skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How does your app manage external calendar events?
I want to write events to a calendar, keep them up to date and perhaps cancel them on reasonably short notice. While supporting any calendar app (not just Google Calendar).

How have you solved this in the past (or present)?
Is there a service/project that handles this smoothly?

My gut tells me that this problem has been solved many, many times before, and that someone may have written a service for it, but I can't seem to find anything.

The obvious choice seems to be the open formats: CalDAV, iCalendar etc. But I read nothing but bad things about integration with the likes of Google Calendar. From data loss to 12-24 hour delays in syncing.

So that pushes me to API integration. But integrating with every calendar API out there seems like a never-ending job.

Any insights and help are welcome.

GCal data loss:
https://evertpot.com/google-carddav-issues/

GCal delays:
https://help.cheqroom.com/en/articles/1502123-why-is-my-google-calendar-sync-slow-or-not-updating-at-all
If in 10 years you want a year off is your landlord going to give you one?
Institutional racism really does not exist, and in general, people really are not racist. Obviously, subtleties exist, and there is work to do - but by and large, people are treated fairly in 2020, moreover, there are numerous 'affirmative action' programs in place to try to make up for the issues.
The most interesting question is the one that cannot be answered in the context of this project.

> How does decomposing and displaying my life in a database change who I am or who I want to be?

The quantitative display is interesting as well; there are multiple sources where this information could be gathered from by OEMs. It does make me wonder if someone is using Apple Health, Apple Credit Card, an iPhone, and using Apple Music if most of this information isn't already available and potentially displayed in a similar manner.

Apple of course is just used as an example.
This is such a poorly written and nonsensical article. I get the hate for blockchain but please at least share something that makes sense.
I wouldn't straight out recommend fly.io. See, part of Heroku's value proposition was their excellent support.
I had asked fly.io to delete my account since there wasn't a provision to delete it from their interface and they never bothered to reply and put me in some kind of shadow ban from re-registering with my email.

I mean if this is how you're going to treat your customers, then good luck!
I'm yet to try out railway.app and..looks interesting to say the least.
> For instance, in trade finance where multiple parties in an environment with limited trust have to settle a complex transaction asynchronously, blockchain / DLT can really help.

When does that happen?
The Cold War was not a war. Thus "cold".

Throughout history, we only had a few very long wars.
Recently on Odd Lots, SBF offered to race to transfer $100,000 to the person sitting at the next desk over. The opponent could use tools such as wire transfers or checks or walking to a bank to ask to withdraw 1,000 $100 bills to send dollars, and SBF would use USDC. The person whose recipient receives the $100,000 earlier would win the race. A variation of this exercise where the money must be sent to someone in a foreign country was also proposed.

Is winning such races at all valuable?
> You can't just call all the most important aspects of monetary transfers "out of scope" if you're trying to create a system for monetary transfers.

Different people have different perspectives. Clearly a lot of coiners think it's totally fine to put the burden on the user. Of course the author is free to disagree, but it's silly to pretend there is only one possible set of priorities.
Every banking system ever? At vastly lower energy waste, at higher transaction rates, and with all the legal protection of centuries of well developed needs.
Isn't it a bit late for that laugh? Which distros in common use haven't done that already or will do so in their next release?

Ubuntu: 3 years ago

Debian: supported both merged and non-merged for a while; only merged supported since last year

Opensuse: last year (?)

Arch: btw

Fedora: 2011

...

Any big distro I am missing?
Same for bank investments, except for inheritance (but someone had to work).
A student breaching terms of a contract would still not constitute a copyright violation, which is the only thing DMCA can be used for (legally).
These kind of networks exist. Not all of them rely on a blockchain datastructure. In general, they are thousands of times more efficient than a system like bitcoin, and require no mining, however, are subject to the whims of the various political jurisdictions that those organizations exist under.
How hard would be to abstract the Hauku-specific bits into their own part? It'd be neat if it was possible to use this not only to target Haiku but also other window systems like Win32 and Cocoa.

Does something like Gtk1.2[0] (which AFAIK does more heavy use of xlib than modern GTK) work? How about Motif?

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/
Translation: the EU have installed Mastodon. https://social.network.europa.eu/public

But yes: it's a good first step to "dogfooding" not being dependent on non-EU tech services.
I would like a system where the airline had to declare the type of aircraft used on the flight at the time of booking. If at the time of departure the aircraft model actually use for the flight is different then the passenger must on request be repaid the entire value of the ticket.

This means that there is no (financial) pressure on the passenger to fly on an aircraft they do not trust.

Currently the live-or-die risk devolves to the passenger and they have no direct say in the choice of aircraft: after ticket purchase they are left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

This system might force airlines to think much much harder when making their aircraft purchasing decisions.

Just because the aircraft is certified will no longer amount to adequate commercial due diligence.

An airline which wants to protect its revenue will now need to deep-dive into the manufacturers quality procedures themselves.

Otherwise their customers can vote with their feet, at no financial cost, any time prior to departure.
You could always use the crypto currency as the store of value there, just as people did with MPesa. You don't necessarily ever have to convert it to a local currency.
Mark Zuckerberg says more workers leaving Facebook will 'make us a better compa
And discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31183882.
So you're claiming this is a rare case for which Blockchain is useful, but outside this rare, niche case normal banking is better?
"it is the only known solution to the Byzantine Generals problem that doesn't involve a centralized authority"

Did you skip that one on purpose? How do non-blockchain technologies solve the the Byzantine General's problem without relying on a (corrupt) central authority? Address this before you make more demands.
I thought this is what trending means.
Database browsing tool with sophisticated and animated Java Swing UI
Yes, I suffer dearly from it.

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed, it causes cognitive paralysis and I just mindlessly browse HN, Twitter, Reddit etc. Or I just go on accumulating stuff.

I append to my list of to-read books, to my to-read papers, to-check-out languages and frameworks, to-read articles and so on.

With information overflow, I have become an information aggregator- I download dozens of podcast episodes, add a lot of RSS feeds to reader apps, bookmark a lot of Tweets, save a lot of articles to Pocket, and the list goes on.

I am always anxious, always worried that I am not getting any work done or making any intellectual progress. This feeling lingers strongly and I keep aggregrating "stuff".

Some of it is me. I am interested in wide variety of topics- wildly unrelated. I get a very little done, but keep adding to " to-X" lists.

I am seriously worried about this and it upsets my mental piece.

I have to brutally prioritize. Or learn to simply abandon wishes. Or I am going to be crushed, if I am not already.

Funny thing is I never waste time watching memes, following stupid social-media or playing games. I am having to choose from unhealthily large amount of stuff that will enrich me, make me better. This is was makes the matter depressingly worse.

No enrichment is actually happening because of the paralysis I talked about earlier.
An automatic theorem proving project
WatchThis – Software Jailbreak for Any Kindle
I'm not sure what your point is. Yes, people are doing the thing I explained from the very start of this conversation. To recap, OP was curious why people would do it for a such a small amount of money and I pointed out, what I incorrectly assumed was non-controversial, that they don't just do one thing they do several and it adds up.
> Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted.
I don't trust this author for a start
Of course, there must be some assumption that you either have the ability to do extra work that generates income at work (could very well be the case for consultants), or you can do contract / consulting work yourself.

Writing a book falls into the category of being your own boss/business - but there are also uncertainties.

The author mentioned that he spent around two months on producing a book, and seeing that he's authored 17 books - that comes out to 34 months over 6 year. But I can't find any information on how much time is being spent during those two months. My estimates were almost two hours / pages or writing a day, and with average of 170 pages a book, that came to 80-90 days of writing, or almost 3 months. So it seems I overestimated.
As I said, little or no manual labour is involved when you pay your bills or transfer money. Bank employees meet customers, set up mortgages, program the payment infrastructure, make deals with other banks, help hide money in shady jurisdictions etc.
Uh, what's the concept for cooling the stuff? ;-)
The classic crypto phrase "choose the team".

When the team consists of one person with a monkey as their profile picture and no other details other than he's rich, another is a 20year old 10x dev who's been creating smart contracts "for years", one's the cool looking marketing genius who posts on twitter a 1000 times per hour and the rest is made up of stock imagery of middle age white men who are the "advisory board"
Depending where you live, can do that in traditional banking mobile phone apps pretty fast. The instant transfers with the European SEPA are up to €100k, I think, and they need maybe a few seconds (max. 10s AFAIK).

Not sure what the use cases for high frequency cash transfer in sub second space are.
Gas molecules in a box - entropy seems quite straighforward there. An even distribution is the most likely state and has the highest entropy.

In space, at large scales, gravity starts dominating - so stars and planets are actually a higher likelihood state than an even distribtion.

Isn't this just about statistical independence? In a small amount of gas (almost by definition of what is a gas), the particles don't have much effect on each other. One can assume statistical independence.

While in space with gravity overwhelming other effects, the particles have very much effect on each other. Hence the statistics about their state are affected by these dependencies. So the previous intuition about entropy can't hold.
The main benefit of cryptocurrency is you cannot be prevented from transacting by governments. This is also a big downside as it provides a mechanism for all kinds of crime we would rather not encourage.

But crypto brings too many other problems: climate change; local pollution; scams; gambling addiction; sucks up tech talent that could be working on something else;
There's nothing about railways or the dot com bubble that facilitate scams. New frontiers attract greedy people. Greedy people attract scammers.

However these eventually become regulated. Lawlessness was a bug that was progressively fixed. In the case of crypto, it's a feature.

> Of course these are also the people against free speech

Leave those strawmen alone. Be the HN user you want HN to have.
People could just post hackerrank problem answers to congressmen's pages and wait.
Or maybe, they are trying to cost-save, by using algorithmic methods to block people, and spam? And maybe, just like the little guy, they should curtail, and moderate manually?

There is no reason they cannot, other than it costs. And if the "little guy" can manually moderate a forum, and respond to unblock requests, then it is no problem for Facebook, or any other big player too.

In truth, Facebook would still save over "the little guy's" moderation methods, as Facebook has the size and scope to develop software tools to significantly improve the workflow of manual moderators.

All this "but it is impossible!" blather I hear, re: manual moderation just means "cause our profits would drop a little".

Oh boo hoo! Manual moderation is the future.
Lol Whot ?

Not trying to be a d*k or saying you are wrong, maybe I've only worked on simple-silly projects in my "medium'ish-long-career" so far but:

Why do you say that ? Really interested ?
I tested and created a IFTTT recipe for this:
https://ifttt.com/applets/iMnNGt3V-backup-spotify-likes

Despite the incorrect labelling "Saving a spotify track" means liking it, not "downloading to your device". So you can add it to another Spotify playlist.

To get historical likes, cmd-a / ctrl-a (or equivalent) all Liked Songs tracks and drag them into the backup playlist.
Japan I think is a bit different. Over there, housing is seen as a real commodity. In Tokyo, housing is torn down and replaced with newer stock all the time, often without any additional occupancy. Houses in Japan do not appreciate the way they do in the rest of the Western world.
You're being willfully obtuse here.

> What non-blockchain solution solves the double spend problem when transferring digital assets in a peer-to-peer network?

Literally any trusted central authority or database.

> Or, in the case of Ethereum, providing solutions to general-purpose decentralized computation and state (rather than only peer-to-peer payments) with such strong public consensus?

You haven't actually stated a problem here, you've described a solution in search of a problem.

> User A holds digital asset X (such as a valuable domain name "xyz.eth")

You're mentioning a .eth domain name being bought with cryptocurrency as an example, which is entirely circular. "Hurr durr, betcha can't swap one blockchain thing (.eth domain) for another blockchain thing (cryptocurrency tokens) without using a blockchain" isn't as strong an argument as you think it is. If we were talking about a .com domain name, no blockchain in the world will help you with that transaction.
this story led me down the rabbit hole to this corner of the internet, must be one of the original of the species:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaXt2quMCoA
That's the airplane itself, ie. you're suggesting that the airplane itself is so dangerous that other risks don't add significantly to the total danger.
Seeing "Read the rest of this story with a free account."

Nope.
> xlib is kind of terrible IMHO [...] force synchronicity on the asynchronous protocol that is X11. Lots of xlib based programs wait for a response [...]

Was fixing that the intent behind libxcb?

(honest question, my understanding of X stuff is limited, I just feel to recall Awesome depends on libxcb instead of xlib and read some vague blurb about it back then)
Of course it does. It's like saying "but Uber doesn't own any cars, they can't run a taxi service". There are pros and cons with their approach, and you might prefer the traditional way, but they purposely chose another way.
The technical solution to that is temporary CC numbers, not a giant crypto chain.
Database browsing tool with sophisticated and animated Swing UI
Good as in quality or good as in looks? I seem to read a lot about Tesla and poor reliability. https://www.sfgate.com/tech/amp/Tesla-ranks-almost-dead-last...
> I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for like 16 bitcoins or something.

Was that a coffee shop in the Holesovice area? I remember a café where you could only pay in Bitcoin, which I thought was a rather dumb idea.
> I can see all the challenges faced by cryptocurrency and understand the skepticism, but these takes that write off blockchain due to cryptocurrencies' problems exhibit a sort of surface-level perspective that I can't take very seriously

I would agree, if there were any use for the blockchain or PoW.

It's dangerous nonsense because it's an industry consisting entirely of producing scams, with huge impact to the environment, availability of graphics cards, hard drives (thanks Bram Cohen), and free tiers of everything[1].

Even bandwidth has been turned into a get-rich-quick scheme! Waste bandwidth for coins! (Obvious result: increase in use of ISP transfer caps, and/or just a congested Internet for us all)

It's one stop short of "mine my new cryptocurrency by throwing away food". People will start stealing your food deliveries in order to throw them in the trash, for money.

That's the equivalent of what's happening whenever some blockchain-buzzword new scam is created, but in internet form.

So the fact that it ruins everything is why it's dangerous. It only creates problems, and only "solves" problems by the definition of "when I want to break the law then it's a problem that I'm not allowed to". That's why it's nonsense.

[1] You can't launch a free tier turing complete anything today without having ALL your resources be taken by freeloading cryptojerks. Like if your free online puzzle game was accidentally turing complete (or less, since that's not even a hard requirement) then someone somewhere will start burning all your quota and money calculating hashes.

Like if you make "the game of life" processed server side I'm sure someone will turn it into a bitcoin miner.
>Oh, Germany. Somehow Germany has escaped the constantly increasing house price effect

I hope that was sarcasm since housing in Germany has gotten super expensive.
Where do you store things like images, PDFs, binary files etc involved in your web apps? Most CRUD apps in my experience involve some kind of artefacts that need to be stored in some way.
Please run this article through a spellcheck. There are just about 1-2 typos per paragraph through the piece, and it's extremely distracting.

Example of two typos in two consecutive sentences:

>Blinded by the shine of the *enrmous* revenues of the crypto bubble, a lot of companies and government organizations look over that. *Everbody* wants a piece of the tasty blockchain cake and tries to shove a little blockchain into something, anything.
Good attempt at a deflection, I won't casually solve the very thing that is a great example of blockchain being a solution looking for a problem.

But, given the 'real world' context I tried to stress, do you think blockchain is a good solution to the variations of that problem in real world contexts?
So deep. We all live in our matrix bubble
Lyndsay Ellis documented the mis-use of the DMCA by an author, and attempts to invoke the perjury penalties for same, across a couple of hours of video that will teach you more about wolf porn fiction ("The Tiger King of wolf porn") than you wanted to know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhWWcWtAUoY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3v5wFMQRqs

If you choose to forego the entertainment therein, the TL;DR is essentially that the time and cost of pursing a case, and enforcing it, means that the threat is worthless as a counter-balance.
The whole point is peer to peer transfer of digital assets and digital state that is recorded on-chain. The goal is not “how to transfer a physical asset.”

These assets do have market value (despite your own personal feeling on what they “should” be worth) and so users do wish to find ways of interacting with and trading them without an intermediary.

The TLD/ICANN is irrelevant, as “.eth” is a construct for Ethereum clients, not HTTPS clients.

And yes, we build trust of, say, an immutable contract address originated by a human, and continue to trust in it years later because (a) the ledger is incredibly expensive to dismantle and (b) we can cryptographically verify this on our own local node.
Wait, are you saying that scenario has been solved (or is solvable in the future) by blockchain? Where can I learn more? Is eth even a real TLD?
Mastodon, and Peertube!

https://tube.network.europa.eu/
Ask HN: Is there anything I can do with an Apple Watch without an iPhone?
Title says it all. I got an Apple Watch from my job but I have a Pixel 4a. Tried setting it up and it appears you MUST have an iPhone to use it.

Is there anything I can do with this thing besides sell it to someone who has an iPhone?

For what it's worth, the only thing I really care about there is the heart rate and O2 monitor. I would love to decouple those features if I could.
They are absolutely not nonsense. As a citizen living in a thirld-world country, with a very authoritarian government that seizes property and confiscates goods, I can tell you that Bitcoin is the ONLY method I have to transfer value in and out of the country. I don't save money or treat it like stocks, I just transfer money.

Bitcoin works, in the real world. It has worked flawlessly for over 10 years. Whether people speculate on its value, whether there are unrelated scams that use the word 'blockchain', whether people mistakenly write the address and lose money, or whether transactions have 'no refunds', that doesn't take any of the value. It was a known danger from the very beginning.

This article, on the other hand, is complete nonsense. Same as most takes that conflate Bitcoin with blockchain with NFTs with pyramid schemes and throwing them all into one big bag.

PS: I can only speak for the Bitcoin (proof of work) blockchain. It's innovative, it passed the test of time, and it's secure due to how strengthened it is.
Finally, a reason to over-engineer your app
There has been one case - the Addison Caine lawsuit - but the fact that it's only one shows how ineffectual the provisions are as a counterbalance.
TL/DR what are the pings?
You can start with a breadboard, oscilloscope and a set of standard parts (LEDs, resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes). Combine this with a microcontroller you can flash via USB dongle or an RaspberryPi. Should all fit on a desk.

The lab is really only necessary for soldering and creating custom PCBs.
There aren't many things that are more against "hacker culture" than taking down an open-source repository via a DMCA notice. The fact that HackerRank had to apologize due to public pressure cant' really excuse this, in my opinion.
> Cash largely doesn't.

If you get a contract/receipts you can use the legal system to attempt to recover your cash. With blockchain that's technically impossible?

There recently was a piece of news about some blockchain believers who locked themselves out of 20 million in <random crypto coin> because they used a "smart contract" and their code was buggy. Both the payer and the payee would like the transaction to go through but neither can do anything about it.

Edit: random link

https://vnexplorer.net/aku-ethereum-nft-launch-ends-with-34m...
> Normally, cases of fraud or mistakes could be rectified or reverted by the bank or similar institutions after a review of the situation by humans.

Why do people keep repeating this obviously false idea? Fraud happens with bank transfers all the time and banks don't reverse them. There are humans reviewing it, and they say "hmm, looks like the money's gone, sorry."
I did a fair bit with a solderless breadboard when I was a teenager, components just push into the connectors on the board. Obviously this won't let you use surface mount components but you can get started. If I was that age now then an FPGA dev board would be good too.

Another comment suggested working at a hackerspace, you might need your own "toys" to take there.