Obamacare’s web site is really bad • Hacker News Board

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#31

Post by roboneal » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:24 PM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #26

dkhenry wrote: post #18

I ask my self how much better could I do then what they have presented. I like to think in this case I, myself, without the teams of developers and millions of dollars could have made a system that queries a database that could handle 7m page views per day.

It doesn't just "query a database", it talks to a whole slew of 20-year-old legacy systems on all different platforms at a whole list of other government agencies. In the process of signing up and creating your profile, here are a few of the systems, all maintained and managed by other departments, that this website has to communicate with in real-time: * The IRS to verify your AGI, family size and marital status * T…

They hid all of that complexity behind an essentially non-functioning website....genius!

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#32

Post by arxanas » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:24 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #22

>Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-." Requiring entropy in the username ? What? I can understand the password, but what site requires you to put a symbol in your username?

I haven't visited the website but

> lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-."

says "or" and not "and", so it doesn't actually seem like there's any issue so long as you include a letter. Then the only real restriction is the minimum of six characters.

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#33

Post by mdkess » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:26 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #22

>Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-." Requiring entropy in the username ? What? I can understand the password, but what site requires you to put a symbol in your username?

I think they're saying that the username has to match [a-zA-Z0-9_\.@/-]{6,} - note the "or" there.

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#34

Post by joshuahedlund » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:27 PM UTC

From my experience, yes the site is really bad, and it's more than just heavy traffic.

The sign up screen lists some requirements for the username, but not all of them. My sign up attempt failed several times with a non-descript error message, which I attributed to the heavy traffic, until later I saw the "Forgot your username" page listed more requirements (apparently you can't end a username in a special character, which wasn't mentioned on the signup page, and which I only added at the end because that page wouldn't let me through without one)

So finally I signed up, but I get invalid login message every time I try to log in. Thinking maybe I mistyped my password (twice?) I clicked "forgot your password" and entered my username. It actually sent me a Forgot Password link to my email (confirming that I'm in the system) but when I click the link in the email it pulls up a page that says "We could find any account with the information you provided" - yes, with the information I provided from their own link. Have done that three times.

With these kinds of basic inconsistencies and bugs, I'm actually hesitant to enter my info once I do get in, wondering what kind of massive security holes are waiting to be discovered...

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#35

Post by gee_totes » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:27 PM UTC

Here's the repo of healthcare.gov is anyone is interested in addressing some of the optimization issues mentioned in the article:

https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#36

Post by chris_mahan » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:28 PM UTC

jeffgreco wrote: post #25

conroy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but Obama's campaign used AWS heavily ( http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/how-te... ).

Campaign is irrelevant to actual government work.

Technology or otherwise.

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#37

Post by dangrossman » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:29 PM UTC

roboneal wrote: post #31

dangrossman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't just "query a database", it talks to a whole slew of 20-year-old legacy systems on all different platforms at a whole list of other government agencies. In the process of signing up and creating your profile, here are a few of the systems, all maintained and managed by other departments, that this website has to communicate with in real-time: * The IRS to verify your AGI, family size and marital status * T…

They hid all of that complexity behind an essentially non-functioning website....genius!

The website's easily among the best this government, or any government, has ever created. It hasn't had a single minute of downtime (the Healthcare.gov servers have handled the load without a hiccup), it looks great, it's easy to use, it's mostly open source (on GitHub no less), and during off-peak hours I had no problem making an account. All that in a few months with a small team and no headline-making budget over-run. The only "non-functioning" aspect is likely that the legacy systems it talks to can't handle that many millions of people a day. Even in the face of those failures, the site doesn't crash or unhelpfully throw you some cryptic error code, it puts you in a queue and eventually tells you it's too busy and asks you to use the call center in the meantime.

http://i.imgur.com/xAikKoM.png

Sure, it's not accomplishing its goal for everyone yet (over 2.4 million have been able to sign up for new plans, or so I heard on NPR today). But, from the perspective of "I could've built a better website alone in my bedroom", no he couldn't, as what this team built is working great despite doing a lot more behind-the-scenes than one might expect.

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#38

Post by smackfu » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:29 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #22

>Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-." Requiring entropy in the username ? What? I can understand the password, but what site requires you to put a symbol in your username?

Speak of the devil... We just used this terrible site which is used to manage gift cards, and it requires all usernames include a number: https://www.ucard.chase.com/

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#39

Post by stan_rogers » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:30 PM UTC

RobotCaleb wrote: post #16

gesman wrote: post #11

They must've hired a well-known team of web developers from elance: http://toprate.org/FILES/programmers.jpg

Have*. It's must have. Or, must've, but that feels very weird.

The contraction shouldn't feel weird unless all contractions feel weird. The grammticalized "have" in the modal is almost never pronounced the same way as the verb meaning "possess"; it has become a schwa-vee or often even a simple schwa (rendered as musta) in ordinary (not explicitly emphatic) speech. It has really become more of an affix than a separate word, so maybe it is time for the written rendering of the language to begin to reflect that.

Re: Obamacare’s web site is really bad

#40

Post by SilasX » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 9:31 PM UTC

mdkess wrote: post #33

SilasX wrote: post #22

>Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-." Requiring entropy in the username ? What? I can understand the password, but what site requires you to put a symbol in your username?

I think they're saying that the username has to match [a-zA-Z0-9_\.@/-]{6,} - note the "or" there.

Ah, okay. That makes more sense. But I thought the standard way to phrase that restriction was something more like "Username may only contain letters, numbers, and the symbols _.@/- ."