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

An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

tsa.arik.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 99 posts

Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

#71

Post by morgante »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/tsa-spent-47000-o... "According to Mashable, the Transportation Security Administration apparently spent $47,000 on an app that is essentially a random number generator—it was briefly used to assign travelers to left or right lanes at airports. As the website reported: “The app was used by TSA agents to randomly assign passengers to different pre-check lines as part of a now…

$47k actually seems kind of reasonable, when you consider the overhead (much of which is fixed price) of any government contract.

Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

#72

Post by lifeisstillgood »

jrockway wrote: post #27
zappo2938 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

13. Rule of Economy: Programming time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time. 15. Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.[1] [1] https://www.slingcode.com/ref/ProgrammingPhilosophies.pdf

Is programming time expensive? Let's say you have a mobile app used by 1 billion people every day. It sounds crazy, but I bet a fair number of people in this forum contribute to such an application. Imagine you want to make an optimization that increases battery life by 1%. Assume a 30Wh battery and that it's charged once per day. Over the two year lifetime of the phone, at $0.10 per KWh, that change would save your…

The usual (and frankly convincing) argument is that you won't get to a billion users without using the cruft as a means of scaffolding to help change and iterate and try new features, whatever the behind the scenes architecture looks like

Then, when you have 100 million users, you can afford a team of optimisation specialists to strip out that 1% battery life

But yes, it seems on average npm pulls in 1,000 upstream packages when you just try making a vanilla project of any complexity

Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

#76

Post by sdenton4 »

wcummings wrote: post #49
Gratsby wrote: post #17

I 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.

It's a jobs program. IMHO we should put them to work building gaudy monuments of Obama.

Don't you mean Bush II? He started the jobs program, after all...

Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

#77

Post by russellbeattie »

armandososa wrote: post #74

This left me thinking what could be the simplest implementation I could do, while keeping a good UX. I came up with this in 10mins: https://jsbin.com/xidefopuqe It was a fun experiment and felt very old school.

Nice - you saved me the effort. But after I wouldn't have been able to resist the idea of tweaking the randomness and ended up spending the rest of the evening trying to perfect something that felt more random than random - including forays into Wikipedia and other searches to find prior examples... So really you've saved me hours of work!

Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

#78

Post by ojr »

solomone wrote: post #2

I 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(' ')

I see this as a polyfill for import statements which are not implemented in the browser

Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

#79

Post by Godel_unicode »

kough wrote: post #24
mediumdeviation wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern iOS should support flexbox, which should get you what you want with a few lines of CSS. http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

Or you can throw this in a table and be done with it.

Haven't you heard? Only noobs use tables. Also your design totally won't scale and isn't internet grade :)

Re: An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

#80

Post by 0xCMP »

Has anyone here worked with IBM before as either: a) employee/contractor b) Customer

And if so, are of those who would say that you didn't expect something so seemingly stupid to happen when they read that IBM was involved?

And do any of those people have any reason to believe that IBM managed this project well from prior experience?

I bet not, but lets see...

Post reply on HN