eksemplar

In the perfect world, you could design an architecture for sharing data, so patients would own some sort of medical card with their history.

In the real world, your doctor and your eye doctor bought different IT systems that can’t share data without someone manually typing them in.

Hell, the hospital probably runs around a thousand different IT systems and maybe two of them have APIs, but one is SOAP and the other is Graphql and there isn’t any middleware to make them speak with eacother. So the hospital can’t share your journal between your ward and the X-Ray room, unless there is a centralised journal.

We’re working toward a better architecture, but it’s not easy, and if only 500 of your 1000 systems adopt it, then you’ll still need a way to handle those 500 systems.

Things are made worse by the political decision organ and it’s variating agendas.

For a decade you may have political leadership that enforces an open architecture in which systems have to be able to share data. And you get maybe 10 major systems build on it, and they work, and you build some middleware and use RPA for some of the other systems.

Then the political landscape shifts, and maybe lobbyists play a part. Because open architecture for data is making companies less money since they can’t sell you data extractions. So they spend money on politics, and the conservative side listens and starts making the open APIs and public ownership and management illegal because it “steals” jobs.

Then you have another decade where you change another 10 major systems, except now they are silos and you fire your local IT developers so you can’t build RPA or middleware.

Then people realise that was stupid, so it shifts back to open architecture. Except now 20 years have passed, so we design a new open architecture that doesn’t fit with the old one. And then we buy another 10 major systems on the new architecture.

Now, after 30 years of good intentions, you still need a centralised way to share patient data, and when it fails, people do die.

The public sector uses the data to save your life, google sells your medical search history to your insurance company.

I do work in the public sector, and I’m obviously biased, but really, I’d prefer an efficient public sector to a dysfunctional one hindered by data security.

I mean, if we took the GDPR at its strongest interpretation, then you’d need to consent when the ambulance hands your information over to the hospital, and if you’re unconscious, well though luck, then you’ll just have to die. In what world does that make any sense?

I wouldn't worry about it not being the fastest tech, the fact is that if it's more productive, then it's often more cost-efficient. Iron is so cheap, that if you need to spend 1-2 weeks extra on development, then you'll be able to pay for your servers for several hundreds of years until a faster tech becomes more cost-effective than something that deploys faster.

There are a lot of organisations and volunteering options that deal with loneliness though, at least where I'm from, but they aren't really working. I mean, they are better than the alternative, which is often no social contact, but they aren't curing loneliness because the people involved in the programs are often painfully aware of the fact that they are being helped.

I think what is needed is more environment for adults to hang out. The basic recipe for friendship is basically spending time together outside of work. Spend enough time together and you grow on each other.

That's easy when you're young, but once you finish your education, it stops completely, and if you don't have a friend circle or some hobby activity where you'll get stuck with the same people on a regular basis, then you'll probably end up being lonely.

Can tech fix that? I doubt it. But board game cafes are doing an excellent job all over Europe.

I mean, I had a google+ account since the early days, but I used it about as much as I use facebook now.

Everything is so low level and so unproductive it's silly, and the only redeeming features was how well it integrated into the windows setting. But now with 3.0 they're removing every non-core library, meaning, it's really not a good choice.

I'm sure it's fast, but if it takes longer to build and deploy, then it really doesn't matter to me. We can buy more iron a lot cheaper than we can buy more development hours after all.

And I agree that it's not ready, I wanted to do a quick hobby thing on my Mac, and despite the development environment working well with VSC (as good as regular visual studio really) it's just terrible to run. .net watch breaks on Mojave, and despite issues on the GitHub there isn't a real fix in sight.

Needing to reboot every-time you stop your development server for it to free the .net resource correctly is just silly.

And that's not to speak on entity. If you've ever tried Django and migrations you'll probably never work with entity again and not hate it. In face, entity is unproductive we've stuck with LinqToSql for a long while, yes I know it's slower, but who cares if I save enough development hours to pay for a thousand years of server time?

This is anecdotal, but everyone in my social circle is considering quitting facebook. They stick around for the same reason I am, because events are planned on facebook, because everyone is there.

No one really uses the wall though, and messenger completely died when it started forcing you to use it on mobile and people simply started using other message services because half their friends wouldn't respond until they were at computers.

That's not to say facebook the company is struggling. The wall has moved to instagram and a lot of people obviously use watsapp, but facebook itself is almost exclusively a better meetup.

Maybe this is different in the US, and it's certainly anecdotal, but it's the story I hear everywhere.

The user base is big, like you've said, and that means facebook has better potential than almost everyone else, I'll agree with you there, at least in theory. I just don't think Facebook is really a company with enough vision to disrupt online dating. If they were, they probably wouldn't still be trying to push facebook as their core product, and certainly not at the expense of their new apps that people actually like. I mean, it feels like the world is moving on, and Facebook isn't realising it, maybe because of their company name, but it just feels like they don't have the or any vision anymore.

We’re currently spending billions trying to build bitemporal public data in Europe, and it’s no easy feat so far.

Basically what we need is to be able to register future data, that don’t come in to play until they are supposed to, as well as keeping a live history that you can spook through to view a data set from any given date, as well as make changes to some past data as if you were there at that date.

You can obviously do so with code, and a lot of the old SAP systems actually support this, but the first DB that handles this well will get to run every single public system.

I think SPAs are misused in general, but Angular is certainly the worst of the bunch. In the time it takes to configure and setup the right modules and make sure everything is updated and works together, even with a cli tool that really ought to make most of that redundant, you could've build and deployed a full Django app, DB migrations and all.

Ok, maybe that's a little much, but we did benchmarks and a basic web-app that takes 1 week to build in Django, took 3 weeks with Angular and Node. It takes 2-3 weeks with Vue and graphql Apollo, but you do get some advantages from the SPA frameworks and graphql that you don't do with old school mvc.

Over all though, web development hasn't really improved that much, and neither has the user experience. Just look at HN, it's one of the most efficient sites I use, and it's very old web.

They sell things they can’t deliver, they never drive technology forward unless you pay them to, and then they get angry and confused when you pick someone who didn’t stand still over them.

Back in the day, almost everything we did ran in IBM mainframes, next year we’ll be signing away our last contract on any of our 500 different IT systems with IBM and we’ll never do business with them again if it can be avoided.

And that’s saying a lot, because I think most companies who sell software to the public sector are terrible leeches, but IBM always took it one bit further and never understood why no one loved them.

I mean, they still don’t get why nobody wants watson, and keep on trying to sell it, never realising that what it does for BI is stuff we automated almost a decade ago, and what it does for deep learning is so much worse than some of the smaller setups that you can scale by running them on AWS or Azure ( probably other clouds as well, but being public sector we’re in Azure and AWS ).

I think this will be absolutely terrible for redhat, and we’re already making exit strategies for the two jboss setups we have for when it becomes necessary in a few years.

It should really be called angry mob media, if anything.

I see your point of course, but I’m not really worried about creating echo chambers by giving users more ownership over their own conversations.

If you started screaming at me in the real world, I’d walk away and probably never talk to you again. That’s an echo chamber, but it’s relatively harmless, and I think the same thing would apply to almost all of social media.

I’m sure political tweeters would be terrible at it, but would it really change anything? Right now thousands of people are trolling each other in Donald Trumps twitter feed, but do you think they make a difference? I don’t, in fact I don’t think anyone has ever really been pursauded of anything in a political twitter comment section.

Mean while, the rest of us are taken hostage by the angry mob and a lack of control of what ought to be our content.

When comments stay relevant and informative, like they do here on HN, for the most part anyway. They are an asset to the social media, but as soon as they become something else they become a big problem.

Maybe they shouldn’t be disabled entirely, but instead you’d need to be approved by the poster to comment? I could see a value in giving users the control over you would allow to comment on your tweet.

How is being scientific or philosophic exclusive from giving interesting examples that people immediately get?

I’d say being able to speak in a way that your audience gets is an inherent part of philosophy.

Being scientific isn’t being complicated, it’s basing what you say on a foundation of evidence.

Being philosophical isn’t being abstract, it’s basing what you say in reason.

If you’re neither of those things, you’re seldom worth listening to.

I see how the automation of those analytical scientist work a huge companies like google, where you probably save quite a few millions on having less employees, but even at our 20.000 employee municipality AI is an expense. Sure we could maybe cut the data/analytical staff down to half the size if we replaced them with data scientists, but data scientists are more expensive and you’d also need to pay a license for whatever ML platform you use, and none of our POCs with various consultants or academics have provided us with anything that was better than what we already have. In fact, In every test, it turned out our own human build models were a lot better at predicting and auditing than ML.

Heh.

AI is also struggling outside of big datas. We’ve run a poc on self driving cars for three years now, and they don’t work, at all. They certainly can work, if we replace and maintain every piece of road infrastructure to their exact needs, but that’s never going to happen.

I guess AI will eventually find a usage outside of advertising and privacy invasion, and don’t get me wrong, we certainly use it for things like trolling through millions of old case files as part of our quality control. So it’s not completely useless, but I don’t see how it’ll change the world anytime soon.

I should have said arrogance really, young developers often remind me of the conversation between yoda and kenobi on the arrogance of anakin in the clone wars.

That’s what I eventually switched to and it works fine.

Out of all the different IT personal I manage, developers are the only ones who seem to think they have to be correct all the time. That doesn’t exactly brew the best atmosphere, because how can you be?

The job bit will vary from region to region, but in Europe, almost everything runs on either JAVA or C#, and I do mean almost everything. If I go to a job database the two top languages are JAVA and C# and the third, php, is around a 1/5 of either of those.

For computer science anyway. If you’re into IOT, Engineering, datascience or robotics you’ll do python or C.

Back to JAVA. It’s lack of freedom is a great teacher. You’ll learn what return types are in your first function along with access modifiers and it really only goes on from there.

I think python is a great language, but I think it’s much harder to teach programming with because it’s so forgiving and free.

I mean, freedom and joy of use could probably be really great motivators, but most CS teachers aren’t exactly great at that part of teaching, at least not the ones I had, and unless you’re really good at teaching freedom and easy of use both become risky.

Or maybe I’m just old and grumpy.

Ever go to a townhall, join an interest group for hobbies or exercise or done some vulanteer work? You’ll meet all sorts of people at those, and most of them treat each other well.

I’ve seen my share of assholeness on the internet, I’m old enough to have been on it before usenet has its eternal September after all, and I think it’s different today. Much more political than its ever been.

I don’t think that puts me inside a bubble though. It’s not like I avoided the philosophical origin works on fascism when I was studying history at the university some decades ago. I know what these people stand for, and I know their opinions, hell I probably have a good deal of insight in their plights thanks to my job, I just don’t want to associate myself with them.

I mean, I don’t hang out with a lot of drug dealers either, but I have a general idea of what it is they do in society and I won’t avoid reading their opinions of things.

I think you support my point more than you’d like though, because social media already put me in that bubble thanks to algorithms. I’m left-wing, so I see left-wing things on social media, but that’s exactly why I consider it such a terrible place for information.

I read a print newspaper for news, it’s a fairly conservative newspaper, and because that falls out of my left-wing profile, I’ve not once seen an internet add for it, though I’ve been a happy subscriber to it for a decade.

Unfriending someone you dislike on Facebook does absolutely nothing other than make your life a little better.

But we recently build a Blazor.net app, and even though it’s new tech, the production time was a lot lower than it would have been, had we used our standard graphql Apollo + Vue approach.

I think something like django might be even more productive, but good luck hiring for that.

I mean, the internet used to be a place where people shared deep meaningful content that interested them. Sure, your rock collection or biology blog on the different frog species of some random island probably aren’t interesting to most people, but the effort spent on those digital journals and the insights they provided is the internet at its best.

Social media on the other hand is the internet at its worst. What value can you ever have within the limited confines of a twitter chat? And what value does the ability for billions of anonymous people commenting and/or liking really add to anything? I’ve been around since before eternal September, so I know it can be valuable, but that was probably the last time it was.

I think reddit speaks volumes of the status of social media these days. Almost everywhere you go, it feels like strangers waste their time trying to push whatever political agenda they have, and it works on the internet, because in the internet you don’t notice the people who ignore you and simply walk away. You’re only ever confronted by the people who respond.

I’ve noticed that over time, this simple fact destroys anonymous social media. I say anonymous but I probably should say strangers instead, because Facebook is just as bad. I’ve removed friends on Facebook that where alt-right, just like I’ve cut them out of my life because I didn’t want to debate whether holocaust was real every time I saw them, so these people certainly noticed the impact of their opinions, but all the thousands of hateful bastards and trolls who post nonsense on the few history groups I follow might as well be anonymous and will never know that I disprove of them. Because I’m not going to waste my time on them, I’ll just walk away.

It’s been a while since I’ve even been to reddit. I’ve had wonderful conversations on there, but these days you can barely make it three posts into something before it’s about some crackpot political issue. Just look at /r/technology, it used to be a slow version of HN that also featured arstechica articles, now it’s a political hellhole, and it’s getting worse, probably because I’m not the only person leaving.

I’m not sure what can be done though. Censorship isn’t a great option, but I have to agree with the NYT that it’s not working out great right now. More than a 100 people died of the measles in Europe this year because a bunch of fools got together on the internet and decided vaccines were bad, and that’s just the start of it.

I doubt we’ll really succeed though, I fully expect a lot of the less regulated countries to go full cyberpunk dystopia in the next 25 years, and I think it’ll give a huge advantage to the pro-censorship countries who don’t have to deal with the nonsense, but they’ll fit right into the cyberpunk dystopia, won’t they?

It’ll make its way into .net core 3.0, so I think it’s more than just a poc.

It’s early of course and not very flexible, if you want to build something it wasn’t meant for, it breaks.

+ a popular index.

I mean, a centralized blogging service that lets you customise your style sheet a little is basically just MySpace.

C# doesn’t get a lot of love on HN, but we’re launching our first Blazor app in production this week and it’s been pretty easy to use.