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.
There's some similarity between nationality and copyright: arcane, obscure, complex and mean rules that only benefit incumbents and punish everyone else.
The problem with those rules is that they "all make sense" somewhat (and where details might have been influenced by local idiosyncrasies) locally but if you mix and match them then it gets weird
But the trick here is: if you're relying on the details for your benefit then make 100% sure it's provable (though tbh legal proof is less - and different - than what your HN commenter might understand). Or just make it easy on yourself and don't rely on them
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!
I wonder if this is something that could be built on top of Google location tracking. Presumably there's not enough info there by itself, but basic time/position data should be sufficient.
This made me appriciate the amount of visa-free travel my passport allows me on a whole new level. Figuiring these things out seems possible, but so inefficient and time consuming.
It’s not just that. I’m about 1/3 in one country, 1/3 in another one, and 1/3 in others, with income from multiple countries… I pay all my taxes (even more than I should), but hell, I won’t make the paper trail completely clean, because there is pain there. A lot. Tax authorities are utterly incompatible with each other.
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.
> To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago.
I am confused whats British citizenship application to do with his, or any travel at all? That's not what you do regularly, I mean most people do not apply for citizenship in other countries ever in their lives? Or am I missing something?
Right now the biggest problem in life is the country of my passport.
I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me.
sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country.
And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries.
I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.
FWIW I have been asked for this a couple of times and I always just included the transits that were stamped in my current passport. Maybe I got lucky but I got away with it...
You've been lucky in that the countries you've travelled to all stamped your passport.
This gets much murkier in the EU, or being a non-citizen with Global Entry traveling to the US, etc.
To get a driving license in Japan without having to retake the exam, I had to prove that I lived in the country that issued my license for at least 90 days after I got it (presumably because they had some issues with people getting licenses in jurisdictions that are... easier to get the licenses in.).
This was a _very_ non-trivial thing to do for a document I first got over ten years ago, in a country that is part of the Schengen zone.
> I couldn't find any legit reasons for keeping the "six-month rule" around but it seems like it's still occasionally checked, sometimes even during boarding.
Airlines sometimes check for things during boarding. Those things are never rules outside the context of the airline.
I had an airline require once that I complete a form before boarding that, by the terms printed on the form, expired before the plane landed. That didn't matter to them.
Airlines are clueless. I don't know why they do their imaginary checks.
Once you've lived in a few countries you start to see how silly their little rules are. Once you are asking cross jurisdictional questions there is nobody who can give you a correct answer, its all guesswork.
It seems that it has become quite popular that images don't expand anymore, when clicking on them. One needs to use the context menu "open in new tab" to get a properly readable image. Why?
57 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 69.2 ms ] threadIt'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.
I hope we will eventually get rid of both.
I often wonder what the world would look like if humans could fly like birds. There would be cages everywhere.
But the trick here is: if you're relying on the details for your benefit then make 100% sure it's provable (though tbh legal proof is less - and different - than what your HN commenter might understand). Or just make it easy on yourself and don't rely on them
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910865
If that's the first thing he thinks of while transiting through a UK airport, he deserves a citizenship, no questions.
- search it on a search engine -> google it
- fetch it from an API -> cURL it
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.
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.
I am confused whats British citizenship application to do with his, or any travel at all? That's not what you do regularly, I mean most people do not apply for citizenship in other countries ever in their lives? Or am I missing something?
I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me.
sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country.
And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries.
I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.
FWIW I have been asked for this a couple of times and I always just included the transits that were stamped in my current passport. Maybe I got lucky but I got away with it...
This gets much murkier in the EU, or being a non-citizen with Global Entry traveling to the US, etc.
To get a driving license in Japan without having to retake the exam, I had to prove that I lived in the country that issued my license for at least 90 days after I got it (presumably because they had some issues with people getting licenses in jurisdictions that are... easier to get the licenses in.).
This was a _very_ non-trivial thing to do for a document I first got over ten years ago, in a country that is part of the Schengen zone.
Airlines sometimes check for things during boarding. Those things are never rules outside the context of the airline.
I had an airline require once that I complete a form before boarding that, by the terms printed on the form, expired before the plane landed. That didn't matter to them.
Airlines are clueless. I don't know why they do their imaginary checks.
https://juxt.github.io/tick/
if you cant express it with the tools it gives you, it generally means youre making unsafe assumptions