> I made one of these too, but a minimal/fast HTML/CSS/JS web app
Same story here. But not sure if yours had a backend. Mine did not have one and stored everything on the browser datastore, but could export it to some free json hosting service after encrypting and compression so that it can be synced to other devices and used from them as well.
Was not aware of anything that did the same, thought it would be useful (mostly because it would be totally free to use, could be accessed from multiple devices and respected user privacy) and shared here couple of days back.
Zero interest! Ha ha. At least I didn't spend a lot of resources on it and made it for my own use. It have been working well for me for many years.
One big benefit of a google sheet over a web app is that you're not relying on the creator to keep maintaining it. You can copy the sheet and then you have it forever. (Unless Google shuts down sheets, but even for Google that's unlikely.)
>"The big suppliers can ratchet up prices with zero consequences. What are you gonna do about it?"
I think one (uncomfortable) solution is this. Consumers should budget their expenses. So when the egg prices increase, they should consume less to maintain their budget for eggs, for example, a month.
This will mean that when the companies increases prices, more of their stock will remain unsold, increasing their expenses stocking them to go up. This could also cause disruptions on their supply chain. This should force them to reduce prices.
It doesn't have to be so formal, and for most people it's more like "wow eggs have gotten expensive, I'll skip buying them this week" that is what I do, same with beef and anything else that just seems like it costs too much. Or I'll shop around, there are people selling eggs from their home-kept chickens at the side of the road for less than supermarket prices (I realize that doesn't scale, at least not quickly).
I do the same for EVERYTHING. my wife and I make a decent living but we drew lines when the prices started going up. we can afford it, not just eggs but also other things that have been price gouged in the last couple of years. issue is of course there are not enough of us to make a difference
There is no economic system that can accommodate a population that refuses to respond to prices. That said, I think your numbers are overly pessimistic.
The critical part to remember is that people dont have to do the math and do the budgetary calculus. If they cant afford the eggs, they cant buy them.
I think there is small percentage of people that cannot afford the eggs. we are not talking diamond rings here - even if dozen eggs were $20 it is still $20 - most families can afford that...
Fair enough. I suppose it is your decision to donate 1%.
But would you like your president to make that decision for you? Would it be okay with it you if they asked you to sacrifice like 60% of your pay towards this cause, that too indefinitely?
"HN discovers the concept of taxes, gets mad about it."
With that kind of argument sewers are also clearly unconscionable, after all they cost money you didn't donate. In that hyperbolic case where the EU throws 60% of it's productivity for the war effort, Ukraine would win in 6 months. That's an absurd amount of equipment, and more importantly with that kind of money you can set up a foreign legion that would vacuum every half-decent soldier without better prospects from Ethiopia to Perú. This will not happen of course, a wartime economy is not necessary to retake the invaded territories. The "WW3 totally gonna happen guys!!!11" is also exasperating, no, nothing is gonna be nuked unless someone attacks Moscow, which also will not happen.
It's a donation towards the greater good of Europe, so up to a certain amount I am absolutely for it. I have no say in taxation in the first place (well, indirectly through voting, but you know what I mean).
60% is excessive though, and would make it impossible for people to pay bills. That's detrimental for the future of Europe :)
Russia won't ever use a nuke, because then India and China are not going to support them again ever. I am not scared a single bit of any nuclear saber rattling. The biggest threat is an uncontested russia.
Lemme reuse the same response I give to my antivaxxer and climate change denier friend: If only you would have spent the time watching those videos doing something useful world would be a nicer place.
Half of the sons, daughters, and mistresses of Russian leadership and their plutocratic friends enjoy vacationing or living in western Europe, so they will probably replace Putin with somebody else or let Russia lose and run away with their pockets full of money before letting any nuke fly.
> But would you like your president to make that decision for you?
Not without a discussion, of course, and I may disagree with the decision after the discussion, but on the whole I have been happy enough with the parliamentary systems where I have lived within Europe that I can say yes to this.
What would upset me and concern me to no end would be if the premiere went rogue and made these decisions unilaterally while ignoring all other branches of the government.
So basically, I think at this point if you support this to go on, then you are really willing to face an all out war that possibly involves your country. So there is a real chance that you won't be able to limit how your pay will be affected. But things could get much worse if some country goes nuclear.
So what I am trying to say is that may be some people are acting from this point of view (which makes a lot of sense to me, if you are realistic), and is actually not unsympathetic to Ukraine.
I'm not able to make sense of what you're saying in this context, I apologise. There's a lot of "this" and "it" with very little clarity regarding what those actually refer to.
There will never be a perfect direct democracy but a lot of Europe is pretty good on the democracy index. Of course things could always be better and there are always worries of regression but it's been my experience that I've felt decently represented; I've spoken with my representatives, I've felt heard and I've felt that my views were reflected in debates at the highest levels.
Why not? I've had direct contact with not only my own representatives on the local, national and European level, but also with members who didn't represent me directly but who nonetheless provided open ears to my issues. I have been able to vote for all three since I turned 18, as well as in various other referenda. Where are you, and what is different about your situation that you are denied this?
Because the parties I support are not left wing or far-left wing. So it gets called Nazis and ignored even though it gets a lot of support, but because it doesn't align with the mainstream narrative of mass media and governments and challenges the existing status quo.
Most European countries have proportional elections, at least for some levels of the government. Such elections give a pretty good idea of the popular support for various ideologies. On the average, parties that are broadly aligned with US Republicans get ~25% of the votes, though there is a lot of variation from country to country.
>Share of respondents who said Trump would be good or bad for their country..
No no, that is not what is being said here. To match with it, the poll should ask if they would like someone like Trump to be their leader, not if Trump in US would be bad for their country.
The whole issue is that the President of the Ukraine choose to argue in an event that was just ceremonial to an agreement that he agreed to. It was NOT supposed to be a discussion or negotiations. The POTUS and vice president were pissed because the Ukraine president tired to put them in a difficult situation when the media was involved, particularly when he has came in the guise of already having agreed to sign the agreement.
That is literally what the vice president said he said the Ukraine president was being "deeply disrespectful", and know what, I agree.
> Speaking of being childish, that whole exchange reminded of being bullied in grade school. Zelenskiy handled it much better than I would have.
Oh ya, for sure. Where and when I grew up (in the North-Western USA a good forty years back) the natural reaction to a bully gettin' all up in your face was to haul off and knock 'em the hell out, regardless of how important or untouchable they thought they were... Pretty sure I'd be lounging in a federal prison or Guantanamo right now if I'd have been Zelenskyy in that room that day. He's got far more self-control than I would have had.
In my viewing of it, Zelensky was very respectful in the face of extreme, and unwarranted, condescension. The biggest disagreement was started by Zelensky politely correcting Trump on a fact. Trump and Vance escalated from there.
>POTUS and vice president were pissed
I don't care if they were pissed, they need to act like fucking statesmen!
I'm allowed to be a little uncivil here because I'm not the fucking POTUS. Let's hold our nation's best and brightest to a high standard. They're supposed to be figures that we aspire to emulate.
>The biggest disagreement was started by Zelensky politely correcting Trump on a fact.
Which fact was this? That diplomacy will not work? Then why did he choose to come to sign the deal? Don't you think it to be dishonest and disrespectable to have an agreement, and when the other party believes it and provides them an audience, do a U turn and start arguing about stuff in public? I am not saying that they shouldn't argue. But that should have been before making the agreement and coming to the Oval office.
>I don't care if they were pissed, they need to act like fucking statesmen!
Ha! I think a statesman is supposed to have some amount of maturity and wisdom. And if a person have those things in an average quantity, they will know NOT to utter things that wouldn't advance their cause. And they will know what those things are. What this president have shown here is the utter lack of both, because those words spoken out of emotion, not only did not advance their cause, but have put them in a much worse position.
That Russia does not keep agreements and did not kept agreements in the past. Likencomon, this is not opinion difference, but fact. Likewise you spread lies about how war started and how, President have to respond.
Correcting and responding in public is normal in politics, business ... except in Russia, North Korea and China communist party.
And these were NOT relitigations, he came to sign. Just a facts about world
> And if a person have those things in an average quantity, they will know NOT to utter things that wouldn't advance their cause.
After that exchange Zelensky got full, energetic and unified support of the whole Europe and full support of his own people across political spectrum. And he sacrificed nothing because trump was openly signalling for a month that support of USA is already lost. The only cause that was not advanced was USA's.
USA mostly lost defense market in Western countries. What's a Patriot battery good for if US is going to suddenly and surprisingly align with your enemy and stop selling you the rockets for it?
Trump's temper tantrum intentionally triggered by Vance coached by backseat billionaires who put him where he is gave Zelensky everything he could realistically hope for from this meeting.
I hope defending his ego was worth it. It feels a bit like defending your ego against a bully with a 3 year old in tow. Even if you are right, there's no need to expose your dependents to the rage of a psychopath you need something from. This spat is going to cost Ukraine -- it already has.
Also not an American, and naturally more appealed by an Obama than a Trump.
I don't want to contribute any fuel to an online "political discussion", but yet I think it might be useful for some to hear that it's never been more visible to me how much the "left" also has its own issues with alternate reality.
How people reacted to this interview was another symptom of that.
Yep, Zelensky started an argument with Vance about diplomacy, referring to him informally as JD even (this was disrespectful), and that's when it started breaking down. Makes me wonder how he became a successful politician, he completely misread the room.
You can frame it however you want but Zelensky was the one who was looking for support. If you don't follow protocol, the you get what happened, which. is complete loss of support until you come around
He was looking for support, and what he got was an offer to pillage his country.
He would have been his country's disgrace if he just signed that "deal" as it stood, and Trump would have boasted about it for years, of how stupid Zelensky had been, and how he stole 500 billions in return for nothing.
You can see from the beginning of the press conference that something wasn't right, Zelensky was probably expecting a discussion rather than the direct signing that Trump began talking about.
Zelensky, if he didn't want things to break down, for sure exaggerated in how he behaved, he wasn't able to contain his distress.
But just signing that agreement, without trying anything, would have been foolish, and things are likely to end better for Ukraine now.
I'm bewildered that no attempt was made to get a minerals agreement with Europe, by the way; if Ukraine really has to give up some of its resources, it would be a lot wiser to give them to Europe, you can't place any whatsoever trust in the US right now.
A deal with Europe could let them get much more involved with the war, by bolstering the public support for it; and yes, Europe has a lot less military resources than the US, but at least you can rely on its word.
I agree it was a bad deal for Zelensky but he should not have gone to DC in the first place. It gave the impression that he was willing to compromise and since he was not, relations broke down.
Europe will need years to build up a military and until then will have to rely on the US for troops, equipment, intelligence. And so they would need permission from the US to do anything. So Ukraine cannot go directly to Europe.
In a sensible world, we would be using this, instead of whatsapp. It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".
>It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".
WhatsApp lets people find each other with phone numbers instead email addresses. This has a profound difference in real-world usability because it decreases friction.
Before WhatsApp, people texted each other using cell companies' SMS service.
Why did Person A (who already had an email address) send a SMS text to Person B (who also already had an email address) to chat?!? Because both people already had each others' phone number in their smartphone's address books. Recording each other's email address is less likely so it won't be used as "ids" to chat -- especially between friends & family.
To wit, my mother has already memorized my brand new phone number that I've only had for a few years but she doesn't know my email address at all even though I've sent it and re-sent it to her multiple times. To normal people, the phone numbers are more sacred than email addresses. WhatsApp was a continuation of the conveniences of SMS -- without paying 10 cents per message to the mobile phone carriers.
Friction from cognitive overhead is a big deal in technology adoption.
> Why did Person A (who already had an email address) send a SMS text to Person B (who also already had an email address) to chat?!?
Arguably primarily because they want to chat with them and not email them. The two have vastly different UX beyond just contact discovery.
Before WhatsApp there were ICQ (also number-based!), MSN, Skype... WhatsApp's main contribution over these was indeed using phone numbers and contacts access for automated contact discovery, but I don't think it makes sense at all to characterize it as a usability improvement on email.
Another case in point: iMessage supports email addresses as identifiers too. I don't even have my phone number on there because I consider it a strictly inferior identifier (it changes every time I move countries, I lose it if payments to my operator ever lapse, unlike a TLD I have no way of owning it independently from a phone plan etc.)
>but I don't think it makes sense at all to characterize it as a usability improvement on email.
Chats in general (not WhatsApp specifically) have "better" usability than email for some people because:
+ chats skipp the extra keystrokes of email workflow such as "Compose new email" and then enter an extra "Subject:" line which makes normal people put useless things in there such as "a quick question..." and then put the real conversation in the email body. It's a bunch of extra friction for no reason when communicating informally between friends & family.
+ chat ids such as phone numbers are not given out as freely as email addresses which makes chats have less spam and clutter and more easily isolated to personal communications. Email inboxes are clogged up with a bunch of non-chat mails like shipment notifications from Amazon.
I actually prefer email comms and have told my family to send me emails instead of text chats because I'm always at my desk and can use my full keyboard to type out a reply -- but -- they ignore me and always just send text chats. Normal people have a mental model that's geared toward text chats.
E.g. I saw my aunt again 30 years after she last saw me and one of the first things she asked was "What's your phone #? I want to send you a photo when you were little." And because I received her text, I now have my aunt's phone # in my Contacts app. But I don't have her email address. She never gave it to me; and I never asked for it.
Exchanging phone #s is the natural thing to do between friends & family. On the other hand, exchanging emails is often more natural when interacting in business settings or dealing with people at arms length.
Email address is a *far* better identifier than a random string of numbers though. The only reason why phone number discoverability works better is because everyone keeps being in that ancient world.
>both people already had each others' phone number in their smartphone's address book...
Look if it is saved in the smartphone's address book, why does it matter if it is email or a phone number. I bet that people don't actually memorize even the phone numbers of people close to them these days.
>Why did Person A (who already had an email address) send a SMS text to Person B (who also already had an email address) to chat?!?
I think it is because we didn't have near universal internet access in smartphones for a long time. If Whatsapp (or something like that) was a little bit late to appear, and the tech crowd was actually a bit more smarter, things like Delta Chat had a much better chance to be in Whatsapps current place.
>Look if it is saved in the smartphone's address book, why does it matter if it is email or a phone number.
Because when people interact with each other in informal situations, it's the phone numbers that are shared. Not email addresses. Thus, email addresses are often not in the Contacts app at all.
That ship seems to have largely sailed and the trend will be hard to reverse given how cell number has started to become all-purpose ID number tracker.
To say nothing of the fact that most people are not running their own email servers so that messaging is going to reside in places they don't own and the fact that relays get to read about everything exacerbating that problem, so you cannot really expect forward secrecy:
Does this solve all the other problems with encrypted email, which is not widely used for a reason?
messaging is going to reside in places they don't own
but that is the case with every messenger that stores messages on your behalf. telegram, whatsapp, signal... with those ALL people are not running their own servers.
whatsapp and signal store encrypted copies of the messages, and so does deltachat.
beyond that each client also stores a copy of each message locally. as does deltachat.
in difference to all others at least with deltachat i have a choice to use a different server that i trust. with whatsapp and signal i don't have that choice.
> most people are not running their own email servers
I honestly don't care about what the people I communicate with do, as long as I have the capability to at least own my persistent identifier (i.e. my TLD).
Just having that capability exerts just the right type of pressure on large service providers to maintain a baseline quality of service, regardless of whether the majority actually makes use of it or not, just like phone number portability has done in that domain.
Does this solve all the other problems with encrypted email
it doesn't solve all of them but a few at least. i don't believe using pgp itself is a problem. if it was deltachat could replace it with another better encryption.
metadata is a problem. that could be solved by removing messages from the email server and storing them elsewhere. (or storing them back on the server with the metadata removed). that doesn't prevent intermediate mail forwarders from keeping a copy though.
i think that is the real problem. deltachat doesn't control the communication channel and can't prevent leaking. i don't know how matrix or jabber compare here. if they use intermediate servers to forward messages the problem would remain.
message content leaking is not a problem because messages won't ever be decrypted on the server.
long term secret leaking is a problem tied to the current implementation of pgp. deltachat could change that (and maybe it does?)
Email is the completely wrong protocol choice for instant messaging. It's just a completely different use case. You wouldn't send a letter to the fire department if your house is on fire either.
I think the point is that it builds on existing infrastructure that almost everyone already has in their life. Whether you self-host, use a niche provider, or a mainstream provider, email provides a pretty interoperable starting point which isn't a walled garden and doesn't have to be owned by FAANG.
Are there some compromises? Of course. But creating new accounts, or using new services isn't one of them. Email-speed instant messaging is good enough for me.
And to be honest, as much as I like Matrix, it has plenty of compromise of its own - including speed/reliability when using their own servers.
When you use XMPP or Matrix you know your message will be delivered instantly. When you use email you don't. But that's only because we haven't defined an extension that tells the client whether the server can deliver messages instantly. It's not really that inherent to the system. Surely you've had at least one real-time conversation by email because both of you happened to be online at the same time and nothing went wrong necessitating a message delay.
Yes, it's theoretically possible to adapt many protocols to many use cases, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Email and XMPP are just geared towards very different use cases.
In particular, Email has a lot of assumptions about acceptable delivery delays, bidirectional (non-)reachability etc. baked in that would be very hard to globally undo.
As programmers, is it not our natural instinct to create a ChatSystem and MailSystem on top of a GenericMessageDeliverySystem? When did we stop doing that? Creating a brand new GenericMessageDeliverySystem for each purpose comes with substantial costs. We don't reinvent the Internet to create WhatsApp.
Email is a communication system with a lot of moving parts. You can't have reliable IM through existing MX servers but you may have it if for example SMTPs are running on your machine and you poll their data more (it's just an example, I know that with an SMTP running on your phone you'd have more problems).
See earlier on today's front page, another all in one mail server. It is much, much simpler than it was to do this. I've been self hosting email for nearly 20 years and the state of the art is considerably better now. Latency is virtually nonexistent and federation works.
I mean... WhatsApp is literally XMPP / Jabber... It's amazing that we didn't stop and said, wait, Jabber can do this, we just need a pretty UI...
Hell, Jabber can still do this. I'm not convinced of the other modern alternatives that don't have half the functional capabilities that Jabber do.
The only "downside" of Jabber is that it's XML based, but really if you think about it, that's a strength. Anyone here could probably parse the protocol effortlessly. There's also lots of fully functional clients out today, and servers that scale like nobody's business.
I'm more ashamed we don't invest more into XMPP: Google Talk, Facebook Chat and WhatsApp were built around it. These are companies with insane to scale userbases, tried and tested.
Here's a 2008 article from Facebook on using their chat with a Jabber client:
> it's XML based, but really if you think about it, that's a strength
Nope.
Another downside is the X. The protocol being extensible means that no two clients implement the same subset of extensions making it useless. I’ve been scolded in the past for using the "wrong" client, making my messages look weird for people using the "right" client. Just make a good protocol.
I am curious about the plan of Europe about on countering a nuclear first strike on Ukraine by Russia, because the latter has run out of options because the war dragged on and on by the support from Europe, draining Russia of everything they have..
They can always just stop? It's not as if Ukranian tanks are at the gates of Moscow, it's more like the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or the previous USSR withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It is unclear whether the UK or France would threaten a retaliatory strike in case of nuclear weapons use not against their own territory. It doesn't seem likely, but if there's one thing Putin is very cautious about it's his own personal survival.
They can, but that is what I am wondering about. Will a desperate Putin think he can get away with a nuclear first strike on Ukraine? If he thinks he can, why stop?
I won't claim to be able to read Putin's mind, but:
Considering that the Russian government continues to sell this invasion to its people as a "special military operation" and bans calling it a "war", what impact would using nuclear weapons have on the internal politics of Russia?
I also invite you to consider the converse: Ukraine is already asking if it made a mistake by giving up its nuclear weapons, and I have heard plausible claims they could construct a nuclear device within a few months… a few months ago.
The US withdrawing all support, may well result in Ukraine making their own nuclear weapons — and attacking Russia with them to make the point, given that Putin seems to have great difficulty understanding that the Ukrainian people don't want him.
>What was Putin’s intention in the war? I can tell you what his intention was. It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality. And that happened within seven days of the start of the invasion. You should understand this, not the propaganda that’s written about this.
>Oh, that they failed and he was going to take over Ukraine. Come on, ladies and gentlemen. Understand something basic. The idea was to keep NATO. And what is NATO?
>It’s the United States off of Russia’s border. No more, no less. I should add one very important point. Why are they so interested? First, because if China or Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or in the Canadian border, not only would the United States freak out, we’d have war within about ten minutes.
>In 2022, Sachs appeared several times on one of the top-rated shows funded by the Russian government, hosted by Vladimir Solovyov, to call for Ukraine to negotiate and step away from its "maximalist demands" of removing Russia from Ukrainian territory.
>Sachs has suggested that the U.S. was responsible for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. In February 2023, he was invited by the Russian government to address the United Nations Security Council about the topic.
Putin acts pretty rationally, just with flawed information. "Launching a full-scale invasion on the capital with the intention of negotiating neutrality" is a crazy plan he would never come up with. That's like beating someone up to get them to like you. The initial goal of the invasion was clearly to remove the democratically elected leadership of Ukraine, and then either incorporate it into Russia or (more likely) to install a puppet government that's more favorable of Russia.
On day 7, the three-day military excursion to Kyiv had stalled, the Russian army was scrambling to establish supply routes and figure out logistics for a war that should have been over, and Putin was trying to convert a stalemate into something he could call a success. Nobody at the time would have claimed that his behavior on day 7 was reflective of his plans on day 1, when days 3-7 were clearly not going his way.
I don't know, may be Russia see NATO + US as a much bigger threat than how NATO see Russia as a threat. Or may be NATO have some other ways of dealing with this threat.
> may be Russia see NATO + US as a much bigger threat than how NATO see Russia as a threat
Or maybe Russia see eastern and central Europe as their sphere of influence, which they lost. And now they're using any excuse to try to re-establish that.
What kind of NATO danger did they expect from Georgia?
Russia had zero reason to see de-militarised Europe as a threat.
I don't know, may be Russia see NATO + US as a much bigger threat than how NATO see Russia as a threat.
That's certainly true now, even if it wasn't true before. So why would Putin act in a way that was absolutely guaranteed -- win, lose or draw -- to fortify and entrench NATO's presence on Russia's borders?
His NATO excuse never made any sense. Don't invade anybody, and you have nothing to fear from NATO.
>It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality.
Umm, no. Bullshit. That's my response. It's the 3rd time in a decade Putin pulled this off. Let's not pretend this is anything about NATO obligations. He wants to take back land he feels was always his (aka the most common reason for war)
Liars going to lie, ehh? No, the reason for this milirarny operatia was to exterminate Ukrainian nation, erase it from the history. Destroy and disperse it. There is enough proof for this, starting with the Putin's manifest about non existence of Ukrainians.
The only reason why Russia is so much against NATO is the article 5, because it makes attacking peaceful nations expensive and risky for Russia.
Same story here. But not sure if yours had a backend. Mine did not have one and stored everything on the browser datastore, but could export it to some free json hosting service after encrypting and compression so that it can be synced to other devices and used from them as well.
Was not aware of anything that did the same, thought it would be useful (mostly because it would be totally free to use, could be accessed from multiple devices and respected user privacy) and shared here couple of days back.
Zero interest! Ha ha. At least I didn't spend a lot of resources on it and made it for my own use. It have been working well for me for many years.