>Plenty of ethics to debate, but when it comes down to being wasteful with tax dollars, there's a monopoly on that.

Is it the government that's being wasteful with tax dollars, or the company that took the money? Why is there this idea that business can be as wasteful as they want, but it's the governments fault?

Every corporation, every private charity, and every public institution that I've worked for has been wasteful, and the corporations have been the worse offenders in that regard.

I don't doubt _this_ guy (and most HN-ers) could do a great job for $8.6M, but there are plenty of companies that couldn't. Govt contracts cost so much in part due to the number of legal hoops you have to jump through to get one. It's better to get something that works and is mostly supported even if it costs a lot than to get nothing for still a lot.

> It's better to get something that works and is mostly supported

But a lot of companies fail at even this basic test. It doesn't work, and it's unsupported. Meanwhile, they're getting paid more to 'fix' it while making the users run around in circles.

Sure, but imagine how much worse things would be if the bar were lower. Govt contracts always bring out the leeches - it's not unique to software contracts.

Part of getting older is accepting things like this as being how we stop truly shitty jobs from getting done.

How would a non-technically competent government official figure out which random hacker to award a contract like this to? They can't. And if they tried they'd probably hire someone that would over-promise and under-deliver and wouldn't be around in six months to fix things if they needed fixing.

I've no doubt there was a chance to save some money, but saying this guy replicated an $86M system is quite a stretch. He managed to replicate the code to OCR the plates in a somewhat controlled condition, and use existing networks to access an existing web service. It's not going to work in low light conditions traveling at 55MPH with plates at varying distances while simultaneously fighting off attacks to jam/DOS/insert false results during a power outage. Additionally there's going to be a backend to store and process the data for whatever purposes. We really don't know much about what the scope of the $86M project was, and may have included a lot of unrelated things also.

Meh I’ll do it for $8m even.