<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: hnick</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hnick</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:35:06 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=hnick" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Notes on Managing ADHD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FWIW ritalin reduced my anxiety a fair bit. It changed my brain from one with multiple concurrent streams of thought, often negative and never truly going away, to focusing on the task at hand.<p>As a direct outcome it means I don't have bad thoughts and feelings sitting in the back of my mind when trying to do something else 24/7 so I'm generally more balanced. Indirectly, it was helped by actually getting stuff done and feeling less shit in general and not putting myself down as much for failing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2025 02:53:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088998</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088998</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088998</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Notes on Managing ADHD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A study I glanced over a while ago said something like 40% of people respond to dex or ritalin, around 80% to either (I'm in this group but dex had more annoying side effects), and the last 20% to neither (but there is other stuff out there). So it's definitely worth trying both branches of the common meds first. You should also talk about dosages because there is titration period where they need to monitor and adjust to see how your specific body responds.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2025 02:49:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088986</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088986</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088986</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "PDF to Text, a challenging problem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It can also use fonts which map glyphs via characters which do not represent the final visual item e.g. "PDF" could be "1#F" and you only really know what it looks like by rendering then viewing/OCR.<p>A nice file won't, but sometimes the best work is in not dealing with nice things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2025 00:12:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979331</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979331</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979331</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "PDF to Text, a challenging problem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I assume you mean open source or free, but just noting Acrobat Pro was almost there when I last used it years ago. The problem was you had it in reverse, browsing the content tree not inspecting the page, but it did highlight the object on the page. Not down to the command though, just the object/stream.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2025 00:04:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979271</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979271</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979271</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Why can't HTML alone do includes?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Which (as I'm sure you know), also literally has 'content' :)<p><a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/content" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/content</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 May 2025 00:46:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883575</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883575</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883575</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even if the format is understood, it's also very much a case of Acrobat handling extremely badly formed PDFs instead of erroring out if it were strictly adhering. If you've ever seen a save prompt when making no changes, that happened.<p>"It works on Acrobat" was something we got told a lot from clients sending us PDFs that were broken according to the official spec - we just had to deal with it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 May 2025 00:42:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883558</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883558</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883558</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>PDF was basically created as a final presentation format, it's essentially append-only by design, which is why you hear so often of redactions just marking up a white/black box over text.<p>You can edit text streams, which needs a decompress/recompress, messes up all the object reference offsets for the entire file, potentially adds or removes characters to the subset font, which may not be referenced by the glyphs but a number instead to intentionally break copy/paste/scrape (e.g. 'a' is not 'a' in the text stream, but a random number), etc. Assuming the text is even marked up as strings, and not individually positioned characters with nested offset co-ordinate scaling to further muddy the waters.<p>The fact so many people want to edit PDFs probably indicates a design flaw on Adobe's side, when considering what customers really want.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 May 2025 00:23:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883465</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883465</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883465</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can't find it right now but I recall seeing somewhere that around 40% of ADHD patients reported better effects on Ritalin (methylphenidate) or dexamphetamine roughly equally, another 40% says both are about as good as each other, and the final 20% don't find either very effective.<p>In my personal testing the Ritalin was much better, dexamphetamine was more up/down and shorter lived. However I didn't really get a crash or lethargy with either, it's just the focus wearing thin (and yes, the benefits were real and massive starting for the first time in my forties).<p>According to my psych, both have been around 70+ years and are fairly well understood. Longer term therapeutic doses shouldn't be habit forming and tolerance is minor after the initial phase, there's no withdrawal effects and it's easy to forget to take a dose if your routine changes. My morning coffee is far more demanding in that regard.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864744</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864744</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864744</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ritalin was a game changer. After the initial adjustment it just feels like it brings me up to normal, I'm not particularly stimulated (in fact my lack of wandering mind makes it easier to doze during the day), I just prefer coding to games etc. It feels like it unlocks access to natural reward mechanisms instead of chasing artificial feel-good rewards. I can't even listen to a YouTube video while coding when using it, which was a normal activity for me since my brain felt bored and went off on its own without it.<p>Just mentioning because curiously it almost entirely put me off caffeine. I still enjoy my morning coffee as a ritual, but sometimes don't finish it. If I have another then the side effects are severe, Ritalin massively boosts those - nerves, jitters, hitting the toilet. Not terrible or dangerous, but just interesting, and honestly caffeine never did a whole lot for me mentally so it's no big loss.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2025 23:49:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864676</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864676</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864676</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Home washing machines fail to remove important pathogens from textiles"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From a skim it looks like the highest setting tested was 60°C which can kill, but wouldn't be considered sufficient in all cases for food safety for example.<p>My own washing machine is nothing special (front-loader Euromaid, whatever was cheap ~10 years ago) and you can manually bump to temperature up to 70/80/90°C for a cycle (which adds some time). I haven't measured it though to see how accurate it is and I'd imagine 90°C at least isn't great for those rubbery painted patterns or general clothing integrity either.<p>I started using the higher temperatures occasionally since I have some old t-shirts, but I always have to stop wearing them since the underarms develop a crust - I guess it's some kind of bio-reaction between me, my bacteria ride hitchers, and deodorant. Higher temps do seem to delay this build-up (which seems impossible to clean off), but does seem to reduce the life expectancy of the clothing. When I see people (mostly women) still wearing shirts they got in high school, it makes me a little envious. Mine got that issue in < 5 years before changing the wash temps :(</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2025 23:35:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864577</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864577</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864577</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.<p>I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.<p>Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2025 11:18:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856203</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856203</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856203</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah that makes sense, if they collaborate and share information. But more-so it avoids the case where a patch drops then people suddenly get banned - it's easier to match the exact version and what changed or is different compared to others on the market that avoided it, which I think they want to avoid most.<p>I think ultimately it's to avoid devoting too many resources to the arms race by breaking it up into sprints. Mass ban waves also make community impact and news, and in some cases for the regular players it refreshes the scene just for a bit by clearing the muck. They can time it to coincide with in-game events or updates too then (which often break cheats), giving a window for non-cheaters to enjoy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2025 22:13:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42808595</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42808595</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42808595</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The intent is usually to gather data then ban in waves. If a new tool comes out and you ban a couple of players the tool authors might figure out why and update it. Let it sit a while and you can get hundreds/thousands of players who get a message to rethink their choice to cheat.<p>An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down exactly what the flaw was. That's the why for no warnings (or explanations) - false positives and recourse if mistakenly flagged is another matter entirely.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:46:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42778145</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42778145</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42778145</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Is the world becoming uninsurable?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think what you mean is what I wasn't sure about (but found with a quick search), some banks do offer home loan and insurance bundles here in AU. I found one that offered a discount on the insurance if you get the loan with them, for the life of the loan.<p>But legally, you are allowed to change insurers at any time. They would probably not be allowed to include that as a contract-breaker clause in the loan itself due to free-market-reasons, or force you to take only their insurance to have the loan (we tend to have a few laws about keeping conflicts of interest like this at arms length but I'm not sure about this case). But if insurance is legally required, I suppose they can ask for proof periodically after you leave to terminate the loan.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2025 08:06:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735162</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735162</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735162</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Proposed amendment to legal presumption about the reliability of computers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Some of the sites we work on are insurance based. We save every step of the calculation (inputs and outputs, e.g. rates and sub-totals). An administrative user can see the entire calculation from start to end, including overrides at various steps (e.g. a manual discount), and breakdowns per state or item insured if appropriate. This seems like the acceptable bare minimum to me, rather than just showing a magic number. And it definitely helps to expose bugs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2024 23:20:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42301448</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42301448</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42301448</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes from what I heard it would be very few users, definitely not the general public. Maybe academia, signage, marketing, historical/legal use, etc. It might be enough to simply plug the gap with occasional images instead of fonts. But CJK fonts often do apparently include Hanja.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2024 22:35:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42130954</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42130954</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42130954</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm not Korean but my understanding is they do use the Chinese-derived script occasionally, for emphasis or to solve ambiguity, among other things. So some users will need access to that script too.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2024 02:10:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122219</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122219</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122219</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "Company named "><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD" forced to change it (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I liked perl's taint mode. It seemed pretty good against the "oops, forgot to sanitise this and you used it as output" situation that probably accounts for a lot of these issues. It won't force you to correctly sanitise, but assuming you have that capability it lets you know about gaps so you can plug them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 26 Oct 2024 01:09:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41951662</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41951662</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41951662</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can help routing induced latency as the other comment says (or force a new route if having downstream issues with your ISP peering), and some games in the past could leak IPs especially if using a p2p model and a VPN can mitigate that (especially one that only routes traffic for the game).<p>IIRC you also need one when playing from some countries, whether due to legal reasons or server restrictions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Oct 2024 03:27:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41866153</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41866153</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41866153</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hnick in "The three-page paper that shook philosophy: Gettiers in software engineering"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm not sure if it qualifies as mixing logical levels but I once tracked down a printer bug where the PDF failed to print.<p>The culprit was an embedded TrueType font that had what (I think) was a strange but valid glyph name with a double forward slash instead of the typical single (IIRC whatever generated the PDF just named the glyphs after characters so /a, /b and then naturally // for slash). Either way it worked fine in most viewers and printers.<p>The larger scale production printer on the other hand, like many, converted to postscript in the processor as one of its steps. A // is for an immediately evaluated name in postscript so when it came through unchanged, parsing this crashed the printer.<p>So we have a font, in a PDF, which got turned into Postscript, by software, on a certain machine which presumably advertised printing PDF but does it by converting to PS behind the scenes.<p>A lot of layers there and different people working on their own piece of the puzzle should have been 'encapsulated' from the others but it leaked.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Oct 2024 07:53:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41845987</link><dc:creator>hnick</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41845987</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41845987</guid></item></channel></rss>