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Comment by cbcoutinho | Hacker News Reader

Get ready for a data dump of 40 year old COBOL code /s

But in all seriousness, this is a great step forward in institutional software. Open up software to further progress towards standardizing an industry's software interface.

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I would love for a few banks to dump all their old COBOL code on to GitHub. Not because it would necessarily be useful for anything, but simply because it would be fascinating to read... There is actually very little open source COBOL code available, of the massive quantities of COBOL code written over the decades the vast, vast majority of it remains closed source.

Sadly I think a lot of it is just going to be lost to history... at an old employer of mine, I remember we had a store room full of old 9 track mainframe backup tapes – the mainframe had been retired and we no longer had a 9 track tape drive to read them with – I wonder if they are still there now – ideally they'd be sent to some sort of archive – they couldn't be released now without vetting because they would have contained confidential information (e.g. employee payroll information, customer data), but a century from now when all of us are dead who cares if our confidential info gets released to the public then?

> a century from now when all of us are dead who cares if our confidential info gets released to the public then?

I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's far-future scifi "A Deepness in the Sky," where "programmer-archaeologist" is one of the occupations. (along with "programmer-at-arms")

As I keep saying. Some people chuckle about Warhammer 40k Techno Priests. The only people in the warhammer universe with some chance to understand the centuries old compuer systems and machines. Other people work with legacy systems.

It's pretty genius how they've turned ancient maintenance routines into prayers and rituals in order to preserve the knowledge and scale out the work force

We do it too. I hold my breath every time I kick over an old server that it comes back again. They just formalized it.

The oldest occurence of this idea that I know of is in Asimov's Foundation series, where a class of priests preserves knowledge about nuclear technology and robots.

it might lead to cargo culting though, already hoards of programmers are chanting refrains of "_ considered harmful" and "_ is the root of all evil" ... ;)

It's deliberately _worse_ than cargo culting in Warhammer 40k. That universe is deliberately set up to be as bleak and cynical as possible. Partly just for fun, partly to serve the game a justification why any faction would get into a skirmish with any other faction (including itself).

knowledge is a priesthood

The Tau might be able to reverse engineer?

I’ve just been listening to that. It’s remarkable how much AI can already do, compared to the limits assumed in the story.

And how technology starts hijacking people' minds. From HN, one year ago and a few days ago:

https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peop...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphon...

those are more to 'reading' source codes to find the functionality you want, but I do get what you mean

> "but a century from now when all of us are dead who cares if our confidential info gets released to the public then?"

Your descendants probably. Especially if grandpa earned a lot of dough which by heritage would be theirs now. Or just for the sake of privacy. Would you care if your private social network data was dumped after your death?

To me, when I sign up for confidential that means now and always. Not until death do us part.

> Your descendants probably.

Go back three or four generations, and most people can't even remember any of their ancestors names. Why should I care about the privacy of people who died long before I was born, and whose names I can't even remember?

> To me, when I sign up for confidential that means now and always. Not until death do us part.

I guess it is a matter of personal preference. But why should I care about what happens to my personal info long after I am dead? Once I am dead, and my children are dead, and their children too, and nobody alive can even remember who I was–what difference does it make to me then? (Maybe 100 years is too short, since a century from now I might still have living grandchildren – but I think the principle is sound whatever the exact timeframe should be.)

Although I agree with you in general, to play the devil's advocate, it's also possible that the current state of affairs is a side effect of the state of record keeping over the past couple hundred years.

Given modern data storage paradigms, with perfect[0] recording of a wide range of data, it's entirely possible that people might care in the future. For example, if you have an ancestor who was near-sighted, you are automatically disqualified from any colonization missions (regardless of your own eyesight) due to the presence of potentially-flawed genes.

It would be similar in concept, if not degree, to the Nuremburg Laws[1], which were only made possible by the meticulous record-keeping of the pre-WW2 German bureaucracy. Whether or not those records are used for malicious, distasteful, or nefarious purposes at some indeterminate future is not something we can control or predict effectively today.

[0]: Reduced human error

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws#Classifications...

> For example, if you have an ancestor who was near-sighted, you are automatically disqualified from any colonization missions (regardless of your own eyesight) due to the presence of potentially-flawed genes.

I don't find the future you describe very plausible. Keep in mind that you only inherit (on average) half of each parent's genes, a quarter of each grandparent's, an eighth of each great grandparent – so even if your great grandpa had some nasty health problems, odds are you didn't inherit whatever genes might have been responsible for them. Also, don't you think by then, our knowledge of human genetics will likely have advanced to the point that we don't need to assume you might have bad genes because your ancestors had health issues, we actually have a complete sequence of your individual genome, along with a much better understanding than we have today of what all those individual genes do?

Not the person you responded to, but I think that the point of the analogy was to illustrate that information can be used in unanticipated ways. Shifts in politics have frequently resulted in the persecution of formerly innocuous people and groups (see McCarthyism). Greater and greater data processing and storage will inevitably be turned against various targets. While we can’t prevent that entirely, we can at least have a forward view when making decisions at present.

Exactly. Money obtained through heritage being one thing. Cancer in the family raising health insurance another (if all open information shows cancer they can assume next generations will as well). Near sighted raising car insurance. Grandpa being a bank robber making kids have a hard time in preschool (or probably be a hero nowadays). Grandpa being a kid high school shooter being disclosed. Sex offenders. Well, you get the point. Confidentiality is not something to let forgo easily. Once lost it can never be obtained again.

So while you may be comfortably dead your descendants may pay the penalty in unexpected ways. A suitable time frame would probably be beyond centuries but rather like today finding Neanderthals (prehistoric men).

This is all apart from the breach of contract in a social sense.

>Would you care if your private social network data was dumped after your death?

no?

For a probably extreme but real example, I think I would prefer my Grandfather's specific duties with the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s not be released. I don't even like talking about what kind of scientist he was in some crowds.

> I think I would prefer my Grandfather's specific duties with the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s not be released

Is your preference that they never be released, or not released in your lifetime? How would you feel about them being released a thousand years from now?

I think 1000 years would be fine.

EDIT: I felt unethical saying this and have since changed my mind. I plan on no children but my cousins have children and I can't be sure what they would want.

You are not responsible for the acts of your grandfather.

I'm sure the inventor of the time-travel machine will be very happy with such a treassure :-)

I would actually appreciate that. I recently dealt with a DDF file that was 780 columns of tabular data.

Looking at the code I cannot find any finance related code (searching for the terms bond, swap, future). So it must be a communication protocol only but doesn't cover the products. Why not using a simple REST API then?

There are a big likelihood that they used german terms since it's a german bank. Sourcecode written in other languages are not funny to read.

I very much doubt so. Most of the IB, even at Deutsche Bank, doesn't speak German. And from what I can tell it seems to be in English.

I tend to find source code comments written in German quite often.

More like a lot of Java code based on knowing someone whose worked for DB at least at City of London anyway. I think most banks are doing JVM nowadays if I'm not mistaken.

I would much prefer a bank using that over, say, Python

https://github.com/symphonyoss/plexus-interop

Java/JS/C#

I bet it's Java.

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