

500m Lines of Code Suggests Healthcare.gov Will Not Be Fixed Anytime Soon - chocolatekale
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/21/healthcare_gov_problems_why_5_million_lines_of_code_is_the_wrong_way_to.html

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adam419
Come on guys. At this point in time, I'm pretty surprised HN isn't completely
outraged by now by this whole ordeal. We all in our right minds know a website
like this shouldn't cost 1/100 of it's $90 million price tag nor be this
bloated...

Even if this information isn't accurate, I'd argue the figures fall somewhere
near what is being said, and still way more than it should for line count and
price! That's simply a colossal, and pathetic failure, no matter which way or
how you look at it. Why is everyone being so lax on all this? I don't want to
say it....but if this was Bush's legislation and administration....yeah well I
said it

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swalkergibson
It would be nice if they named the source. Perhaps it was some non-technical
person who heard one of the junior developers lamenting about what _seemed_
like a project with 500M lines of code? It would be really hard to believe
that a website consisting of a registration form and a few API calls to get
pricing data would ever get to that many lines of code. Also, keep in mind
that the site was reported to have cost $600 million, but actually only ran
$90 million. Given the political climate surround the legislation, it seems we
must take any reporting on it with a whole bag of salt.

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adam419
You still don't think even $90 million for a website that mostly performs CRUD
operations is absurd?

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swalkergibson
I definitely agree that it seems like an awful lot. Any idea what a standard
hourly bill-rate is for DC? In Arizona, the agency I work for bills at
$125/hour.

However, not knowing the exact requirements for the project, we can only
speculate as to what the true complexity is. Perhaps the insurance companies
in each state did not provide well-documented REST APIs and you had hundreds
of custom screen-scrapers pulling the data. Or, perhaps $30 million went to
paying all of those insurance companies to build the required APIs? I cannot
imagine how difficult and frustrating it would be to interface with those
systems. Plus, all of the privacy and data safeguarding practices, and then
arranging hosting, etc, etc, etc. Was there waste? Most likely. Was there
waste to the tune of tens of millions? Couldn't say. However, to dismiss it as
a simple CRUD app might be belying the complexity underneath.

~~~
adam419
I don't know man, while those possible sources of complexity and complications
may be the case, to me they're still inexcusable. Many companies each year
manage to successfully implement and release systems of ungodly complexity
compared to whatever had to be dealt with to make some website like this.

All those sources of inefficiency are, to me, consequential of the fact that
the people doing this work don't have proper incentives. $90M for a failed
website that has to be redone? Well it's just tax dollars, let's suck in some
more.

If any private company were to perform like this, they would be obliterated
and their work would be done by people who are competent.

~~~
swalkergibson
If you will recall, Twitter in its early days was essentially unusable due to
high load. That was a private company that ultimately found its way.

However, that is really here nor there. I am always hesitant to make an
armchair judgement about the execution of a development project without all of
the facts because there are so many places where things can go pear-shaped.
That is basically my point.

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damianknz
I wonder if the reporter has not mixed up lines of code with database records.
Perhaps the database has a record for each and every American and 5 million of
those records have incorrect data and need to be fixed up so that those people
can use the website?

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venomsnake
I don't buy it - I don't know where the 500M lines of code came from but it
seems absurdly high. Those are 33 linux kernels and a change.

I am not sure if so many LoC is even possible to be produced at such short
time.

~~~
johndriscoll
It's complete guess work. The only mention of 500M lines of code is from the
last paragraph of The Times article: "According to one specialist, the Web
site contains about 500 million lines of software code."

This "one specialist" is obviously a fraud.

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kilroy123
Are they rewriting the entire linux kernel from scratch? There's no way that
much code has to be re-written.

Who built this website? What stack is it running on?

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pippy
Healthcare.gov is all opensource:
[https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/](https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/)

Some chunks are made in node.js: [https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace](https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace)

They've taken down the source on github, though it used to be all there. The
server they're running it on is AkamaiGHost, and likely linux (although I've
heard they're running some on it on windows)

It's an odd choice of technologies. For scalability I would have chosen
something that scales across the cloud easy. I'd put my money on the different
calls between organisations being at fault. There seems to be many API calls
going on. It would take only one server to be slow to cause a cascading
affect.

