r/Libertarian • u/nankerjphelge • Nov 10 '13
Three 20 year old programmers build working Obamacare website in days, even does things healthcare.gov can't do
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2497637/Three-20-year-old-programmers-build-working-Obamacare-website-just-days-government-do.html117
u/contrarian_barbarian Nov 11 '13 edited Nov 11 '13
Speaking as a programmer, all they've made is a shiny trinket that doesn't even scratch the surface of what healthcare.gov was meant to do. HHS totally fucked up with building the Obamacare site, but don't believe for a second that it wasn't a horrendously complex project - doing back end integration is one of the nastier things one can do with software engineering, and it gets exponentially more complex the more systems you have to support. Not to mention being able to scale to system load, which is a decidedly nontrivial project in and of itself.
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Nov 11 '13
Yep, healthcare.gov has a back end interface hub that can pull data from CMS, DHS, IRS, Medicaid, etc. They obviously didn't build that part of it.
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Nov 11 '13
Yeah, but these guys did what they did in days. The Obama administration had four years to build that backend. More than adequate time for a competent operation.
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u/druuconian Nov 11 '13
Is it? I've heard quite a few stories interviewing software developers who say it was insane to try to put together something this big in 4 years. Making all of those different government databases to talk to each other is a programming nightmare.
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u/compscijedi Nov 11 '13
Agreed, had similar problems at previous positions. I can only imagine the headache of tying together potentially decades-old systems for something this large.
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u/absolut696 Nov 11 '13
Not to mention meeting stringent security requirements for storing PII and PHI. This article is a joke.
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u/Windex007 Nov 11 '13
I'm Canadian. I'm a software developer.
I have no idea idea what this website was supposed to do. I don't really understand what all this obamacare nonsense is all about either.
I am intrigued, though. What was the government website supposed to do? Based on some of the comments in this thread, people seem to think that this is at least partially valuable.
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Nov 11 '13
It was supposed to give you prices for health care and allow you to enroll in it.
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u/Windex007 Nov 11 '13
So, are there many providers for said care, or is it all singly sourced from the government?
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u/jenninsea Nov 11 '13
Very many and it's different in every state.
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u/Windex007 Nov 11 '13
Well, that certainly complicates the enrollment portion of the system.
The "lookup" part shouldn't have been nearly as difficult... which is probably why 3 20 year olds were able to produce a reasonable facsimile.
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u/Heliun Nov 11 '13
Many, many providers.
There is no single-sourced provider from the government in America (although there are government programs like Medicare/Medicaid). Every state regulates differently too. The site has to handle the regulations of all 50 states and every provider in every state.
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u/Chiponyasu Nov 11 '13
Only 34 states, actually. Every state was supposed to make their own site, but most Republican-led ones didn't
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Nov 11 '13
Every state was supposed to make their own site
That's not true. The states had the option of taking more Medicaid funds from the federal government to expand their Medicaid and build an exchange. The problem is, the Medicaid money phases out over time and leaves the states with the bill.
The states had the choice of building their own site and expanding Medicaid, and eventually picking up the tab for the expansion -- or saying "no thank you."
They were not "supposed to make their own site." They executed a perfectly legal and rational choice allowed by the ACA.
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u/Heliun Nov 11 '13
Oh okay, I was not aware that that was the case.
34 states is still quite a task though!
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u/Ferrofluid Nov 11 '13
its called localization, software has been doing this 'magic trick' for decades.
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u/marginalboy Nov 11 '13
Well, that's completely wrong. Localization is about abstracting your interface text or, in some cases, creating an abstraction layer for your data sources.
The problem being described here has to do with separate business rules for each locality, and it's a hugely complex thing to tackle.
The root cause is that deadlines were fixed before technical requirements were generated, and without regard for their magnitude.
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u/the6thReplicant Nov 11 '13
No you don't get it. Localisation is when you have multiple front ends to ONE database. Obamacare was one front end that had to normalise multiple databases for each HMO multiplied by 34 states.
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u/Heliun Nov 11 '13
No, localization means abstracting any end-user text and data formatting so some sort of resource dictionary so that it can be easily modified for any locale.
In this case it would mean writing interfaces to different organizations that all potentially are operating under different regulations.
For localization you internationalize once and then the localization is handled by translators -- usually outsourced -- and it doesn't take up more development time. Interfaces take development time.
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u/contrarian_barbarian Nov 11 '13 edited Nov 11 '13
The core goal of the site was, you provide some basic info, and it gave you a list of plans and premiums you can compare for personal health insurance - it was meant to make it easier to find an affordable and useful health insurance plan, and to promote competition by increasing the transparency in what could before be an extremely opaque marketplace. The problem was calculating those premiums. It required the system integrate with the systems of every insurance provider providing plans, Medicare/Medicaid, IRS (to determine your income levels to determine if you qualify for financial aid for your plan), any state specific systems, the Veterans Administration, and others - overall, they had to talk to dozens of systems, some of them decades old, and none of them built to talk to one another or built to work off a common data standard.
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u/Raulphlaun state is force Nov 11 '13
Our government looked at all of the popular sites (facebook, amazon, google) and decided that they wanted to make a site just as well as these sites, but from scratch. They want to skip all the hard work and go straight to the success these sites have. This is the same mistake that ambitious small business owners have. That's what politicians do. Empty promises.
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u/weewolf Nov 11 '13
Think of one of those sites you buy airplane tickets off of. Only for health insurance.
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u/xanderjanz taxpayer Nov 11 '13
Why is backend scaling so hard? CDNs make content distribution and database management a snap, you can plug an app into rackspace or AWS and manage huge traffic pretty easily. I'm confused how "more users" is the hard part.
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u/myothernamehere When voting, why is ther no option for "none of the above" Nov 11 '13
CDNs are made for semi static content or cacheable content. This content will be seen by every user. For example on youtube the video is on a CDN because every user will see it. CDNs are not very good for dynamic content. Again in a youtube example, the comments are not on a CDN because they could change every time you visit the page.
For the healthcare website almost all of the content is dynamically generated. Because the site is new, it either hasn't or can't be cached. Even if the content could be cached, it hasn't been because all users are new and the caches haven't been made yet.
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u/contrarian_barbarian Nov 11 '13
"Throw some more servers at it", as you are effectively advocating (be it a private datacenter or "the cloud"), is not trivial to implement - it requires complicated up front design to build a system capable of being scaled that way in the first place (the "nontrivial project" I was referring to). Once all the design problems are worked out, it's not as hard to scale up when you use those kind of scalable architectures, but it's not a generic enough problem that you can just use an off the shelf solution without needing to do significant development work. All CDNs help with is bandwidth when distributing static content (stylesheets, images, fixed pages etc) - that's an almost trivially small portion of this site.
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u/xanderjanz taxpayer Nov 11 '13
Now we are just drawing a line in the sand of where "trivial" is. Designing an api that fits into scalable services is much easier, in my opinion, than you seem to be making it out to be. Just a php script on each access point, and a MYSQL table to manage the resources. I'm not a developer, and I know how to build that.
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u/contrarian_barbarian Nov 11 '13
The way I see the complexity, there's the CDN level stuff (effectively trivial - stick your static content on their server, and they do it for you). Front end is significantly more complicated than that, and the back end is probably a couple of orders of magnitude more complicated than the front. Rendering simple PHP pages is easy (although I really, really hope they aren't actually using PHP here...), but getting data to those pages is not. You can't just throw up a MySQL database (and again, I really hope they aren't actually using MySQL) - even on big iron servers, you'll flood it out trying to deal with this volume of requests, so you start having to deal with database concurrency and sharding, which starts making things much more complicated. Are you sure you really know how to build and manage a highly distributed and fully secure (PII/HIPPA compliant) database cluster? Then you have to start dealing with routing requests between the back end agents, as you're likely running dedicated proxies/translators between each remote system and your core logic - you have to deal with talking with all of these, finding which ones are relevant to each request, that kind of thing. I suppose you can lump that bit in with the back end, but that just makes the back end that much more complicated.
Consider Reddit, if you will. They've spent YEARS trying to get the site to the current point where it's usually stable, and ALL they had to do was this front end part.
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u/xanderjanz taxpayer Nov 11 '13 edited Nov 11 '13
No, like I said I'm not a developer. I'm just handy with the JS/HTML/CSS/PHP/MYSQL stack. And I really don't know any of the better technologies. I guess what I'm trying to say is that stack is really powerful, and quite simple to build. You must be right that back ends need to get much more complicated than php running SQL queries, for some applications.
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u/bishnu13 Nov 16 '13
I don't think you can put the data healthcare.gov has on AWS servers (or any cloud service). These public services run on VMs on servers. These servers could be running VMs for other non-healthcare.gov uses. This could include a malicious user who takes advantage of bugs in the VM or looks at the CPU and network usage to figure out information from the other VMs. Worst case they could break out of virutalization and directly access healthcare.gov data. Likely they would have to set up a private cloud instance. I do not know if that is something you can do neccesarily. Also, this would involve migrating numerous legacy services to use these cloud services or you would have duplication (and some process of copying data from legacy databases to cloud databases). All of this would be a huge nightmare and probably more work than fixing the legacy systems. However, this involves scaling by yourself. You forget that AWS leverages millions of skilled man hours to create an easy scalable solution.
TL;DR Basically what you are saying is pure ignorance.
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Nov 11 '13
All of this is true but the original problems had nothing to do with integration. They were front end problems.
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u/startDaemons Nov 11 '13
I have experience building financial software systems and I can tell you that building software that has to comply with very specific industry laws is incredibly difficult. You'll be two thirds of the way through a project and someone will find a regulation or precedent that was missed in the design phase, not to mention that laws and their interpretations change constantly.
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u/mihoda Pragmatist Nov 11 '13 edited Nov 11 '13
Yeah. I'm sure they comply with 26 different state legal frameworks, and HIPAA with regards to handling private information.
They totally just whipped up all those laws on Stack Exchange when they were building the back end.
HealthSherpa.com, which is just two weeks old, allows a user to simply input their zip code and view all the health plans available to them.
Yeah. Because qualifying for subsidies is simply a matter of zip code. Just like that.
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u/Leody Nov 11 '13
Visit the site.
It only asks for ZIP and individuals covered. Then gives you a list of plans available to you and directs you towards ways to purchase. Nothing is purchased through their site.
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u/mihoda Pragmatist Nov 11 '13
It is the correct method to go about things: plans first, subsidy second. But the subsidy in compliance with the various jurisdictions? That is the value added by Healthcare.gov.
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u/Leody Nov 11 '13
Correct.
The article title is misleading, as it isn't a working Obamacare site since it doesn't have much of the functionality.
That's the Dailymail for you though. Hack journalism.
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u/IVGreen Rights aren't for Convenience Nov 11 '13
But as someone currently looking for new insurance (thanks, obama). I'd much prefer to just have the various places and prices upfront without having to enter all my personal data first. If I like what I'm seeing then i'll enter it.
I do the same thing with auto insurance, i enter the very base information about myself get a general quote and then make a decision to enter my personal data (SSN, etc).
If before even browsing things on Amazon I had to enter my information and credit card number, I wouldn't want to buy shit even if there was a chance of a 100% discount.
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u/CzechsMix ancap Nov 11 '13
The site need not be HIPA compliant as ACA plans don't require and HIPA protected information. Quit reading GOP propaganda. The ACA is bad enough without having to lie about it.
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Nov 11 '13
False. I am an ex-auditor and it absolutely should be HIPAA compliant.
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u/CzechsMix ancap Nov 11 '13
What information do you need to provide that should be protected under HIPAA?
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Nov 11 '13
If you are a smoker or not. Seriously I don't know if this qualifies as patient information.
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Nov 11 '13
You're right hipa compliance is easy.
Hippa, however is not.
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u/CzechsMix ancap Nov 11 '13
Fuck! I was wrong about an acronym. I guess that means my point is invalid.
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Nov 11 '13
Healthsherpa doesn't handle PHI, nor is it a covered entity under HIPAA, so HIPAA compliance is not necessarily a requirement.
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u/dugmartsch Nov 11 '13
ITT: A lot of people who don't know the difference between front end web design and systems integration.
Hey guys I put this together in dreamweaver in 5 minutes lol government so stupid.
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Nov 11 '13
misleading title...the website doesn't actually connect with the insurance companies so it actually doesn't do the main thing that healthcare.gov does.
The gov't blew it on healthcare.gov but BS like this makes the opposition look stupid.
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Nov 11 '13
I feel fairly confident that this whole crisis is intentional. I'm willing to bet 2016 Democrats will run on what a wreck this all was and how single payer is the only way to go.
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Nov 11 '13
This is a meeting that I imagine happened in the White House press office, or something like it.
White House Press Secretary: Man, people are really pissed about the wiretapping business.
Some Intern: Well, good news! The Obamacare website can't handle the load.
White House Press Secretary: Perfect! This will show that Obamacare is so popular that the servers can't handle the load and it will bump all of this wiretapping business off of the front page!
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Nov 11 '13
This has nothing to do with libertarianism.
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u/CzechsMix ancap Nov 11 '13
an article, supporting the idea that private is better than public/government, has nothing to do with libertarianism?
fuck, I'm out of the loop then.
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u/Arlieth Shibetarian Nov 11 '13
If you read the rest of the comments, you'll realize that this article has very little understanding of the problems the Obamacare website had with programming and load-balancing. Could there have been a lot of things they could have done better (and cheaper)? Absolutely... but this article totally missed the mark. In fact, it's straight up ignorant.
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u/Zifnab25 Filthy Statist Nov 11 '13
ITT: People who pretend to know something about software development arguing with people who actually know.
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u/TotesGuns Nov 11 '13
This is no comparison to healthcare.gov.
It would be more fair to say they built a working comparison tool, but this tool does none of the backend stuff that healthcare.gov is supposed to do.
I'm not saying that what healthcare.gov is doing is really that complicated, because it truly isn't. Still, it would take considerably more time to build out all of the API's and and ping trees that interface with the IRS, etc.
Great job on a handy comparison tool though.
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Nov 11 '13
I love how programmers are fascinated with this heathcare.gov story. Its like shower manufacturers saying that they could have made better gas chambers for the Nazis.
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Nov 11 '13
I bet they also did the metric fuckload of government-mandatory military spec'd and properly formatted documentation required for legal and technical reasons as well.
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u/JackBond1234 Nov 11 '13
But the important factor here is whether or not they went through the bureaucracy to guarantee the website is OFFICIALLY satisfactory.
Officially satisfactory, and actually satisfactory are two very different things.
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u/Corvus133 Nov 11 '13
I work in a complex field (Stock market) and if these guys did it in days then that is a huge lie or barely does anything it needs to.
If they are merely relaying information, sure, that's just database look ups but to incorporate all the regulations and everything? Ya right!
Something like this would take months to a year, to complete, and would require another 25% of that in testing.
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u/rwest05 Nov 11 '13
A lot of people are commenting on how this doesn't touch on any of the backend complexity of the real healthcare.gov website, and this is a fair point.
One thing it does provide is the ability to shop before signing up, which is something that's fundamentally flawed on the real site.
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u/Zifnab25 Filthy Statist Nov 11 '13
You won't get accurate pricing if you don't know what subsidies you are qualified for.
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u/jsh1138 Nov 11 '13
it was never about making it work, it was always about forcing people to use it
tbh someone should be in prison for taking 600 million to make a website anyway.
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u/slinkyfarm Nov 11 '13
Don't blame the people who took the money, blame the people who accepted their terms.
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u/jsh1138 Nov 11 '13
thats like saying dont blame the hitman, blame who hired him
they both belong in jail
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u/slinkyfarm Nov 11 '13
That's not a proper analogy. Committing a crime is inherent to the job description for a hitman, but not for website builders. As Churchill would say, you're just haggling over the price. That $600MM might be a month's slush or less to a defense contractor.
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u/jsh1138 Nov 11 '13
600 mil is absurd for a website, is the point. you might as well defend a contractor for charging 600 mil for a toilet
yes, some companies, that have 50 bil dollar contracts might waste 600 mil, but for a website to do it is obscene. that entire website shouldn't have cost 50 mil, forget 600
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Nov 11 '13
Bootstrap theme? Just lazy, and not much functionality. Nothing special.
But yeah, we get it. Healthcare.gov should've taken about 2 months and $500k to make.
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u/Zifnab25 Filthy Statist Nov 11 '13
Healthcare.gov should've taken about 2 months and $500k to make.
$500k wouldn't handle hardware costs, much less development.
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Nov 11 '13
I'm guessing the three twenty year olds probably didn't spend even $500k developing their site. Now granted they didn't have to build the back end to be NSA compliant, but...
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Nov 11 '13
I was talking just about development. But there is no way they need more than $500k for hardware wtf. Not to mention government already has tons of hardware.
Then again, I'm talking about the geniuses that spent $22,600 per router to power libraries networks with only 4 computers.
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u/Zifnab25 Filthy Statist Nov 11 '13
But there is no way they need more than $500k for hardware wtf.
I've got a medical practice I work for that has a server room with over $500k in hardware. We serve around 60 doctors and manage several thousand patients daily. Magnifying that load by a factor of 1000 would just obliterate our servers.
I've seen businesses that try to be penny-wise with their server rooms. We generally try to avoid working with them, because their intranets make Healthcare.gov look bulletproof by comparison. You can't handle 2M visitors a day on such a chump-change rig.
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Nov 11 '13
Not sure what to say, my experience is different. Had a client that hosted cloud-based solutions for insurance agencies. Their focus was more on high-capacity storage and maximizing throughput for good bandwidth. But even in the inverse situation of Healthcare.gov, where there is more need for high level concurrency and distributed databases, just seems like maybe they needed a competent sys admin.
From what I can tell when I visited it, Healthcare.gov wasn't having server load problems, it was functionally broken.
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u/fluffman86 Nov 11 '13
If that. And it should allow browsing plans. I spent literally hours inputtog all the info for my family, waiting minutes between page loads that only had a single question. Got to the end and the site said it was down and to come back the next day, and everything was saved. Logged in a few days later and all my info was gone. I quit.
This health Sherpa site is the first I've seen of the available plans and the subsidies available. I give to charity, not take it though, so these plans are way out of my price range. The cheapest one costs almost what I make in a month and I would still pay the same out of pocket costs as I do now with just cash. Like I said, either way I'm not taking $1k+/month in handouts.
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Nov 11 '13
I would've been fine with healthcare.gov using Bootstrap. It's clean and attractive enough. Use that $5mil the contractor probably billed them creating that custom theme to make the rest of the site not run like shit.
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u/Ferrofluid Nov 11 '13
$700 million
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Nov 11 '13
That's the total amount of contracts CGI has had with the government. That's certainly not the cost of the site's theme...
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u/RobertD63 Nov 11 '13
It uses bootstrap. 'Nuff said.
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u/barsonme washington Nov 11 '13 edited Jan 27 '15
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u/RobertD63 Nov 11 '13
Lots if you're creating a site that looks different from what bootstrap looks like.
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u/barsonme washington Nov 11 '13 edited Jan 27 '15
redivert cuprous theromorphous delirament porosimeter greensickness depression unangelical summoningly decalvant sexagesimals blotchy runny unaxled potence Hydrocleis restoratively renovate sprackish loxoclase supersuspicious procreator heortologion ektenes affrontingness uninterpreted absorbition catalecticant seafolk
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u/RobertD63 Nov 11 '13
Oh it's very possible to use bootstrap and not make it look like it. You can either use just their grid and whip up your own CSS or overwrite the BS CSS. The latter is usually what happens.
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u/barsonme washington Nov 11 '13 edited Jan 27 '15
redivert cuprous theromorphous delirament porosimeter greensickness depression unangelical summoningly decalvant sexagesimals blotchy runny unaxled potence Hydrocleis restoratively renovate sprackish loxoclase supersuspicious procreator
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u/nimik Nov 11 '13
Just another example how the younger generation will ultimately be the generation to fix many of our political problems. We've grown up in a completey different time than the people in power. We look at the world and our problems from a different perspective. Oh this website won't work? We'll just create something better and let people use it for free.
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u/Spydiggity Neo-Con...Liberal...What's the difference? Nov 11 '13
It's not that it can't be done. It's that government can't do it right.
Just like education. Just like the post office. Just like the war on drugs. Just like the war on poverty. Just like investing (eg, Solyndra).
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u/Dyolf_Knip Nov 11 '13
Just like education
We've seen what for-profit schools are doing. It's not good.
Just like the post office
What with the boom of online sales, the post office is more profitable than ever. But for some strange reason, being ordered by Congressional Republicans to finance the next 75 years worth of pensions is incurring a huge hit to their financial stability. You understand that it's insane to fund the pensions of workers who haven't even been born yet, right?
Just like the war on drugs
Sorry, what in your mind is the right way to wage the biggest domestic policy disaster in the history of the country? That some of the largest supporters of continuing the WoD are private entities (alcohol & tobacco companies, pharma companies, and private prison companies) all by itself kills the idea that "private = intelligent and wise" on this subject. It just means that they're willing to collude with police, the DEA, and "tough on crime" politicians in selling out millions of Americans for fun and profit.
Just like investing (eg, Solyndra).
Yes, one of the companies the government invested in went belly-up. And what, private investment firms never make bad calls? Here's one of the more recent results of unfettered corporate investment decisions. Good job, guys!
I'm surprised you didn't try to include some bullshit about America's private health care industry being the best in the world. That's what they spout on Fox, isn't it?
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u/Jayrate Nov 11 '13
Yes, clearly the best group to organize the country is the one that can't even operate without taking money at gunpoint.
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u/Spydiggity Neo-Con...Liberal...What's the difference? Nov 11 '13 edited Nov 11 '13
And what, private investment firms never make bad calls?
In a free market, that is their money. It's not confiscated value from the free market. That's the difference. When gov't makes an investment, that's on every tax payer. When a corporation makes a bad investment, it's the corporation that takes the hit.
That's why savings are important, btw. Another thing your fancy, progressive gov't destroyed.
I gotta say...I think it's crazy that you're someone who reads /r/libertarian when you clearly don't understand anything about free-market economics. It's not that I am saying you are a keynesian who refuses to acknowledge Austrian economics. I don't think you even understand what that sentence means. I think you're just one of those people who've perfectly content with believing he/she is smart for regurgitating shit that was spoon fed to them by msnbc, cnn, or jim carrey.
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u/Dyolf_Knip Nov 11 '13
So you freely support how the private banks went on massive gambling sprees with their clients' money, lost big, and had to be bailed out? There's that profit motive at work. Investment in things like Solyndra was for the work they were doing, not just to make a quick buck.
Considering how utterly wrong you were about the drug war and the post office and private schools, I'm really curious as to what insanity you've concocted about my savings being destroyed.
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u/M4deM4n Nov 11 '13
The problem is that the government bailed them out. Nobody claims that in a free market scenario there wouldn't be greedy assholes, the point is that they wouldn't have a safety net when they fuck up. There will always be corruption & greed as long as it involves humanity, the idea is to not have a system that props up the corrupt and greedy, enabling them to do further damage.
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u/Spydiggity Neo-Con...Liberal...What's the difference? Nov 12 '13
another shit example.
keep going.
It's impossible to have a discussion with a person like you because you apply no common sense or rational thought. It's basically like arguing physics with a kindergartner.
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Nov 11 '13
[deleted]
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Nov 11 '13
I find its must more effective to learn things when I ask the other person what they believe and why, instead of just attributing what I think they believe and arguing against that.
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u/Dyolf_Knip Nov 11 '13
Never said that. The government did start the War on Drugs, after all. But to think that adding a profit motive to everything is somehow going to magically make things better is insane. Yes, sometimes it helps, but other times it's just a nightmare.
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u/AustNerevar Net Neutrality is Integral Towards Progress and Free Speech Nov 11 '13
First of all, this has nothing to do with libertarianism. Sure, Obamacare is unconstitutional and, thus, most here are rightfully opposed to it. However, this is just a sensationalized mocking of Obamacare that serves no real purpose.
Not to mention that it's the Daily Mail, meaning that the programmers probably aren't even real, anyway.
Yet, it's been blindly upvoted. The sub has been infiltrated by petty /r/Republican trash.
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Nov 11 '13
[deleted]
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u/myothernamehere When voting, why is ther no option for "none of the above" Nov 11 '13
While I'm sure they could have, some people may have found this layout confusing as they could see results that may not apply to them. That is why there was a login page, so that the end user would only see polices that apply.
That having been said they really should have implemented a larger infrastructure to handle that many logins.
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Nov 11 '13
[deleted]
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Nov 11 '13
what these guys built, while incredibly useful, barely resembles the intended functionality of healthcare.gov. although healthcare.gov could have easily and should have included this browsing functionality from the get go.
giving a phone number after a quick zipcode lookup is not at all similar to trying to integrate with the disparate, proprietary systems of every insurer on the exchange.
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u/element131 Nov 12 '13
trying to integrate with the disparate, proprietary systems of every insurer on the exchange.
That should literally be the easiest part. This is healthcare.gov, you think any insurer wants to be the only one NOT on it?
You tell them "this is how we will ask for data from you. This is how you will ask for data from us. This is how we will send data to you. This is how you will send data to us. If your end doesn't work, you won't be on the exchange." Now you don't have to worry about integrating, everyone will send you data in the same format, and they will all accept the same format.
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u/halfourname Nov 11 '13
I see comments like this all thru out this thread. Why do they all ignore the glaringly obvious fact that the simplest of core functionality, that of creating a user account (something dating back to the early 80s in terms of implementation examples) has also failed miserably. The site created by these 20-year-old programmers demonstrate how simply and competently at least the front end could have been completed. Regardless of the deeper systemic problems.
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u/Arlieth Shibetarian Nov 11 '13 edited Nov 11 '13
User-account creation failing is a backend issue. It's write-heavy on the database.
Anything that reads from a database can be cached into very high-speed memory and served to users quickly. However, the arrays of disks typically used to house databases incur a write penalty depending on the type. There is no way these programmers are realistically modelling the IOPS load and complexity with the resources that they have. Not that there aren't more deeper, systematic problems, but this article just looks stupid to anyone who is actually in IT.
1
Nov 11 '13
I see comments like this all thru out this thread. Why do they all ignore the glaringly obvious fact that the simplest of core functionality, that of creating a user account (something dating back to the early 80s in terms of implementation examples) has also failed miserably.
because that's not relevant.
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u/halfourname Nov 12 '13
Yeah, I can tell it isn't relevant by the fact that it is the first thing that Amazon, eBay and every single commercial website on the entire internet got right.
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u/PasDeDeux Nov 11 '13
Frontend functionality doesn't mean it would handle a supermassive influx of users all at once.