

Maybe NYC could start with a simple URL - infdaze
http://www.nyc.gov/html/simplicity/html/home/home.shtml

======
davidhollander
Second news highlight on linked page:

> _New York City and Microsoft Partner to Modernize City's IT Infrastructure -
> Mayor Bloomberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announce first of its kind
> partnership to keep New York City at the cutting edge of technological
> innovation while saving taxpayer dollars._

Long term licensing of proprietary software somehow does not seem like the
best way to save tax payer dollars. I wonder how many thousands of IT
departments and millions of computers exist across federal, state, and local
levels? It seems likely that either the Department of Energy, NSA, or DoD
already maintains their own Linux or BSD distribution that could be used to
run open office on every government computer in the country for free. Even if
you are a Windows fan, it seems hard to justify spending tax dollars on that
many licenses for government use.

------
wallflower
To be fair to NYC, they were enlightened enough to let developers compete to
build apps on city databases.

<http://www.nycbigapps.com/>

~~~
cloudwalking
That's really cool. Someone should make a game to compete with your neighbors
for lowest power/gas/water usage... Maybe have a Friends Leaderboard on fbook.

~~~
phlux
Why don't we have a game where elected officials actually compete to fulfil
campaign promises, lower spending, increase efficiency, hold people
accountable.

That sounds fun! We can vote for the officials that do best!

------
Todd
.../html/home/home.shtml ...there's a certain symmetry, don't you think?

~~~
taylorbuley
Agreed. To simplify even further:
[http://www.nyc.gov/shtml/home/home/html/simplicity/html/home...](http://www.nyc.gov/shtml/home/home/html/simplicity/html/home/home.shtml)

~~~
ams6110
In fairness, <http://www.nyc.gov/nycsimplicity> works too, and www.nyc.gov is
pretty damn simple itself.

~~~
nborgo
Until it redirects you to:

<http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/?front_door=true>

~~~
ams6110
yeah but once they've gotten in, users generally don't care about URLs within
the site.

------
JBiserkov
Try <http://nyc.gov/residents>

Then click the top left logo.

That's 174 characters long

------
misterbee
Something like <http://www.nyc.gov/simplicity>, maybe?

Oh, that works.

Let's try to be constructive here.

------
hansef
This is what you get when you spend millions of dollars on an enterprise CMS +
integration once every 8 years or so.

~~~
GBond
Yes. Many of the NYC.gov websites are run on a "enterprise CMS" that imposes
long URLs (name of the CMS starts with an "I"... ends with a "woven").

I understand that the purpose of this submission was to poke fun at NYC gov't
and their seemingly inability to adapt to current-day tech standards. In a lot
of cases this is valid criticism. However, for the past few year, nyc has made
some pretty cool initiatives to make data and services it support more open
and available. Someone else mentioned the nyc data feeds which is a good
example. There are a bunch of twitter accounts (like @311nyc) that are
actually useful. Another cool use of data is:
<http://gis.nyc.gov/doitt/nycitymap/> (geo map search, great for looking up
official city building info).

Even with some flaws (and many inefficiencies), we should commend NYC for not
treating tech only as "necessary overhead" as most other cities do. IMO, NYC
is second only to SanFran when it comes to being progressive on tech (SanFran
has a policy to look OOS first for any new project which is great).

BTW, I do not work for the city but I interact with many agency IT groups via
work.

------
tehmasp
<http://www.nyc.gov/simplicity> works! Are we trying to make HN like digg or
something? maybe a little restraint could help.

"Look! That Hacker picked his nose!"

------
yoshiks
Redundancy is important in simplicity discussion, they want to say.

------
CoachRufus87
Can someone explain why this is? You would think that the developers building
it would say, "hey, let's make these urls a bit more friendly..."

~~~
notJim
I used to work for a company that made custom web applications, occasionally
for the government (though more often, not.) This problem is actually a pretty
tough one.

The way it usually works is the government agency drafts a request for
proposal which has a list of features and other miscellaneous, sometimes
random requirements. The thing is, who at the government would think to
request friendly or short URLs? They are not web developers. They are probably
older than 40, and not really up on all this social media stuff.

Now, some firms that submit proposals are of a high-enough quality that they
would know that friendly and/or short urls are a part of modern web best
practices. But again, how does the government agency know that seeing that is
a good sign?

So sometimes, the agency realizes it doesn't know anything about technology
and hires a company who does to develop the RFP. Except, then you're back at
the same problem: how does the government agency know how to choose a company
that will write a good spec?

~~~
iuygthn
>They are probably older than 40

Yep it's tough being over 40 - we don't really understand this web stuff. I
mean we invented it all 20years ago, we wrote the first browsers and the first
servers, we wrote the first pages - but since we don't spend all our time
following #britney or end every sentence with LOL we obviously can't
understand it.

Now you kids get off my (virtual) lawn

~~~
notJim
You're right, that was an ageist thing to say, and I'm sorry I said it. My
point is just as valid without it.

~~~
iuygthn
You're exactly right though ;-)

As a 40+ engineer I would have considered REST urls but facebook would never
have occurred to me.

~~~
ams6110
I'm over 40, and admit that I don't "get" facebook. I use email, IM, SMS with
my friends but I don't even have a facebook account

~~~
trafficlight
Don't worry, you aren't missing anything of value. Maybe some inane babble,
but you can just turn on CNN or Fox News if you're need a quick fix.

------
Ben_Dean
haha. double home is funny.

