Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 399 posts

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#241

Post by giarc »

Aperocky wrote: post #132
war1025 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether I heard correctly or if the number was accurate, but I heard someone throw out $60k as the amount paid for the app development this morning on the radio. That sounds like a lot of money to a lay-person, but assuming $100/hr, which seems like at least a reasonable ballpark rate, that breaks down to 600 man-hours, or 15 man-weeks. That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this.…

Why does it have to be an app? This is the part that confuse d me the most. Do it from an web page, use cloud, heck, it could even be cheaper. You only had 1000 precincts, all you had to deal with is 1000 calls - and if one of them went wrong, you'll let that person know through some kind of reviewing mechanism. I understand that $60K is nothing but this kind of failure is absurd.

I agree with you. Why an app, heck this could be done with a private Google Sheet. If they wanted call in tool, I could set this up in Twilio in 5-10 minutes.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#242

Post by hodgesrm »

mindgam3 wrote: post #227

Let me get this straight. A company deeply embedded in the Democratic establishment (0) that has worked directly with Buttigieg — the candidate with close ties to Facebook aka the company undermining democracy since 2016 — managed to totally screw up, potentially undermining the campaign of Sanders, the anti-establishment candidate. Yeah, democracy is fucked. 0. https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-sha…

If you are arguing a conspiracy of some kind it is probably best to rule out incompetence before moving on to active malfeasance. This is after all the same political party that managed rollout of the non-functioning Obamacare website.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#243

Post by EGreg »

This is why we need to start using Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed systems to vote via our mobile phones. No need for a voting holiday or standing in line. Bigger turnout, too. If it's secure enough for banking apps, why not for opt-in voting via app.

Maybe it's too hard to move to electronic voting nationwide. But every organization has governance and could use an electronic voting system based on BFT consensus of mutually distrusting parties. Vote using an app, it gets stored "on-chain", then you can check it on another app.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#244

Post by killjoywashere »

Is it just me, or is the money just draining away from the economy right now? It's like we were all splashing around in the ocean and suddenly everyone is noticing that their toes are touching the bottom, and there's a few people standing on the steps, floaties on, looking around at us in horror.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#245

Post by untog »

madeofpalk wrote: post #153
Aperocky wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be an app? This is the part that confuse d me the most. Do it from an web page, use cloud, heck, it could even be cheaper. You only had 1000 precincts, all you had to deal with is 1000 calls - and if one of them went wrong, you'll let that person know through some kind of reviewing mechanism. I understand that $60K is nothing but this kind of failure is absurd.

I don't think this is a failure because an iOS app was delivered instead of a website.

In a way it was. If you're building something that is going to function on one night and one night only you really, really don't want to choose tech that won't let you do an on-the-fly update if something goes wrong.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#246

Post by jessaustin »

jmull wrote: post #139
allovernow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is this even helping Buttigieg?

The count has been frozen at "62%" for six hours now. That just happens to be the first/only level at which "Mayor Pete" had a delegate lead over Bernie, even though Bernie still leads the popular vote. Several days from now, when the count ticks up to 100%, Bernie will lead both measures by large margins. Still, in the meantime, the corporate media can pretend like the Mayor is ahead. They know he's going to bomb in SC worse than Biden bombed in Iowa, but they're hoping that somehow they can get him to "Super Tuesday" when the other Mayor can take over for him due to his 9-figure ad spend.

Of course, the idea that the perfect candidate to beat a vain old NY rich guy is another vain old NY rich guy who also banned soft drinks the last time he held elected office is risible, but they don't care about that. The point is to ratfuck any candidate who might plausibly do fewer stupid wars.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#247

Post by ikeyany »

astronautjones wrote: post #209
ikeyany wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's never been how caucuses work, so it's not quite a solution to this problem.

the solution is to modernize and stop having ridiculously archaic caucuses

That's begging the question though. The problem is not that caucuses are old—caucuses were just fine before this app-driven craze to change them.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#248

Post by jmull »

kyrieeschaton wrote: post #233
jmull wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? In the case of the hypothesis, he gets more delegates. He also gets to take them from the person he is screwing (likely Sanders). Both of those immediate rewards have their own payoffs down the line (eg, in Buttigieg receiving an appointment to a grateful Warren administration or what have you) even if he does not win. The idea that the Democratic nominating process would be rigged is not ipso facto crazy given…

Well, no. The problem with the app is delaying the result not changing it. There’s a paper trail of everything and the app can’t change it.

Maybe you can provide more details of your hypothesis, but what you have so far doesn’t make sense.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#249

Post by neuromantik8086 »

Aperocky wrote: post #169
umeshunni wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Titles are a form of compensation. When you are a cash-strapped startup, especially in a domain that's not particularly lucrative, you pay people with titles. If this incident hadn't happened, these folks could have proudly claimed that they were the CTO/COO/CPO etc of Shadow Inc on their LinkedIns and whatever article BuzzFeed/Forbes wrote about them.

With the exception of CTO, none of them seem to be engineers. If I'm on the hiring end, this is not something that will help. Instead, if someone's going to sell me the importance of their title at their 6 people startup, it's going to negatively affect their chances.

The COO majored in Music Technology at Oberlin. That's quite a bit more technical than most people realize. TIMARA (the music tech program at the Oberlin Conservatory) involves a decent amount of programming and/or audio engineering. To put that in perspective, the founder of Macromind/Macromedia (Marc Canter) is also an alumnus of TIMARA.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#250

Post by tmpz22 »

dang wrote: post #91
tmpz22 wrote: post #2

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 violates as millions of em…

Please don't post duplicate comments to HN. In addition to lowering the signal/noise ratio of the site, it creates a big pain when we go to merge threads (as happened here). If you want to refer to something you said elsewhere, please use a link.

My bad, I got emotional over the content discussed and just copy-pasted the content because it seemed like the original thread would be eclipsed. I'll make sure not to do it in the future and in general have a great appreciation for the work you do moderating HN - I imagine it is quite stressful at times.
Post reply on HN