Slashdot Mirror
No, HealthCare.gov Doesn't Require 500 Million Lines of Code
itwbennett writes: "Half a billion lines of code for a transactional website — more than five times as much code as that behind OS X — just didn't pass the sniff test. But just how many lines of code does it take to generate HealthCare.gov? This question came up on Reddit again last week and it appears that we may now have an answer. One commenter who claimed to have worked on HealthCare.gov as part of the post launch clean-up crew at the end of 2013, provided counts of the lines of code behind HealthCare.gov, broken down by programming/markup language."
That much Perl?
That's probably the whole app there, with each line being around 10,000 characters of obfuscated self-referencing goodness.
The rest is just quotes from Tolkien.
Has this been verified? Is this poster even supposed to be posting data like this? Main news channels now repeat blogs true or not as facts, et tu Slashdot
Not implying anything.
You also post without the intent of communicating? Me too. Let's be friends.
*I'm not actually implying we should be friends.
Hmm.
Could we, perhaps, use some of the techniques that people have speculated about for deflecting space rocks and, instead, guide one into Earth deliberately?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Not only that, but you need to go to the link to get the number. They could have just posted that in the summary. Typical click bait. Fuck 'em
Posting AC due to recent politically motivated mod bomb attempts on my account. Fuck the moderators also
-F
You could have posted it in your comment too....
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Forget about the number of lines of code. I work for a U.S. company that builds healthcare.gov type web sites and the reporting back end for large companies. The estimated price tag of the front end ($150 million or so) is about 20 times what the tax payers should have paid. Add in the back end reporting to the insurance companies and billing, throw a call center in at least two different time zones, main and backup datacenters and instead of the full price tag ($600 mil?), let's say at the high end $20 million for the whole thing. Ongoing administration costs maybe in the 7 digits per year. The whole thing was a sham to get votes and fill the coffers of some cronies.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Me and my 120 developer colleagues are able to make software for 40 hospitals, covering about every bit of information you can imagine, in less than 10 MLocs (I counted 4.7 real code MLocs four years ago, might be 10+ now because of migration to other language/environment and new features). 500M for a website isn't possible. Period.
Language files blank comment code
Java 13481 419643 847982 2399683
HTML 1635 50124 16845 515494
Javascript 1631 56298 102140 322192
XSD 5227 1238 20945 156696
XML 659 6436 13073 136827
CSS 205 14000 9420 109815
Maven 275 737 1421 47449
XSLT 383 2357 1476 21624
Bourne Shell 248 2305 1446 8830
SQL 28 860 139 8487
JavaServer Faces 35 766 0 3770
DOS Batch 48 235 118 849
Ant 8 77 45 810
Perl 18 161 45 646
Visualforce Component 39 0 0 626
Groovy 4 68 15 361
Python 5 55 90 263
Visual Basic 1 3 0 25
DTD 1 8 0 17
JSP 3 0 0 13
ASP.Net 1 0 0 11
SUM 23935 555371 1015200 3734488
Holy Christopher Columbus! Was it bring your favourite programming language to work month?
Seriously. This account was created just to post some numbers and we are suppose to take them as fact? Hell, I could create an account on Reddit and come up with a totally different set of numbers and you can take my comment as fact too.
Where do you get $1.2 Billion?
As of December it was $319 million or so. And that includes a lot of non-technical stuff.
Goddamn I thought I typed that link right. But this is the source for $319 million:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I thought the whole point of the ACA was that everyone got the same basic benefits?
And while it's true that calculating the subsidy is part of the job, that's not all that big a deal, really. Family size & family income are pretty much the only variables. Given those inputs, you should be able to make the calculation in a hundred lines of code, tops.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I don't see how they could have reported 500 million lines of code in the first place. The Congressional authorization to spend $30 million to study the best way to count lines isn't even out of the House committee yet.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
yeah, where everyone is in a few insurance groups and gets the same basic benefits
obamacare has variable pricing based on history, finances, where you live, etc. lots of business rules to properly price the policy
Actually, no. We can program a high amount of variability in pricing and eligibility based on whatever data is required. And we own a private exchange, so we do that, too. Also, we can implement such a project in 6 months, sometimes less, including the entire reporting requirement.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
To be fair, most of that is probably getters and setters.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
No, that's not the point at all.
The point was to make useful insurance policies more readily availible to more amercians. Its so frustrating to hear people on the news talk about how a doctor wouldn't treat them because he didn't take "obamacare". There is no single policy that can be catagorised as "obamacare". If someone actually said that without actually looking at his policy, then that's just crazy wrong. As far as I know, providers can't really tell if a specific policy was purchased on an exchange or not.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The user who posted the numbers rounds out by saying 5 - 15 million lines of code. (It is a guess as his numbers only included part of the project.)
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
First, the cost of both wars was less than $2 trillion, making the 's' on the word "Trillion" misleading and dishonest.
Next, we have a government run, single payer, health care system now. It's called VA. How's that working out?
You forgot to include lifetime costs for VA health care for surviving vets, who tend to have fairly difficult to treat injuries that would have killed people in prior wars.
This is why there's such a backlog in the VA.
The costs are as I state, not the low ball "cost" you've been told.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Finance guys are so cute.
I was an IT guy so....
For example a retail bank needs two tables in it's accounts database. One for the account, a second to record the transactions.
The DB needs a customer table (name, address, phone, address, ect), transaction table, account type table, account table, interest rate table, payee table, payroll tables (complete with more account data from other banks, employee names, etc) etc. There's a LOT of data involved, and this still doesn't include the cutesie stuff banks throw in like customer preferences.
The database may be queried by other databases (ie: the guy approving loans), but it is not actually a part of those databases.
Actually, different systems maintain different databases. For example the Internet Banking side will maintain it's own database. the ATM side will have it's own side. Then there's the credit card system, ACH systems, wire systems, the core system itself and others. All of these systems must interact with eachother. For example, the a customer may log into the Internet banking side, which will have to hit the core to get the current balance, EOD balance from yesterday, unprocessed transactions, processed transactions, interest rates, any messages from the bank, and so on. It also has to be able to inject transactions such as payroll into the core system, wires into the wire system and so on.
Of course, all of these systems are different. The ACH system uses a flat text file. The core is usually an UNIX based system with a terminal interface. The Internet Banking is probably an Apache Tomcat connecting to a MSSQL system. Then, there is the bank end that is comprised of DB front-ends, screen scrapers, batch files, transaction injectors and so on.
You could probably convince a bunch of PHB-English Majors your database is more complicated because you have six different, totally unrelated databases in the same file, but don't try that shit in front of engineers.
Not just different DB's but completely different architectures. And, of course, different states have different laws. For example, all states that take income taxes have a different method to pay them. Then their are business taxes, both federal and for all 50 states, loan laws, interest rate laws etc.
And there is much much more, but this is getting out of hand. Suffice to say that you have no friggin' clue as to what you are talking about when it comes to everything a bank does, much less when it comes to tying all those systems together.
Compare that to the ACA system which involves user data, finance data, what companies are available per state, what plans available per company, and an interface system to communicate between the handful of ACA authorized insurance companies per state and the back-office system. Many states run their own system. The government has claimed that their system doesn't even keep the data!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
>. Its so frustrating to hear people on the news talk about how a doctor wouldn't treat them because he didn't take "obamacare". There is no single policy that can be catagorised as "obamacare"
You're probably misunderstanding what is said, or the reporters are saying it wrong. The ACA cut $200B from Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, and some doctors stopped accepting such patients when they did the math and found it would cause them to take a loss, or not be worth their time.
At a minimum, you would need to compare HealthCare.gov to another web site that had similar requirements. It would have to be nationwide and be HIPPA compliant. For example, AMAZON or EBAY would not count, because they don't have any of the legal requirements that a heath provider has.
It is obvious that this bogus number is just another politically motivated smear against the ACA (Obamacare). Everyone here is quibbling about LOC, while the real issue is that people are engaged in propaganda and wild lies because they oppose a government program.
Something must be wrong with me. I keep making the mistake that those who post on Slashdot are somehow more intelligent then the average population. When you fixate on minute technical details rather then the larger issues you are not smart, you are dumb.
Why is Snark Required?