Is there any transparent accounting on how much the Obamacare website ended up costing? I think it was originally supposed to cost ~$94mil.
From 2014: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare-...
An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
61–70 of 99 posts
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#62The UI looks nice, but there is more to this than a UI. This should be implemented using a cryptographically secure random number generator. Presumably, the TSA requirements would specify some defense against an attacker being able to predict program outputs.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/RandomSourc... solves that. Just need to tweak the code.
I submitted https://github.com/arik-so/tsa/issues/4 about this issue.
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#63I get that it's trying to be funny, but is it really no longer possible to create a website with a single arrow that doesn't have to pull down all this cruft ? window.jQuery || document.write(' ')
Agreed. I was curious as to how the random numbers were being generated (math.random()? Something else?), so I went to look at the source code. I expected `assets/js/src/application.js` to be the main file (I mean, look at that name. What else would it be?)
I start reading the code, and pretty soon it starts messing with the clipboard, and it even pulls in Flash [1]:
> // Config ZeroClipboard
> ZeroClipboard.config({
> moviePath: '/assets/flash/ZeroClipboard.swf',
> hoverClass: 'btn-clipboard-hover'
> })
In all honesty, this website serves more as an indication of why the TSA spending this much money on such code may actually be justified, rather than effectively mocking the cost, which I think was its intent. How many security holes do you think this website is subject to? Can we know for certain that none of these dependencies are malicious or contain backdoors?
Security can't be taken lightly. And yes - for an app like this, it's much more important that it be secure than that it look good. I doubt a browser application is really the right approach anyway, given those concerns.
[1] https://github.com/arik-so/tsa/blob/master/assets/js/src/app...
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to Wikipedia there have been 6 notable hijackings in the last 5 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#20... There are roughly 100k commercial flights per day, 36m flights per year. Therefore, the probability of your flight being hijacked is 1 in 30 million, which is an absurdly low number. Note that only one of the 6 hijackings resulted in casualties, so the mortality rate even lo…
Most likely due to the TSA's efforts! Can you imagine how many would be hijacked if there weren't a TSA?
Ah, the good old days...
The history of airport security is somewhat interesting. There wasn't a TSA for long time, and the hijackings/flying to Cuba got annoying, so metal detectors were added.
Everything else since then hasn't made much sense.
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
..and yet airport security didn't stop this.
> [The] EgyptAir flight was taking too long to get from Alexandria to Cairo Not to interrupt some good-old lazy cynicism, but something tells me there is a substantial difference between domestic Egyptian airport security and the TSA.
TSA is far more idiotic ?
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#66I'm not sure the TSA app is weighted 50/50
For all we know, it's using the camera to gauge the "brown-ness" of the current passenger's skin, and using that as an input to the calculation. It would be about as racially and culturally unbiased as anything else the TSA has ever done.
Dont forget beard.
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#67I feel like HN's nerd rage at stuff like this (the TSA expenditure) is the same reason many (if not most) engineers make less than they could. It's a very willful denial of a fact of how the world works (large organizations routinely pay large sums for seemingly very simple work).
"Nerd rage"?
Try "taxpayer rage".
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#68I have a cheaper alternative. Get rid of TSA altogether. Travelling was a whole heck of a lot more fun in 1975. Since then it's been overreaction upon overreaction. Nobody is going to hijack a plane in this day and age because of the simple fact that the passengers will immediately revolt.
The pre-2001 airport security apparatus did a good job of keeping guns off planes, eliminating the most common hijacking scenario. Almost everything since then has been increased hassle for diminishing returns, with the most effective improvement being one of the least visible - hardening the cockpit doors.
Which introduced a different issue allowing incidents such as the Germanwings and EgyptAir crashes and maybe even Malaysian MH-370.
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#69I get that it's trying to be funny, but is it really no longer possible to create a website with a single arrow that doesn't have to pull down all this cruft ? window.jQuery || document.write(' ')
They are probably just using a quickstart file that has all of those things included as defaults.
I have a repo I clone for my one-off projects with all the boilerplate I could possibly need for a weekend project. None of the projects actually end up using all of that stuff, but I'm not bothered by the lack of professional optimization in my "for fun only" projects.
Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant
#70I get that it's trying to be funny, but is it really no longer possible to create a website with a single arrow that doesn't have to pull down all this cruft ? window.jQuery || document.write(' ')
In this case a few lines of CSS and a few lines of JavaScript would have delivered the exact same result, including all necessary responsiveness. We have gotten so far away from bare bones, non-jquery based development that this kind of heft has become the standard starting point for all projects. It certainly isn't my style, but then I didn't go to Stanford and don't work for a unicorn, so perhaps I am the unenlightened one.
That said, I don't think it's necessary to criticize a satirical project like this on technical grounds. The idea is great; the developer probably just used his boilerplate frameworks that are usually used for much more complex projects in order to save time.