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Show HN: govuptime.com
- jstalin 13y agoExcellent. I look forward to that downtime number getting worse (or better, depending on how one looks at it).
- hartator 13y agoDo you think they have some kind of SLA, you get your money back a la amazon EC2 ? :)
- goshx 13y agogood luck trying :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- VladRussian2 13y agonot until Bezos becomes President. How about Government-as-a-Service? (I mean for regular citizens :)
- nucleardog 13y agoRead "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, if you haven't.
- VladRussian2 13y agothank you, sounds interesting about brainstem BIOS/etc... , while other staff (i looked up from Wikipedia): " The federal government of the United States has ceded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs.[3] Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion). Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign, gated housing developments. ... . The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds where they transact tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the dynamic society around them." sounds very similar to USSR/Russia around 1989-92. It were a fun times :)
- lukifer 13y agoAnd "Diamond Age", for that matter. The concept of "phyles" is not unlike government as a service.
- webmaven 13y agoAnd "Jennifer Government".
- csomar 13y agoWhat I understood (not an American citizen) is that your money (tax payer) has run off (actually it's a quite of a negative balance). So no, you won't get any money back. You probably should pay your due bills.
- VladRussian2 13y agoyou're mistaking Continuing Resolution (Congress giving President(Exec Branch) weekly(or whatever) allowance - current drama) for Debt Ceiling (the source of the money for the Continuing Resolutions - next show coming in a couple of weeks)
- dragonwriter 13y ago> you're mistaking Continuing Resolution (current drama) for Debt Ceiling (next show coming in a couple of weeks) They aren't separate issues. Part of the current drama is that: 1) A sizable portion of the Republican congressional delegation is demanding separate votes on, first, a CR that would be linked to various policy demands and, second, a debt ceiling increase (to which, presumably, additional policy demands would be attached), while 2) The White House and a sizable portion of the Democratic congressional delegation are calling for a single "clean" (independent of extraneous policy changes) vote on continuing funding and a debt-ceiling increase.
- VladRussian2 13y agowell, not going to argue whether Lord of the Rings or the Dragon Tatoo Girl is a one or three separate books each. Though "Hobbit" becoming 3-movie series would undoubtfully generate more money this way, so it seems Republicans is right on the money here :)
- Fuzzwah 13y agoI chuckled at the "A SysAdmin would be pissed." line and then checked the source to see if there was any javascript which was going to change this line as the uptime % dropped lower and lower. I was disappointed there wasn't, but perhaps it is some dynamic magic that happens on page load or something....
- thatrailsguy 13y agoThat's a great idea.
- muzz 13y agoI don't get the downtime comparison. In government, it's not the result of an unplanned outage that is being addressed to bring the system back up. Rather our governmental "sysadmins" decided to bring the system down, and can simply decide when to bring it back up.
- jaggederest 13y agoDowntime is downtime - if you're measuring service reliability the planned or unplanned nature of it being offline doesn't really come into play. When people say five 9s, they don't mean "except for when you decide to take it offline".
- patmcc 13y agoWhat? No, that's completely untrue. We guarantee 4 nines on some of our services, but they're measured with 2 hours of allowed downtime early Sunday mornings (we usually don't need this, but very occasionally we do).
- jaggederest 13y agoThen I'm sorry to say, you're doing 4 nines wrong.
- PhearTheCeal 13y agoWhat does ``Service level for last year:'' mean?
- benmanns 13y agoIt's the percentage of time that the government was functioning for the last year. So, if they are "down" for 36.5 days, their service level for last year would be 90%.
- arscan 13y agoAh, that chart on the bottom is on a log scale. I wasn't expecting that... and if I didn't look closer I would have completely misinterpreted it (for example, it appears that the DoD is mostly shut down).
- bbarn 13y agoIt took me a sec too. It's a confusing application, since the intent is to compare to adjacent rows.. the first one for example is "half furloughed" but only a slightly smaller red line. Visually confusing.
- benatkin 13y agoI like it. You need only look at a few log charts to get the hang of it, and if it wasn't a log chart, it would be hard to see the difference between organizations with less than 20,000 employees, because the bars would all be very short. Edit: took another look, and it is quite a bit more confusing than I thought, because of furloughed vs total employees. I can't quickly tell if the furloughed for an agency is linear based on the percentage of the total employees for that agency, or is also logarithmic.
- thatrailsguy 13y agoIt's also logarithmic.
- khawkins 13y agoIt's downright deceitful, in my opinion. The entire page is trying to exaggerate the significance of the shutdown.
- arscan 13y agoI personally think the author did this because otherwise the DoD would so heavily dwarf everything else that you wouldn't be able to see whats going on. But I agree, intended or not, this has the effect of heavily exaggerating the proportion of people on furlough. Its like using a log scale on a pie chart. It really makes no sense. The author really should consider this and think hard about what point he is trying to make with that chart on the bottom.
- coldcode 13y agoNSA still working. Damn.
- Fuzzwah 13y agoFeature request: hover pop ups explaining what each of the acronyms mean.
- m_ram 13y agoThis is exactly what I was going to recommend. Maybe a sentence or two describing what the department does as well. I'm sure most non-Americans (and even most Americans) don't know what the DOI does, for example.
- thatrailsguy 13y agoI'll look into this.
- RailsResearch 13y agoYa, this would be awesome.
- asperous 13y agoIt's too bad the http://www.usdebtclock.org/ http://www.usdebtclock.org/ isn't updated for Furlough, it would show some pretty happy numbers right now.
- anigbrowl 13y agoA facile assumption.
- jleader 13y agoExcept I had the impression that restarting shelved projects, catching up after delays, etc. is going to end up costing more money than the shutdown saves. Not to mention the effect on the economy if it goes on for too long, which will affect tax revenues. [Edited to add:] Also, my understanding is that you can't get an EIN (Employer ID Number) issued during the shutdown, which means you can't legally start a new business and hire employees until this is over.
- RailsResearch 13y agoInteresting.
- dandelany 13y agoNice dashboard :) Out of curiosity, where did you get the data re: who is furloughed from which departments? I have been working on a similar data graphic but had to collect that data in a Google Doc by hand with a couple colleagues from the OMB's list of contingency plans. I'd be curious to compare my data with yours. FWIW I'm working on visualizing it with a treemap instead of bar charts - my progress is here but still has lots of design work left to do: https://github.com/dandelany/shutdown2013 https://github.com/dandelany/shutdown2013 http://cognitiveharmony.net/experiments/shutdown2013/ http://cognitiveharmony.net/experiments/shutdown2013/
- thatrailsguy 13y agoI've got to ask one of the other guys where he got the data. It's available via json in our project here: https://github.com/dvito/govuptime https://github.com/dvito/govuptime
- dandelany 13y agoThanks! If anyone is interested in my data, there's a CSV & JSON in the github and the shared Google Doc is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsyXWqYXia4PdGlDWGVFODF2T0hYV05nM1NESXp4OHc&usp=sharing#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsyXWqYXia4PdGl... Looks pretty similar to yours, mostly... Mine is less-complete at the moment but also tries to break some agencies down by sub-agency (eg. IRS-specific stats within the Dept. of Treasury). If anyone would like to contribute, let me know and I'll make you an editor on that doc (my email is in my HN profile or on that github project).
- thatrailsguy 13y agoI talked to dvito, he said he compiled it by hand, so he might incorporate your data into ours.
- dnprock 13y agoThanks for the data. Any idea where to get $ of salary not being paid to each department.
- kimagure 13y agoCould you add comma formatting for the mouseover bubble numbers?
- RailsResearch 13y agoAdded to our TODO!
- dreamdu5t 13y agoIt'd be nice to see a percentage of the Federal government shut down. I heard it's only around 18%.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- guelo 13y agoJust going by the rough employee counts it would be 40%, 800k furloghed out of 2 million total. This whole business of forcing "essential" employees to work without pay, which would be illegal for any other employer to do, is keeping things from getting out of control for now.
- officemonkey 13y agoPoint of technicality, it's not "essential," it's "exempt from furlough." There are plenty of government functions that are "essential" that have been mothballed for the shutdown. For example, there's no money for Federal Highway Grants, so the people who manage Federal Highway Grants are furloughed. When there's no funding, there's a lot fewer people needed. The "exempt from furlough" employees constitute a much smaller pool of activities: those that can not be stopped. For example, FEMA employees that are responding to TS Karen, Border Patrol agents, TSA employees, VA Hospital workers.
- bayesianhorse 13y agoMy condolences to people living in countries with dysfunctional politics.
- mdigi 13y agoSo, most of the world population?
- blahblah12345 13y agoThe IRS is also shut down.
- dvito 13y agoI'll see if I can't find some better data. I know there are some groups we are definitely missing.
- thatrailsguy 13y agoThey fall under the Department of the Treasury.
- protomyth 13y agoPartially, they are still collecting money just fine.
- Amygaz 13y agoAnd this sucks, because I can't get my mortgage approved. No joke. I feel like have been taken hostage by the government...
- Glyptodon 13y agoI'm not sure if it's just me but the scale on the graph seems a little odd.
- CoachRufus87 13y agoNice! Just a suggestion: add mouseover tooltips to the department acronyms w/ their full name.
- thatrailsguy 13y agoThe other guys that did most of the work will weigh in in a couple of hours. I just wrote the hour calculation.
- thatrailsguy 13y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dvito https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dvito is one of the creators.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- agotterer 13y agoLooks great! Id advise adding some Facebook sharing tags and maybe an image. Right now its just a link with no content or image on my fb feed.
- RailsResearch 13y agoCan do!
- savrajsingh 13y agoFeature request: It would be nice if this page had the total # of employees / furloughed employees.
- dvito 13y agoI'll get on that. I'm thinking of adding some other ways of looking at the data as well, since I'll have some actual time this weekend.
- javert 13y agoThe federal government is operational, so the text at the top of the page is politically dishonest. We still have a federal government that is taking care of national defense, among a number of other things. "Non-essential" services have been suspended, while "essential" are still operational. Frankly, I'd like it if it stayed this way. The government shouldn't tax-and-force in "non-essential" areas.
- VladRussian2 13y ago>Frankly, I'd like it if it stayed this way. The government shouldn't tax-and-force in "non-essential" areas. you must be kidding. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/irs-collecting-money-not-sending-refunds-during-sh/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/irs-collectin... "IRS collecting money but not sending tax refunds during shutdown"
- bmelton 13y agoThat's just due to the politicization of the shutdown. The Executive has actually taken great pains to make things as inconvenient as possible for the citizenry, to ensure that they get the message that government is necessary to their daily lives, whether it would otherwise impact them or not. Websites are shut down, but not like, in a way that would save any actual money. Instead of turning the servers off, they're serving up error pages carping about the shutdown, which takes power, bandwidth, etc. Also, of course, those pages had to be modified, which given how dispersed federal webservers are, was far more than a single search-and-replace effort. Moreover, freestanding monuments are closed. These monuments don't require daily staff, y'know, cause they're just buildings, or walls in many cases, but instead of not manning them (which would be free), we're sending dozens of guards to keep people out of a place that ordinarily requires no staff. On top of that, at least in DC, they're renting barricades and pasting them with signs carping about the shutdown. In some cases, we've even tried to close parks that weren't affected, like when the Feds tried to shut down Mount Vernon, which is operated through private funds. On top of that, there are essential persons in place and on duty that the executive branch has instructed not to do their jobs... Border Patrol, for example, has been instructed to "just let anybody through", despite their roles being considered essential. Edit, for clarity, I was in debate mode, and did not intend to imply that the shutdown does not have negative effects. I've worked in the federal government, and have federal customers currently, live in the DC area, and am well aware of the pain that some are feeling. That said, the Executive Branch has specifically gone out of their way to make that pain even more acute.
- ANH 13y agoThere are a lot of contractors sitting on the sidelines, too, made to take leave or, if they don't have leave, they go without pay. In other words, the "man hours lost" is probably much higher.
- thatrailsguy 13y agoBut very hard to calculate. If we had a solid source of information on this, I could add it.
- RailsResearch 13y agoAgreed. It's hard to track some of these, though.
- mcculley 13y agoThat could benefit from the <abbreviation> tag.
- ok_craig 13y agoIs the IRS still operating?
- winslow 13y agoYes and No. They are still collecting their "fair share" but their support lines will go unanswered. http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2013/10/04/cant-stop-the-machine-during-shutdown-irs-computers-still-churn-out-tax-liens-levies-and-bills/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2013/10/04/cant-stop...
- j_baker 13y agoIt would be nice if this also showed how much money the shutdown has cost, being that it costs $12.5 million/hour. http://www.cnbc.com/id/101078145 http://www.cnbc.com/id/101078145
- enoex1 13y agolike this? http://shutdown.outline.com/ http://shutdown.outline.com/
- nextstep 13y agoIt would be cool if on the bar chart the two bars for each agency could be combined; make the furloughed employees in blue and show the rest of the agency in grey-blue or something like that, so it more visually shows how the agencies are diminished.
- arscan 13y agoIf the author chooses to do this, absolutely get rid of the log scale. The chart makes it look like 95% of the DoD civilians are on furlough. Its 50%. The author is simply trying to show too much on that chart, and s/he is inadvertently making it look way worse to the average person (who doesn't know what a log scale is) than is intended. I may lose my salary because of this shutdown (this thing affects way more than direct govt employees), so I am probably biased towards making this seem as bad as possible. But I can't stand charts that are misleading.
- Avitas 13y agoSeconded--I like seeing my data on a linear scale.
- dnprock 13y agoThe best way to visualize this I think is with pie chart. I made one here: http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR
- rayiner 13y agoNon-linear bar graph scales should be a last resort.
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoVery nice, good job!
- RailsResearch 13y agoThank you!
- bithive123 13y agoMetrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.
- Aqueous 13y agoNot just subverting the budget process, but inflicting economic damage targetted at not just a single party or a single individual but all of us. It's like threatening to blow a hole in the boat you are on with others, or shoot the glass out of an airplane window if x, y, and z demands are not met.
- jeremybencken 13y agoThe budget process is also a law.
- trothoun 13y agoYep. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones.
- 13y ago
- frank_boyd 13y agoThe funnier version: http://www.thedailyshow.com/ http://www.thedailyshow.com/ Or as a download: http://thepiratebay.sx/search/daily%20show/0/7/0 http://thepiratebay.sx/search/daily%20show/0/7/0
- dnprock 13y agoI made another chart to visualize percentage of furloughed. NASA, HUD, ED are among the hardest hitters: http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR thatrailsguy, thanks for the data.
- thatrailsguy 13y agoThank dvito for compiling. This is a great visualization.
- thatrailsguy 13y agoMind if we add this to the site?
- mwsherman 13y agoThis is a misleading dataviz, I’m afraid. There are around 4 million federal personnel, of which 800k are furloughed, which means the government is running at 80%. So, at the very least, ‘Is the federal government operational?’ should be 0.8 instead of zero (aka, ‘no’). I would also expect the ‘service level’ calculator to reflect this. Update, citation from US Office of Personnel Mgmt: http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/total-government-employment-since-1962/ http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docum...
- dnprock 13y agoI don't think you can use 800k/4m to say government is running at 80%. Some departments are affected more than others. Furloughs can have ripple effect. NASA, HUD, ED are the most affected according to data.
- spikels 13y agoBut clearly most of the government continues to run because either it was declared "essential" (a rather haphazard process) or is "self-supported" by fees, like the Post Office* or Amtrak.* More detail about "essential" workers/activities: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-shutdown-essential-20131002,0,382999.story http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-shutdown-ess... *-ironically both lose money
- brown9-2 13y agoDo you have a source for the 4 million number? Most reports this week have said 1.8 million total. Regardless of how many are furloughed versus working unpaid, not paying that many people will have a big economic impact the longer this goes on.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Ankaios 13y agoI'm not sure that civil-service headcount will give you a good indication of how much of the government is operational. At NASA, IIRC only ~ 20% of the funds go to civil servant salaries. The rest goes out the door in contracts, grants, etc. I don't know the fractions for other agencies.
- RailsResearch 13y agoHi everyone, @GSMcNamara here reporting from a car on the side of an interstate over 4G. Deployed an update just now. Once at my destination I'll respond to all the comments. Thanks for the support! 13,695 unique visitors so far, keep it up!
- alexmr 13y agoMost enterprise apps have an SLA of at least 99.9%. If the government was an email server for example, for the month of October they'd like have to give a partial refund to their customers for the downtime.
- nraynaud 13y agoIt reminds me of the counter for Belgium.
- RailsResearch 13y agoOh? Got a link?
- nraynaud 13y agohttp://lerecorddumonde.be/ http://lerecorddumonde.be/ Now they have a government, so they changed the page. But it was a counter of days, with comparison to other countries, then they passed Iraq, and got the world record of days without a government. If you're unfamiliar with the situation, they got stuck in the reverse situation of the US, where they didn't have a government (technically the government resigned, but stayed in place for the transition), so they where simply passing the same budget as the year prior, and rolling everyday life as usual, but not starting any new project or making any change to the laws (not making any real political).
- visualcsharp 13y agoAh, yes, Hacker News--where duly-elected representatives performing their duly-allowed-by-the-Constitution duties to fund or not fund the government "should not be allowed to do this." Big news, folks: the House is allowed to not allow any additional spending. It's their right to do this under the Constitution. No votes to allow spending? No spending. It's really that simple. Don't let normalcy bias (we've always increased the debt ceiling!) cloud your judgment. Oh, and should not be allowed by whom? They are allowed under the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. Are some suggesting that there is a more supreme law/being/entity that can disallow that which is Constitutionally approved from happening?
- daned 13y agoHow many 9s does the US government have for its existence?
- smoyer 13y agoSince a major part of the federal budget is its several million employees, I'd also like to see a ticker that shows how the deficit is behaving during the massive furlough ... is it going down? And what about unemployment? Is it funded even with the shutdown? And are furloughed federal employees eligible for unemployment compensation? I'm not going to pick sides in the current battle, but I do think the federal government is far too big, and that we really don't get enough for the money we put into it. One interesting side effect of the current standoff is that we can see what it's like without most of the government ... perhaps we should trim off the parts we (collectively) don't seem to miss.
- pmorici 13y ago"I'd also like to see a ticker that shows how the deficit is behaving during the massive furlough ... is it going down?" Doubtful; historically furloughed employees are given back pay once a shutdown of this nature is over. Also don't forget all the lost productivity from all those employees sitting at home instead of doing what they normally do. "are furloughed federal employees eligible for unemployment compensation?" Yes. "we can see what it's like without most of the government" I don't think you can. If you didn't mow your grass or trim the landscaping in your yard for a week or two no one would likely notice. Let it go longer and all of a sudden your property is the eye sore on the block and you're going to get angry calls from the neighbors. I'm with you on government being generally too big or rather inefficient but politicians never seem to want to address that in a meaningful way it's always in terms of we are spending to little or to much. Instead they might look at making it easier to fire an under performing worker and provide more budget flexibility and incentives for automation and efficiency instead of just throwing more clerical workers or benjamins at a problem.
- ep103 13y agoShould include cost to the economy!
- RailsResearch 13y agoReally hard to calculate