[HN Gopher] Singapore Government Tech Stack
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Singapore Government Tech Stack
Author : korginator
Score : 193 points
Date : 2022-05-07 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.developer.tech.gov.sg)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.developer.tech.gov.sg)
| butterfi wrote:
| I've worked on a Singapore website sponsored by the major
| University and a Govt. office and frankly speaking, it's a poorly
| managed process dominated by IT protocol more than
| business/client goals. The admin responsible for running the site
| was inept and his colleagues were worse. The person who inherited
| managing the complex web stack was a secretary with no dev
| skills. I hope it works out for them, but I'm not optimistic.
| noobermin wrote:
| On the one hand you said it's dominated by IT people with no
| business goals but then complain the manager is a secretary
| with no dev skills...which is it?
| lgvln wrote:
| Let's not forget the whole fiasco with Singapore's TraceTogether
| app for contact tracing during the pandemic. The actual
| implementation of it differs significantly from the white paper
| they open-sourced. The actual app does not anonymize the data and
| the government has access to everyone's location and interaction
| data. Initially, their privacy policy promised the data would
| only be used for tracking of the spread of COVID but it was later
| revealed by the parliament that the police had in fact accessed
| the data for investigation purposes. There is no constitutional
| right to privacy in Singapore so they did not actually break any
| laws so it was mostly an "oops, too bad, we didn't do anything
| 'wrong'" moment for them.
|
| https://www.sgtech.org.sg/SGTECH/Web/SGTech_News_2020/May20/...
|
| https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/31...
| quinnjh wrote:
| Good thing the United States has a constitutional amendment
| that totally protects us from having our location data
| harvested sold and deanonymized by thousands of data brokers!
| themitigating wrote:
| What is the value of this comment? The US government, privacy
| in the US, and the like is already discussed frequently here.
| People are also aware of it so you aren't bringing it to
| light.
| saghm wrote:
| I think it's fair, given that GP mentioned "There is no
| constitutional right to privacy in Singapore so they did
| not actually break any laws". There's a long history to the
| debate of whether there's a constitutional right to privacy
| in the US; it's not explicitly mentioned in the
| Constitution but it's a fairly common interpretation
| nowadays, so whether or not the courts in the US would
| consider it legal if the US government did this is not a
| sure thing either way.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| lgvln wasn't comparing it to the US. quinnjh was the one
| who brought up the US.
| noobermin wrote:
| Looked at a wiki article, and it looks like not many
| states have a "right to privacy" in their constitution
| but rather have it specified by various other laws.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy
| tdhz77 wrote:
| This practice should extend to the private sector in my
| opinion. Protection of location data should fall under the
| 14th amendment.
| [deleted]
| xeromal wrote:
| My favorite comment. Let's ignore any valid criticism and
| complain about something else instead.
| noobermin wrote:
| The unfortunate reality is a lot of people post comments
| like GP but do so reflexively to deride non-US governments
| then play defense for posts critical of the US. Some do it
| for China, and so on. It would help in general if people
| are reasonably (emphasis on reasonably) skeptical of all
| states.
| theteapot wrote:
| I think the point was, we can't use the fact US (or
| China, or state X) is a corrupt basket case to lazily
| dismiss any valid criticism here. That's like dismissing
| the teachers criticism of an A grade student's English
| Literature exam question by saying "Yeah well, Ralph's
| answer was 'boobs'". Ralph exists. The A grade student
| wants to improve. These are separate concerns.
| jolux wrote:
| Let's not pretend that China's laws and norms are
| comparable to those of the US here, though. Yes, it's
| reasonable to be skeptical of all states, but there's
| definitely a difference of degree in state overreach.
| pphysch wrote:
| Simply not true. For every (actual, not just FLG disinfo)
| overreach of Beijing you can find one for Washington
|
| You are more likely to be permanently incarcerated in
| America than China
| jolux wrote:
| What about people being welded into their apartments
| during COVID lockdowns? That never happened in the US.
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| the road to hell is paved with good intentions let not forget
| SG is a sort of single party system with no real freedom of
| press.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| And that's a big part of why their country is wealthy and
| successful while their neighboring countries are disasters.
| noobermin wrote:
| Korea and Japan rose from the ashes (Japan having lost WWII
| after their imperialist ambitions failed) in the same
| amount of time. Korea had a dictatorship or sorts but Japan
| didn't, but unless I'm mistaken, neither government was as
| autocratic (and still is) like the PAP is today.
| phantomathkg wrote:
| Any prove?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I was really worried when I saw APEX. I thought it was that
| crappy Oracle app-in-plsql nonsense.
|
| Thankfully not! This all looks pretty cool!
| brassattax wrote:
| I thought it was going to be built on Salesforce
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yes, that would be better than the Oracle option!
| pjmlp wrote:
| That nonsense powers lot of companies where dbas can quickly
| ramp-up applications, in the same vein as VB and macros filled
| Excel documents.
| Joeri wrote:
| We have something similar to this in Antwerp, Belgium.
|
| Most of our solutions are built on top of a kubernetes-powered
| microservices platform, with an API-first design approach. It is
| called the Antwerp City Platform as a Service
| (https://acpaas.digipolis.be).
|
| To ensure technological consistency we have a Digipolis Antwerp
| Application Stack, which is the technological foundation for new
| projects.
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR9N3gAJoJFI...
|
| And finally for UI consistency, we have a design system called
| Antwerp UI (https://antwerp-ui.digipolis.be), which includes a
| custom-designed font meant to evoke the city's historical
| architecture, used both for internally facing web apps, and for
| our public facing website https://www.antwerpen.be
| daqhris wrote:
| Hey Joeri, thank you! I've previously lived in the Antwerp
| province.
|
| The whole time of my stay, I was in love with the city's visual
| identity (posters, website,..) and the effectiveness of digital
| services across the administration offices, public institutions
| and media centers. It's the one city in Belgium taking
| advantage, in the best way, of digital infrastructure and
| modern tech.
|
| Nowadays I'm living in the Ardennes (Bastogne) where I can see
| a huge gap (compared to Antwerp) in Internet services and tech
| investments. I'm grateful to the people at Digipolis and the
| city offices taking visionary steps in fostering the local tech
| scene and building beautiful interfaces/apps.
| [deleted]
| herunan wrote:
| Why reinvent the wheel? A lot of govt websites have very similar
| use cases. I would e.g. just get The UK Government Design System,
| which is really good: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-
| system
| javajosh wrote:
| This looks impressive, and something we (America) should copy.
|
| Man, I can't help wishing that if we had to have a dictator why
| couldn't it be someone (mostly) reasonable like Lee Kwan Yew.
| davesque wrote:
| I understand the sentiment, and I don't think you were probably
| being serious, but, for the sake of conversation, I think the
| issue with dictatorships is eventually with stability. The
| allure of that much power in a single position leads to the
| wrong kind of people talking it.
|
| Actually, when we frame things that way, it almost makes me
| feel like democracy is primarily designed to provide a certain
| amount of _slowness_ in government; enough to spot corruption
| coming and head it off. Maybe corruption always eventually
| wins, just more slowly in democracies. Kinda feels that way
| lately.
| javajosh wrote:
| It's nice to get the benefit of the doubt, and I'm tempted to
| let it remain, but let me clarify: I'm serious. I was
| impressed with Lee Kwan Yew's "From Third World to First" and
| it seemed to me he wasn't bashful about talking about the
| times he made an illiberal, dictator move. Both from the
| outcome and his telling, he made these moves as rarely as
| possible and didn't relish them. And he did smart things like
| rewarding government officials extremely well so that they
| would be (relatively) immune to bribery. I'm sure there are
| other examples of good leadership from the seat of absolute
| monarchy, even if we mainly focus on the bad ones in history
| class. FDR's wartime leadership comes to mind (people seem to
| forget how illiberal American government was during the war -
| and it was surely effective).
|
| In all cases, the key to success with illiberal government
| seems to be self-restraint. When the war ends, you give up
| power. Or in general, when the object is achieved, you give
| up power. I've not followed Singapore's timeline since I read
| the book, so maybe they've backslid? Maybe its a psuedo
| monarchy run my Yew's ancestors? If so, that's a failure.
| Hopefully they can figure out how to pick leaders in a
| rational way - like an aptitude test.
| decafninja wrote:
| I feel dictators/autocrats come in two flavors.
|
| The first genuinely feel they know what is best for the country
| and how to best govern it. They might still enrich themselves
| and their cronies in the process of course.
|
| The second are primarily out to enrich themselves and their
| cronies. The country exists to support this selfish goal.
|
| Of course this is not black and white, but rather a spectrum
| but various historical figures seem to strongly lean to one
| side or the other.
| dontreact wrote:
| And history repeatedly shows that even if you get a dictator
| of the first kind, it's an unstable equilibrium of a system
| that eventually leads to a dictator of the second kind.
| AnAfrican wrote:
| And that can happen with the same person !
| javajosh wrote:
| Yes, but it's not always true - see cousin comment. There
| are examples of actually good dictators in history - but my
| back of the envelope estimate is that its like 1 in 20.
| skissane wrote:
| Just over a week ago, Singapore executed by hanging an
| intellectually disabled Malaysian man (of Indian ethnic
| origin), Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam. His crime? He was caught
| trying to import heroin - I think it very likely the
| traffickers exploited his intellectual disability in order to
| talk him into becoming a drug mule.
|
| In this regard, Singapore is a rather extreme outlier among
| developed countries - few of which retain the death penalty,
| and those which do largely restrict it in practice to murder.
| William Gibson's famous phrase, "Disneyland with the Death
| Penalty", is as true as it ever was.
|
| So yeah, Lee Hsien Loong seems like a cool guy - wow, a Prime
| Minister who can write C++. But, remember Nagaenthran, and
| realise he's not actually cool at all, he's actually a rather
| terrible human being. Whatever the Prime Minister's formal role
| in decisions about executions, I don't think anyone doubts that
| he had the political influence (even if quietly, behind the
| scenes) to stop it going ahead, if he had wanted to.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| TLDR; It's a wishlist, not the current tech stack
|
| Title is misleading
| dazsnow wrote:
| Singapore's GovTech does amazing work.
| United857 wrote:
| Even their prime minister can code in C/C++:
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime...
| afr0ck wrote:
| He was the Wrangler at the Univ of Cambridge (best Undergrad
| in Math).
| random314 wrote:
| And it's no mean achievement. Here is the list of Senior
| wranglers on wikipedia. Check out his peers to see what
| mathematics possibly missed out on
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler
| djtango wrote:
| I prefer to think of it as what politics and society
| gained.
|
| It was pretty clear that most politicians, let alone
| leaders, didn't know what "exponential" meant over the
| pandemic.
|
| At a time where technological advance has vastly outpaced
| politics (Joe Biden was around 65 when the first iphone
| came out) I think it's quite remarkable to have a Maths-
| CS major heading up a (small) nation.
| 2143 wrote:
| > most politicians, let alone leaders, didn't know what
| "exponential" meant over the pandemic.
|
| Maybe they did and chose to ignore it. Lots of countries
| (including but not limited to the USA) have people with
| high credentials at the helm. Or they have advisors with
| high credentials close by.
|
| > I think it's quite remarkable to have a Maths-CS
|
| _Math never gets old._
|
| > a (small) nation
|
| They may be small, but they definitely punch above their
| weight :)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The qualifications of most people in politics are not
| nearly as good in the US.
|
| In the US, the private sector eats the public sector and
| leaves very few high quality candidates behind.
| srazzaque wrote:
| I believe that's precisely why the SG government choose
| to pay extremely well. They gain candidates with great
| credentials that otherwise will have gone to the private
| sector.
|
| Also, having well compensated staff makes the ranks less
| susceptible to corruption and bribery.
| vira28 wrote:
| Is there something similar to US Government.
| gwbrooks wrote:
| At least for the design system, the answer is yes. The US
| Government Design System: https://designsystem.digital.gov/
|
| Don't have the URL handy, but California has an amazing design
| system as well.
| justbaker wrote:
| Something similar to what you mentioned, but for the state of
| Michigan
|
| https://digitalguidelines.michigan.gov/
| [deleted]
| mxuribe wrote:
| I'm sure there might be because several years ago the U.S.
| created the U.S. Digital Service with the premise being
| recruiting professionals (yeah mostly from corporate but not
| only) to spend time in the government and help modernize many
| of its aspects and offerings...for the benefit of the citizens,
| etc. Here's one example of their playbooks:
| https://playbook.cio.gov/
|
| ...While not exactly like the Singapore page linked in this
| post, alot of the intent with the USDS - as i understand it -
| is alos to be quite transparent with the hope of any other
| government agencies/orgs such as state/province level, city
| level, etc. benefiting from their ideas and hopefully
| broadening the benefit at all levels. Here is the main site,
| but of course (as the above playbook link denotes), there are
| plenty of other related sites that might help better answer
| your question: https://www.usds.gov/mission
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