A surprisingly large amount of data one might think is classified is not at all. In this case all the examples listed are from freely available public data outside of the Twitter thing which seems to be just setting up the environment for some local tool. Here are the sites:
---
datacatalog.worldbank.org
opendata.arcgis.com
mrdata.usgs.gov / www.usgs.gov
---
Sharing things like this isn't very useful because it just causes further divides. People who think DOGE is not a big deal will use this to confirm that 'oh no the worst they could dig up is somebody posting publicly accessible data in public!' And those who do think it's a big deal will often just double down on stupid and insist this was leaking secret information, even when they probably know it wasn't. So you end up with people living in two different worlds, but only one of them is real.
Usually: actually a third world is real. As constructed in your narrative there is a difference in the deltas between the two worlds and the third (i.e. one is more real).
The problem is, compiling the list like he has, and being on the DOGE team, makes it all very, very suspicious. And it is sensitive data - even if it is open. Those are important infrastructure locations.
He is saying the malicious actor is doge itself, if I understood what is being said by the previous comment. Which is the idea behind which I posted the news here on hn
If by that you mean newsrooms are happy to publish stories full of the disingenuous sayings and doings of those who hope to benefit from polarization and chaos, I agree.
Not even data, html snippets with links to publicly available data.
Watch at the media turns this into “doge bros mapping top secret minerals” and “doge has access to all our DMs!”
For those who hate Trump but know what the you are looking at in the screenshots keep this one in mind. The media hates you and their goal is to sow division
While this is the lede there are other activities posted. If there were true transparency with nothing to hide Mr. Wick would not have taken the repos private but just ensured that that all avenues of harassment were disabled. More of concern to me is the potential for a focus on the union status - though with just the screenshots it is quite difficult to tell what is really going on.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to the author... finding the quickest and easiest way to stop harassment and backlash is what I would have done too. The author is a mere human, likely not equipped with the mental fortitude to deal with the magnitude of armchair bullies that are likely aimed at them.
As I said in anothercomment, using available data in itself can be seen with suspicion. With freely available data you can build a nuclear reactor (if very capable), or buy fertilizer and build a bomb. Chances are, fbi will knock at your door and ask what you're doing. The same way, an agency gathering lot of public available data regarding sensitive infrastructure can be assumed to misuse the data for shady purposes, given the agency isn't exactly one you can trust
I gather things like this all the time. I'm against DOGE as much as 90% of the US is, but collection of open data for curiosity and interest is really not a thing to focus on.
However, i am let's say, at least dubious about the whys of an agency which is wreaking so much havoc need to collect data on us sensitive infrastructure. If you were dealing with drugs, and you told me you buy codeine based pharma products in bulk, i wouldn't think you caught a cold
There are companies that are making bucks selling satellite photos of russian army storage(s) so that it is possible to calculate how much of remaining tanks are in storage. While a single photo of a single storage wouldn't matter on its own, having a clear picture of every russian storage can give you an idea of how many tanks were refurbished and remain in stock
The government has whole departments of people whose job it is to be on top of this sort of thing.
Why is it suddenly part of the job description of a junior DOGE employee to build workforce org chart visualization tools and investigate strategic resource datasets? Isn’t that weird to have one brand new government employee doing self-taught random investigations of topics as complex as ‘government workforce management’ and ‘strategic resource analytics’?
> Why is it suddenly part of the job description of a junior DOGE employee to build workforce org chart visualization tools and investigate strategic resource datasets?
That is totally fine to focus on. My point was focusing on the code prior to DOGE existing showing collection of GIS data.
> Isn’t that weird to have one brand new government employee doing self-taught random investigations of topics as complex as ‘government workforce management’ and ‘strategic resource analytics’?
We're in total agreement on this particular point.
Point of contention - according to a recent YouGov[1] poll, 48% of respondents think DOGE should be kept or expanded, while only 37% think it should be reduced or eliminated. A far cry from 90% either direction. You may be subject to confirmation bias.
I don't really care about a single YouGov poll about what people think about a headline -- that's a shallow approach, misses quite a bit of context, and when used as a summary would rightly be called clickbait. Digging deeper and past propaganda, the activities of DOGE are deeply unpopular to the electorate wholesale, and my 90% claim is easily justified by a groundswell of current and long time understanding of the electorate:
- negative impact to the economy is deeply unpopular [0]
- lying about savings is deeply unpopular [1]
- threatening cuts to entitlement spending is deeply unpopular [2]
How you ask a question, what question you ask, and how you collect data will unduly influence any poll -- event with adjustments.[3] People aren't as fickle as headlines would otherwise lead you to believe.
My take on your oblique reference to "maybe [I] have confirmation bias" is that you are taking the headlines as fact and thus can dismiss anything that doesn't agree wit your perspective. This may be mistaken on my part, but if you feel deep inside that it is not, then I encourage you to dig deeper.
A bit tangent, and since I’m an outsider who doesn’t live in the states and have no skin in the game — my understanding is, they will do literally anything to make sure DOGE succeeds, because a failure is basically unacceptable. I can’t even imagine how you can backtrack this, and fix stuff up. They obviously prepared for it months in advance. Targeting ex-employees of successful product companies and putting them in charge (especially the ones with a lot of money, but a bit lost because they want can’t find meaning in life) is also kinda funny.
That being said, if it doesn’t succeed, they will start doing the usual — pretending that it was successful. And that’s when the team-sports based politics come into play. If you’re so deep into supporting one side that you can’t objectively see failures, the narrative pushers will keep winning. It applies to both sides, by the way. But burden of proof lies on the government in power.
> my understanding is, they will do literally anything to make sure DOGE succeeds, because a failure is basically unacceptable
They have shown over and over that they are after a good story, not good results. They’re going for shock factor and they’re pumping out propaganda at an alarming rate.
We’ve seen so many hyperbolic claims of rampant fraud with zero evidence. At the same time, they’ve had to remove the biggest wins from their public DOGE leaderboard because they were found to be incorrect (some might say fraudulent claims).
One of their biggest wins was discovered to be an error because someone put it into the DOGE leaderboard as billions instead of millions. On off-by-1000 error in one of their top claims to success is no small matter. Numerous other claims have been shown to account for entire contract amounts, even though they only cancelled the remaining balance of the contract.
They don’t care about facts. They care about what they can convince enough people to believe without getting caught.
>Numerous other claims have been shown to account for entire contract amounts, even though they only cancelled the remaining balance of the contract.
They are building this live and it's been a month as a side quest. They have fixed those issues that you have said, and have been updating the website, fixing different pricing, etc. etc. every single day.
They have not been preparing for months... that's not how system integration works... They post literally daily about their savings.
Project 2025 has been an open plan for years and the level of coordination between political elites aligned with the Heritage Foundation and tech industry radicals is obvious on its face.
If the goal was reducing fraud and waste, accurate accounting would be a core principle and this wouldn't happen. They aren't because it's not. Their goal was rapid destruction of the US government apparatus to prevent oversight and accountability that would enable preservation and restoration of constitutional government. Seems like it's working.
To me it "seems like" the CIA is being attacked and its extinction burst through the media it controlled for the last generation is causing a blast of hysteria. Everything published in media organizations that until recently were receiving federal funds should be viewed through that light. They're mainly mad because their gravy train stopped.
I don't like the Yarvinists doing the attacking but the old regime acting like it was a representation of the will of the people at this point is pretty offensive.
There's a reason people voted against them. It's just a shame that we couldn't have voted for liberal ideals instead of neoreactionary ones.
If we get very lucky maybe we will wind up with the CIA defanged and without completely sliding into authoritarianism! a person can dream, anyway..
My fellow Americans need to stop inventing wish-fulfillment fantasies that everything's going to be ok and fine. It's a coup by the worst elements of American society (eugenicists! Christian nationalists! white supremacists!) in collusion with oligarchs, dictators, and autocrats. People are acting like the most disingenuous and dishonest people are scions of truth.
Half of y'all are excited cuz you seem to think you'll get to strap a nuke to your bike and screw a 15 year old razorgirl. This isn't Snow Crash, it's real life, you WILL be impacted by mass famine, unmanaged pandemics, economic depression, geopolitical balkanization, and war. These are the outcomes made possible through DOGE.
I’m not sure how to put it in the nicest way possible without offending anyone, but — your government is the only one in the 2nd/1st world country that is doing in a way where it hurts average person for no reason. Hypothesis among people that I talk to in real life is that American government is jealous of China and knows they can’t have the same power and abilities as they due. This is just a side effect of them freaking out and realizing that they are, in fact, the laughing stock of the entire world.
There’s this idea, I have no idea from where, that entire world depends on the states, and without US everyone would literally starve to death. But it’s just really not the case. Sure, everyone would suffer, but any sane country has already worked out contingency plans, and is preparing for it while blatantly pretending to bend the knee.
I think there’s a deep cultural issue that you guys need to face and fix. In my opinion, most of it comes from the lack of education. However, you’re actively making sure that people are less educated and blur our the moral lines to have small wins that will be insignificant in the longer term.
I’m saying this as a person who has deep personal connections to people living in the states. Those people belong different “factions” of the political spectrum, and it is just incredibly sad to see from the sidelines.
You're right we should give the people slashing budgets without thought or care more space to build their website showing they have no idea what's going on.
They know what they want to cut and are counting on finding enough seuface-level-bad-sounding sound bites to justify what they were already going to do.
For example, they canceled invasive species control programs for the Great Lakes. Is it a success that they saved a modest amount of money, while letting the condition of the lakes further erode?
Not to attack you personally, but I’ve noticed there is a lot of hyperbole here based on dramatic headlines, extrapolation based on feeling rather than facts, so important but difficult to stay informed.
The comment you're responding to says "...while letting the condition of the lakes further erode", which the article you linked to supports.
> ...extrapolation based on feeling rather than facts...
12 of 85 is a fact. It's basic logic to estimate the effect of this.
The administrator in the best position to understand the impact of this has provided an analysis: "Cutting back the control program by one-sixth would allow over one million lamprey to survive, McClinchey estimated. Those lampreys would eat nearly 5 million pounds of fish, equalling $105 million in lost economic output and potential, far outstripping the cost of the workers’ salaries."
What's your basis for dismissing this as feelings? It appears irrational.
Saying something involved hyperbole means you think part of the claim was exaggerated, not that you think the entire affair was invented from the ground up.
E.g. if your coworker comes into work and says "Wow, you guys wouldn't believe it - I was passed by this maniac doing at least 140 mph on the way in to work today. What a crazy speeder!" then you see on the news the police arrested the driver for driving up to 95 mph. You might say "140 mph sounds like hyperbole, it looks like it was significantly less". If they respond "what's the hyperbole, you don't think he was speeding? You're irrational!" you might be a bit confused as, leaving the unnecessary bit at the end aside, the hyperbole was the clear and excessive exaggeration of the rate of speed, not an implication the individual was driving safely this morning.
In the above the hyperbole was "they canceled invasive species control programs for the Great Lakes". Well no, they are risking it being ineffective and causing great harm due to a personnel cut somewhere on the order of 15%-20%. The exaggeration here is the amount it was cut. At no point was it claimed the exaggeration was there could be some level of a negative impact as a result.
> Cutting back the control program by one-sixth would allow over one million lamprey to survive, McClinchey estimated. Those lampreys would eat nearly 5 million pounds of fish, equalling $105 million in lost economic output and potential, far outstripping the cost of the workers’ salaries.
Oh good, they are just arbitrarily risking it being ineffective. My bad. I read a similar article to the one you link that I think didn't have the numbers, just talked about cutting the staff of the two locations.
Whatever they promised and people voted for by believing in those promises. People wanted a strong man, and they basically got it. I understand markets can be irrational blah blah, but still surprised how people with money aren’t shipping it away or storing it somewhere more safe looking at the current situation.
I would frame that as being motivated to satisfy their base, vs being motivated to succeed.
Success usually has a positive connotation, and they don't seem to be doing a particularly good job if you take the "reduce the size of the government" goal at face value (they are making messes everywhere they go, with the government shrinking slower than normal attrition...).
Their base is the MAGA gestalt. They like you imply do follow the will of one man however, so that's not far from the truth, but they also have a guaranteed 30% of the voting population no matter what the gestalt Prime does to them or the USA
They also wanted people who wouldn't spend money on "stupid programs", which is basically anything there isn't an immediately obvious reason for. A lot of work that government programs do is data-gathering and preparation for other, more obviously helpful programs. But these clowns don't seem to understand that, at all.
They also don't seem to understand that a lot of work isn't profit-oriented (which is the only thing the Trump administration believes in). Some programs exist because they were a benefit at the time (and yes, those need review) and may still be of use, but they always were intended to be a service for everyone, even if some people didn't use. them.
No one seems to understand the concept of government service. It's government business or nothing.
Some have said that the folks running DOGE follow an Anarcho-capitalist philosophy. According to Wikipedia, that philosophy "seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforced by private agencies." If so, I don't think they care if it's a "good" program or a "bad" program, they just want to reduce the size of government. Some might say, they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but their goal might be to throw out the baby, bathwater and the tub.
Afghanistan has that. Instead of landlords, they have warlords, just a different term for the same thing. Why is anybody interested in repeating that thing?
I've been told that billionaires think differently than the rest of us, but I still can't fathom why someone would want to be the king of a shit hole when they could be richer as a regular citizen of a liberal democracy. Why do they hate our success?
The argument I could see is that even the least king has certain privileges that no tycoon in a democratic state offers. The obvious example I could see is just the concept of legal immunity. There's no need to deluge your critics with lawyers when the courts will simply refuse to take up objections to His Majesty. It would also presumably make an excellent "flag of convenience" for your other wealth assets- create a legal framework to formally avoid taxes and liability.
Of course, I always assumed it would be cheaper to buy a regime change in some small nation of limited economic import than to wrangle a nuclear superpower, so what do I know.
If I woke up with Elon Musk's pocketbook, given I spent way too much of my childhood playing SimCity and Civilization, I'd want to experiment with some ideas on statecraft myself. Mine run to more "WWII-style ration books as a UBI distribution medium", "we're banning cars and building so much rail that people will regularly have their arms amputated by sticking them out their apartment window and hitting a passing train" and "ripping the Berne Convention to shreds and wiping with it on livestream", but clearly YMMV.
I would suggest you read “Anatomy of the State” by Murray Rothbard. I don’t want to sound rude but your comment is what people say when they haven’t read anything about it.
I used to make similar arguments like was at the top of your comment until I actually read some literature around it.
Is life really that much better for billionaires of today than kings of last millennium?
Sure you can acquire a private fleet of jets and cars now. But given that you rarely if-ever drive them it's no different than a fleet of rare animals.
Sure you can play video games and watch sports on TV but is that really much better than watching sports from a private suite?
I will conceded that their life expectancy has basically doubled but I don't think there's anything you can do as a king to fix that. If you don't hoard all the wealth it's not like life expectancy immediately doubles. A rising tide raises all ships but the tide takes centuries to do that lifting.
In fact things are worse for them today. In Versai it was the norm for the king to take a dump in a bucket in front of the whole court. Today's billionaires have to pay people to watch them do it and have to keep it hush hush.
Billionaires are transnational; they can live wherever they want. The only thing tying them to a particular country is that country's restrictions on their capital flows. They don't really care if it's a liberal democracy or not, they just want the lowest taxes and free movement of capital. If an area becomes undesirable to live in, they'll move somewhere else.
But there needs to be a somewhere else, i.e., they still depend on the liberal democracies for any quality of life above bare subsistence. While they point the finger at those democracies for being decadent and corrupt.
They needed to maintain the claim that democracy should be destroyed, in order to prop up their ideologies, without actually going ahead and destroying it. Oops.
The DOGE members are tech bros who are into classic Randian libertarianism,small government that only protects money and property, and all other "public services" would be provided by private markets. They want to make government look weak and impotent so that people like Musk, Bezos, the Waltons, etc can provide those services at a premium or "fuck you". it's a downward spiral that concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and creates a permanent class of serfs and slaves. Until they figure out that won't work here when the masses have had enough and communism starts looking pretty good when you and your children and freezing and starving and you have a basement full of guns and ammo that you can't eat.
Michael Lewis paints a different picture in his book “The Fifth Risk” where govt infrastructure is leveraged for private profits. Ex: AccuWeather uses NOAA data to make their products while lobbying to make the same NOAA data inaccessible to others.
Most of the people that seem to be influential seem to be either Paleo-cons, Rothbardians and people that are believers in the Austrian School of Economics.
I am not an ancap because there are some major problems with their philosophy, but your analysis is just incorrect.
> All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
> The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.
[…]
> The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”
Have you ever read cyberpunk, especially William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (starting with Neuromancer) where corporations are the government? Basically that.
Indeed I believe that the current administration's end-goal is the collapse of the US as we know it. Thiel and other billionaires need the collapse to create their own cyberpunk states inside current US territory. The remaining territory will be probably taken by Project 2025 guys, who want to rule it as a Christian theocracy / far-right utopia.
Another possibility is that the uber-rich techbros can see that, if we keep heading the way we're going, the whole thing comes crashing down. We've been speedrunning a far-left utopia for quite a while now, and it's not going well. Whether it's some kind of currency collapse, internal civil war, or something else, this is a death slide towards something bad.
Assuming that's the explanation, then radical change isn't surprising. How radical can be argued, but turning the rudder on the ship of state can't be.
Depends from the definition of "far-left utopia" I guess.
I admit that I'm an outsider, but in terms of social welfare and equality, the US still seems closer to capitalist dystopia than a far-left utopia. Expensive healthcare mostly tied to work / insurance, very expensive education, high wealth inequality and pretty poor social safety nets.
At the same time, on many "culture war" issues America has seemed too extreme for my taste. For instance, discriminating people based on their "race" in university admissions is absolutely insane. But the solution to fixing these crazy ideas shouldn't be going all the way to far-right, with its own crazies like anti-vaxxers, Putin fanboys and climate-change deniers. I miss the times when most popular politicians were centrists.
Being a distraction from the fact that Trump is raising taxes on average Americans (tariffs) while trying to blow out the deficit to the tune of $2 trillion to finance tax cuts to the rich.
Didn’t they cancel some cancer treatment research projects?
I am sure the Head of the health department — one that doesn’t consider measles a problem — has given his stamp of approval for that, after all, he has a whole 0 years in all tangentially related fields combined!
> Didn’t they cancel some cancer treatment research projects?
“Cancel” suggest more decision-making than appears to have happened, at least in the research projects I am aware of—a number had to be canceled by those running them because the unprecedented blanket payment pause notionally to evaluate programs existing programs made it impossible for them to continue operating.
> my understanding is, they will do literally anything to make sure DOGE succeeds, because a failure is basically unacceptable.
Not sure I buy that. My general expectation is that once there’s a big, major problem which annoys the general public, Musk will be thrown to the wolves. See Trump’s previous go round; very few of his people stayed in favour for the whole administration.
> Targeting ex-employees of successful product companies and putting them in charge (especially the ones with a lot of money, but a bit lost because they want can’t find meaning in life)
there was a post a couple of months back on HN from such a person who worked with DOGE for a bit
I think they will declare mission accomplished. MAGAs will swallow it like it's ambrosia of the gods, people who voted didn't support him as a messiah will shrug and hope for tax breaks, the rest of us know it's a grift.
A conservative movement has no end goal. The dismantling of the government will never be over for them. The point is destroying progress, not a specific government size.
Or just setup Redirector* to automatically redirect you to xcancel (and old.reddit.com, and away from whatever other hostile websites there are these days...)
HN’s policy is that one should submit the original link, hence providing a more accessible but not original link as a comment is the correct thing to do.
To add a bit to what layer8 correctly said: it's also for displaying the original provenance of the article (i.e. the domain it came from), and for making the /from pages that list submissions from a domain work properly. That may not matter when there's just one:
I clicked the twitter link. Perhaps because I don’t have an account, I don’t see any Community Notes nor can I read any other posts in the thread, so no point in using the “official” link.
And it’s not like Community Notes will remain reliable.
Because it is a pending note. Which often already are extremely relevant. Many see these as prominently as other CN's as becoming a "Community Noter" is not too hard.
>And it’s not like Community Notes will remain reliable.
That's as useless like saying your house might burn down in the next hour so might as well not go inside during a storm. CN's are the best weapon we have against misinformation given they require consensus from people that have disagreed in the past. Track record of CN's is unbeatable. They sure as hell are better than the abuse of flagging my factual parent comment on HN. Shame on whoever did that, but a honor system clearly isn't enough, sadly not even on HN.
No, it’s not like that in the slightest. Read the link, my comments was within its context, not made in a vaccumm. The point is precisely that one person, the owner of the platform, wants to change Community Notes to agree with his own opinions and world view.
You clearly do not understand how Community Notes work given you're talking of "how one person wants to change them".
Good thing is that no single person can change them. Their data and source code is open. So your point is nothing but some anti-Elon propaganda basically.
Works created by U.S. federal government employees as part of their official duties are in the public domain, according to 17 U.S.C. § 105, except for classified or restricted information (but none of what he posted is classified or restricted)
That is a clear misinterpretation of the law. The law says that copyright protections do not exist for government work created for a government capacity except where noted. That does not mean any of that work is in the public domain. Just because copyright protections are not available does not mean other intellectual property protections are equally void.
By the way it seems most of the stuff I produce for the government contains copyright notices. I don't know if those notices are valid or not, but none of the stuff I produce is in the public domain or released to the public.
If they are an actual federal employee then they will need a 'cooling off' period before they can work in the private sector in an area related to their government work (I don't see that happening).
This depends on their role. That more applies to people involved in contract decisions and execution (the legal/financial parts, not the doing the technical work part). For programmers, they can move back and forth relatively freely, but should go through their agency's legal office to be certain.
They are not. They de facto cancelled contracts while rooting around at the Treasury. Given the lack of transparency at DOGE, it’s unclear how the front-line bros can claim they were following official instructions versus making calls on their own.
Does that also applied to all of the employees that have been DOGEd? For example, would someone that just got fired from NOAA need a cooling off period before getting hired at AccuWeather? That seems to be the MAGA solution for all of the NOAA employees.
Not necessarily, see my other comment. If they were involved in, say, a contract selection to integrate with AccuWeather's other data sources and models then they could be restricted from working at AccuWeather or in what they can do at AccuWeather. It looks like a quid pro quo if you're involved in contract selection and get hired by that same company. Introducing the delay reduces that appearance, it also makes a real quid pro quo less likely.
If they were a meteorologist conducting analysis and improving models, they could get hired on without difficulty. If they were the developer tasked with doing that integration after the contract was awarded, it also shouldn't be an issue to get hired by AccuWeather.
DOGE moving under the presidents executive office instead of as a separate agency seemed to be done for the purpose of shielding DOGE From FOIA and only subject to President Records Act
I'm not asking how to go about requesting his code, I'm asking whether the policy you cite allows him to decide what is public domain himself or if one has to work through processes and procedures to release and obtain that code.
> U.S. federal government employees as part of their official duties
“Official duties” is load bearing in this sentence.
If the work is found to have been improperly authorised, this DOGE bro is acting in his personal capacity. That means personal liability for his actions and lawbreaking.
I think it’s pretty hard to show an employee is not acting in an official duty in regards to work material. I don’t think this is a sound legal opinion.
> it’s pretty hard to show an employee is not acting in an official duty
Not if they’re violating a court order without executive privilege.
Wick officially works for the USDS and CFPB. If Bessent and Trump haven’t given a clear order to violate the law, his actions cease to be on behalf of the United States but instead enacted in his personal capacity. Similar to a park ranger walking into a military base and trying to run off with some kit.
Counter: Especially when they can decide without any resistance from the judicial branch who is an officer, an official, etc. They interpret all laws as being friendly to them and ignore the contradictions when it suits them. This isn’t rule of law and you know it. Sound legal opinions don’t mean shit now.
This is a ridiculous statement. The US Government (or any government) has processes to publish data so that it is well vetted and understood. Some script kiddie isn't allowed to just post things in public on his own.
roughly speaking - the work products of the US Federal Govt are public unless specifically ruled otherwise. It may be hard to believe that, but historically it is the exact opposite of the British Crown policy "all government information is restricted unless specifically ruled otherwise" IANAL
Given they have to be vetted the same way as any other government employee with that access, including security clearances, I’m not sure these will succeed.
At least to my mind it’s not clear how a government employee can have access but for doge it’s breaking the law. The devil is in the specific details.
> they have to be vetted the same way as any other government employee with that access, including security clearances
We know this wasn’t done when they were rummaging around the Treasury. Courts are granting restraining orders because the DOGE bros acted so incompetently. (It’s generally incredibly hard to restrain government employees.)
> it’s not clear how a government employee can have access but for doge it’s breaking the law
Same way a park ranger can’t walk onto a military base and start rummaging through documents. Or start tweeting them. (Or hell, the President himself tweet your tax return.)
Firing people on false pretenses (telling them they're being fired for poor performance when that wasn't the case and they're even being told by their overseers that it's not the case) breaks labor laws.
I feel they are actively shoring up the country’s foundations. For decades, since the Church committee in the 1970s and under Vice President Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative (which IIRC resulted in the removal of 100,000 government employees), disclosure of questionable or hidden programs was a core progressive value.
You're responding to someone who believes DOGE is getting rid of corruption in government while Musk is capturing contracts for his own companies. There's no point in responding to people like them. They aren't based in reality.
If the individual is living in a fantasy land, then any responses here will be discarded by them as fantasy themselves. Someone who legitimately believes that Musk is fighting corruption when Musk is also directing contracts to his own businesses is in a fantasy land.
If the individual is trolling, which could be the case here, then responding is just feeding the troll. It encourages them.
The better thing in both cases is to ignore them. At most, respond to the comment, but not the individual, with facts (like that Musk is directing contracts to his own companies) so that others don't fall into the same fantasy land.
> At most, respond to the comment, but not the individual, with facts
There is still a purpose for the response. It may not be for a particular reader, but there are other readers. It would be worth it to flag and move on if there is nothing to engage with but that’s not the case here.
> administrative state (created during FDR) is going away
Created by FDR through acts of the Congress. DOGE is ironically recapitulating the lawlessness that tanked Sourh Africa’s economy.
Also, we’re seeing a breathless expansion of federal executive power. The administrative state isn’t going away. It’s being subsumed. The size of the government is being increased, not decreased—that’s why the GOP budget calls for $2 trillion in new deficits over ten years.
One can celebrate cost cutting. But other than USAID, there is no sign anything durable is being done. The power of the central government is being expanded in ways that should be obviously problematic for anyone thinking ahead: next cycle, a Dem President can just cancel student debts by firing everyone in loan collections and shredding the loan documents.
What functional, diplomatic purpose exists for calling him a "bozo"? What problems does this solve? Which tensions does this ease? Which conflicts does this stop? What sensitive government data does this un-leak? Which broken laws does this adjudicate? What usurped power is being brought back under control with this?
Or is it just contributing to a one-way ratchet that only ever increases partisan polarization and hostility for no reason at all, instead of seeking to de-escalate and solve problems?
P.S. this goes for Trump/Musk/DOGE supporters too. Name calling and vindictive personal attacks aren't decreasing the deficit, they're not paying off the debt, they're not reducing weaponization of government against conservatives, they're doing nothing to address border and immigration concerns, and they aren't reducing crime. So I ask you, too, what problems are being solved with vindictive, spiteful namecalling?
On one hand, you have a a group that is working very quickly to make irreversible changes (likely in violation of many laws) before the judiciary catches up and enjoins them.
On the other hand you have an internet user calling them a bozo.
De-escalating the conflict and lowering the temperature of discourse, as you suggest, massively favors the group trying to ram through these changes. If we take a deep breath and calmly work it out, it will already be over and nothing can be done.
Elected officials take notice of these urgent issues when there is significant public outcry. Now I'm not saying that one person calling them bozos meaningfully moves the needle, but as a principle if a regular person wants to do their best to stop what is happening, they must use strong language.
> Name calling and vindictive personal attacks aren't decreasing the deficit
The GOP budget blows out our deficit by an additional $2 trillion over the next ten years. This government doesn’t actually care about the deficit.
DOGE is some combination of a loyalty purge, giving Musk keep-busy work, a distraction from Trump’s tax increases & proposed deficit spending and propaganda.
> what problems are being solved with vindictive, spiteful namecalling?
Piss people off. Particularly in the centre. The far right has been ignoring norms and now the law. We need the centre enraged enough to break at least norms and conventions to go after these folks. I’m personally interested in the state laws the DOGE bros may be breaking.
The OP is not. He’s calling someone working on a project, posting his code to GitHub names.
The correct response in a democratic society to people attacking political enemies as enemies of the state, spreading untruths, attacking the rule of law, and acting like assholes is _to not do these these things_.
I’m really baffled by this take. How are you not understanding the basic fact that these are criminals actively performing a coup to destroy the “democratic society”, not political opponents?
I'm a bit on the edge regarding to why someone on DOGE should collect data on critical infrastructure, even if it's available to the public audience for free.
I'm also quite worried by the possibility to filter federal workers based on the union status
Saying “the quiet part out loud” is kind of a hallmark with this team’s approach though, so watching it steamroll over any auspices of ethical behavior is noteworthy.
I don't the author of the tweet, but I don't know how he's arrived at the conclusion that there's some smoking gun. A datavis script? And, I mean, really, a tweet downloader?
It's not like he made a gee you eye in VB or something...
Most federal workers aren’t openly and flagrantly breaking the law. Given each DOGE bro has violated several laws in the past weeks, it’s prudent to focus attention on them. Not too much. But enough that there is a public record for litigation and prosecution at the state and local level in the future.
I was working at a MNC a few years ago and some junior developer did this to one of our codebases "so he could work on it at home" (pre-covid). When it was discovered his access to everything was immediately shut off, company assets confiscated and he was escorted out the building by security.
My comment was tongue in cheek. I'm not a web focused guy and I learned HTML long enough ago that I have no specific moral objection to tables. I used them in a quick personal project a few months ago.
I get it. I'm just adding, as an aside, that they actually do have a perfectly good place. For one thing, there are off-the-shelf libraries that'll turn an HTML table into a pretty good PDF. Saved me weeks of work back when I was buried in financial reporting.
From the perspective of wanting to maintain the integrity of the American federal government, it seems like all this DOGE stuff (and the whole Trumpist movement in general) serves the purpose of a red team, in the cybersecurity sense; people with nebulous intent have gotten access to everything.
So now, if Americans care about the integrity of their government, there needs to be a blue team: how can this catastrophic level of access be dealt with, and how can it be safeguarded against in the future. Alas, I'm not seeing this perspective being enacted. The obvious security compromise is being allowed to stand and continue, usually on the basis that "separation of powers" and "checks and balances" are relied on to be effective; congress will stop this, or the courts will stop this. But we're watching these mechanisms fail.
So, what's the plan here? Where's the counter-offensive? We're watching a system being hacked, and I've yet to see anyone talk about a recovery plan, or a prevention plan.
The cynic in me thinks these kids were recruited as "useful idiots." Musk has shown he is capable of recruiting competent people, but it's pretty clear these aren't them. History has shown that it's a lot easier to radicalize and weaponize incompetent young adults whose self-image has been built up in an environment of privilege. Without personal accountability, it's a lot easier to be angry at the world for denying you the success everyone tells you that you deserve.
Looks like they used it to scrape the DMs for the @doge account, as they are calling for people to report "fraud" there. Crazy that the US government is allowing a third party such as X to have such control.
I mean false as in filing a DMCA claim just to take down something you don't like rather than to protect material that actually means anything. So, false as in morally, not legally.
Besides, this shit was clearly at least 90% AI-generated anyway, and I think the jury is still out on whether some specific arrangement of AI-generated chunks of code actually even counts as a copyrighted work.
But everyone knows the drill is DMCA notices now, lawsuits years to decades later.
Did anything other than your gut reaction tell you that the information was classified or secret? I take issue with your use of the word "disinformation". This whole thing is a nothing burger, to be clear.
I wish I could downvote all these political topics to get them off the front page; they're so toxic. I feel like the submission system has been taken over by political operatives, which is disappointing.
According to official documentation submitted to the court by the current US Administration, the person running DOGE, was on holiday in Mexico when nominated.
This is literally nothing - visualizing an org chart using D3 (a JS dataviz library), playing around with open source geospatial datasets, and a Twitter DM downloader for personal use.
Look at the screenshots, not the description by this "politics reporter" who seems to be indulging in evidence-free witch hunts.
Exactly, these look like baby’s first JavaScript projects. Surprising considering these doge employees are supposed to be genius coder whiz kids, and yet this looks like the work of someone following a tutorial to write their first tweet downloader.
Does being a 'genius coder whiz kid' imply knowledge of every technology? Should one only be allowed to publish code according to your standards? What kind of nonsense is this?
It implies knowing your boss owns X and you shouldn’t need to write a downloader at all, direct DB access is more efficient, they should know this they’ve been doing a lot of it lately.
Let's skip the statement that Musk being the head to both DOGE (a public agency) & X (a private company) somehow makes it acceptable for one to have access to the other's sensitive data, the downloader project could be unrelated to their DOGE work.
The DOGE staffer gets infinite chances, infinite understanding, and infinite excuses. The staffers DOGE targets, if they're lucky, get one chance to prove loyalty.
I wonder if they programmed that into them through RLHF, as a way of trying to teach the model that a preceding comment should be completed by whatever code is described by the comment
I make comments like this all the time because I write code for people to read, not robots. Well-commented code allows you to skim very quickly, and gives a sanity check, allowing others to ensure a line or block of code does what it is expected to do.
That's not well-commented code, that's just noise. When you are calling a function named "read_csv()", you do not need to add a comment that says "Read the CSV file". These sorts of comments make code harder for humans to read.
The hill that I will die on is that if you need to comment what your code is doing, your code is either a) bad and should be rewritten to be clearer, or b) the result of tricky, clever optimization that you needed to do after profiling.
Comments should tell readers why you're doing something, when it's not obvious based on the code itself.
I agree that there should be "why" comments. Those are great to have in any codebase. However, that does not preclude descriptive comments.
Obviously, the best way to make code self-documenting is to wrap logic in a method whose name clearly describes its intended function. For one-liners however this can lead to overabstraction, and leaving a "what" comment can be entirely appropriate if the engineer decides it is. This cult-like behavior of engineers who think that well-commented code is some sign of weakness or unprofessionalism is beyond silly.
Absolutisms are a sign of a bad engineer, but I can give you the benefit of the doubt and not assume you're a bad engineer just because you employ such absolutist statements and use erroneously use them to judge code by oversimplified metrics instead of relying on deeper analysis.
A well-placed comment serves as an anchor for the eye when skimming large amounts of code, and provides a sanity check. This is something you would come to appreciate when working in certain environments.
Does this mean every line of code needs an accompanying comment? No, that is absurd. But what's also absurd is the amount of judgement and unwarranted extrapolation over this particular bit of code, and the general defensiveness which most people in this thread seem to be engaging in. I leave comments like this sometimes if I think it helps increase code clarity.
I didn't say always. I made a general statement and avoided absolutist terms. "Are" is not an absolutist term if you charitably interpret my comment and I'm happy to clarify if you need it, however I don't need to append every comment with a disclaimer so that people like you don't respond with meaningless criticism towards some straw man.
Please review the Hacker News guidelines, especially this excerpt:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
This is a bad comment. It adds nothing to clarify anything, since the function in the line below is "read_csv." This would be a textbook example of a comment that is not useful to improve legibility by humans and it demonstrates a lack of expertise among the people who are currently dismantling our government.
I'm sorry, but a code comment does not demonstrate lack of expertise, although such a perspective certainly brings your own expertise into question. Perhaps we should all assume a little less?
Yes it clearly does. A comment that is 100% noise and adds no value whatsoever to the codebase demonstrates a lack of expertise. I would expect undergrads and very junior engineers to write comments like this and then very quickly stop when told why these sorts of comments are a straightforwardly bad thing.
Comments are good. I am a huge proponent of more comments over fewer comments. I have written functions where 80% of the lines are comments. But this is a bad comment for very simple to understand reasons.
I think it does, objectively. In a pull request, I’d comment: “You imported pandas with an abbreviation. You economize the variable name `df` instead of dataframe. Those anticipate a reader who already knows when to chose the read_csv method.”
If you are in charge of reviewing someone's pull request and ensuring they adhere to specified company guidelines, you can do whatever your organization wants. Outside of that though, you lack the authority to tell programmers how many comments are too much. I too know how to write self-documenting code, but that doesn't mean your code should have no comments or shouldn't be liberally commented.
GP mentions that this is a textbook unnecessary comment and I would beware any textbook and professed expert that disagrees.
Whether a LLM coding model demonstrates understanding of unnecessary comments might be interesting, as would any differentiation in quality if my prompt asked for more or fewer lines of comments.
And I would beware any professed expert who has such a oversimplified heuristic of what makes a good engineer.
> Whether a LLM coding model demonstrates understanding of unnecessary comments might be interesting
I think it would be an interesting experiment, that sounds like a great idea for you to pursue. Make sure to sample a wide variety of models, and include a caveat that LLMs are not a source of truth regarding such matters, as they are simply providing probabilistic text completions based on prior training data.
You'd get the spirit roasted out of you at any FAANG (at least, back when people gave a shit) if you ever sent out a change review with such a dumbass comment.
I have no problem adapting to style guidelines of specific codebases I contribute to. It would, however, behoove you to have similar respect for other coding styles which have zero impact on the quality of code itself and serves a particular purpose for a particular kind of person who might not particularly care what someone at a FAANG (lol appeal to authority) thinks about their code style.
This is not a case of "code for people to read". If you want that, maybe try literate programming[0]. I prefer in the case where the code is blindingly fucking obvious for there not to be an extra comment above it that adds no value whatsoever. I much prefer for comments to be about the theory of the code rather than to explain in a worse way what I can already clearly see simply by reading the code. In other words I much prefer comments about, say, why some particular data structure was chosen, over comments that only say shit like "create a new linked list".
How about we don't tell other people how to code? It's one thing to make suggestions, it's another to make demands. I've been doing this for a long time and I can code laps around most people. I also like well-commented code that allows me to quickly skim code and check it for correctness.
You can have your preferences all you want and that's great, but when you start passing irrational judgement about the value of someone's code just because it's liberally commented, your perspective becomes less respectable.
> How about we don't tell other people how to code? It's one thing to make suggestions, it's another to make demands. I've been doing this for a long time and I can code laps around most people. I also like well-commented code that allows me to quickly skim code and check it for correctness.
I'm sorry, that was not intended to be received as a demand, I edited my comment to hopefully clarify.
> You can have your preferences all you want and that's great, but when you start passing irrational judgement about the value of someone's code just because it's liberally commented, your perspective becomes less respectable.
I didn't say anything about the value of your or anyone's code other than that obvious comments don't add any to me. (I do tend to find it funny when a comment manages to obviously contradict the code that it's about, but here that's not the case.) My point was more that comments are more useful to me when they're non-obvious. See, again, the data structure example.
I appreciate the edit and I do think we could have an enjoyable and fruitful conversation about this. Normally I would, but I have a lot going on today. I do appreciate your willingness to have a productive conversation about this topic and I apologize if I let my frustration toward some of the other commenters in this thread affect how I engaged with you specifically :)
Generating boring one off analysis scripts is the best use case for AI code writing, so can’t fault them for doing so. For serious projects I found LLMs—even cutting edge Claude Sonnet 3.7 in agent mode—just can’t generate a large amount of code with the level of consistency and quality I expect and fixing such code is barely faster than writing it myself with AI autocomplete. But little scripts that I throw away after a single use? What used to take fifteen minutes or longer now takes thirty seconds.
Yes you can because they are accessing sensitive government data with it and that requires more time effort and care than the barest of bare minimum...
What do you mean? I don't write code with AI because figuring out how to code things is not what takes a lot of time in my job. That's the fun bit, why would I automate it? What takes time is coming to alignment with the team on what problem we are solving, figuring out what is possible, and aligning on a solution based on the available tradeoffs. Is there some way AI is supposed to be able to help me with that?
No, it just does the layout, not the text. Much like LLMs do the code tokens but not the goal. Abstraction in all things, and automation of the lower levels does not devalue the higher levels (that is, a traffic sign works the same regardless if hand painted or commercially printed).
They were making the point that using a word processor as a tool isn't the same as having an LLM write something, then retain the LLM generated changes such that it is immediately obvious the bulk of the code was generated by an LLM, not that it isn't possible to discern whether someone is using a word processor.
What made me suspicious, immediately, was that in their org chart has "union status".
For payment systems, it's incredibly important for the employer to know whether to withhold some portion of the paycheck for union dues, obviously. But given how they are likely using this information, which isn't tied to payroll, it's worrying and only increases the need for feds to move over to direct pay systems that they are already transitioning to, for their safety. Especially given some other moves the administration made last week in the space of collecting union activity (specifically on stewards) data.
There’s a good chance the reason this is public is because he was using gist to transfer ChatGPT code between his personal computer and his government computer.
Probably true. I work in a regulated space and I have done this to get my zsh config to a secure laptop, but I have always had the common sense to mark the gist as hidden (can still be accessed if you know the hash, obvs).
I don't care about the twitter DM thing, I care about gathering ton of open source sensitive data by an organization which is disemboweling the bureaucratic apparatus from within
You can buy soil fertilizer and other things online, but with a specific combination of purchases 3 letters agencies will think you're building a bomb.
The same way, an agency who is led by a pathoilogical liar, who is not following pre existing guidelines to make the state apparatus more efficient, (and i could go on for hours) who has a worker who compiles an extensive list of sensitive infrastructure, even if publicly available, makes my spider sense tingle
What a weird thing to say. They are slashing and burning government and routing the permanent bureaucracy of democrats that run the country no matter who wins the election. That’s simply what the GOP has been promising to do for decades, but has been too feckless to do until now.
That’s ridiculous on the face of it, unless you think GOP appointed heads of agencies have been in on it, and that there has been a massive conspiracy for years with no real evidence leaking.
All you have to do is look at how Trump is treating Zelenskyy and praising Putin to know that he's in Putin's hip pocket, either out of stupidity or is an actual asset that they have компромат on
> how Trump is treating Zelenskyy and praising Putin to know that he's in Putin's hip pocket
Ukraine has been my pet war for the last few years. I have to disagree.
Trump doesn’t particularly care what happens to Ukraine. He needs the dollars we’re sending to Europe to finance his tax cut and trade war. I’m less convinced Trump is acting at Putin’s direction than that he’s looking for the nearest guy to offload the problem onto.
I would be more willing to believe that if not for the first-order result of the current administration's aims being a 6% GDP loss from kicking out illegal immigrants and another 6% loss from what Musk says he's aiming for with DOGE, plus another 1% GDP loss from the tariffs.
That said, I am willing to believe Trump wants to use Musk to cut whatever he can actually cut, and then throw him under a bus for the political fallout of those cuts. That plus Musk's habit of making maximal promises and delivering "merely" impressive results, means I think DOGE will actually cut a lot less than $2T — I don't see how even "just" $200bn would be anything less than a major geopolitical shift felt well outside the US, that breaks something so hard that Trump will want a fall-guy. Same for the illegal immigrants: kicking them out may be a vote winner, but they're too important, so I expect perhaps 10% of them to actually be removed.
But that still produces a 2.2% GDP contraction. Ukraine aid won't come close to covering that.
I would agree something has to be going on that we're not aware of. He went to Russia in 1987 on business, met with some shady characters, came back and immediately placed a $100,000 ad in the NY Times that points fingers at other countries "taking advantage" of the US to promote the idea of US isolationism. He was not political before that trip, and since then it's been his life mission to separate us from our alliances. Now he's parroting lies directly from Putin's mouth gaslighting the world about who invaded who. He's certainly done a good job of keeping whatever it is secret, but it's pretty easy to see what's going on from his actions. Either he's been directly compromised or Russia's running a very effective influence campaign to basically brainwash certain people of influence without their direct knowledge.
BTW the ad is in this article for anyone who's interested:
Noticing patterns is "tinfoil hat" territory while ignoring oddly specific and contemporary strategic infrastructure leaks is just "rational thinking."
I'll try to be more reasonable and assume it's pure coincidence that incompetence consistently aligns with foreign interests. Much more plausible.
When patterns become too obvious, just label them "conspiracy theories." Much easier than explaining why critical infrastructure leaks consistently benefit the same interests.
Funny how skepticism disappears when billionaires dismantle democracy—that's just "innovation," right?
Genuinely curious here. How does this relate to Putin being captured by Russia/Putin? This, to me, looks like textbook ineptitude not foreign interference.
I want to be clear. I'm not casting doubt on observations that Trump does currently echo Russian talking points. I'm also not trying to argue that he's not captured by Russian interests. I'm merely wondering how this specific piece of information points to that conclusion.
I understand your question's fairness, but consider what's actually being exposed here: geospatial data on undersea cables, ports, and "critical minerals" - precisely the vulnerable infrastructure points that would interest foreign intelligence services, particularly Russia.
This isn't mere incompetence - it's a clear alarming pattern. The Trump administration has consistently mishandled classified information while simultaneously adopting positions that align perfectly with Russian strategic interests regarding NATO, Ukraine, and European security.
When a DOGE staffer carelessly exposes sensitive infrastructure data that maps America's strategic vulnerabilities, and does so while the administration pushes policies beneficial to Russia, the connection becomes impossible to ignore.
This incident isn't separate from Russian influence - it's another manifestation of how this administration's OpSec is compromised at the most fundamental level, creating opportunities for exploitation by the very foreign powers they seem reluctant to oppose.
How old are you? Trump isn’t echoing “russian talking points.” He just sounds like an anti-interventionist democrat of the 1980s and 1990s. The neocons have been accusing that faction of “echoing russian talking points” since vietnam.
I remember the anti-interventionist Democrats of the 80s and 90s quite well. They criticized military adventures but never suggested dismantling NATO, abandoning treaty allies, or praising dictators while undermining their own intelligence agencies.
Funny how this "anti-interventionism" only applies to defending democracies against Russian aggression, but not to inserting troops into cities to confront protesters or threatening military action against political opponents.
The neocons accused the left of being soft. They never had evidence of infrastructure data being leaked while presidential rhetoric perfectly aligned with a specific foreign power's strategic objectives.
But please, continue your historical revisionism. It's fascinating how "America First" now means "Russia's interests first."
> I remember the anti-interventionist Democrats of the 80s and 90s quite well. They criticized military adventures but never suggested dismantling NATO, abandoning treaty allies, or praising dictators while undermining their own intelligence agencies
You’re making it sound like they were on board with the general idea of using american power to police the world, but only disagreed on the particulars. That was not the case. For example, a common refrain was to criticize America’s military bases all over the world, or spending 10 times as much on defense as the next 10 countries combined: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili....
You make it sound like they merely objected to use of that infrastructure in particular conflicts for fact-specific reasons. That’s not true. Anti-interventionist liberals opposed the idea of using american military power to defend far-away borders, and the imperialism and military apparatus required to underwrite that commitment.
> Funny how this "anti-interventionism" only applies to defending democracies against Russian aggression, but not to inserting troops into cities to confront protesters or threatening military action against political opponents.
Shutting down riots is good for the vast majority of americans. Defending far away borders isn’t. The logic is simple.
Anti-interventionist Democrats criticized military spending but never advocated abandoning treaty obligations that maintained global stability since WWII.
(or you would prefer that the US hadn’t even joined the Allies in WWII?)
There's a profound difference between questioning military budgets and actively undermining alliances while praising dictators.
Your characterization whitewashes the specific nature of Trump's positions, which uniquely align with Russian strategic objectives in ways no previous anti-interventionist movement ever did.
As for "shutting down riots is good for the vast majority of Americans" while "defending far away borders isn't"—that's revealing. Democracy only matters within arbitrary geographic boundaries? The same argument justified ignoring Hitler's early aggressions.
Strange how this selective "anti-interventionism" consistently benefits one specific foreign power while dismissing democratic values as irrelevant beyond US borders.
But I understand—principles are flexible when they're just convenient vehicles for power rather than actual beliefs.
> Anti-interventionist Democrats criticized military spending but never advocated abandoning treaty obligations that maintained global stability since WWII. There's a profound difference between questioning military budgets and actively undermining alliances while praising dictators.
Anti-interventionists opposed the maintenance of American hegemony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMyJWuvW_9k. For example, they opposed having military bases all over the world. I distinctly remember a debate about this in 1999 or so in high school world history class. We mocked a crazy chinese anti-communist kid for saying that maintaining american hegemony was important.
It was not just a quibble about the particulars of defense spending. That would have been an irrational position--to say we should maintain our commitment to maintain worldwide borders frozen in time as they were in 1950 but somehow do that without having military bases everywhere and spending enormous sums on defense.
> Democracy only matters within arbitrary geographic boundaries?
Yes, obviously! How other people run their countries is none of America's business. E.g. as long as Syria was keeping Muslim terrorists from attacking America, it was irrelevant to America how many of his own people he killed.
> The same argument justified ignoring Hitler's early aggressions.
Strange how this selective "anti-interventionism" consistently benefits one specific foreign power while dismissing democratic values as irrelevant beyond US borders.
For god's sake read another book. Evangelizing "democratic values" is how the U.S. has long justified immiserating people in other countries and toppling their governments. It's the fundamentally incorrect ideology that led to the Iraq War. And if your only takeaway from that disaster is that the execution was flawed but democracy-promotion is fundamentally sound then you're beyond helping.
> > Democracy only matters within arbitrary geographic boundaries?
> Yes, obviously! How other people run their countries is none of America's business. E.g. as long as Syria was keeping Muslim terrorists from attacking America, it was irrelevant to America how many of his own people he killed.
Where do you think the Syrian's that don't want to die go? This question applies to other countries as well such as say Mexico.
The world is very connected and ignoring that fact will just leave with you ton of problems. Say at the southern border ...
Your "yes, obviously!" response is refreshingly honest. At least you admit moral values are irrelevant to your worldview—just raw power and self-interest matter.
This isn't the anti-interventionism of principled peace activists; it's naked realpolitik stripped of ethical pretense.
I opposed the Iraq War too—the difference is I don't use it to justify abandoning democracies facing genuine aggression. Opposing misguided interventions doesn't require embracing callous isolationism.
Strange how your selective anti-interventionism consistently aligns with Russian strategic objectives while claiming to represent American interests. You've moved from opposing specific military actions to dismissing the entire concept of international solidarity.
The line between principled non-intervention and moral abdication isn't that difficult to see—unless you're deliberately looking away.
It’s funny how you’re in every thread in this topic, defending the indefensible. So Trump saying that “Ukraine should never have started it” [0] is not echoing a Russian talking point?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
A nothingburger. Not common to see such blatant misinfo high on HN. I do have higher expectations on this and people here instead of people jumping on a hatewagon :/
Community note on the post:
The geospatial data the reporter claims is "sensitive data" is not actually sensitive data. It is open source data. The source files in the DOGE employee's GitHub repository point to an open source site accessible by anyone.
HN's approach to political stories has been stable for many years: most are off-topic, but some are ok; but only some.
'Stable' here means stable over time. The proportion of political stories goes through pretty big fluctuations (mostly in response to macro social events, e.g. elections), but HN's principles remain the same, and the swings eventually subside*.
* perhaps ironically, this 'stability' includes the phenomenon of users complaining that HN is turning too much into a political site. For a glimpse into how far back that goes, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
While I too find it distasteful and distracting, the inclination to expunge politics from conversation may have played a role in getting us (at least in the US) where we are: 1) where people have forgotten to talk about politics politely, and 2) where politics have been weaponized by tuning to especially divisive issues specifically for high-engagement.
And that is where many of us have played a role: increasing engagement.
DOGE is a creature of Silicon Valley. Paul Graham spends his time now opining on woke [1]. One can escape base partisanship. But the political economy makes any attempt to escape politics pretend.
This is messed up... The guy took his github down now... This witch hunt against doge is just so incredibly unnerving... all public information, obviously using cursor to write basic scripts(i.g. //insert your script here, and inline comments describing basic code) and posting it on his github for future use, sharing, and boosting his 'hireability'. He seems to be rapid fire coding and sharing what he can... he had 35 repo's last time i checked.
He also wasn't the only doge team member who seems to be doing it, hopefully they don't all stop posting their code because of this...
This may or may not be breaking the law, but who is checking? Where are the controls? Forget checks and controls, there is no willingness on anyone in power to even ask the question.
Ironically, fear of losing power has paralyzed everyone that objectively have no power in Washington as they just exist to please the two presidents.
A surprisingly large amount of data one might think is classified is not at all. In this case all the examples listed are from freely available public data outside of the Twitter thing which seems to be just setting up the environment for some local tool. Here are the sites:
---
datacatalog.worldbank.org
opendata.arcgis.com
mrdata.usgs.gov / www.usgs.gov
---
Sharing things like this isn't very useful because it just causes further divides. People who think DOGE is not a big deal will use this to confirm that 'oh no the worst they could dig up is somebody posting publicly accessible data in public!' And those who do think it's a big deal will often just double down on stupid and insist this was leaking secret information, even when they probably know it wasn't. So you end up with people living in two different worlds, but only one of them is real.
https://openstreetmap.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.h...
There are actually a lot public information available on Layers -> ArcGIS Online.
I used to see ongoing Waterworks maintenance in there. In the area I live, there are also very up to date earthquake information from Government feed.
Usually: actually a third world is real. As constructed in your narrative there is a difference in the deltas between the two worlds and the third (i.e. one is more real).
> Sharing things like this isn't very useful because it just causes further divides.
Perhaps creating division is the point:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
Yeah the "sensitive geospatial data" is just open data. He also created the geospatial gists before trump was in office so he definitely didn't have access to critical data then https://web.archive.org/web/20250228230950/https://gist.gith...
The problem is, compiling the list like he has, and being on the DOGE team, makes it all very, very suspicious. And it is sensitive data - even if it is open. Those are important infrastructure locations.
> And it is sensitive data - even if it is open.
This is literally contradictory.
Data does not become sensitive because some random on HN says so. You are speaking with authority but have no idea what you are talking about.
This is nonsense. If infrastructure locations are not classified then every potential malicious actor already knows them.
He is saying the malicious actor is doge itself, if I understood what is being said by the previous comment. Which is the idea behind which I posted the news here on hn
> Sharing things like this isn't very useful because it just causes further divides.
I gave up trying to gentle parent other adults a long time ago. Newsrooms themselves have no fear publishing disingenuous and polarizing content.
If by that you mean newsrooms are happy to publish stories full of the disingenuous sayings and doings of those who hope to benefit from polarization and chaos, I agree.
Not even data, html snippets with links to publicly available data.
Watch at the media turns this into “doge bros mapping top secret minerals” and “doge has access to all our DMs!”
For those who hate Trump but know what the you are looking at in the screenshots keep this one in mind. The media hates you and their goal is to sow division
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While this is the lede there are other activities posted. If there were true transparency with nothing to hide Mr. Wick would not have taken the repos private but just ensured that that all avenues of harassment were disabled. More of concern to me is the potential for a focus on the union status - though with just the screenshots it is quite difficult to tell what is really going on.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to the author... finding the quickest and easiest way to stop harassment and backlash is what I would have done too. The author is a mere human, likely not equipped with the mental fortitude to deal with the magnitude of armchair bullies that are likely aimed at them.
As I said in anothercomment, using available data in itself can be seen with suspicion. With freely available data you can build a nuclear reactor (if very capable), or buy fertilizer and build a bomb. Chances are, fbi will knock at your door and ask what you're doing. The same way, an agency gathering lot of public available data regarding sensitive infrastructure can be assumed to misuse the data for shady purposes, given the agency isn't exactly one you can trust
This is such a lame comment. He's looking at publicly available geospatial data, not trying to build a bomb.
He's not looking at, he's gathering
I gather things like this all the time. I'm against DOGE as much as 90% of the US is, but collection of open data for curiosity and interest is really not a thing to focus on.
That's completely fair.
However, i am let's say, at least dubious about the whys of an agency which is wreaking so much havoc need to collect data on us sensitive infrastructure. If you were dealing with drugs, and you told me you buy codeine based pharma products in bulk, i wouldn't think you caught a cold
There are companies that are making bucks selling satellite photos of russian army storage(s) so that it is possible to calculate how much of remaining tanks are in storage. While a single photo of a single storage wouldn't matter on its own, having a clear picture of every russian storage can give you an idea of how many tanks were refurbished and remain in stock
The government has whole departments of people whose job it is to be on top of this sort of thing.
Why is it suddenly part of the job description of a junior DOGE employee to build workforce org chart visualization tools and investigate strategic resource datasets? Isn’t that weird to have one brand new government employee doing self-taught random investigations of topics as complex as ‘government workforce management’ and ‘strategic resource analytics’?
> Why is it suddenly part of the job description of a junior DOGE employee to build workforce org chart visualization tools and investigate strategic resource datasets?
That is totally fine to focus on. My point was focusing on the code prior to DOGE existing showing collection of GIS data.
> Isn’t that weird to have one brand new government employee doing self-taught random investigations of topics as complex as ‘government workforce management’ and ‘strategic resource analytics’?
We're in total agreement on this particular point.
Point of contention - according to a recent YouGov[1] poll, 48% of respondents think DOGE should be kept or expanded, while only 37% think it should be reduced or eliminated. A far cry from 90% either direction. You may be subject to confirmation bias.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/doge-support-collapsing-poll-elon-m...
I don't really care about a single YouGov poll about what people think about a headline -- that's a shallow approach, misses quite a bit of context, and when used as a summary would rightly be called clickbait. Digging deeper and past propaganda, the activities of DOGE are deeply unpopular to the electorate wholesale, and my 90% claim is easily justified by a groundswell of current and long time understanding of the electorate:
- negative impact to the economy is deeply unpopular [0]
- lying about savings is deeply unpopular [1]
- threatening cuts to entitlement spending is deeply unpopular [2]
How you ask a question, what question you ask, and how you collect data will unduly influence any poll -- event with adjustments.[3] People aren't as fickle as headlines would otherwise lead you to believe.
My take on your oblique reference to "maybe [I] have confirmation bias" is that you are taking the headlines as fact and thus can dismiss anything that doesn't agree wit your perspective. This may be mistaken on my part, but if you feel deep inside that it is not, then I encourage you to dig deeper.
[0] "It's the economy, stupid!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1hxNKweJbc
[1] DOGE is not trusted - https://truthout.org/articles/nearly-6-in-10-voters-concerne...
[2] https://www.nasi.org/learn/social-security/public-opinions-o... - Gallup shows opinions are fairly stable even though this source is somewhat dated
[3] Now-infamous Selzer poll https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/03/trump-harris...
A bit tangent, and since I’m an outsider who doesn’t live in the states and have no skin in the game — my understanding is, they will do literally anything to make sure DOGE succeeds, because a failure is basically unacceptable. I can’t even imagine how you can backtrack this, and fix stuff up. They obviously prepared for it months in advance. Targeting ex-employees of successful product companies and putting them in charge (especially the ones with a lot of money, but a bit lost because they want can’t find meaning in life) is also kinda funny.
That being said, if it doesn’t succeed, they will start doing the usual — pretending that it was successful. And that’s when the team-sports based politics come into play. If you’re so deep into supporting one side that you can’t objectively see failures, the narrative pushers will keep winning. It applies to both sides, by the way. But burden of proof lies on the government in power.
Good luck to you, guys!
> my understanding is, they will do literally anything to make sure DOGE succeeds, because a failure is basically unacceptable
They have shown over and over that they are after a good story, not good results. They’re going for shock factor and they’re pumping out propaganda at an alarming rate.
We’ve seen so many hyperbolic claims of rampant fraud with zero evidence. At the same time, they’ve had to remove the biggest wins from their public DOGE leaderboard because they were found to be incorrect (some might say fraudulent claims).
One of their biggest wins was discovered to be an error because someone put it into the DOGE leaderboard as billions instead of millions. On off-by-1000 error in one of their top claims to success is no small matter. Numerous other claims have been shown to account for entire contract amounts, even though they only cancelled the remaining balance of the contract.
They don’t care about facts. They care about what they can convince enough people to believe without getting caught.
>Numerous other claims have been shown to account for entire contract amounts, even though they only cancelled the remaining balance of the contract.
They are building this live and it's been a month as a side quest. They have fixed those issues that you have said, and have been updating the website, fixing different pricing, etc. etc. every single day.
They have not been preparing for months... that's not how system integration works... They post literally daily about their savings.
https://doge.gov/
Project 2025 has been an open plan for years and the level of coordination between political elites aligned with the Heritage Foundation and tech industry radicals is obvious on its face.
If the goal was reducing fraud and waste, accurate accounting would be a core principle and this wouldn't happen. They aren't because it's not. Their goal was rapid destruction of the US government apparatus to prevent oversight and accountability that would enable preservation and restoration of constitutional government. Seems like it's working.
To me it "seems like" the CIA is being attacked and its extinction burst through the media it controlled for the last generation is causing a blast of hysteria. Everything published in media organizations that until recently were receiving federal funds should be viewed through that light. They're mainly mad because their gravy train stopped.
I don't like the Yarvinists doing the attacking but the old regime acting like it was a representation of the will of the people at this point is pretty offensive.
There's a reason people voted against them. It's just a shame that we couldn't have voted for liberal ideals instead of neoreactionary ones.
If we get very lucky maybe we will wind up with the CIA defanged and without completely sliding into authoritarianism! a person can dream, anyway..
My fellow Americans need to stop inventing wish-fulfillment fantasies that everything's going to be ok and fine. It's a coup by the worst elements of American society (eugenicists! Christian nationalists! white supremacists!) in collusion with oligarchs, dictators, and autocrats. People are acting like the most disingenuous and dishonest people are scions of truth.
Half of y'all are excited cuz you seem to think you'll get to strap a nuke to your bike and screw a 15 year old razorgirl. This isn't Snow Crash, it's real life, you WILL be impacted by mass famine, unmanaged pandemics, economic depression, geopolitical balkanization, and war. These are the outcomes made possible through DOGE.
I’m not sure how to put it in the nicest way possible without offending anyone, but — your government is the only one in the 2nd/1st world country that is doing in a way where it hurts average person for no reason. Hypothesis among people that I talk to in real life is that American government is jealous of China and knows they can’t have the same power and abilities as they due. This is just a side effect of them freaking out and realizing that they are, in fact, the laughing stock of the entire world.
There’s this idea, I have no idea from where, that entire world depends on the states, and without US everyone would literally starve to death. But it’s just really not the case. Sure, everyone would suffer, but any sane country has already worked out contingency plans, and is preparing for it while blatantly pretending to bend the knee.
I think there’s a deep cultural issue that you guys need to face and fix. In my opinion, most of it comes from the lack of education. However, you’re actively making sure that people are less educated and blur our the moral lines to have small wins that will be insignificant in the longer term.
I’m saying this as a person who has deep personal connections to people living in the states. Those people belong different “factions” of the political spectrum, and it is just incredibly sad to see from the sidelines.
You're right we should give the people slashing budgets without thought or care more space to build their website showing they have no idea what's going on.
They know what they want to cut and are counting on finding enough seuface-level-bad-sounding sound bites to justify what they were already going to do.
Succeed at what?
For example, they canceled invasive species control programs for the Great Lakes. Is it a success that they saved a modest amount of money, while letting the condition of the lakes further erode?
Source?
The only news I’ve heard is that they fired 12 of 85 staffers and prohibited hiring seasonal workers, which was then rescinded a few days later.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/federal-firings-coul...
Not to attack you personally, but I’ve noticed there is a lot of hyperbole here based on dramatic headlines, extrapolation based on feeling rather than facts, so important but difficult to stay informed.
Where's the hyperbole you're complaining about?
The comment you're responding to says "...while letting the condition of the lakes further erode", which the article you linked to supports.
> ...extrapolation based on feeling rather than facts...
12 of 85 is a fact. It's basic logic to estimate the effect of this.
The administrator in the best position to understand the impact of this has provided an analysis: "Cutting back the control program by one-sixth would allow over one million lamprey to survive, McClinchey estimated. Those lampreys would eat nearly 5 million pounds of fish, equalling $105 million in lost economic output and potential, far outstripping the cost of the workers’ salaries."
What's your basis for dismissing this as feelings? It appears irrational.
Saying something involved hyperbole means you think part of the claim was exaggerated, not that you think the entire affair was invented from the ground up.
E.g. if your coworker comes into work and says "Wow, you guys wouldn't believe it - I was passed by this maniac doing at least 140 mph on the way in to work today. What a crazy speeder!" then you see on the news the police arrested the driver for driving up to 95 mph. You might say "140 mph sounds like hyperbole, it looks like it was significantly less". If they respond "what's the hyperbole, you don't think he was speeding? You're irrational!" you might be a bit confused as, leaving the unnecessary bit at the end aside, the hyperbole was the clear and excessive exaggeration of the rate of speed, not an implication the individual was driving safely this morning.
In the above the hyperbole was "they canceled invasive species control programs for the Great Lakes". Well no, they are risking it being ineffective and causing great harm due to a personnel cut somewhere on the order of 15%-20%. The exaggeration here is the amount it was cut. At no point was it claimed the exaggeration was there could be some level of a negative impact as a result.
From that article:
> Cutting back the control program by one-sixth would allow over one million lamprey to survive, McClinchey estimated. Those lampreys would eat nearly 5 million pounds of fish, equalling $105 million in lost economic output and potential, far outstripping the cost of the workers’ salaries.
Oh good, they are just arbitrarily risking it being ineffective. My bad. I read a similar article to the one you link that I think didn't have the numbers, just talked about cutting the staff of the two locations.
Whatever they promised and people voted for by believing in those promises. People wanted a strong man, and they basically got it. I understand markets can be irrational blah blah, but still surprised how people with money aren’t shipping it away or storing it somewhere more safe looking at the current situation.
They are getting their cash reserves ready for the fire sale. That Buffett guy is a good example.
They know thy have the opportunity to buy up the assets and to cash in on the chaos.
I would frame that as being motivated to satisfy their base, vs being motivated to succeed.
Success usually has a positive connotation, and they don't seem to be doing a particularly good job if you take the "reduce the size of the government" goal at face value (they are making messes everywhere they go, with the government shrinking slower than normal attrition...).
Success is subjective and is defined by common people’s expectation in this scenario.
Their bases in this context is also one or two men, not voters.
Their base is the MAGA gestalt. They like you imply do follow the will of one man however, so that's not far from the truth, but they also have a guaranteed 30% of the voting population no matter what the gestalt Prime does to them or the USA
They also wanted people who wouldn't spend money on "stupid programs", which is basically anything there isn't an immediately obvious reason for. A lot of work that government programs do is data-gathering and preparation for other, more obviously helpful programs. But these clowns don't seem to understand that, at all.
They also don't seem to understand that a lot of work isn't profit-oriented (which is the only thing the Trump administration believes in). Some programs exist because they were a benefit at the time (and yes, those need review) and may still be of use, but they always were intended to be a service for everyone, even if some people didn't use. them.
No one seems to understand the concept of government service. It's government business or nothing.
Some have said that the folks running DOGE follow an Anarcho-capitalist philosophy. According to Wikipedia, that philosophy "seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforced by private agencies." If so, I don't think they care if it's a "good" program or a "bad" program, they just want to reduce the size of government. Some might say, they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but their goal might be to throw out the baby, bathwater and the tub.
Afghanistan has that. Instead of landlords, they have warlords, just a different term for the same thing. Why is anybody interested in repeating that thing?
I've been told that billionaires think differently than the rest of us, but I still can't fathom why someone would want to be the king of a shit hole when they could be richer as a regular citizen of a liberal democracy. Why do they hate our success?
The argument I could see is that even the least king has certain privileges that no tycoon in a democratic state offers. The obvious example I could see is just the concept of legal immunity. There's no need to deluge your critics with lawyers when the courts will simply refuse to take up objections to His Majesty. It would also presumably make an excellent "flag of convenience" for your other wealth assets- create a legal framework to formally avoid taxes and liability.
Of course, I always assumed it would be cheaper to buy a regime change in some small nation of limited economic import than to wrangle a nuclear superpower, so what do I know.
If I woke up with Elon Musk's pocketbook, given I spent way too much of my childhood playing SimCity and Civilization, I'd want to experiment with some ideas on statecraft myself. Mine run to more "WWII-style ration books as a UBI distribution medium", "we're banning cars and building so much rail that people will regularly have their arms amputated by sticking them out their apartment window and hitting a passing train" and "ripping the Berne Convention to shreds and wiping with it on livestream", but clearly YMMV.
I would suggest you read “Anatomy of the State” by Murray Rothbard. I don’t want to sound rude but your comment is what people say when they haven’t read anything about it.
I used to make similar arguments like was at the top of your comment until I actually read some literature around it.
Which state is it about? Can't I just read history, and the news?
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Is life really that much better for billionaires of today than kings of last millennium?
Sure you can acquire a private fleet of jets and cars now. But given that you rarely if-ever drive them it's no different than a fleet of rare animals.
Sure you can play video games and watch sports on TV but is that really much better than watching sports from a private suite?
I will conceded that their life expectancy has basically doubled but I don't think there's anything you can do as a king to fix that. If you don't hoard all the wealth it's not like life expectancy immediately doubles. A rising tide raises all ships but the tide takes centuries to do that lifting.
In fact things are worse for them today. In Versai it was the norm for the king to take a dump in a bucket in front of the whole court. Today's billionaires have to pay people to watch them do it and have to keep it hush hush.
Billionaires are transnational; they can live wherever they want. The only thing tying them to a particular country is that country's restrictions on their capital flows. They don't really care if it's a liberal democracy or not, they just want the lowest taxes and free movement of capital. If an area becomes undesirable to live in, they'll move somewhere else.
But there needs to be a somewhere else, i.e., they still depend on the liberal democracies for any quality of life above bare subsistence. While they point the finger at those democracies for being decadent and corrupt.
They needed to maintain the claim that democracy should be destroyed, in order to prop up their ideologies, without actually going ahead and destroying it. Oops.
If true, there’s some irony in how much of the actions are centrally planned rather than pushed down to lower level leaders closer to the problems.
The DOGE members are tech bros who are into classic Randian libertarianism,small government that only protects money and property, and all other "public services" would be provided by private markets. They want to make government look weak and impotent so that people like Musk, Bezos, the Waltons, etc can provide those services at a premium or "fuck you". it's a downward spiral that concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and creates a permanent class of serfs and slaves. Until they figure out that won't work here when the masses have had enough and communism starts looking pretty good when you and your children and freezing and starving and you have a basement full of guns and ammo that you can't eat.
Michael Lewis paints a different picture in his book “The Fifth Risk” where govt infrastructure is leveraged for private profits. Ex: AccuWeather uses NOAA data to make their products while lobbying to make the same NOAA data inaccessible to others.
Most of the people that seem to be influential seem to be either Paleo-cons, Rothbardians and people that are believers in the Austrian School of Economics.
I am not an ancap because there are some major problems with their philosophy, but your analysis is just incorrect.
It's obvious isn't it?
Owning the Libs!!!
> Succeed at what?
Dismantling government. Look up the "network state":
* https://thenetworkstate.com/preamble
> All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
> The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.
[…]
> The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”
* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration...
Also:
* "Why big tech turned right": https://www.vox.com/politics/397525/trump-big-tech-musk-bezo...
* "The crypto bros who dream of crowdfunding a new country": https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyl171lyewo
Have you ever read cyberpunk, especially William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (starting with Neuromancer) where corporations are the government? Basically that.
Yep, here's a pretty good summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
Indeed I believe that the current administration's end-goal is the collapse of the US as we know it. Thiel and other billionaires need the collapse to create their own cyberpunk states inside current US territory. The remaining territory will be probably taken by Project 2025 guys, who want to rule it as a Christian theocracy / far-right utopia.
Another possibility is that the uber-rich techbros can see that, if we keep heading the way we're going, the whole thing comes crashing down. We've been speedrunning a far-left utopia for quite a while now, and it's not going well. Whether it's some kind of currency collapse, internal civil war, or something else, this is a death slide towards something bad.
Assuming that's the explanation, then radical change isn't surprising. How radical can be argued, but turning the rudder on the ship of state can't be.
Depends from the definition of "far-left utopia" I guess.
I admit that I'm an outsider, but in terms of social welfare and equality, the US still seems closer to capitalist dystopia than a far-left utopia. Expensive healthcare mostly tied to work / insurance, very expensive education, high wealth inequality and pretty poor social safety nets.
At the same time, on many "culture war" issues America has seemed too extreme for my taste. For instance, discriminating people based on their "race" in university admissions is absolutely insane. But the solution to fixing these crazy ideas shouldn't be going all the way to far-right, with its own crazies like anti-vaxxers, Putin fanboys and climate-change deniers. I miss the times when most popular politicians were centrists.
> Succeed at what?
Being a distraction from the fact that Trump is raising taxes on average Americans (tariffs) while trying to blow out the deficit to the tune of $2 trillion to finance tax cuts to the rich.
Didn’t they cancel some cancer treatment research projects?
I am sure the Head of the health department — one that doesn’t consider measles a problem — has given his stamp of approval for that, after all, he has a whole 0 years in all tangentially related fields combined!
> Didn’t they cancel some cancer treatment research projects?
“Cancel” suggest more decision-making than appears to have happened, at least in the research projects I am aware of—a number had to be canceled by those running them because the unprecedented blanket payment pause notionally to evaluate programs existing programs made it impossible for them to continue operating.
> Good luck to you, guys!
Unfortunately I think we're going to need a lot more than luck.
But I appreciate the sentiment.
What's the benchmark for success, I wonder?
It's not that hard to spend less money, but will the government still be doing the things we want it to do effectively?
There doesn't appear to be a plan, just a bunch of actions. It looks like we're achieving chaos, not efficiency.
> my understanding is, they will do literally anything to make sure DOGE succeeds, because a failure is basically unacceptable.
Not sure I buy that. My general expectation is that once there’s a big, major problem which annoys the general public, Musk will be thrown to the wolves. See Trump’s previous go round; very few of his people stayed in favour for the whole administration.
> Targeting ex-employees of successful product companies and putting them in charge (especially the ones with a lot of money, but a bit lost because they want can’t find meaning in life)
there was a post a couple of months back on HN from such a person who worked with DOGE for a bit
I think they will declare mission accomplished. MAGAs will swallow it like it's ambrosia of the gods, people who voted didn't support him as a messiah will shrug and hope for tax breaks, the rest of us know it's a grift.
A conservative movement has no end goal. The dismantling of the government will never be over for them. The point is destroying progress, not a specific government size.
if you don't want to open twitter, here is xcancel link which i should have put as the og link https://xcancel.com/SollenbergerRC/status/189560929481046439...
Or just setup Redirector* to automatically redirect you to xcancel (and old.reddit.com, and away from whatever other hostile websites there are these days...)
* https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector
Cool
HN’s policy is that one should submit the original link, hence providing a more accessible but not original link as a comment is the correct thing to do.
I may be wrong, but I feel that the gist of posting the direct source is to avoid websites reporting a news regarding that source.
Such as, amd announcing new graphics card and a blog making a post about it. And it is understandable that it would be better to post amd own's page.
I would be curious about dang opinion on posting non og link that only contain the og source repackaged in a more accessible way
It’s also to automatically deduplicate submissions of the same source.
And HN does for example block archive.is for submissions, to which your argument wouldn’t apply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130177
You can email hn@ycombinator.com to ask about the policy.
Oh ok, it is quite useful for disambiguation. I get that
To add a bit to what layer8 correctly said: it's also for displaying the original provenance of the article (i.e. the domain it came from), and for making the /from pages that list submissions from a domain work properly. That may not matter when there's just one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/sollenber...
but it does when there are lots:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/karpathy.
The first thing I wondered is why you'd post this information on Twitter of all places, to be honest.
because they have followers there and it won't get taken down? Sometimes you have to make a deal with the devil
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Also superior since I can see the replies.
Ah, many thanks for that tip
finally, a nitter replacement
It's just a copy of nitter on a different domain.
I hadn't seen one since X took over
Poast runs one
https://nitter.poast.org
it does look like nitter but I thought it was dead after twitter changed the api after musk took over?
It’s a nitter instance
https://status.d420.de/
[flagged]
I clicked the twitter link. Perhaps because I don’t have an account, I don’t see any Community Notes nor can I read any other posts in the thread, so no point in using the “official” link.
And it’s not like Community Notes will remain reliable.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-says-hell-fix-community-notes-...
Because it is a pending note. Which often already are extremely relevant. Many see these as prominently as other CN's as becoming a "Community Noter" is not too hard.
>And it’s not like Community Notes will remain reliable.
That's as useless like saying your house might burn down in the next hour so might as well not go inside during a storm. CN's are the best weapon we have against misinformation given they require consensus from people that have disagreed in the past. Track record of CN's is unbeatable. They sure as hell are better than the abuse of flagging my factual parent comment on HN. Shame on whoever did that, but a honor system clearly isn't enough, sadly not even on HN.
No, it’s not like that in the slightest. Read the link, my comments was within its context, not made in a vaccumm. The point is precisely that one person, the owner of the platform, wants to change Community Notes to agree with his own opinions and world view.
You clearly do not understand how Community Notes work given you're talking of "how one person wants to change them".
Good thing is that no single person can change them. Their data and source code is open. So your point is nothing but some anti-Elon propaganda basically.
Works created by U.S. federal government employees as part of their official duties are in the public domain, according to 17 U.S.C. § 105, except for classified or restricted information (but none of what he posted is classified or restricted)
That is a clear misinterpretation of the law. The law says that copyright protections do not exist for government work created for a government capacity except where noted. That does not mean any of that work is in the public domain. Just because copyright protections are not available does not mean other intellectual property protections are equally void.
Here is the law text: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/105
By the way it seems most of the stuff I produce for the government contains copyright notices. I don't know if those notices are valid or not, but none of the stuff I produce is in the public domain or released to the public.
Can one request all of the code this dude has written or is it as his discretion what is released to the public domain?
If they are an actual federal employee then they will need a 'cooling off' period before they can work in the private sector in an area related to their government work (I don't see that happening).
This depends on their role. That more applies to people involved in contract decisions and execution (the legal/financial parts, not the doing the technical work part). For programmers, they can move back and forth relatively freely, but should go through their agency's legal office to be certain.
Right, well ... the DOGE staffers (which assumes they are actually employed) seem to be primarily focused on contract decisions and execution.
If they are just data analysis and gathering, that's not exactly contract negotiation.
> they are just data analysis and gathering
They are not. They de facto cancelled contracts while rooting around at the Treasury. Given the lack of transparency at DOGE, it’s unclear how the front-line bros can claim they were following official instructions versus making calls on their own.
Does that also applied to all of the employees that have been DOGEd? For example, would someone that just got fired from NOAA need a cooling off period before getting hired at AccuWeather? That seems to be the MAGA solution for all of the NOAA employees.
Not necessarily, see my other comment. If they were involved in, say, a contract selection to integrate with AccuWeather's other data sources and models then they could be restricted from working at AccuWeather or in what they can do at AccuWeather. It looks like a quid pro quo if you're involved in contract selection and get hired by that same company. Introducing the delay reduces that appearance, it also makes a real quid pro quo less likely.
If they were a meteorologist conducting analysis and improving models, they could get hired on without difficulty. If they were the developer tasked with doing that integration after the contract was awarded, it also shouldn't be an issue to get hired by AccuWeather.
idk try to make a FOIA request
DOGE moving under the presidents executive office instead of as a separate agency seemed to be done for the purpose of shielding DOGE From FOIA and only subject to President Records Act
A reference for those curious:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-musk-do...
Which is hilarious because they promised DOGE was going to be all about transparency
....and that was a lie.
Also they've been hoovering up cash like it's going out of style. I think at last count DOGE had slurped up $40M and nobody knows where it's gone
Probably Elon’s margin calls since TSLA has been going to shit.
And Trump's history with that act suggests it'll go to the highest bidder, foreign or domestic
Is it OK to make baseless accusations on Hacker News now? When did that become OK?
After yesterday, hardly baseless.
Not really baseless when he was caught with classified documents after he was selling them to the highest bidder.
Yes americas right wing courts blocked justice from being applied in this case but this would hardly be baseless.
Only if you are attacking Trump or anything his administration is doing.
He could always try committing fewer crimes, and see how that goes for him.
I'm not asking how to go about requesting his code, I'm asking whether the policy you cite allows him to decide what is public domain himself or if one has to work through processes and procedures to release and obtain that code.
> U.S. federal government employees as part of their official duties
“Official duties” is load bearing in this sentence.
If the work is found to have been improperly authorised, this DOGE bro is acting in his personal capacity. That means personal liability for his actions and lawbreaking.
I think it’s pretty hard to show an employee is not acting in an official duty in regards to work material. I don’t think this is a sound legal opinion.
> it’s pretty hard to show an employee is not acting in an official duty
Not if they’re violating a court order without executive privilege.
Wick officially works for the USDS and CFPB. If Bessent and Trump haven’t given a clear order to violate the law, his actions cease to be on behalf of the United States but instead enacted in his personal capacity. Similar to a park ranger walking into a military base and trying to run off with some kit.
Counter: Especially when they can decide without any resistance from the judicial branch who is an officer, an official, etc. They interpret all laws as being friendly to them and ignore the contradictions when it suits them. This isn’t rule of law and you know it. Sound legal opinions don’t mean shit now.
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Now the debate begins on whether downloading Twitter DMs is an official government duty.
This is a ridiculous statement. The US Government (or any government) has processes to publish data so that it is well vetted and understood. Some script kiddie isn't allowed to just post things in public on his own.
roughly speaking - the work products of the US Federal Govt are public unless specifically ruled otherwise. It may be hard to believe that, but historically it is the exact opposite of the British Crown policy "all government information is restricted unless specifically ruled otherwise" IANAL
Implying that DOGE bozo is law-compliant while breaking laws and destroying trust is...humor too soon?
What laws are being broken?
> What laws are being broken?
In this specific case? Unclear. Will wait for the lawsuits.
In the last weeks, the DOGE bros have broken the Privacy Act of 1974 [1] and numerous court orders [2].
[1] https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/EPIC-v-OPM-25-cv...
[2] https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/19-state-ags-file-suit-a...
Given they have to be vetted the same way as any other government employee with that access, including security clearances, I’m not sure these will succeed.
At least to my mind it’s not clear how a government employee can have access but for doge it’s breaking the law. The devil is in the specific details.
> they have to be vetted the same way as any other government employee with that access, including security clearances
We know this wasn’t done when they were rummaging around the Treasury. Courts are granting restraining orders because the DOGE bros acted so incompetently. (It’s generally incredibly hard to restrain government employees.)
> it’s not clear how a government employee can have access but for doge it’s breaking the law
Same way a park ranger can’t walk onto a military base and start rummaging through documents. Or start tweeting them. (Or hell, the President himself tweet your tax return.)
https://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/Resources/Analyzing+Potentia...
Self-assessed conflict of interest is conflict of interest.
Someone interested in filtering employees by union status seems highly suspicious to me that that someone is interested in breaking labor laws.
Firing people on false pretenses (telling them they're being fired for poor performance when that wasn't the case and they're even being told by their overseers that it's not the case) breaks labor laws.
How do we know he is a bozo?
Seems like a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day"
Similarly, wearing a seatbelt on your way to assassinate somebody.
>humor too soon?
C'mon USA, do something funny.
"Funny", since yesterday I can't get out of my head the clip "You think I'm funny" from the goodfellas
Except the second half never happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d2LAs-WL_4
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“Bozo” is pretty lightweight for someone actively trying to destroy the foundations of this country’s government and democratic policies.
I feel they are actively shoring up the country’s foundations. For decades, since the Church committee in the 1970s and under Vice President Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative (which IIRC resulted in the removal of 100,000 government employees), disclosure of questionable or hidden programs was a core progressive value.
> disclosure of questionable or hidden programs
We’re seeing more “claims” than “disclosures”. Can you point me any examples of the latter?
Feed here:
https://doge.gov/
You're responding to someone who believes DOGE is getting rid of corruption in government while Musk is capturing contracts for his own companies. There's no point in responding to people like them. They aren't based in reality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036122
Hard disagree with this take. There is certainly a purpose responding to them. Whether or not their opinion is changed comes down to them.
If the individual is living in a fantasy land, then any responses here will be discarded by them as fantasy themselves. Someone who legitimately believes that Musk is fighting corruption when Musk is also directing contracts to his own businesses is in a fantasy land.
If the individual is trolling, which could be the case here, then responding is just feeding the troll. It encourages them.
The better thing in both cases is to ignore them. At most, respond to the comment, but not the individual, with facts (like that Musk is directing contracts to his own companies) so that others don't fall into the same fantasy land.
It does not seem like we disagree.
> At most, respond to the comment, but not the individual, with facts
There is still a purpose for the response. It may not be for a particular reader, but there are other readers. It would be worth it to flag and move on if there is nothing to engage with but that’s not the case here.
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> administrative state (created during FDR) is going away
Created by FDR through acts of the Congress. DOGE is ironically recapitulating the lawlessness that tanked Sourh Africa’s economy.
Also, we’re seeing a breathless expansion of federal executive power. The administrative state isn’t going away. It’s being subsumed. The size of the government is being increased, not decreased—that’s why the GOP budget calls for $2 trillion in new deficits over ten years.
One can celebrate cost cutting. But other than USAID, there is no sign anything durable is being done. The power of the central government is being expanded in ways that should be obviously problematic for anyone thinking ahead: next cycle, a Dem President can just cancel student debts by firing everyone in loan collections and shredding the loan documents.
> Calm down...You're behaving in a histrionic way.
This sort of condescension is characteristic of people who hold the opinions you do. The rest of your post is complete nonsense.
Ok. Doesn't matter. We took power and you're gonna stew for the next 4 to 12 years while not getting your way. Sucks, kiddo.
They’re calling a public figure a bozo. That’s always been fine. Name calling other HN users is against the guidelines.
> They’re calling a public figure a bozo. That’s always been fine.
Not in Germany. Public insults are punishable. Doing so in a permanent way with lots of outreach (like the web is) increases the consequences.
> Not in Germany
Not sure why anyone should be emulating Germany right now.
When Elon became the role model probably
What functional, diplomatic purpose exists for calling him a "bozo"? What problems does this solve? Which tensions does this ease? Which conflicts does this stop? What sensitive government data does this un-leak? Which broken laws does this adjudicate? What usurped power is being brought back under control with this?
Or is it just contributing to a one-way ratchet that only ever increases partisan polarization and hostility for no reason at all, instead of seeking to de-escalate and solve problems?
P.S. this goes for Trump/Musk/DOGE supporters too. Name calling and vindictive personal attacks aren't decreasing the deficit, they're not paying off the debt, they're not reducing weaponization of government against conservatives, they're doing nothing to address border and immigration concerns, and they aren't reducing crime. So I ask you, too, what problems are being solved with vindictive, spiteful namecalling?
On one hand, you have a a group that is working very quickly to make irreversible changes (likely in violation of many laws) before the judiciary catches up and enjoins them.
On the other hand you have an internet user calling them a bozo.
De-escalating the conflict and lowering the temperature of discourse, as you suggest, massively favors the group trying to ram through these changes. If we take a deep breath and calmly work it out, it will already be over and nothing can be done.
Elected officials take notice of these urgent issues when there is significant public outcry. Now I'm not saying that one person calling them bozos meaningfully moves the needle, but as a principle if a regular person wants to do their best to stop what is happening, they must use strong language.
> Name calling and vindictive personal attacks aren't decreasing the deficit
The GOP budget blows out our deficit by an additional $2 trillion over the next ten years. This government doesn’t actually care about the deficit.
DOGE is some combination of a loyalty purge, giving Musk keep-busy work, a distraction from Trump’s tax increases & proposed deficit spending and propaganda.
> what problems are being solved with vindictive, spiteful namecalling?
Piss people off. Particularly in the centre. The far right has been ignoring norms and now the law. We need the centre enraged enough to break at least norms and conventions to go after these folks. I’m personally interested in the state laws the DOGE bros may be breaking.
How dare we call the vindictive, spiteful, name calling president currently destroying our country names!
> weaponization of government against conservatives
The government is clearly being weaponized against anyone who has ever opposed Trump in any way. You are in a reality tunnel.
The OP is not. He’s calling someone working on a project, posting his code to GitHub names.
The correct response in a democratic society to people attacking political enemies as enemies of the state, spreading untruths, attacking the rule of law, and acting like assholes is _to not do these these things_.
I’m really baffled by this take. How are you not understanding the basic fact that these are criminals actively performing a coup to destroy the “democratic society”, not political opponents?
We must be polite to them as they spit in our faces UwU
Okay
> Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
Name calling isn’t going to do anything, and lowering yourself by it is, at best, self-harming.
What makes you think that problems will be solved by de-escalation?
A bit more on Jordan Wick: https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/doge-agent-jordan-wick/
I'm a bit on the edge regarding to why someone on DOGE should collect data on critical infrastructure, even if it's available to the public audience for free.
I'm also quite worried by the possibility to filter federal workers based on the union status
> I'm also quite worried by the possibility to filter federal workers based on the union status
Well, from a purely day-to-day, operational HR standpoint, that information is important. Like many things, in the wrong hands it’s easily abused.
Yup, that's what I was talking about, it's not happening in a vacuum, it's concerning given the context
Saying “the quiet part out loud” is kind of a hallmark with this team’s approach though, so watching it steamroll over any auspices of ethical behavior is noteworthy.
Can someone be more specific about what's potentially illegal on these screenshots?
I don't the author of the tweet, but I don't know how he's arrived at the conclusion that there's some smoking gun. A datavis script? And, I mean, really, a tweet downloader?
It's not like he made a gee you eye in VB or something...
The answer is...nothing.
I wish people paid this close attention to federal workers and their agencies all the time.
Most federal workers aren’t openly and flagrantly breaking the law. Given each DOGE bro has violated several laws in the past weeks, it’s prudent to focus attention on them. Not too much. But enough that there is a public record for litigation and prosecution at the state and local level in the future.
Why? A good government is one that runs well without half the public frothing at the mouth.
Quite a few people do. Most of them just have editors who fact-check things prior to publication.
I was working at a MNC a few years ago and some junior developer did this to one of our codebases "so he could work on it at home" (pre-covid). When it was discovered his access to everything was immediately shut off, company assets confiscated and he was escorted out the building by security.
If you think that's bad, in one of those screenshots, he is using HTML tables.
They're underrated if you're doing reporting.
My comment was tongue in cheek. I'm not a web focused guy and I learned HTML long enough ago that I have no specific moral objection to tables. I used them in a quick personal project a few months ago.
I get it. I'm just adding, as an aside, that they actually do have a perfectly good place. For one thing, there are off-the-shelf libraries that'll turn an HTML table into a pretty good PDF. Saved me weeks of work back when I was buried in financial reporting.
From the perspective of wanting to maintain the integrity of the American federal government, it seems like all this DOGE stuff (and the whole Trumpist movement in general) serves the purpose of a red team, in the cybersecurity sense; people with nebulous intent have gotten access to everything.
So now, if Americans care about the integrity of their government, there needs to be a blue team: how can this catastrophic level of access be dealt with, and how can it be safeguarded against in the future. Alas, I'm not seeing this perspective being enacted. The obvious security compromise is being allowed to stand and continue, usually on the basis that "separation of powers" and "checks and balances" are relied on to be effective; congress will stop this, or the courts will stop this. But we're watching these mechanisms fail.
So, what's the plan here? Where's the counter-offensive? We're watching a system being hacked, and I've yet to see anyone talk about a recovery plan, or a prevention plan.
Build in public!
He made his GitHub account activity all private once people started paying attention. What does he have to hide?
Anyone grab a copy of the repos before jomanw set their account to private?
It turns out that DOGE is USDS rebranded
that's how they were able to turn up an new "Department" in a week with no oversight. the D in USDS now stands for Department.
The cynic in me thinks these kids were recruited as "useful idiots." Musk has shown he is capable of recruiting competent people, but it's pretty clear these aren't them. History has shown that it's a lot easier to radicalize and weaponize incompetent young adults whose self-image has been built up in an environment of privilege. Without personal accountability, it's a lot easier to be angry at the world for denying you the success everyone tells you that you deserve.
The account has been privated now.
Sadly his github is now private and the archived pages are mostly previews, not full repos.
Just search for forks: https://github.com/PatrickFanella/x-dm-downloader for example. We will probably have a short while (day or two) before false DMCA notices about this are actioned by GitHub
Looks like they used it to scrape the DMs for the @doge account, as they are calling for people to report "fraud" there. Crazy that the US government is allowing a third party such as X to have such control.
ah, obviously, thanks a lot
What makes them false DMCA claims?
I don’t see a license on the repo.
I mean false as in filing a DMCA claim just to take down something you don't like rather than to protect material that actually means anything. So, false as in morally, not legally.
Besides, this shit was clearly at least 90% AI-generated anyway, and I think the jury is still out on whether some specific arrangement of AI-generated chunks of code actually even counts as a copyrighted work.
But everyone knows the drill is DMCA notices now, lawsuits years to decades later.
As the Germans say:
You need to be smart to be that stupid ;)
it's a none issue and the ones depending on the scam, are screaming the loudest now. lol
Sounds like a conflict of interest.
Siphoning money away from the public and to themselves is the whole point.
Only if you (somewhat naively) assume the interest is what was publicly stated.
Grifting is the goal, not the unintended side effect.
None of the info listed is classified or secret. This article reeks of disinformation.
Did anything other than your gut reaction tell you that the information was classified or secret? I take issue with your use of the word "disinformation". This whole thing is a nothing burger, to be clear.
I wish I could downvote all these political topics to get them off the front page; they're so toxic. I feel like the submission system has been taken over by political operatives, which is disappointing.
According to official documentation submitted to the court by the current US Administration, the person running DOGE, was on holiday in Mexico when nominated.
"Gleason told a CBS reporter on Tuesday that she was in Mexico, with The New York Times later reporting that she was on a previously scheduled vacation." - https://www.thedailybeast.com/doges-mystery-leader-finally-u...
Useful for Russia. Easy download.
it's public info
Compilations of data can have value. That’s the whole point of the “facts aren’t copyrightable, but databases are” principle.
Yeah, the Russians definitely couldn't have done this themselves... they needed the help of this one guy to compile publicly available data.
Am I on Reddit or HN?
You seem to think you’re on Reddit. Handwaving away assistance because someone else “could have” done it is pretty on brand there.
Software industry is now filled with maga supporters
Another politically motivated asinine post on Hacker News, I wonder why, right President Trump is in office and doing a great job. Makes sense.
This is literally nothing - visualizing an org chart using D3 (a JS dataviz library), playing around with open source geospatial datasets, and a Twitter DM downloader for personal use.
Look at the screenshots, not the description by this "politics reporter" who seems to be indulging in evidence-free witch hunts.
Exactly, these look like baby’s first JavaScript projects. Surprising considering these doge employees are supposed to be genius coder whiz kids, and yet this looks like the work of someone following a tutorial to write their first tweet downloader.
Does being a 'genius coder whiz kid' imply knowledge of every technology? Should one only be allowed to publish code according to your standards? What kind of nonsense is this?
It implies knowing your boss owns X and you shouldn’t need to write a downloader at all, direct DB access is more efficient, they should know this they’ve been doing a lot of it lately.
Let's skip the statement that Musk being the head to both DOGE (a public agency) & X (a private company) somehow makes it acceptable for one to have access to the other's sensitive data, the downloader project could be unrelated to their DOGE work.
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Yes and no.
It’s like opening a trunk and finding rope, crampons, a glass cutter, duct tape, a ski mask, and a pamphlet about the museum’s diamond exhibit.
None of this is impressive or sufficient evidence for a prosecution but we’re not in court.
evidence free witch-hunts. Hm.
I wonder where else I've seen that recently.
The DOGE staffer gets infinite chances, infinite understanding, and infinite excuses. The staffers DOGE targets, if they're lucky, get one chance to prove loyalty.
This tells me all I need to know:
Thanks for the explanatory comment Jordan /sYou can even tell that's ChatGPT rather than, say, Claude. Redundant obvious comments are a stylistic signature of their models.
That would be expected of generative predictive ai.
The comments that are most likely to correlate strongly with the code are the useless redundant ones.
I get redundant obvious comments from Claude Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7 all the time.
I wonder if they programmed that into them through RLHF, as a way of trying to teach the model that a preceding comment should be completed by whatever code is described by the comment
I make comments like this all the time because I write code for people to read, not robots. Well-commented code allows you to skim very quickly, and gives a sanity check, allowing others to ensure a line or block of code does what it is expected to do.
That's not well-commented code, that's just noise. When you are calling a function named "read_csv()", you do not need to add a comment that says "Read the CSV file". These sorts of comments make code harder for humans to read.
The hill that I will die on is that if you need to comment what your code is doing, your code is either a) bad and should be rewritten to be clearer, or b) the result of tricky, clever optimization that you needed to do after profiling.
Comments should tell readers why you're doing something, when it's not obvious based on the code itself.
I agree that there should be "why" comments. Those are great to have in any codebase. However, that does not preclude descriptive comments.
Obviously, the best way to make code self-documenting is to wrap logic in a method whose name clearly describes its intended function. For one-liners however this can lead to overabstraction, and leaving a "what" comment can be entirely appropriate if the engineer decides it is. This cult-like behavior of engineers who think that well-commented code is some sign of weakness or unprofessionalism is beyond silly.
Absolutisms are a sign of a bad engineer, but I can give you the benefit of the doubt and not assume you're a bad engineer just because you employ such absolutist statements and use erroneously use them to judge code by oversimplified metrics instead of relying on deeper analysis.
Every word of the comment is in the code except "the". That level of redundancy is always bad. Yes, always.
A well-placed comment serves as an anchor for the eye when skimming large amounts of code, and provides a sanity check. This is something you would come to appreciate when working in certain environments.
Does this mean every line of code needs an accompanying comment? No, that is absurd. But what's also absurd is the amount of judgement and unwarranted extrapolation over this particular bit of code, and the general defensiveness which most people in this thread seem to be engaging in. I leave comments like this sometimes if I think it helps increase code clarity.
"Absolutisms are a sign of a bad engineer"
Oh the tasty irony.
I didn't say always. I made a general statement and avoided absolutist terms. "Are" is not an absolutist term if you charitably interpret my comment and I'm happy to clarify if you need it, however I don't need to append every comment with a disclaimer so that people like you don't respond with meaningless criticism towards some straw man.
Please review the Hacker News guidelines, especially this excerpt:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
This is a bad comment. It adds nothing to clarify anything, since the function in the line below is "read_csv." This would be a textbook example of a comment that is not useful to improve legibility by humans and it demonstrates a lack of expertise among the people who are currently dismantling our government.
I'm sorry, but a code comment does not demonstrate lack of expertise, although such a perspective certainly brings your own expertise into question. Perhaps we should all assume a little less?
Yes it clearly does. A comment that is 100% noise and adds no value whatsoever to the codebase demonstrates a lack of expertise. I would expect undergrads and very junior engineers to write comments like this and then very quickly stop when told why these sorts of comments are a straightforwardly bad thing.
Comments are good. I am a huge proponent of more comments over fewer comments. I have written functions where 80% of the lines are comments. But this is a bad comment for very simple to understand reasons.
I think it does, objectively. In a pull request, I’d comment: “You imported pandas with an abbreviation. You economize the variable name `df` instead of dataframe. Those anticipate a reader who already knows when to chose the read_csv method.”
If you are in charge of reviewing someone's pull request and ensuring they adhere to specified company guidelines, you can do whatever your organization wants. Outside of that though, you lack the authority to tell programmers how many comments are too much. I too know how to write self-documenting code, but that doesn't mean your code should have no comments or shouldn't be liberally commented.
GP mentions that this is a textbook unnecessary comment and I would beware any textbook and professed expert that disagrees.
Whether a LLM coding model demonstrates understanding of unnecessary comments might be interesting, as would any differentiation in quality if my prompt asked for more or fewer lines of comments.
And I would beware any professed expert who has such a oversimplified heuristic of what makes a good engineer.
> Whether a LLM coding model demonstrates understanding of unnecessary comments might be interesting
I think it would be an interesting experiment, that sounds like a great idea for you to pursue. Make sure to sample a wide variety of models, and include a caveat that LLMs are not a source of truth regarding such matters, as they are simply providing probabilistic text completions based on prior training data.
You'd get the spirit roasted out of you at any FAANG (at least, back when people gave a shit) if you ever sent out a change review with such a dumbass comment.
I have no problem adapting to style guidelines of specific codebases I contribute to. It would, however, behoove you to have similar respect for other coding styles which have zero impact on the quality of code itself and serves a particular purpose for a particular kind of person who might not particularly care what someone at a FAANG (lol appeal to authority) thinks about their code style.
// This is my reply:
No. You have "well-commented code" completely backwards. This is not it.
// This is the end of my reply.
Yes, we can take anything to the extreme and hyperbolize in order to prove a point, but that doesn't really add anything useful to the discussion.
This is not a case of "code for people to read". If you want that, maybe try literate programming[0]. I prefer in the case where the code is blindingly fucking obvious for there not to be an extra comment above it that adds no value whatsoever. I much prefer for comments to be about the theory of the code rather than to explain in a worse way what I can already clearly see simply by reading the code. In other words I much prefer comments about, say, why some particular data structure was chosen, over comments that only say shit like "create a new linked list".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
How about we don't tell other people how to code? It's one thing to make suggestions, it's another to make demands. I've been doing this for a long time and I can code laps around most people. I also like well-commented code that allows me to quickly skim code and check it for correctness.
You can have your preferences all you want and that's great, but when you start passing irrational judgement about the value of someone's code just because it's liberally commented, your perspective becomes less respectable.
> How about we don't tell other people how to code? It's one thing to make suggestions, it's another to make demands. I've been doing this for a long time and I can code laps around most people. I also like well-commented code that allows me to quickly skim code and check it for correctness.
I'm sorry, that was not intended to be received as a demand, I edited my comment to hopefully clarify.
> You can have your preferences all you want and that's great, but when you start passing irrational judgement about the value of someone's code just because it's liberally commented, your perspective becomes less respectable.
I didn't say anything about the value of your or anyone's code other than that obvious comments don't add any to me. (I do tend to find it funny when a comment manages to obviously contradict the code that it's about, but here that's not the case.) My point was more that comments are more useful to me when they're non-obvious. See, again, the data structure example.
I appreciate the edit and I do think we could have an enjoyable and fruitful conversation about this. Normally I would, but I have a lot going on today. I do appreciate your willingness to have a productive conversation about this topic and I apologize if I let my frustration toward some of the other commenters in this thread affect how I engaged with you specifically :)
To be fair I did use profanity in my original comment so I can understand the jump to frustration. Hopefully your day goes well.
Generating boring one off analysis scripts is the best use case for AI code writing, so can’t fault them for doing so. For serious projects I found LLMs—even cutting edge Claude Sonnet 3.7 in agent mode—just can’t generate a large amount of code with the level of consistency and quality I expect and fixing such code is barely faster than writing it myself with AI autocomplete. But little scripts that I throw away after a single use? What used to take fifteen minutes or longer now takes thirty seconds.
Yes you can because they are accessing sensitive government data with it and that requires more time effort and care than the barest of bare minimum...
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Well I can tell you the Python code was written with the help of an AI
If you’re not writing code with the help of an AI honestly that’s a skill issue in itself
What do you mean? I don't write code with AI because figuring out how to code things is not what takes a lot of time in my job. That's the fun bit, why would I automate it? What takes time is coming to alignment with the team on what problem we are solving, figuring out what is possible, and aligning on a solution based on the available tradeoffs. Is there some way AI is supposed to be able to help me with that?
It's a skill issue if your code looks like AI code, regardless of whether you used AI or not.
> If you’re not writing code with the help of an AI honestly that’s a skill issue in itself
Making statements like this one is a skill issue all on its own.
Yeah it’s like looking at text and saying “oh they used a word processor”.
not really, unless your word processor outputs significant portions of text for you
No, it just does the layout, not the text. Much like LLMs do the code tokens but not the goal. Abstraction in all things, and automation of the lower levels does not devalue the higher levels (that is, a traffic sign works the same regardless if hand painted or commercially printed).
Really not sure where this tangent is going but looking at hypothetical text it can be pretty obvious that various word processors were used.
Like if an email has the same font/etc as google doc then it's pretty obvious they wrote it in a doc and then copy-paste it.
They were making the point that using a word processor as a tool isn't the same as having an LLM write something, then retain the LLM generated changes such that it is immediately obvious the bulk of the code was generated by an LLM, not that it isn't possible to discern whether someone is using a word processor.
What made me suspicious, immediately, was that in their org chart has "union status".
For payment systems, it's incredibly important for the employer to know whether to withhold some portion of the paycheck for union dues, obviously. But given how they are likely using this information, which isn't tied to payroll, it's worrying and only increases the need for feds to move over to direct pay systems that they are already transitioning to, for their safety. Especially given some other moves the administration made last week in the space of collecting union activity (specifically on stewards) data.
That is chatgpt generated code too.
There’s a good chance the reason this is public is because he was using gist to transfer ChatGPT code between his personal computer and his government computer.
Probably true. I work in a regulated space and I have done this to get my zsh config to a secure laptop, but I have always had the common sense to mark the gist as hidden (can still be accessed if you know the hash, obvs).
Good catch this is actually my workflow when I code on my phone in the hot tub.
Probably. By the time I check this it's already gone.
Interesting, that would be a pretty blunder
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Org charts!? Our government is saved! /s
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I don't care about the twitter DM thing, I care about gathering ton of open source sensitive data by an organization which is disemboweling the bureaucratic apparatus from within
Posting linked in followers seems egregious to me.
Guilt by association publicized for people to troll or harass people?
What happened to pretending or trying to be better than the people you hate? Why sink to their level?
Gathering open source data is a problem? lol it’s open!
You can buy soil fertilizer and other things online, but with a specific combination of purchases 3 letters agencies will think you're building a bomb.
The same way, an agency who is led by a pathoilogical liar, who is not following pre existing guidelines to make the state apparatus more efficient, (and i could go on for hours) who has a worker who compiles an extensive list of sensitive infrastructure, even if publicly available, makes my spider sense tingle
bureaucrats? Don’t kid yourself.
English is not my first language, government workers would have been more apt
What else do you call government employees?
Mechanics, technicians, soldiers, pilots, doctors, nurses, IT specialist, programmers, researchers, ...
It implies that he works and operates in the reigns of a bureaucratic system he is everything but. I would call government employees, just that.
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What a weird thing to say. They are slashing and burning government and routing the permanent bureaucracy of democrats that run the country no matter who wins the election. That’s simply what the GOP has been promising to do for decades, but has been too feckless to do until now.
So undermining national security by leaking oddly specific and contemporary critical infrastructure data is just "draining the swamp"?
Interesting how "routing the permanent bureaucracy" conveniently includes actions that benefit foreign adversaries.
Funny how Conservative principles now include strategic incompetence at the exact points that serve Russian interests.
What was leaked? It was all publicly available datasets?
I guess the leakers didn’t know that! :D
What can you do? Those DOGE staffers are young and inexperienced.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sounds like you didn't know that either.
What I do know, is that Russia seems to be remarkably fond of other people’s undersea links:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Baltic_Sea_submarine_ca...
> the permanent bureaucracy of democrats
That’s ridiculous on the face of it, unless you think GOP appointed heads of agencies have been in on it, and that there has been a massive conspiracy for years with no real evidence leaking.
Careful, your tinfoil hat is a bit creased.
All you have to do is look at how Trump is treating Zelenskyy and praising Putin to know that he's in Putin's hip pocket, either out of stupidity or is an actual asset that they have компромат on
> how Trump is treating Zelenskyy and praising Putin to know that he's in Putin's hip pocket
Ukraine has been my pet war for the last few years. I have to disagree.
Trump doesn’t particularly care what happens to Ukraine. He needs the dollars we’re sending to Europe to finance his tax cut and trade war. I’m less convinced Trump is acting at Putin’s direction than that he’s looking for the nearest guy to offload the problem onto.
I would be more willing to believe that if not for the first-order result of the current administration's aims being a 6% GDP loss from kicking out illegal immigrants and another 6% loss from what Musk says he's aiming for with DOGE, plus another 1% GDP loss from the tariffs.
That said, I am willing to believe Trump wants to use Musk to cut whatever he can actually cut, and then throw him under a bus for the political fallout of those cuts. That plus Musk's habit of making maximal promises and delivering "merely" impressive results, means I think DOGE will actually cut a lot less than $2T — I don't see how even "just" $200bn would be anything less than a major geopolitical shift felt well outside the US, that breaks something so hard that Trump will want a fall-guy. Same for the illegal immigrants: kicking them out may be a vote winner, but they're too important, so I expect perhaps 10% of them to actually be removed.
But that still produces a 2.2% GDP contraction. Ukraine aid won't come close to covering that.
I would agree something has to be going on that we're not aware of. He went to Russia in 1987 on business, met with some shady characters, came back and immediately placed a $100,000 ad in the NY Times that points fingers at other countries "taking advantage" of the US to promote the idea of US isolationism. He was not political before that trip, and since then it's been his life mission to separate us from our alliances. Now he's parroting lies directly from Putin's mouth gaslighting the world about who invaded who. He's certainly done a good job of keeping whatever it is secret, but it's pretty easy to see what's going on from his actions. Either he's been directly compromised or Russia's running a very effective influence campaign to basically brainwash certain people of influence without their direct knowledge.
BTW the ad is in this article for anyone who's interested:
https://archive.is/ATuqH
Noticing patterns is "tinfoil hat" territory while ignoring oddly specific and contemporary strategic infrastructure leaks is just "rational thinking."
I'll try to be more reasonable and assume it's pure coincidence that incompetence consistently aligns with foreign interests. Much more plausible.
That's the good thing about conspiracy theories. Hard to falsify.
Quite a few of those conspiracy theories are starting to look preeetty attractive these days.
Last time I checked, I hadn't gotten any more schizophrenic than I haven't been all my life, but - you never know.
Always watch out for misinformation, folks. If in doubt - Russia invaded Ukraine. I mean, unless they didn't. (But they did.)
Whose line was it again, anyway?
When patterns become too obvious, just label them "conspiracy theories." Much easier than explaining why critical infrastructure leaks consistently benefit the same interests.
Funny how skepticism disappears when billionaires dismantle democracy—that's just "innovation," right?
Genuinely curious here. How does this relate to Putin being captured by Russia/Putin? This, to me, looks like textbook ineptitude not foreign interference.
I want to be clear. I'm not casting doubt on observations that Trump does currently echo Russian talking points. I'm also not trying to argue that he's not captured by Russian interests. I'm merely wondering how this specific piece of information points to that conclusion.
I understand your question's fairness, but consider what's actually being exposed here: geospatial data on undersea cables, ports, and "critical minerals" - precisely the vulnerable infrastructure points that would interest foreign intelligence services, particularly Russia.
This isn't mere incompetence - it's a clear alarming pattern. The Trump administration has consistently mishandled classified information while simultaneously adopting positions that align perfectly with Russian strategic interests regarding NATO, Ukraine, and European security.
When a DOGE staffer carelessly exposes sensitive infrastructure data that maps America's strategic vulnerabilities, and does so while the administration pushes policies beneficial to Russia, the connection becomes impossible to ignore.
This incident isn't separate from Russian influence - it's another manifestation of how this administration's OpSec is compromised at the most fundamental level, creating opportunities for exploitation by the very foreign powers they seem reluctant to oppose.
How old are you? Trump isn’t echoing “russian talking points.” He just sounds like an anti-interventionist democrat of the 1980s and 1990s. The neocons have been accusing that faction of “echoing russian talking points” since vietnam.
I remember the anti-interventionist Democrats of the 80s and 90s quite well. They criticized military adventures but never suggested dismantling NATO, abandoning treaty allies, or praising dictators while undermining their own intelligence agencies.
Funny how this "anti-interventionism" only applies to defending democracies against Russian aggression, but not to inserting troops into cities to confront protesters or threatening military action against political opponents.
The neocons accused the left of being soft. They never had evidence of infrastructure data being leaked while presidential rhetoric perfectly aligned with a specific foreign power's strategic objectives.
But please, continue your historical revisionism. It's fascinating how "America First" now means "Russia's interests first."
> I remember the anti-interventionist Democrats of the 80s and 90s quite well. They criticized military adventures but never suggested dismantling NATO, abandoning treaty allies, or praising dictators while undermining their own intelligence agencies
You’re making it sound like they were on board with the general idea of using american power to police the world, but only disagreed on the particulars. That was not the case. For example, a common refrain was to criticize America’s military bases all over the world, or spending 10 times as much on defense as the next 10 countries combined: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili....
You make it sound like they merely objected to use of that infrastructure in particular conflicts for fact-specific reasons. That’s not true. Anti-interventionist liberals opposed the idea of using american military power to defend far-away borders, and the imperialism and military apparatus required to underwrite that commitment.
> Funny how this "anti-interventionism" only applies to defending democracies against Russian aggression, but not to inserting troops into cities to confront protesters or threatening military action against political opponents.
Shutting down riots is good for the vast majority of americans. Defending far away borders isn’t. The logic is simple.
Anti-interventionist Democrats criticized military spending but never advocated abandoning treaty obligations that maintained global stability since WWII.
(or you would prefer that the US hadn’t even joined the Allies in WWII?)
There's a profound difference between questioning military budgets and actively undermining alliances while praising dictators.
Your characterization whitewashes the specific nature of Trump's positions, which uniquely align with Russian strategic objectives in ways no previous anti-interventionist movement ever did.
As for "shutting down riots is good for the vast majority of Americans" while "defending far away borders isn't"—that's revealing. Democracy only matters within arbitrary geographic boundaries? The same argument justified ignoring Hitler's early aggressions.
Strange how this selective "anti-interventionism" consistently benefits one specific foreign power while dismissing democratic values as irrelevant beyond US borders.
But I understand—principles are flexible when they're just convenient vehicles for power rather than actual beliefs.
> Anti-interventionist Democrats criticized military spending but never advocated abandoning treaty obligations that maintained global stability since WWII. There's a profound difference between questioning military budgets and actively undermining alliances while praising dictators.
Anti-interventionists opposed the maintenance of American hegemony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMyJWuvW_9k. For example, they opposed having military bases all over the world. I distinctly remember a debate about this in 1999 or so in high school world history class. We mocked a crazy chinese anti-communist kid for saying that maintaining american hegemony was important.
Even today, less than half of conservative/moderate democrats would support U.S. intervention if China invaded Taiwan or North Korea invaded South Korea: https://globalaffairs.org/commentary-and-analysis/blogs/libe...
It was not just a quibble about the particulars of defense spending. That would have been an irrational position--to say we should maintain our commitment to maintain worldwide borders frozen in time as they were in 1950 but somehow do that without having military bases everywhere and spending enormous sums on defense.
> Democracy only matters within arbitrary geographic boundaries?
Yes, obviously! How other people run their countries is none of America's business. E.g. as long as Syria was keeping Muslim terrorists from attacking America, it was irrelevant to America how many of his own people he killed.
> The same argument justified ignoring Hitler's early aggressions. Strange how this selective "anti-interventionism" consistently benefits one specific foreign power while dismissing democratic values as irrelevant beyond US borders.
For god's sake read another book. Evangelizing "democratic values" is how the U.S. has long justified immiserating people in other countries and toppling their governments. It's the fundamentally incorrect ideology that led to the Iraq War. And if your only takeaway from that disaster is that the execution was flawed but democracy-promotion is fundamentally sound then you're beyond helping.
> For god's sake read another book.
> you're beyond helping
Please don't get on the wrong side of the guidelines like this. I realize these are high-energy topics but this is important.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> > Democracy only matters within arbitrary geographic boundaries?
> Yes, obviously! How other people run their countries is none of America's business. E.g. as long as Syria was keeping Muslim terrorists from attacking America, it was irrelevant to America how many of his own people he killed.
Where do you think the Syrian's that don't want to die go? This question applies to other countries as well such as say Mexico.
The world is very connected and ignoring that fact will just leave with you ton of problems. Say at the southern border ...
Your "yes, obviously!" response is refreshingly honest. At least you admit moral values are irrelevant to your worldview—just raw power and self-interest matter.
This isn't the anti-interventionism of principled peace activists; it's naked realpolitik stripped of ethical pretense.
I opposed the Iraq War too—the difference is I don't use it to justify abandoning democracies facing genuine aggression. Opposing misguided interventions doesn't require embracing callous isolationism.
Strange how your selective anti-interventionism consistently aligns with Russian strategic objectives while claiming to represent American interests. You've moved from opposing specific military actions to dismissing the entire concept of international solidarity.
The line between principled non-intervention and moral abdication isn't that difficult to see—unless you're deliberately looking away.
It’s funny how you’re in every thread in this topic, defending the indefensible. So Trump saying that “Ukraine should never have started it” [0] is not echoing a Russian talking point?
0. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9814k2jlxko.amp
Trump literally said Ukraine started the war with Russia, how is that not a russian talking point?
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-trump-war-zelensky...
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5151545-trump-uk...
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
A nothingburger. Not common to see such blatant misinfo high on HN. I do have higher expectations on this and people here instead of people jumping on a hatewagon :/
Community note on the post:
The geospatial data the reporter claims is "sensitive data" is not actually sensitive data. It is open source data. The source files in the DOGE employee's GitHub repository point to an open source site accessible by anyone.
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038118/Glo...
Until they accidentally cut funding to it, anyway.
Ohh, any credentials? Like is this guy the kind of guy who hard codes a resource key?
We need politics out of here. Maybe make the line between HN and the rest of news a bit more clear.
HN's approach to political stories has been stable for many years: most are off-topic, but some are ok; but only some.
'Stable' here means stable over time. The proportion of political stories goes through pretty big fluctuations (mostly in response to macro social events, e.g. elections), but HN's principles remain the same, and the swings eventually subside*.
If you (or anyone) want to read about what those principles are, I've posted about that many times. Here's one pointer into those explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
* perhaps ironically, this 'stability' includes the phenomenon of users complaining that HN is turning too much into a political site. For a glimpse into how far back that goes, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
While I too find it distasteful and distracting, the inclination to expunge politics from conversation may have played a role in getting us (at least in the US) where we are: 1) where people have forgotten to talk about politics politely, and 2) where politics have been weaponized by tuning to especially divisive issues specifically for high-engagement.
And that is where many of us have played a role: increasing engagement.
> We need politics out of here
DOGE is a creature of Silicon Valley. Paul Graham spends his time now opining on woke [1]. One can escape base partisanship. But the political economy makes any attempt to escape politics pretend.
[1] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
This is messed up... The guy took his github down now... This witch hunt against doge is just so incredibly unnerving... all public information, obviously using cursor to write basic scripts(i.g. //insert your script here, and inline comments describing basic code) and posting it on his github for future use, sharing, and boosting his 'hireability'. He seems to be rapid fire coding and sharing what he can... he had 35 repo's last time i checked.
He also wasn't the only doge team member who seems to be doing it, hopefully they don't all stop posting their code because of this...
This may or may not be breaking the law, but who is checking? Where are the controls? Forget checks and controls, there is no willingness on anyone in power to even ask the question.
Ironically, fear of losing power has paralyzed everyone that objectively have no power in Washington as they just exist to please the two presidents.