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- Hacker News
- Ah, the classic programmer's mistake of treating complicated human interaction systems as a computer programs.
There is no State Almighty judging you to the last dot of absurdly complicated rules (well, in 99.99% cases when you don't actively look for trouble). Like, if you overstayed Schengen visa for one day because you messed up with counting entry and exit days, but used it otherwise for its intended purpose, the border officer likely won't even notice. Or for tax residence, a lot of countries I know just take what you say about your trips at face value - especially when there is no way to check it.
Just relax. If you don't know how to count your days in Morocco because they changed the time zone in an inconvenient moment, the officer evaluating your documents doesn't know that too. It's truth and best effort that counts.
by reisse - I just realized this was the same author who made the apple watch integration for their gym entry system, I loved their writing then, and I loved it here!
- It wasn't super obvious reading the article, but the app the author made is available for anyone to download.
https://drobinin.com/apps/residency/
If I wasn't on android and decidedly sedentary at the moment, I'd love to see how it works.
- Huge respect to the author for the details that have gone into this. I'd spent a week hammering at a Claude max 20x plan to try and build schengen 90/180 rolling window + tax residency in a couple of countries tracker... and that was hard work. I can only imagine how much effort has gone into this, to get all the details right.
It's unclear whether the author wrote all of this themselves, or if they outsourced a bunch of it to Claude. My experience with Claude was that it was terrible at writing code to do the math, even when I explained what the calculation needed to be, what the input was, and what the expected result was. It ultimately took starting a whole new project just to do the rolling window calculation, and then have that fed back in.
My biggest question for the author, if they happen to see this, is: how much manual testing validation did you do of the outputs the app produces? IE: Did you do the inputs + transformations = output calculations yourself as well, counting days on calendars, etc, to validate that the app is actually accurate? (That was the only way I developed any faith in solution I made for myself, which is way less impressive than your app). Regardless of whether you wrote the code yourself or not, a thorough test harness feels vitally important for an app like this.
by oarsinsync - Few of my relatives just went to Europe as tourists, threw away their back home tickets and went illegal. After few years they legalised and now citizens. And I'm still here, because I don't want to break the law and I don't have valid legal grounds to get the working visa. It sucks to obey the law.by vbezhenar
- It's a great article... but a strange title?
This is about all the country-specific requirements for tax residency, visas, citizenship, etc.
But I don't know what downloading a border means. The title makes it sound like this is going to be about downloading national mapping data... If the author was looking for an evocative metaphor, I don't think this one works. Maybe it's supposed to refer to:
> It would be alright with a single source of truth, but all these facts are scattered across (semi)official websites and PDFs, and you're supposed to figure it out yourself.
But they got those all through... downloading. I.e. cURL.
by crazygringo - > buy a sausage roll at Greggs
If that's the first thing he thinks of while transiting through a UK airport, he deserves a citizenship, no questions.
- I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens.
Wow, I'm almost annoyed on the authors behalf of how much hoops there are to jump through.
>To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago. Not approximately five years, not that week—that exact day when you press "submit" on the form minus five years. Miss it by 24 hours and your application is reject after months of waiting, and you have to pay a hefty fee to re-apply.
That's a hilarious requirement. I wonder how that ended up in there.
by apexalpha