wslack

healthcare.gov's problem led to a rescue team, whose members helped to start USDS, whose members helped to start DDS!

To your first point, it'd be more accurate to say that many government offices often don't hire any programmers, which can (among other issues) make it challenging for those offices to select strong contractors.

The office has a deliberately different type of culture.

Edit: more info at https://www.dds.mil/about

Well done!

Not if the evidence for such things isn't admissible. (like certain types of recordings)

I think the intent is usually found in statements made by drafters of the legislative language. Intent is not packaged in the raw text of statute.

Which, I would argue, is out of step with how that language was understood at the time the legislation was drafted.

Yep. It's a pity there isn't more attention for churches that answer questions clearly and dig into nuance - but complexity doesn't get attention.

I moved to newsblur, but Reader was a product near and dear to me.

I don't think we have laws against the kinds of things that make these apps challenging. If you publish someone's personal information on an app, is it the app's fault? Is the app subject to legal sanction for being an engine of harassment?

Apps with good moderation and communities can do things that other apps cannot. How do you tell the difference, legally, without punishing apps that are trying but have a bad incident?

This is about patterns more than specific moments. The law is about moments. So its hard.

Nadia Eghbal's work and writing about this subject was eye opening for me.

Buffett won and it wasn't close: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...

It's also much bigger than most other airports, double the number of gates as SFO.

We're trying. There's still a lot of bureaucracy around USDS (which we work with to make things happen), but the org itself aims to be an excellent working environment. Happy to answer questions.

Seems like a good situation for an Oversight Board appeal.

It's already in the trap. Very hard to justify the $$$$ to be platform neutral when sales reps are so good at pushing the savings of jumping in fully with one SaaS.

If that was the case, why do the people invading the capitol feel "betrayed" by his video condemning them?

No, it wasn't legally incitement. It was absolutely stoked by him.

Twitter should let everyone talk freely, but that isn't worth being a party to an attempted insurrection.

Being an absolutist about this means being okay with violence based on those lies, just as we saw in Myanmar.

<3

I've also heard of contractors selling nearly identical software to multiple agencies and charging each the full price of development (one reason open source has faced opposition), and sometimes decent excel macros can solve the actual problem.

You're totally right that if the incentives don't change, the choices made by execs won't change either. For example, a contracting officer I've met saved their agency a billion dollars by not continuing a failing contract, and was punished (to the point of leaving that agency) because that wasn't what the incentives supported.

How can USDS/18F be helpful to you and others in your position? The messages you list at the end are all true.

> The IT folks say that passwords have to change every 90 days

This is explicitly not the NIST recommendation (the group in gov that sets some security standards), but the word is not getting out quickly.

Part of a solution for that are term-limited civil service jobs - that keeps a rotation of talent and low performers can't stay forever.

That said, you raise an important problem - how do you manage poor performers without allowing a bad-faith political official to fire people unfairly?

This is hard for practical reasons. The civil service needs to be a place where everyone can get a job without knowing someone inside, so a lot of best practices in the private sector (referral-based hiring) don't easily translate.

It's akin to the Postal Service visiting everyone's mailbox each day - not efficient, but important.

THAT SAID, there are massive improvements that can happen in hiring - if agencies have incentives to pursue them!

There are digital groups of various sorts already operating at NIH. If the folks working on it are federal employees, there are groups that can help - but there has to be buy-in from decision makers.

Bureaucracies have infinite ways to stop something if you don't get cover from certain people.

True, and not something that can be changed through technology, but there are good digital services operating in quite a few states!

FWIW, I don't know if there's a significant difference along a senior vs junior axis. I think the set of people willing to consider gov employment at USDS certainly (and reasonably) changed in after the 2016 election, so USDS lost access to some talent, but there is good work happening now.

Most importantly, USDS is seen as non-partisan, and so has been able to have good impact in both administrations.

Because the goal of news should be to inform, especially when talking about court filings, and we as viewers should not give traffic to sites that don't do basic linking work.

Expressing thanks when things are good is all too rare.

What punishment do you want? How would you calculate damages?

US gov guidance from NIST no longer suggests regular password resets, but that guidance hasn't gotten out yet.

> Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

Source: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

I removed the word "important" from the title to fit under the character limit.