10 ms·

You can't cURL a Border

471 points by valzevul 11mo ago

clacker-o-matic 11mo ago
that was fascinating; I didn’t realize border requirements were that complicated.
- rmunn 11mo ago
  It grows exponentially the more countries are involved. I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B, and I have to satisfy country B's visa requirements, which involves quite a bit of paperwork. I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork. It gets complicated. But I'm only dealing with the requirements of two countries. The author mentioned five or six countries; I'm glad I'm only dealing with two.
  - a012 11mo ago
    I’ve never worked in 2 countries but there are many countries that have DTA (https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/international-tax/international-tax-agreements-concluded-by-singapore/list-of-dtas-limited-dtas-and-eoi-arrangements?pg=1&indexCategories=all https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/international-tax/internationa...) so theoretically you only pay taxes to one country at a time, wouldn’t it be simpler?
    - buildfocus 11mo ago
      This typically means they agree you don't get double charged (so you can claim taxes paid in one back in the other) but they both still want you to complete the paperwork regardless. Saves money, not time.
      - swiftcoder 11mo ago
        Don't get double-taxed on income, specifically. You may still get double-taxed on investments, property, wealth, etc depending on which pair of countries
        rmunn 11mo ago
        When I moved from country A to country B, I shipped quite a lot of stuff (books, board games, etc) that was too heavy to take on the airplane and which I could live without for a month or two. Country B did not charge me customs duties on my books, but did charge me customs duties on my board games; I think they must have looked at how many I had and thought "There's no way this is personal possessions, he's bringing this into the country to sell them." I decided not to argue with them about it, so I got double-taxed on some of my property (sales tax on it in country A when I bought those games, then customs duties in country B years later). P.S. My collection of board games is not particularly impressive for a board gamer: it's in the double digits, but not in the triple digits. I know some board gamers with far more games than I have.
    - rmunn 11mo ago
      I still have to submit the paperwork that says which country my income was earned in, which is basically the standard tax paperwork from country A plus an extra form or two. (And in years when I went to country A on business trips, it's non-trivial. Simple enough, but not as trivial as years when I was in country B the whole time). It's not extremely burdensome, but it's still one more piece of paperwork to keep track of than the tax paperwork that people who have never left country A have to deal with.
    - jwr 11mo ago
      If you are a US citizen, US taxes you on your worldwide income, so you have to file regardless of where you live. And filing in the US is the actual burden, not the taxes themselves — inscrutable tax law and byzantine forms mean that you can't file yourself (you pay tax-filing companies to do that for you) and your tax returns easily reach hundreds of pages. US screws its expats in a big way. The club of countries that do this includes: United States, Eritrea and Myanmar.
      - gear54rus 11mo ago
        The thing is, only the US can realistically know your worldwide income. And only due to its banking cronies it intimidates into submission worldwide.
  - cesarb 11mo ago
    > I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B [...] I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork. Isn't that the case only when country A is the USA? AFAIK, nearly all countries in the world tax only residents, not citizens, so in most cases you'd only have to fill tax paperwork (and pay taxes) for country B.
    - tow21 11mo ago
      Only if you're only talking about income from work. If you own property in country A which you rent out while you live & work in country B, then you probably still owe tax on that rental income in country A. (but it will depend on the exact wording of the relevant DTA if one exists) And since you are now filling in two tax returns for different countries, with different tax allowances across rental income and work income which interact in decidedly non-linear fashion, you probably need to make sure both country A and B have no confusion about where your work income was earned. Having spent the last 8 years obsessively counting days across the UK and Finland (and every other country I have visited) exactly to account for this scenario, I am very sympathetic to attempts to solve this problem space!
      - cesarb 11mo ago
        > If you own property in country A [...] But then, that's because you own property in country A, not because you're a citizen of country A! The same would happen if you were a citizen of country B, lived and worked in country B, but bought a house to rent out in country A.
- swiftcoder 11mo ago
  Now try international taxation rules (particularly if you come from one of the handful of countries with world-wide taxation, like the USA!)
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  The more you travel (or immigrate) the more you realise the government probably needs less money than it gets, just better spent.
  - eptcyka 11mo ago
    Which government?
    - philipwhiuk 11mo ago
      every government. Waste is inevitable.
      - Muromec 11mo ago
        Look, I actually like that my municipality pays a salary to city ecoligist that makes sure, the sparrows living in a bushes dont get disrupted too much when new train tracks are laid down
        philipwhiuk 11mo ago
        Yeah I mean this is why regulations are hard. Someone's "this is an important environmental concern" is another person's "anti-growth NIMBYism"
        Muromec 11mo ago
        You have a point -- if nimbysts had their way, the whole place would not even exist, as the referendum rejected it. On the other hand, when there is such a person making sure that environmental concerns are addressed, it turns nimbysm from a roadblock to a stakeholder. In the end the sparrows got their bushes and we got our train and the bridge has a place for bats to nest and all that.
      - poncho_romero 11mo ago
        Then you agree that whatever replaces it will be wasteful too
- matsemann 11mo ago
  Working at a company in Norway hiring lots of internationals, I've heard so many stories. I'm myself born here, but to foreign (EU) parents. Getting a citizenship for me was quite "easy" (in the sense that I didn't have to do anything or be at someone's mercy, just had to apply), but still lots of bureaucracy. For instance, I had to order a transcript from the police saying that I hadn't committed certain crimes. This document I would have to bring to my appointment for citizenship at the police station. But the document had a short expiration date, and didn't know how long it would take to obtain or not when my appointment would be. So it's a gamble if you hit the timing, shrugs. I think however they now just pull up the records themselves instead of doing this weird dance. One coworker had lived her for many years on a string of temporary working visas. He was then eligible for a permanent one, and applied. However, while that was processing, he kinda was in limbo. Still legal to live and work here, but somehow wasn't guaranteed entry if he were to leave for a vacation / visit his home country/family. I don't know the exact details, but so weird how he suddenly was stuck here for months, with many delays. In the end he needed to travel for work, and our company sent a letter and his application got fast tracked.
  - ncruces 11mo ago
    My country just had a minister appointed who's sole mission is to spearhead a system that no government agency can demand from you a document that belongs to any other government agency, so long as you authorize both agencies to talk to each other for the purpose.
magnusm 11mo ago
[flagged]
oarsinsync 11mo ago
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.
- davedx 11mo ago
  When I’ve worked on complex scheduling problems like that I use copious unit tests, they’re perfect for this kind of input->algo->output problem where algo has tons of edge cases. Indeed, not using unit tests and instead trying to manually test all the cases sounds crazy to me!
- gommm 11mo ago
  I tend to find that for things like this that are really math heavy, it's usually better to create a DSL (or create easily readable function calls, etc) that you can easily write yourself instead of relying on AI to understand math heavy rules. Bonus points, if the rules are in an easily editable format, you can change them easily when they need to. It seems that was the path the author took... And yes this kind of use-case is exactly where unit tests shine...
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
evadne 11mo ago
This is an impressive article, & is incidentally why every sane set of rules has administrative discretion in its enforcement
exidy 11mo ago
It's a cool app, and makes me wish that Australian tax residency rules were actually computable.
bambax 11mo ago
There's some similarity between nationality and copyright: arcane, obscure, complex and mean rules that only benefit incumbents and punish everyone else. I hope we will eventually get rid of both.
- lionkor 11mo ago
  Do you dislike copyright also when it protects your intellectual property, and makes things like software licenses possible?
  - immibis 11mo ago
    If I couldn't use the AGPL to force Amazon to release Elasticsearch, but they couldn't use normal copyright to force me not to reverse engineer Alexa and Widevine, would it be that bad?
    - ronsor 11mo ago
      It wouldn't be bad. We have more than enough resources to reverse engineer most software, yet we're restricted by arcane EULAs and DRM.
      - immibis 11mo ago
        And so much "FOSS" is MIT anyway. Abolishing copyright would make literally no difference to MIT-licensed software.
  - bambax 11mo ago
    Yes, I do. I think the world would be a better place if there were no Microsoft, Adobe or Oracle. We would still have OSes and databases, we would be fine.
- teiferer 11mo ago
  At the rate things are going, even EU and Schengen, areas in which their citizens are blissfully unaware how nice they have it compared to outsiders, are going to come to an end. Far-right nationalists are on the rise over Europe.
raverbashing 11mo ago
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
caminanteblanco 11mo ago
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! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910865
- netsharc 11mo ago
  Regarding the writing, I'm the opposite.. but I can't point out why I don't like it. Maybe because the author is trying to sound sleek and sexy, "look at me, jetset international traveller", although the topic is so nerdy and dull, and the bragging feels off-putting to me. (My opinion. Did I need to share it? probably not. Flag away if you think so)
  - davedx 11mo ago
    No I agree, tone and context matters for technical writing too. Digital nomads gonna digital nomad…
    - netsharc 11mo ago
      You've illuminated the issue for me. He's asking "What, you don't have the problem of needing to stay sweet of tax and visa regulations when you need to make a split-second decision whether you can spontaneously travel to Iceland?". And it's not even a "sexy" problem.. it's bureaucracy!
      - justsomehnguy 11mo ago
        > whether you can spontaneously travel to Iceland on a budget. At least this is what it triggered for me.
    - jen729w 11mo ago
      > Digital nomads gonna digital nomad… People who enjoy travelling gonna travel…
- 11mo ago
FearNotDaniel 11mo ago
> 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.
- BerislavLopac 11mo ago
  The Life in the UK test certainly needs updating.
- evertedsphere 11mo ago
  claude is nothing if not sensitive to cultural differences
fragmede 11mo ago
[flagged]
- swiftcoder 11mo ago
  Are you always this cynical? The article is interesting on its own merits, that the author is also selling the app (outright, I might add, not subscription-based!) is neither here nor there
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    You'd think so, but there's always people complainers that something is an ad. It just happened to be my turn. Mostly because the type of person who would complain that something is an ad and raise a fuss wouldn't complain about this one, and was feeling like pointing out that hypocrisy. Unfortunately I didn't strike the exact right tone for the peanut gallery. Maybe I'll have better luck next time!
    - inglor_cz 11mo ago
      "Unfortunately I didn't strike the exact right tone for the peanut gallery" Right tone depends on site. "Smug + cynical" could be a great fit on X or Reddit, but HN isn't really built around this sort of discourse.
      - _vqpz 11mo ago
        I can't tell if this comment is actually serious. This place is often smugger and more cynical than Reddit, which says a lot.
- throw-the-towel 11mo ago
  What late stage capitalism? This is literally some guy hacking some stuff together.
  - actionfromafar 11mo ago
motiejus 11mo ago
It's fascinating that cURL is becoming a genericized term: - search it on a search engine -> google it - fetch it from an API -> cURL it
- strix_varius 11mo ago
  "curl it" has been a common (tech) term for at least 15 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&query=%22curl%20it%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&que...
caminanteblanco 11mo ago
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/ 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.
kitd 11mo ago
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.
FinnKuhn 11mo ago
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.
- ruszki 11mo ago
  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.
apexalpha 11mo ago
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.
- Terr_ 11mo ago
  Guessing it stems from "we need something dead-simple to evaluate that yields a definite yes-or-no answer, with no annoying variables." I'm trying to think of some other reason they might want a specific moment rather than "pick your own instant within this span", but I can't think of anything. Even if it was to "make sure you aren't claiming the same time on two applications to different places", the person could have simply staggered the applications.
  - SecondHandTofu 11mo ago
    The other reason is more mundane. There's been a lot of political incentive to reduce immigration for a long time, which means adding arbitrary friction to increase the effort of applying and decrease the number of successful applicants. Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.
    - poncho_romero 11mo ago
      That explanation doesn’t seem to jive with the fact that post-COVID the UK has accepted millions of immigrants
      - airstrike 11mo ago
        it does, if the alternative would have been "more millions"
bjackman 11mo ago
> ten years of travel history, down to the day 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...
- klausa 11mo ago
  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.
  - bjackman 11mo ago
    No that's what I meant - I just didn't report the countries that didn't stamp my passport. To report dates of entry and exit of every country I've visited would be impossible, I don't think I have that information at all. Quite likely in many cases nobody does. But yeah I think the place where I got lucky is that nobody ever checked.
jgoode19 11mo ago
[dead]
thaumasiotes 11mo ago
> 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.
- lmm 11mo ago
  > Airlines sometimes check for things during boarding. Those things are never rules outside the context of the airline. Nope. Plenty of countries still require 6 months' passport validity to enter. > 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. The airline doesn't give a shit about whether you can legally or practically enter the country they're flying you to. They care about whether they're going to be held liable to repatriate you at their own expense, and their processes are set up to ensure they avoid that. If the requirement on them is that they check your document before you board, they'll check your document before you board.
wartywhoa23 11mo ago
That's no travel, that's transfers between cells on a prison planet.
- DaSHacka 11mo ago
  [flagged]
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
symbogra 11mo ago
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.
faeyanpiraat 11mo ago
I cant afford having this problem
geokon 11mo ago
ive had to deal with a fair share of this messy time logic, and ive found this library really useful https://juxt.github.io/tick/ https://juxt.github.io/tick/ if you cant express it with the tools it gives you, it generally means youre making unsafe assumptions
sanskarix 11mo ago
[dead]
- philipwhiuk 11mo ago
  They can also introduce a law that says something akin to 'deliberately skirting minimum requirements is grounds for removal' to kill this sort of shenanigans.
qwertox 11mo ago
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?
- wodenokoto 11mo ago
  I’d say that’s pretty good behavior. It used to be common that images would expand in ways that would not allow you to zoom in mobile devices but also not allow you to open the image directly
reisse 11mo ago
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.
- nly 11mo ago
  It's absolutely not best effort that counts. I've heard many stories of people overstaying their visa in the US by e.g. one day, by way of a mishap or honest mistake, and subsequentially being denied visas or turned away at border control. The effects of this can go on for years and years... it's basically zero tolerance
  - raverbashing 11mo ago
    Overstaying in the US Anywhere else, less strict. Still can be problematic yes. And of course depends on the circumstances
    - bjord 11mo ago
      hate to break it to you, but this isn't accurate
    - DownGoat 11mo ago
      Its tru for Schengen visas too. Overstaying a day because of a cancelled flight is enough to deny future visas, they are very strict. It depends on the country you are applying to, and from. There are also exit requirements, like having to leave Schengen from the same country you arrived in.
philipwhiuk 11mo ago
If you're trying to engineer loopholes out of citizenship laws, you're going to get yourself pulled aside. The whole point of these arbitrary rules is entirely to make this sort of shenanigans impossible but to let in people who are using the system for the purpose it was designed. That's why the rule about 'relevant to your travel' is vague. So that you can't weasel your way through it. People who write this sort of app think border entry is two doors, allowed and denied. But there's also the guard who stabs people who ask awkward questions and their name is 'National Security'.
- SamBam 11mo ago
  No, it sounds like the author is well aware of that, and is instead just trying to get a read on what the gov's various systems are saying about him, so he can stay well within buffers of that. He explicitly says that none of his data on the app would convince an official.
  - fridek 11mo ago
    The point is - while all of these systems are fuzzy at the edges, that is not a bug. Letting people reside in a few countries at the same time, and to pick a tax residency like a new winter jacket is a non-objective for the border, tax and residency systems. It's actually relatively simple to follow the rules that lead you down the well estabilished residency paths if you do the opposite of what the article suggests and leave enough of a buffer for every required number, so you don't need to think about it and the precise count can be handwaved by the officials. Conversly, if you try to minmax the rules, you might find that most important systems still have an arbitrary human decision maker, who simply decides whether to apply a complex ruleset to the letter, or to be lenient.
  - philipwhiuk 11mo ago
    > No, it sounds like the author is well aware of that, and is instead just trying to get a read on what the gov's various systems are saying about him, so he can stay well within buffers of that. You don't need an app for that. You just behave like a normal person.
andai 11mo ago
Who's gonna tell him?
- Muromec 11mo ago
  Dont spoil the fun pls
vbezhenar 11mo ago
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.
- anal_reactor 11mo ago
  Now I'm curious what countries we're talking about and what's the process of "legalisation"
  - vbezhenar 11mo ago
    My relatives naturalised in the Spain.
- ricardobeat 11mo ago
  What do you mean by valid legal grounds? For many countries all you need is to get a local job paying above a threshold, that’s enough to get a work permit.
  - monsieurbanana 11mo ago
    You need a work permit to get a job, not the other way around. If you meant a "job offer", yes you can get a work permit with a job offer, but not everybody is that lucky. If you are on a tourist visa you can't legally get a job then worm your way to a valid work/residency visa. I mean you can, just not legally.
    - jrochkind1 11mo ago
      What might be some of the ways GP poster's family managed it? Pretty much nobody does that in the USA (maybe by getting married? Prob not even that in Trump II), where I am. Come in an a tourist visa, stay over, manage to legalize your stay in a few years and then become a citizen. Nope.
Aloyjahat 11mo ago
[flagged]
fauigerzigerk 11mo ago
>The app is local by default. [...] Being local also means no liability. Personal immigration history is exactly the kind of data governments might want. That doesn't seem to be a great argument in favour of crossing borders with this information stored locally on your device. >Keeping it off my servers means nobody can demand I hand it over. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that this is completely false. [Edit] On second reading, I realise that he's just talking about him not being able to hand over the data. This is true. But the user can be forced to hand it over. So I retract that it's completely false, but it's still a very bad idea. If I was concerned about this sort of thing when travelling, the only sensitive thing I would carry is a password in my head that grants me access to end-to-end encrypted data on some server.
- shortrounddev2 11mo ago
  You're correct. They're assuming that they might be served with a subpoena or warrant or something, but US Customs officials can and will demand the passwords to your personal devices or coerce you into giving your biometrics https://www.eff.org/issues/border-searches https://www.eff.org/issues/border-searches
crazygringo 11mo ago
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.
- cruano 11mo ago
  I think it's a reference to those "You wouldn't download a car" memes on anti-piracy campaigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
  - Tade0 11mo ago
    I had the same association. "You wouldn't cURL a border."
- 8organicbits 11mo ago
  I think the title works. > You can't cURL a border. But you can track your own state carefully enough that when the governments know the answer, so do you. Maybe API would be a better term, but it's a clever.
qrobit 11mo ago
Great post! Reminds me of (UK) Passport Application game: https://jameshaydon.github.io/passport/ https://jameshaydon.github.io/passport/
cbondurant 11mo ago
This is the kind of app I wouldn't believe could actually exist. Human rules are just so painfully complex and unwilling to agree with the concept of consistency. Insanely impressive that it works even just well enough that more than just the developer finds use in it.
bitdivision 11mo ago
Amusingly this appears to block access from the UK. https://archive.ph/pBmlV https://archive.ph/pBmlV
advisedwang 11mo ago
Am I correct in understanding that this App does not include any built in understanding of the rules that you must comply with? It looks like you have to "create a goal" in which you encode your own understanding of the rules you must comply with and the app then checks that against your travel log
ashellunts 11mo ago
What is the app shown in the screenshot in the article that displays a flight price?
rjmunro 11mo ago
Why is it that when I travel to certain places I need to ensure my passport has at least n months before it expires? So what if it's due to expire next week if I'm only staying until next week. Even if I'm staying 2 weeks and it expires tomorrow, why does that matter? I guess I might not be allowed back into my home country, but that should be my concern, not the worry of the immigration of the country I am going to. What kind of illegal immigration / criminal activity does a country prevent, or economic benefit / any other advantage does a country get by enforcing this kind of rule?
- hahn-kev 11mo ago
  My guess is that it's because of emergencies. If you get injured and can't or shouldn't fly home then you need more time on your passport. It is also much easier to send you home if you over stay your visa if your passport is still valid. Also the system is setup to give you a visa of a specific length (eg 30 days), they can't just give you a 2 day visa. Also if your passport lasts for 10 years you've known when it's going to expire for quite a while, they're just expecting you to be responsible.
- exidy 11mo ago
  It's a risk mitigation measure. The three or six month requirement usually comes from how long you could stay, not how long you do stay. You are also assuming a point-to-point trip. While a citizen of a country usually cannot be denied entry to their own country, any countries you transit are under no obligation to allow you through on an expired passport. tl;dr filters out people who may be problematic to deport.
senordevnyc 11mo ago
In the US you can just book the error fare immediately and then sort out whether you can take it. You have 24 hours by law to get a refund for any airline ticket.
DelightOne 11mo ago
> This time, I tried to learn from that: facts are stored as instants, reasoning happens in local days of the jurisdiction that cares. I think that's how the JavaScript Temporal proposal works. Convert your instant to the timezone, make the comparisons/calculations, hope you didn't jump an hour due to summertime, convert back.
csense 11mo ago
I don't travel internationally. This all sounds like a nightmare, and I'm glad it doesn't affect me.
- anthomtb 11mo ago
  I travel internationally. These arcane rules also do not affect me. Me: Lifelong, native-born citizen of a western nation. 1 or 2 international trips of less than 2 weeks each year. Author: Immigrant to his country of residence. Applying or soon to apply for citizenship or permanent residency. Has taken multiple, lengthy international trips and also appears to have had immigration status in different countries . Conclusion: If you are more like me than the author then international travel will not require navigation of arcane and contradictory rules.
renewiltord 11mo ago
My favourite is the Norway visa application. It says you have to bring along a confirmed flight ticket. But it also tells you that you shouldn’t pay for your tickets till you have the visa. Oh sure, dude. I’ll just tell the airline to hold it for me while I wait 60 days for you to make a decision.
ifh-hn 11mo ago
I live in the country I was born in and whilst I do travel it's mostly holidays and then if abroad at most once a year for less than 2 weeks. I have no idea what half of the stuff the article is talking about and less about what the app solves. I can only assume it's something so far out of my frame of reference I'm completely ignorant... I don't get it.
realaaa 11mo ago
nice app ! definitely is needed for many in this brave new world we are living in, so many things to keep track of..

471 points by valzevul 11mo ago

clacker-o-matic 11mo ago

that was fascinating; I didn’t realize border requirements were that complicated.

rmunn 11mo ago
It grows exponentially the more countries are involved. I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B, and I have to satisfy country B's visa requirements, which involves quite a bit of paperwork. I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork. It gets complicated. But I'm only dealing with the requirements of two countries. The author mentioned five or six countries; I'm glad I'm only dealing with two.
- a012 11mo ago
  I’ve never worked in 2 countries but there are many countries that have DTA (https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/international-tax/international-tax-agreements-concluded-by-singapore/list-of-dtas-limited-dtas-and-eoi-arrangements?pg=1&indexCategories=all https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/international-tax/internationa...) so theoretically you only pay taxes to one country at a time, wouldn’t it be simpler?
  - buildfocus 11mo ago
    This typically means they agree you don't get double charged (so you can claim taxes paid in one back in the other) but they both still want you to complete the paperwork regardless. Saves money, not time.
    - swiftcoder 11mo ago
      Don't get double-taxed on income, specifically. You may still get double-taxed on investments, property, wealth, etc depending on which pair of countries
      - rmunn 11mo ago
        When I moved from country A to country B, I shipped quite a lot of stuff (books, board games, etc) that was too heavy to take on the airplane and which I could live without for a month or two. Country B did not charge me customs duties on my books, but did charge me customs duties on my board games; I think they must have looked at how many I had and thought "There's no way this is personal possessions, he's bringing this into the country to sell them." I decided not to argue with them about it, so I got double-taxed on some of my property (sales tax on it in country A when I bought those games, then customs duties in country B years later). P.S. My collection of board games is not particularly impressive for a board gamer: it's in the double digits, but not in the triple digits. I know some board gamers with far more games than I have.
  - rmunn 11mo ago
    I still have to submit the paperwork that says which country my income was earned in, which is basically the standard tax paperwork from country A plus an extra form or two. (And in years when I went to country A on business trips, it's non-trivial. Simple enough, but not as trivial as years when I was in country B the whole time). It's not extremely burdensome, but it's still one more piece of paperwork to keep track of than the tax paperwork that people who have never left country A have to deal with.
  - jwr 11mo ago
    If you are a US citizen, US taxes you on your worldwide income, so you have to file regardless of where you live. And filing in the US is the actual burden, not the taxes themselves — inscrutable tax law and byzantine forms mean that you can't file yourself (you pay tax-filing companies to do that for you) and your tax returns easily reach hundreds of pages. US screws its expats in a big way. The club of countries that do this includes: United States, Eritrea and Myanmar.
    - gear54rus 11mo ago
      The thing is, only the US can realistically know your worldwide income. And only due to its banking cronies it intimidates into submission worldwide.
- cesarb 11mo ago
  > I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B [...] I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork. Isn't that the case only when country A is the USA? AFAIK, nearly all countries in the world tax only residents, not citizens, so in most cases you'd only have to fill tax paperwork (and pay taxes) for country B.
  - tow21 11mo ago
    Only if you're only talking about income from work. If you own property in country A which you rent out while you live & work in country B, then you probably still owe tax on that rental income in country A. (but it will depend on the exact wording of the relevant DTA if one exists) And since you are now filling in two tax returns for different countries, with different tax allowances across rental income and work income which interact in decidedly non-linear fashion, you probably need to make sure both country A and B have no confusion about where your work income was earned. Having spent the last 8 years obsessively counting days across the UK and Finland (and every other country I have visited) exactly to account for this scenario, I am very sympathetic to attempts to solve this problem space!
    - cesarb 11mo ago
      > If you own property in country A [...] But then, that's because you own property in country A, not because you're a citizen of country A! The same would happen if you were a citizen of country B, lived and worked in country B, but bought a house to rent out in country A.
swiftcoder 11mo ago
Now try international taxation rules (particularly if you come from one of the handful of countries with world-wide taxation, like the USA!)
philipallstar 11mo ago
The more you travel (or immigrate) the more you realise the government probably needs less money than it gets, just better spent.
- eptcyka 11mo ago
  Which government?
  - philipwhiuk 11mo ago
    every government. Waste is inevitable.
    - Muromec 11mo ago
      Look, I actually like that my municipality pays a salary to city ecoligist that makes sure, the sparrows living in a bushes dont get disrupted too much when new train tracks are laid down
      - philipwhiuk 11mo ago
        Yeah I mean this is why regulations are hard. Someone's "this is an important environmental concern" is another person's "anti-growth NIMBYism"
        Muromec 11mo ago
        You have a point -- if nimbysts had their way, the whole place would not even exist, as the referendum rejected it. On the other hand, when there is such a person making sure that environmental concerns are addressed, it turns nimbysm from a roadblock to a stakeholder. In the end the sparrows got their bushes and we got our train and the bridge has a place for bats to nest and all that.
    - poncho_romero 11mo ago
      Then you agree that whatever replaces it will be wasteful too
matsemann 11mo ago
Working at a company in Norway hiring lots of internationals, I've heard so many stories. I'm myself born here, but to foreign (EU) parents. Getting a citizenship for me was quite "easy" (in the sense that I didn't have to do anything or be at someone's mercy, just had to apply), but still lots of bureaucracy. For instance, I had to order a transcript from the police saying that I hadn't committed certain crimes. This document I would have to bring to my appointment for citizenship at the police station. But the document had a short expiration date, and didn't know how long it would take to obtain or not when my appointment would be. So it's a gamble if you hit the timing, shrugs. I think however they now just pull up the records themselves instead of doing this weird dance. One coworker had lived her for many years on a string of temporary working visas. He was then eligible for a permanent one, and applied. However, while that was processing, he kinda was in limbo. Still legal to live and work here, but somehow wasn't guaranteed entry if he were to leave for a vacation / visit his home country/family. I don't know the exact details, but so weird how he suddenly was stuck here for months, with many delays. In the end he needed to travel for work, and our company sent a letter and his application got fast tracked.
- ncruces 11mo ago
  My country just had a minister appointed who's sole mission is to spearhead a system that no government agency can demand from you a document that belongs to any other government agency, so long as you authorize both agencies to talk to each other for the purpose.

magnusm 11mo ago

[flagged]

oarsinsync 11mo ago

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.

davedx 11mo ago
When I’ve worked on complex scheduling problems like that I use copious unit tests, they’re perfect for this kind of input->algo->output problem where algo has tons of edge cases. Indeed, not using unit tests and instead trying to manually test all the cases sounds crazy to me!
gommm 11mo ago
I tend to find that for things like this that are really math heavy, it's usually better to create a DSL (or create easily readable function calls, etc) that you can easily write yourself instead of relying on AI to understand math heavy rules. Bonus points, if the rules are in an easily editable format, you can change them easily when they need to. It seems that was the path the author took... And yes this kind of use-case is exactly where unit tests shine...
- embedding-shape 11mo ago

evadne 11mo ago

This is an impressive article, & is incidentally why every sane set of rules has administrative discretion in its enforcement

exidy 11mo ago

It's a cool app, and makes me wish that Australian tax residency rules were actually computable.

bambax 11mo ago

There's some similarity between nationality and copyright: arcane, obscure, complex and mean rules that only benefit incumbents and punish everyone else. I hope we will eventually get rid of both.

lionkor 11mo ago
Do you dislike copyright also when it protects your intellectual property, and makes things like software licenses possible?
- immibis 11mo ago
  If I couldn't use the AGPL to force Amazon to release Elasticsearch, but they couldn't use normal copyright to force me not to reverse engineer Alexa and Widevine, would it be that bad?
  - ronsor 11mo ago
    It wouldn't be bad. We have more than enough resources to reverse engineer most software, yet we're restricted by arcane EULAs and DRM.
    - immibis 11mo ago
      And so much "FOSS" is MIT anyway. Abolishing copyright would make literally no difference to MIT-licensed software.
- bambax 11mo ago
  Yes, I do. I think the world would be a better place if there were no Microsoft, Adobe or Oracle. We would still have OSes and databases, we would be fine.
teiferer 11mo ago
At the rate things are going, even EU and Schengen, areas in which their citizens are blissfully unaware how nice they have it compared to outsiders, are going to come to an end. Far-right nationalists are on the rise over Europe.

raverbashing 11mo ago

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

caminanteblanco 11mo ago

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! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910865

netsharc 11mo ago
Regarding the writing, I'm the opposite.. but I can't point out why I don't like it. Maybe because the author is trying to sound sleek and sexy, "look at me, jetset international traveller", although the topic is so nerdy and dull, and the bragging feels off-putting to me. (My opinion. Did I need to share it? probably not. Flag away if you think so)
- davedx 11mo ago
  No I agree, tone and context matters for technical writing too. Digital nomads gonna digital nomad…
  - netsharc 11mo ago
    You've illuminated the issue for me. He's asking "What, you don't have the problem of needing to stay sweet of tax and visa regulations when you need to make a split-second decision whether you can spontaneously travel to Iceland?". And it's not even a "sexy" problem.. it's bureaucracy!
    - justsomehnguy 11mo ago
      > whether you can spontaneously travel to Iceland on a budget. At least this is what it triggered for me.
  - jen729w 11mo ago
    > Digital nomads gonna digital nomad… People who enjoy travelling gonna travel…
11mo ago

FearNotDaniel 11mo ago

> 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.

BerislavLopac 11mo ago
The Life in the UK test certainly needs updating.
evertedsphere 11mo ago
claude is nothing if not sensitive to cultural differences

fragmede 11mo ago

[flagged]

swiftcoder 11mo ago
Are you always this cynical? The article is interesting on its own merits, that the author is also selling the app (outright, I might add, not subscription-based!) is neither here nor there
- fragmede 11mo ago
  You'd think so, but there's always people complainers that something is an ad. It just happened to be my turn. Mostly because the type of person who would complain that something is an ad and raise a fuss wouldn't complain about this one, and was feeling like pointing out that hypocrisy. Unfortunately I didn't strike the exact right tone for the peanut gallery. Maybe I'll have better luck next time!
  - inglor_cz 11mo ago
    "Unfortunately I didn't strike the exact right tone for the peanut gallery" Right tone depends on site. "Smug + cynical" could be a great fit on X or Reddit, but HN isn't really built around this sort of discourse.
    - _vqpz 11mo ago
      I can't tell if this comment is actually serious. This place is often smugger and more cynical than Reddit, which says a lot.
throw-the-towel 11mo ago
What late stage capitalism? This is literally some guy hacking some stuff together.
- actionfromafar 11mo ago

motiejus 11mo ago

It's fascinating that cURL is becoming a genericized term: - search it on a search engine -> google it - fetch it from an API -> cURL it

strix_varius 11mo ago
"curl it" has been a common (tech) term for at least 15 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&query=%22curl%20it%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&que...

caminanteblanco 11mo ago

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/ 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.

kitd 11mo ago

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.

FinnKuhn 11mo ago

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.

ruszki 11mo ago
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.

apexalpha 11mo ago

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.

Terr_ 11mo ago
Guessing it stems from "we need something dead-simple to evaluate that yields a definite yes-or-no answer, with no annoying variables." I'm trying to think of some other reason they might want a specific moment rather than "pick your own instant within this span", but I can't think of anything. Even if it was to "make sure you aren't claiming the same time on two applications to different places", the person could have simply staggered the applications.
- SecondHandTofu 11mo ago
  The other reason is more mundane. There's been a lot of political incentive to reduce immigration for a long time, which means adding arbitrary friction to increase the effort of applying and decrease the number of successful applicants. Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.
  - poncho_romero 11mo ago
    That explanation doesn’t seem to jive with the fact that post-COVID the UK has accepted millions of immigrants
    - airstrike 11mo ago
      it does, if the alternative would have been "more millions"

bjackman 11mo ago

> ten years of travel history, down to the day 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...

klausa 11mo ago
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.
- bjackman 11mo ago
  No that's what I meant - I just didn't report the countries that didn't stamp my passport. To report dates of entry and exit of every country I've visited would be impossible, I don't think I have that information at all. Quite likely in many cases nobody does. But yeah I think the place where I got lucky is that nobody ever checked.

jgoode19 11mo ago

[dead]

thaumasiotes 11mo ago

> 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.

lmm 11mo ago
> Airlines sometimes check for things during boarding. Those things are never rules outside the context of the airline. Nope. Plenty of countries still require 6 months' passport validity to enter. > 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. The airline doesn't give a shit about whether you can legally or practically enter the country they're flying you to. They care about whether they're going to be held liable to repatriate you at their own expense, and their processes are set up to ensure they avoid that. If the requirement on them is that they check your document before you board, they'll check your document before you board.

wartywhoa23 11mo ago

That's no travel, that's transfers between cells on a prison planet.

DaSHacka 11mo ago
[flagged]

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

symbogra 11mo ago

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.

faeyanpiraat 11mo ago

I cant afford having this problem

geokon 11mo ago

ive had to deal with a fair share of this messy time logic, and ive found this library really useful https://juxt.github.io/tick/ https://juxt.github.io/tick/ if you cant express it with the tools it gives you, it generally means youre making unsafe assumptions

sanskarix 11mo ago

[dead]

philipwhiuk 11mo ago
They can also introduce a law that says something akin to 'deliberately skirting minimum requirements is grounds for removal' to kill this sort of shenanigans.

qwertox 11mo ago

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?

wodenokoto 11mo ago
I’d say that’s pretty good behavior. It used to be common that images would expand in ways that would not allow you to zoom in mobile devices but also not allow you to open the image directly

reisse 11mo ago

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.

nly 11mo ago
It's absolutely not best effort that counts. I've heard many stories of people overstaying their visa in the US by e.g. one day, by way of a mishap or honest mistake, and subsequentially being denied visas or turned away at border control. The effects of this can go on for years and years... it's basically zero tolerance
- raverbashing 11mo ago
  Overstaying in the US Anywhere else, less strict. Still can be problematic yes. And of course depends on the circumstances
  - bjord 11mo ago
    hate to break it to you, but this isn't accurate
  - DownGoat 11mo ago
    Its tru for Schengen visas too. Overstaying a day because of a cancelled flight is enough to deny future visas, they are very strict. It depends on the country you are applying to, and from. There are also exit requirements, like having to leave Schengen from the same country you arrived in.

philipwhiuk 11mo ago

If you're trying to engineer loopholes out of citizenship laws, you're going to get yourself pulled aside. The whole point of these arbitrary rules is entirely to make this sort of shenanigans impossible but to let in people who are using the system for the purpose it was designed. That's why the rule about 'relevant to your travel' is vague. So that you can't weasel your way through it. People who write this sort of app think border entry is two doors, allowed and denied. But there's also the guard who stabs people who ask awkward questions and their name is 'National Security'.

SamBam 11mo ago
No, it sounds like the author is well aware of that, and is instead just trying to get a read on what the gov's various systems are saying about him, so he can stay well within buffers of that. He explicitly says that none of his data on the app would convince an official.
- fridek 11mo ago
  The point is - while all of these systems are fuzzy at the edges, that is not a bug. Letting people reside in a few countries at the same time, and to pick a tax residency like a new winter jacket is a non-objective for the border, tax and residency systems. It's actually relatively simple to follow the rules that lead you down the well estabilished residency paths if you do the opposite of what the article suggests and leave enough of a buffer for every required number, so you don't need to think about it and the precise count can be handwaved by the officials. Conversly, if you try to minmax the rules, you might find that most important systems still have an arbitrary human decision maker, who simply decides whether to apply a complex ruleset to the letter, or to be lenient.
- philipwhiuk 11mo ago
  > No, it sounds like the author is well aware of that, and is instead just trying to get a read on what the gov's various systems are saying about him, so he can stay well within buffers of that. You don't need an app for that. You just behave like a normal person.

andai 11mo ago

Who's gonna tell him?

Muromec 11mo ago
Dont spoil the fun pls

vbezhenar 11mo ago

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.

anal_reactor 11mo ago
Now I'm curious what countries we're talking about and what's the process of "legalisation"
- vbezhenar 11mo ago
  My relatives naturalised in the Spain.
ricardobeat 11mo ago
What do you mean by valid legal grounds? For many countries all you need is to get a local job paying above a threshold, that’s enough to get a work permit.
- monsieurbanana 11mo ago
  You need a work permit to get a job, not the other way around. If you meant a "job offer", yes you can get a work permit with a job offer, but not everybody is that lucky. If you are on a tourist visa you can't legally get a job then worm your way to a valid work/residency visa. I mean you can, just not legally.
  - jrochkind1 11mo ago
    What might be some of the ways GP poster's family managed it? Pretty much nobody does that in the USA (maybe by getting married? Prob not even that in Trump II), where I am. Come in an a tourist visa, stay over, manage to legalize your stay in a few years and then become a citizen. Nope.

Aloyjahat 11mo ago

[flagged]

fauigerzigerk 11mo ago

>The app is local by default. [...] Being local also means no liability. Personal immigration history is exactly the kind of data governments might want. That doesn't seem to be a great argument in favour of crossing borders with this information stored locally on your device. >Keeping it off my servers means nobody can demand I hand it over. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that this is completely false. [Edit] On second reading, I realise that he's just talking about him not being able to hand over the data. This is true. But the user can be forced to hand it over. So I retract that it's completely false, but it's still a very bad idea. If I was concerned about this sort of thing when travelling, the only sensitive thing I would carry is a password in my head that grants me access to end-to-end encrypted data on some server.

shortrounddev2 11mo ago
You're correct. They're assuming that they might be served with a subpoena or warrant or something, but US Customs officials can and will demand the passwords to your personal devices or coerce you into giving your biometrics https://www.eff.org/issues/border-searches https://www.eff.org/issues/border-searches

crazygringo 11mo ago

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.

cruano 11mo ago
I think it's a reference to those "You wouldn't download a car" memes on anti-piracy campaigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
- Tade0 11mo ago
  I had the same association. "You wouldn't cURL a border."
8organicbits 11mo ago
I think the title works. > You can't cURL a border. But you can track your own state carefully enough that when the governments know the answer, so do you. Maybe API would be a better term, but it's a clever.

qrobit 11mo ago

Great post! Reminds me of (UK) Passport Application game: https://jameshaydon.github.io/passport/ https://jameshaydon.github.io/passport/

cbondurant 11mo ago

This is the kind of app I wouldn't believe could actually exist. Human rules are just so painfully complex and unwilling to agree with the concept of consistency. Insanely impressive that it works even just well enough that more than just the developer finds use in it.

bitdivision 11mo ago

Amusingly this appears to block access from the UK. https://archive.ph/pBmlV https://archive.ph/pBmlV

advisedwang 11mo ago

Am I correct in understanding that this App does not include any built in understanding of the rules that you must comply with? It looks like you have to "create a goal" in which you encode your own understanding of the rules you must comply with and the app then checks that against your travel log

ashellunts 11mo ago

What is the app shown in the screenshot in the article that displays a flight price?

rjmunro 11mo ago

Why is it that when I travel to certain places I need to ensure my passport has at least n months before it expires? So what if it's due to expire next week if I'm only staying until next week. Even if I'm staying 2 weeks and it expires tomorrow, why does that matter? I guess I might not be allowed back into my home country, but that should be my concern, not the worry of the immigration of the country I am going to. What kind of illegal immigration / criminal activity does a country prevent, or economic benefit / any other advantage does a country get by enforcing this kind of rule?

hahn-kev 11mo ago
My guess is that it's because of emergencies. If you get injured and can't or shouldn't fly home then you need more time on your passport. It is also much easier to send you home if you over stay your visa if your passport is still valid. Also the system is setup to give you a visa of a specific length (eg 30 days), they can't just give you a 2 day visa. Also if your passport lasts for 10 years you've known when it's going to expire for quite a while, they're just expecting you to be responsible.
exidy 11mo ago
It's a risk mitigation measure. The three or six month requirement usually comes from how long you could stay, not how long you do stay. You are also assuming a point-to-point trip. While a citizen of a country usually cannot be denied entry to their own country, any countries you transit are under no obligation to allow you through on an expired passport. tl;dr filters out people who may be problematic to deport.

senordevnyc 11mo ago

In the US you can just book the error fare immediately and then sort out whether you can take it. You have 24 hours by law to get a refund for any airline ticket.

DelightOne 11mo ago

> This time, I tried to learn from that: facts are stored as instants, reasoning happens in local days of the jurisdiction that cares. I think that's how the JavaScript Temporal proposal works. Convert your instant to the timezone, make the comparisons/calculations, hope you didn't jump an hour due to summertime, convert back.

csense 11mo ago

I don't travel internationally. This all sounds like a nightmare, and I'm glad it doesn't affect me.

anthomtb 11mo ago
I travel internationally. These arcane rules also do not affect me. Me: Lifelong, native-born citizen of a western nation. 1 or 2 international trips of less than 2 weeks each year. Author: Immigrant to his country of residence. Applying or soon to apply for citizenship or permanent residency. Has taken multiple, lengthy international trips and also appears to have had immigration status in different countries . Conclusion: If you are more like me than the author then international travel will not require navigation of arcane and contradictory rules.

renewiltord 11mo ago

My favourite is the Norway visa application. It says you have to bring along a confirmed flight ticket. But it also tells you that you shouldn’t pay for your tickets till you have the visa. Oh sure, dude. I’ll just tell the airline to hold it for me while I wait 60 days for you to make a decision.

ifh-hn 11mo ago

I live in the country I was born in and whilst I do travel it's mostly holidays and then if abroad at most once a year for less than 2 weeks. I have no idea what half of the stuff the article is talking about and less about what the app solves. I can only assume it's something so far out of my frame of reference I'm completely ignorant... I don't get it.

realaaa 11mo ago

nice app ! definitely is needed for many in this brave new world we are living in, so many things to keep track of..