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tjomk

698 karma · joined April 15, 2013

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tjomk··on Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer
Let's go the US way and arrest children for doing lemonade stands. How dare they not get a license and pay their taxes to Uncle Sam! /s
tjomk··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
Are you going there as a hobby or plan to work as a watch repairman/watchmaker? if the latter, how big is the market these days for analog watches? I feel like everyone is wearing electronic watches. I have been thinking of also learning horology as an entry to building automata machines
tjomk··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
I love it. Just recently got my first plotter, and it is so much fun. Sadly though this still keeps me near computer.
tjomk··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
Not exactly a hobby either
tjomk··on OpenRocket
Anything can be misused by the bad actor. Knives, guns. With AI things are getting easier to develop bio-chemical weapons. There was recently a video of a YouTuber creating a portable rocket launcher in <100 USD.
tjomk··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
They don't need to. They need just good enough. Don't underestimate "Made in Europe", just like "Made in America"
tjomk··on Volvo Centum is Dalton Maag's new typeface for Volvo
They should instead focus on their overall software stability and usability. And introduce more physical buttons for climate control. I don't want to click 4 times on a screen while driving in order to enable seat heating.
tjomk··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
I have always wanted a super simple local startup job board for my country. No calls, no AI chat bots, no fancy matching. Spending 1-2 hours a week on this

https://estonianstartupjobs.ee

tjomk··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
Having worked for different startups for 10+ years and started 3 of my own (eventually failing), I always wanted a job board for local startups. Not necessarily IT-related jobs. Finally built it about a month ago: https://estonianstartupjobs.ee

There are few similar projects too, one is itself a startup which sadly on the verge of bankruptcy, and another aggregates only IT-related jobs.

tjomk··on Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager
Why does everyone assume that if something is open source it must also be free and licensed under permissive license allowing you whatever? Briefly looking at their website I got the impression that it was meant for transparency reasons rather than in the spirit of free and open-source.
tjomk··on Whatever Happened to Those Self-Service Passport Kiosks at Airports?
You have the right to queue for several hours and present your biometric passport to a human who will take your picture, save it to another database, and then visually compare that to your face.
tjomk··on Ask HN: Is it okay to just bootstrap it, even when VCs are knocking?
Growth is not everything. I remember reading "Let my people go surfing" by the Patagonia founder where he mentioned multiple times that they were trying to artificially limit their growth by raising the prices for their products. You don't need to chace ever higher profits. Staying small and enjoying your life is also an option.
tjomk··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2022)
Salv | Product Engineer | Tallinn/Tartu, EE, or Vilnius, LT | onsite | full time

We build a platform for banks and other fintechs to help fight money-laundering. Well-funded and growing startup where your work will have positive impact on many people.

We're looking for multiple engineering roles. We use Kotlin and Typescript. The work is remote but you must be tax resident of Estonia or Lithuania.

Read more about this and other engineering positions: https://salv.com/careers/

tjomk··on Russia’s Oil Revenue Soars
Good luck trying to swap rubles to dollars with that exchange rate. They block foreigners from their stock exchange which prevented the collapse in prices. They blocked people from trading their rubles to usd or eur to prevent the exchange rate from soaring. Normal people cannot do anything there. So that exchange rate and their stock market is nothing to be proud of or point to.
tjomk··on Show HN: I built an unofficial roadmap for Wise
I'm the author (and an indie dev) of the project here. I stumbled upon the public roadmap [1] for Wise [2] recently, and being the person behind product roadmap tool wanted to see how easy it is to build a similar looking one [3]. Turned out pretty well.

[1] - https://wise.com/gb/blog/wise-mission-roadmap

[2] - https://wise.com/

[3] - https://app.getshipit.com/r/tVTZlShDfP

tjomk··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Working on two things. During the day I am (almost) a solopreneur and building shipit [1] - a tool for people to help visualize their product plans and connect these to company goals. There is a fair share of competition here, but all of the existing tools are extremely broad (think Jira vs Trello), and when you just start using these it's hard to figure out what to do first. Trying to solve that issue by keeping shipit super simple and avoiding feature bloat.

While I try to keep the blog relevant to the target audience, every now and then a technical post slips in:

- encrypting sensitive data in the database [2]

- using checlists for testing the build before release [3]

- moving from software engineer to product manager [4]

To avoid burning out, in the evenings I also build a remote-controlled car that uses 4 independent motors and is controlled by PS3 joystick. I got inspired by the video showing torque vectoring [5] in Rimac, and wanted to build something like that too. There's also an old project called Aelith [6] doing similar thing. I'm still in the early stages, and experimenting with 3D-printed motor mounts. When that is ready, will move to the software part.

[1] https://www.getshipit.com

[2] https://www.getshipit.com/blog/securing-data-at-shipit/

[3] https://www.getshipit.com/blog/software-checklist-testing/

[4] https://www.getshipit.com/blog/from-software-engineer-to-pro...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD2Do1gAuog

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET1HEyqEQJQ

tjomk··on WHO says no need for major alarm over new coronavirus strain – CTV News
Initially WHO was saying the same about the original Covid-19
tjomk··on EU countries team up for semiconductor push
Someone apparently has bad memories from the USSR-era where they centrally planned the whole economy, including how much people have sex.
tjomk··on Qwant: The Search Engine That Respects Your Privacy
They are about Yandex results. I always get a note when searching cyrillic content.
tjomk··on Thrust Vectoring at Model Scale
All of the comments under video say it's not guided but rather stabilized.
tjomk··on Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016
Likely because some of these companies are still in business, but are struggling right now, or raising another round, or are in the process of finding a buyer.
tjomk··on CrimeOps: The Operational Art of Cyber Crime
Damn, didn't know the grugq was reading hacker news, mind you, even have an account here! :-)
tjomk··on What is a Product Roadmap?
I would argue about the roadmap being visual. When you present people with the gantt chart, people tend to focus more on the timelines rather than the direction. This inadvertently pushes you to follow clearly defined deadlines and makes your roadmap a release plan instead (which Jira or similar tool is much better at).

We've been experimenting with gantt-style vs a simple table/list-view [1] and found that in many cases the latter actually works better in presenting the product vision, albeit at the expense of longer reading times.

[1] https://www.getshipit.com/blog/should-you-use-gantt-product-...

tjomk··on Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
Well, it's actually not that hard to fall for social engineering even if you're well educated about the topic. Have a listen to an interview Christopher Hadnagy gave on Darknet Diaries.
tjomk··on GitHub was down
Probably both. I remember the very first versions of Gitlab when it was just announced on habr.com, and it used to be a minimalistic (more in terms of UI) version of Github. As the functionality grew, things got a bit out of control.

Currently UI looks more like it's been designed by people who write code rather than those who have spent considerable time thinking through user interactions and designing based on that. So it's not bloated in terms of the code and libraries, but rather all of the functionality is just thrown to the user as is without much thought.

tjomk··on GitHub was down
Maybe they're migrating their infra to Azure?
tjomk··on Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains
To a degree, they did a sane thing: listened to the advice of an expert. Now if you look at the other side of the ocean where the orange man didn't listen to the advice of an expert, look what happened.

I don't know how these things work in government, but relying on the opinion of just a single expert might not be the best strategy to win here. It's unlikely though that policy makers will come out in the worse shape here than they were before because even though they might have failed (a big if in the long run), they've relied on the advice of the experts rather than their beliefs.

tjomk··on Operating a Tor Relay
There are a bunch of similar projects where such people could (and likely already are) move: I2P, Freenet, GNUnet, and probably some others. So closing (or not supporting) Tor just because some bad actors are there is pointless. Every tool can be used for both good and bad things.
tjomk··on Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms
Gotcha! Thanks for a thorough explanation
tjomk··on Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms
I'm likely out of touch here, but at least for the person mentioned in the article, why does he need a huge SUV? If the crisis hits and you cannot re-pay the bills, that would be the first thing I'd get rid of. It doesn't look like he needs it for work, and he could just get away with a used Honda Civic or a similar smaller car that doesn't require much gas, expensive insurance, and most importantly monthly loan payments.

During the last financial crisis I sold lots of stuff that was dear to my heart but wasn't essential like motorbike, mtb, etc.

Is it the cultural gap that I'm not seeing as a European? Or something else?

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