[FRIAM] I am accepting wagers

[Barry MacKichan]

What you describe probably could be done approximately as fast as Dave 
says. But we are not talking simply about a system with an elegant web 
interface for the public and a static database on the back end. The 
compexity of the back end depends a lot on the requirements. Localities 
have to keep up to date about hours, capacities, etc. Presumably this 
system is required to: reject people signing up bogus names to scalp the 
appointments, check that second shots are taken, etc. There are 
databases currently handling all this, very competently in our county, 
but I bet you’ll find everything in the wild from spreadsheets to 
modern systems. It’s not that its hard to get data into the system, 
but the entropy out there is huge, so feeding data into the system from 
the existing systems could get really messy.

The general principal is that a simple problem repeated in a thousand 
different variations is no longer a simple problem.

--Barry

On 13 Mar 2021, at 21:59, jon zingale wrote:

> """
> /I can see a lot more work needed that will never be seen from the 
> public’s
> side of the system. The 50,000 sites will not be constant. Some new 
> ones
> will come, and some will go. Hospitals, public health departments,
> independent as well as chain pharmacies have to feed information into 
> the
> system. How do they pass that information?  How do they prove they are 
> not a
> hacker and have the authority to change hours, capacity, availability 
> of
> vaccine, location, etc. Are there mechanisms for weeding out defunct 
> and
> out-of-date vaccination sites? The problems getting up-to-date and 
> accurate
> numbers for COVID tests, deaths, ICU usage, etc., demonstrate this is 
> not
> trivial./
> """
> Not trivial, but also tinker toys. Industry-level authentication of 
> RESTful
> services is a pattern that many of us on this list ought to be able to
> implement while skimming Instagram or playing online go. A small team 
> of
> Friammers and/or a few interested parties could have something up in a 
> month
> that would be considerably better than healthcare.gov or the New 
> Mexico
> Unemployment app. Some on this list are pretty bright and could write 
> or
> implement  formal verification software
> <https://galois.com/research-development/software-correctness/>   for
> proving the correctness of the code.
> It is so easy to point to software that doesn't do as advertised that 
> it is
> easy to miss out on what the present state of the art actually is. The
> anecdotal cases are click-bait. But hey, I have spilled enough ink on 
> this
> subject already. Yes, we /can/ have nice things.
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/


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