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Are you also the type of person who thinks the government should be run like a business?

No. Stop putting words in my mouth.

No one put words in your mouth, they asked you a question. You are the one who made the initial comparison to B2C apps, so it seems like a fair question to me. Your comment implies that its standard and the app isn't doing anything out of the ordinary when I think most people would except an official government app to be held to a higher standard than the average B2C app.

>You are the one who made the initial comparison to B2C apps, so it seems like a fair question to me.

The relevant part of B2C is the 2C part, not the B. Mass market apps are generally ridden with telemetry and SDKs. Moreover I'm not sure how you think it's a "fair question" to go from a remark about how other apps are equally bad, to thinking I want the US government to operate as a business. It's like doing:

A: "I called the IRS and was put on hold for 2 hours, can you believe that?"

B: "To be fair that's the experience calling into most businesses, like banks or the cable company"

A: "Wow so you think we should be running the IRS like a bank?"

>I think most people would except an official government app to be held to a higher standard than the average B2C app.

Is this a "yes, in an ideal world that's how things should be" type of statement, or are you claiming "yes, government agencies have a track record of delivering technical excellence on software projects, and this particular project was especially bad"? The former is basically a meaningless platitude, and I don't think anyone seriously thinks the latter is true.


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>Ok, so then it just sounds like whataboutism.

The flip side of "whataboutism" is "isolated demands for rigor"[1]. Going back to the IRS example, is it a fair retort to point out that IRS's hotline only sucks as much as any other large organization's hotline, or is it "whataboutism"?

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...


It's the government, the US government. By far the largest employer and spender in the world. So yes, they are held to a higher standard. Businesses intentionally throttle customer service lines for profit reasons. The government should not. How is this difficult to understand?

>So yes, they are held to a higher standard.

See my earlier comment about how this is a meaningless platitude.

>Businesses intentionally throttle customer service lines for profit reasons. The government should not.

None of this was presupposed in the original comment, only that wait times are long.


what the hell do you mean meaningless platitude? Do you understand the difference between civic duty and corporate duty?

If a company proactively evades taxes for profit, do you give the government the same pass? Companies skate and fight all this through litigation and interpretation. The government's duty is to the people and to uphold the law, not fight it. They are held to a higher standard of law, accountability and practice in all undertakings. What exactly are you refuting here?


It's a classic deflection tactic - when they can't refute you by merit, they answer something with a question that is completely different about what was said - BOOM, the discussion is now about something else, completely different from the original issue. I honestly can't tell if it's bots or humans these days doing this a lot, but they're getting pretty good at it.

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> If so, why do you think lobbying exists?

Specifically because it's not a natural market. There are people who secure a 2-year, consequence-free term to impact U.S. law, at the behest of people with money.

Lobbying is special interests dictating decisions that often are not financially, morally, or otherwise ideal/beneficial to the other party (the United States and its people). This wouldn't fly at any corporation or business because there would be direct impacts on the bottom line or reputation of the company.


> If so, why do you think lobbying exists?

Would you like to be able to ask your representative to focus on a particular issue?


The government should outsource way more of their traffic to third parties than a business should, since the government is inefficient, right?

Poe's Law strikes again. I legitimately can't tell if this is sarcasm.

It is sarcasm. I always get screwed by Poe's law, since dry sarcastic parodies of extremist views is one of my favorite methodologies for producing humor.

You could just have two bus stops. People who live and work at both ends will be very happy. But everyone else gets thrown under the bus.


Why stop there. Build enough buses for everybody so they can choose where those two stops are.


Great idea! And then what if we went even further and made enough busses so we could all have one waiting at our houses at all times?


You might need to make the buses smaller. Maybe give some options on the number of seats. You could also tailor the bus; different colors and shapes. Heck, you could store and transfer things easier. Personal buses sound like a marketing win.


You'd have to invest so much money into putting roads everywhere, and then the personal busses need to have their own refueling depots everywhere, and getting the oil for those depots in the first place is going to be the cause of needless war and deaths. That's totally never gonna happen!


That sounds like a great idea! But what if you have to catch your bus when it's cold or raining? To solve this problem we can build mini indoor bus terminals and attach them to each house.


You couldn't afford the bus drivers. The convenience of the bus is that someone else drives for you. If you have to drive, it's not a bus. Maybe a wealthy tech investor could announce self-driving cars...


And then what if you owned the bus so it was super convenient. And maybe made it smaller so it was easier to drive and park.

Just like a little 4 seat bus you could just have all the time. I bet that would be popular!


Depends on what you're targeting

- If it's a rough PR, you're looking for feedback on direction rather than nitpicks.

- If it's in a polished state, it's good to nitpick assuming you have a style guide you're intending to adhere to.

Perhaps this can be provided in the system prompt?


I don't think you can build a unified platform using anecdotes. That's why product research and product market fit is a thing. Not product customer fit. Unless you're willing to understand how to address your market segment's painpoints, you're just going to have a platform like jira that does nothing great but everyone somehow limps along with it.


you assume he cares about falling birthrates.


that's already happening? are you going to be funding your own vaccine research?


None of what you say is inherent in a public service.

The DMV often gets singled out as an inefficient system that is emblematic of the failure of public option, but I assure you as someone who's had to deal with a privatized version, you're not getting better service and in fact the fees are much more expensive without recourse or oversight.

The answer to a bad system is a good system. Adding a middleman who is only interested in extracting as much money as possible is rarely the improvement the consultants would have you believe.


Washington state has privatized much of the DMV, and it's much better then what I've experienced in other states.


I saw someone suggest in another post, if only one crawler was visiting and scraping and everyone else reused from that copy I think most websites would be ok with it. But the problem is every billionaire backed startup draining your resources with something similar to a DOS attack.


use anubis to throw up a POW challenge


Saw an actual PR that says "this was generated with claude, please review carefully". Since when did we stop taking responsibility for what is submitted?


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