Digital Analogue

Hey healthcare.gov, your username requirement is wonky

I can't figure out how to actually submit a bug report to healthcare.gov, so I'll just talk about it here as an example of poorly phrased instructions (and suboptimal user interface).

I decided tonight to go looking around healthcare.gov, the new Healthcare Marketplace with information about the new ACA (Obamacare) policies and, if you live in a state like Virginia, also the marketplace itself. The "outer" part of the website seemed fine for finding out what applies to you, what the different rules are, etc, but if you want to get a quote, you have to create an account. (Aside: I'm not really shopping for a new health plan---the one I get as a Commonwealth of Virginia employee isn't bad. But I'm curious about the ACA and trying to be an informed citizen, so I'd like to know what I could get if I were shopping for an individual plan.)

Once you've entered some preliminary information, you have to pick a username, and you're presented with this screen:

on which it tells you that your username should be at least 6 and at most 74 (!) characters in length, and that it has to have "a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-". Those symbols are apparently not "special characters", which the earlier instruction says not to enter; but more importantly, that's a bit of a strange instruction, right? Telling you that it has to have at least one of those four categories of characters?

And of course what they've written is not what they meant. As you can see from the screenshot, the username "asdfgh" is 6 characters long and contains a lowercase letter, but is not considered a valid username. Playing around a bit, the following are all considered invalid:

asdfghj
_asdfghj
_asdfghj2
/asdfghj
Aasdfghj
123456
123456_

while these are considered valid:

2asdfghj
asdfghj_
asdfghj/
Aasdfghj@
Aasdfghj2
123456a
123456a_
12345a
12345A

So from what I can tell, the actual logic of this system (or at least, of the validator running on this form field) is that a username must:

• contain at least six characters (and no more than 74, but I didn't test that part)
• contain only numbers, letters, or one of the five given symbols
• start with a number or a letter
• contain at least one letter
• contain at least one non-letter

Of course, they probably didn't want to provide a bullet list of rules, and so someone tried to boil that down into a "simple" instruction which is, unfortunately, quite wrong. And not wrong in an acceptable direction---if they specified a rule that was more restrictive but accepted some usernames that violated it, that's not perfect but it's ok from a UI perspective. But people can follow this rule they've given and still get rejected.

Here's a fairly simple phrasing that would be (afaict) correct: "Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long. It must start with a letter or number, but cannot be all letters or all numbers. It may contain these symbols: _.@/-" This phrasing has the added benefit of being syntactically simpler (thus accessible to people with lower levels of reading comprehension---an important accessibility concern for government websites).

(Separately, they're in for a nightmare if they really mean that about it being case-sensitive. It won't be long before someone signs up with MyName and then tries to log in using myname (or vice versa), and then they're just angry at the system. Even worse if the system will grant the username MyName to one person and myname to another! Perhaps they just mean that it's case-preserving, i.e. that when they print your username out it will always preserve the case that you first typed it, but it will match case-insensitively, so that e.g. the person with MyName could type myname and still successfully log in. This is generally considered a UI best practice.)

I should point out, too, that for all the complaining above, there are actually a fair number of good UI choices on the website---not least that they do validate your input immediately and tell you if you've chosen an invalid username the moment you navigate away from that form field (by hitting tab or clicking away). So the possible scope for confusion is at least relatively limited... but they should still probably fix it. Even if only 1% of visitors got tripped up by this, with literally millions of visitors to the site we're talking about tens of thousands of people that could be better served.

"The next time you... find yourself talking to a linguist, ask them about their research (definitely!), but please don't ask them how many languages they speak. That would be like asking a wedding planner how many spouses they have." --DS Bingham

Bugs in ancient software: as88

In my Computer Organizations class, I use the venerable Tanenbaum textbook, now in its 6th edition, and this year I decided to go with the flow and use the assembler/simulator that he documents extensively (and tutorials at length) in an appendix to the book. The problem, of course, is that the code base is really old; it's written in K&R C, and copyrights and headers indicate that some of the files were last edited more than twenty years ago. But hey, it works! And it's not like the basics of assembly have changed all that much since then.

Except it doesn't quite work. The simulator and tracer run fine on the pre-assembled example files, but when I go to run the assembler, as88, even on an unmodified source file, it mostly runs (generating the appropriate extra files) and then segfaults right at the end. A little poking around shows that the crash occurs on line 36 of comm.c, where a call to fclose is failing. Some rummaging around the internet turns up a site in Italian that has discovered what appears to be the same problem, although their suggested solution doesn't work---the problem is not that input itself is NULL, but that something it references has already been closed.

Observing that this is cleanup at the end of the program, of resources that will automatically be cleaned up by the OS anyway, I thought about just commenting the line out. Buffer issues shouldn't be a problem, because this is an input buffer, so there shouldn't be anything buffered that needs to be written out (and we're done with the input, so we must be at EOF).

So, just commenting that line out seems to work. At some point I may find time to hack around further and see if I can figure out the real source of the problem, but if this duct tape I just applied continues to work....

"To put it bluntly, I believe the world is patriarchal because men are bigger and stronger than women, and can beat them up." --Roger Ebert