Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

nearform.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 133 posts

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#81

Post by roomey »

ruiseal wrote: post #77
rsynnott wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more about public trust in the app than anything else. Nearform, and the government, were quite effective in establishing public trust; I think it helped that it was open source.

There's still a fair amount of people that are suspect that the published binary doesn't match the source and the app could be doing nefarious things. It will be interesting to see how this sentiment progresses. Reproducible builds would help in this regard.

Really, I work in the industry (it) and haven't known one person to raise this.

I would say the majority of people in Ireland know the various social network apps are a bajillion times more intrusive than the covid checker. Im fairly sure most people "trust" the government not to be "spying" on us

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#82

Post by donaltroddyn »

ericlewis wrote: post #5
donaltroddyn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't sure whether to remove that as a gratuitous adjective. Even without that claim, it's an interesting development, especially as the app cost only €850k. In contrast, our nearest neighbour scrapped their app last month after spending over £11MM (~€12MM) and are now rebuilding on the Apple/Google API: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53095336 The code is already up on GitHub: https://github.com/HSEIreland

I worked on this project a bit and have a deep understanding of how it went about, though, I am not sure how much I can talk about that. edit: I guess what can be said was it was a highly efficient project, and there weren't so many fingers in the development pot so to say.

Thanks for working on this.

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#83

Post by johannes1234321 »

rkachowski wrote: post #76
johannes1234321 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it has bugs, but most bugs are from the system framework ... they could have handled those better, but the cause is often out of their control

In what sense are most of the bugs from the "system framework"?

There is this contact tracing framework in iOS and Google Play Services and that causes a few errors. Some users get a message like "not possible in your region" and some get some random error codes about rate limits and such errors, which bubble up from those frameworks and can only be fixed there.

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#84

Post by kanox »

quonn wrote: post #24

In Germany the app was developed by research institutes. Then canceled. Then SAP picked it up and charged 10 million Euros for what is essentially a few 1000 lines of UI code. The German Telekom got the same amount, just „because“ and will additionally charge 2-3 million per month mostly for the hotline (with limited capacity). So the total cost will be 50-100 millions. Despite the fact that most technical work was a…

> 50-100 millions

Relative to other COVID-related economic damage this is peanuts. It's acceptable to throw a few tens of millions at a wall and hope that something sticks.

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#85

Post by johannes1234321 »

riffraff wrote: post #79
tlarkworthy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20M for the boost of Germany's worldwide status is a drop in the ocean. The money was well spent, Germany did not embarrass themselves by penny pinching. It needed to work, and it appears to. Compare this to the UK who is still flapping around.

I mean, if there was a public tender there's little to complain, if there wasn't then it seems right to, even if it's "a drop in the ocean". And frankly nobody thinks "wow, Germany has a working COVID app" since almost everyone else has it too. Even Italy, amongst a ton of screw ups, has managed to produce a perfectly fine open source contact tracing app.

> And frankly nobody thinks "wow, Germany has a working COVID app"

Small exchange from the British Parliament: https://youtu.be/atAy8NGOoiw

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#86

Post by a_paddy »

Kinrany wrote: post #21
ericlewis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on this project a bit and have a deep understanding of how it went about, though, I am not sure how much I can talk about that. edit: I guess what can be said was it was a highly efficient project, and there weren't so many fingers in the development pot so to say.

Is this HN-speak for "it was a clusterfuck and there were too many stakeholders with incompatible requirements"?

You can check the GitHub but it looks like there were only a max of 3 devs involved https://github.com/hseireland/

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#87

Post by Lurkars »

makomk wrote: post #37
tsbinz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with contact tracing apps is that their effectiveness has a quadratic relation with the adoption rate. They would be mostly useful to trace "random" contacts (since you tend to know which of your friends and family you saw within the last 2 weeks), but to be able to trace a possible infection both the infected and the "recipient" have to have the app and active. In Germany they said their 12M installs is…

The other problem is which people are likely to install the app. It basically requires a modern Android or iOS smartphone with internet connectivity, which probably excludes the really at-risk groups that are of most concern: https://www.dw.com/en/loved-or-loathed-how-germanys-coronavi...

Trying to create hardware token for this. Because myself and many friends are not able to use this. And if I think of old people not able to handle smartphone, this should be useful. https://github.com/Lurkars/esp-ena

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#89

Post by Kinrany »

IncRnd wrote: post #74
Kinrany wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this HN-speak for "it was a clusterfuck and there were too many stakeholders with incompatible requirements"?

It sounded like the opposite of what you wrote.

Yes, but given the previous phrase:

> I am not sure how much I can talk about that

it genuinely seemed like it might be a way to list the problems without saying that there were problems.

I'm sorry that it seemed like I'm attacking the GP. I did not intend to, but I also knowingly ignored this interpretation, because wording is hard

Re: Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation

#90

Post by Tainnor »

dividuum wrote: post #54
quonn wrote: post #24

In Germany the app was developed by research institutes. Then canceled. Then SAP picked it up and charged 10 million Euros for what is essentially a few 1000 lines of UI code. The German Telekom got the same amount, just „because“ and will additionally charge 2-3 million per month mostly for the hotline (with limited capacity). So the total cost will be 50-100 millions. Despite the fact that most technical work was a…

Not sure where you get the 1000 lines from. That's ridiculous. `cloc` counts 16k lines of Kotlin for the Android app and 22k lines of Swift for the iOS app. That does not even include other aspects like the server side code or support documentation. Also it's not only the app that had to be build: It required all the notification infrastructure and coordination to deliver test result to the app. This is really one of…

You're right that the parent comment is exaggerating, but 20 million for a project of this size is still a bit crazy. The same app cost Austria "only" 2 or 3 million, IIRC.

Plus, I just don't understand all the NIH. Why isn't this kind of stuff being developed in one place and then forked by the respective countries instead of everyone creating their own tiny island?

That said, I don't have any major gripes with how the code turned out, just with the cost.

Post reply on HN