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Can someone explain to me why the IRS even bothered with a patent application on software? Those are taxpayer dollars being used to fund that innovation--unless

by aejnsn 6y ago

Can someone explain to me why the IRS even bothered with a patent application on software? Those are taxpayer dollars being used to fund that innovation--unless it's a classified technology, it should be public domain. Furthermore, why did the IRS spend time and salaries to reinvent the wheel for a solution that is likely to exist as an OTS product?

aejnsn 6y ago
Shamelessly tagging off my own comment for another thought. Remember the articles about states' unemployment insurance systems at the height of the COVID19-inflicted unemployment in March? They kept talking about hiring COBOL developers to address the current need. This next comment is intentionally vague--some federal government agencies offer frameworks for state governments to use in their own regulatory agencies. It's a shame we heard so little talk of that model in relation to state unemployment insurance systems at such an opportune moment. It's an unemployment insurance system--I cannot imagine there's too much creativity involved other than the clean integration of a business rules engine.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  Just FYI for next time, there is a two hour edit window on HN comments, and no one minds if you update a comment with added thoughts. Either way, thank you for the interesting comment(s)! (At the risk of going too far afield, some feel that you should add an "EDIT:" note for any changes to a comment, but my personal feeling is that it's cool to simply edit without calling extra attention to the edit, especially when the edit doesn't significantly change the meaning.)
  - aejnsn 6y ago
    Thanks!
andrewstuart2 6y ago
Which part of the $3.5 trillion dollar-a-year processing system that interacts with 3.5 million businesses, tens or hundreds of thousands of HR systems, paper forms, tax laws, jurisdictions, edge cases, bank transfers, etc, did you expect to come Off the Shelf. I work for a large bank, and yes, we use OTS software here and there, but that's such a miniscule part of the overall solution (let's completely forget organizational politics out of it). Try a few solutions, pick one, and get down to business because that was maybe 5% of the work. "Just pick a business rules engine" is easy to say, but the meat of this problem is still the rules: thousand to hundreds of thousands of individual tax codes, jurisdictions. That, and the countless inputs and outputs the IRS presumably already deals with. Couple that with the fact that politically, where do you think your career is going if you move fast and break things, and mess up $3 trillion dollars of revenue across 143.3 million tax payers, including some of your boss' biggest campaign donors? Not to say it couldn't be done faster, easier, if you could break through the legacy and politics, but that's a really big if, and it still leaves you with all the complexity of the tax codes to implement on whatever great stack you find.
- aejnsn 6y ago
  I am not referring to some sort of gateway, ESB, etc. I am referring to the patent application, which would be for a tool to port code from Assembly to another target language, the example they used being Java.
  - andrewstuart2 6y ago
    I'm not sure what ALB assembly is, but I do know disassemblers themselves are kinda rare (which this really isn't either; more of a disassembler+transpiler). On top of that, whatever ALB assembly is, it kinda sounds like there might be only a market of one or two places in the world using it. Remember, they're saying these systems were put in place in the 60s and 70s. In 1960, COBOL was the new hotness -- modern day Go has 5 years more maturity than COBOL had in 1960, and there was no internet yet. Even ARPANET wouldn't be invented for another 9 years. Whatever was being written back then was not written by developers with the kind of access to information we have today. And definitely not with the kind of storage luxury we have today that permit us to document and comment as copiously as we want to.
    - antonvs 6y ago
      ALC (mentioned in the patent) is Assembly Language Coding, referring to various IBM mainframe assemblers. Disassemblers aren't rare, and certainly exist for the CPUs in question. But the patent is trying to produce structured Java code from handwritten assembly, which is definitely not something for which many OTS solutions exist.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Maybe filing patents are generally encouraged for government jobs?
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      That's one way to prove output
- 6y ago
thrill 6y ago
Patents can be used to protect yourself from others.

by aejnsn 6y ago

aejnsn 6y ago

Shamelessly tagging off my own comment for another thought. Remember the articles about states' unemployment insurance systems at the height of the COVID19-inflicted unemployment in March? They kept talking about hiring COBOL developers to address the current need. This next comment is intentionally vague--some federal government agencies offer frameworks for state governments to use in their own regulatory agencies. It's a shame we heard so little talk of that model in relation to state unemployment insurance systems at such an opportune moment. It's an unemployment insurance system--I cannot imagine there's too much creativity involved other than the clean integration of a business rules engine.

Stratoscope 6y ago
Just FYI for next time, there is a two hour edit window on HN comments, and no one minds if you update a comment with added thoughts. Either way, thank you for the interesting comment(s)! (At the risk of going too far afield, some feel that you should add an "EDIT:" note for any changes to a comment, but my personal feeling is that it's cool to simply edit without calling extra attention to the edit, especially when the edit doesn't significantly change the meaning.)
- aejnsn 6y ago
  Thanks!

andrewstuart2 6y ago

Which part of the $3.5 trillion dollar-a-year processing system that interacts with 3.5 million businesses, tens or hundreds of thousands of HR systems, paper forms, tax laws, jurisdictions, edge cases, bank transfers, etc, did you expect to come Off the Shelf. I work for a large bank, and yes, we use OTS software here and there, but that's such a miniscule part of the overall solution (let's completely forget organizational politics out of it). Try a few solutions, pick one, and get down to business because that was maybe 5% of the work. "Just pick a business rules engine" is easy to say, but the meat of this problem is still the rules: thousand to hundreds of thousands of individual tax codes, jurisdictions. That, and the countless inputs and outputs the IRS presumably already deals with. Couple that with the fact that politically, where do you think your career is going if you move fast and break things, and mess up $3 trillion dollars of revenue across 143.3 million tax payers, including some of your boss' biggest campaign donors? Not to say it couldn't be done faster, easier, if you could break through the legacy and politics, but that's a really big if, and it still leaves you with all the complexity of the tax codes to implement on whatever great stack you find.

aejnsn 6y ago
I am not referring to some sort of gateway, ESB, etc. I am referring to the patent application, which would be for a tool to port code from Assembly to another target language, the example they used being Java.
- andrewstuart2 6y ago
  I'm not sure what ALB assembly is, but I do know disassemblers themselves are kinda rare (which this really isn't either; more of a disassembler+transpiler). On top of that, whatever ALB assembly is, it kinda sounds like there might be only a market of one or two places in the world using it. Remember, they're saying these systems were put in place in the 60s and 70s. In 1960, COBOL was the new hotness -- modern day Go has 5 years more maturity than COBOL had in 1960, and there was no internet yet. Even ARPANET wouldn't be invented for another 9 years. Whatever was being written back then was not written by developers with the kind of access to information we have today. And definitely not with the kind of storage luxury we have today that permit us to document and comment as copiously as we want to.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    ALC (mentioned in the patent) is Assembly Language Coding, referring to various IBM mainframe assemblers. Disassemblers aren't rare, and certainly exist for the CPUs in question. But the patent is trying to produce structured Java code from handwritten assembly, which is definitely not something for which many OTS solutions exist.
- andi999 6y ago
  Maybe filing patents are generally encouraged for government jobs?
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    That's one way to prove output
6y ago

thrill 6y ago

Patents can be used to protect yourself from others.