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On a similar vein, if you visit Milan, go see "San Bernardino alle ossa", little known but quite worth a visit!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_alle_Ossa#/medi...


Italy does the same: https://github.com/pagopa/io-app

This is the official government app (you can get benefits, pay taxes, etc...), downloaded by 30+ million citizens, stack is React Native + Typescript


maybe EU countries could save a bundle and co-develop these apps. might also improve quality / ensure best practises are available to all etc.


This is the baffling side of the EU to all outsiders/newcomers. When I first moved here, that was my first thought as well. There is just so much in common, why repeat everything everywhere instead of single effort with branches everywhere?! (police force, consular services, Identity services, and pretty much any Government paperwork one can think of, transportation services etc). However, the population is very localised and divided. The French do it their way, Italians another way, the Germans on their own way etc. It is hard to find gain common ground beyond what EU already represents(which is very good IMO). I do wish doing things at EU level becomes the norm, and individualities slowly disappear.

Imagine a single European rail service (not Euro rail where you can buy a single ticket that will make you take Dutch train, and then connect on a German train, and then on an Austrian train, and if you miss a connection, good luck figuring out your replacement..)


My partner and I just moved to the Netherlands and I mildly disagree. For one, we really like the diversity and appreciate the different cultures and histories. But I also think there's something to different member states getting to experiment on their own. Like, the Finns are onto something with their school system for sure, but the Dutch have a lot of Montessori schools--what are the pros and cons of each approach?

But, yeah not that we're wild about international train travel--that's a sore spot for sure. But generally we view the differences as a kind of richness and less of an inconvenience.


Agreed. Inconvenience is a small price to pay to avoid blandness.


> I do wish doing things at EU level becomes the norm, and individualities slowly disappear.

Unless you reach an economic moment where you can pay the same to a policeman in Sweden and a policeman in Greece there is never going to be a socioeconomic identity that would allow you to aggregate all these people in some sort of federation police force. Same for rail, same for most anything where there is a cost or expense or transaction.

The diversity of systems reflects a diversity of arbitrage. Brute forcing that into a single entity or federal body is ivory tower thinking.


Unless you reach an economic moment where you can pay the same to a policeman in Sweden and a policeman in Greece there is never going to be a socioeconomic identity that would allow you to aggregate all these people in some sort of federation police force.

Why?

Localized pay has been a thing for literally centuries, across a wide swath of fields.

This is not about standardized pay, but about resource sharing.

Imagine a study about an uptick in a certain type of crime. Easier on one big force, than 20 little ones.


> There is just so much in common, why repeat everything everywhere instead of single effort with branches everywhere?!

I think you misunderstand the history of the EU project: its goal is what you describe, but it must be balanced with respecting the autonomy of each individual nation inside the union. It can only work if all involved governments agree to do it. Which is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve.

What we have now is the progress we have managed to make so far. If it does not appear like much, well, you should have seen what things were like before the EU, especially regarding red tape.


That’s the downside - and beauty - of federalism. EU is very diverse with different cultures, language, and behaviours.


there are many obstacles (pre-existing conditions, different legal context, national sensitivities etc)

in general the EU strategy has been to agree common rules and standards. But there are also examples of common infrastructure, e.g. the Euro bills

it will be interesting to see how this might develop for software related to public institutions


sounds like USA and it's relation to its members states


Such a collaboration has the potential to save time, money, effort, and increase quality. But in reality it either ends up being "design by committee", or a few of the countries are the drivers and the rest are the followers who try all kinds of maneuvers to retain some control.

Even if this is done under the umbrella of an EU institution, the politics work the same way except now every other country is trying all kinds of maneuvers in an attempts to retain as much of the control as possible.


Power games happen in every large scale collaboration that does anything of value. This is not a reason to refuse doing it altogether.


You're saying how things should be. I told you how they are, from experience with both worlds. I have the impression you are vastly underestimating the "power games" happening at country/union level compared to the ones in a company.

In the usual company there is a reasonably clear hierarchy, if someone doesn't fall in line some superior dons the big boots and drop kicks them all the way past the company parking lot without some democratic process behind it. Each level is accountable to the higher one.

At country level there's no such thing. It more like a lot of different companies sometimes reluctantly agreeing to work together, while not owing each other anything, and being subjected to the whims of the people back home (managers and citizens). There is no true hierarchy, no supreme authority, the accountability isn't towards the committee but towards superiors "back home" to get specific interests pushed. And if they don't make the cut you can always pack up your toys and go, maybe even turn it into a win back home ("we retain full control"). You want to look good for the managers and the citizens at home, not the ones in the committee. National pride, ego, politics on the world stage are very strong factors at play. If there is some obligation to contribute it also had to come democratically in a process to which your country participated.

These aren't power plays inside a company, they are the power plays between big companies. Except with a lot of nationalistic aspects and actual politics sprinkled in. And you can't even buy cooperation like in a commercial case.

So calling them "power games" is correct in principle but not at all useful to gauge the difference in scale in the 2 cases.


EU is a collaboration between countries where anyone can veto anything, yet they still manage to pass laws. Open source is much easier in comparison: no need for full consensus and no way to retract code that has already been published.


This is not for co-develop. This is mainly report, of what government done. For some extent it could be used to check safety of software/infrastructure.

For example, in Ukraine used closed source software, and only war (because censorship), slightly slowed stream of scandal publications about bugs and vulnerabilities.


The tax systems are national responsibility, and building a bespoke app for a given tax system is cheaper than supporting 27 widely different tax systems in a single app.


Stealthy dig at the European military acquisition strategy :)


Wow, looks pretty nice from the screenshots. Do you have experience using it? Does it work well/do what it claims? I recently moved to Spain, who has a digital identity system, but is a pretty disjointed attempt.


Yes, the project started in February 2017, so it's been a while and the app is very mature and frequently used by many citizens (full disclaimer, I was leading the development of the app and the backend from the beginning until almost two years ago).


Do you know why no other, more open, two factors are being introduced in DigiD auth? I'd rather use my U2F fobs, like I can almost everywhere else. Some people like TOTP.


It's a great app, doesn't do "much" except sending some government news from time to time. It was used a lot during Covid because it showed your negative QR code.


Well, apart from sending highly targeted updates to citizens, it is also used for:

1. receiving payment request for car tickets that you can pay right away with the credit card you saved in the app 2. receiving pending tax payments for local and national taxes that, again you can pay right away in the app 3. it was used for the national cashback program as a mean to enroll citizens, register the payment cards that could be used to accumulate points, setup banking details to get the prizes, etc... 4. distribute several government incentives (e.g. holiday bonus, bonus for young citizens, etc...)

After I left the project, the team was working on implementing a full digital signature solution that could be used to sign official requests to the public administration and they were also working on supporting legally valid communications from the government (vs just informational).


How is the working environment in PA tech? Would you recommend working there?


Yeah it works pretty well. Italy also has a digital identity system called SPID which can be used to log in for all governmental services which also works pretty well.


I’m likely astounded some people are not aware that not every women can breastfeed their children


I don't think one should be angry at people that are wrong. I mean, unless he asked and someone told him he might have gone around thinking they choose to let the baby starve etc.


Astounded != angry does it?


Ye not directed directly at GP. I tried to whine about downvotes without writing the d-word.


? I was replying to your comment.


To clarify: I agree that the "astounded" comment was not an angry comment.


up in Italy for me


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Probably because EV trucks would need to go through the current Brenner motorway, that is a very trafficked road, from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Pass#Motorway ):

The ever-increasing freight and leisure traffic, however, has been causing long traffic jams at busy times even without border enforcements. The Brenner Pass is the only major mountain pass within the area; other nearby alternatives are footpaths across higher mountains at an altitude of above 2,000 metres (6,600 feet). As a result, air and noise pollution have generated heavy debate in regional and European politics. As of 2004, about 1.8 million trucks crossed the Europa Bridge per year.


There's an alternative to only on motorways and never on motorways: sometimes on motorways.

90% of the time you can use ordinary roads, with autonomous driving acting like a normal truck, giving the meat bags plenty of space. The most congested 10% you can build restricted access paths only for your smart trucks where they can act more like a train, with minimal spacing, increasing the traffic capacity of the road/tunnel/bridge/whatever so the extra cost of constructing it pays off sooner and/or it's cheaper in the first place because it's not built for drivers so doesn't need to be as safe.


What a surprise seeing Marcella mentioned on HN! She was my grandmother cousin but I've never actually met her because she left Italy before I was born. It's a pity that she's virtually unknown in Italy, you will not even find her books in international book stores. My uncle told me once that her son, Giuliano Hazan, is preserving her legacy in Italy with cooking workshops that he holds in Verona once every year.


that’s quite interesting, do you mind elaborating on your last sentence? How does that work?


I setup a firewall rule in openwrt that said anything coming over USB needed to set the TTL to 65 so it looked like the data was coming from the phone itself and not from the tether.

IIRC, on the plan I was using on Cricket, I would get unlimited data + 15GB of tether. This just byapssed that limit.

I think they can almost figure it out because if I tried to tether without the TTL trick, data wouldn't work. So I'm guessing it still counted the data I was using against some kind of cap?


On Android, there are apps that you can install that do this for you.

I used to use them a lot when I was traveling with my laptop a few years ago and it always worked great.


Can you mention some? I've been having an issue with my phone having its hotspot limited to under 1mbps.


I switched to iPhone and can’t even remember the name of the app anymore, sorry

But the good news is that I got it from the Play Store back then and you didn’t even need to jailbreak.


Years ago, I did this with my jailbroken iphone 3gs. When visiting lots of websites, it would serve up the mobile version, so I assumed that the app was somehow modifying request headers to look like a phone request. I guess not as many sites used TLS back then.


I’ll admit I don’t know much about networking, but what’s special about 65?


That's the TTL that some carriers use from the phone. So once it hits the router it goes down - meaning the carrier knows you're tethering. Setting it to back to 65 on the router makes it harder for the carrier to detect.


Close, but it's a little bit different than how you describe it. The router is connected between the phone and the other devices in this user's scenario. The default TTL on Linux and Android is 64. If you tether, the packet will go through your phone and have its TTL decremented to 63 (the phone is a gateway). Then when it arrives at the cell tower with a lower TTL, they know you're tethering and drop the packet.

If you set it to 65 on your host device or router, it will be decremented to 64 on the phone - and is now hard to distinguish from real traffic from the phone.


I was bit confused while trying to digest the TTL hack up thread, but your explanation completed cleared up my confusion, so thank you for that.


So 65 isn't necessarily the correct value, but whatever the phone's default is?


You want it to be one more than the value the phone uses as its default. Then when the packet arrives at the phone via the tether its TTL is decremented and it is passed out to the tower. Tower sees a packet with a TTL that it is expecting and assumes it is phone data.


With some carriers, it can bypass tethering quotas, appearing as if usage is originating from the "phone".


As part of a big project I've worked on, we created a tool to generate Typescript types + runtime validation + SDK (client) from an openapi definition. The tool as been used quite extensively to help in the integration of many services and APIs. https://github.com/pagopa/openapi-codegen-ts


It's actually: - "cavallo" (horse) - "caciocavallo" (cheese) - "provolone" (cheese)


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