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

371–380 of 399 posts

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

#371

Post by fuqmachine »

ikeyany wrote: post #247
astronautjones wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We don't know that they were fine. Until Sanders campaign urged them to make a change in transparency, only the final delegate count was reported. So it could've been a dumpster fire every other time and they just obscured the discrepancies with "final delegate count"

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

#372

Post by fuqmachine »

According to multiple reports, the vote counts entered into app and sent were not what was received by HQ. How do we know that the company wasn't paid to change the numbers on the backend? How would the numbers change by themselves? I'll be called a tinfoil-hatter for assuming malice.

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

#373

Post by dv_dt »

asdff wrote: post #288
dv_dt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in the vote counting business, it's a conflict of interest to also be in the vote making business for candidates.

Good thing they are in the tally business and not the counting business, then. What is the difference, you might ask? One failed last night while the other one is occurring right now.

I'm not really feeling the difference between counting and tallying, but even keeping that distinction, it still sounds to me like they're mostly not in the tally business for lack of performance. If they had performed, it would still be a conflict of interest, just one none of us would likely have heard about. I feel that doesn't make anything better.

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

#375

Post by fapjacks »

bradgessler wrote: post #275
nooron wrote: post #44

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…

Is there a world where this type of software could be open source?

I realize this is HN but let's not be so milquetoast about the critical infrastructure of our democracy. Non-free, closed-source software DOES NOT belong in the machinery of our democratic processes.

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

#376

Post by jessaustin »

eldarian wrote: post #374
jessaustin wrote: post #366

More info: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth...

That's not a reputable source in any way, please do not promote conspiracy sites.

...says the greenbean account. Blumenthal is an excellent reporter, and all of his reporting is extensively sourced. The article linked above is liberally peppered with links to sources, several per paragraph. If there's anything there you doubt, you can just click through.

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

#377

Post by jessaustin »

fuqmachine wrote: post #370
jessaustin wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

He will never in a billion years run as independent. You're patently wrong. He hates Trump more than his supporters do.

Like all thinking adults, Bernie views Trump as a symptom of a deeper disease. Bernie has fought to fix USA's underlying problems for over four decades. Why would he care in a personal sense about the latest plutocratic figurehead? Trump's policies aren't significantly different than those of his predecessors; Bernie's policies will be.

Besides, Bloomberg is more of a Republican than Trump is. Why would Bernie care to see him elected?

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

#378

Post by birdyrooster »

Ill_ban_myself wrote: post #369
birdyrooster wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I worked with Michael Slaby in 2008 and 2012. He's an incredible technology manager. He's great at punching up and fighting for his engineer's perspectives and helping upper management understand limitations and then getting out of the way. 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 poss…

"In politics no service, company, initiative, or team lasts long enough to complete the cycle."

This is systemic corruption. A billionaire can dump as much money into a for-profit company to build a platform for a specific campaign and then when the campaign is over then can claim that there isn't enough business to keep the platform solvent for the next 2 to 4 years and do it all again with the benefit of the previous code base. It's better than a Super PAC because the for-profit company can work directly with the campaign and no one will bat an eye. The company can even have foreign financing. All the while, their losses amount to a huge tax write-off and the public pays the bill.

In the case of The Groundwork, it likely cost upwards of $10 million for the people, building lease, AWS costs, etc. But where did all of the money come from? Certainly Hillary didn't pay for this. I'd love to see Eric Schmidt's 2016 Tax Returns.

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

#379

Post by cosmodisk »

relaxing wrote: post #335
cosmodisk wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would be endless queues if those Bulgarian devs would get even a fraction of that rate. They were lucky if they were getting more than $10-15/h. I also doubt there would be huge shortage of US devs willing to do the work if they were to get $120-150/h. The other problem is modus operandi of a standard software agency- it just suck your sole out for those extra lines of code.

The developers don’t get all the money they’re billed out for. The billable rate goes to the company to pay business expenses, of which developer salary is a minor fraction.

I think that's pretty much what I wrote in my comment. Agencies bill through the roof yet the devs get pennies.

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

#380

Post by meshko »

altitudinous wrote: post #260

$50000 for a mission critical, scalable app? They got exactly what they paid for. I would have written an app that doesn't work for only $25000

to be fair, they needed to scale to roughly a thousand concurrent users (where concurrent is used very loosely here). so I wouldn't say that scaleability was really a requirement. 1000 users is nothing.
Post reply on HN