The other day I set up the
App.net Comments widget
on this blog. Comments require an App.net or Facebook account, as the
Venn diagrams
of the two have one of the smallest intersection in the tech world :)
You would think nobody would ever never say something like that, but
x0054 disagrees. He
offers advice, (professional advice), on how not to get arrested. In case you
don’t believe him, he links to some guy (a Detective) on youtube. This is
2014 folks!
If you always wanted to automate the tedious process of exporting your
collection of papers in Papers to BibTeX here’s an Applescript
that does that:
{% gist 8471281 save_bib.scpt %}
To use it, you should invoke it when the focus on Papers is on the collection
(or selection of papers) that you want to export. The various variables
presented in the script, pretty self-explanatory, should allows for enough
customization.
This is a true story about Dutch doctors. It seems scary, and frankly it
scares the shit out of me, since I live in the Netherlands.
In december, playing football, my knee “cracked”. It didn’t break, but I
felt a crack, and fell in an excruciating pain. I had pay the doctor a
visit, which is never a pleasant thing here. Believe me, this story will
convince you.
Barely standing I made into the doctor’s office. He briefly examined my
knee and concluded that nothing was broken. He told me to take two
paracetamol every 6 hours, even though I was perfectly fine bearing the
pain. No thanks. I wanted to know what was going on, but, apparently,
nothing. Just crutches for a couple of days, no sport for 4 weeks, and in two
months I should be like new.
After six months I’m still in pain. Not always, but my knee hurts often.
I decided to try the doctor again. He said that I should get an MRI to
check whether the meniscus is broken.
“Fine — I said — let’s do that.”
“Who-ho, not so fast. Too expensive.”
Too expensive for who? For him?
If you now read through the lines, you already get the main message:
I’m not going to treat you, even if you need it, because it’s
expensive. You’re a doctor, and you don’t want to cure people with
their own money? Which kind of doctor are you again?
A little background here. For what I heard, here in the Netherlands the
less clinical analysis a doctor prescribes, the more he gets at the end
of the year. That’s right, he get richer if he doesn’t cure you!! How
sick is that?
I had to fight a week with him to get my MRI. Do you think he’s just
greedy?
When getting some medication for my psoriasis, he saw my file and asked
about my heart illness, ARVD. I said that I had to be under
control, but without taking pills, like my brother and my mother do.
“Why? — he inquired — I see here in your file that it has no
consequences.”
I don’t want to play the part of the asshole here, but if you look in
Wikipedia you see that death is a, rightfully, very feared consequence
of ARVD. And which kind of illnesses do not have any consequences? Oh,
right, the one that needs only painkillers.
So I told him, and he gave me that strange look, like I’d know better.
Maybe a novice, you may think. He works at the VU,
the Free University of Amsterdam.
Let’s try another one. It goes back when I first went to the
doctor here in the Netherlands. I told him about ARVD, saying that in
Italy I was checked every year to see whether the status of my heart had
changed.
“Who-ho, slow down you handsome, here in the Netherlands we don’t treat
illnesses like in Italy — because here they prefer to let you die if
that yields little money for their wallet — so we’ll do the following:
we test for it this year and then, if you feel some disturbs, we’ll see
what we can do.”
Let me help you out with this: when your hearth is not feeling fine with
ARVD, that means you’re dead. How nice from him to take action after my
funeral! I told him and, as the other doctor, he gave that look as I’d know
better.
Do you think the fun is over?
My wife is not feeling well lately. She’s very tired, her head itches.
So what should we do? Go to the doctor. Yay!
The doctor is sure she’s allergic to something. But it will be so
difficult to find out what that you’d better take this pills and shut
up. It will go away.
Three weeks later, you guessed right, it’s not gone. How can it go?
They take a blood sample. I don’t want to question the timing, but they
could have done that weeks before.
Anyway, ten (10) days later we get the results. The doctor’s assistant
said she’s allergic to 5 different things, including cats and dogs. The
next day she return to the doctor to hear the “strategy”. With a wee of
sadness she says
“I know that I’m allergic to this and that, and I’ll not be able to eat
these and those. What should I do?”
That strange look again. The doctor says that she’s not allergic to
anything. Some blood values are out of range, and a new blood sample is
needed (OK, here it’s the assistent’s fault).
New blood sample, another 10 days. It turns out that she’s low on iron.
I check with an Italian doctor (you never know), who said that low iron
can give you some itch.
In the meantime my wife goes to the doctor again, to see what he can do.
He’s a nice guy, so he begins with “Now you’ll tell me that all your
symptoms are gone, right? Just eat better and you’ll be fine”.
My wife is italian, like me. If you happen to know some folks down in
there, you know we have temperament. A lot. But it was the doctor’s
lucky day, so she didn’t explode. Instead she asked whether iron
enriched pills would help with the itch.
Blank look. He checked the PC, but it was not working, so he resorted to
Google, on his iPhone (!!!). Lo and behold, Google confirmed what my
wife said.
Needless to say we went to Italy to have ourselves cured. If you’re
curious, my knee is doing pretty bad, and my wife is waiting for the
results of new blood samples.
Did I mentioned that, besides having good doctors, in Italy the weather
is gorgeous and the food is great?
You have to admit that, even though most of the news point and can be
found elsewhere, Hacker News (HN from now
on) is a pretty amazing place. It has a thriving and highly-educated
community of hackers reading, writing and posting every day. Heck,
there’s even a book with the best comment of one of them,
edw519.
However, if you get distracted easily, you
end up downloading 33GB of academic
papers
and maybe reading some of them. Or you get caught in a HTML5 version of
Mario and there goes your day.
Many people took the wrong approach to that, and created HN for your
workspace,
which may get you out of troubles with your boss or with your wife,
not solving the real problem.
there are times when I can’t get on for a week or when I know if I
open HN I will end up on there for an hour or more.
Well, it turns out that duck is a real hacker, and he puts his money
where is mouth is. He’s name is Kale Davis and he builds web apps and created
the weekly Hacker Newsletter, as
his website says. Yeah, you read it right, he made what he needed, and
made it available for everyone.
Not only that, but Kale has also agreed to reveal what lies behind the
scene of the newsletter.
Giovanni Kale, thanks for your time. When you told
HN you were going to build
a newsletter, you said it would contain the top items on Hacker News,
an editorial side, the best “Ask HN” posts, job threads, and a look
back at some past articles that would still be useful. I’d say that so
far it is really working out great.
But with all the weekly posts, how do you handpick the best? Do you ever
feel you let something out?
Kale Thanks Giovanni for asking me to do an interview! Yeah, it has
gone very well. I didn’t imagine that one year later I would have 4000+
subscribers, so I’m very happy with how it has gone. As far as picking
posts for each issue, I scrape HN every 30 minutes and then use a custom
Ruby/Sinatra web app to build out the newsletter. I use a lot of regex
statements and look at other metrics like votes, number of comments, and
who commented on it. I also use what I up-voted during the week as a
gauge too.
I definitely miss some every week, there is just too many to include. I
struggle with keeping the links down to a manageable amount for each
section too, so sometimes I might include one and then have to remove it
before I publish the newsletter. I often
tweet or use Google
Plus to share links that
I missed or didn’t make the final cut.
G. So you really are an hacker! In your about
page you wrote that you come from
the world of Microsoft. What do you mean by that? And how do you became
a “hacker” who enjoy Ruby hacking the most?
K. Haha, yeah, one of these days I’ll actually finish that about
page. When I say that, I don’t mean that I have worked for Microsoft,
but rather for the last 13 years I’ve been doing nothing but either
operations or development work with Microsoft products, mainly within
the corporate IT space. Not the most exciting jobs, but nevertheless
they have been good and I’ve learned a lot.
I got into Ruby right around when Ruby on Rails came out, I think late
2005. I’ve always been into scripting languages like Perl and PHP to
create simple sites for myself or friends, and actually used Perl a lot
within the Windows environment to do sysadm tasks. Basically, if a
task was repeatable, I would write a Perl script to do it. The moment
I saw Ruby in action though I knew it was a huge leap from what I had
been doing, so I jumped on it and been using it ever since and rewrote
everything I still used that was in Perl. Currently, I do some freelance
work on the side using it and at some point I would like to get into a
position doing Ruby or Rails programming full-time.
G. Ok, back to the newsletter then. Using again your words:
I want to do some original content as well and have some different
ideas that I am working on, but one will be highlighting projects that
HN members have release (both small and large).
Right now you highlight HN members’ project in the Code section in
the newsletter. What other ideas you had at the time? Should we expect
something new in the near future?
K. From the beginning I wanted to make HNL more than just a
newsletter and wanted it to have that community feel just like HN has.
I’ve
donesomeinterviews
in past and things like getting everyone to share what they are
reading.
In an upcoming issue look for my next idea which involves a spin on the
great The Setup blog and I have a few founder
interviews lined up too.
G. What kind of feedback do you receive in general for these ideas
and the newsletter? What’s the funniest email you got? Did someone ever
offered you a job because you run the thing?
K. I get a lot of great feedback. With every issue I get anywhere
from a couple to a dozen replies back with feedback. Most of the time it
is just subscribers thanking me, but other times it is someone offering
feedback on how to make the newsletter better or other ideas. The
funniest one I have received was from a passionate guy that couldn’t
understand why I didn’t link to one of
patio11’s great articles.
He was quite animated and sad that I had missed it! The funniest part
was I couldn’t believe I missed it either (turned out to be a bug in my
scraper). Regarding jobs, I have been offered a job (which I turned
down), but even better than that is I have made lots of great contacts.
G. We all know that great feedback is essential to keep things
going, because money ain’t everything. However I guess that money is
what you need to keep the newsletter going. That is probably the reason
that made you insert sponsors in the newsletter. Nowadays more and more
businesses are using this form of advertisement, unobtrusive and
respectful for the reader. How do you pick your sponsor and is
this model of revenue, as opposed to wild CPM ads, working out for you?
Kale Since I started Hacker Newsletter as a side project, making
money was never really something I thought about. However, as the list
grew, my costs went up and so did the time commitment. Around the same
time people started asking about sponsoring the newsletter, so I knew
I could start doing some advertising and in the end I think it is a
win win for both myself and the subscribers. I’m glad I waited until
about a year into it though just so I didn’t let that distract from
the original goal and I think letting it happen organically made the
transition really easy. I do handpick them and recently hooked up with
LaunchBit to help with the process. It
is working out great!
G. I recently made the switch from Emacs to Macvim, because of the
better Cocoa compatibility and because I was a bit tired of the Escape
Meta Alt Control
Shift
madness. I miss some features, but I appreciate many things. I heard you
use Vim as well. Can you tell us why the newsletter would have not be
possible were you using Emacs?
Kale Haha, I do use Vim and glad to hear you made the switch. It
would probably be pretty funny watching me try to use Emacs, but since
I use my custom app to build out each issue, I hardly ever have to open
up a text editor in the creation process so it wouldn’t be too big of
a deal now. However, I’m constantly working on my code and adding new
features, so I guess that would come to a stop until I picked up Emacs.
:)
When we got our first computer, 20 years ago, we managed our backups
with floppy disks. We had maybe two or three of them. As for the “backup
software” we used Norton Commander. It wasn’t really meant for the task,
but we had only a bunch of files.
Those disks were enough for us. When we got a new computer it was a matter
of minutes before every important file was accessible to the new
machine.
Ten years later my father bought a scanner, for his old photos. The TIFF
that were coming out of it were huge. We had to buy a CD recorder to fit
them somewhere. And that changed everything. The two or three floppies
became the three or four CDs, 0.6GB of data each (it seemed a lot back
then). They were lighter than the floppies but there was so much data
inside that moving to a new computer was almost a matter of hours.
But we felt safe. When I was looking at the digitalized pictures of my
grandfather hunting game, I thought about him a bit like Han Solo in
Jabba de Hutt’s mansion: he was preserved in the polycarbonate plastic
forever. Safe, ready to be seen by a click of the mouse.
Except that now the original photos are still doing fine, while their
digital counterpart has been trashed, because the CDs got unreadable.
All CDs are equal, but some CDs are more equal than others. The ones
from the music shop were more equal than the ones from the supermarket.
But we kept using them, because we’re resilient folks (or should I say
stubborn?). And so at the end of the bachelor, with a tiny iBook G4, I
was moving to the Netherlands. In my bag some of my carefully labeled
backup CDs. Again? Well, I was also carrying another device, an
external hard drive, that I used with iBackup. External? It
was mind blowing, at the time. Oh boy, spinning plates, moving parts,
you could write and rewrite on the same hard disk forever, and at the
same time carry it in your pocked and attach it everywhere.
But I wasn’t relying only on (less equal) CDs and the external HD.
People say that data needs to be redundantly stored, which is a way to
say that, if something bad happens, the consequences will not redound
upon your data. And in the case of an hard drive, your odds can be
worse than a cd, because they fail a
lot.
That means that I started sftp’ing the most important files to my
university server. Mathematica files, C++ code, LaTeX, you name it. For
me, it was the beginning of cloud storage. Now, I’ve already said what
redundant storage means: by all means you can imagine that cloud storage
means something with throwing your data out the window.
So what I have now, 2011? Well, I kept the be-redundant-with-your-data
and upload-your-data-to-the-cloud styles. Plus I grew the need of
having the same data in one or more devices. Therefore my home directory
is synced between my Macbook Pro and my iMac
SpiderOak.
This means that all the data is first encrypted, locally, and then
backed up on the web. Then I have a Dropbox
folder where I keep the data accessed by mobile app (mostly
1Password and Nebulous
Notes). Is that it? No, besides
that I have two external ZFS HDs
which hold my home folder in two different physical location. I use an
rsyncscript to do that.
My backup rig seems still silly compared to someone like John
Gruber.
He, and many more, uses
SuperDuper,
however I haven’t decided on that yet. I can’t boot from a ZFS HD, and
all my external HDs are ZFS. But it’s fine for me, and I think I’ll
never lose my data, because:
if something happens to my HDs, I have my Macs + SpiderOak
if something happens to my Macs, I have the HDs + SpiderOak
if a cataclism ruins both my house and my offsite HD, I’ll have other
things to worry about, but just in case I hope it spared SpiderOak, on
the other side of the world.
A new shiny app by Brett Terpstra,
creator of NValt. Only
available at the App Store. I’ve been using it since it came out, and
I have to say that I absolutely love it!
