Three 20-Year-Olds Make Their Own WORKING Obamacare Site – In Just Three Days

Flatfish
reply to post by seeker1963

 

Can their software handle millions of simultaneous hits?

edit on 12-11-2013 by Flatfish because: (no reason given)

Where are you guys getting the idea that the ACA website was being accessed that heavily? Tests prior to going live showed that at 1,100 concurrent users the site exhibited unsatisfactory performance. Much more than 1,000 users and things are grinding to a halt.

Source: www.foxnews.com... itics/2013/11/07/obamacare-website-could-only-handle-1100-users-day-before-launch-docs-show/

PlatinumShatinum
Here is a comparison of other sites compared to ACA (which only server 36 states).
The end result is the taxpayers handed out 500 million dollars and the thing doesn't work.

"Facebook, which received its first investment in June 2004, operated for a full six years before surpassing the $500 million mark in June 2010. Twitter, created in 2006, managed to get by with only $360.17 million in total funding until a $400 million boost in 2011. Instagram ginned up just $57.5 million in funding before Facebook bought it for (a staggering) $1 billion last year. And LinkedIn and Spotify, meanwhile, have only raised, respectively, $200 million and $288 million."

www.digitaltrends.com...

That's like comparing apples and rocks.

Do you really think that the software required to operate social networking sites is anywhere in the ballpark with what will be required to administer the ACA?

As far as I'm concerned, that's like comparing typewriters and snail mail to smart phones. Hardly even in the same universe.

FireAndForget

Flatfish
reply to post by seeker1963

 

Can their software handle millions of simultaneous hits?

edit on 12-11-2013 by Flatfish because: (no reason given)

Where are you guys getting the idea that the ACA website was being accessed that heavily? Tests prior to going live showed that at 1,100 concurrent users the site exhibited unsatisfactory performance. Much more than 1,000 users and things are grinding to a halt.

Source: www.foxnews.com... itics/2013/11/07/obamacare-website-could-only-handle-1100-users-day-before-launch-docs-show/

I heard it from places like this;

www.bloomberg.com...

Obamacare’s opening day drew millions of consumers to the law’s core insurance exchanges, offering supporters and investors hope that if the websites can stay up and running, customers will follow.
Enlarge image

In New York, officials said their exchange had 2.5 million visitors in its first half hour yesterday. California reported as many as 16,000 hits a second. And U.S. officials recorded 2.8 million visitors to the federal website, healthcare.gov, even as it fought technical problems much of the day.

I'm not saying that the ObamaCare website was successful at handling the volume of interested people, but that's what will be required in the end and I doubt the software developed by these kids would do any better at accomplishing that task.

The least capable Americans are always pushed into Government work and the Obamacare website will be placed into the history books as the worst "product" liberalism has ever created.
So not surprising intelligent computer kids out did Obama...eventhough he spent 100 millions.

Barry and Michelle more than likely arranged to have millions of dollars funneled back into their own hidden bank accounts using these sham contractors as a perfect way to re-launder all that money in a nice payout program for their friends, and crony helpers in government, because there doesn't exist any real web development companies that are this incompetent.

These idiots were just stool pigeons for the Obama criminal regime.

Xtraeme

Vortiki
I took computer science for a completer years ago in high school.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that no competent student would have graduated their website design class without being able to create such a website.

Web design code (html) is literally the easiest programming language to learn. So easy, in fact, most teenage kids these days know enough html to successfully edit their own facebook, myspace, whatever.

The fact that someone took hundreds of millions of dollars to do what a few teenagers could have done in a couple days with a 24 pack of Mt Dew is nothing short of disgusting. These people should be taken to prison for fraud.

Do you know CSS? XPath, XSLT, JSON and other tricks for Ajax? ASP.Net? C#? Javascript? Jquery? SQL? What RDBMs do you work with (MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL, PostgreSQL)? NoSQL? BizTalk? Servlets? JSP? PHP? Or do you just do work in something like Dreamweaver? How about BASH scripting? Working in a *nix environment? There is a lot more that went into the ACA website than what the three guys did over a weekend codejam. They made a front-end that queries the ACA backend. The complexity of the full site comes in the form of making sure all the systems can talk to each other and track all the state changes.

If you don't know what BizTalk is, you can't even hope to understand the complexity that gets involved with making lots of disparate disconnected systems communicate. This doesn't mean the ACA website couldn't have been better, not by a long-shot (and no I didn't have any involvement with it), but it's a little annoying hearing people talk about things that are of a technical nature when they really don't know what goes into an operation like Amazon, EBay, or even a midlevel website like ATS.

That said it's nice to see the guys simplified the process to query for different plans by zip. That should have been a no-brainer for the launch. Then again stupidly obvious things get missed all the time with any big project. That's why it's always iteration, iteration, iteration...

edit on 2013-11-12 by Xtraeme because: (no reason given)

Truth! Truth! Truth! Huge projects equal huge complexity. Thank you, Xtraeme, for providing a small taste of the various programming languages and tools that interactive web developers need to master and apply, in order to make any website with more complexity than an html interface with an embedded PayPal link work.

People who aren't in the industry... and to a lesser extent, people who aren't on a given project... with any of the huge players named (currently Oracle, Google, and Red Hat, last I heard) will probably not understand.

Remember what you heard in college, and let this be our standard... Loose coupling over tight coupling is always more flexible. The current model of software companies of purchasing each other and tightly coupling and bundling/creating dependencies on every bundled product, then forcing the product bundles to be sold together is the model for the end of this design phase. It is unsustainable as companies will not continue to pay for the vendors to come in and charge millions to implement their products to "meet the business needs" while they actually learn from the companies who are now "de-facto" beta testing their products. At least, I fervently hope not.

My imagined version of how the multiple "big players" are jockeying to try to rescue the Healthcare.com account and come out with a win to report to their shareholders is both sad and comical, and probably more than a little of how the reality is playing out.

reply to post by gwynnhwyfar


You present a hopeful possibility. Though locking people into a technology is how the game has always been played. Microsoft did it with ActiveX and Internet Explorer's host of oddities. Amazon made their own ebook DRM format that only works with their Kindle readers. You know the drill. Perhaps one day we'll realize how much of a detriment it is to lock people in by making it impossible for outside software and hardware to communicate.

gwynnhwyfar
My imagined version of how the multiple "big players" are jockeying to try to rescue the Healthcare.com account and come out with a win to report to their shareholders is both sad and comical, and probably more than a little of how the reality is playing out.

The big players just have cleanup work, but it'll be marketed to the public as though it's being completely rebuilt by the opposition. People in office don't understand what's going on under the hood and, frankly, don't care to. They just feel the pressure from constituents to make the website as simple as possible. So if Democrats who supported the bill can get a huge player like Google to help them. Even though it's probably not necessary. It'll be a good marketing campaign. Unfortunately that means we'll end up spending ungodly amounts of money to fix a bunch of low priority non-issues because opponents will use every opportunity to point out every small superficial quirk. A huge waste? Yep. But that's what happens when people just want to look competent and win rather than get things done and actually solve a real problem.

I think the government made a mistake hiring that firm. They could have hired a few of their own people to build and maintain that internet site and a ninety percent savings. Maybe it wasn't a mistake, maybe it was a way of someone putting money aside for their future.

catt3
reply to post by seeker1963

 

I think everyone knows that this debacle has to be on purpose. No one is this incompetent.

of course. The money used to build the Obamafraud websites....whose pockets did you think that it went into?

Cronyism and corruption at its finest

but make sure to vote in 3 years.

Couldn't something like 0.1% of the NSA server space and bandwidth easily handle a hundred million or so people logging onto healthcare.gov at once??

Not that I will ever sign up for Obamacare in my life anyway....

8675309jenny
Couldn't something like 0.1% of the NSA server space and bandwidth easily handle a hundred million or so people logging onto healthcare.gov at once??

Not that I will ever sign up for Obamacare in my life anyway....

Nope. The software running the ACA website is talking to outside companies and their databases. That's why the launch was so complex and wrought with errors. Unless all the insurance companies are willing to hand over their hardware and records to big brother. Ain't happening.

There is a reason the Government hired that Firm. I guess Michelle has a Friend on the Board.

Besides that, $650 million for one Web Site that has to handle maybe 30 million users?? That is like a Steak House charging $200 for some Kobe Beef. But atleast you get to taste the Beef and not get kicked out of the Restaurant.

This should have a Congressional Hearing as well as a Senate Hearing to ask some questions. I am sure the Congress will be all for it but the Senate?? Probably not.

Either way, did any of you really think Obama was going to change anything?? LOL!!!

Just wait until Hillary is elected. Your dreams will become a reality.

reply to post by Xtraeme
Those Companys "databases" are already online for access. They didn't need to do anything. You can search Google for any Insurance "free quote" you would like. You can also talk to a Human being (not easy) to verify.

Either way, making this soooo complex to make it worth the Money to create means you really dont understand Computers.

reply to post by hoochymama23

Either way, making this soooo complex to make it worth the Money to create means you really dont understand Computers.

I am in a generous mood this evening. Do you know what an API is? Here is an example. Do you realize that to implement something like the ACA as a software system requires sending data to each healthcare provider in a way that is programmatic -- not just through a web browser.

This requires the vendors to implement a software web service that not only knows *how* to receive data, but to send it back in a way that the ACA website can interpret.

This agreement between the two entities is called a protocol. This can't be made in advance (e.g. "their databases already being online for access") without both parties first coming to an agreement.

Here is an example of a problem that comes up with this:

CREATE TABLE Persons
(
PersonID int,
LastName varchar(255),
FirstName varchar(255),
Address varchar(255),
City varchar(255)
);

Lets pretend this is what is stored at insurance company XYZ to describe a client. The trick though is the ACA website requires other information like the social security number, age, and other details say to factor into a government enforced pricing model.

Company XYZ doesn't have this information. That means that they have to add this information or come up with a workaround to their system to factor this into their new pricing.

Now do you see how it's not just the ACA website that's at fault? The software permeates beyond the ACA website into the healthcare network. If the provider sends back garbage, or if their system doesn't properly handle every case, the ACA team can't do anything.

And this is just one small issue amongst a host of problems. The web interface isn't as good as it should have been and that's all on the ACA team. The communication between the providers has glitches. That's not entirely their fault. All of these problems have to be worked out. However this is really no different than what you see with Massively Multiplayer Online games on launch day. Nothing launches flawlessly. I should know. I worked as a network software engineer.

This would have played out the same way with any company at the helm.

Zarniwoop
reply to post by seeker1963

 

Could the purpose of freely giving the government all of this information have a more nefarious reason other than getting health insurance?

I doubt it, but it's yet another place for your personal information to be compromised.

It makes more sense to get the quote, THEN give the personal information to the actual Health Insurance Company that you choose to do business with right?

Absolutely. And it requires a much smaller amount of computing resources to simply display rates. I think these kids did a bang-up job.

Part of my job is to help people sign up for "ObamaCare". The healthcare.gov site (among other things) pulls info on you from deep inside government and private archives. Much of this info is completely in accurate. This past weekend it asked this lady if her 13 year old son was delinquent on his alimony payments. After a chuckle in dis-belief, we answered "No". Healthcare.gov then went into "thinking mode" for 5 minutes and finally displayed a screen telling us to stop the session and try again another time.

My preferred website for quick, accurate quotes and subsidy $$$ amount information is www.ValuePenguin.com. It was also started by 3 young entrepreneurs, but way back in August. Didn't get much play in the media because healthcare.gov wasn't "live" at the time, but it's a nice tool for quick quotes without having to enter any personally identifying information.
-cwm

reply to post by Xtraeme
Was that worth $650 million?? I am sure with your explanation you would of gladly done that for that amount of money.

Or did you think your explanation was not worth that much??

reply to post by carewemust
Part of your job was to set this up and you answer "we answered no". So are you saying there are Humans that also make decisions?? Or was that a mistaken gesture of Computer speak.

Facebook has over a billion users, and uh, it was built by university students...

How can anyone believe that it costs 700 million dollars to build a website? Are people really that thick? Give me a break. Open your eyes. A site that costs a million dollars to build and operate is a ridiculous amount of money. Infact, 50 grand sounds like a lot.

700 million? And people still support this government and system? I guess when you can write yourself 328 billion dollar checks, you can spend millions on a can of coke and some skittles. But please, when they talk about being in debt, and that they have to use austerity measures on your rights and freedoms to cut back spending...Don't fall for it. It's all a game people. It's all a joke, and you're the one that's been had. The debt is a lie, interest doesn't exist, and money is worth the paper its written on. Period. Why we sacrifice our lives to work jobs we don't like for paper that's worth nothing to pay bills that we believe are a problem because we believe money is worth something, is beyond me. This is system is so broken, so useless, so limiting, that for us not to see it for what it is, makes me seriously believe that humanity is insane. We're delusional. We're in denial. And because we refuse to wake up, we will face the extinction of our species very soon. We're in the end times now, humanity is in its last gasp, and we're too stupid to realize that.

A lot of you should stop pretending you even understand the complexity that had to go into creating the "site"... I use that term loosely because this is on a WHOLE other level completely.

First let me say that I still think the cost is outrageous... and I would have rather seen my tax dollars go to something akin to a basic-coverage universal system...

But please stop comparing it to WOW or FB or any other website or game you have ever used/played because its just not the same... period.

This thing has to make so many different entities speak and share info that its crazy. For anyone who has worked in web development (as I do for a living) you know how difficult it can be to get two businesses/systems/departments to communicate or share data in a similar fashion/language.

I can only imagine all the bureaucratic crap the devs had to put up with! Thats not to say these companies didnt pad the invoice A LOT... but can we please stop comparing this thing to WOW or Twitter which doesnt even come close to the same level?!?!?!

reply to post by Xtraeme


Thank you for sharing your insight for those among us who might not have the same level of understanding as you obviously do!