elisehein

Thanks for raising! I guess I feel it's a necessary disclaimer out of respect to people who do have the first-hand experience. But I can see how it can come off as an excuse for not getting it right, and it certainly shouldn't be.

FWIW, I did talk to a screen reader user for this article (the accessibility consultant I mention – he is the chair of a local blind union), but indeed I don't know anybody personally and he could have easily brushed me off as random cold emailer, so I'm grateful for his comments.

Discussions about how to save time on eating and cooking -- essentially the ultimate life hacking -- always make me think about early man and his lifestyle that must have consisted mostly of hunting trips that may well have taken up days at a time, and then returning home with the prey and enjoying every bit of the reward. I wonder if they ever contemplated on how they could minimise all this time they spent on keeping themselves alive to make room for .. ehm, what else was there to do anyway?

And that is wonderful for her :)

I've grown up with the same perceptions of gender equality in the Soviet job market. However, I get the feeling that this does not so much have to do with a heightened sense of morality or anything, as it does with the fact that work in the USSR was simply a chore or an obligation that was assigned to you. Often people didn't do a particular job because it suited their personality or they were exceptionally good at it, most jobs were government orders anyway. There was no such thing as career planning. People's careers sort of just happened.

I went for "please sign up on Path and add me as a friend because unlike on Facebook, there are some things that I share which I really sincerely would like YOU (and not every other random person) to see". I've got my family and closest friends on Path now, about 12 people in total, most of whom add content regularly and I'm happy :)

Having said that, as much as I like Path, I do sometimes feel like I'm doing them a favour promoting it so aggressively, and the favour hasn't quite been returned yet.

That's so cool for your friend :) I hope you've taken some of the credit, encouragement is such a huge part of success.

I'm a girl doing a CS degree and also often think that the amount of help I get from my boyfriend (who has graduated by now) borders on cheating which really makes me feel miserable from time to time, and constantly having someone next to you who you know can complete any task you have with so much less effort doesn't help a lot either.

Other times, however, I acknowledge that as long as he isn't plainly handing the solutions over to me (which he never does) but just kind of acts as my rubber duck, all that can really be said is that it's just a fortunate situation where you constantly have someone to bounce ideas off of. It's also a question of not becoming dependent of that person -- at first I felt that he literally always knew the answer to whatever I was struggling with, but by now I've realised that it's simply about the ability to think out loud and make conclusions as you go along, and I know that I have all the potential to do that on my own as well.

I guess it's kind of what the article is saying as well -- if you're used to someone being better than you and kind of like a mentor, it's difficult to adjust to a situation where you might just have caught up with them in terms of skill and expertise.

This might not be the case for quite a few Estonian startups though -- with 1.3 million people you're desperately lacking a large enough target market for the niche products that some startups are developing, and looking to other countries may actually be a part of a strategy, not simply a case of 'I happen to be an Estonian living in the UK so I'll just go with the flow and do my startup here'. I would call these startups Estonian.

Interestingly, if I would've read the discussion out of context, I definitely would have thought the author meant digital as shadowy and gradienty, and analog as flat.

It just makes my skin crawl :/

I've been lucky enough to have visited NK as well and unsurprisingly everything I read lined up perfectly with my own experience. Most likely tourists from all over the world are always shown the stock tour. Our guides were incredibly insistent that we see everything, too -- that means no suggestions for other activities and definitely no wandering off.

One of my most memorable take-aways was also a visit to a school that we were told was one of the best in the country. We were taken to a room where students had formed groups around several desks, all performing different tasks (one desk had microscopes, the other a pc, yet others had more contraptions, probably for demonstrating mechanical processes). As was mentioned in the story, they weren't actually doing anything, they were just sitting there looking at the machinery in front of them and trying to look like they were about to discover something huge. They must've been the best actors in the school, and probably were very proud of themselves to have been chosen to present to such a prominent audience.

You could easily follow every single story without ever commenting on any of them.. Not to mention the amount of unregistered users

I actually found the voice of the speaker, especially her accent, quite fascinating :)