361–370 of 399 posts
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One time I was working on a Splunk thing at an old job. We had an engineering contact there, and when a question came up about how something in Splunk was tested, the guy literally just replied back to our email with that meme and no other details. Yikes?
Devs that respond with memes are either really bad (like 80%) or really, really good.
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There's no such thing as an "Iowa DNC". You presumably mean the IDP, the Iowa Democratic Party. They're separate organizations. The DNC and the state parties are often at odds with each other. There's a good series of "Reply All" episodes about this, focusing on the Alabama Democratic Party.
Since I heard those episodes I've been hoping that the Alabama situation isn't typical. Do you have any special insight about Iowa? Is there an Iowa kingmaker running everything from behind the scenes?
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Maybe what I am thinking is that, if it is a real business with products that are agnostic any user would benefit from a much higher quality product. I don't know enough about software in politics to understand just how ridiculous this idea might be. Perhaps an example might serve as a better explanation of what I am thinking: Trello is a real company with a product that is agnostic. Politicians of any school of thou…
The essential factors [1] are: * There are types of software that are politics-specific, and therefore do not exist until a party pays for it to be made. * Politics is a zero-sum game: if you're funding software (either institutionally, or by being a tech worker who works below market wage For The Cause), you don't want it to be used by your political opponents. So commodity stuff that already exists is bipartisan. A…
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"The application is literally tables of relational data with multiple simultaneous users" How is this data "relational"? Each precinct has 3 numbers to submit for each candidate, that's not a big task for one person, and none of those precinct's candidates numbers are related to anything else in the db except the grand total of all precincts numbers and that's a one way relationship. The grand totals never change any…
> How is this data "relational"? Each precinct has 3 numbers to submit for each candidate The numbers relate to each candidate. It's that simple!
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What about the Iowa Caucuses makes you believe these are "high information" voters? They often have nonsensical positions and ranked choices. They're committed voters, but that is not at all the same thing.
This [0] was my favorite "high information voter" story so far. [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mayor-pete-buttigieg-gay-iowa-c...
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 don't think that's a better theory. The process may be 'bad' but it has been that way, and worked, for a long time. As far as we know, the new ingredient was the app.
> The process may be 'bad' but it has been that way, and worked, for a long time. The process has never worked. I attended a couple caucuses myself between becoming 17 [0] and leaving Iowa. I still hear about them from family. They have various flaws. The most severe one IMHO is that due to the time commitment, they only reflect the voice of die-hards and/or those with few responsibilities. That's true for choosing t…
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…
Curiously... Any take on Michael Slaby, Timshel (defunct), The Groundwork (defunct), the dozens (up to 70 at one point, many from SV/NYC) of engineers that worked on it for roughly two years in close contact with HFA 2016 (The Groundwork was right down the street from HFA 2016 HQ), and the $700,000 that HFA 2016 paid for that work? More generally, do you think there is a problem with for-profits which focus on politi…
Since that time he's probably had his own epiphanies from working in industry but one of mine was that we did shockingly little QA and everything was built as fast as humanly possible. Everything was building the airplane in the air and it was largely due to constraints of the political or legal kind. Timeline management and allocating resources to testing was always an afterthought.
Testing usually comes from a feedback loop of launching broken features, incident response, manager gets in hot water, engineer gets in hot water, engineer proposes testing plan, manager uses incident as primary source reference to secure additional budget, testing implemented.
In politics no service, company, initiative, or team lasts long enough to complete the cycle.
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The Democratic Party must be destroyed to save it. This is a material manifestation of underlying shit, just a symptom at several degrees of remove from any more-than-superficial cause. The only thing that could conceivably provide a systematic opening to fix things (ie, not just fixing specific things, after they've become apparent, because they've already catastrophically failed), in the realm of badly-written scie…
...ratfucked... If they ratfuck him this time anywhere near as bad as they did last time, he'll run independent. In that case, Trump will win even more easily than I've been expecting since February 2017. Of course, Trump has a sort of death wish, so he could invade Canada or something and then Bernie would win without owing anything to the other face of the status quo party. The most recent results (at 62% reporting…