askonomm

Voting, much like all other things in Estonia such as getting married/divorced, doing taxes, signing documents, starting/closing companies, notary dealings, bank dealings, selling/buying vehicles, and many more things I can't even think of right now are entirely done via the digital ID that every citizen has. This means that you authorize/sign actions with it, including voting, because only you have your private keys (either in your personal ID card, in your phone's sim card, etc) that you yourself know the PIN for, which then authenticates you as being you. I think we're now at a point where there isn't a single government or business dealing you can not do entirely online (https://e-estonia.com/solutions/).

It costs as much as your ID card costs by the government, and lasts as long as well. They are one and the same. Applying for a new ID card / national ID document in Estonia costs 35€ and the document is valid for 5 years. If you forget your PIN code, you can reset it with your PUK codes, but if you also lose your PUK codes you need to apply for a new ID card. The process for getting a new ID card from the moment you applied for it takes no more than 30 days. You can also have it fast tracked for 250€ and get it in 2 days.

But, like the parent said, you have many other options other than the physical ID-card as well. Most people these days use Mobiil-ID or SmartID, which works on your phone and even smart watch. SmartID is completely free and Mobiil-ID is tied to your phones carrier, so the cost varies, but it's a one-time set-up fee of around 5€. Mobiil-ID certificate also lasts 5 years.

In Estonia you can easily do banking via the website on all the banks (LHV, Swedbank, SEB). That said, we do have it all integrated with our digital-ID (which every ID card has private keys encoded into with a PIN you know) so it's not like you can access it with a simple password (our online voting works the same way).

Why are so many Americans trying to move to the EU? Turns out people have different wants and needs in life, and so they move to where they like best. I for one would never set foot in USA in fear of being shot, kidnapped by ICE (or shot by ICE), fear of being bankrupt by the healthcare options there if something happens to me, fear of the poison you call food, and the absolutely ignorant populace that seems to roam the streets there. I swear half the times I can't even tell if USA is a real place or some really bizarre reality TV show.

More and more reason for Europe to become decoupled from USA. This is not an attack on USA, merely my opinion that you should not have your eggs in one basket.

Yup, totally! I'm also not against the evolution of software engineer to a software architect. We were on that direction already anyway with the ever increasing amount of abstraction in our libraries and tools. This also frees up my ability to do other things, like coordinate cross team efforts, deal with customer support issues, etc. As a generalist, I feel more useful and thus valuable than ever, and that makes me very happy.

Seems like the author has a case of all or nothing. The real power in agentic programming, to me, is not in extremes, but in that you are still actively present. You don't give it world-size things to do, but byte-sized, and you constantly steer it. It's to be detailed enough to produce quality, and to be aware of everything it produces, but not so detailed that it makes sense to just write the code yourself. It's a delicate balance, but once you've found it, incredibly powerful. Especially mixed with deterministic self-checking tools (like some MCP's).

If you "set and forget", then you are vibe coding, and I do not trust for a second that the output is quality, or that you'd even know how that output fits into the larger system. You effectively delegate away the reason you are being paid onto the AI, so why pay you? What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills?

Agentic programming to me is just a more efficient use of the tools I already used anyway, but it's not doing the thinking for me, it's just doing the _doing_ for me.

It's difficult to describe just how many people are using Windows not because they choose to, but because they have to. Whether it is because the corporations they work at only give them Windows PC's or because whatever software that they need only runs on Windows. Being able to choose your operating system that you also do work with is largely a luxury of software engineers, I think, but for your average Joe you get what you get, even if it sucks.

Microsoft has an amazing sales team forcing vendor lock-in at corporations, schools and governments all over the world, no wonder they get tons of users.

As a Clojure developer I have the opposite experience. The more they ignore my open source work, the more they never call up any of my references, the more they give me useless test jobs and assignments unrelated to the actual work, the more it's a signal of a place with poor engineering culture and generally also not that great salaries.

However the places that actually do read my open source work, do contact my references, and where the interview has had no tech assignments of any kind other than a simple discussion about a variety of topics, perhaps just going over some of my OSS projects, the higher the salary has been.

This is in Northern Europe though, your mileage may vary.

Then that's not vibe coding though.

Vibe coders who enjoy code? I thought the whole idea of vibe coding is that you don't enjoy code, don't want to ever see code, and just let AI do everything YOLO mode?

The weird thing is that, at least as an Estonian, I would've never expected this from Germany. Italy, Spain? Sure. Germany? That just feels weird.

That's crazy. Notarization in Estonia can be done entirely online using a digital signature, just like everything else here is done (including voting, getting married, getting divorced, filing taxes, opening/closing a company, etc). From all I hear Germany is still stuck in the 90s for some reason.

Well there is NB8 and JEF, of which I (Estonia) are also part of.

I wonder how long will people write things when LLM's will just steal the content and leave no attribution? I doubt for very long.

As someone who works at a place where we do a lot of code analysis and also research AI's effect on code quality, if you do not even so much as look at your code anymore, I do not believe you are creating maintainable, quality software. Maybe you don't need to, or care to, but it's definitely not what's sustainable in long-term product companies.

AI is a force multiplier - it makes bad worse, it _can_ make good better. You need even more engineering disciplines than before to make sure it's the latter and not the former. Even with chaining code quality MCP's and a whole bunch of instructions in AGENTS.md, there's often a need to intervene and course adjust, because AI can either ignore AGENTS.md, or because whatever can pass code quality checks does not always mean the architecture is something that's solid.

That being said, I do agree our job is changing from merely writing code, to more of a managerial title, like you've said. But, there's a new limit - your ability to review the output, and you most definitely should review the output if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software.

I for one don't remember software ever being very good. Windows XP crashed all the time and needed frequent formats due to all the viruses (all antivirus software) that made it unusable. Win 2k was even worse. Old MacOS's also crashed frequently. Old Linux's had barely any hardware support. In fact while I agree that software is more bloated than ever, it also seems more stable than ever thinking back to what was before.

I have a Framework 16, and as for it being a Linux machine I couldn't be happier with it. I still daily drive my MacBook Pro 16 instead, because it's just a more polished, more performant (and better battery life) machine, but still, I also really like my Framework 16. I eagerly await the time when Linux desktops reach the level of polish I'd like to have, and I feel like that isn't that far away anymore.

Many (most?) WYSIWYG editors automatically convert two hyphens (--) to em dash, no need to specifically look out for it.

I vividly remember having to reinstall Windows also in the XP days at least once a year due to malware or due to anti-malware software slowly strangling the OS.

I'd like to add to this that do not make any food with chilli peppers like habanero or such if you just came from the gym with torn skin. I found out the hard way.

Discovered in-door bouldering / rock climbing and now go 3x a week, am absolutely loving it! Because of that, I haven't really worked on any side projects in a while. Perhaps I don't need to? My job advances me plenty in my field, but it is a bit of a bitter-sweet feeling in a sense, like maybe I should try to squeeze more out of my free time somehow.

Well Gnome tells people that they should just know keyboard shortcuts for everything - which is literally something only power users know to do. Their entire design ethos is a weird opposition to itself where it is aiming to be so simple and minimal that in order to do basic things you have to memorize keyboard shortcuts as there is no visual interface possibility to do those things.

Yup, and these days we have relative units in CSS such that we no longer need to hardcode pixels, so everyone wins (em, rem). That way people can get usability according to the browsers defaults, which make the whole thing user configurable.

I'm assuming you have a rather small resolution display? On a 27" 4k display, scaled to 150%, the font is quite tiny, to the point where the textarea I currently type this in (which uses the browsers default font size) is about 3 times the perceivable size in comparison to the HN comments themselves.

Docker is also down.

I'm a little confused: does it have its own DE, or is it just a heavily modified Gnome?

There already is something like it (though not Apple-exclusive): https://grumpy.website/

There was indeed. Took a whole bunch of us on GitHub to make them finally add it.

Oh yeah, and there already is (preact, for example). I'm not worried about losing front-end SPA libraries. If anything, I'm just annoyed at the endless greed of VC funded firms.