[dangrossman]

The website's easily among the best this government, or any government, has ever created. It hasn't had a single minute of downtime (the Healthcare.gov servers have handled the load without a hiccup), it looks great, it's easy to use, it's mostly open source (on GitHub no less), and during off-peak hours I had no problem making an account. All that in a few months with a small team and no headline-making budget over-run. The only "non-functioning" aspect is likely that the legacy systems it talks to can't handle that many millions of people a day. Even in the face of those failures, the site doesn't crash or unhelpfully throw you some cryptic error code, it puts you in a queue and eventually tells you it's too busy and asks you to use the call center in the meantime.

http://i.imgur.com/xAikKoM.png

Sure, it's not accomplishing its goal for everyone yet (over 2.4 million have been able to sign up for new plans, or so I heard on NPR today). But, from the perspective of "I could've built a better website alone in my bedroom", no he couldn't, as what this team built is working great despite doing a lot more behind-the-scenes than one might expect.

[roboneal]

You've made a bunch of hyperbolic (reads more like B35T W3BS1TE EVAR!) and unsupported statements in that reply.

There has been no official release of how many people have signed up for actual plans -- Jay Carney said as much at his daily press briefing today.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/04/1244260/-Briefing-b...

Considering the "patient zero" cause celeb from yesterday who supposedly signed up for a plan without a hitch was essentially caught in a lie:

http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/political-insider/2013/oct/03/one...

Forgive me for being a bit skeptical that actual plan signups are a small fraction of your claimed 2.4 million.

[roboneal]

I hate to pile on, but this just came across my Twitter feed.

"The federal government will take down a critical part of HealthCare.gov, the Obamacare web portal, for a portion of the coming weekend as programmers feverishly work to fix major glitches that are impeding enrollment and marring the debut of the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's health care reform law."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/04/obamacare-website_n...

[dangrossman]

We've all acknowledged that the site isn't working right now. That's not evidence that you could've built a better one, or that it's simple as "querying a database". I think you've lost track of the conversation, and this entire story's been flagged off the front page, so let's leave it at that.

[roboneal]

Let's leave it at this "It hasn't had a single minute of downtime". So with the shutdown does your Organizing For America paycheck still clear?