Comment by killcoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by killcoder | Hacker News Reader

In South Australia an algal bloom started in ~mid-March of this year, it's a pretty big ecological disaster, probably the worst non-bushfire disaster in living memory. Probably 30% of SA's coastline is affected. It's a pretty big deal affecting many people's livelihoods.

The joint state and federal government relief and cleanup package is worth AUD $102.5 million dollars.

I hope the public receives that comparison at every opportunity.

The old website was frankly excellent, the only problem was it didn't have HTTPS support. I would have happily upgraded that part of the system for the cost of a cup of coffee if I'd had an opportunity to submit for the tender!

The new website is significantly more difficult to navigate (for me, a seasoned tech user). The primary thing Dad's everywhere use it for (the weather radar) now requires scrolling to the _bottom_ of the page, and zooming in from the 'map of Australia' to the region you live in. It used to be like, a click to go from home page -> state weather radar with all the info you needed.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...

If you want to read our local news about it.

> [BOM] said the cost breakdown included $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build, and the site's launch and security testing cost $12.6 million.

Absolutely stupid, even those numbers are outrageous. They say it's part of some 'larger upgrade package', prompted by a cyber attack in 2015.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-02/china-blamed-for-cybe...

But politicians over here love to blame cyber attacks when technical blunders happen. We had a census a couple years ago and the website fell over due to 'unprecedented load' or maybe it was a 'DDOS attack'? The news at the time couldn't decide who to blame!

Welp, I hope this gets as much world-wide attention as possible so they can be embarrassed and do better.

(Hello, fellow South Australian!)

The painpoint for me has been the loss of information density. 99% of my use of the old BoM was the 7 day forecast showing rain and cloud: former for working outside, latter for photography jobs. Now, at about 800px or narrower the 7 day forecast loses the rain estimate, and all they manage to fit in is day, icon, min and max. The day name could be abbreviated, and the other elements are typically 30px wide. Having to expand each or all days to look for the rain estimate is thoroughly tedious.

Among the highlights of vertical space wastage are 130px for a cookie warning, 50px for "No warnings for this location" and then another 110px for heading a table with "7 day forecast" and "expand all". On a large phone screen, it leaves only about a third of the vertical spacing for starting content; the rest is site header and browser chrome!

Funny enough, I recently stumbled upon an Australian comedy show called Utopia that looks more and more like a documentary now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_otJbx-PVOw

The least realistic thing is how many Aussies are employed in that government department.

I don't understand how those kinds of numbers get accepted, approved and paid! We built a fairly complex web application for a customer. The total cost including design, development, QA, data migration from a legacy platform + independent 3rd party security audit/pentest was less than $0.5M!

Even if I accounted for the additional capacity to serve a nation of users, I can't imagine the cost being more than $5M.

I would have settled for https to redirect to http. Instead, it redirected to a generic page telling you they don't support https, with no way to get to the actual content.

In some ways, poor project management is like an algal bloom or wildfire: costs expand, feeding on other costs, unless a huge active effort to keep them under control is made.

And it ends up being a disaster for the public.

Another way to think about the price, is that it's slightly less than we spend per day on the NDIS(~126 million)

Cleaning up algae doesn’t buy votes

Seasoned tech user and changing the link location stumps you? BOOKMARK IT. Things change.

Sorry fellow Aussie here and every Tom, Dick & Harry has had their say on this website during the likely 1000’s of committee meetings here.

I’d charge 96m to the BOM too to upgrade their old POS website.

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