Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro - <AUTHOR> https://ianlotinsky.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/thank-you-robert-voit-creator-of-jasc-paint-shop-pro/ <comment><USER2> While Paint Shop Pro 6 is the most beloved version, PSP 7 and (particularly) 8, took the software in a very interesting direction. I remain convinced that this directly lead to Corel acquiring it with the unstated but definite intention of crippling it.

See, 6 and below were fairly traditional raster-based editors. But starting in 7, and with substantial improvements in 8, PSP introduced the concept of raster _and_ vector editing capabilities, in the same document. You could create raster layers, and do traditional drawing and filtering, and you could also create vector layers, where you could draw shapes and paths which would remain editable and would be rasterised on the fly.

It took a while to get your head around this capability, but once you did, it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about. Coupled with the rate at which its general raster editing capabilities were improving, I suspect Corel feared not just that PSP was becoming a more serious competitor in the raster space, but that it would undermine the market for CorelDraw, and threaten the whole model of selling separate vector and raster editors.

In the past few years, mixed paradigm vector/raster editors like Sketch have become more common. But download a copy of PSP 8 and you'll see that Jasc got there years before the rest of the industry, to such an extent it meant PSP had to be killed.

<comment><USER3> > it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking > about

Fireworks was also doing this around the same time but seems to have been completely been forgotten because of Photoshops dominance.

<comment><USER4> Yep, it still is puzzling why Fireworks never got the recognition it deserved -- the amount of unnecessary suffering UI designers went through for 10 years they could have avoided by just switching tools is mind boggling.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it ever got enough recognition for handling UI designs and everyone just gravitated towards Photoshop or Illustrator.

I think its heyday was when HTML table layouts were still how you had to layout websites and it's slicing capabilities were really convenient. I suspect that was the killer feature for a lot of people but once CSS layouts took over, Fireworks really fell out of favor and Adobe never bothered to reposition it as a UI tool.

I still use it to this day for my limited editing/mockup needs. The new workflow seems to be mockup tool (like Balsamiq) -> Photoshop design -> HTML/CSS, but for my needs, I can get reasonably close enough in both layout and design in Fireworks just do Fireworks -> HTML/CSS.

I don't know if a tool that is close enough to Fireworks to be a good replacement has come around, but I know it's definitely not Photoshop, which I find far too complicated for the basic tasks I need.

<comment><USER6> Macaw felt close to Fireworks, but is now sadly discontinued (although one can play around with the last released version): [http://macaw.co/](http://macaw.co/)

<comment><USER7> Macaw is now Invision Studio - [http://macaw.co/invision/](http://macaw.co/invision/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still have my copy of PSP 7 (from circa 2001). It's still (for my rather modest needs) my go-to image editor to this day yet.

Apropos nice letters and communications from founders of software companies such as JASC, the hosting company I worked for used many of Persits Software's[0] components on our Windows/IIS servers.

Every now and again I'd need to clarify some technical thing with them that wasn't in their documentation and every time I'd get a reply within 4-8 hours directly from Peter the founder of Persits. I didn't even need to supply a license number or proof of purchase, it was just straightforward good old fashioned support and customer service. What was also nice about them as well was that they never fleeced you for "upgrades", you bought a lifetime license and that was it.

[0]: [http://www.persits.com/index.html](http://www.persits.com/index.html)

<comment><USER9> Man PSP 5 was fantastic. Learning photo manipulation on PSP, and comparing it to the slow, laggy, unintuitive mess that Photoshop seemed to be, I'm still not convinced that Adobe products actually work to this day. Obviously other people have better experiences with Adobe, but I also suspect they're more tolerant to slower UIs.

<comment><USER10> All of the anti counterfeiting US currency code in PS probably slows it down.

<comment> mark-r The same code is in PSP, and it only slows down specific operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> PSP is imho the prime example of how piratism hurts software industry. The problem was not so much that PSP was pirated, but that _Photoshop_ was pirated. Most people did not need Photoshop, and would have been happy PSP users. But if Photoshop was "free" then it is natural that people gravitated towards the "industry-standard" "professional" tool.

Piratism hurts small low-cost hobbyist software most by dislocating them with free professional juggernaut tools.

<comment><USER12> What's your take on big companies contributing and/or running open source/free software? Doesn't that also dislocate small low-cost hobbyist software?

<comment><USER11> Well I'm not a fan of "open core" products, for not all too dissimilar reasons. But I'll admit the situation with open source and commercial actors is fair bit more complicated, with no easy answers (unless you are Stallman)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> PSP was one of those programs (along with Winamp) that are the hallmarks of the golden age of user experience for me. They had _a lot of functionality_ but were very lean, a joy to use and reasonably priced. I miss the days when you didn't need a 100 MB (relatively speaking) package just to show a screen.

<comment><USER14> for offline music collections, winamp is _still_ the best player on windows!

<comment><USER15> If you haven't seen it, check out foobar2000 [1]. It was created by the same dude that made the original Winamp (which is now owned by Yahoo, IIRC).

[1]: [https://www.foobar2000.org/](https://www.foobar2000.org/)

<comment><USER16> According to WinAmp folklore, he was a contractor for WinAmp 3 skins and not necessarily a full-time dev: [http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118192](http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118192)

You might be thinking of Justin Frankel: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel)

The connection is still kind of cool though!

<comment><USER15> Ah, thanks for the correction. I remember being told they had the same creator; that's what got me interested in foobar2000 in the first place, years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Paint Shop Pro 5 (and later 6 & 7) is still to this day one of my favorite pieces of software (no, I'm not still using it) and one of the first things in the PC era that I didn't pirate.

It was largely responsible for my early development as a web designer and later developer. I still remember it being incredibly intuitive and fun to use. I probably logged thousands of hours inside of that application.

<comment><USER18> My copy of PSP 5 came with my computer, and may have been my gateway into graphic design.

I'd still take Photoshop over it, but it was a surprisingly solid alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Paint Shop Pro (I think 6) was my first ever non-Paint graphics editing program. I spotted it at a dollar store in Alabama, soon after moving to the US and getting our first computer. At the time I wanted to become a web designer.

I fricking loved Paint Shop Pro. As a teenager I made some websites for local bands and record companies. I was at the stage where you'd create one fancy image and then slice it into website parts to position them as backgrounds on the page and layer the textual elements over them. Paint Shop Pro was a joy to me as the maker of these cheesy band website layouts that I'd then slice up.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a similar story about Brad Templeton's C64 Assembler. It was the first development tool I ever bought and, at the time, very expensive for me as a high school student. I later came to claim that I would always pay for any software that I used for more time than it would have taken me to earn the money to buy it. Quickly that became everything I used as my earnings were a lot better.

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to thank Brad for C64 Assembler and the role it had in forming some of my ethics around fair-use and paying for intellectual property.

</comment><comment><USER21> "You are on day 1,439 of your 30-day trial"

<comment><USER22> Ha, right, no upgrade needed in that version... but eventually I did upgrade and recommend it to others, due to the generosity of the honor system they put in place in that version. Loved the software. Wait, maybe that was Winzip. Both were great.

<comment><USER23> Around day 2,000 is when the guilt kicked in for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fascinating article here about Robert - [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxa53/how-an- air...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxa53/how-an-airline- pilot-took-on-adobe-photoshopand-nearly-won)

TIL: JASC stood for Jets and Software Company..

Adding my name to the list of people who loved Paint Shop Pro and had several amazing interactions with the company.

<comment><USER25> Primarily the Name JASC was short for "Just Another Software Company" but later it was changed to "Jets and Software Company".

[1] [https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old- brands/jasc/](https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/old-brands/jasc/)

<comment><USER26> JASC also made "Animation Shop", a GIF editor.

It won't open modern x264 files, but works fine with uncompressed video.

And the GIF format just won't die thanks to hipsters.

Thank you JASC and hipsters!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Paint Shop Pro was the best.

I was not as honest as the author of this article. I didn't buy Paint Shop Pro and I didn't write to its creator. I got a free trial on a cover-disk of some PC magazine and managed to extend the trial indefinitely via some hack or other.

Until then my only image editing tool was Microsoft Paint(brush), and PSP was a whole new world. Layers, clone tools, airbrushing. It was amazing. I was one of the few kids in my school who could edit images like that -- there were a couple who had Photoshop because their parents did design or photography.

Then at some point they clamped down on dodgy users, but by then Adobe had old versions of Photoshop out for free and eventually the GIMP made it to Windows.

</comment><comment><USER11> > It was no surprise to me years later to learn that JASC was acquired by > Corel. Your life's hard work, honesty, and kindness rewarded you, and I > couldn't have been happier for you.

Rewarded maybe financially, but it must have been a bittersweet moment considering that PSP probably had already peaked at that point and definitely did not prosper under new ownership.

</comment><comment><USER28> PSP7 was a favorite piece of software that I had been using for years when still mainly on Windows systems. It was useful and intuitive when having to make changes to plenty of raster images, or when doing pixel graphics; creating alpha transparent sections, clean ups, and so on. I also used Paint.NET a lot for batch edits.

It still seems a bit difficult to find a replacement for these two on macOS and Linux. Intuitive interfaces focusing on primary image editing functions and stable output to various formats are probably what is missing for non- professional users like me.

GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI. I tried Photoshop / Illustrator for a year as you get the CS4-subscription at a low price from my university. A few features, e.g. how embedded images were handled are nice, but the software is massive and the interface is so weirdly complex that I had to search for guides for the simplest tasks (who is profiting from having to "study" CS4...?). With PSP7, which is decently powerful I went through a couple of tutorials and was set up for years. Also, I had spent half an hour to deactivate all the spyware that comes with CS4, this is a no-go.

You can read that I am just really ignorant about modern graphics editing workflows. I'm not a graphics professional, but need to make "production level" graphics every few months. I need relatively technical vector illustrations (e.g. of experiment flows, NN models) and clean figures of scientific results (raster) in a visualization-heavy field.

For vector graphics I now really like Inkscape with its SVG basis. I still go back to Dia a lot though whenever the illustration fits their limited (but sufficient) scope. Both can be used on Linux and macOS.

Still searching for a powerful but plain & simple (and stable!) raster graphics editor though. Currently Krita looks nice, but it is clearly in development stage. Would pay for either Acorn or Pixelmator if I wasn't concerned that they will also start emulating the UI of Photoshop in the future.

<comment><USER29> > GIMP seems like a great project but has a terrible overblown UI

Have you tried the new 2.10 and the single window mode?

<comment><USER30> I haven't, but I have another bone to pick with its authors. They lost credibility in my eyes with the whole Save/Export debacle. Sure, I use a plugin now that changes behaviour so I can save to PNG (who in the world uses xcf directly anyway?), but it's a pain to install everywhere, and I'm afraid it will stop working one day. I really wish they listened to their longtime users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I apologize if this an insensitive question, but a Google search wasn't very enlightening.

Did Robert Voit die, or was this prompted solely by the author's reminiscence?

<comment><USER32> He's alive and lives in peaceful Scottsdale, Arizona.

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r There's a benefit to starting out as an airline pilot.

Decision making is critical for a pilot, in the worst case hesitation can mean death. Robert Voit was a master at taking in relevant information, making a decision, and moving on. That's an essential skill for a good business leader.

<comment><USER33> OODA Loop: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Everybody here is talking about PSP 5.0+.

But for me, the best version _ever_ was 3.0. I was able to draw pretty impressive diagrams at the pixel level, without any problem.

In subsequent versions, they modified the zoom tool, the GUI and the brushes, so it was quite harder to do the same thing.

<comment><USER35> I stopped upgrading at version 4.14, in 1997. I think version 5 added layers and some other complexities that I just didn't care to deal with.

Eventually, I added Gimp to my "arsenal" for occasional complex work, but that 20 year old Paintshop Pro is still my daily driver for quick graphics stuff. Runs fine on Windows 10.

Amazing piece of software and Minnesota!

<comment> mark-r Version 5 was also the first one that forced you to pay after the trial period was over. Did that have anything to do with your decision?

<comment><USER35> No, I was using a paid for version.

I just noticed you can buy a brand-new copy of Paintshop Pro for $48 (cheap!) at [https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop- pro/stand...](https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop- pro/standard/) I'm thinking about it.

<comment> mark-r It occasionally goes on sale for even cheaper. Plus you can find it bundled for free sometimes, e.g. with a Panasonic camera lens: [https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html](https://www.adorama.com/ipc2517mnk.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Animation Shop, PSP's sibling application for creating animations, is something I still keep on a VM for making highly customized gifs - timing for frames, pixel modification, compression, etc.

Corel had made it available via Jasc's FTP server for free a number of years back when I went looking for it again.

I check every now and then, but I've never found anything nearly as useful. Other software seems to have a much reduced feature set, be extremely slow or unstable, and maddeningly, not offer any control over individual frames.

It's possible there's something in the Adobe suite, but I (alone, of seemingly everyone on the Internet) never pirated Photoshop, and wasn't willing to fork out the asking price.

</comment><comment><USER37> PSP was fantastic. I stopped using it when Corel acquired it though.

</comment><comment><USER38> My dad came home from work one day and handed me a floppy disk from one of his colleagues. I suddenly had my hands on my first decent image editor _and_ my first digital image of a naked woman.

Never did find out if he knew about the latter.

</comment><comment><USER39> Paint Shop Pro 6 was far better than the version of Photoshop at the time IF you were a Web dev. While Photoshop did a better job of handling really big photos for print, PSP had the best tools for generating web-ready images.

</comment><comment><USER40> Back then I was still going to school and thus didn't have much money. And so it was always a joy when a new version of psp came out so that I could us an evaluation copy for another 30 days :D

edit: the article states simple re-installation was enough to reset the evaluation? I thought I tried that. Maybe it changed with later versions?

</comment><comment><USER41> I loved, loved, loved Paint Shop Pro. I think my all-time favorite version was 7. Back then (2003-2008) I used to do a lot of web design, and I would do all the graphics with Flash and PSP. I tried Photoshop 2-3 times during these years, and was always surprised to see how terrible the UX was in comparison with PSP.

Good memories.

</comment><comment><USER42> Jasc PSP 5 was the first full-blown image editor I ever used. Those were the days when I was taking baby steps with web design. Absolutely loved the no- nonsense, workflow. Not to mention, it seemed to pack every feature imaginable in a small, cheap package!

</comment><comment><USER43> I love PSP. It was one of the few applications worth the money the author charged for it. Up until recently I was using PSP5 for all of my taster image editing, but I reinstalled my OS drive and I don't know where I stashed my setup.exe for it and the much-needed patch. Great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm another person who regularly uses PSP (version 4 in my case) for most of my day to day bitmap editing tasks - it's fast, stable and has most of the features I need so I've never felt the need to upgrade!

</comment><comment><USER45> Is there a descendent-in-spirit of PSP in active development nowadays?

<comment><USER8> Yes, PSP is still in development:

[https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop- pro/](https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/products/paintshop-pro/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> PSP was and still is amazing. And while we are down the memories lane, one thing that strikes me as incredible was running Ventura Publisher (DOS) with that graphic UI on a 286.

</comment><comment><USER47> Xylon looks fun to play. I miss old and simple computer games.

<comment><USER48> Thanks! We gave up on it because the game was too easy and RSD Game-Maker--not to be confused with YoYo Games GameMaker--wasn't sophisticated enough to build a real game. It was a heck of a lot of fun to use though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> PSP was the only program I knew about that showed images inside a folder in the folder's thumbnail. This was a very time-saving feature!

</comment><comment><USER50> Are you going to release Xylon for people to play?

<comment><USER48> The video captures the entire game. Still want a copy? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> My copy was legit, paid for by work. I made weather icons with it in 8 bit colour with transparency - think of animated GIF's. The hardware was a Compaq Deskpro with 2Mb of video RAM. I was a mere techie with 8 bit home computing experience, not a trained graphic artist.

My employers were not the sort to have pirated software on the premises, however, the process if getting a purchase order for £30 software rather than £10000 software seemed almost more awkward.

My colleagues who did have the £40K SGI workstations with the £10K+ Parallax Matador software and giant Wacom tablets just did not have the tools needed to make the all important weather icons. This was in the days before maps had been sorted out so they mostly drew artistic interpretations of maps, with limited knowledge of geography - quite embarrassing really. But, you know, gotta work as a team.

The icons had to be made as sprites and only a certain amount of RAM was available, I think they also had to align on some type of kilobyte boundaries too. Needless to say JASC Paintshop Pro was the perfect tool for the job.

I did have access to Photoshop which actually came full version with a scanner. My colleagues in graphics saw Photoshop as a cut down PC tool, not really professional at all. So I could not get to meet with them in the middle whereby they would be able to do the icons and somehow get them into the formats needed for broadcast. That thought was tantamount to asking them to sweep the streets and empty the bins - below them.

Maybe I stuck with PSP longer than I should have done as I did have a bit of a learning curve a few years later when Photoshop became the vital tool for part of a job I moved on to. Due to consolidation in TV and nobody being able to pay £100K for a seat for graphic artists my colleagues also had to move on from their tools of choice. They chose to be dinosaurs, to be usurped by kids with dirt cheap tools. Sad really. So many games of status and other delusions made up the reality of working in broadcast television at that time, the toys being part of that.

The funniest thing I found was the giant Wacom tablet gorilla arm problem. If you were a proper graphic designer then you had to have the biggest of huge Wacom tablets, great in principle except the action is all in the wrist. They would be dragging their elbows to the far corners of the desk to get to a palette colour or menu item.

Most of my PSP work was done with a mouse and 1280 x 1024 15" CRT monitor. However I did get a lucky break when learning Photoshop as I had a small Wacom Tablet and an excellent mentor in a former graphic designer that just barked hotkeys at me. I did what he wanted done in doubleplusgood time, studio crew of twenty waiting... Creating masks and other image corrections were done in the way that bluescreen video is done, dealing with the whole image and doing so very quickly. Only years later did I understand what some of those toolbox icons were or what the hotkeys corresponded to in the menus.

Sometimes it pains me to see today's graphic artists spending all day doing basic artwork stuff where they are manually deleting pixels and drawing around things, headphones plugged in, no knowledge of hotkeys known. Despite being retired the lessons that my mentors taught me come back to haunt me and I do a little bit of teaching.

PSP was the opening for me to not be just a mere techie but to cross that imaginary line into doing creative work. There is no point being adamant that you are just an artist and don't do tech stuff. It is also cowardly to be a techie and never do creative artwork stuff. For me PSP enabled me to let go of the handrails and become a creative techie.

<comment><USER52> Thanks for sharing that. I worked in broadcast tv briefly and remember fondly the strange world of tooling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> the article would have more credibility if author would not try to promote his game in it

<comment><USER48> Hi Markoff!

I agree with your sentiment, but I'm not promoting my game in the least. It was created back in the mid-90s, never was released to the public, and never will be. Robert expressed that he looked forward to playing the games we made with PSP, and we never shipped a game he could see. The video captures the entire gameplay simply to show him what we were up to as kids as a part of our thank you.

I hope this clarifies things for you.

Thanks,

Ian</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any AI/ML approaches to "date tag" text documents? - <AUTHOR> For news articles, press releases etc. etc., might/not have an explicit date mentioned, but in the body could state "In the Spring of 2018...." => 2018/03/??<p>Any tools in this space? <comment><USER2> There are two parts to this: (1) labeling something as a date or time and (2) normalizing it to a time stamp. The first part is the tagging. The second part is temporal normalization.

There are several libraries for temporal normalization:

\- Duckling: [https://github.com/facebook/duckling](https://github.com/facebook/duckling) \- JChronic: [https://github.com/samtingleff/jchronic](https://github.com/samtingleff/jchronic) \- There's also Chronic (Ruby version that jchronic was made from).

Stanford NLP and SpaCy also do tagging: \- [https://github.com/stanfordnlp/stanfordnlp](https://github.com/stanfordnlp/stanfordnlp) \- [https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#named- entities](https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#named-entities)

Edit: Stanford NLP does not do temporal normalization. Added SpaCy</comment>


Tent Cities in the US? ... wow. - <AUTHOR> http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/tent-city-report/?hp

<comment><USER2> Wow, dude that's an awesome title. Did you come up with it yourself or is there a team of writers behind _dot dot dot wow_?

You can generate a lot of traffic with those editorial skills, but it's a lot more effective if you're at a more popular site. HN is so boring and not popular, why waste your time by submitting such catchy headlines here?</comment>


Love, a reprise - <AUTHOR> http://zenpsychiatry.com/love-a-reprise/ <comment><USER2> There are some posts that shouldn't allow comments - this is one of them (it says it all).

Since I've already ruined it ... I'll add my best wishes to Elana. Have a long, love-filled and kid-filled life.

<comment><USER3> Nicely said.

I love this sentence:

 _I do not believe everything happens for a reason (a platitude, in my opinion, too easily offered to those struck inexplicably and unfairly by life's cruelties) — but I believe we can find meaning in the things that happen._

I hope HN can indulge Elana's use of a psychic's guidance and a little mystical thinking, and see the beauty in the whole story.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my favorite lines as well.

Theee years of chemo treatment, I say she is allowed some mystic guidance :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >I saw a psychic.

I'm so anti quackery I can't follow the rest of the story, sorry.</comment>


Largest VM in the Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/08/largest-vm-in-the-cloud/

<comment><USER2> $7,180/month, $86,160/year. That's a pretty penny.

<comment><USER3> That VM nearly costs one whole engineer!

<comment><USER4> Or several baremetal servers, amortized over 3 years.

<comment><USER5> People seem to forget that EC2 stands for Elastic Cloud Compute. Emphasis on elastic. If you you use the Elastic Cloud Compute in a non-elastic manner then you're doing it wrong. If you need dedicated hardware then there are many services that specialize in precisely that.

(Yes I know this is Azure not EC2. The point remains.)

<comment><USER6> I think that ship has sailed. Even Amazon offers heavy reserved instances, which are expected to be on 24/7 (you pay for every hour in the month even if you're not running a machine).

<comment><USER7> Yes, but occasionally they will retire instances, and notify you. If you don't spin it up as another instance, well, sucks to be you when it disappears. Actually pretty simple, but you can't just set it and forget it; you have to be prepared for some degree of elasticity.

Also note that reserved instances don't require you to pay for 24 hours X 30 days. It just gives you the right to pay a lower rate for the capacity you've reserved.

<comment><USER8> True, although they used to in specific cases - the AWS "heavy utilization" reservations would be charged if you had the server running or not.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Booking.com sends raw CC data to Hotels. Is it legal? - <AUTHOR> A friend of mine has a hotel and hostel and is partner with booking.com. He received 100s of CC raw data each day.
There is no protection whatsoever. Booking doesn't manage payments on their own, they send the data clean-text directly to the hotel owner to process them using their own POS.
Is it legal? this is Masive. <comment><USER2> they send raw credit card numbers, they dont send YOUR credit card number. They create a disposable credit card number, which they send down to the hotel, linked to your credit card. Its like a token in the form of a different credit card number. The hotel doesnt know the difference and the disposable credit card number has a fixed limit which is what you paid for your room. After that it is discarded, I dont know what happens to it afterwards. Edit: I work for a large hospitality software company, those numbers go thru us before they get to the hotel.

<comment><USER3> PayPal used to offer one-time use disposable CC numbers. The limit fixed at the right price is a good innovation. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER4> My bank (Bank of America) offers this feature, but it's a bit buried in the menus. Custom limits and everything, it's pretty useful.

But there are plenty of reasons not to do business with Bank of America. I'm no shill for them.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I'm with BoA and didn't know about the feature (it's called ShopSafe, for others).

I like privacy.com for this purpose - works well plus it can anonymize transactions to make them opaque to the bank.

<comment><USER6> I love privacy.com - I can kill the debit cards I generate and use with specific merchants when they have been exploited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You should edit the context of this question based upon the answer from its_trivial : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103175)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think you have the answer already and IANAL but just to add on, in most countries this a matter of PCI compliance that is enforced by the card networks. In most countries it's not a criminal offence to be PCI non- compliant (but you could be liable for civil suits and fines by the card schemes).

I imagine there's a clause in the PCI compliance rules that allows raw card numbers to be sent less securely if they are virtual + single use card numbers or maybe if the liability of fraud on those card numbers doesn't fall on the "original" card holders.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you want to know it's legal ask a lawyer.

Am I shocked? no... reminds me of ACH and the file format they use.</comment>


Phishing with Unicode Domains - <AUTHOR> https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/ <comment><USER9> HN Discussion about the same topic from 2 days ago (126 comments to date): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14119713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14119713)

<comment><USER10> High level recap:

Chrome - fixed in 59 (current stable is 57)

Firefox - no plans to change; you can adjust network.IDN_show_punycode in about:config

IE - <USER3>

Safari - <USER3>

<comment><USER11> Could you explain what fixed/immune means? Is it only the confusable characters, ie characters that are visually identical or near-identical to latin characters, that is getting the punycode treatment?

<comment><USER12> I think IE and Safari just don't support Unicode in domains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can a browser could track how many language/character sets are typically used by a browser profile, and warn the user when they are about to use a new, previously unused set, rather than waving the duty off as the "responsibility of domain owners"?

With now over 1000 top-level domains, and however many homographic matches among character sets, expecting people to register dozens of matching domains seems unrealistic.

<comment><USER14> Won't it be even easier to just check if the domain contains something outside the currently used character set (perhaps always allowing ascii)?

I think that, plus a "you have never visited this site before" kind of warning could go a long way towards combating these kinds of attacks.

I think the real devil is going to be in the UI. You don't want to make it overly scary (otherwise you penalize domains which use some unicode characters correctly), but it can't be so unnoticable that you won't be able to tell when it matters.

<comment><USER13> For a multi-lingual (really multi-char-set, "multi-graphic"?) user who often visits sites in several different char-sets, and might have a 60/30/5/5 percentage distribution, getting an "are you sure?" check before visiting a site with mixed char sets or a new-to-that-profile unmixed set seems like an useful confirmation that would not be invoked often, but would be likely to avoid a trip to the phishy sites. The same approach would work for the 99/1 or 100/0 distribution. The UI should be more of:

      "You have never visited a site in this language/character set before"
       More_Info.  Cancel?   Proceed?

<comment><USER15> Interestingly enough, my Chrome sends "accept-language:en- US,en;q=0.8,ko;q=0.6". I dont even know how it infers that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how the domain displays on email clients like gmail and outlook, this is the scariest part, most people will just look at the domain and think it's a valid mail and follow the instructions of that mail, it could be catastrophic for companies, the ubiquity $40 million fiasco comes to mind.

<comment> mike-cardwell Considering how easy email is to spoof, why bother using a unicode domain which is only similar to the target domain? Why not just use the real domain instead?

<comment><USER17> Spoofing isnt so easy for gmail and yahoo inboxes. Some web-clients warn of a return path too. For sophisticated spoofing and phishing unicode domains are helpful. Plus, spoofing emails is just a small attack vector.

<comment> mike-cardwell Spoofing is trivially easy for gmail and yahoo. Here's me spoofing an email from email@example.com to my gmail address:

      mike@blob:~$ telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25
      Trying 126.96.36.199...
      Connected to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
      Escape character is '^]'.
      220 mx.google.com ESMTP 19si14686133wmr.1 - <USER8>
      EHLO whatever
      250-mx.google.com at your service, [220.127.116.11]
      250-SIZE 157286400
      250-8BITMIME
      250-STARTTLS
      250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
      250-PIPELINING
      250-CHUNKING
      250 SMTPUTF8
      MAIL FROM:<email@example.com>
      250 2.1.0 OK 19si14686133wmr.1 - <USER8>
      RCPT TO:<*****@gmail.com>
      250 2.1.5 OK 19si14686133wmr.1 - <USER8>
      DATA
      354  Go ahead 19si14686133wmr.1 - <USER8>
      From: "Fake Address" <email@example.com>
      To: *****@gmail.com
      Subject: This is a spoofed email

      Spoof spoof spoof

      --
      Spoofy McSpoof
      .
      250 2.0.0 OK 1492497764 19si14686133wmr.1 - <USER8>

Email was delivered fine. Straight into the Inbox (not the spam folder). Even though ycombinator.com has strict SPF records which don't include my IP.

The only clue is, in the web interface Google displays a grey octagon with a red question mark inside it next to the sender address. And when you hover over that a tooltip says:

"Gmail couldn't verify that ycombinator.com actually sent this message (and not a spammer)"

So yeah. I would dispute "Spoofing isnt so easy for gmail and yahoo inboxes" \- They're as shit as everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What an odd coincidence: I just published a Go package yesterday to detect such attacks in source code. Is there a homography bug going around?

[https://github.com/NebulousLabs/glyphcheck](https://github.com/NebulousLabs/glyphcheck)

(btw, Wikipedia notes that "The term homograph is sometimes used synonymously with homoglyph, but in the usual linguistic sense, homographs are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, a property of words, not characters.")

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, but -from the repo description- why this is limited to Go source code files?

<comment><USER18> Mostly because it has an "ignore comments" mode. A lot of non-English speaking programmers write code using English keywords and identifiers but use their native language in the comments.

With some work, it could be made language-agnostic, but that's more than I have time for right now. If comments aren't an issue, you can just grep through all your source files for the offending characters, which shouldn't take more than a simple bash script.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the scariest one: [http://www.xn--80a6aa.com/](http://www.арр.com/) & [http://www.app.com/](http://www.app.com/)

<comment><USER20> Why is this the scariest one? I've never heard of app.com, any real new or fake news (in the literal sense) coming from that site wouldn't register as legitimate one way or the other.

However apple.com with a CC reset form could be a mighty easy way to scam a lot of people into giving up the personal details which could easily lead to full blown identify theft.

Thankfully FF/Chrome are patching this

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://blog.unicode.org/2014/09/updated-unicode-security- spe...](http://blog.unicode.org/2014/09/updated-unicode-security- specifications.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting. The apple.com one ([https://www.xn-- 80ak6aa92e.com/](https://www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com/)) shows literally that text in Pale Moon (27.2), but shows "аррӏе.com" (Cyrillic text) in Chrome 57 and Firefox 51.

Someone else's example that looks like "app.com" ( [http://www.xn-- 80a6aa.com/](http://www.xn--80a6aa.com/)) translates to the Cyrillic text, even in Pale Moon. I wonder if Apple's site is on a hard-coded blacklist in the browser, or if every update includes the top-1000 list, or something?

I remember reading about issues with Unicode domains _years_ ago, though. It surprises me that something hasn't been figured out by this point. One mitigation that I remember being discussed was coloring characters from different scripts in different colors, to make variant characters more obvious.

<comment><USER10> Even if you could train that, it doesn't help color-blind people...

<comment><USER22> Depends on the palette used. On the other hand, if that's the only indicator, then it doesn't help _blind_ people either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thankfully I got this: [https://imgur.com/a/3XyIe](https://imgur.com/a/3XyIe)</comment>


Starlink satellites passing over Leiden, the Netherlands [video] - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/1132064132390379520 <comment><USER2> It's easy to see how - when you're not in the know - this would be seen as a UFO...</comment>


How to Turn a Stadium Full of People into Thousands of Pixels - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/how-to-turn-a-stadium-full-of-people-into/ <comment><USER2> The unrivaled masters of this art are the North Koreans. [http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/07/travel/nk-mass- games/](http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/07/travel/nk-mass-games/) Plenty of videos on YouTube, search for human pixels

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been wondering how easy it would be to do this with phones.

I've seen documents for setting up wifi networking for a stadium to serve 20000 people. After that you need to know where each phone is. You'd have everyone go to a webpage, with some cameras maybe you could flash the phones in different colors, patterns and figure out where they all are? Or you could just ask users to enter their seat number.

Then download a JS demo to the phone, tell the phone which pixel of the demo to show, make sure the clocks are synced. Instant giant screen!

Anyone want to work on this with me? Getting someone to wire the stadium for 20k people though, and testing it is the hard part?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I've thought of this too. I was thinking you could just use a normal mobile network, as you'll just be sending the correct color to a full screen (not a ton of data needed for that). I was thinking that a website serving up web socket connections would be the best way to send the data, no clock sync needed.

Just spin up $10K worth of AWS instances for a few hours to handle all of the connections, and done.

<comment><USER3> clock sync is far easier than sending data. Once the clocks are in sync the demo just runs. If you think the clocks are going to drift just sync them every 10 to 20 second.

Example: This demo runs on clock sync. In general no data is sent between the machines. They are running independently. They just happen to be using the same clock.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64TcBiqmVko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64TcBiqmVko)

When the camera changes that is sent to each machine (ie, change your camera to ...) but then it's back to no communication.

Use 20000 phones each with a much smaller view and you'll get the same thing.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: twicly - realtime Twitter image search - <AUTHOR> http://twic.ly/

<comment><USER2> I find that the live feed is difficult to scan because everything jumps to the right and down when a new photo is added. I recommend changing the grid location where a new photo is displayed instead of shifting the photos.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that it can be a bit jarring. I have a new grid/swap version in the works, but it's not quite ready yet. I spent a bunch of time sweating the live feed but decided I could live with it for now and just get it launched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should use something like Pretty Date for the timestamps: <http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-pretty-date/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I never really thought about how useless the date probably is. "2 hours ago" is obviously more useful than a UTC date. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like it, very clean and works well.

I wonder what the application is for this though, do you have a use-case in mind? How many image services are you supporting?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is my side project MVP launch. Any feedback/suggestions is greatly appreciated.</comment>


Project Covalence - <AUTHOR> https://blog.samaltman.com/project-covalence <comment><USER3> Hmm, sounds more like a PR statement rather than the usual (insightful) posts that Sam writes. Anyway...

> Project Covalence's platform, powered by TrialSpark, is uniquely optimized > to support COVID-19 trials, which are ideally run in community settings or > at the patient's home to reduce the burden placed on hospitals and health > systems.

What's a "platform" in this case? I'd love to read simpler words. Is it a... piece of software to coordinate things? A physical machine? Else?

<comment><USER4> I looked at the site

> Participate in a clinical trial at no cost to you or your health insurance.

Why would health insurance be involved when running medical trials and why would it cost anything? The pitch doesn't make sense to me. I always assumed medical trials were free for the participants. No idea who their target demographic is which makes me suspicious already.

<comment><USER5> > Why would health insurance be involved when running medical trials and why > would it cost anything?

To cover for the possible adverse effects

<comment><USER6> Actually AEs, and especially SAEs, are more often than not handled by the clinical investigators or trial sponsor, for a variety of reasons.

Insurance policies often don't cover you while you're enrolled in a trial ("you wouldn't have broken your leg if you hadn't been in that cholesterol drug trial so we don't cover that").

The agency really cares a lot, especially about SAEs, and if someone is hit by a trolley while in a cholesterol drug study they will want the company to promptly determine that the drug didn't cause them to stumble, or lose vision, or be confused about where they were. We used to joke at one company, "but being hit by a meteor is not an SAE."

<comment><USER7> SAE = serious adverse event

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great initiative! There needs to be more effort towards streamlining these trials.

At TrialX [1], we also launched Covid Labs Initiative to _Hack The Pandemic_ [2] by bringing together hackers in Clinical Trials informatics space - <USER2> us a note firstname.lastname@example.com if interested.

We are seeing an unprecedented activity on-the-ground at various orgs[3,4,5] where we power the clinical trials recruitment. There is a huge interest in patient/volunteer community. Any effort to streamline and accelerate would be welcome.

1\. [https://trialx.com](https://trialx.com)

2\. [https://trialx.com/covid-labs/](https://trialx.com/covid-labs/)

3\. [https://www.pennmedicine.org/coronavirus/covid-19-clinical-t...](https://www.pennmedicine.org/coronavirus/covid-19-clinical- trials)

4\. [https://www.centerwatch.com/covid-19-treatment- information](https://www.centerwatch.com/covid-19-treatment-information)

5\. [https://clinicaltrials.med.nyu.edu/clinicaltrials/?keyword=C...](https://clinicaltrials.med.nyu.edu/clinicaltrials/?keyword=COVID-19)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why set up a separate brand to funnel COVID trial business to TrialSpark? From their own site, TrialSpark is a VC-backed company which primarily runs trials for major drug companies to recruit more patients with painful chronic conditions (like Astma, COPD, Diabetes, inflammatory, skin problems etc, but not cancer)for drug studies. The highly profitable medical areas are clearly attractive for Pfizer, but the sales pitch of TrialSpark is to identify high cluster areas of a disease in small communities, recruit community doctors and incentivize them to attract patients to drug studies with 1.9x higher than usual conversion rate.

So why the separate brand?

</comment><comment><USER10> I've actually been wondering as covid19 winds down and people's lived experiences no longer perceive it as the doom and gloom threat it once held sway with, if given that perception whether the market rewards will continue to stand and attract massive investments in pursuit of a vaccine where the rewards may not outweigh the risks.

I would think that would be a pretty strong signal that covid is not as large a risk if big industries don't think it worthwhile to pursue any longer. Along those lines of thinking have any of the big pharmaceutical companies given serious pursuit of a vaccine or is it mainly smaller outfits?

<comment><USER11> Most of the big pharma companies are developing a vaccine. [0] The ones that aren't specifically mentioned by name are probably funding some of the smaller biotech companies instead.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine)

<comment><USER10> That is an exceedingly thorough wiki article. What a great testament to community efforts. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good luck with that, Sam.

</comment><comment><USER13> It is now clear that Covid-19 is not as dangerous as was thought and hyped by media and governments worldwide, and that the prescribed shutdown cure has been and will be much worse than the disease itself. Please see ([https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/](https://swprs.org/a-swiss- doctor-on-covid-19/)) for a pretty clear summary or follow Aaron Ginn. Covid-19 vaccine development is nearly useless at this point. That said, we need countermeasures and resilience to such events in the future.

The expectation is we may be well be in 50% to 100% infection rate if serology yield is 1/5\. Pretty scary. This means the disease was extremely rapid, and we would've been absolutely trashed if it had been significantly more lethal. We need to invest massively on R&D against such potential threats. Covid-19 shows that state control wouldn't have done much to prevent global devastation, and that state control can itself cause the devastation. We need technological countermeasures such as one week vaccine development and deployment or transition to more separate economic spheres with permanent and complete travel bans and highly controlled trade between countries or geographic regions.

<comment><USER14> This is actively dangerous misinformation.

In places where the pandemic is not under control, there have been vast numbers of excess deaths: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus- missing-deaths.html)

We are still far from the peak in most parts of the world.

New York City has a population about 8 million, with 24,000 [1] excess deaths and an antibody positive rate of about 20% [2]. Do you really think it would be acceptable to let another 50,000 people in New York die (0.6% of the population) to reach herd immunity?

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-11/new- york-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-11/new-york-city- had-24-172-excess-deaths-as-outbreak-accelerated) [2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/antibody-testing-shows- coron...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/antibody-testing-shows-coronavirus- is-still-spreading-in-low-income-minority-communities-in-nyc-gov-cuomo- says.html)

<comment><USER13> Lots of downvotes on my comment. A somewhat hilarious denial of what is plainly visible. Did you people even read the linked summary? The economy was hijacked for a complete non-threat, driven by increasingly discredited studies, "experts" speaking in apocalyptic terms, and a media looking for crisis.

<comment><USER3> > The economy was hijacked

So, a conspiracy? I bet hundreds of people met in secret at least once in the past few months, and decided it would have been really lucrative to stage this farce. Well played! And nobody will ever know.

Sarcasm or jokes apart... Who, tell me who would have had the power and the drive to set this up?

<comment><USER15> There have multiple conspiracies with covid-19:

\- coverup at Wuhan Corona Lab in Dec. and disappearance of local doctors

\- coverup of US government funding and oversight of that lab

\- California has had flat hospital stats for 3 months, yet we're still lockdown because Gavin Newsom wants to be President</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Successful male contraceptive gel trial brings new form of birth control closer - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/07/successful-male-contraceptive-gel-trial-brings-new-form-of-birth-control-closer-vasalgel <comment><USER2> > _If [men] knew they could get a reliable contraceptive that could also be > reversed I think it would be appealing to them._

You think? If it was truly reversible, I'd sign all three of my sons up for it, and myself. The risk to males from a pregnancy (at least in the United States) is insanely high, and all the power rests with women (to carry or not).

Anything that gives men control over when and who to have children with, I'm 100% in favor of.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's like that almost everywhere in the world: girl pregnant, you don't want it? Shit, son.. time to be financially hamstrung for 18 years. Girl pregnant, you want to keep it? Shit, son.. you still don't have a say. It's fucking ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on a technique developed in India and now the IP is owned by a not for profit [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm_under_guidance)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hormonal birth control costs ~$500/year.

This procedure could cost less - far less - than that.

Unfortunately, market forces don't encourage investment in it.

Negative impacts:

\- Men have no direct control over conception other than condoms

\- Many women experience unwanted side-effects while on hormonal control

\- Environmental impacts (waste, estrogen)

\- Unwanted pregnancies from improper use

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised that giving the sperm nowhere to go doesn't seem to be an issue.

<comment><USER7> Its reabsorbed by the body safely.

<comment><USER8> fun topic on it from ancient india: [http://www.ayurvedacollege.com/Ayurveda/shukra-dhatu- closer-...](http://www.ayurvedacollege.com/Ayurveda/shukra-dhatu-closer-look- reproductive-tissue-ayurvedic-perspective)</comment></comment></comment>


A landslide on a comet - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/21/scientists-captured-incredible-photographic-proof-of-a-landslide-on-a-comet/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone else get awestruck that we can look at photos of what's going on on a comet with the same detail as one of the photos of the Kaikuora earthquake (or some other earthbound geological event)?

<comment> bjelkeman-again There is so much happening with launch tech in the next few years that when the people planning space missions catch up with the lower launch cost, I think a lot more cool stuff is going to happen. I may even see people land on Mars.</comment></comment>


SubEthaEdit 5 – native open-source text editor with live collaboration feature - <AUTHOR> https://subethaedit.net/ <comment><USER2> With all the work from home going on, I recently discovered Visual Studio Code Live Share which has been pretty awesome for pair programming and pair debugging. It even has built in text and voice chat. Terminals can be read only or read/write by people sharing, I can browse their workspace and folders and it knows to attribute the author of a commit to a remote editor.

We were initially very excited about it and while we don't use it as much as we did, to me its essential for doing remote collaboration / pair stuff.

[https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live- share/](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/)

<comment><USER3> For a more general use case (although probably *nix only, or maybe via WSL) I'd also like to mention tmate, which is a fork of tmux that allows collaboration/sharing: [https://tmate.io/](https://tmate.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used this way back in 2003 when it was still called _Hydra_.

It was the first collaborative text editor I ever used and was a showpiece for Apple's _Randezvous_ (later _Bonjour_ ) implementation of _zeroconf_. I was absolutely amazed.

I never used the collaborative features (much) but it certainly impressed people when I showed them!

<comment><USER5> I remember using it around the time they switched names. Although I barely ever used the collaborative features, SEE's multi-cursor editing capabilities were like magic. Yeah, other editors let you edit multiple lines, but SEE was the first editor I'd used that gave you multiple _distinct_ cursors, rather than giving you a single vertically stacked cursor. Top that off with OSX's default emacs keybindings, and you had a super simple, but incredibly powerful editing experience.

I eventually needed something cross-platform and switched to Sublime, but I still have very fond memories of SEE.

<comment><USER4> That's right! I'd forgotten how utterly amazed I was when I discovered multiple cursors and how useful they were. I don't think I've ever encountered that feature anywhere else.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't sublime text have multiple cursors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish we would have the equivalent of the language servers but for collaborative editing. That way you could edit with one user in emacs, one in vscode, one in intellij etc.

<comment><USER8> I once used something called Floobits[1] that was capable of this. In practice collaborative editing wasn't that much more useful vs screen sharing and the additional constraints of managing Floobits workspaces didn't make it worth it for us.

[1] [https://floobits.com/](https://floobits.com/)

<comment><USER9> What makes floobits awesome is that it could will allow someone using Vim and someone using Emacs to do pair programming.

And if you can make Emacs and vim users happy then you can have world peace.

The only problem we had with it, was that it was only 99% reliable... And that 1% error (in the connections dropping and such) was annoying.

But I still consider floobits a project with great potential.

<comment><USER10> I did pair programming on XEmacs in the 90's by opening a new frame on a second X server. It worked surprisingly well as long as both people stayed out of the minibuffer.

<comment><USER11> A.k.a. M-x make-frame-on-display. It's nice, but it does not show the cursor of the other person, which makes it hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For reference, a long discussion about real-time code sharing in SubEthaEdit, Atom, VS Code, floobits and elsewhere took place in this HN discussion from November 2017:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704730)

</comment><comment><USER13> I used this 10+ years ago, was really cool to pair program in the office. We also used it to take notes in meetings. But liked TextMate better for programming and then sort of stopped using it.

</comment><comment><USER14> SubEthaEdit is a nice enough text editor that it deserves consideration even if you never use its networking features.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's free on the Mac App Store and open source (MIT)

[https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit/tree/master](https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit/tree/master)

I thought this was a new version and got somewhat excited... :(

<comment><USER16> Here's a blog post from the developer on the occasion of the open source release: [https://rant.monkeydom.de/posts/2018/11/28/see-is- back](https://rant.monkeydom.de/posts/2018/11/28/see-is-back)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> macOS only as per GH tagline:

General purpose plain text editor for macOS.

<comment><USER18> yeah I was excited til I saw that - the "native" in the title should specify the platform too, really.

<comment><USER19> I think it's left out because it's about 17 years old and most people who would be familiar with the name of the editor already know it's a macOS app.

But you're right, that 'native' tagline is such a big draw these days, it is probably worth mentioning the OS in the title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Relevant page on the Emacs wiki: [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SubEthaEditProtocol](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SubEthaEditProtocol)

</comment><comment><USER21> I remember my group of friends being really hyped about this when it first came out. I ended up writing something for Emacs that let people ssh into a common server and each have their own "point" so that they could sort of get the same effect in Emacs. Exactly 0 people ever used it and we promptly forgot about collaborative editing.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's so nice to see this app continues to update. Hello to ETcon'03 folks!

</comment><comment><USER23> "Native" doesn't mean much.

Please mention as quickly as possible that it's native _on macOS_. You do on Github, but it's not immediately obvious on the webpage or in the title of this submission.

</comment><comment><USER24> What is the state of collaborative coding using (N)Vim?

<comment><USER25> While not tied to {n,}vim per se, I'd like to mention tmate which is a fork of Tmux, and you can manage voice communication with mumble.</comment></comment>


Documentation for the new Facebook platform - <AUTHOR> http://developers.f8.facebook.com/ <comment><USER2> Uh, they should probably do one more edit pass over the docs before opening it up to the world... =P

from [http://developers.f8.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc;=fbml#mockajax](http://developers.f8.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc=fbml#mockajax)

" __ _PLEASE CHANGE THE URL IN THE EXAMPLE_ __: ... clickrewriteurl="[http://www.mancrushonmcslee.com/metaconsole.php"](http://www.mancrushonmcslee.com/metaconsole.php)

<comment><USER3> Theres a lot of broekn links, missing bits of documentation, some bugs in there and currently the site isn't even loading for me! The whole release feels a bit rushed..

<comment><USER4> It redirects me to my FaceBook home page now. Perhaps it was leaked unintentionally and has now been un-released.

<comment><USER5> It's been changed to <http://developers.facebook.com>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wooo!

<comment><USER6> notice how everything with facebook requires a _"login first"_. No freeload reading here. Everyone's a member. Like it nor not. Even though I have an account it still is a waste of time typing in the un/pwd combo.</comment></comment>


Chunkhost offering a free VPS instance during beta - <AUTHOR> http://chunkhost.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to point out, I'm not involved or connected with the company (actually, I'm a happy Linoder). But these guys seem like a dev-friendly bunch of folks trying to start a new business so wanted to support them.

</comment><comment><USER2> free betas should not ask for credit card info...</comment>


An actress lived for decades in this New York City apartment – for $28 a month - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/us/new-york-apartment-rent-control-actress-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> What I find interesting is that the low rent did not effect the economic viability of the real-estate purchase. It wasn't even part of the calculus in the building purchase. It's also worth noting that the low rent was not due to rent control but due to personal relationships between the tenant and the building's owners.</comment>


Emails show how fake university in metro Detroit lured students - <AUTHOR> https://www.freep.com/story/news/2019/02/11/emails-reveal-how-university-lured-students-fake-farmington-university/2744103002/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand who they were trying to catch with this "sting operation."</comment>


1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond (2001) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php <comment><USER2> > RTS3's network architecture is strongly object oriented (see Figure 6). The > requirements of supporting multiple network configurations really played to > the strengths of OO design in abstracting out the specifics of platform, > protocol, and topology behind a set of common objects and systems.

No comment, just thought this was interesting</comment>


Raising a seed round instead of a Series A - <AUTHOR> https://www.atrium.co/blog/seed-stage-funding-startups/ <comment><USER2> These posts should come with a disclaimer: If you don't have a) significant traction or b) "elite" connections, then it's unreasonable to expect to raise a seed round in Silicon Valley at all.

The author has Yale and YC connections, among the most "elite" there are. It's virtually certain he could not have raised funding without these connections. If you don't have a similar background (i.e. 99.9% of people), then the advice is more harmful than helpful.

From the Atrium Scale web site:

"The Scale Program is a 1:1 mentorship program that helps founders craft their Series A pitch and _get exclusive intros to our network of investors and partners._ "

The business model of organizations like YC and "Atrium Scale" is to sell access to their "elite" networks.

They perpetuate Silicon Valley elitism for profit. They help a lucky few chosen founders and damage the entire ecosystem for everyone else.

The best advice for anyone that is not a lucky member of these private clubs is to just build a regular business and ignore Silicon Valley entirely. Once you have significant traction, you can raise money with 100% certainty. Greed is the ultimate motivator for most investors.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, and also a fair amount of angst that's pointed the wrong direction. I've never worked with Atrium, but yc was pretty much the ultimate leveling mechanism for founders with no connections.

Yes they get you access to elite networks, but they _also_ level the playing field so founders don't get exploited the way they used to.

And, they're obviously doing well because of it, but I don't think they're perpetuating the elitism. If anything they've lit a fire under other investors asses to get them to start making more objective decisions about funding. There are a bunch of really good seed funds now that are really easy to get ahold of.

<comment><USER4> +1 to joining an accelerator and having them parade you. That's how we were able to raise.

Of course, getting into accelerators isn't easy either. As far as I can tell, early stage fundraising for the non-elite is basically random (I consider myself lucky).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Sometimes an investor who hasn't invested will offer to intro you to another > investor.

> Don't take it!

> The signal you are sending is bad; if you were a good investment, the first > investor would have invested.

I just completed a $750k seed round and this is the only thing I don't agree with. Some investors simply don't want to be in certain spaces, even if it is a good investment. Would you invest in a car when you knew nothing about that car or cars in general?

<comment><USER6> > The signal you are sending is bad; if you were a good investment, the first > investor would have invested.

We did a $1.9M seed round and I completely agree with this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >With the cost of rolling out an MVP (minimum viable product) lowering every year, many startups think you need a prototype in order to raise a seed round.

I might argue that it's the opposite. We hit peak MVP, there is too much competition, all the Low hanging fruit is gone, and we're going to have to go back to the days where we raised seed capital off of a business plan because you can build much in today's market as an MVP. The app days are gone.

<comment><USER8> Oh please. This is like the (apocryphal) saying everything that can be invented has been invented [1]. It's easy to look backwards and in hindsight say app MVPs were easy and obvious. For most ideas you should be able to distill some quantum of utility into an MVP even now.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell#Everythi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell#Everything_that_can_be_invented_has_been_invented)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Commitments go both ways: don't back out from investors — or feel guilty if > investors back out from your seed round — after the following 4 steps have > been completed_

This sentence does not make sense to me as written. Based on the first clause, I assume it's supposed to mean that neither party can back out. But I just don't see this meaning in the two clauses that follow. Is the first clause (" _don 't back out from investors_") telling investors what to do, or telling the founders what to do?

<comment><USER10> Telling founders what to do. Don't back out on a handshake deal, and if an investor backs out on a handshake deal it's not your problem, but don't do business with that person again.

<comment><USER11> Curious how that lines up with the [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! Atrium CEO Justin Kan here. Happy to answer any questions about the article or help coach you through the process live in our next Atrium Scale program.

<comment><USER12> Hey Justin,

Thanks for the article. I'm a co-founder in San Diego. We're being asked for traction, when we have a team and a pretty good prototype out with beta users.

My question - it seems like we should be targeting pre-seed money, as the seed guys seem to be acting like VCs for an A round. Is that normal for Silicon Valley, or that specific to San Diego?

Thanks in advance.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would need a lot more context to answer this question properly. There's no hard and fast rule for when a "pre-seed" becomes a "seed" or "A". These are just labels. The biggest difference is whether you are raising a round of SAFEs or a priced-round. The legal and business consequences of raising SAFEs are more casual than a priced-round, where investors (regardless of location) take things more seriously. Hope this helps and good luck on your company!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great article. I would just add that using a service like DocSend will give you a great visibility into which slides your investors spend the most time on, hence allowing you to fine-tune your messaging over time.

<comment><USER14> For what it's worth, many investors strongly dislike DocSend. It helps founders track views but adds friction. Here's a good recent post from Mark Suster on the subject: [https://bothsidesofthetable.com/i-know-everybody-told- you-to...](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/i-know-everybody-told-you-to-send- your-fund-raising-decks-as-a-link-d5b4409886af)

<comment><USER13> I really value Mark and love his writing, but this article seems a bit one- sided. He's essentially telling founders that if they are not publicly sharing their traction, acquisition channels, unit economics and market insights, that they are doing it wrong. Couple of reasons why I disagree:

\- You lose control of your messaging from the PR point of view. Perhaps you said in your deck you'll expand to XYZ by a certain date, and now that you're 6 months late and want to get some PR, why open up yourself to people putting a negative spin on your story?

\- You expose yourself to risk of getting copied by well-funded startups looking to pivot. Will you manage to win anyway? Perhaps. But if you could choose, do you really want expose yourself to all that risk?

\- Last but not least, here's an investor essentially confirming that investors cannot be trusted to keep your deck confidential. Just in case you ever wondered...

For everyone who disagrees with these points, please share your deck in your comments :)

<comment><USER15> These are dreadful reasons. The first is silly, for the second you shouldn't share that stuff with investors without having a conversation, and the third is a problem whatever the transmission system (unethical people aren't going to be stopped that easily).

Especially since Docsend supposedly let you download PDFs if you log in.

I rarely open docsend docs and never on cold pitches. Using other tracking links is an automatic fail. You already can imagine why.

I do like having the deck in my inbox so that when the pitch changes I can see what they once did. Lots of founders will do multiple companies and abandon failures early, and I want to be able to see what they pitched me on six months ago.

I don't think you necessarily need to put all of that stuff in the deck (and certainly not proprietary data) but you are effectively sending people a shortened URL for your stuff that will die in a few weeks.

<comment><USER13> > you shouldn't share that stuff with investors without having a conversation

> I rarely open docsend docs and never on cold pitches

Therein lies the conundrum: we are both right and wrong, depending on the context.

Scenario A: you just completed a hackathon and have no connections or existing investors to help you reach other investors => in this case you should reduce the barrier of distribution in any way possible.

Scenario B: you are running a seed funded startup and have enough traction to raise the A round => you will be getting warm introductions, and investors will be opening your links.

Most founders fall somewhere in between those two scenarios, starting at the Scenario A at the beginning of their careers, and slowly making their way towards the Scenario B. The nice thing about using DocSend is that it will tell you exactly if you're ready for it => just look at the open rate of your links.

> I do like having the deck in my inbox so that when the pitch changes I can > see what they once did. Lots of founders will do multiple companies and > abandon failures early, and I want to be able to see what they pitched me on > six months ago.

This is what I meant with one-sided. Nobody disputes the value of that information to the investor. From the founder's perspective, however, you get this set of options:

1\. the slide deck you were pitching 1/2/3 years ago materialized exactly how you predicted => congratulations, you're in Scenario B, and investors will be reading your deck no matter how you present it to them.

2\. your old slide deck was overly optimistic, and you either underperformed, pivoted, or abandoned your startup altogether. Do you really want everyone out there to have this dirt on you?

<comment><USER15> You are deliberately misconstruing the things I said. One of those comments is about the disposition of content of the deck, not whether to share it.

In the last para - "dirt" is inane. I know you pitched something but can't figure out what it was at all looks as bad as you pitched something and there is still information. But neither look good. Instead you are increasing friction in the hopes of redacting possible dirt years from now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> See also another recent post on process and leverage in fundraising [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17013516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17013516) and another previous experience [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7858317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7858317)

PS. We are currently raising Series A in China/HK @ [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/)</comment>


Show HN: Gomp – a tool for comparing Git branches - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MarkForged/GOMP <comment><USER2> This looks similar in spirit to `git range-diff` [0], which may interest anyone who wants more visibility of what's changed between branches (e.g. before and after a rebase).

[0] [https://git-scm.com/docs/git-range-diff](https://git-scm.com/docs/git- range-diff)

<comment><USER3> Another neat command added to the arsenal. Thanks for linking this here.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I've been working at Markforged for about a month, and I've been thrilled to be involved with launching a pilot open-source project and our engineering blog [0]. This is the first time we've released an internal tool to the public [1] and I think it is an important step for the team.

AMA about how to get an internal tool open-sourced!

[0] [https://engineering.markforged.com/#/blog/post/welcome](https://engineering.markforged.com/#/blog/post/welcome)

[1] [https://engineering.markforged.com/#/blog/post/preparing_gom...](https://engineering.markforged.com/#/blog/post/preparing_gomp)

</comment><comment><USER4> This can be genuinely useful.

If you use rebase flow on your development branch, then fork to history flow for stable release branches, this can give insight into what was or wasn't backported subsequently, as long as you try to keep atomic patches.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting tool!

When I first saw this, the term "GOMP" made me thing of gnu gcc "GOMP" \--> gnu open multi processing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wanted to like this tool, but it seems a bit unpolished still. Apparently it doesn't support 3.6 at all, I just got a backtrace about an extra parameter to some subprocess call. Figuring it was a version issue I switched to 3.8, which got past that, but then when I tried to compare 2 branches that I hadn't checked out locally yet I got a different traceback, ending in:

File "/home/lol/.pyenv/versions/3.8.3/lib/python3.8/site- packages/gomp/gomp.py", line 132, in find_first_common_hash if source_commit[i][0] == _hash: IndexError: list index out of range

Then, after checking out those 2 branches, I got the table but the commit msgs were cut off from the front, here's an example:

874464e s bug

There's obviously something before that s.

This isn't a support forum obviously, but just something to be aware of.

I was interested in this because we have the issue of trying to figure out the new commits between releases. We have a branch with cherry-picks per release, and so enumerating new commits between these 2 branches isn't straightforward or even necessarily well defined.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will look into all of that. One thing I have learned today is that while an internal tool might be extremely battle-tested against a narrow slice of use cases and environments, public scrutiny will uncover numerous issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When does it happen that two branches share random commits? I never had that happen in my use cases.

<comment><USER6> If you do a branch per minor version, with cherry picks on top of the minor version branch as bugs are fixed

<comment><USER8> The cherry pick will refer to a different history, so it will have a different commit hash (and thus be considered a separate and independent commit by any sane tooling, including Git itself).

This seems to work around that by matching on the commits' summary lines instead, which only (sort of) works because their workflow disambiguates this (1 commit per issue, each commit is prefixed with the issue ID).

Then again, most of their desire for this tool seems to come from their broken rebase-oriented workflow stomping all over commit hashes in the first place (on top of ensuring that what was tested and reviewed no longer matches what was merged, while destroying the history that could help someone trying to diagnose the issue).

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, I guess. Your history isn't, has never been, and will never be linear. Whether or not you rewrite your logs to make it seem that way.

<comment><USER7> I think making the commit summary the "id" of this workflow is actually interesting. It is a step towards doing project management in git itself rather then an external tool.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Should Be In A Top Tier MBA Entrepreneurship Class? - <AUTHOR>

I've been asked to provide advice about appropriate topics for an introduction to entrepreneurship class at a top 5 MBA program in the US.  About 20% of the class sessions are being changed, and I'm being asked to give advice about what topics should go into that 20%.  As I understand it, the remaining 80% of the class will cover the basic introductory topics (team formation, financing options, IP, etc.) and will bring in guest speakers.<p>While I have some thoughts of my own, I'm very interested in what the Hacker News community thinks would be a good fit for this class. <comment><USER2> This is a really broad question. I wish there were more answers. Do you have any ideas you could kickstart the topic with? Company/startup simulations, labs, working with real startups.</comment>


Thanktuary – the stress-free social network - <AUTHOR> http://sustainablepace.net/thanktuary <comment><USER2> This is a really nice idea. Shame, as the author mentions, that it never materialised.</comment>


FDA Updates on Hand Sanitizers with Methanol - <AUTHOR> https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-updates-hand-sanitizers-methanol <comment><USER2> Could you use the moonshine test on hand sanitizer? If it burns blue then you know it's ethanol and if it burns yellow it's methanol? I'm not familiar with the other ingredients in hand sanitizer so I don't know if this would work (so don't try it at home!) I'm only asking out of curiosity.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting idea... but think that's reversed.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/chemicalreactiongifs/comments/5cw7z...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chemicalreactiongifs/comments/5cw7zj/burning_pure_methanol_left_and_pure_ethanol_right/)

You're more likely to detect metallic or other organic contaminants which are likely (moisturizers etc) in sanitizers of both sorts. Even the effect shown above only shows up in an oxygen restricted environment (like the bucket above) due to the extra O2 the ethanol carbon needs to burn clean. You won't see that if you put it in a spoon where there's plenty of air. Any other carbon/sodium compounds are likely to show up and orange/red.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jfXjG9q19Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jfXjG9q19Y)

Even dangerous metals like Lead (Pb) are hard to detect with simple flame test and a very pure flame.

[https://images.app.goo.gl/k8rSHZ4QtGR57Ca47](https://images.app.goo.gl/k8rSHZ4QtGR57Ca47)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw a paper indicating that ethanol and isopropanol are not readily absorbed through the skin, but can enter as fumes -- enough to show up on an (overly sensitive) drug screen.

I would expect methanol might be similar, although it _is_ quite a bit smaller. However, I wasn't able to find any information on this. Any sources?

<comment><USER5> From [1]: "In human metabolism of methanol, given its physical and chemical properties, high skin absorption is expected. Methanol penetration is predicted at 2.0 mg/cm2/h (logP = −0.77). Skin absorption of methanol vapor is another primary exposure route in terms of respiratory exposure."

I had a hard time finding dermal exposure thresholds for adverse effects. Oral intakes associated with severe acute effects were easier to find and could be used to estimate the effects of dermal intake. The smallest systemic oral intake threshold I saw was 3–11 g: "An oral intake of 3.16–11.85 g/person of pure methanol could cause blindness."

From those values, I think you're probably right; at least, death or blindness from dermal exposure to methanol seems unlikely. But the thresholds for less severe symptoms and the relevant intake thresholds for symptoms from chronic exposure are unclear to me.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5625597/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5625597/)

<comment><USER6> Hand surface area is often given as 1% of body surface area (1.5-2 m^2), i.e. 150-200 cm^2, unclear if one or both hands but I assume one. I've also found claims of 400 cm^2 for one hand.

Methanol penetration is predicted at 2.0 mg/cm2/h" would imply that assuming two hands of 800 cm^2 total, exposed to methanol "hand sanitizer" for 5 minutes, would absorb 133 mg of methanol.

I think the skin absorption issue is a red herring and the real issue is that people keep drinking it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like every single example they found with methanol contamination is imported from Mexico. I wonder if that's just because they only started there or if it's not a problem with imports from other regulatory domains.

</comment><comment><USER8> If I recall correctly, most of the moonshine blindness was not due to improper distillation technique (i.e. not cutting your distillation head), but rather that methanol was often used to dilute ethyl alcohol.

<comment><USER9> Most fermented alcohol doesn't contain a significant amount of methanol to begin with, fermented fruit being the exception. After distilling you can usually drink the heads with no risk of methanol poisoning. You'll still get a nasty hangover from aldehydes and higher alcohols if you do, but it won't kill you.

The majority of methanol poisoning cases are where illegal spirits have been deliberately adulterated with industrial methanol (most likely with denatured alcohol, which is still 90%+ ethanol) to increase profits.

<comment><USER10> The US government once methylated alcohol to try to convince people to follow prohibition.

[https://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5975605/alcohol-prohibition- poi...](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5975605/alcohol-prohibition-poison)

<comment><USER11> Good old Vox finding nefarious deeds in everything.

The gov't still "poisons" alcohol today. It's called "denatured" alcohol and there are a bunch of "poisons" added like diesel, methanol, Bitrex, etc.

It's done because the gov't wants their alcohol tax.

<comment><USER12> You're just being stupid. Denaturing agents are used to make the product unpalatable. They may be mildly toxic, but they are so disgusting that users typically don't absorb much of it.

Methanol, on the other hand, is not just more toxic but also reportedly tastes better than than ethanol. As such it _encourages_ people to drink it. Using it to punish illicit alcohol drinkers is just plain evil.

<comment><USER11> Wrong. They still sell "methylated spirits" today, where the only adulterant is methanol.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol)

And no, they didn't used methanol to encourage people to drink it - that's just silly.

Not everything is a conspiracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, this kinda answers the question I had, which was whether you could use denatured alcohol to sanitize things. Because, when the crisis started and you couldn't get isopropanol, you could still get denatured alcohol by the gallon. But I assumed it had this hazard and didn't buy any.

<comment><USER14> It depends upon exactly how the alcohol has been denatured. I'm of the understanding there's a couple ways: lacing with methanol to make it poisonous, or lacing with bittering agents powerful enough to make even the most desperate alcoholic spit the stuff out reflexively. But, not knowing which method is in use, probably better to avoid using denatured alcohol for sanitation purposes.

<comment><USER13> True. The cans of denatured alcohol at Home Depot said methanol (or methylated spirits, whatever). But that's a sample size of one. They were also labeled "alcohol fuel" or something like that.

I'm not sure what legitimate purpose ethanol serves at a home improvement store. To improve my home, ethanol has to be drinkable. ;-)

<comment><USER15> >I'm not sure what legitimate purpose ethanol serves at a home improvement store.

because how toxic alcohols other than ethanol, to humans and pets, i never bring other stuff to home. For cleaning/sanitizing purposes there is currently a bottle of Smirnoff among cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink. Yes, i'm Russian and say 25 years ago back there i'd consider such usage of good vodka a capital crime :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not being familiar with these brands at all, I wonder if they were created during the pandemic or existed before; and if the latter, did they always contain methanol and were now just discovered, or recently started to be adulterated due to ethanol shortages?

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a simple litmus test, for example?

</comment><comment><USER18> Unless I'm missing something the last they updated was about three weeks ago.

<comment><USER19> Sorting by date I see 2 additions to the table on 2020-07-21.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had no idea that all those stereotypes about moonshine turning people blind and/or crazy were real - I guess methanol alcohol was a common enough contaminant in bootleg alcohol during prohibition. And wherever they make moonshine these days, though I imagine even backwoods people are wiser these days.

Edit: it's complicated: [https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol- history/prohibit...](https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol- history/prohibition-history-methanol-poisoning-bootlegging-alcohol/#how- methanol-likely-killed-thousands-during-prohibition)

<comment><USER21> Distillation is a way for farmers to transform crops into a denser form with arbitrary shelf life. This means that if they think local spot markets are offering a raw deal, they have the options of both temporal and spatial arbitrage.

In my country, people with stills on trailers often come around to villages to help the farmers with excess crops, and home distillation is legal. I haven't heard of problems with CH₃OH.

Even in russia distillation has been legal for all of this century. I would not be surprised if a fair amount of the booze mentioned in "Выпил С2H5OH / Сел на «Ниву» Ростсельмаш" was homemade. (who needs a fancy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency) when one can express appreciation for favours in bottles?)

For that matter, in china, 白酒 is discouraged but legal.

Anyone know what the north korean line may be? If they're a repressive state on the order of iran or the soviet union, they might ban home distillation.

(Bonus tracks from "Darkside of The Moonshine": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLMsvaRWhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLMsvaRWhY) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Surely this is fine if you dont drink it. I'm not convinced toddlers would like the taste anyway.

<comment><USER23> Toxicity for methanol also comes through skin absorption and inhalation of vapors. The effect you're concerned about there is what happens when your body breaks down the molecule - formaldehyde is an intermediate metabolite and is pretty toxic.</comment></comment>


Renowned Harvard Psychologist Says ADHD Is Largely a Fraud - <AUTHOR> http://curiousmindmagazine.com/harvard-psychologist-says-adhd-largely-fraud/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/news/20170215/imaging-study- co...](http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/news/20170215/imaging-study-confirms- brain-differences-in-people-with-adhd)

Neurological studies of developmental difference between children with ADHD and baseline give physical evidence that the psychologist interviewed for that opinion piece is demonstrably wrong. In most cases, ADHD in children is the outcome of pieces of the brain not developing at the same pace as the rest of the brain.

That is also why children often "grow out of" the disorder... those components do eventually grow to adult size. They are just slightly behind schedule. ADHD medication is a stimulant, which pushes the logic center of the brain to operate faster. At that point the logic center is able to compensate for the underdeveloped pieces that should be regulating attention.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a link to a NY Times article that describes how big pharma turned a true affliction into a money making condition thru advertising to doctors and patients and the relaxing of the diagnostic rules for ADHD. It's an eye opening read.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/health/the-selling-of- atte...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/health/the-selling-of-attention- deficit-disorder.html?pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much of this is due to environmental and upbringing factors. How much coke / caffeine do kids drink these days? How much more exposure to media / apps possibly contributes to this? What about how our food is produced nowadays? I don't want to disregard someone's personal experience or health issue, but I think there are some cases where symptoms resembling ADHD can be aided by some lifestyle changes.

<comment><USER5> Pathologies that aren't susceptible to lifestyle changes are few and far between. Death is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems to be written as a response to the over-diagnosis and over- treatment that happens in the US.

But it's going to be used against people in the UK and other countries where there are much lower rates of diagnosis and treatment.</comment>