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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The Medium article says to visit the site for the standards.[1] That yields:

    MAX.gov Application Unavailable

    If you are seeing this message and it is not Sunday 2AM-8AM ET then
    please contact MAX Support by clicking here.
    If you’re trying to access MAX Community, please use our snapshot 
    site: MAX Snapshot Community Site

"MAX.gov" appears to be some kind of in-house cloud service for the Federal government.

[1] https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/

Update: now it's up.

View on HN

It's not fully in house. The idea is to centralize management of services (both in-house and external) for budgeting reasons, since MAX is part of GSA which is part of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget).

MAX.gov was kind enough to run us a proxy in order to support https, and that proxy had a bad day under load. Described more here https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/issues/733

Btw, GSA and OMB aren't connected the way you describe. They just happen to be the respective parent agencies of 18F and USDS-HQ. Here's a tree.

  POTUS
  ├── GSA
  │   └── 18F
  └── OMB
      ├── USDS-HQ
      └── MAX

GSA, the General Services Administration, is the purchasing, construction, and building operations unit of the US Government. They're a huge operation, with a $20 billion budget and operations all over the US. The Office of Management and Budget is a White House staff unit with about 500 employees, most in an office building next to the White House.

GSA has forklifts. OMB has clout.

Thanks!

And now it's down again.

It came back up, but in case it goes down again here's a link to the GitHub for it: https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards

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