Three programmers fix Healthcare.gov in a weekend | Hacker News Reader

Three programmers fix Healthcare.gov in a weekend

cbsnews.com

23 pointspsymen14 comments

It's been said before but the biggest issue the site has is not the front-end but the integration with all the other gov't services. Which they are most certainly not integrating with.

Also they should drop the 'the' from the name.

Large software systems implementers will continue to win multimillion-dollar government contracts. To me, that's the most depressing thing about it all. These implementers should be out of business with the shit they put out year after year. How do we make sure they do not win another contract?

I think that awarding contracts to the lowest bidder is a recipe for disaster if it is a software product being ordered.

Awarding contracts to a handful of large government contractors is always a recipe for disaster, no matter what it is.

Nail down on the corruption. I bet the winners have back doors into gov incentivising the decision makers in some way.

We need a YELP for work-for-hire gov shops to create transparency especially when tax dollars are involved.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701517

In a weekend? lots of hacks, no tests...

    <a href="news">Hacker News</a>

"Let me be clear – this does not mean you should ship code without tests. Thorough tests. Carefully written tests. I’m saying that you shouldn’t write tests first, because it limits your creativity and ultimately slows you down. Stop fixing tests when your implementation breaks them, and start writing awesome code without the fear of red." — "Mother Nature doesn’t use TDD, and she’s done pretty damn well.", http://compphi.com/2012/05/06/mother-nature-doesnt-use-tdd-a...

That was quite possibly the worst analogy I've ever seen.

Gut reactions come from the gut.

I'm not sure what you mean. The analogy just does not make sense. Mother nature's way of solving problems is by throwing random solutions and millions of years at them (you know the whole 'evolution' thing) and the solutions that come out of this process are not exactly optimal. If you have millions of years to finish your project, please go ahead and don't write tests. I think that I will though. I also think that you are really misunderstanding the TDD methodology if you think that writing tests somehow constrains your creativity.

Let me rephrase that for you: "Mother Nature doesn't use TDD, because she doesn't do software development."

That opinion is antiquated, oversimplification at best[0]; or it is a feature of one literalist's thought.

We are increasingly modeling our systems on nature's patterns[1].

[0]: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_law

[1]: http://www.zmescience.com/research/computer-made-using-solid...

Governmint: im just going through agile sprint 0 with fda. according to the project manager sprint 0 will take weeks or even months! these people really need to stop saying they are agile. The pace of anything happening is horrible. Sprints taking months.... welcome to the government way of doing things!

And what sprint 0 is all about? Onboarding. That's right they need months jystvto give laptops to developers. As a guy coming from a start up i get heart attack every time they rape vocabulary with agile, sprints, scrum master or even daily stand ups that should be renamed to hour long meeting about why we failed again...

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