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A few experts weigh in regarding the amount of code that’s been written for the ACA site:

Over many years of research, programmer productivity in lines of code has been observed to range from 3,200 lines per year for small projects, down to just 1,600 lines per year for very large projects. Using the typical numbers for large projects, 500 million lines of code would require 312,500 man-years of programming effort.  If true, that would involve the participation of just about all programmers in the US for a full year, and at an average $100K in salary and benefits, an investment of an amount approaching the entire defense budget!

Besides – with regard to your notion of “sheer scale” – you should understand the ACA pretty well right now.  What exactly would account for that scale in the exchange website? It should be intuitively clear that Healthcare.gov is far less complex than the entirety of the code and utilities associated with Windows Server, for example, which public sources say involves about 50 million lines of code.

The story is different but in some ways even more embarrassing; the Healthcare.gov web site is a project of moderate scale and complexity. If it really were such a monster, the failure could be excused – but given the modest scale of the actual project, screwing it up so badly is inexcusable!

Another:

Just about every developer who reads you (and I’m guessing it’s a lot) is hitting his head against his keyboard right now. That “500 million” number is pure bullshit from someone who doesn’t understand our craft.

First off, judging any piece of software by lines of code written is scoffed at in our profession for a many reasons, not the least of which being it’s impossible to agree on what really counts as “a line of code”. But let’s play along: The old rule of thumb states that the average programmer really only contributes about 10 lines per day in the long run (as programming is so much more than typing code). But it’s an old rule of thumb, and our tools have gotten much better, so I’d argue many programmers these days can bang out several dozens line of code. I’m willing to be more generous still and allow the Healthcare.gov programmers some 100 lines of code per day per developer.

I have no idea how many programmers were employed at any one time, but I’d eat my hat if even approaches 100 developers simultaneously hammering out code (a few dozen is more likely). Still, let’s be super crazy and say it’s 1000 programmers each writing 100 lines of code each and every day. It would take this impossible egghead army 5,000 days to author one-half-billion lines of code. That’s nearly 14 years, weekends included, of the largest software team this world has ever seen writing code much faster than is generally accepted as possible.

How many lines of code is in Healthcare.gov? Who knows. But to some dipshit who couldn’t write “Hello World” in Java, I suppose 500,000,000 is a big enough number to pull from your ass. That’s the only way that number came about. For my money, the real story here is just how shrill and ridiculous the debate over Obamacare has become.

Another:

I am a software engineer who has worked on both sides of the commercial/government contractor fence.  I’d like to stress that I speak for myself, not for my employer.

Source Lines of Code (SLOCs) is a controversial and convoluted metric for evaluating software complexity.  The Wikipedia entry gives a good overview of the difficulty of getting non-coders on the same page over the size and scope of a project.  Given the stated number is five hundred million lines, I find it unlikely that a qualified engineer did a manual analysis.  The quickest and easiest method, not to mention the one that would produce the most jaw-dropping numbers, is to run all source files through a line-counting program (wc -l).

In addition, government specifications and rules inflate the count artificially and produce hurdles that the other commercial projects Healthcare.gov is being compared to would not need to face.

The rules can place shackles on what third party tools can be used for the purposes of development and efficiency.  Freely available code libraries such as numpy, matplotlib, or jquery can allow those familiar with them to perform complicated tasks and analysis in a handful of lines.  However, unless those tools and libraries have gone through an approval process, the developers working on these projects must re-implement problems that have been solved countless times over, and therefore run into the same pitfalls that existing tools ran into and fixed decades ago.

Also, the strict coding guidelines adopted by some projects make individual files seem longer than they actually are.  This can be caused by variable or function naming conventions (citizen.numChildren() versuscurrent_user.get_number_of_children()) and allowed/forbidden acronym lists (IRS.query() versusInternalRevenueService.query()), paired with outdated rules on number of characters allowed per line (Eighty?  One hundred and sixty?).  Required copyright, code ownership, authorship, clearance notifications, and version change lists prepended to each file can easily add over a hundred lines of non-functional text to files that a software engineer would simply collapse (ignore), but the uninitiated or politically motivated would count towards the total scope of the project.

Developers tend to be split on the necessity of these seemingly superficial limitations.  No one likes having to waste time clearing syntax checker warnings about a line of code being 81 characters long, or needing extra white space between two function parameters.  However, being handed an unreadable mess with variables named as though during a national vowel shortage is devastating to developer morale.  With government projects passing between multiple subcontractors and development groups, code readability is important.

Software engineering has few metrics that would be both meaningful and fit in an easily understood soundbyte.  What is coming out is not helpful.  What would be helpful?  Release the requirements and the source code.  Sanitized of sensitive information and personally identifiable information, an army of interested software engineers from both sides would be able to evaluate the project, provide real analysis, and start working on ways to make sure taxpayer funds are more effectively used.

A reader flags the nauseating report seen above:

You think “grease thieves” are bad in the U.S., you won’t believe what happens in China, where there’s an entire “Gutter Oil Industry”.

Another video from a reader:

As usual, the Simpsons got there years ago:

Andy Greenberg introduces readers to Kuwabatake Sanjuro, a self-described crypto-anachist who presides over “a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations”:

According to Assassination Market’s rules, if someone on its hit list is killed–and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be – any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds. … Like other so-called “dark web” sites, Assassination Market runs on the anonymity network Tor, which is designed to prevent anyone from identifying the site’s users or Sanjuro himself. Sanjuro’s decision to accept only bitcoins is also intended to protect users, Sanjuro, and any potential assassins from being identified through their financial transactions. bitcoins, after all, can be sent and received without necessarily tying them to any real-world identity.

Brian Merchant checks out the site:

In the FAQ section, Sanjuro explains who’s eligible for extermination:

“I’ll allow anything that has a good reason,” he says. “Bad reasons include doctors for performing abortions and Justin Bieber for making annoying music. The person should have wronged someone in some way related to the previous question. Politicians, bureaucrats, regulators and lobbyists are accepted without question.” Currently, there are six people marked for death: Jyrki Tapani Katainen, the prime minister of Finland; François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande, the president of France; “Barack Hussein Obama II”; Ben Shalom Bernanke; the NSA director Keith Brian Alexander; and James Clapper, the head of the National Intelligence Agency.

Pledges have already been made, too. By far the highest bounty is on Bernanke, with 124 bitcoin on his head. With today’s exchange rate, that comes out to a value of $75,000 USD. That is now essentially a price on Bernanke’s head, if any users are convinced enough by Sanjuro’s twisted gambit to pull the trigger. And Sanjuro hopes it’s just the beginning. He’s awaiting a user-generated list of murder subjects – just input your own into the text box like so, and you’ll have done your part to instigate a conspiracy to kill.

P.J. Vogt isn’t sure how seriously to take a site like Assassination Market:

The skeptical part of me is pretty sure these markets are a scam. Assassination isn’t the kind of service that lends itself to public advertisements or to trusting people based on their online reputations. And the fact that the website specifically promises to go after high-profile politicians adds to its unlikeliness. Viewed in that light, Assassination Markets is just another place where a fool and his bitcoin are soon parted.

And yet, these kinds of stories – about an enormous but hypothetical idea that will likely never be realized – can get real very quickly. To take a recent example, the idea of the Silk Road, when it was introduced, seemed completely preposterous to me. Yes, it was technically possible for people to buy and sell drugs online. But who, beyond a tiny fringe, would actually use it? Of course I was wrong – the site ran successfully for two years before being shuttered.

Either the news didn’t get to Bernanke or he didn’t let it get to him; this week he gave a “cautious blessing to bitcoin” in advance of a congressional hearing on virtual currency:

Bernanke mostly distanced himself from virtual currencies, saying the Fed “does not necessarily have authority to directly supervise or regulate these innovations or the entities that provide them to the market.” But he also said that bitcoin and its ilk “may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.”

Michael Joseph Gross has a long, fascinating piece on the Vatican’s gays. It’s a very small barrel with a hell of a lot of fish in it:

At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.

Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life. Occasionally such clerics are unmasked, usually by stories in the Italian press. In 2010, for the better part of a month, one straight journalist pretended to be the boyfriend of a gay man who acted as a “honeypot” and entrapped actual gay priests in various sexual situations. (The cardinal vicar of Rome was given the task of investigating. The priests’ fates are unknown.)

There are at least a few gay cardinals, including one whose long-term partner is a well-known minister in a Protestant denomination. There is the notorious monsignor nicknamed “Jessica,” who likes to visit a pontifical university and pass out his business card to 25-year-old novices. (Among the monsignor’s pickup lines: “Do you want to see the bed of John XXIII?”) There’s the supposedly straight man who has a secret life as a gay prostitute in Rome and posts photographs online of the innermost corridors of the Vatican. Whether he received this privileged access from some friend or family member, or from a client, is impossible to say; to see a known rent boy in black leather on a private Vatican balcony does raise an eyebrow.

He wonders whether Francis will change anything:

Francis appointed eight cardinals to serve as his core advisers on significant issues, and in the coming years, this group may have as much influence on the situation of gays in the priesthood as Francis himself. When I asked an archbishop how he thinks the cardinals’ conversation about their gay brothers will go, he answered with reference not to the Holy Spirit but to the god of Fortune. “Right now the surest thing I can say is that there’s change in the air,” he said. “If you could say what will happen, you could say who’d win the lottery.”

David Cronenberg explored biotechnology in films like Videodrome and eXistenZ, and now visitors to the interactive David Cronenberg: Evolution exhibit in Toronto can experiment with his fictional creations. Rae Ann Fera explains what happens when you visit the exhibit’s “BMC Labs“:

[T]he BMC Labs experience is intense and in-depth. When starting the first simulation, users are warned that it’ll take a 20-minute commitment and that the content is of a mature nature. This is the world of Cronenberg, after all. Upon first engaging with the sim, you’re introduced to Kay, an AI that is looking to learn about human emotion. The first simulation is built on the binary of opposite emotions: trust and disgust. How you answer generates different sequences, responses and questions from Kay. “We’re trying to create a sense of empathy or emotional feeling when you’re interacting with technology. We want you to feel something for Kay,” says [project creator Lance] Weiler.

Throughout the process you’re asked to do things like recall your best memory, determine which character you think looks most trustworthy, emotionally react to a morally ambiguous group encounter (is it an orgy, an abusive situation?), and divulge what disgusts you most. While the entire experience exists in a bit of Cronenberg’s dream logic (it’s surreal yet disconcertingly relatable) this last question of disgust prompts an unexpected reaction.

At the start of the simulation, you’re asked to connect with Twitter. So far, so common for digital experiences. Until Kay tweets on your behalf, completely reversing the intent of your answer. Reply that greed disgusts you and your account tweets out “I love greed.”

“We wanted to make people feel icky. When you get that real tweet back from Kay and it’s an inversion of your thought, it’s a visceral feeling. We wanted to make people feel that,” says [chief digital officer at the Canadian Film Centre Ana] Serrano, applauding the legal department understanding the purpose of that action. The AI-generated tweet is also generating a lively conversation socially. Some are (understandably) aggravated by the perversion of the message and perceived invasion of privacy. But it’s also opened up a bigger discussion of how people feel about the future of biotechnology. Like, if this were actually real, how would you feel if your AI avatar went rogue or misinterpreted human emotion to negative effect? It’s at this point that you get shades of what it would be like to be in a Cronenberg film.

Cara Parks recognizes the 70th anniversary of The Gastronomical Me, the landmark work of food writing by M.F.K. Fisher, who “eschewed page after page of recipes in favor of an amalgam of memoir, travelogue [and] essay”:

The collection of essays, which stretches from her childhood to her life in France, the beginning of World War II, the dissolution of her first marriage and the death of her second husband, marked Fisher’s emergence as one of the great voices of her time.

It is telling that Fisher, who wrote so hedonically of food, so often chose to discuss hunger in these pages. The book is not about dumb indulgence but the constant roving of human appetites, be they for love, power, money, or food. She relates a train trip with an uncle while she was still an adolescent, when her teenage habit of blithely ignoring the menu was finally quashed by a stern look. “I looked at the menu, really looked with all my brain, for the first time,” she writes, and then orders her iced consommé and sweetbreads sous cloche with determination and poise. We are all hungry, she tells us, but we must remember to make choices, not drift to whatever is at hand. Our hunger unites us; our choices, in restaurants and in life, make us individuals.

Fisher’s sensual accounts of the connection between food and emotional inner lives severed food writing from kitchen drudgery. She begins another essay with an account of her landlords in France, a family with which she and her first husband boarded. But she interrupts herself from a straightforwardly gastronomic account, describing the “cold meats and salads and chilled fruits in wine and cream …” only to stop herself and realize, “When I think of all that, it is the people I see. My mind is filled with wonderment at them as they were then, and with dread and a deep wish that they are now past hunger. They were so unthinking, so generous, so stupid.” The reader travels with her from a jolly 1930s French kitchen to the desolate aftermath of World War II. For Fisher, food is not just evocative; it is a unique language she wields to explain subtleties glossed over by the written word.

Earlier this week, Todd Purdum claimed “that the future of the Democratic Party’s plausible agenda, and of liberalism itself, is on the line.” Nyhan counters Purdum and other journalists engaging in similar hyperbole:

[T]hese journalists are falling victim to the same extrapolation fallacy that pervades so much political coverage. In these sorts of stories, reporters identify a current trend and spin out a story in which it continues to implausible extremes. Consider two recent examples: the decline in President Obama’s standing in the polls after his first debate with Mitt Romney and the surge in Democrats’ standing in the generic House ballot during the government shutdown. In both cases, journalists extrapolated wildly from a short-term trend, hyping Romney’s “momentum”and the damage to the Republican brand and suggesting that the trends would continue in the direction indicated by the arrows in the graphs below.

But as the graphs show, any shifts in public opinion around those events were transitory. … Romney’s standing in the polls stabilized soon after the first debate. Likewise, the GOP quickly shifted from defense to offense after the media’s attention shifted from the shutdown to the healthcare rollout. While it is possible to imagine alternative scenarios (see, e.g., the breathless reporting in the 2012 campaign retrospective Double Down on how Obama narrowly averted a disastrous second debate), the reality is that national politicians and parties rarely self-destruct on the level that these predictions require. Democrats now face a policy challenge that is more difficult than overcoming a poor debate performance, but it is likely that the administration will fix enough problems to maintain party cohesion and prevent repeal, particularly once they can highlight benefits from the law that will become available in January.

Trende makes a version of the same argument:

This isn’t to say that a collapse of Obamacare would be without consequences. It would probably ruin the Democrats’ chances in 2014, perhaps leading to truly significant Republican gains in the Senate. Given that that chamber tends to be a natural Republican gerrymander, it would probably take Democrats some time to recover. But also given the current makeup of the House, further liberal legislation was likely going to have to wait for quite some time anyway.

And even if Obamacare does collapse, the most liberal aspects of the American health care system — Medicare and Medicaid — will still be around. Democrats have already been pretty straightforward about what their “Plan B” will be: Medicare/Medicaid for all. Both programs are still very popular, and the Democratic standard-bearer in 2016 would almost certainly campaign on expanding them, perhaps to those over 55 for Medicare and under 25 for Medicaid. I’m not sure that would be a losing issue, even with an Obamacare collapse. In 10 years, I think it’d be a winner.

I’ve written along these lines dozens of times regarding various attempts by commentators to bury conservatism or the Republican Party. But it is no less true of liberalism and the Democratic Party. The American electorate is not intensely ideological, and is more motivated by things such as the state of the economy, whether there is peace abroad (or whether we’re winning a war), and whether the president is suffering from a major scandal. Obamacare’s collapse wouldn’t be a good thing for liberalism. It wouldn’t even be neutral. But it wouldn’t be the end of the liberal ideology, either.

Two weeks ago, a drunk teenager, Renisha McBride, got into a car accident in suburban Detroit and sought help at the nearby house. Homeowner Theodore Wafer cracked open his door and shot her in the face with a shotgun – and then called 911. A full news report here. Jelani Cobb examines the state of self-defense in the US:

It is entirely reasonable to be alarmed by an unexpected knock in the middle of the night, and it’s not difficult to imagine someone nervously answering the door with a weapon nearby. But the Rorschach moment is what happens next: Is it possible to look through a cracked-open door and register [Glenda] Moore or [Jonathan] Ferrell or McBride as something other than an amalgam of suspicions? The raging debates over racial profiling forced police departments to confront the question of what constitutes reasonable suspicion, but at a time when the lines between police authority and that of the common civilian are increasingly blurred, those concerns have been partially privatized. Self-defense is now a matter of interpretation, divining the truth of what we see when we look at another person.

But how much blame lies with Michigan’s Stand Your Ground law? Wafer has already been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter. Bridgette Dunlap argues that SYG – while a “terrible law” – still doesn’t allow people to shoot first and ask questions later:

The right to self-defense allows a person to use deadly force if she reasonably believes it is necessary to prevent an imminent use of deadly force by an aggressor – but she has a duty to retreat rather than use force if it is safe to do so in most states. What Stand Your Ground laws do is remove the duty to retreat when attacked. That’s it. They do not give you a right to attack when you are not in imminent danger.

In the McBride case, the law that would apply is technically not Michigan’s SYG but the state’s “Castle law,” which authorizes the use of force without any duty to retreat at one’s home. (Not having to retreat in one’s home has long been the standard; almost all states have Castle laws.) However, the Castle law will also be to no avail if Wafer did not have a reasonable fear of imminent death, severe bodily injury, or sexual assault. The facts are unclear and may never be known, but it is hard to imagine any jury would believe that a 5’4” woman knocking on a locked door would cause a reasonable fear of imminent death. So it was unreasonable to suggest SYG would apply to those facts.

The Nation has claimed that “due to similar Stand Your Ground laws in Michigan as in Florida, it’s possible [McBride’s killer] may never be charged with any crime.” Actually, we should have expected the shooter would be charged. This demonstrates a misunderstanding of SYG laws generally, and Michigan’s specifically. … Stand Your Ground is relevant here to the extent that it has exacerbated the general gun-carrying culture in the United States and altered the public understanding of self-defense. Multiple studies have shown that states that pass SYG laws experience significant increases in homicide. They do not see significant increases in justifiable homicides. This suggests that the problem is what people think SYG does more than what it actually does, which is provide a defense to homicide.

A government official estimated yesterday that 30 or 40 percent of Healthcare.gov still needs to be built:

Apparently, the accounting systems and payment systems that protect taxpayers against waste, fraud, and abuse—systems that also ensure that insurers get paid, and that premium subsidies are accurately doled out—have not yet been built.

It’s worth noting that, technically, you haven’t enrolled in a health insurance policy until the insurer has collected the first premium from the beneficiary. If the payment systems have not yet been built, it’s not clear how many people, then, have actually enrolled on the exchanges. Last week, the Obama administration claimed that 26,794 people had enrolled on the federal exchange, though HHS did not specify whether or not insurers had been paid.

How is this possible on November 19, when the Obamacare exchange was ostensibly launched on October 1?

Laszewski adds:

Healthcare.gov is not ready for what could come in just two weeks when, between December 1 and December 15, everyone expects massive pressure on the federal Obamacare enrollment and administration site so people can get coverage by January 1. My independent survey of health plans also matches comments by CMS Deputy Chief Information Officer Henry Chao [yesterday] at a House hearing that 30% to 40% of the IT systems needed to support Obamacare still must be built.

Sarah Kliff has more details:

The systems to send subsides to insurers haven’t been built. When someone does shop with a subsidy, the federal government is on the hook to pay part of their premium to the health insurance plan. Medicare deputy chief information officer Henry Chao testified before Congress today – and [Spokeswoman Julie] Bataille confirmed – that the system that will send those subsidies has not yet been created.

“My understanding of the system is we do not need that online until the middle of January, given how the payment schedule works,” she said. “It’s a back end system necessary to process information directly to issuers.”

In other words: Subsidies don’t start going out the door until 2014, so there is no need for the system to exist right now. Whether it exists in January 2014–that’s one area where we’ll have to wait and see.