Bulgaria's new eGov minister is a software engineer
twitter.com
twitter.com
Also IOCCC winner, FreeBSD contributor and more.
Occasionally comments here on HN.
"Hi, can you provider references for your figures? - Skiiv
The figures come directly from SQL queries I executed on the General Secreteriat for Information Systems database.... – Diomidis Spinellis"
People don't have a clue about the reality of politics in Bulgaria. To put it simply: It is a mixture of crooks and shady billionaires with ties to underground criminal organizations and ex Bulgarian Secret Services operators.
To clarify further, things are so corrupt and chaotic that people voted a local TV star Slavi Trifonov to power. Which failed so miserably, that now they elected a government with some "new actors" and bunch of old corrupted faces. There is now even a local Hip-hop star in the parliament. Go figure:)
Even if this guy has good intentions, or technical expertise, fixing the always "broken" e-government (https://cnn.it/3m0f1CE) will not be easy or remotely possible. To much corruption is lurking in the shadows.
1. For the first time in 10+ years the Bulgarian IT community is represented. To add to that, it's represented in both parliament and government. This is a huge change on its own.
2. For the first time in 10+ years there are new faces and young people (20 and 30-somethings) in the parliament and the government. Yes, this includes among many others, TV stars, musicians, artists. They are representing the people who voted for them and that I find is positive.
3. Fixing the broken e-gov, or starting anew, is indeed a hard task. That is why the local IT community needs to be positive and helpful. It's for the best of everyone and an important prerequisite to reducing corruption. This includes both administrative corruption (by reducing the number of people on administrative positions) and political corruption (by providing transparency through easing access to data and fostering public involvement in policymaking).
New faces don't change corrupt practices. Jail-time for corrupt politicians and related third parties can. But the Judicial System is full with corrupt judges with ties to Secret Service and criminal underground and EU is not making any efforts to change this.
For the last 20 years there is not one representative, from any party, with proven corruption practices to serve jail time. All of this in country which is famous for one of the highest death rates in the world and one of the lowest standard of living in the EU.
Sorry, for being a realist.
This is not a fact, but a hypothesis, and probably wrong one. Higher punishment will most probably bring more corruption.
If it wasn't, nobody would be committing (pre-meditated) murder any more, because that's got the toughest penalty (not really, but let's pretend for a bit) of all the crimes.
(HN submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29534714)
Morally speaking; depends on your morals ;)
Morally speaking; maybe :)
Yeah, that only happens in Bulgaria...
I get it though. Although I think nepotism does result in people voting for anything but a politician or what established media recommends, since those would be suspected to engage in corruption themselves.
(thanks to Diederich for the correction)
founder of a blockchain-based SIEM startup
Now I'm worried for Bulgaria.
In 2017 they posted a skeptical https://techblog.bozho.net/blockchain-its-all-greek-to-me/ which in linked to from very recent https://techblog.bozho.net/digital-transformation-and-techno...
> Technology alone will not solve anything. And my blockchain skepticism is a hint in that direction – many blockchain enthusiasts are claiming that blockchain will solve many problems in many areas of life. It won’t. At least not just through clever cryptography and consensus algorithms.
I'm usually the last person in the world to say anything should be on a blockchain but I feel something like this could be handy for hosting open source projects.
And there's no need to agree on anything between repos, heck git allows you not to agree with yourself on your own repo between different branches. Git actually works completely fine between a number of different repository (the UX isn't great of course, but which part of git's UX is…).
Anyone know of any studies of famous techocrats and the overall view on the effectiveness of appointing ppl that aren't career politicians?
But what if, in democratic countries, it's more important to be good at making an impression (being a career politician), to win more votes
Engineer-turning-politicians in non-democracies also do not need to make an impression on a wider public, but just on a restricted set of decision makers (or political mentors).
USA has had its own share of non-politician politicians (think Schwarzenegger and Trump, to name the few most prominent ones). And I am sure you can find many politicians throughout Europe who have an engineering background, it's just never highlighted.
In the USA, it's also that business accomplishments are valued more than problem solving skills, and in politics, you don't get the same freedom as in business: eg. late Steve Jobs would probably have an easy job of getting elected, but what would he have done afterwards? His mode of operation would not translate to democratic governance (even though, arguably, Trump attempted a similar style with less charisma), IMO.
Maybe Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg could run for the office? I'd honestly wonder what would the polls say about them (Zuckerberg is maybe not going to do so well with all the privacy-related negatives, but I wonder how much would people care about net worth vs that). But again, these are top-of-the-line businessmen, not top-of-the-line engineers, even if they've got engineering background.
EDIT: to add some more context
Technocracy in the Second World (see: tektology) is quite common. In the First World the history of technocracy can't really be understood without studying the history of eugenics. This is also generally true of much of our science and even mathematical theory. Terms like "regression to the mean" have direct origins in eugenics theory
https://nautil.us/issue/92/frontiers/how-eugenics-shaped-sta...
And yet studying the history of eugenics will not help you understand regression to the mean. It's certainly not a bar to understanding.
I was saying that you need to have a good grasp on the history of eugenics to have a good context to understand the history of technocracy, a political ideology, in the West
A technocratic gov will still have to make political decisions. And those decisions will often reflect the interests of whoever’s hired them.
But in a way it will shield the political class from criticism since they are not the ones implementing the decisions directly.
Interestingly enough, they are also both from different ends of the political spectrum.
Just some ideas
For instance, Jimmy Carter would widely be considered a "politician" since he was directly elected, but someone like Janet Yellen could be considered a technocrat since she was appointed as Secretary of the Treasury due to her technical experience.
However, in this case maybe there’s a chance because his post seems quite domain specific and not very policy heavy.
probably the worst of all the listed specimen and it reminded me of a prescient Hitchens moment from the early 90s
>... Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
In case he sets up a good team of techies, I think he would be able to guide them in the right direction, because he is aware of the problems and has the technical competence for choosing the viable solutions.
However, bozho's submission history is maybe borderline rather than over the line, so I've restored the posts now. The software can be a bit overzealous and I need to tweak it.
It's true that some good posts don't get recovered this way. But I'm not aware of an alternative that would fix that without also seriously diluting the quality of HN. Not all, but certainly most of those posts are dead for good reason.
Rescuing good submissions is great, I just wish there were a way to somehow rescue good people making bad submissions, so that they start posting good ones instead. (Or at least stop wasting their time.)
I've done it a few times.
1. The most godawful place on the planet. I used the company's services when I was 12-13 and I'm still embarrassed to say I've had anything to do with them, even as a client.
2. Didn't even bother to put an ssl certificate which takes literally two minutes and is free with, say, letsecrypt.
It's a common practice to offer HTTPS, but you shouldn't think of it as dogma. It's perfectly reasonable to provide both so that people using old terminals (an iPad v1, or an old game console for example) can access the content without technical issues. Or if you want a very low-resources device to access it.
It's all trade-offs and use-cases. One is not a superset of the other.
It's like saying every door should have a lock. No, not every door is improved by adding a lock. Many use-cases are actually not possible with a lock.
Different situations have different tradeoffs, and different people value different things.
There are many valid use cases for HTTP, and more broadly, keeping old devices and experiences working as time passes
My country (France) has many buildings and bridges from 500 years ago for instance. I hope these get preserved as there is a lot to learn from them, lots of beauty in them, and they may be more and more relevant in the future.
Not everything should disappear the instant there an alternative. Things co-existing is great.
As I highlighted above, a redirect from http to https is going exactly against this. If you care about MITM attacks for your visitors to that extent, you should not serve any traffic on HTTP. Yet that's a usability nightmare because of how web clients (not just browsers) operate today.
Browsers are finally starting to default to HTTPS without using a whitelist when no protocol is specified. That's the only reasonable approach, and hopefully in a few years, that's prevalent. Maybe browsers can also start doing something "smart" where they also fetch https resource when http is requested, and switch to https if they largely match.
Combining it with secure DNS is the only way to true protection against eavesdropping and MITM attacks.
Bozho is a doer.
1. Superhosting is the largest Bulgarian shared hosting provider. Although they indeed offer a relatively mediocre service, they're far from unusable and have low latency for his Bulgarian readership. Also his blog is somewhat old, so there may not have been much choice at the time.
2. He has configured TLS for both https://blog.bozho.net/ and https://techblog.bozho.net/ although no redirect has been added for the first site. As far as we know this may have even been intentional.
The engineering responsibility should be low in the hierarchy with wide political support across all ministries. Unless the ministry of social affairs sees, that the only sensible way to fulfill their mandate is to offer electronic services and is also able to execute that, nothing will get better in that area. The egov minister might walk back and forth the government meeting room on his eyebrows but he will not be granted the power to tell other ministries how to do their jobs.
You can think about it like object orientation (vertical) vs. functional programming (horizontal). Both have their use cases.
The drawbacks you're concerned about are resolved through communication. If there's ongoing communication, there will be synchronization.
These look like ministries introduced to address specific concerns or goals of the leadership. When something is "ministry of something" gets budgets and freedom to use these budgets and other tools that may not be possible if it was just "department of something under the ministry of other thing".
When Turkey used to be friendly with EU and had a goal of joining the EU, there was "Ministry of EU".
These injections often completely broke functionality of any even slightly non-standard blog engines, as they were not tested by the designers of the injectors.
True.
Singapore (the chancellor himself), Israel (min. of justice and now interior), Taiwan (egov min.), Bulgaria (egov min.).
Then Greece (Spinellis was just a secretary in finance). Israel has one more in the office of the prime minister, India has 2, but not in the state government and I'm probably missing Estonia and more Baltics. But in Estonia I only see Lipp working in some ministry, not leading it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petkov_Government
We can wish the new government success. They will need a lot of it to purge the corrupt mafia demons.
Administrative corruption was the scourge of 20th century.
Political corruption is the scourge of our time.
Alas.
The funny thing (for some definition of funny) is that the rise to stardom of the new PM -- the one to "eliminate 100% of the corruption" -- started on a document crime and a blatant transgression of Bulgarian constitution.
The way this happened: he was appointed as an 'Economy Minister' in the caretaker cabinet preceding the current one and so he had to sign a declaration that his only citizenship is Bulgarian. (Bulgarian Constitution forbids foreign citizens from holding minster office). Yet, later it turned out he also had Canadian citizenship at the time.
He tried to justify that falsification of an official document, saying, quite politician-ly, that the truth/facts didn't matter as he had "always held Bulgaria first in his heart".
In the end, though, almost no one seemed to care about that and people voted for him. So, yeah, people are excited but perhaps, at least for some of them, that's for a different reason.
Whether a person is a Canadian citizen does not depend solely on the person. Before he was appointed as a minister, he had requested his Canadian citizenship be terminated. The Canadian authorities took months to process his request, thereby creating a situation in which another country is to decide whether a person can be part of the government of Bulgaria. If this seems absurd to you, you're not alone. The idea behind the clause in question is exactly the opposite -- to not allow other countries to interfere with the government of Bulgaria.
This was a hot discussion before the elections and his main opponents (much like you) made sure everybody knew without context that he. blatantly. broke. the. constitution. And yes, considering that he won the election, apparently people did not care. And considering that the broken clause has been pointed out as especially outdated, out of touch with the real world, and even possibly discriminatory, I don't care either. To me he did whatever was in his powers to stop being a Canadian citizen and I'm pretty sure Canada is not trying to take control of Bulgaria via him, so in my eyes, the spirit of the clause was not broken. Not only that, but if he had not been appointed because Canada had not yet revoked his citizenship, then the spirit of the clause would have been broken as the bureaucracy of another country is interfering with Bulgaria's government having a qualified and impactful person be part of it. Much like the entire country, Bulgaria's constitution is in dire need of reforms and modernisation.
Eg. you are not going to stop that nurse at the hospital from letting her sister in law into the doctor's office early even if it was not her turn.
Boy, what an example of a lie. I'd be more than happy even if they dare to limit themselves to stopping all corruption with public funds and government contracts.
Somehow I think I'll live if my doctor prioritizes a family member before me. There's a chance I won't even accuse them of a crime because of it, let alone blame the government for it...
FWIW, this is a mathematical tool called a contradiction to disprove a claim: you seem to be agreeing that they won't achieve 100%, so you are fine with the lie. That does not make it not a lie.
They are similarly not going to completely eliminate most of the corruption no matter what, even the corruption you are concerned with. The same case as above will play out in granting a large government contract when a clerk at the office discloses competing offers to his best friend who runs a company in the same space, or they add in particular requirements and clauses to exclude some competitors.
They are either "lying" of planning to achieve 100%-corruption-free society (sorry, they are being "diplomatic" to win the office first), or they are utterly unrealistic and unfamiliar with human patterns of behaviour. Lying is likely better if their motives are truly pure, but I'd have a hard time trusting someone who lies their way into office.
Your mileage may vary.