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The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

gun.io

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Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#81

Post by tomlin »

jellicle wrote: post #62

Fine. "6 hours maximum", says the author, for an app translated into English and Spanish that interfaces with a remote database and performs some user-initiated calculations, and also has a bunch of static pages. Before starting you must consult with at least a dozen people who know very little about Android and succinctly describe the capabilities of the smartphone and what sorts of applications are even possible. F…

> and Hacker News jumps on that like starving dogs on Alpo.

I couldn't help but note that the title contains Useless Android Application, although the article indicates that the total cost of $200,000 was spent on Android, iPhone and BB (not completed) versions.

I won't go as far as calling it linkbait, but if I ever wrote an article about an app I didn't like and it was available on Android, I now know a way to get more traffic if I were to submit to HN.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#82

Post by gravitronic »

captainaj wrote: post #61
aresant wrote: post #17

Outstanding piece of marketing on Gun.io's part with a clear "here's how my biz solves this" at the end. #1 on Hacker News is a feat, but this thing has legs on every political and general fluff channel - HuffPo, FoxNews, Conservative Radio, CNN, wire services, etc. I learned from our own blogging efforts when you have a winner, take it to the bank. EG - Hit every PR angle you can think of to get redistribution while…

Right, was thinking that the writer could file a petition on change.org, great way to build the buzz (aside from the main purpose)

The irony would be that whatever legislated change the government would make to publicly "fix" this problem would in reality just add another step with another form to the process.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#83

Post by rweba »

jmspring wrote: post #35
GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #12

In the government agency where I work, $200k would actually be considered very reasonable for a steaming pile of shit. We've paid many times that amount and sometimes the shit wasn't even lukewarm, let alone steaming. Believe it or not, we often spend $150 to $200k or more just to make the decision about whether or not we're going to invest in a particular pile of shit.

A lot of government agencies, as well as groups within large companies, want to keep their budgets (or increase them), so there isn't an incentive to be cost effective -- as you mentioned. But, as another person commented, the overhead around government projects (documentation, reports, meetings, etc) will bloat things beyond a simple time/materials development contract. The FBO has a site listing the contacts, but t…

Yeah the same happens within any large organization - universities are one example I am familiar with. If you get a large grant from NIH or NSF or whoever, you don't have any incentive to minimize expenses because you don't benefit in any way from spending less than your budget.

So typically people will order the most expensive things that can fit within the budget or even buy stuff they don't need just to spend all the money.

This does strike me as often wasteful but I don't see an easy fix.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#84

Post by feralchimp »

jellicle wrote: post #62

Fine. "6 hours maximum", says the author, for an app translated into English and Spanish that interfaces with a remote database and performs some user-initiated calculations, and also has a bunch of static pages. Before starting you must consult with at least a dozen people who know very little about Android and succinctly describe the capabilities of the smartphone and what sorts of applications are even possible. F…

I was actually just going to mention this. With all of the in-bundle resource differences required for two iPhone resolutions, different .xibs for iPad, etc, we're talking about much more than 6 hours worth of work here.

The source code (for iOS, at least) is also pretty clean and decently commented for what it is.

$96k is still outrageous, but for work-for-hire it's off by a factor of 2-5 rather than a factor of 10.

Nevertheless, it's crap. The quality of the constructed software is irrelevant because the feature set is a no-op. It's a graphical front end for a NOAA web service that returns temperature and humidity. If the public isn't living and breathing the content of that NOAA web service, maybe it's because there's no graphical tool to access it, but maybe it's because they have 50,000 other ways to determine temperature and humidity at their current location. Like, say, existing in a conscious state at their current location.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#85

Post by Jacquass12321 »

jellicle wrote: post #62

Fine. "6 hours maximum", says the author, for an app translated into English and Spanish that interfaces with a remote database and performs some user-initiated calculations, and also has a bunch of static pages. Before starting you must consult with at least a dozen people who know very little about Android and succinctly describe the capabilities of the smartphone and what sorts of applications are even possible. F…

Did you look at the source code? At all? it took two minutes to find a bug in the application just messing around with it. The application is supposed to display warnings if your temperature or relative humidity is outside of acceptable ranges. However if you use the get current or get max buttons, it skips these warnings and calculates the Heat Index anyways, displaying a value it shouldn't be providing with no warning.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#86

Post by Tichy »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #47
Tichy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they should have created a competition for finished apps instead. If the app is as simple as it sounds (not sure what it actually does), maybe some high school kids would have entered a better version and raked in 5000$ as the first price.

What test would they use to check whether an app is simple or not? At a certain point, you put out a bid for a complicated monstrocity, and the only entrant is some RentACoder who claims he can re-write Windows in Python in two weeks for $50.

Since the competition would be for finished apps, it wouldn't matter.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#88

Post by mkramlich »

This kind of nauseus bloat is a big factor why I'm trying to stay away from iOS and Android development. So many projects out there could be much more quickly, cheaply and freedomly (my word) done as a simple web app or even as pure static HTML website in some cases. So much foolishness, hype and hipstering going on.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#90

Post by jlev »

feralchimp wrote: post #66

These guys are clearly elite: - (float)getHeatIndex:(float)temp:(float)humidity { NSLog(@"[getHeatIndex] temp: %f, humidity: %f", temp, humidity); float hIndex = -42.379 + 2.04901523 * temp + 10.14333127 * humidity - 0.22475541 * temp * humidity - 6.83783 * pow(10, -3) * temp * temp - 5.481717 * pow(10, -2) * humidity * humidity + 1.22874 * pow(10, -3) * temp * temp * humidity + 8.5282 * pow(10, -4) * temp * humidity…

Snark aside, that is the correct NWS formula for Heat Index given temperature in farenheight and percent humidity. Sure it's un ugly regression, but it's accurate within +- 1.3˚F

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/images/ffc/pdf/ta_htindx.PDF via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index reference 8

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