helldritch

In a way, this post gives me the same feeling I had when I read the story of Terry Davis, author of Temple OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis), and his gradual slide into homelessness.

OP: I've been homeless before, I don't really care if post is truth or a lie, a scam or a sincere cry for help. Desperation takes many forms and I'd like to help either way.

A $5,000 pledge would unfortunately be a terrible financial decision at a time where I'm saving for a house, but I won't hurt purchasing the yearly newsletter subscription for $50. It's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, especially if it helps you get on your feet. Send a payment link to shane at my username dot com.

My ADHD was diagnosed last year, around the age of 30. I started medication in January and I've been able to turn my life around - I no longer have that awful feeling that my next crisis is constantly flying towards me, just waiting to happen.

I was open and honest in my interview with my current company about my ADHD, and that I didn't need any form of special treatment (with the exception of a keyed locker to keep my medication in - it's a controlled substance in the UK). Everyone was understanding about it, and I have a lot of support on offer from them, but ironically I no longer seem to need it, my medication has completely removed my symptoms.

Large companies these days want to appear welcoming and care about things like diversity. We have a disability, and it's important we see it that way. Without my medication, I struggle to integrate with society, I struggle to focus on tasks (or obsess over them to an unhealthy degree).

There's also a lot to be said for hiring developers with ADHD who are being treated: We spent decades learning behaviors to allow us to focus on tasks, once we're being treated, the issues goes away but the behaviors remain. It can be a superpower sometimes.

I spent my life wondering how people focus on work for 9 hours a day: It turns out that they don't, but decades of trying to emulate that combined with "performing enhancing" medication means that we _can_.

A little bit different to software, but the big kicker for me was a standing desk.

When I'm on calls I compulsively wander around the apartment with my wireless headphones on, I can't stand still. If I'm in a call for 4 hours, I will be walking constantly for 4 hours (often covering 20km in small circles in my apartment).

I got a powered sit/stand desk with presets so I can press a single button to have it raise up or lower down, and it's made me a lot more present at my desk during discussions, because I can sort of fiddle about on my feet while still being in front of my screens.

Strongly considering adding a flat, miniature, quiet walking machine underneath my desk for this stuff, if I can find one which meets my specs.

I've just been emotionally effected by this work at a deep, almost uncomfortable level.

I've worked as a mental health support worker, and this short story poked at some of the darker parts of the field: the dream of people getting "better" and wanting to "fix" them, the subtle (and not so subtle) jokes made out of their failings, having to deal with the basic human urges they don't fully understand, subjects consenting to treatment they don't have the capacity to understand, etc.

In myself, I see my own inevitable cycle of depression and elation. I'm disabled not mentally, but emotionally. I could be happier than anyone, but in the end some part of me is always dragged back into anguish. Charlie was a genius, but in his infantile state it's brought him nothing but pain.

The saddest part of all of this is that even when Charlie became smart enough to understand the world around him, he spent so little time in the relatable range of intelligence that the people he cared about struggled to communicate with him. They didn't understand, they were worried. Charlie never truly had a friend. Ms Kinnian cared for him, but they spent so little time able to meaningfully interact that friendship didn't have the chance to properly form.

I'm going to go and pet my dog, I think, until this reaction passes.

This is run by BunnyCDN, I've been one of their smaller users for a few years now (live video hosting and delivery, mostly .m3u8, mpegts, HTTP Live Streaming type of stuff) and I've always found their service reliable and cheap. One of the primary reasons I liked them was that their API is REALLY fast at making changes to the files (you make the call and 100ms later the file attributes / content have been updated throughout all their delivery locations) and the interface is pretty easy to use.

This isn't an advertisement, I had a very specific use-case, but it follows into this:

Of course, just like with Google, we are the product here. Google Fonts is an analytics data collection platform, Bunny Fonts is an advertisement for their CDN services.

I'm going to stick with a /fonts/ directory, I think, despite being one of their current users. It's really not very much bandwidth for the fonts, it's not 2010 anymore, and I prefer the control (and the local development environment being the same, I don't always have internet and I don't want a dev toggle for something as silly as fonts).

Gosh, you weren't kidding. Even ignoring the painful contrast and small text, the background characters not being regular (lined-up) is setting off my ADHD something awful, I keep getting distracted, couldn't make it through the first paragraph.

Wow, I thought you were joking, but you really weren't.

From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact

They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service on some trial account or with a $10 provisioning spend as part of a few hours long Jira ticket on a Friday afternoon.

By inserting humans in the middle of this process (and the delay and back-and-forth which is incurred from having to formally give all that company information and implementation planning information and have it vetted) they're going to turn off a really significant number of potentially lucrative clients who will go elsewhere because they don't have to mess around with humans until they're sure of what they want.

Generally I prefer a mid-saturation blue-tinted grey in the #111111 horizontal line for my base text colours, which is basically indistinguishable from black but works better with the other hues on our website.

That being said, it's easy using the prefers-contrast CSS property to override that to #000000 for people who are hard of sight.

It's supported by edge, safari, chrome, opera but it's a bit finnicky in Firefox.

I do! I was on 30mg for a week, then increased to 50, and I've been stable there ever since.

I was worried at the start I would end up on 70mg, but it just seemed to work from day one onwards.

Do you get the reduced appetite? I basically don't eat from 11am until 8pm most days, which has worked quite well for weight loss. I wasn't super heavy (18st, now 14.5st) but I had put on quite a lot during COVID.

Absolutely. But you first have to factor in that my ADHD is performance degrading.

As an example: Mirtazapine is an antidepressant used to treat major depressive disorder, but that doesn't mean you can give it to an otherwise emotionally healthy person and it'll give the same effect delta to them.

If you put a crutch on a healthy leg, it doesn't suddenly become a better leg.

My medication allows me to experience the world without crippling anxiety and constant distraction, it just so happens that 30 years living with those issues means that a large portion of my attention and time was devoted to dealing with them.

So, yes, my ADHD medication is performance enhancing, but that's an incredibly reductive way to look at it. That doesn't mean that anyone can take it and perform better, in fact studies of studies have found that the results of stimulative medication for people without ADHD (such as those who are using it to try and improve cognition during studying) can be similarly triggered by placebo effects:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/

    As it remains unclear whether stimulant medication has the same effect on healthy individuals as for those with ADHD, it is possible that many reported effects of prescription stimulants in healthy individuals may stem from placebo effects. Looby and Earleywine (2011) examined whether placebo effects influence reports of subjective mood and cognitive performance among college students who endorsed several risk factors for prescription stimulant misuse (e.g., low grade point average, fraternity/sorority involvement, binge drinking). Interestingly, participants believed that they had better ability to focus and persevere, particularly for a sustained amount of time, when they expected to receive MPH (Looby and Earleywine 2011). This is similar to circumstances in which participants may engage in nonmedical-stimulant use to study or cram for extended hours. On the other hand, when experimental participants did not expect to receive MPH, their attention appeared disrupted resulting in inconsistent reaction times throughout the CPT.

If my medication is performance enhancing, then literally any antidepressant, antianxiety, anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory, antihistamine, antibiotic, etc., is also performance enhancing by the same thought. What we need to consider is the baseline it lifts you from and the place it takes you to.

It's probably worth mentioning that I'm in the UK, not the USA, where access to stimulant medication is a _lot_ stricter and it can be very difficult to get a diagnosis of ADHD. I had to go through several hour long sessions with specialised psychiatrists to receive the diagnosis after spending years being tested for other conditions like Mixed-Anxiety Disorder.

An excerpt from my remission notice is here showing the clinically recognised reduction in symptoms, it mentions that the decision was based on both subjective and objective justifications: https://i.imgur.com/RJQCAs6.png

The diagnostic screening questions for the ASRS1.1 are here showing the areas where I subjectively improved: https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnair...

On a side-note, your comment came across very harshly. It's very easy to make a short, pointed statement like that about a topic you aren't very familiar with, but you should consider how informed your statements actually are - if they're backed in data or long term subjective beliefs. Sometimes, brevity imparts a lot of information in few words, sometimes it just comes across as rude.

I don't use this, but I also don't really use any traditional social media. I have an account on HN obviously but it feels a lot less tracked and invasive than Facebook, etc. Probably because the business model is different, on Reddit we're there to look at overt ads for paying third party companies, HN is tailored towards us looking at more subtle ads for the companies they invest in and building their social capital in the dev community.

That being said, I'd be very wary about using a service like this (from a user's perspective) where one company, one WAF, one person, one error is the only thing stopping all of my data being deleted or exfiltrated. It seems like a single point of failure waiting to happen.

If I was the company (and I have been), I'd just make it easy and fast to let my users delete and manage their data and collect as little as possible. Don't hide it behind 5 menus, 4 pages, 3 password entries and an email confirmation with a 14 day waiting period; instead focus on providing a service people don't feel creeped out by and decide to leave.

https://assets.website-files.com/61251391cad0dc5676f648d0/61...

They have a typo for "integration" on their landing page imagery. A typo is obviously a small thing to nitpick, but this is a landing page, from a business perspective this is likely the most important page on their website so you would expect this is where all their internal eyes would be. It's also something I'm almost confident I would have caught in a pull request so it doesn't point to great testing standards on their end.

That's a fair point, although some people do constantly multitask.

I have ADHD and I'm capable of doing work while focussing entirely on two tasks, often I'm looking at one screen where I'm writing code while reading an article on another screen.

Sometimes I feel like "reality" is too slow and I've already figured out the code for the unit test (or whatever I'm working on) in my head and I'm impatiently waiting for my hands to catch up while filling in a boilerplate template. I often focus on two things at once because the main work I'm doing isn't stimulating enough.

A lot of people question how I'm able to do this without making constant mistakes, but before I started on my medication my brain and the world around me was so incredibly noisy. Not necessarily sound, it's just that everything around me was a distraction. When I'm taking my medication, the distractions don't exist and there's almost so little happening that I find it unsettling.

I don't really know how to describe it properly so this probably made little sense. Just imagine you have a really angry baby screaming at you 24/7, it would probably effect your work? Now the baby is suddenly being quiet and you're able to work really effectively, but you got so good at coping with the baby distracting you that now you have all this spare CPU time in your brain which used to be devoted to denoising.

The equation for escape velocity is: v = √(2GM/R)

R = distance (radius, really) M = Mass of the body G = Universal gravitation constant

We can modify this equation to find for the distance at which you can escape:

r = 2GM/v^2

The answer is largely: it depends on how fast you can go, at the speed of light you can escape from further away, since the pull will increase the closer your are to the "event horizon".

I'm in a car right now (as a passenger ofc) doing this from my phone so not in a situation where I can put together a model, but you should be able to plug in some numbers and estimate a result, just make sure you convert to SI units so you don't accidentally end up 3 orders of magnitude off.

A black hole with the mass of the earth would have a radius of about 2cm, so things less massive than a planet start to get very small, very fast, and you end up fighting quantum effects which become less intuitive.

</sarcasm></sarcasm>

<i>Felt like I needed to resolve that or we may never stop being sarcastic</i>

You have untreated ADHD, that's why your life keeps feeling apart when you make impulsive decisions.

They missed it when you were a child and none of the specialists thought to diagnose it as an adult.

This has been really frustrating me lately.

Sometimes I just want to quickly merge a small change (maybe a small config change, 1/2 lines) and then pull on master, branch off and start working again.

I'm regularly having to wait several minutes for the merge and while I know that there are ways around this locally it just annoys me that something so simple is taking so long.

This feels less like an apology and more like Atlassian saying "Us changing a platform which has worked a certain way for years and that breaking your workflow is YOUR PROBLEM. It's you looking at this wrong, merges have been asynchronous all along." despite our many combined millennia of experience being entirely to the contrary.

Just to clarify: the meat packages I ordered didn't use any dry ice. They provide two (standard) ice packs, one which is placed beneath the meat and one which is placed above the meat.

Because the polystyrene is so thick and they send so much ice, the ice was still fully frozen when I received it 42 hours after my order.

We've actually kept the polystyrene box and ice packs to reuse for picnic days and things like that.

I order meat from The Great British Meat Company and my meat arrives 2 days later, still refrigerated, in a hard polystyrene case packed in with still frozen ice cube bags. It costs a little more to deliver, but it arrives upright and in a perfect condition at 3 degrees Celsius (~38f).

Its ridiculous that something of regular shape, in a regular box, is so difficult not to damage in transit especially from a company like Lego who exist purely on the sentiment parents and children have towards their brand.

I believe it's BeyondCorp: https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp

This is one of those comments I so rarely see where what I already know is put in to words I've never been able to find.

Thank you for this, I'll be updating our documentation to include these concepts first thing tomorrow.

At least in terms of movies, this seems like the obvious route:

It used to be that game engines had real-time processing requirements (60/30/15 frames per second) and were constrained by the hardware on which they ran, but movies looked more photo-realistic and could take hours or days to produce a single frame.

As silicon and algorithms get faster and closer at approximating reality, the difference between the output of the two softwares approach one another. Given the amount of effort required to build these softwares it makes sense to save the years of effort, cost involved and risk involved with what essentially amounts to building a bespoke, internal graphics / physics / particle simulation engine.

Home photo-lithography and chemical etching setups aren't common, but have been done by several people. We wouldn't be able to jump straight to 14NM, but we would probably be able to get to the 500-300nm size relatively quickly (a year or two, maybe, if starting from scratch) and shrink down from there.

Devices would be much bigger and less efficient, but we would be able to run code and pump out 8086 processors within 6 months.

Cheers for this! Don't worry about the negativity, it's something I've come to expect from subject matter experts since this is a very long process I'm going down fraught with danger and legislation.

One of the issues with solid rocket motors is that in the UK we can't manufacture our own solid rocket motors under the 1875 explosives act (supplemented by the EU Directive 2014/28/EU), so we have to purchase off the shelf rocket motors which are available in the UK.

Flying in an air frame with these has several key issues: It won't be a solid test bed for our air frame weight, the centre of gravity will be offset, they aren't throttle-able, even the high specific impulse motors tend to have very short (sub 10 seconds) burn times, they don't generate shock cones, etc.

One of my personal inspirations is the UCSRPL: http://www.uscrpl.com/

I imagine we'll have to follow in their footsteps: progressively more complex builds following on from a relatively simple starting point.

The plan is to use as many pre-existing resources as possible, this means:

- Using purchased fuel and oxidiser combinations instead of synthesis

- Working on a software (virtualising the hardware) test bed for avionics, then progressing to breadboards, then to purchasing PCBs. It's worth mentioning that I will be a student of Computer Science, but I'm going in to this with a significant experience of real time programming and PCB design - previous companies I've worked at had embedded systems.

- Using a simple system for recovery, most likely pressure deployed drogues fitted in the air frame cone, and an emitter which enables us to find it post touchdown.

I also understand that it's likely going to take the majority of my degree to get this done. If we don't make it to the Karman line: that's also fine. I'm not daunted by the possibility of failure, I'm excited by it. We learn a lot from failure. The goal is to go as far as we can and develop our skills through iteration.

The typical way to produce small scale liquid oxygen (LOX) requires liquid nitrogen (you use the liquid nitrogen to cool the gas as it passes through some transport medium like a copper pipe and collect the cooled liquid).

Purchasing LOX isn't too difficult, there are many vendors willing to supply large amounts of it, and a few vendors willing to supply small (experimental) amounts of it.

Storing LOX is the real challenge, you need to keep it at ~310f (~-190c) which requires a well insulated cryogenic storage chamber. Typical industrial sized storage tanks have a few metres of insulation to keep the heat out, and typical small-scale tanks have around 1-2 feet of insulation.

You're probably looking at a viable minimum storage container size of between 500-1000 litres (any smaller and your insulation layer will be so thin that you'll lose 10-20% of your stored oxygen as gases per day), with the typical minimal size being in the 2,500 litres range (which normally lose 1-2% of stored oxygen to gas per day)

You can buy very small containers (2l, 5l, 25l, etc, these are for nitrogen but you can get them for oxygen too): https://uk.vwr.com/store/product/2104367/liquid-nitrogen-dew... but these lose the liquid very quickly and you would likely want them delivered the same day you need them, resulting in a just-in-time delivery failure point.

In general, I would agree with you.

If you're dealing with umsymettrical-dimethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide, you're going to be in a world of pain trying to produce them, handle them and get them close enough to use in an engine without being so close that the fumes spontaneously ignite. Not to mention that the dinitrogen tetroxide boils at ambient temperatures, etc, etc.

Obviously, I was glossing over the danger (not something I do in real life when handling dangerous fuels, but probably something I do when writing a short comment on Hacker News) and anyone seeking to work on Rocket Engines needs to ensure that they consult with subject matter exports before, during and after any construction or launch preparations begin.

... With that disclaimer out of the way, in the grand scheme of dangerous fuel and oxidisers combinations, Kerosene and Hydrogen Peroxide are significantly safer to handle than traditionally used hypergolic mixtures:

- They are both liquids at ambient pressures and temperatures (don't underestimate the value of not needing highly pressurised canisters - above 2000psi in many cases - and cryogenic equipment, that's all mass you don't need to lift and failure states you don't need to control for)

- Storage and deployment of AVTUR (Aviation Turbine Fuels) is a well understood procedure with pre-certified canisters.

- Hydrogen Peroxide at sub-90%, and especially at sub 70%, purities is reasonably safe to store and handle, especially if you store it in an inhibited state and you're willing to have a suboptimal hypergolic reaction in return for a safer handling procedure.

- The pressures and temperatures created when reacting these two liquids together in a combustion chamber are extreme, but not so extreme as to be outside the remit of an amateur team.

This all doesn't mean that these are safe to handle - and failing to properly respect rocket fuel results in death for yourself and others - but it does mean that they're safer to handle.

In a perfect world I would manufacture solid state rocket propellants, but in addition to the negatives of not being throttle-able and being hard to early-terminate, manufacture of solid rocket motors is a criminal offence in the United Kingdom and getting an explosives certificate is a long, daunting task.

This is pretty much right on the money. The expected worst-case failure state would be a rupture in the Kerosene canister resulting in a high pressure, high heat ignition. Infrastructure and support needs are minimal, spatial radius needs are maximal.

There would be bits of rocket everywhere in a 20m radius (which we would be dutiful in picking up since it's useful to study for next time) and there is unlikely to be any sort of crater, but there would be a small kerosene fire we would have to put out (so providing and testing fire suppression equipment in the form of extinguishers and blankets will be important).

Realistically, we'll be flying something around the 30-40KG mark so we'll have to get it certified by the CAA: http://www.largemodelassociation.com/resources/over-20kg-sch...

I feel like with a youthful charm and the right paperwork from all the respective government divisions (The Explosives Division at the Health and Safety Executive, a certified model design from the Civil Aviation Authority, and our insurance as operators / flyers with the CAA) it won't be too hard to talk a field landowner in to it, in return for a token payment and an offer of a few cool afternoons seeing model rocket launches on the back-end of one of their fields.

Hi! Please can you send the email to: 52bdec35-22f4-4488-bac5-d055a9fff4b8@helldritch.anonaddy.com?

Thanks a lot for this, it sounds useful, I wonder if we could time the launch so that the satellite could receive telemetry (as a back up to the integrated avionics failing due to rapid pressure or temperature changes, or shock)

Cheers for this, I'll get in contact with them over the next month when I have some more concrete plans. I was thinking it would end up being the peak district/lakes district/Lancashire moors/Scottish highlands we would be launching from.

This book is a great resource, and I would recommend it to to any amateur model rocketry fan.

I'm starting University in September as an adult student of Computer Science and I'm planning to start a model rocketry society with the goal of putting a 9ft tube above the Karman line and recovering it safely.

I'm still deciding on fuels, but I'm strongly considering a hypergolic combination of catalyzed pure hydrogen peroxide and kerosene (I've already been granted a recipient competent authority from the explosives department for the storage and transport of usable quantities these for the use in a model rocket).

The primary reason for hypergolic fuels is because it doesn't require a complex combustion chamber / ignition set up. You can mix them together at ambient pressure and temperature and they will spontaneously combust producing heat, steam and pressure. If you can safely handle the dangerous fuels it's a much easier route to a liquid fueled rocket engine.

One of the difficulties in the UK is going to be finding somewhere to launch from: we don't have large swathes of unowned, unmonitored land and the restrictions the CAA (rightfully) place on launching near cities means that it'll have to be out in the sticks somewhere. I'll probably have to convince a farmer to let us blow up a couple rockets on the back of a fallow field a few times before we get a successful launch off the ground.

I'm trying to plan as much as possible and get all the requisite licenses (I already have a CAA unmanned surveillance drone operator ID, as well as exemption from the need for a flyer ID because I have my flight competency certificates, and exemption from the 400ft amateur flight ceiling as long as I issue a NOTAM (notice to airmen) 1 week before any test flights, and I'm insured by the UK Rocketry Association) in the hopes that people will "take me seriously" when I found the society.

I'm also working behind the scenes to set up partnerships. I've been in contact with Starchaser Industries and a few other aerospace companies nearby to have them sponsor the program, show us around their rocketry factories and hopefully give us contacts at their company we can bounce ideas off to see if there's anything we've missed, or any hazards we are hugely mispredicting.

Because they don't want devices to be repaired, they want devices to become obsolete or irreparable within 5 years so that consumers can buy a new device.