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

Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 102 posts

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#41

Post by kaonashi »

pdeuchler wrote: post #27
brandonb wrote: post #2

A bunch of the folks in this article are Y Combinator or Google alumni, and we're giving a talk on Saving HealthCare.gov next Thursday in SF for anyone who's interested: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/saving-healthcaregov-tickets-118... Let us know if you have questions! Or if you want to help. UPDATE: we seem to be sold out. Trying to find a larger venue. In the meantime, feel free to sign up on the waiting list and yo…

Not to start a political flame war, but... How do you, as technologically savvy people who are in a better position than most to understand the grave transgressions of the NSA, reconcile your support of an administration that has shown complete disregard for our privacy and civil liberties (specifically within the scope of the NSA/Snowden scandal) with your inherent duty, as an engineer of powerful systems, to above…

The ACA doesn't really have anything to do with the NSA. You're falling victim to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#42

Post by Subetei36 »

How do they measure success? If something costs 1000x what it would have in the market and still strives for adequacy it's already proof of failure. If any of us failed so spectacularly we'd go bankrupt and another service would be used (and there would be plenty of choices if regulations/poor law services didn't dissuade people from creating this kind of service).

Now we have people that were productive at companies making services we pay for of our own volition spending time on this thing that doesn't work as a symptom, not a cause. So confused why this is a thing.

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#43

Post by stephenhuey »

brandonb wrote: post #2

A bunch of the folks in this article are Y Combinator or Google alumni, and we're giving a talk on Saving HealthCare.gov next Thursday in SF for anyone who's interested: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/saving-healthcaregov-tickets-118... Let us know if you have questions! Or if you want to help. UPDATE: we seem to be sold out. Trying to find a larger venue. In the meantime, feel free to sign up on the waiting list and yo…

I see it's sold out now. Will there be any possibility of a second event or will the rest of us also be able to find out how we can help after the event happens?

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#44

Post by ceejayoz »

sp332 wrote: post #26
toomuchtodo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You serve the static assets from a CDN, but the authentication and dynamic content generation need to scale very quickly when you have an in rush of traffic. This is the perfect use case for Amazon AWS (GovCloud, specifically). EDIT: Disclaimer: I did not work on Healthcare.gov, but did study up on the entire architecture while trying for a gig on the recovery team.

How many servers are we talking here, anyway? Like 1 rack's worth or what?

It's highly variable because of the way health insurance in the US works.

There's an "enrollment" period where you can switch/reenroll in your plan. It only lasts a few weeks to a few months in the end of the year. During that period, load is immense.

Outside that period, there's extremely low traffic, as only people who have "qualifying events" are eligible to shop for insurance - if you get married, divorced, lose a job, etc.

Letting someone else figure out what to do with 95% of your server capacity for 10ish months out of the year is a pretty decent cost savings for the government, I'd imagine.

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#45

Post by Bill_Dimm »

dangrossman wrote: post #25
enjo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absolutely baffling comment. Particularly for a community (hackers) that value openness and transparency above pretty much all else. What in the world are you talking about, to a general public audience, that can't be heard by the rest of the world?

This is a highly politicized topic. Recording/streaming the event makes it very easy to take an out-of-context soundbite and turn it into a media story that actively hurts their ongoing efforts to improve the marketplace. They may want to keep the TV cameras out for the same reason they're not present in just about any kind of political discussion/negotiation; by the time anyone in government is speaking to media, th…

Recording/streaming the event makes it very easy to take an out-of-context soundbite...

I would have concluded the exact opposite. Making a full recording available allows any attempt to quote part the meeting out of context discoverable and provable. Without a recording, anyone that attends the meeting could jot down a quote that serves their purpose and report it without anyone being able to dispute the context (aside from relying on the memories of other attendees).

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#46

Post by abstractbill »

angersock wrote: post #34
abstractbill wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC talks aren't recorded, for similar reasons. When you know every word you say will be potential fodder for a sensationalist news story, it's harder to be blunt about what went right and wrong.

There's a difference between talks for invenstors/entrepreneurs, and talks about fixing a massive clusterfuck of government spending. Especially when the narrative people want to spin is "Gee golly whiz look at those Silicon Valley folks saving the day!". Anything else is CYOA, and it'd be nice if people could actually rise to the occasion and be honest and precise. (Besides, if you are honest on everything, and some…

Anything else is CYOA

I don't think so. The people fixing the obamacare website most likely want obamacare to succeed, and are aware that there's a hungry media out there ready and waiting for the next story revealing just how awful the original website (and, they'll insinuate, hence obamacare itself) is.

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#47

Post by wutbrodo »

pdeuchler wrote: post #27
brandonb wrote: post #2

A bunch of the folks in this article are Y Combinator or Google alumni, and we're giving a talk on Saving HealthCare.gov next Thursday in SF for anyone who's interested: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/saving-healthcaregov-tickets-118... Let us know if you have questions! Or if you want to help. UPDATE: we seem to be sold out. Trying to find a larger venue. In the meantime, feel free to sign up on the waiting list and yo…

Not to start a political flame war, but... How do you, as technologically savvy people who are in a better position than most to understand the grave transgressions of the NSA, reconcile your support of an administration that has shown complete disregard for our privacy and civil liberties (specifically within the scope of the NSA/Snowden scandal) with your inherent duty, as an engineer of powerful systems, to above…

I'm not the person you asked, but there seem to be quite a few things wrong with the assumptions underlying this question.

> an administration that has shown complete disregard for our privacy and civil liberties

Is it really true that this is the case for this administration more so than other administrations? Admittedly the increase in opportunity for surveillance has been huge in the last couple decades so the quality of the comparison degrades as you go further back in time, but what the NSA has been doing seems entirely in line with what they've been doing for decades. To be clear, what they've been doing for decades is really, really shitty and I'm glad people are finally outraged, but then wouldn't your view require basically boycotting working with any administration ever? I don't think it's an unreasonable proposition to not hold hostage policies that are potentially worthy just for a single (however significant) issue that you disagree with.

> your support of an administration

> continuing to further said administration's political aims

This leads to me to my next point: it seems like your comment assumes that this was done purely out of a desire to help a political figure, instead of considering the possibility that the volunteers may think that Healthcare.gov is a worthy goal or at least that its brokenness is negatively affecting the American people (I don't think there's any disagreement across the political spectrum on this latter point). That's an awfully cynically political way to look at the world, and I don't think it's accurate to assume that that viewpoint is shared by the volunteers. I think it's probably a safe assumption that the volunteers acted more out of a desire to see hc.gov working than to see Obama's political capital enhanced per se.

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#48

Post by mseebach »

bicknergseng wrote: post #16
akoumjian wrote: post #9

The question I have is, how do we get government to hire teams like this in the first place?

Build a federal gov run IT branch that isn't the NSA instead of contracting things like this out?

And what are the dynamics that will make this work better, especially recalling the iron law of bureaucracy?

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#49

Post by ceejayoz »

abstractbill wrote: post #28
enjo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absolutely baffling comment. Particularly for a community (hackers) that value openness and transparency above pretty much all else. What in the world are you talking about, to a general public audience, that can't be heard by the rest of the world?

YC talks aren't recorded, for similar reasons. When you know every word you say will be potential fodder for a sensationalist news story, it's harder to be blunt about what went right and wrong.

This doesn't make sense to me.

I can write down an out-of-context statement and report it with or without a recording. If anything, a recording is positive because you can contest what I claim you said with a hard-to-fake, in-context version of things.

Re: Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

#50

Post by wutbrodo »

iamdave wrote: post #20
brandonb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately we're not doing any recordings -- it's hard to be candid and recorded for all history at the same time. :(

Define: "Hard". Technologically "hard" or Politically "hard" ?

Do you really think that the presenters haven't figured out video recording? It's obviously the latter.
Post reply on HN