4 ms·

It's amazing that this has become the low-bar standard for government websites -- simply to get basic things right is "heartening".

perihelions 5y ago
It astonished me that the people who wrote the CDC covid tracker made it refuse Firefox visitors through User Agent checks. Mozilla had to add an intervention to spoof UA's, specifically on that site: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1719846 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1719846 ("Bug 1719846: Add UA override for https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/ https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/")
- jackson1442 5y ago
  Wow. Really the only excuse to restrict a mainstream browser like that would be for a complex internal webapp where you can mandate browsers through organization policy. I remember I had to install a UA spoofer addon when I used FF to access some sites. Absolutely obnoxious.
nevir 5y ago
TBH it's a low bar for any software company – in general, we (developers) tend to dramatically over-engineer quite a few things.
Tempest1981 5y ago
Engineers have long memories. Get some thing wrong once, and it'll take years to overcome. They need to stay perfect for 3 to 5 years before "heartening" becomes "normal".
cmckn 5y ago
I kind of agree, but I respect the fact that the site hasn't had any major issues while (presumably) millions of orders have flooded in over the last 24 hours. I can't remember the last product I pre-ordered, for example, that was that stable.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  It may be stable, but there are certainly issues. I cannot get mail delivered to my home address, and it told me I can only use a residential address, so no tests for me. I am far from the only person with this situation. This is a major fail when the website boldly advertises, "Every home in the U.S. is eligible". They even specifically refuse to send it general delivery to my local post office, which is the usual solution when people refuse to ship to anywhere but my home address.
  - scotu 5y ago
    one would assume usps would have the best data regarding residential addresses, so I assume "where you live" is not a residential address. Part of the reason they are delivering to residential addresses (and no "to the local post office") is to limit the orders by household, and avoid scalpers reselling those tests. Obviously ideally they should be limiting the orders by person, but without national id and with scalpers ready to make a penny wherever they can we cannot have nice things.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      > I assume "where you live" is not a residential address. It is. But there are definitely a lot of assumptions that happen. The USPS occasionally reports to HUD that my home is unoccupied because it has no mailbox, which leads HUD to report such to my bank, which makes them report to my insurance company, and then I get a call telling me they cannot insure a house that is unoccupied, and I have to explain it to them... again. Anyway, yeah, I get the reason why they'd limit it to residential addresses. But its the "Every home in the U.S. is eligible" that is a bit of a slap in the face. Don't say it if you know it isn't true, and they know it isn't true because they address it in their FAQ.
      - cowsandmilk 5y ago
JPKab 5y ago
You're being downvoted, but you're right. I used to work in defense/intel, and then spent a lot of time at a large Federal consulting firm, where I learned just how insanely wasteful these agencies are on software projects. It's not THAT infuriating that the product is so thoroughly _NOT_GREAT_, until you find out that the budget for it exceeds by orders of magnitude anything you've ever seen. The size of the teams on these projects is mind-boggling, and when you find out there's multiple managers for every developer, that's when your head will explode. People on this site tend to think that any attack on the horrific spending efficiency of these agencies is motivated by an antipathy of the government in general, or a view that the government CAN'T do it right. I'm not of that mind at all. My gripe is that the people who are most invested in expanding the government's role in the US for positive goals seem to have zero interest in even discussing the rot within these institutions that has crippled their ability to execute on the funding they already have. I can confidently assert that, if I'm being generous, 3/5s of the current Federal (and yes, contractors too!) work force is what my old chief called "furniture". I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated).
- ekidd 5y ago
  > It's not THAT infuriating that the product is so thoroughly _NOT_GREAT_, until you find out that the budget for it exceeds by orders of magnitude anything you've ever seen. I once interacted with a private government contractor. They did an adequate job on a project. It worked, and it wasn't terrible. But they billed $5 million for a project that could have been built for $50 thousand, or—once you put up with a drawn-out sales process, endless client meetings and the occasional change request—more like $500,000. The simple fact is that many large organizations, public or private, couldn't do a $50,000 software project. It costs more than that to close the sale and negotiate contracts. As Joel Spolsky pointed out, once you need to put salespeople on airplanes, even shrinkwrap software costs $75,000: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-.... > I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated). Yeah, that has often been my experience. Sufficiently large companies tend to be deeply inefficient about small things. Partly this is because they're optimizing for different needs than you might think, and partly because $1 million is basically pocket change if it actually solves a problem. But also, once a company grows beyond a certain size, it operates internally like a centralized command-and-control economy. Internal politics matter far more in the short run than any market feedback. If anything, governments can have a slight advantage if they keep things in-house. Government employees are often slightly more idealistic than their private sector counterparts, and they're definitely paid less. So an organization like the US Digital Service can outperform the original private contractors who built healthcare.gov. The USDS was staffed by idealistic FAANG developers working for the common good at below-market salaries. They did a better job than CGI Federal, the original private contractor.
pjscott 5y ago
It makes some sense that it would be that way. If a private company's web site doesn't work at all, then they don't get your money. There are incentives for them to get basic functionality right, and if they still screw it up they can be replaced by a competitor. If a government web site is completely broken, what can you do about it? Yell angrily at a passing cloud? (In theory you could vote for a legislator who wants to make that web site a priority -- but nobody runs on that. Why would they? It would put most voters to sleep.)
mpyne 5y ago
The day used to be that "good enough for government work" was a compliment, an expression of the satisfaction that comes to a craftsman for doing work to high standards.
ehsankia 5y ago
How many other sites do you know that would go from 0 users to hundreds of millions within a few days? Even big studio games like Blizzard or Square Enix often struggle with release day, and those probably get a fraction of the users that something like this would, being blasted on all news platforms at once across the country.

perihelions 5y ago

It astonished me that the people who wrote the CDC covid tracker made it refuse Firefox visitors through User Agent checks. Mozilla had to add an intervention to spoof UA's, specifically on that site: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1719846 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1719846 ("Bug 1719846: Add UA override for https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/ https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/")

jackson1442 5y ago
Wow. Really the only excuse to restrict a mainstream browser like that would be for a complex internal webapp where you can mandate browsers through organization policy. I remember I had to install a UA spoofer addon when I used FF to access some sites. Absolutely obnoxious.

nevir 5y ago

TBH it's a low bar for any software company – in general, we (developers) tend to dramatically over-engineer quite a few things.

Tempest1981 5y ago

Engineers have long memories. Get some thing wrong once, and it'll take years to overcome. They need to stay perfect for 3 to 5 years before "heartening" becomes "normal".

cmckn 5y ago

I kind of agree, but I respect the fact that the site hasn't had any major issues while (presumably) millions of orders have flooded in over the last 24 hours. I can't remember the last product I pre-ordered, for example, that was that stable.

technothrasher 5y ago
It may be stable, but there are certainly issues. I cannot get mail delivered to my home address, and it told me I can only use a residential address, so no tests for me. I am far from the only person with this situation. This is a major fail when the website boldly advertises, "Every home in the U.S. is eligible". They even specifically refuse to send it general delivery to my local post office, which is the usual solution when people refuse to ship to anywhere but my home address.
- scotu 5y ago
  one would assume usps would have the best data regarding residential addresses, so I assume "where you live" is not a residential address. Part of the reason they are delivering to residential addresses (and no "to the local post office") is to limit the orders by household, and avoid scalpers reselling those tests. Obviously ideally they should be limiting the orders by person, but without national id and with scalpers ready to make a penny wherever they can we cannot have nice things.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    > I assume "where you live" is not a residential address. It is. But there are definitely a lot of assumptions that happen. The USPS occasionally reports to HUD that my home is unoccupied because it has no mailbox, which leads HUD to report such to my bank, which makes them report to my insurance company, and then I get a call telling me they cannot insure a house that is unoccupied, and I have to explain it to them... again. Anyway, yeah, I get the reason why they'd limit it to residential addresses. But its the "Every home in the U.S. is eligible" that is a bit of a slap in the face. Don't say it if you know it isn't true, and they know it isn't true because they address it in their FAQ.
    - cowsandmilk 5y ago

JPKab 5y ago

You're being downvoted, but you're right. I used to work in defense/intel, and then spent a lot of time at a large Federal consulting firm, where I learned just how insanely wasteful these agencies are on software projects. It's not THAT infuriating that the product is so thoroughly _NOT_GREAT_, until you find out that the budget for it exceeds by orders of magnitude anything you've ever seen. The size of the teams on these projects is mind-boggling, and when you find out there's multiple managers for every developer, that's when your head will explode. People on this site tend to think that any attack on the horrific spending efficiency of these agencies is motivated by an antipathy of the government in general, or a view that the government CAN'T do it right. I'm not of that mind at all. My gripe is that the people who are most invested in expanding the government's role in the US for positive goals seem to have zero interest in even discussing the rot within these institutions that has crippled their ability to execute on the funding they already have. I can confidently assert that, if I'm being generous, 3/5s of the current Federal (and yes, contractors too!) work force is what my old chief called "furniture". I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated).

ekidd 5y ago
> It's not THAT infuriating that the product is so thoroughly _NOT_GREAT_, until you find out that the budget for it exceeds by orders of magnitude anything you've ever seen. I once interacted with a private government contractor. They did an adequate job on a project. It worked, and it wasn't terrible. But they billed $5 million for a project that could have been built for $50 thousand, or—once you put up with a drawn-out sales process, endless client meetings and the occasional change request—more like $500,000. The simple fact is that many large organizations, public or private, couldn't do a $50,000 software project. It costs more than that to close the sale and negotiate contracts. As Joel Spolsky pointed out, once you need to put salespeople on airplanes, even shrinkwrap software costs $75,000: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-.... > I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated). Yeah, that has often been my experience. Sufficiently large companies tend to be deeply inefficient about small things. Partly this is because they're optimizing for different needs than you might think, and partly because $1 million is basically pocket change if it actually solves a problem. But also, once a company grows beyond a certain size, it operates internally like a centralized command-and-control economy. Internal politics matter far more in the short run than any market feedback. If anything, governments can have a slight advantage if they keep things in-house. Government employees are often slightly more idealistic than their private sector counterparts, and they're definitely paid less. So an organization like the US Digital Service can outperform the original private contractors who built healthcare.gov. The USDS was staffed by idealistic FAANG developers working for the common good at below-market salaries. They did a better job than CGI Federal, the original private contractor.

pjscott 5y ago

It makes some sense that it would be that way. If a private company's web site doesn't work at all, then they don't get your money. There are incentives for them to get basic functionality right, and if they still screw it up they can be replaced by a competitor. If a government web site is completely broken, what can you do about it? Yell angrily at a passing cloud? (In theory you could vote for a legislator who wants to make that web site a priority -- but nobody runs on that. Why would they? It would put most voters to sleep.)

mpyne 5y ago

The day used to be that "good enough for government work" was a compliment, an expression of the satisfaction that comes to a craftsman for doing work to high standards.

ehsankia 5y ago

How many other sites do you know that would go from 0 users to hundreds of millions within a few days? Even big studio games like Blizzard or Square Enix often struggle with release day, and those probably get a fraction of the users that something like this would, being blasted on all news platforms at once across the country.