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Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

It's fashionable to talk about how dystopian social media is, but in my experience, it pales in comparison with the pure hell that is trying to use ID.me and realizing that such a poorly engineered system sits between a loved one of mine and their social security payments.

I tried to help set a relative up a while back to receive his payments, which required authenticating with ID.me. Over and over again, the facial recognition feature would fail and prompt to take a new video. It took reaching out to a support line to assist, but they weren't particularly fast or helpful. I couldn't imagine being his age and trying to set this stuff up alone.

For every beautiful, artisinal website experience out there that takes UX seriously, there's an equally horrible one that stands between you and something you need and it's pretty clear that the people behind that system don't give a damn about you the user.

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> I tried to help set a relative up a while back to receive his payments, which required authenticating with ID.me.

Isn't it weird for the US to rely on public services that are managed on the TLD (.me) of a foreign country?

I see the same stupidity with my own country's government where they use independent domain names for every service rather than a single, high value namespace (ex: gov.TLD). I guess I should just be happy they use our country's TLD. Lol.

The TLD is one of the only ways that's quick to teach as a way to verify a domain. It's absurd to use another country's -- especially as I've seen first hand how the actual operation can just be handled by a small and easily-infiltrated group (as sometimes the TLD is initially handled by a university group).

It was always funny seeing news about the instability of government in Libya and then also see a bunch of projects come out using the TLD (.ly)

It really does raise the question what other obvious (or not-so-obvious!) risks they ignored. How is "a foreign country can perform a DOS by using the DNS system as intended" not an obvious problem?

Imagine if the service was called who.ru. What could possibly go wrong?

Hard agree. Even if they contract it out, it should at least live on CNAME under official gov TLD(s).

It was pointed out to me, a millenial, that Social Security was created and administered in the Depression era before computers even existed. To think that they somehow created a working system without the tech that we throw at it today is interesting.

My (96 year old) father is quite sure that every such system worked far better before computers got involved.

In some cases, perhaps he's right.

In some countries, the modern systems are byzantine.

In New Zealand, which is similar population to say Oregon, the modern systems absolutely spank the old systems.

Tax: the majority of people don’t need to file a tax return, instead it is all automatic. You only file if you have income from uncommon sources, such as foreign investments. Any questions, and I can call my tax department, and I get a person who answers the phone call, and answers the difficult questions correctly. They don’t treat you like a criminal: 10 years ago I personally did five years of unfiled tax returns simultaneously . . . I rang and asked questions of the tax department, and got my refunds without any trouble. I believe you can trust the tax department (YMMV).

Local government: I can walk in to their help desk and ask questions for free about the council rules and processes. I admit the help desk does not provide legally binding opinions, instead you need to go through formal processes. The local council may be slow and difficult for some things, but the process is fairly transparent and you can get closure on questions if you persist. The local council has restrictions on what it can do. There are automatic rights to house development, so if you follow the planning rules (setbacks, recession planes, etcetera), then it is unlikely for neighbours or local government to be able to chuck a spanner into your plans to build on your own property.

Passport renewal: last time I did it over the internet.

Mostly the government interactions New Zealand at least functional, and sometimes they are even pleasant.

The exception is our legal system, which is still mostly paper based, and archaic. Although anecdotally it works better than the US system.

I bet he's right in a lot of cases. I think the difference would be that back then you had actual humans making every decision and everything was local so the social and cultural expectations from everyone involved would have been more predictable.

Plus, I imagine everyone made more effort to be civil when interacting because everything was face-to-face.

I wonder if it's survivorship bias. Same as not every old building has survived the times, only the amazing ones did, maybe just the "amazing" government systems have survived, while the others have long since become forgotten. I put amazing into quotes because SSNs have plenty of problems, but at least they are successful in that they are used everywhere. This in turn creates the impression that government systems used to be better than they are now.

True, because those systems were designed for pre-computer technologies, and all we did when computers came along was put the same systems not designed for computers on computers. This is how we ended up using mice to sign signatures on 8x11 PDF forms that then have to go through an OCR to be input into other computer systems.

Paper works great in a lot of ways. I'm using my printer & notebooks more than ever nowadays.

Haha I just dropped $60+ for black/color cartridges, I'll probably print a couple of docs and need to get new ones again. So annoying.

I bought HP 61s

I just bought an Epson Ecotank printer. Supposed to have the advantages of a laser jet but not be nearly as expensive refills. The printer itself was $200, though.

Take them out when not using the printer and store them with the plastic/sponge covers on. Inkjet carts last much longer that way.

that's an interesting though, it drips or something while just sitting there?

Buy a toner printer instead?

I'll look into that, don't know the difference offhand

Toner is cheaper per page than ink. But the quality of photo prints will be slightly better with inkjets. If you never print photos (on photo paper), a toner printer is perfect.

...and it never dries, if unused.

This os because procedures were repeatable, doable by a layman, and persisted in a way that was trivial to navigate.

(Paper file navigation is so easy my Gram can do it faster than me!)

Computers added:

-Hardware abstraction -Software abstraction -Storage abstraction -Search abstraction -Indexing abstraction -Networking abstraction -Legislative abstraction (When you have a computer to program once instead of a workforce to train, people are more willing to complicate things instead of leaving well enough alone)

Honestly, I can totally believe it worked better.

Better for the end-user, not better for administrators and accountants on the side of government services.

I have a theory about your dad's observation: i bet it's because a physically implemented system can't afford being realized through pulling in deeply nested dependencies, and their bugs and weird corner cases.

We also got to the moon without calculators. (This used to be well-known but may not be anymore - I'm not sure. Forgive me if I'm saying something obvious.) Pretty incredible how unnecessary most of our "technology" really is.

Can't find it now but one of my all-time favorite engineering memes goes something like, "modern engineer, cries when Matlab crashes; Roman engineer, built aqueducts by eyeballing them."

I mean, if we're talking about Apollo, they had IBM mainframes and I believe the Apollo guidance computer was actually the first computer made of integrated circuits which was crucial to fitting it within the power/weight budget. I'll bet a lot of work was still done with slide rules though.

We had computers - they were just teams of women crunching numbers in a room somewhere

It wasn’t only women. Not cool totally cut out a major group of people who contributed to such a milestone.

It may not have been only women, but

> In 1935, the first group of female human computers were hired. Before electronic computers, all mathematical equations and computations would be done by hand by people, often known as human computers. With the advent of World War II, many male employees at NACA left to fight overseas. More and more women were needed to fill their roles, and soon African American women were hired to help with the shortfall.

> These African American women were sent to a segregated computing section known as the West Area Computing Unit, which was the center of the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. In April 1942, a memo was passed around stating that, “The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could.” The women computers were becoming increasingly more valuable and doing incredible work along the way.

https://www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/women-nasa

I love the fact that this so so dear to you that you feel you must comment but fail to mention who you think should be included.

An entire gender group that contributed.

Which one?

Men, are you saying no men contributed to calculations?

You don’t need computers to administer entitlement programs; but computers are implemented as labor saving devices.

> the people behind that system don't give a damn about you the user

Or at least, the people buying the system don't have the technical ability to create it, and the contractors who won the lowest bid to create it don't care about anything other than having the project's completion signed off on.

That was exactly my experience as well! I was beyond frustrated.

Unfortunately I had to do this just to PAY MY TAXES since I had received some unemployment benefits and the relevant form was gated behind my Dept of Labor acct that had, of course, been long since locked due to scam attempts.

The more that you need a system the less the designers need to care about UX. If this one service is something you absolutely have to use, then you will use it regardless of awful UX, because you have to. Conversely, if the service is something that's simply nice or fun to use, or there are tons of alternatives, then the UX must be good or people will go without your service or use an alternative.

> For every beautiful, artisinal website experience out there that takes UX seriously, there's an equally horrible one

more like 10 equally horrible ones

The primary reason I do not use the va.gov online services.

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