1,555 karma · joined December 4, 2015
Personal website: https://eidel.io
OpenRegulatory: https://openregulatory.com
Navigate to https://ec.europa.eu/budget/financial-transparency-system/an...
1. Enter "subject of grant or contract" = "eudamed" [enter]
2. Receive the numbers until 2022 inclusive (2023 is incomplete).
3. Extrapolate conservatively.
Citation #2:
We received documents as part of a "freedom of information act" request (the EU version, named differently) which we published here. Those include numbers for 2022 and the head count, among other things.
1. Open website
2. See the IP 1.1.1.1. Copy.
Done.
I do get your point - and, sure, the EU website is not catastrophically terrible. But, damn, if I'm looking for a DNS, I just want the IP, I don't want five options and the mental overhead of having to determine why the hell I now am faced with five options for a DNS, which one I should choose, how they differ, etc., etc.. Add all of the IPv4/6 stuff on top of that, and.. oh man, I feel like you've lost 90%+ of interested people already.
1. Looks like the cost of this project so far is already ~€1M. Does it really take you a million Euros to set up a DNS server?
(Just did a quick research in the EU's financial transparency system [1], I entered "dns4eu" in the subject field. €3m budgeted, €1M used already, most of it going to a company named "Whalebone sro" (?))
2. Why does every EU-funded software project have such a terrible website? As a visitor, you get the impression that the designers took great care to obfuscate the actual product as much as possible, while throwing in random text blurbs, useless buttons and boxes.
Stuff like:
> Looking for a fast, secure, and privacy-focused way to browse the internet? You're in the right place.
Yeah, sure.. just give me the product?
Reading on..
> Learn everything you need to know about DNS4EU Public Service – including where it's located, how to easily set it up on your device, and what configuration options are available to best suit your needs.
Yeah, sure.. just give me the product?
Compare this with the UI of Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 [2] which gives visitors exactly what they need. It's awesome.
---
It's hard not to be cynical about EU projects, this one included. I've had the questionable pleasure of diving deep into EU software projects and their funding when analyzing and rebuilding [3] the EU medical device database [4], a simple database with ~500k entries (~10GB on disk), which has burned €45M (!) so far and employs a team of ~50 people. Link to website with budget tracker [5].
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/budget/financial-transparency-system/an...
[3] https://openregulatory.com/articles/beudamed-better-eudamed
Sure, this interest has recently gone up significantly, but it already was there, especially in the area I've been working in (hospitals / medical devices).
But here's what I can't wrap my head around: Why do the European alternatives suck so much?
- Pretty much all cloud providers seem (very) subpar to AWS. Some are better in a very isolated way, e.g. Hetzner offers better prices for cloud instances, bare metal servers and object storage. But they don't offer anything else. OVHcloud's web interface is terrible. Telekom Cloud runs Huawei hardware and software (!) and the dev experience is really bad.
- There's no real Cloudflare alternative.
- There's no real Google Workspace / Microsoft Teams competitor (Mail + Calendar + Drive).
- No search engine / Google alternative.
Or, let me rephrase this from another angle: In the US, startups regularly build serious competitor products to some of the incumbents mentioned above. Look at what fly.io and render.com did to Heroku, I think that's very impressive. Or hey.com slowly building a Gmail alternative, very cool.
So it's possible, technically.
But why not in Europe?
I can't get a satisfactory explanation for this observation. We certainly have smart people and good universities. Is it about funding? Or about the culture of not promoting entrepreneurship? Bureaucracy? GDPR?
I genuinely don't know. What do you think?
As a side note, I recommend the book "Being Mortal" from Atul Gawande. The TLDR here is that our healthcare systems tend to overtreat patients, especially those with cancer who actually have a rather bleak prognosis, because it's easier for a physician to simply order all treatments and tell the patient "all good here, good luck" instead of taking the time to sit down and have a (long) conversation about the bleak prognosis and which options are actually still worth it. By "worth it" I mean that there are trade-offs to each treatment option, and it takes some very careful weighing whether each one provides a net benefit for your friend's individual situation. E.g. surgery might extend survival by X months, but might also create, worst case, new disabilities. So now you're faced with the very difficult decision of whether to potentially live for a shorter time with less disabilities, or for a longer time with more. There's no perfect answer, but having this sort of discussion is a good step which many patients unfortunately never take. I think this is a failure in our healthcare systems and maybe in the education of physicians.
Now, if I personally had a Glioblastoma, on top of the standard of care (surgery probably makes sense etc.), I think the ketogenic diet would currently be my best shot. Yeah, sure.. it's mostly only case reports so essentially anecdotal evidence, but it does look promising.
Good luck for your friend!
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tinu7tYAAAAJ&hl=en
One lesser known hack is to search the friendly Estonian site [1] for a cheaper version of the standard - they often create their own versions of the standards which much pretty contain the exact same content as the original. Unfortunately, in this case, it seems they only are offering the actual standard at a similar price [2]. Sad dog face.
It could be worthwhile to monitor the website to see if they release their own version for a better price in the future. Usually, their prices are ~10% of the original price (one more data point that Estonia does cool stuff).
We deal with the rather shady standardization organizations quite a lot as we work in medical device compliance [3]. I've heard all the usual arguments: "But standardization costs money!", "These organizations are doing good work!", etc., etc. No. I completely disagree. If something's a standard, that in my opinion makes it similar to a law - people should be able to follow it, and that requires people to freely access it. The EU Advocate General seems to agree [4]. And there are lots of standardizations which don't rely on shadily offering PDFs for money: ECMAScript and ANSI C come to mind, but the list goes on.
[1] https://evs.ee [2] https://www.evs.ee/en/search?OnlySuggestedProducts=false&que... [3] https://openregulatory.com/accessing-standards/ [4] https://openregulatory.com/maybe-eu-standards-are-becoming-f...
OPs comment is valid - physical servers might incur downtime.
But I do agree with your sentiment. "Downtime" is not an argument which should tilt the discussion towards either physical servers or the cloud. AWS data centers famously also have outages, while physical servers often have uptimes of multiple years. So what's better? It's hard to tell, but at the very least, none of these solutions is downtime-free.
Many sub-aspects of this are debatable, of course: Is VC money good? Are high startup valuations good? Also: Sure, you can defer the payment, you can pay it later with interest, etc., etc. But that's besides the point.
The problem here is: Once your startup reaches a high valuation, exiting the country, for whatever reason, will become difficult. And this might happen for rather innocuous reasons: Temporarily moving to the US to open up a subsidiary, staying there > 180 days / year? --> Exit tax. Etc. The number of second-order consequences is high, and I'd wager most of them are not good if your goal, as a country, is to foster a startup ecosystem.
I feel like this is a bias in the HN bubble: In the real world, 99% of companies with any sort of web servers (cloud or otherwise) are running very boring, constant, non-Uber workloads.
The PDF-selling companies argue that they need that money to organize committee meetings for developing further versions of standards etc., but that leaves me wondering - we have so many other standards-setting institutions which don't rely on shady PDF sales, so why not take that model instead?
[1] https://openregulatory.com/accessing-standards/ (Disclaimer: My company)
There are many things which we do differently at OpenRegulatory. We don't use Slack. We have a four-day workweek. Everyone gets access to the company bank account, and if you get your work done in 2 hours per day, that's fine with us.
But now over to you!
You love building things. You've discovered programming which enabled you to build many things fast.
You have a fair amount of experience in different programming languages. After cycling through many new, shiny tech stacks, you've arrived at the conclusion that productivity is at its highest when using old-school, proven technology. Like Rails, tailwindcss and Hotwire.
Read more on our own digital health job board (we ship side projects, too):
https://digital-health-jobs.com/job_posts/1
Apply by sending us your CV and a short explanation why you don't want to work at Google:
hello@openregulatory.com
There's quite an overlap with US (FDA) regulations but we're less experienced there.
Most startups (at least in my bubble?) focus on one of those two areas.
The author already touched upon a few hypotheses why the industry has arrived at this state. There's one I'd like to highlight: The author, now having gone through this experience, would actually be in a perfect position to found their own CRO and implement all their efficiency learnings there. However, they probably look back upon this experience and think it was super painful and would prefer to do fun stuff like developing software instead.
That, for me, is the main reason. There are smart, structured, pragmatic people who got acquainted with this industry, but they choose to leave it.
And that's sad!
So the solution would be to find a group of smart, structured, pragmatic people with a high tolerance for bureaucratic pain and give them the resources to make this industry more efficient.
And here's my plug: That's exactly what we're doing at OpenRegulatory [1], albeit for medical device software and not for clinical trials. Among other things, we've published all our document templates for free (also on GitHub), host a free Slack community for companies to help each other out, and offer a compliance SaaS with transparent and fair pricing. It's still a long way, but it's a start :)
Their PaaS is rock-solid. The UI sometimes looks less polished but that shouldn't detract from the fact that their service quality is really, really good. No problems so far. When I had questions, I've been in touch with their support - you have real engineers responding to your message in a few hours. Really cool.
I've recently come to increasingly appreciate profitable, bootstrapped startups, because they have (much) less incentive of getting acquired, subsequently shifting their focus to "scale" and "enterprise sales" (wait, which company comes to mind here.. ah, Heroku). Scalingo is bootstrapped and profitable.
Why not render.com or fly.io? Both are based in the US, so GDPR compliance becomes more tricky. They're VC-funded, so I have no clue what will happen to them in the future. Maybe they'll be profitable and their investors will say "oh okay, it's fine to have a boring, profitable startup in our portfolio". Maybe not. Likely not.
In spirit, in reminds me of Arachne [1][2] which somewhat sold a similar vision of "let's build a cool web framework for Clojure", and it also gained quite a lot of traction. Even I as a student funded it. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to that vision, to say the least.
But still - in that sense, you could be right! Clojure may not have had a good web framework for the simple reason that nobody built it so far :)
Good luck!
[1] https://github.com/arachne-framework [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/6qz7sj/is_arachne_...
Are you tired of corporate politics, unproductive meetings and repeatedly building stuff which never got shipped? The VC-funded startup chaos?
I certainly was. I got tired of the typical startup game: Lots of funding, a questionable product, no customers, many meetings and countless interruptions. Instead, I wanted to build a company that got back to the basics. Like being profitable and building stuff which customers love and pay for.
And most importantly, I wanted to call the shots on certain things:
We're not using Slack, because Slack interrupts people and is a crappy project management tool (we use Basecamp instead).
We don't care how many hours you work. If you get the job done and respond to messages within a reasonable time frame, that's fine! If you get stuff done faster, take the rest of the day off. I like to take long naps in the afternoon. We're currently on a 4-day workweek (probably forever).
We don't have any sort of corporate spending policy. You'll get a company credit card and full access to our bank account. Buy what you need.
What about you?
You love building things. You've discovered programming which enabled you to build many things fast.
You have a fair amount of experience in different programming languages. After cycling through many new, shiny tech stacks, you've arrived at the conclusion that productivity is at its highest when using old-school, proven technology that gets out of your way. Like Rails. And tailwindcss!
Simply implementing requirements which were brought to you by product managers has become too boring for you. You're looking for opportunities to influence the direction of product development further upstream, getting regular feedback and sometimes talking to customers.
You're looking for a solid job, where you can apply good craftsmanship to a product which users love and pay for.
Your grades and (University) education are nice to know, but ultimately don't matter much.
Pay range (yearly, incl. German tax): 60-80k € + revenue share.
Apply by sending your CV and a short reasoning why you don't want to work for Google to oliver at openregulatory.com.
PS: You'll be our first developer - I'm just a dude who builds stuff in rails, finds customers, hires people and hands out drinks at team events. Like a soccer mom!
Clojure devs are much more senior - they've typically been burnt by at least one tech stack, often more (Java, JS + React, Fortran, Cobol, punching tape, etc.). Clojure devs also tend to be really passionate about, you guessed it, Clojure, which commonly turns out to be a good thing. People passionate about that level of language-detail tend to be meticulous about many other useful things, like choosing the right tools and building simple and maintainable applications.
There's sometimes a slight tendency towards over-engineering which is understandable. People who dive deep into other programming languages and go through the pain of learning lisp sometimes tend to lose focus of the actual (business) problem to solve. But I wouldn't say this tendency is significantly higher than elsewhere. Still, sometimes, the pragmatism of a rails dev just churning out code is missed.
Also, because Clojure jobs are scarce and there's a high number of "secret Clojurists" (people who code Clojure at night and secretly dream of using it at their day job), you actually get a much higher number of applicants than you would have estimated based on the most recent Stackoverflow survey.
Also, you get a real shot at hiring rockstar devs. This is huge and cannot be overstated. If you're hiring for a standard JS / Python stack, you're suddenly competing with FAANG companies and their salaries. If you're hiring for Clojure, you're hardly competing with anyone. And you get a good pre-selection of senior devs. Like, those which were burned at a FAANG company, who finally came to their senses and now want to code Clojure. What's not to like?
I guess a drawback would be that you couldn't instantly hire a local team of 100+ devs, even if you take secret Clojurists into account. But who would want to work at a place which hires 100+ devs in a short amount of time?
(I interviewed around 200 people, many of them for Clojure roles, sometimes even comparing Python and Clojure applicants for the same role)
Relevant talk: https://youtu.be/kNiGu_VaoTg?t=1566
Yes, the short-term financial implications (cost of standards) are minor compared to cost of employees and consultants (source: I am a consultant). However, non-free standards have a gazillion second-order effects which tend to get overlooked:
- Potential founders (think YC) can't "just quickly browse a standard" to see whether they'd want to build a startup in that area.
- Individuals not affiliated to a company won't purchase them for themselves (too expensive) and therefore are excluded from contributing.
- People can't write blog posts which freely cite passages from a standard --> Less public information on how to actually implement a standard in a company.
- People can't make presentations (slides) with passages from a standard --> A lot of paraphrasing and beating around the bush, making presentations more useless.
Imagine, for a second, the following thought experiment: Open source software on GitHub would be behind a similar paywall, say, 50 EUR per software package. You could make your argument again: Compared to engineering salaries, that's a minor amount. Sure. But the second-order effects are gigantic, essentially killing the open source ecosystem because individuals (like a random person from a third-world country) are entirely cut off and barred from contributing.
Or, like: Would DHH have written rails if access to Ruby would have cost 50 EUR?
- You need to purchase multiple standards (at least 4).
- In theory, you need to purchase a multi-user license if more than one person should be allowed to read the pdf in your company (hint: nobody purchases the multi-user license).
- Every few years, new versions of the standards are released which you have to purchase.
- Sometimes, you just purchase standards to realise that they're not applicable to your company.
- The industry is riddled with shadiness: A German standards web shop offers a "standards flatrate" for a "great price" of e.g. 750 EUR for 10 standards. [1]
- Getting off-topic, but more related shadiness: Your purchased PDFs are watermarked with your company name and full name of purchaser (!) in the footer of each page to prevent sharing.
[1] https://www.beuth.de/de/regelwerke/normen-flatrates-im-ueber...
One common workaround is to go to "the Estonian site" which offers the same, English version of standards for a much lower price [2]. Being a bit cynical, I would say that Estonia prioritises open information much more highly than.. other developed countries. I created a price comparison on my website [3].
But: The core problem of standards being openly available is still not solved. Why is this not possible? For me, standards are very comparable to the law: A large number of people should comply with it. For that, they must be openly available to everyone. Everything else doesn't make sense. Is that unreasonable?
[1] https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html [2] https://www.evs.ee/en/ [3] https://openregulatory.com/accessing-standards/
There certainly seems to be some innovation here, in this case driven by Diamond in Austria. It may have "helped" that Avgas prices over here in Europe are really quite high.
But I'm getting the impression that the authorities prefer to look into local companies where "easy wins" can be had - like in this article.
Let's get this straight: I think the video surveillance here was not okay.
But - shouldn't the authorities rather pursue things which matter more, i.e. maximising the impact of (number of humans affected * magnitude of effect)? The WhatsApp <> Facebook data sharing situation comes to mind. Or the recent change of their privacy policy.
There's lots more. I feel that big (SV) tech companies have much more leeway than local companies, simply because their probability of being fined is lower.
Aside from all the good and valid comments about reducing scope and shipping an MVP, I'd like to raise another point which may be controversial (or even wrong), but still worth raising:
Would it have been different if you had used Rails? A few of the problems you mention (rich text editing, validation, and to some extend, pdf exports) are very easily solved in Rails. Take rich text editing: It's literally a couple minutes to use ActionText. Or validations / forms, there's really not much work to do. PDF exports are also not too hard via wicked_pdf [1] if you're okay with fixing some formatting quirks later on.
I've seen both worlds by writing tons of JS / React code myself, and at that time (2016-2018) those problems were almost an order of magnitude more time-costly to implement in SPAs. I remember react-router.. not great memories.
Of course, all the points reducing MVP scope still hold, but.. if you could have had all those features (nearly) for free, would you be at another stage now? Who knows.
They come to expect that all development is as slow as theirs, including frontend <--> backend apis (graphql), huge js complexity (webpack), breaking changes (react-router), etc.
I see lots of companies nowadays wanting to hire "React devs". It seems we're collectively forgetting how fast you can ship stuff if you just use proven technology. Makes me wonder where we're headed.
Maybe it'll be a competitive advantage to use old (= proven) technology in the future?
Always consider the alternative. This could be a hospital in a remote part of a third-world country. Maybe they're understaffed. How are they currently handling the task of gathering information from monitoring devices and reacting to alarms?
Maybe, their nursing staff has to run from bed to bed to check patient's vital signs and device alarms. Emergencies would frequently be missed because they are understaffed and checking is irregular. Now, you could introduce software which provides centralized monitoring. If it's introduced on top of the existing activities (i.e., running from bed to bed), it leads to a net benefit - you catch emergencies earlier and consequences of malfunctions are less severe. But if it's introduced to replace the existing activities, it may lead to patient harm.
Sure, it's self-coded, browser-based and buggy - but you always need to weigh risks with benefits, and those depend on usage context.
Of course, in most western countries, this would be completely illegal. But these are also the countries in which medical software looks like it's from the 90s, with catastrophic usability and missing features.
We need to ask ourselves: Right now, we heavily prioritize patient safety over innovation - but have we got that balance right? What are patients missing out on if we could just bring a few more of the latest advances in technology to their bedside?
You know, not machine learning, the blockchain or the internet of things. Rather things like browser-based applications which "just work" and have great usability.
Note: I'm a physician, software developer and consultant for medical software certification :)