Comment by Hbthegreat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hbthegreat | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The requirements of the census should be obvious to anyone using it. Not the requirements of some suits sitting around blowing money because they can't think of scalable ways to host a web form. The system has one main purpose and that is data collection. A concise list of requirements could be:

- Scalable to the entire population of Australia (not less than 1 million submissions per hour)

- Significant attempts to combat expected DDoS attacks (the original census site decided not to take the offered help from upstream DDoS protection services)

- Data Security needs to be paramount (seems like the one thing they did right as nothing has been leaked yet)

- Just because it is a government contract doesn't mean the cost is irrelevant. [$9.8m + (testing costs exceeding .5m and .5m of OFFICE plants)]

These students achieved this in a caffeine filled weekend hackathon for around $500 and it achieves at least my first point as they benchmarked it at 4mil req/h. Bantering on about how it isn't an adequate solution just isn't productive here. The purpose was to show that it can be done better and cheaper than what IBM and the Australian Government came up with in FIVE years vs 2 students in 24ish hours.

Credit where it is due guys.

Thank you. I'm surprised where this discussion has headed.

Of course the kids didn't rebuild the ABS census system in 50-some hours, and I don't think the sensationalism in this article is meant to be taken so literally. The purpose of the hackathon project and of the article is more likely to help the average person understand that the ABS could have built this in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost, and given the technically trivial task at hand, it shouldn't have failed.

Absolutely.

> The purpose was to show that it can be done better and cheaper than what IBM and the Australian Government came up with in FIVE years vs 2 students in 24ish hours.

Sure, they made a nice little prototype -- or MVP, if you will. I'll certainly give them credit for that.

But did they really do it "better and cheaper ... in 24ish hours" when they didn't come anywhere near meeting all of the requirements of the project (most of which probably aren't even public/published)?

> scalable ways to host a web form

That's the trivial part. You seem to imply ABS spent 5 years doing just the web form and that's a false premise just there. Once they match the privacy requirements you can read about here:

http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310114.nsf/4a256353001af3...

Let me know how much time it took them (including getting security clearance to do it, all the post-processing, hardware management, etc.)

While I agree with this sentiment if they are doing all of the post processing and data operations in band and not off in separate queues then the architecture was wrong to begin with. Collect data => add to queue => process later. It doesn't matter how long that process later step takes as people only care about being able to submit their census and their government not looking like a laughing stock.

This exercise is about performance not things like security clearances.

If the exercise was about performance, they could just point at google forms. They didn't. You said:

> The purpose was to show that it can be done better and cheaper than what IBM and the Australian Government came up with in FIVE years vs 2 students in 24ish hours.

Neither did ABS spend 5 years on the webform, nor the guys implemented everything that IBM and ABS did in 24h. They did something completely different. These guys got to skip all of the complexity of the solution and did the easy part in a weekend. You're also presenting the easy parts only. Even "add to queue => process later" is easy only if you want to show notification on a small site. Add all the assurances you need for the census and it's a multi-day task on its own.

Basically we're reliving the times of "why is Twitter going down all the time, I implemented Twitter in RoR in a weekend, look"

A benchmark doesn't mean anything unless it's benchmarked with all features and requirements accounted for.

I have all sympathy for the argument that you could do things better and cheaper than the government and IBM, but while banter isn't productive, neither is a benchmark of a bare hosted web form.

Edit: and as another poster below me pointed out, lower downs in the ABS are well aware of AWS. Inability to get new tools and methods in was one of the reasons I left (also the philosophy that tech pay basically tops out at the APS six level, and they don't want tech experts at EL1 / EL2 levels, they want "managers". Also, the government has been pretty explicit that they don't value or respect the ABS: efficiency dividends, job cuts, left without a head for a long time, moving jobs too Geelong!?!, and low levels of pay for technical experts).

Edit 2: also I just want to stare that I in no way think AWS is necessarily the right platform on which to be conducting a national census.

You think IT guys in ABS do not know about AWS? It is about what the management thinks. And management needs code.gov like initiative desperately. Otherwise we will keep bleeding money to IBM time and time again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com