Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkramlich | Hacker News Reader

I like the inverse challenge: let's try to replace as much of government as we can with software/hardware. And the simpler, cheaper and more open, the better.

Not even kidding.

I'm already confident I can replace most/all of the IRS, Treasury, and all the welfare/safety-net type programs with fairly simple, hard-to-abuse software/hardware system. Given that the laws were significantly different and simplified. (And snowball's chance in Hell they'd allow that. Although there are alternate law/tax/welfare configurations which are both physically possible and theoretically sustainable.)

View on HN

And I'm confident I can write a program to solve world hunger. Provided that we re-define solving world hunger to mean something simpler.

that's rude. shame on you. that type of comment is too common on HN. poisons the community

That's what half the IT BPM projects in government are billed as. Most fail for multitudes of reasons beyond the simple fact that technology projects in public sector are by default failures and ironically due in some measure to the incredible mountain of red tape originally designed to make risk transparent and manageable. There is no way in hell I'd let the current standards of technology in government anywhere near any form of decision making besides providing some crunched data points, which alongside DARPA style R&D is really the only example of tech in government I can cite that's had a solid history of successes. Half of the beltway bandits offer some bullshit Big Data solution after their CEO looks at a Hadoop program and the dollars spent on Big Bullshit Data by enterprise so they can keep their company relevant in passing, heaven help us all when we try to get them to build anything vaguely resembling recommenders and expeet systems.

You're overconfident. Replacing massive institutions overnight is a recipe for chaos. What we have now is not perfect, but it works. Within days of instituting your system, there could be a catastrophic oversight that causes mass unrest. Gradual change is far less risky.

Programmers love rewriting things from scratch. But experienced programmers know it's often better to see what can be salvaged.

you can't know if I'm overconfident or not, you have far too little information, including a lack of details about what I'm envisioning. also I am an experienced programer. More importantly I'm a systems thinker. Also I'm well aware of the need to do thorough analysis, testing and then a gradual roll-out. I also have no illusions about whether such a thing would ever be applied by the US government. I do think it could be used by a small experimental organization, micro-state or virtual nation. It can be overlaid on top an existing government's domain, but just tailored and camouflaged to be compatible legally with any "host" country. Obviously test and tune and critique before making drastic changes to an existing system, or start having large amounts of money pass through it. That should be obvious to any careful, experienced, intelligent person. But you made the rude mistake to assume I didn't. You could have framed your concern as a question instead, and that would have been more constructive, less acidic. Acidic comments are too common on HN. Let's all try to elevate the game.

Less talk, more action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com