ceworthington

Good point! Lots of ways to serve.

Our mission has remained very consistent: use design and technology best practices to improve government services. The new administration has different policy priorities, but it has been remarkable to see the bipartisan support for our mission. Our work has remained largely the same. The major difference is fewer technologists are raising their hands for public service now, which constrains our ability to improve things.

Some people might not have realized USDS is still around since it was best known for the Healthcare.gov rescue under Obama. But it's still here, and still hiring people to work on problems like this www.usds.gov/join

Here's a link to the actual work - which is impressively presented - instead of this BoredPanda nonsense which is little more than bootleg theft.

https://www.rferl.org/a/the-mammoth-pirates/27939865.html

This is awesome work that is going to make it easier for a number of our digital service teams across government to deploy services.

[shameless plug to join public service for a year or two]

If you're interested in joining 18F or the U.S. Digital Service (which has an HQ office in the White House but also has teams across government), this application works for both teams: https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds/apply

From our Website:

There are several ways you can plug in to the big problems we’re solving. You'll drive vision for a better government, working alongside policymakers, agency leaders, and program teams to build world-class digital services.

Product Managers -- We are looking for product managers who can balance user needs with business requirements and apply technical knowledge to bring world-class digital services to the American people. You'll need to manage complex projects to hit tight deadlines without sacrificing quality. If you feel comfortable reviewing engineering design documents, project plans, and contracts, and you can communicate technical concepts to various audiences up and down the command chain, we're looking for you.

Engineers -- Our engineering leads will drive technical teams to build large-scale, innovative products that serve the American people. You need to be an expert strategizer, fixer, and builder with the engineering chops to roll up your sleeves and push your own code. You'll provide leadership on major technology projects, manage project teams with focus and vision, contribute to product strategy, and support strong teams of engineers.

Designers -- We are looking for designers from an array of disciplines — experts in research, UX, service design, product strategy, visual/UI design, and content strategy. Whatever your flavor, you embrace complexity and revel in drawing simplicity and clarity out of thorny challenges. You are a relentless advocate for the needs of users. You will help lead teams and prototype, test, and iterate on services and products. You will help build the Federal Government’s capacity to deliver services to the American people.

Many positions are DC-based (at least some part of every month), but several of our digital service teams (including the largest and most mature Digital Service team at GSA called 18F https://18f.gsa.gov) have remote offices and allow remote work. You can indicate your geographic limitations on the application.

If you'd like to build things like this Dashboard, and help fix the services Americans depend on, we are hiring. We have an amazing core already, and are growing fast. Read more about the U.S. Digital Service and apply at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds

Our pitch is pretty simple: Fix Stuff That Matters.

If anyone would like to see, use or contribute to the code we used to build the Dashboard, we're on GitHub: https://github.com/GSA/analytics.usa.gov

And also open-sourced the adapter we use to get the data out of Google Analytics and into a nice clean JSON API for our client-side static app to consume:

https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter

It's pretty damning of the HealthKit product team that a post like this is required. Why would Apple publish the app at all?

It seems like they should have released iOS8 with some kind of simple pedometer/stair counting app that looked good and was easy to use, like a reference application to show what HealthKit could be used for, and then buried the HealthKit app as it currently stands in some settings menu that most people will never need to look at.

The only thing I can imagine is that they intended to roll out a bunch of HealthKit-compatible apps from third parties like Nike and FitBit along with iOS8, but the bug messed up their release plan.

Totally agree with this sentiment.

The best thing about teaching kids some basic programming is that it shows them that they have the power to shape the world, rather than just experience it.

Whether or not they go on to do anything code-related in their "real life", I think getting that experience at an early age is extremely empowering.

Hey USNetizen: want to email rfpez@gsa.gov with some of your issues? The team is good, but very small and I know they would love your feedback.

Yeah, sorry about that. You have to pick your battles in gov IT.

Thanks for reporting. I think this should be fixed, if you want to try again.

Some of my Innovation Fellow colleagues at GSA are trying to do just that: making it easier for modern, small web development shops to apply for government IT contracts.

Check it out: https://rfpez.sba.gov/

This is the first of four contests that will run throughout the coming year. Contest #2, scheduled for Jan - March, is going to ask for functioning apps / prototypes that address an idea surfaced in part #1 (with larger prizes). Contest #3 will be a design and visualization challenge.

The goal was to engage a broad community (read: MBAs :-) ... but also energy professionals/researchers that can't necessarily code). But we're hoping to fire up the dev/designer community in Contests #2-4. We've already seen some awesome ideas submitted, so we're hoping this model works well.

Source: I'm currently an Innovation Fellow detailed to the Department of Energy working on Open Data. Hope you all submit an idea!

This is awesome. Nice work Valerie!

A post mortem would be so helpful. I wonder what the odds of that are?

Nice post.

It's kind of odd that the consumer versions of Chrome and (especially) Firefox are loaded with developer-oriented features. I use these every day, but there's not a great reason for these to be in the main release.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for a developer-focused web browser with all the complicated bells and whistles. Or, a consumer-focused browser without them.

This post is right on, but it's kind of telling that a post where the TL/DR is "Your business idea is not good unless it makes money" can make it this high on Hacker News.

+1 to this. I am on Rdio now for $10/mo, and I easily would have paid Lala the same monthly fee for their service.

I assume they were in bad shape because they had to pay every time someone streamed a song, and not enough of their users wound up paying them for streaming access. Too many loss leaders.

Instead of firing this gentleman, a smarter company would have put him in charge of finding which other corporate tasks could be effectively outsourced for 20% of their current cost.

I'm not sure why anyone thought getting a bunch of Fortune 500 technology companies invested in the status quo of health care spending would lead to reduced costs.

My two cents: it's pretty hard to take this seriously when you lead the post with a picture of a naked woman clinging to Richard Branson kite surfing.

TL/DR: I probably shouldn't have used Rails in the first place, but it was too tempting to roll my own blogging engine. Octopress/Jekyll is a better fit for now, but I do have concerns about future problems this choice may cause.

If they get to the point of going into a store, you can bet that the store employees will do everything they can to sell them a different phone that is in stock today, that they can earn a commission on now.

The same would be true if iPhones were abundant and the Galaxy was out of stock, though Apple will always be at a disadvantage because there is only one "current" iPhone while there are any number of "new" Android phones the sales guy/gal could choose to push.

Supply chain issues really hurt in a market as competitive as smartphones. I wonder how many sales Apple loses per day because they can't keep the product in stock?

Buying an iPhone 5 involves either lots of waiting, or hard work to track one down.

Sorry: I meant "why is there no LEGAL live stream of the World Series game"

I'm legitimately interested in the business rationale. There must be one, but it is non obvious.

My best guess is that by focusing max audience onto one platform, they can charge the broadcast advertisers more. Maybe it's hard to sell that $50M ad deal to Ford while also saying "well some of the people will see a Samsung ad because they're streaming it, but you'll get most people."

Optimizing is often an after-thought on side projects, so it's cool to see you take a stab at it for your personal blog.

Having just completed a Paypal integration for a Backbone.js app (my.jetbets.us), I can pretty confidently say that what Paypal needs is a much better-documented API to interface with a dramatically simpler set of products/pricing plans.

There are like three ways to do everything with Paypal, but it is never clear which of those ways works with the plan you are on, or which of these ways would be "best" or "simplest" or "cheapest," or even why they are different.

The "Square"-ified home page looks nice but my god they make it hard to use their product.