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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 :(


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.

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.

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.


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.

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.


> 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 seems like it could go the other way. There are five cheat programs that each have a dozen versions and now you know that everybody using program A and D got banned, the people using program C and E didn't, and the people using program B got banned but only if they were using version 1.2 or lower and not exclusively version 1.3 where they added a new anti-detection method that A and D don't use and C and E do. Now they know what to do.

Whereas if you ban them as soon as you can detect them, the people using program B get banned before version 1.3 is even out, they have to issue all of those refunds immediately and stop getting sales because their cheat stops working now instead of months from now, and then version 1.3 may not ever get released. Now all they know is that C and E are doing something the others weren't, but that could have been any of a dozen things so A and D don't know what to change.

Doing it that way also has another major problem: Suppose you do the ban wave. Do the people using the existing known detectable cheats now get to make new accounts and keep cheating? If you ban them again right away then the cheat makers get to keep making variants until that stops happening, but if you don't then the game is back to being full of cheaters the next day and the cheat makers are still making money selling the old detectable cheats to fund the development of undetectable ones.


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.

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.


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