13 ms·

Healthcare.gov has disappeared from CMSGov's GitHub account

116 points by jliechti1 13y ago

kmfrk 13y ago
This comes after the intense backlash following the squashing of the project's entire contributor/commit history. I was wondering why the issue complaining about this didn't have any recent updates. --- EDIT: It looks like some people may have used the Issues system to launch asinine political bromides against Obamacare proper - that were and are completely impertinent to the GitHub project. This could have been part of the reasoning for closing off the repo, but I've never dealt with users basically defacing my Issues system, so I don't know what your options are as repo owner in a situation like that.
- goshakkk 13y ago
  They could've just disabled issues if a lot of people were abusing them... Why close the repo?
  - kmfrk 13y ago
    They should at least have explained their decision somewhere, what with this purporting to be open, transparent, etc.
    - lukeschlather 13y ago
      I get the impression they have much bigger problems than PR right now, and they really don't have any time to devote to PR.
      - kmfrk 13y ago
        There's also the aspect of giving contributors their due credit and thanks. As time and furloughs allow, to be sure, but I'm only talking about two paragraphs' worth of giving people who've poured hours into the project an explanation of what's gone on. I honestly don't care one iota about the concept of being entitled to the FOSS source code; I'm just slightly miffed about the seeming lack of thanks for the people who chipped in. If you will, it's about what's owed to contributors, not tax-payers. It's a small thing that means a great deal.
  - tannerc 13y ago
    To bring in the cleanup crew? Or "teach the kids a lesson" perhaps? Whatever the reasoning, kmfrk's comment rings true: wasn't this all about transparency?
    - braum 13y ago
      only during the election...
    - pyre 13y ago
      Didn't you hear? Transparency isn't one of the essential core parts of the government, so it was shutdown, pending a budget compromise.
- senthilnayagam 13y ago
  I get it I now, 1277 files and just 3 commits for the static site, I did not thing about squashing then
- bhauer 13y ago
  > It looks like some people may have used the Issues system to launch asinine political bromides against Obamacare proper - that were and are completely impertinent to the GitHub project. Seems a fair reason to turn off the issues, at least for the time being. However, it is interesting that a similar abuse of issues [1] is left undisturbed by administrators of the WhiteHouse account when the asinine political bromides are favorable to the current administration. I don't expect anything less, of course. [1] https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues/3 https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues/3
  - kmfrk 13y ago
    If you have the inside scoop on why they closed off the repo, by all means share with the rest of us.
    - bhauer 13y ago
      > If you have the inside scoop on why they closed off the repo, by all means share with the rest of us. I do not. I agree with you that disabling the issues due to abuse makes sense.
- aaronem 13y ago
  A 'bromide' is the verbal equivalent of patent medicine, a meaningless nostrum or 'thought-terminating cliché' in the modern vernacular; I think you meant 'broadside', which is literally a ship of war firing her entire main battery at once, or metaphorically a full-throated and fiery verbal attack. The More You Know(tm).
  - rjbwork 13y ago
    Really both work for this situation I think.
    - aaronem 13y ago
      It's only the mixed metaphor to which I object.
yelnatz 13y ago
I guess they used some of that money to pay for a private repo.
- brickcap 13y ago
  lol
ams1 13y ago
They also removed the statement on their developer site (https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/ https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/) that "EVERYTHING we do will be published on Github." Here's a screenshot of the cached version: http://cl.ly/image/0f0R2x2l0w1t http://cl.ly/image/0f0R2x2l0w1t
- mgraczyk 13y ago
  It still says "We’re making our source code freely available on GitHub."
ck2 13y ago
Remember that healthcare.gov was created by two different groups. The front-end people did an okay job. The back-end people is the Canadian company that has messed up.
- pluc 13y ago
  The Canadian company is called CGI.
  - carlosdp 13y ago
    Funny enough, I have experience working with them and I knew they had no clue what they were doing. How did the government not figure it out? -__- It's the kind of company that is years behind on programming practices and over-charges in the millions because their clients never have any clue of the difference between good/bad software. They tend to target markets that have almost no real software servicing it so there is nothing to compare it to (eg. commercial insurance).
    - frogpelt 13y ago
      How did the government not figure it out? This has been a theme. Unfortunately, I expect it to continue.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      > How did the government not figure it out? Government procurement is an incredibly coreographed ritual with a minefield of rules and regulations designed to make the process as human-proof as possible. Unless there was conclusive evidence about CGI's lack of clues, the process would continue with them.
- paulwithap 13y ago
  Sounds like the Canadians are launching a subtle campaign of cyber warfare against us. It's the only explanation.
- paulwithap 13y ago
  Sounds like the Canadians are launching a subtle campaign of cyber warfare against us. It's the only explanation.
rurounijones 13y ago
I wonder if the newer commits would be along the lines of "Shit! XYZ had massive bug, we have done a hacky workaround for the moment" which might not do their company image much good.
- smsm42 13y ago
  That's easy to hide - just write in the commit "Fix issue 65438" and nobody's the wiser :) Of course, analyzing diffs can uncover the truth but if the fix already deployed that's not the worst position to be in.
ErikAugust 13y ago
As far as I know, the public repo was outdated and assumed to be 'for show', so to speak. Now that the show has turned ugly - why not just cancel the show?
- laurenstill 13y ago
  That was my understanding as well... so if it's out of date, why bother taking it down, and changing their policies in the middle of a PR shitstorm. Seems to just add fuel to the fire...
  - ErikAugust 13y ago
    I agree. The whole thing now strikes me as extra phony and bizarre.
lifeformed 13y ago
I've never used a buggier website before. Half the links were broken, the application process just wouldn't proceed halfway through (until I tried again today), I get giant error boxes every other page, and it just plain wouldn't do anything in Chrome. It says I have to "Review my application details" before I can go further, and sends me to: https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/OH/en_US/myAccount?appId=%=applicationId%%3E#applications Yes, that's the actual link. The variable name "%=applicationID%" is directly in there, and so it just sends me to a broken link. This is one of many broken links I've come across, this one just happens to be an essential step in the application process.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- sams99 13y ago
  they actually never open sourced marketplace for some reason
noveltysystems 13y ago
$650 Million and we get THIS?!?
- jonknee 13y ago
  Where do you get your news? No where near $650m was spent on Healthcare.gov (but, perhaps maybe it should considering the project grew considerably in scope when so many states refused to setup their own exchanges).
  - nirvanatikku 13y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      From that thread: http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-troubled-obamacare-exchanges/article/2536805 http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t...
    - jonknee 13y ago
      So as I thought, you were completely misinformed. The story for that link has been updated: > Correction: We miscalculated the expenditures related to the healthcare exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act, and incorrectly attributed the total cost of these expenditures. Another link in that thread (as noted below), contains the actual amount of money: > The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded CGI $55.7 million to launch Healthcare.gov, its central Obamacare health exchange website. Over the full five years of the contract, CGI could receive as much as $93.7 million. $650m turns into $55m real quick and I'd bet a lot of fixed costs for things like hardware and software licenses made the actual figure even smaller. That was for two years, so $28M a year or $2.3M a month. Considering the cost of developers alone that doesn't seem like a ton, especially when developers are only a small part of the challenge. I'm glad I didn't get the contract. I sure wouldn't want to build an exchange to handle many billions of dollars worth of transactions (and be responsible for millions of tax records!) on that kind of budget. Doubly so with talk radio , Fox News and the WSJ watching my every move. If a startup came up with a way for any American to buy health insurance in one place it would be valued in the billions of dollars (even with a fail whale on demo day).
jonknee 13y ago
The code that was on there has nothing to do with what people are clamoring about... It was just the informational side. The /marketplace stuff was not open source (nor would it be very useful considering it would be very dependent on the specific stack of private databases and APIs that it taps into).
joeyh 13y ago
commit 56ef8da2e73712ddabc5f2f2907e62faa4e0e68e Author: Andrew Newhouse <andrewwn@gmail.com> Date: Wed Jul 3 14:02:11 2013 -0400 Initial Commit This was the first and only commit. So it didn't reflect the actual website anyway. There are bugs in the website such as incorrect email address validation that are not present in this code dump. Since this is public domain software, I will put a copy of the git repo on Archive.org when I get a free hour.
- joeyh 13y ago
  https://archive.org/details/healthcare-gov-gitrepo https://archive.org/details/healthcare-gov-gitrepo
STRML 13y ago
If anyone's interested, I've been working on an issue tracker & locally runnable version of the marketplace in a new repo[1] that was spawned from the former issue tracker on the removed repository. It has some issues with hardcoded redirects coming back from their API calls, but it's a start. I originally made it just to simply demonstrate how a few small changes could make a large performance difference, but I've kept it up due to encouragement from some friends and hopes that somebody inside the project will use some of the code or make changes based on it. [1] https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  Is this actual production code? https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/ https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas... It's way below the quality you'd expect from a modern front-end. Poor standards, undocumented code, monolithic sources, hard-coded data all around. Despite using Backbone and other modern frameworks, it looks like something a novice JS developer would concoct, not a project in the millions... My favorite part so far (https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/eeCommon.js#L363-L377 https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas...): //got this from the internets //fetchs the URL parameters function getUrlVars() { ...
  - STRML 13y ago
    Yep, this is 100% real code, taken from the current working site. The initial commit is exactly the code that you would download every time you visited the site (and re-download, and re-download, as they failed to set caching headers). My hope is to reorganize it into a sane set of Backbone views & rich models so it makes a lot more sense. There seems to be a lot of dead code so pruning that is the first priority. Every function is in the global scope so it's actually somewhat easy to detect what is used and what is not... not that I'd ever advocate throwing everything in the global scope. I agree that it is much less than you'd think that amount of money would buy. I hope that by bringing attention to it, I can make it clear to taxpayers and government decision-makers that we are not getting anything close to what we are paying for. The system for winning government contracts needs to be completely revamped, at least for the technical sector. I would love to see a competition-style bidding process, where a detailed set of specs are presented and all submissions that meet the spec are paid, and the winning submission is paid more. $92M buys you a lot of runway. I think we could have seen some much better code out of this if small businesses & independent groups were allowed to tackle it.
bharathwaaj 13y ago
http://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-and-cms-free/ http://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-a...
dvanduzer 13y ago
Look guys, I'm gonna go on the record as pro Drupal+Mongo.

116 points by jliechti1 13y ago

kmfrk 13y ago

This comes after the intense backlash following the squashing of the project's entire contributor/commit history. I was wondering why the issue complaining about this didn't have any recent updates. --- EDIT: It looks like some people may have used the Issues system to launch asinine political bromides against Obamacare proper - that were and are completely impertinent to the GitHub project. This could have been part of the reasoning for closing off the repo, but I've never dealt with users basically defacing my Issues system, so I don't know what your options are as repo owner in a situation like that.

goshakkk 13y ago
They could've just disabled issues if a lot of people were abusing them... Why close the repo?
- kmfrk 13y ago
  They should at least have explained their decision somewhere, what with this purporting to be open, transparent, etc.
  - lukeschlather 13y ago
    I get the impression they have much bigger problems than PR right now, and they really don't have any time to devote to PR.
    - kmfrk 13y ago
      There's also the aspect of giving contributors their due credit and thanks. As time and furloughs allow, to be sure, but I'm only talking about two paragraphs' worth of giving people who've poured hours into the project an explanation of what's gone on. I honestly don't care one iota about the concept of being entitled to the FOSS source code; I'm just slightly miffed about the seeming lack of thanks for the people who chipped in. If you will, it's about what's owed to contributors, not tax-payers. It's a small thing that means a great deal.
- tannerc 13y ago
  To bring in the cleanup crew? Or "teach the kids a lesson" perhaps? Whatever the reasoning, kmfrk's comment rings true: wasn't this all about transparency?
  - braum 13y ago
    only during the election...
  - pyre 13y ago
    Didn't you hear? Transparency isn't one of the essential core parts of the government, so it was shutdown, pending a budget compromise.
senthilnayagam 13y ago
I get it I now, 1277 files and just 3 commits for the static site, I did not thing about squashing then
bhauer 13y ago
> It looks like some people may have used the Issues system to launch asinine political bromides against Obamacare proper - that were and are completely impertinent to the GitHub project. Seems a fair reason to turn off the issues, at least for the time being. However, it is interesting that a similar abuse of issues [1] is left undisturbed by administrators of the WhiteHouse account when the asinine political bromides are favorable to the current administration. I don't expect anything less, of course. [1] https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues/3 https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues/3
- kmfrk 13y ago
  If you have the inside scoop on why they closed off the repo, by all means share with the rest of us.
  - bhauer 13y ago
    > If you have the inside scoop on why they closed off the repo, by all means share with the rest of us. I do not. I agree with you that disabling the issues due to abuse makes sense.
aaronem 13y ago
A 'bromide' is the verbal equivalent of patent medicine, a meaningless nostrum or 'thought-terminating cliché' in the modern vernacular; I think you meant 'broadside', which is literally a ship of war firing her entire main battery at once, or metaphorically a full-throated and fiery verbal attack. The More You Know(tm).
- rjbwork 13y ago
  Really both work for this situation I think.
  - aaronem 13y ago
    It's only the mixed metaphor to which I object.

yelnatz 13y ago

I guess they used some of that money to pay for a private repo.

brickcap 13y ago
lol

ams1 13y ago

They also removed the statement on their developer site (https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/ https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/) that "EVERYTHING we do will be published on Github." Here's a screenshot of the cached version: http://cl.ly/image/0f0R2x2l0w1t http://cl.ly/image/0f0R2x2l0w1t

mgraczyk 13y ago
It still says "We’re making our source code freely available on GitHub."

ck2 13y ago

Remember that healthcare.gov was created by two different groups. The front-end people did an okay job. The back-end people is the Canadian company that has messed up.

pluc 13y ago
The Canadian company is called CGI.
- carlosdp 13y ago
  Funny enough, I have experience working with them and I knew they had no clue what they were doing. How did the government not figure it out? -__- It's the kind of company that is years behind on programming practices and over-charges in the millions because their clients never have any clue of the difference between good/bad software. They tend to target markets that have almost no real software servicing it so there is nothing to compare it to (eg. commercial insurance).
  - frogpelt 13y ago
    How did the government not figure it out? This has been a theme. Unfortunately, I expect it to continue.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    > How did the government not figure it out? Government procurement is an incredibly coreographed ritual with a minefield of rules and regulations designed to make the process as human-proof as possible. Unless there was conclusive evidence about CGI's lack of clues, the process would continue with them.
paulwithap 13y ago
Sounds like the Canadians are launching a subtle campaign of cyber warfare against us. It's the only explanation.
paulwithap 13y ago
Sounds like the Canadians are launching a subtle campaign of cyber warfare against us. It's the only explanation.

rurounijones 13y ago

I wonder if the newer commits would be along the lines of "Shit! XYZ had massive bug, we have done a hacky workaround for the moment" which might not do their company image much good.

smsm42 13y ago
That's easy to hide - just write in the commit "Fix issue 65438" and nobody's the wiser :) Of course, analyzing diffs can uncover the truth but if the fix already deployed that's not the worst position to be in.

ErikAugust 13y ago

As far as I know, the public repo was outdated and assumed to be 'for show', so to speak. Now that the show has turned ugly - why not just cancel the show?

laurenstill 13y ago
That was my understanding as well... so if it's out of date, why bother taking it down, and changing their policies in the middle of a PR shitstorm. Seems to just add fuel to the fire...
- ErikAugust 13y ago
  I agree. The whole thing now strikes me as extra phony and bizarre.

lifeformed 13y ago

I've never used a buggier website before. Half the links were broken, the application process just wouldn't proceed halfway through (until I tried again today), I get giant error boxes every other page, and it just plain wouldn't do anything in Chrome. It says I have to "Review my application details" before I can go further, and sends me to: https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/auth/OH/en_US/myAccount?appId=%=applicationId%%3E#applications Yes, that's the actual link. The variable name "%=applicationID%" is directly in there, and so it just sends me to a broken link. This is one of many broken links I've come across, this one just happens to be an essential step in the application process.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sams99 13y ago
they actually never open sourced marketplace for some reason

noveltysystems 13y ago

$650 Million and we get THIS?!?

jonknee 13y ago
Where do you get your news? No where near $650m was spent on Healthcare.gov (but, perhaps maybe it should considering the project grew considerably in scope when so many states refused to setup their own exchanges).
- nirvanatikku 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526761
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    From that thread: http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-troubled-obamacare-exchanges/article/2536805 http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t...
  - jonknee 13y ago
    So as I thought, you were completely misinformed. The story for that link has been updated: > Correction: We miscalculated the expenditures related to the healthcare exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act, and incorrectly attributed the total cost of these expenditures. Another link in that thread (as noted below), contains the actual amount of money: > The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded CGI $55.7 million to launch Healthcare.gov, its central Obamacare health exchange website. Over the full five years of the contract, CGI could receive as much as $93.7 million. $650m turns into $55m real quick and I'd bet a lot of fixed costs for things like hardware and software licenses made the actual figure even smaller. That was for two years, so $28M a year or $2.3M a month. Considering the cost of developers alone that doesn't seem like a ton, especially when developers are only a small part of the challenge. I'm glad I didn't get the contract. I sure wouldn't want to build an exchange to handle many billions of dollars worth of transactions (and be responsible for millions of tax records!) on that kind of budget. Doubly so with talk radio , Fox News and the WSJ watching my every move. If a startup came up with a way for any American to buy health insurance in one place it would be valued in the billions of dollars (even with a fail whale on demo day).

jonknee 13y ago

The code that was on there has nothing to do with what people are clamoring about... It was just the informational side. The /marketplace stuff was not open source (nor would it be very useful considering it would be very dependent on the specific stack of private databases and APIs that it taps into).

joeyh 13y ago

commit 56ef8da2e73712ddabc5f2f2907e62faa4e0e68e Author: Andrew Newhouse <andrewwn@gmail.com> Date: Wed Jul 3 14:02:11 2013 -0400 Initial Commit This was the first and only commit. So it didn't reflect the actual website anyway. There are bugs in the website such as incorrect email address validation that are not present in this code dump. Since this is public domain software, I will put a copy of the git repo on Archive.org when I get a free hour.

joeyh 13y ago
https://archive.org/details/healthcare-gov-gitrepo https://archive.org/details/healthcare-gov-gitrepo

STRML 13y ago

If anyone's interested, I've been working on an issue tracker & locally runnable version of the marketplace in a new repo[1] that was spawned from the former issue tracker on the removed repository. It has some issues with hardcoded redirects coming back from their API calls, but it's a start. I originally made it just to simply demonstrate how a few small changes could make a large performance difference, but I've kept it up due to encouragement from some friends and hopes that somebody inside the project will use some of the code or make changes based on it. [1] https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace

ricardobeat 13y ago
Is this actual production code? https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/ https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas... It's way below the quality you'd expect from a modern front-end. Poor standards, undocumented code, monolithic sources, hard-coded data all around. Despite using Backbone and other modern frameworks, it looks like something a novice JS developer would concoct, not a project in the millions... My favorite part so far (https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/eeCommon.js#L363-L377 https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas...): //got this from the internets //fetchs the URL parameters function getUrlVars() { ...
- STRML 13y ago
  Yep, this is 100% real code, taken from the current working site. The initial commit is exactly the code that you would download every time you visited the site (and re-download, and re-download, as they failed to set caching headers). My hope is to reorganize it into a sane set of Backbone views & rich models so it makes a lot more sense. There seems to be a lot of dead code so pruning that is the first priority. Every function is in the global scope so it's actually somewhat easy to detect what is used and what is not... not that I'd ever advocate throwing everything in the global scope. I agree that it is much less than you'd think that amount of money would buy. I hope that by bringing attention to it, I can make it clear to taxpayers and government decision-makers that we are not getting anything close to what we are paying for. The system for winning government contracts needs to be completely revamped, at least for the technical sector. I would love to see a competition-style bidding process, where a detailed set of specs are presented and all submissions that meet the spec are paid, and the winning submission is paid more. $92M buys you a lot of runway. I think we could have seen some much better code out of this if small businesses & independent groups were allowed to tackle it.

bharathwaaj 13y ago

http://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-and-cms-free/ http://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-a...

dvanduzer 13y ago

Look guys, I'm gonna go on the record as pro Drupal+Mongo.