231–240 of 399 posts
I'm picturing the Dos Equis meme saying "I don't always test, but when I do, I test in production. Stay on call, my friends." At least now I don't feel bad about when I test in production. (just kidding, I didn't feel bad before).
The app was sent out through the free version of a beta testing platform. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-...
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I think the plan was clearly that they would reuse the software for every caucus during this primary, so the $60K was one of a series of payments for the same product.
Only four states use caucuses (IA, NV, TX, CO).
Several US territories and other states[1] hold democratic caucuses of one form or another, but are less notable due to timing/delegate count.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/politics/what-states-c...
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No, but until recently it was professional to keep your politics private and, more importantly, when there are inconsistencies disproportionately favoring an otherwise less popular candidate, public support from employees and especially the CEO, in conjunction with a money trail, these personal indicators of bias become relevant for justification of suspicion.
How is this even helping Buttigieg? There doesn’t seem to be any indication this was anything but a regular screwup. Throwing around suggestions of a vague conspiracy looks unwarranted. You’re suggesting that to avoid suspicion companies providing services to political campaigns must be apolitical and to have never previously provided services to a candidate in the race or any previous opponent of a candidate in the…
The idea that the Democratic nominating process would be rigged is not ipso facto crazy given that it is publicly acknowledged to have actually happened last election cycle.
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So... What happens when two people share authentication (which will happen!) and access the app at the same time. Maybe you are going to try and implement file-locking, yourself, badly? SQL has literally been used for this kind of app since the 1980s. It's simple to use, and easy to find developers who use it.
>>What happens when two people share authentication (which will happen!) and access the app at the same time. If they both come from a different district and log into CouchDB they'll either only write to their file (one db, multi-user) or write to a file (or files) in their db (db per user). If two users write to same file in same the db at the same time the DB will note the conflict and decide which data gets stored…
Yes, this is how I remember CouchDB working. It leaves the hard parts of conflic resolution up to the client app:
Once you have retrieved all the conflicting revisions, your application can then choose to display them all to the user. Or it could attempt to merge them, write back the merged version, and delete the conflicting versions - that is, to resolve the conflict permanently.
You do realize that SQL databases handle this automatically via locking schemes and transaction, right?
This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX . The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violations as millions of…
The DNC doesn't run the Iowa Caucuses.
Edit: Seeing downvotes on this, but it's in support of tptacek's comment. The DNC and State democratic parties are separate and the latter run the elections. You might believe that the DNC is fixing the process, but the reality is that they have little influence in how the States choose to run their election/nomination processes.
In all honesty, the Iowa caucases are likely a huge pain in the ass for them and this failure is probably driving a lot of DNC folks crazy right now.
I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…
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I have a feeling you haven't used SQL databases very often. This is exactly the kind of thing that SQL database is shine at and noSQL databases do poorly.
> I have a feeling you haven't used SQL databases very often. No, I've not. I just never liked the way it worked so I have to honest and open about my prejudice. > This is exactly the kind of thing that [...] noSQL databases do poorly. That's really not true. I've built web apps that do pretty much exactly what that voting apps does and I use CouchDB to do it because it was built specifically for this kind of thing,…
I've used CouchDB on and off for some years[1], although I've used SQL databases for longer. I've also used NoSQL databases ranging from MongoDB to Cassandra, Hadoop, BDB (and variants), DynomoDB, etc.
CouchDB (or any other NoSQL database) just isn't the best choice here. The application is literally tables of relational data with multiple simultaneous users which is pretty much the perfect use case for a SQL Database Server.
[1] Since 2010! Wow that's a lot longer ago than it seems. https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-user/20101...
My coworker has an alternate theory that frankly makes a lot more sense than “the app broke.” The Iowa caucus is not a paper ballot. People stand in groups in a large multipurpose room and raise their hands for who they vote for. Depending on the viability threshold, people move to new groups and are recounted. The exact rules are complicated and the process is run by unpaid humans. Moreover, in 2020 everyone has sma…
Picture it, there's 100 people in a room who all have to move themselves around to their respective candidates and people count them and shout out the numbers.
All of the candidates are represented (they're reporting the numbers) and can hear the same numbers, all of the voters can hear them too.
It's messy, but it's probably one of the most difficult systems to "hack" in terms of real numbers since so many people know the results immediately.
If there's any good that comes out of this, it's that people will hopefully see the value of physical paper ballots or records.
There always was a paper trail. The purpose of the app is/was to send a set of numbers from the precinct to central.
I think the great problem of our age is that UAT is nothing like production.