Comment by tarmstrong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tarmstrong | Hacker News Reader

This is a great teaching moment for anyone who works in UX or observability, but it's worth keeping in mind that the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (who operate the Emergency Alert Service (EAS)) has a yearly operating budget of around $17MM this year. The system itself was launched in 1997.

This is a legacy software (and hardware!) system with a relatively small budget and number of employees that needs to coordinate with other large organizations (FEMA, HI-EMA, NOAA, etc.). I think the most interesting lessons to learn from this have to do with long term software maintenance. I'm sure folks at the FCC/*EMA knew that this UI was janky but why did they not have the budget/power to fix it? How do we ensure that the public sector can benefit from the technical advances that most people on hacker news take for granted? Curious to hear from folks with experience in relevant parts of the government.

> I think the most interesting lessons to learn from this have to do with long term software maintenance.

Yes! And with re-engineering too! When you redevelop a system, you need to build up historical knowledge of its antecedents, and teach it to the current operators and maintainers. You shouldn't just start from scratch from the requirements.

In this case, there was an even older legacy system that had a similar incident in 1971, which they then mitigated. Apparently that lesson was lost.

http://conelrad.blogspot.com/2010/09/code-word-hatefulness-g...:

> …In the past three tapes, one for the test and two for actual emergencies, were hanging on three labeled hooks above the transmitter… In the future only the test tape will be left near the transmitter. The two emergency tapes [will be] be sealed in clearly marked envelopes and placed inside a nearby cabinet.

I once got contracted to integrate with a large government web app that was created with some sort of legacy SPA generator. The app was written in .NET and the js on the page would render the views from specs it would get over XHR from the .NET app. It positioned everything on the page absolutely and everything was styled with inline styles. The people who manage it were quoting outrageous numbers to do the simplest style changes because it was so hard to work in. Very few improvements ever got made because the money was just not there in the budget to pay these ridiculous quotes.

Not mixing drills and real alerts in one list costs just two headings.

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