Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | hnick's commentslogin

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.

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.


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.

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.

A nice file won't, but sometimes the best work is in not dealing with nice things.


See this is why we can't have nice things.


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.


Which (as I'm sure you know), also literally has 'content' :)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/content


True :)


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.

"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.


Yes, and the same is true for MS Word. "Undocumented implementation algorithms" was meant to subsume that aspect.


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.

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.

The fact so many people want to edit PDFs probably indicates a design flaw on Adobe's side, when considering what customers really want.


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.

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).

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.


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.

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.


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.

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.

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 :(


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: