Great work! I’m Swedish and went to Estonia for a wedding a couple of years ago. I was surprised how well connected the country was to the internet. While surfing Swedish sites in Tallinn it felt like I was surfing from my home in Stockholm. They are really taking internet very serious and taking the lead in many related areas.
> They are really taking internet very serious and taking the lead in many related areas.
Indeed they are. I stumbled across this link because I'm travelling to Estonia in a few months (found from Wikipedia's image of the day, which was this[0]). But I am aware of their e-residency program [1], which is quite an interesting innovation. It's part of a larger effort [2] as well, turns out.
This is really a very cool thing! It gives you possibility to open bank accounts, start companies and do business with Estonia in a better way without even being there, if I’m not wrong.
You couldn’t set up a bank account remotely for a long time. But you can now setup a Holvi account online and it’s really easy, doesn’t even require a Skype call.
There are still some niggles, if you need insurance for example (professional indemnity) it doesn’t seem easily available. But I’m hoping more services will become available, and things will get easier.
I'd love to know more about the costs involved. As the sibling noted, annual recurring costs are interesting, but also super curious about the property values. Is it relatively easy for a foreigner to purchase one?
I would love to know what the legal situation is like in Estonia—are they required to maintain it to a certain level or keep it in it's original condition?
Also, I'm visiting really soon and I would love to see the inside of one of these manors. Would they take visitors?
You have something similar, albeit not as cool, for Portuguese manors (we called them solares) [0]. My father restores these old houses, it's very interesting to see how well they were built, literally designed to withstand for centuries with minimal maintenance.
>The effort this gentleman has put into cataloging and photographing his nation's heritage is something to be applauded!
Ironically the manors were largely owned by Germanic people who were not Estonian. They are the local (Germanic) nobles after the crusades to the Baltic region. Estonians were called "people of the land" (maarahvas) and their language "language of the land" (maakeel) because they had been in some form of indentured servitude ever since the crusades.
The word for German/Germany/Germanic in Estonian is "saks," which implies/means nobility. It as used to refer to the Lords of the manor.
I mention this, because if you think about it then its basically the cultural heritage that accompanied something that was brutal for Estonians. Indentured servitude isn't far from slavery after all. On the other hand, the Soviet era wiped most of that away, so people are neutral about the whole Germanic nobles thing.
I’ve lived in Latvia for some time and spent a fair while in Lithuania. They’re incredibly beautiful countries and at least for me felt more like home than anywhere else. There’s a tranquility you don’t tend to see further West.
I highly recommend paying the Baltic countries a visit and I’d be happy to share more as an ex-pat who moved there.
I'd add Polish manors (the dwór or dworek) to the list. Manors of a wide ranging breadth, spanning centuries and architectural styles, from quaint country estates to stately palaces.
Good stuff. Was just looking at a refurb project in Estonia and saw some of these already :) Such a rich history.
Also, really brings home the point how geographically distributed population used to be in terms of countryside vs city, compared to now when large part of the population lives in Tallinn.
"Rich history" seems like a strangely positive term for feudalism which was not too different from the American black slavery and existed up until about the same time. They might be nice buildings, but were used for horrible purposes.
Taxify is awesome. They are giving Uber a hard time in some territories.
Seems to be same amount or more drivers than with Uber in Tallinn.. And well priced too. We were driving in and outside of Tallinn for a couple hours (visiting some suppliers), same driver, waited for us when we made stops. 25 euros on Taxify
Possibly anti-Russian bias? It's common here. That said, Taxify is pretty good and cheap, and personally I don't bother with anything else.
I live and work in Tallinn as a remote worker for a few clients; internet is cheap and fast. I've half-Australian / half-Estonian, and have Estonian citizenship so I'm not really familiar with the e-Residency program except to the extent that it's clear the government is investing a lot into it.
No, has nothing to do with Russian bias. Their maps use incorrect names. Their app also requires you to pinpoint the exact location to where you are going, as in type it in and you will get a certain price no matter how long the fare takes. Which is great if you have 0 concerns about your privacy. Not very flexible in that regard
Went to Tallinn earlier this year. Old Town Tallinn was beautifully covered in snow. Way more charming than its sister Helsinki. Left by train to St. Petersburg by Narva.
All three Baltic states as well as big chunk of Poland (except Cracow) has relatively little tourism. Lots to see all the way from mountains to dunes to swamps and cities as well as manors in between.
I'm half Estonian. My mother and her parents emigrated to the US shortly after WW2, after spending some time as refugees. They've often spoken of one of the manors on the site, it was gratifying to see it there.
- The clickable image map with pixel-perfect precision is a marvel of efficiency and have probably necessitated a lot of tedious, manual labor. Or a nice dive into a library of country maps and a script to tie it all together.
- Most of the content is static HTML, probably updated by hand from time to time. Could this be the reason why the website is surviving the slashdot/HN effect?
- It seems that there are a lot of Estonians (or Estoniaphiles) on Hacker News
> The clickable image map with pixel-perfect precision is a marvel of efficiency and have probably necessitated a lot of tedious, manual labor.
I remember reading about image maps back when everyone still thought XHTML was going to be it, and really wanting to use them because they seemed to be so underused yet secretly quit powerful. But they're such a pain.
Imagine if someone made an easy GUI tool for that. Just load an image, overlay some vector shapes, associate shapes with links, spit out either a static site, or plain HTML tags to embed elsewhere.
EDIT: Via the MDN tutorial on image maps[0], I found this[1]. Interesting to see old website tech like that.
> Imagine if someone made an easy GUI tool for that. Just load an image, overlay some vector shapes, associate shapes with links, spit out either a static site, or plain HTML tags to embed elsewhere.
This is an amazing idea! That way, any person with the software could create a website that would work well. It could obsolesce the notion of hand-crafted XHTML entirely!
A system where What You See Is What You Get for the web would be incredible.
Is it perhaps possible that not only are you not the first to think of such, but that such systems have been created and commercialized?
I think that amount of snark is a bit uncalled for.
What you're talking about are kitchen-sink tools, and IIRC the produced output was usually a bloated swamp of tags and classes.
I meant a simple tool that does one thing and one thing only.
Image maps are pretty easy, conceptually. The <map> tag is a list of <areas>, anchored to an image. An <area> is an <a> tag with "shape" and "coords" added to it. The former indicating which of the four different shapes of shapes the area is (circle, rect, poly, and default, which is the whole page minus any other hotspots that are defined), the latter being a list of nrs.
A GUI app for that would just need:
- a way to open an image
- circle, rect and poly drawing primitives to create a new area
- the ability to select drawn areas and fill in the required href and alt fields - the ability to change, reorder, copy and delete created areas
That's something barely above the metal of the underlying tags - it wouldn't add any bloat. It could even be done as a web-app, or a plug-in for your favourite code editor.
And it's not nearly as elaborate or complicated as the tools you are talking about.
>Most of the content is static HTML, probably updated by hand from time to time. Could this be the reason why the website is surviving the slashdot/HN effect?
Probably not, because it doesn't survive the slashdot effect. Many of the places I clicked didn't work.
Yes, if I am interested in European history, and after reading the novels of Sofi Oksanen, I feel as if the past is illuminated by the stories like Estonia's. It is hard for me to truly understand the massive shift in 'way of life' and worldview that occured in the early 1900s. The death of the aristocratic, monarchical, peasant-and-master way of life, which these manors represented, transformed within a few decades to the idea that more democratic style of life was normal and everyone should have it. Watching the crumbled manors is a literal embodiment of a shift in human consciousness, where the way things were for hundreds of years suddenly ceased to exist and simply rotted away. Estonians were essentially ruled by a German overclass, and its history is intertwined the Nazi history and it's obsession with restoring the "old ways". What do we have now that is considered normal that will fall away in 500 years? or 50? Will people say 'such and such building represented the old society, where poor people were not allowed to go to the doctor'
This is untrue. You need insurance to visit a doctor. You have insurance if somebody pays your "social tax." This means that you must be employed or be a child, in education, or a pensioner.
If you're unemployed and don't qualify for the unemployment program (many don't) then you don't have health insurance and have to pay out of pocket for all doctor's visits. The same applies if you are self-employed and your social tax cut isn't high enough.
Many of the people who would need it the most don't have access to healthcare in Estonia. They have access to emergency care though, but that's the same in the US.
How strict is the unemployment program? Over there in Lithuania, as long as you go to your appointments at the local job office (= you're not working in UK or Norway), it's really hard to get removed from the list.
You have to keep your monthly appointments and keep to their "job searching plan." This can mean that you must take part in some group events and apply for jobs based on a schedule. And if they can find a job then you can't always turn it down. Some people have said that the dealing with unemployment is almost like working a job.
To register for unemployment (benefits) you must have worked for at least 180 days in the last year. Education is included in work. So if you didn't do that then you're out of luck.
