wslack

This is the talk I want to hear sometime.

> this comment is overemphasizing the impact a lone engineer working on a government project will have, which will just disillusion and frustrate applicants once they start the job.

Very reasonable assumption! However, that's not the USDS model. The work can certainly be frustrating but people aren't dropped in alone. We maximize the impact of our work.

They aren't. Prices are based on the HCPCS codes (CPT for clinical charges). For example, a 99213 is a return office visit.

I don't think delusion is a fair take:

FiveThirtyEight Prediction: 48.5% to 44.9% Real outcome: 48.2% to 46.1%

I agree that the horserace coverage is silly (especially given how polling operations use sampling and such), but its better to look at aggregate trends in polling than to ridiculously overcover outlier polls.

I also certainly don't think its fair to say "28.6% chance he wins" is a "massive win" prediction. Silver's take was regarded as indefensibly right-leaning and attacked.

Local and state governments in the US build most roads and are responsible for them. When the roads are built in a way that causes lots of accidents at a particular intersection (even though the people "at fault" in these accidents are the drivers themselves) people expect the government to improve the roads and reduce the harm.

So likewise, Facebook's choices in how it presented content (giving equal weight to the NYTimes and fake news generated for profit in North Macedonia) and mechanisms for maximizing likes, views, and engagement, allowed lies and nonsense to blossom on its platforms.

This isn't an issue that's restricted to any individual political party or cause, though the people in North Macedonia have been clear that "right" fake news sold much better than "left" fake news in 2016.

Facebook build the roads here and made decisions about the tools to navigate those. Users are using those tools as designed to get maximum engagement and profit, causing the propagation of memes, trolling, and lies over quality content that doesn't generate the same metrics but costs much more to produce and fact-check. That people lie isn't Facebook's fault, but like any local government, now that they know their design is contributing to problems, some expect them to address that. Same would go for the owner of an event venue that's being used weekly to promote a violent cause, even though that owner isn't responsible for the tenants, they do choose to give them space to organize.

I'm not taking a position on what exactly they should do, but I want to be clear: regardless of if there is a scapegoat effect or not, claims of Facebook's degree of measured responsibility have clear precedent.

Showing up and casting a blank ballot is legitimate. Abstaining is surrender.

The most annoying part of this document is the watermark. It seems like a cogent summary of different ideas in the space - and doesn't advocate for "good censorship" (I think the title of the deck is provocative and unhelpful).

I find it strange that being this profitable is labeled a "lifestyle business." The hypergrowth/unicorn exit isn't a healthy outcome for many businesses.

Being encouraged to be "tough" and creating rituals of humiliation are different IMO.

Cash is also harder to collect and manage. It has a scaling problem that cryptocurrencies do not.

It's really not. The US gov't can't require censorship like that.

I saw Cindy just a few weeks ago. She was wonderful and kind as usual, and she was a positive presence, the kind of which we can never have enough of. This is heartbreaking.

The reactions that were most amplified likely included some namecalling, but I saw a lot of well-reasoned and detailed takedowns of the pseudoscience in the memo.

My guess is that both sides look at the worst of the other to justify themselves.

That only works when you have a way to ensure that people who invent things have a way to make a living. Most people working on open source do it as volunteers; only a few have it as part of their job, and the ecosystem suffers.

Deep research requires investment or public funding. If you can get congress to fund it, then more power to you - but until then, people have to make a living from invention.

Old reputations are hard to shake. This speech[1], by the first administrator of USDS, is my favorite to quote on the topic:

> Some of you, not all of you, are working right now on another app for people to share pictures of food or a social network for dogs. I am here to tell you that your country has a better use for your talents. [...]

> The Social Security Administration mails checks from a mainframe running COBOL, which might kind of be OK except that more than half of the workforce that maintains it is at or near retirement age. What happens then? The Department of Veterans Affairs has a serious backlog of disability claims. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service processes permanent resident applications and everything else on paper. If you lose your green card, it will take you 6–8 months to get a new one and in the meantime you will not be able to prove you have the right to be in the country or get a job.

> All of these are design and information processing problems and all of these are matters of life or death to millions of citizens and all of them are things you can fix if you choose to.

Think about the response to the hurricane this weekend - that's a government function, and we need talented people serving to make sure that people who lose their homes retain access to shelter.

[1]: https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/mikey-dickerson-t...

Income security includes VA costs, I think, so its not all direct support of individuals.

This is a really interesting question, given the very long tail of old browsers out there. There's downloadable data about the browsers visiting gov't websites (all anonymized by Google Analytics)[1], but that doesn't solve the "when do you stop supporting" question, particularly for old versions of IE.

[1]: https://analytics.usa.gov/

Issues/PRs welcome! https://github.com/18F/frontend

That's being fixed: https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/issues/1738

You can look up the people involved using GitHub. A desire for positive publicity doesn't invalidate anything good an org does.

Check this part of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13433319

Neither 18F or USDS existed when healthcare.gov launched.

The TL;DR answer is that compliance in the government is expensive (for example, the gov't can require companies to maintain amended terms of service[1]). There are many vendors who choose not to work with government for that reason and its one reason the government ends up paying more for services.

Edit to add this link to a place in a video explaining more about compliance.[2]

[1]: https://www.digitalgov.gov/resources/negotiated-terms-of-ser...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwOG3BrdODo&t=1m30s

* I work at 18F

I think the press articles that sometimes lump it all together can be frustrating at times and I like Matt's descriptions above. Another important difference: when USDS attends a meeting it's the "White House" in the room, whereas 18F sitting in GSA (which does other things like support government real estate) gives us a different context.

We both, though, benefit immensely from strong civil servants that partner with us. There's a narrative out there that "silicon valley" people have come to DC to "rescue" all of the government, when many people in both orgs have government experience (or come from the non-profit sector). Our work is impossible without partners throughout government who know a policy space and are ready to benefit from different tools and processes, and I wish those folks (or even just the tools and processes such as http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-681) got more attention than the "hero narrative."

I think you might be interested in this news from last year: https://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/119166

<3

"cloud" can be a scary topic, because it implies a loss of control and accountability.

I think government, in general, is built to be slow and deliberate, but as the pace of tech change has accelerated, the responsiveness of government hasn't kept up. Git was invested in 2005, for example.

ref: https://bhc3.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/consumption-spreads...

I think that's the case right now with many jobs in mgmt consulting / investment banking. You can end up with a negative situation where people devote every waking hour then feel all subsequent success is owed to them - not great.

Replicated and logged! https://github.com/18F/cg-landing/issues/67

Yeah, I've certainly seen some of that. Hopefully, though, we can share and spread ideas, if not exact policies.