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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered if israel tech wasn't half genius half crook. They come up with fantastic technologies sometimes, but i feel like a lot of people there are just using this image of the "tech nation" to build scam or just lousy products.

As an example, i was extremely surprised when an israeli airline company sent me my existing password in clear text via mail. For a country that's at the forefront of fighting terrorism and always assessing airplanes security, it seemed like an incredible mistake.

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"Israeli tech" is tens of thousands of engineering+IT people, and thousands of managers and entrepreneurs. They don't do anything altogether. So they're not half-X-and-half-Y, they're a relatively typical distribution of people and organizations.

I believe this can even be generalized to all relatively large sample of X'ish Y. Forgetting this is one of the main reason of systemic bias on many topics, including the usual suspects.

Living in israel feel exactly like this. Like el al planes have last gen missile detector embedded, but theirs websites have been only IE compatible until recently.

It’s not just missile detection, it’s also countermeasures of the DIRCM variety: https://elbitsystems.com/media/c_music_2018letter_1.pdf

It's very similar to the US: extremely high tech in some respects and low tech in other respects. Both countries lagged heavily in Chip and Pin which would the most obvious thing to a visitor.

There's a real phenomenon where the top talent works mostly for FAANG / other big tech's local r&d centers / top local start-ups - or are founders; The second tier mostly work for smaller start-ups; And the third tier work for companies and outsourcing shops targeting the local market, which is very small and thus these companies pay less.

This leads to a situation where apps and websites facing the local market are usually sub par, apart from the rare case where a good start-up uses it as a dogfood playground for new tech.

Does it mean we get to extrapolate the competence of US tech from a certain app that recently disrupted election results, or one of the countless breaches eg. equifax ?

Israeli tech is generally good. The problem is only a very small subset of companies or state institutions use this tech. Political parties are not part of this subset, and more likely than not the application developer that got this "project" is somehow connected to the party. This is not a jab at Israeli democracy which I believe to be quite strong, just the way politics work (See the democratic primaries in Iowa for example).

I don't see how that's even relevant here. Most countries have a highly competent and knowledgeable nucleus of tech people but that's not really relevant to tech security in the public sector.

It's always the weakest link that compromises everything, no matter how sophisticated everything else is...

Sounds like a common theme when it comes to relatively young tech industries. You could easily say the same thing about Chinese tech companies. Their software/security due diligence on the part of investors just hasn't caught up yet.

well, the party that leaked this particular info are pretty much pure crooks.

example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Netanyahu

Local market is too small for good products.

This is not true for many products and services. For some, even a single-digit number of users is enough - if the product is critical for public utilities and infrastructure. For others, a potential base of a couple of Million of computer-users, or just consumers in general, is sufficiently large.

I heard a podcast last year that sums it all perfectly. The problem is that we all think outside of the box - so thinking inside the box is difficult.

Israeli private sector tech: genius

Israeli public sector tech: crook

Outside the IDF, which is merely incompetent and overstaffed, this is mostly on purpose. The reigning Israeli government for the past ~10 years have been corrupt neoliberals of the most stereotypical kind.

They are at the forefront of occupation and colonization, not at "fighting terrorism". People fighting for their freedom and human rights are not terrorists.

How old are you? How to you call daily explosing buses?

Here is my experiment: ask any Israeli company you have the pleasure of performing due diligence on to send you the patent numbers of the patents they claim they have. (Any patent number, forget localised patent claims).

More than a decade, no patent numbers yet.

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