your wife is also glad!

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.

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.

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.

Nope, Biden pardoning his son was also widely condemned across the political spectrum as an abuse of the pardon power.

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.

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/

What is ZA? Zambia?

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").

Just a note that [1] is really out of date - in 2025, more than 50% of Americans have a passport. https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/...

As far as the "landscape" - the whole country is a giant meat factory swimming in cattle feces; the landscape was ruined centuries ago.

Love this comment so much. And it's true!

I grew up in Ireland and was immersed in the "everything in Ireland is the best" mentality. I think it was when I started regularly visiting the Hudson Valley in New York, which is mostly still wooded, that I really realized the "countryside" in Ireland is just manmade. It's not natural. The whole island was trees.

My understanding is that you've left Ireland; hope you're making your peace with the problems of the country now that you don't have to deal with them as much!