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The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

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Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#101

Post by tschwimmer »

saidajigumi wrote: post #35
rnestler wrote: post #5

> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. It’s dated. A shrinking number of people can deal with it. But it’s also elegant and highly functional. What is considered elegant and functional about assembly?

An age ago, I wrote a fast interrupt handler in assembler that was, under its somewhat severe operating constraints, "elegant and functional." That was about a page of code, commented in two-column format, a sort of side-by-side tutorial. There were more lines of comments than lines of code. Even with that, the junior engineers (familiar with assembly!) were completely flummoxed by it. Domain knowledge encoded in ass…

The Shakespeare analogy is perhaps more apt than the writer imagined. A popular version of Shakespeare’s plays have the original text on the left hand pages and commentary and definitions on the right. This is what I imagined what your interrupt handler looked like.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#102

Post by erodommoc »

DonHopkins wrote: post #98
jelling wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and any sizable employer offers healthcare and a 401(k). So at best you could say they're betting on an inflation-adjusted pension? That's not going to sell many candidates.

The tax benefits of being an IRS programmer who writes critical code that nobody else can understand are incalculable.

I see what you did there...

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#103

Post by Robotbeat »

abtinf wrote: post #32
jimrandomh wrote: post #8

> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform…

The actual federal pay schedules are here: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... The GS-15 range for the DC area is $135k-164k. For federal government employees, salary only represents about half of their total compensation, which includes a lifetime inflation adjusted pension and medical benefits.

> For federal government employees, salary only represents about half of their total compensation, which includes a lifetime inflation adjusted pension and medical benefits.

No, nowadays you have to pay in for retirement and medical benefits. Retirement money is partially matched, but health care generally is no cheaper than a good private plan.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#104

Post by cosmie »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #2

The best argument to new development is working code. I assume that they can't hire people to upgrade or maintain Maniframe software anymore.

Working code is king, but in the IRS's case it's a very expensive king.

A huge amount of fraud happens by exploiting a timing attack against the batch processing architecture of the existing process. The system only has visibility into data from previous batches, it's blind to what's been done during the the currently processing batch. One exploitable artifact of this is that if you try to claim someone as a dependent (and potentially get child tax credits, EIC, etc) and they've already been claimed in a previous batch, your return will get rightfully rejected. But if multiple returns claim that person in the same batch, and they haven't been claimed in a previous batch, they'll all get accepted. The IRS will catch it after the fact, but by that point they've already paid out the fraudulent returns. If it's something like a misunderstanding between spouses on who claims a kid, it's likely they'll straighten it out and get their money back. If it's outright fraud, then they'll probably be out that money completely (plus investigative costs).

That's just one example, but there are billions of dollars worth of fraud that happens every year which could be prevented by migrating the IRS systems from offline batch processing to an online/real-time transactional architecture.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#105

Post by rbanffy »

gitgreen wrote: post #40
jimrandomh wrote: post #8

> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform…

I work for a state government agency with a big software problem that has a hard time hiring for this reason. We've got some talented devs only due to the fact that they enjoy living in the area, not because they enjoy getting half(or less!) what they'd make in the private sector.

I would work for the government (I did, a couple times) on projects I think will benefit my fellow citizens. This tax reform is not like that.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#106

Post by jsmthrowaway »

jasongill wrote: post #69
vkou wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of medical benefits are we talking about? How many years do you have to work for the government to get it? My employer's healthcare plan costs my employer ~20k/year as long as I'm employed, more if I had children, yet for some reason, nobody ever counts that as part of AMAFAGOPL salaries.

I wasn't sure if "AMAFAGOPL" was a real acronym or just something you made up, so I searched for it on Google. The only result was a link to your comment - posted just 12 minutes ago. Google is getting (scary) good at indexing social content, it seems.

There's several tiers of indexing in Google Search (it's a pyramid, with Instant near the top when that existed), and lots of social stuff is refreshed very frequently at the top of it. That is how recent Tweets show up in searches, as well.

I'd be curious how often Googlebot hits HN.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#107

Post by rbanffy »

TimJYoung wrote: post #7

Wow, what a cool project to work on: working out the logic flows in assembler and breaking them out so that they can be translated into a higher-level language. I've always thought that this type of government work should be open to bids from anyone . If the government is worried about trojans, malware, etc., then they can easily hire an auditor to audit the code and vouch for its authenticity. The fact that only ver…

> working out the logic flows in assembler

Not only assembler, but IBM mainframe assembler. That's way cooler than x86.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#108

Post by DonHopkins »

TheSoftwareGuy wrote: post #9
rnestler wrote: post #5

> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. It’s dated. A shrinking number of people can deal with it. But it’s also elegant and highly functional. What is considered elegant and functional about assembly?

I've always thought the formatting kind of lends itself to a little bit of visual elegance. Since its always 1 instruction per line, various instruction fields tend to line up nicely. But yeah I don't see how it is elegant in any way that's useful

6502 assembly is one of the sharpest smoothest most beautiful assembly languages, because all the opcodes are three letters long, so it doesn't have a jagged serrated right edge like most other assembly languages. Much less friction!

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#109

Post by woolvalley »

maxxxxx wrote: post #94
vkou wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are only guaranteed until some elected official decides to give you a haircut on your deferred paychecks (Which is what a pension is), right as you're about to retire. (Or shortly after you do.) I'd hedge, and prefer splitting my money between both.

You still can do both if you work for the government.

But you exchange a lower salary for that government job, which makes saving for your 401k & co less effective. There is also the entire calculation of the expected value of money now vs 30 years from now.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#110

Post by toomuchtodo »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #82
beachy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intestinal fortitude needed to prepare a proposal for these mega projects is enormous. I always end up with a gut churning feeling that no one is even going to read my work (which is interrupting any work on real projects), or that some back hander will result in a not level playing field.

Do people read them? If it's really a phone-sized book, I assume that there's some sort of algorithm, whether run by a person or a computer, that is just looking for things to check off a list.

There is no algorithm or computer looking at it. It’s essentially a contract, to be looked at by lawyers and project sponsors.
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