---
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.
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.
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.
"classification by compilation" is literally part of the Security Classification Guide (SCG) and given as mandatory training to everyone with a clearance at least once a year. Individually unclassified pieces of information can absolutely become sensitive or even classified when aggregated. Read the SCG people, this is not rocket science.
(I am not saying that applies here to this data. Merely stating that none of you have any idea what you are talking about.)
Why is it contradictory? It could be sensitive and unsecured. Sensitive doesn't mean 'classified'.
> You are speaking with authority but have no idea what you are talking about.
What do you know about the GP?
Perhaps creating division is the point:
I gave up trying to gentle parent other adults a long time ago. Newsrooms themselves have no fear publishing disingenuous and polarizing content.
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
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/doge-support-collapsing-poll-elon-m...
- 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 with 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...
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
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’?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
To me it doesn't seem worthwhile to respond from the perspective of misinterpreting a comment, especially when being pedantic. One would hope the same level of precision could be applied to the writing as to the reading?
> 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.
They know thy have the opportunity to buy up the assets and to cash in on the chaos.
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...).
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.
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?
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.
Consider a scenario - the US falls into some weird anarcho-libertarian dystopia. This works fine for a while, but no one is making new computers or new cars or new anything and the only way to get these things is to open negotiations with outside groups. But what do you offer them? The currency is worthless because it used to be backed by a central government but it isn't now. If you don't have something that is valued by the outside group, you have nothing to bargain with. And if you don't have superior force of arms, they don't have to accept it anyway. And even if you do, you absolutely cannot trust them.
Modern government is built on trust. It has value because, even if it is somewhat corrupt, or even totally corrupt, it keeps society functioning in a way that provides value to everyone, even if it is unevenly distributed. By reducing that uneven distribution, we increase the overall value to everyone both inside and outside the system. It's literally the definition of win-win.
If the government system has some value, then its currency has value, regardless. The US dollar is valued because it is backed by the word of the US government. Other countries have lesser value because, while their word might be good, they aren't as trusted or don't have the might that the US government has at its command.
Trump and Musk and the people they're working with don't get that. They only see win-lose. They don't understand that their value is in trust and that they are rapidly pissing away that trust.
We are unimaginably fucked.
Maybe I'm preaching to the choir, and badly at that, and I apologize for that. I'm sitting down here, so far from being able to do anything effective, and it's so unbelievably frustrating.
The domestic slash-and-burn, the foreign policy tarriff chicken, even the minerals deal with Ukraine-- they all take the form of "you can book some great numbers for the next quarter. All it costs you is pesky stuff like 'long-term viability' and 'leadership positions', and those are only a problem for Future You, and who cares about him anyway?
We've basically become Hewlett-Packard as a country.
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.
And no one has to worry that some other billionaire is going to send an army to conquer his or her estate and holdings by force of arms, slaughtering all the employees and destroying the inventory.
They don't have to pack the basements with food for the winter. Their fleets of cars and other ridiculous collections can be safely stored away from the environment and peasants (meaning anyone poor, like millionaires).
Governments make rules to favor them and do the job of selling it to the masses. They don't have to do their own PR. In fact, the media will do the PR for them and it won't cost them anything, for the most part.
They can bury their pecadillos on private islands, secure in the knowledge that, even if word gets out, word won't get out, for reasons. And besides, no one will really care, because governments and media will magically turn it from horrible scandal to mild eccentricity.
And if they don't like the government, well, now, they can just buy one.
No idea what happens if they try to return it, though.
I used to make similar arguments like was at the top of your comment until I actually read some literature around it.
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.
I am not an ancap because there are some major problems with their philosophy, but your analysis is just incorrect.
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.
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.
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.
What the fuck are you talking about? We don’t even have socialized medicine in this country.
And in a lot of the countries in Europe where things are further along the 'speedrunning' spectrum things don't seem too bad.
Heck, Sweden has more billionaires per capita and a wider social safety net:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
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.
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!
“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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/doge-cuts-911-related-c...
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.
Unfortunately I think we're going to need a lot more than luck.
But I appreciate the sentiment.
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.
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.
there was a post a couple of months back on HN from such a person who worked with DOGE for a bit
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
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.
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.
And it’s not like Community Notes will remain reliable.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-says-hell-fix-community-notes-...
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-musk-do...
....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
Yes americas right wing courts blocked justice from being applied in this case but this would hardly be baseless.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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...
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.
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.)
Sorry, do you have a source for that? Having trouble verifying it.
I agree there are standard vetting and security clearances, and they should be followed.
[1] https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/EPIC-v-OPM-25-cv...
Self-assessed conflict of interest is conflict of interest.
C'mon USA, do something funny.
Except the second half never happened.
We’re seeing more “claims” than “disclosures”. Can you point me any examples of the latter?
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.
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.
This sort of condescension is characteristic of people who hold the opinions you do. The rest of your post is complete nonsense.
Not in Germany. Public insults are punishable. Doing so in a permanent way with lots of outreach (like the web is) increases the consequences.
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 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.
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.
> 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 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_.
Actions the left has allowed during past progressive administrations had real downsides that inflict real harms on real victims. I am frustrated at them and I wish they never would've done those things, but I recognize that insulting them and calling them names is only going to encourage them to be even less charitable in return.
It's not about being nice, it's about not deliberately and intentionally making things worse by stoking polarization for no reason other than to dehumanize and ostracize the other side.
This isn't a complicated idea, it's like mutually assured destruction: we're all better off when we all step back for a second from being pissed off and afraid... slow down... think... recognize that we all lose if we all stay on the offensive, so let's dial things down and be more diplomatic instead of intentionally continuing to make tensions and polarization worse.
Both sides have to recognize that both sides do it and both sides are better off if neither does it.
We are not the foolish prisoners in the prisoner's dilemma who are unable to communicate and thus unable to collectively work together to find win-win and avoid lose-lose. But we have to actually humanize and respect eachother in order to facilitate that dialogue, and that starts with not dehumanizing eachother.
Going through your past posts it seems you may be referring to warrantless wiretapping, which I’ve been railing about for ages. Of course the groundwork was laid by Bush’s PATRIOT act, but absolutely the DNC is extremely corrupt and many democrat leaders have done awful things. I’m not a democrat or a neoliberal and the DNC is very far from a left wing or progressive party. But none of that changes the fact that we’re currently in the midst of a fascist coup, and your whataboutism comes across as fascist apologia.
You seem to make the mistake I see a lot of online rational tech people make, which is to assume that the DNC represents leftism, and to then associate all the evils of the DNC with “the left”. Read some actual left-wing theory like Kropotkin dude. The DNC is a deeply compromised center-right neoliberal party, as anyone on the actual left will be quick to tell you.
It just increases polarization which makes us all feel more uncomfortable and less safe. I wish we could all treat eachother with respect and decency, and I really do mean this in the most bipartisan sense possible.
Both sides do it and we'd all be better off if both sides stopped.
Name calling isn’t going to do anything, and lowering yourself by it is, at best, self-harming.
There's no guarantee a mutually respectful dialogue solves the problem, but it sure doesn't hurt to try that instead of starting out with dehumanizing the other party in a social conflict as the opening move.
So, if you want to win in the court of public opinion, maybe go for the throat in Round 1. Sadly, respectful dialogue is not en vogue.
Aren't we supposed to be allowed to vote in a democracy?
It's not like he made a gee you eye in VB or something...
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.
I don’t see a license on the repo.
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.
'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.
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.
Am I on Reddit or HN?
Look at the screenshots, not the description by this "politics reporter" who seems to be indulging in evidence-free witch hunts.
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.
I wonder where else I've seen that recently.
# Read the CSV file
df = pd.read_csv(csv_file)
The comments that are most likely to correlate strongly with the code are the useless redundant ones.
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.
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.
Oh the tasty irony.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://www.perl.com/pub/2005/07/14/bestpractices.html/#7-co...
This style allows me to scan only natural language comments, generally rendered in a distinct highlight color, to get a high-level view of what the code does. My colleagues have rarely followed the same idiom, but my code has been well-regarded everywhere I've been.
When you do this, there are occasionally times where you wind up with a single line that isn't grouped with the others, and to be consistent the easiest thing is to insert a comment like the one that started this thread.
However, I've adapted this style over the years to avoid any hint of redundancy because some people feel so strongly that they will fixate on it and decide you're a terrible engineer for this one tiny detail. It's easier just to work around them.
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'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.
No. You have "well-commented code" completely backwards. This is not it.
// This is the end of my reply.
Making statements like this one is a skill issue all on its own.
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.
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.
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 can you do? Those DOGE staffers are young and inexperienced.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Baltic_Sea_submarine_ca...
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.
So a political appointee who wants to expand government finds willing allies.
An appointee who wants to reduce government finds opposition.
The association of individual political parties with those positions is more variable.
But this neglects the millions of contractors and other positions that are also funded by government spending, which is harder to measure, and does change more over time.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-true-size-of-governme... (2020, but the article doesn't clarify if the 5m includes short-term census workers)
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.
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.
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."
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.
(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.
> 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.
> 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 ...
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.
Yes, because ethics is a terrible basis for foreign policy. Who made you the god of what’s right and wrong, moral and immoral? The ideological nutjobs are worse for the world than the self interested dictators.
> Opposing misguided interventions doesn't require embracing callous isolationism.
The problem is interventionism itself. You’re arrogantly presupposing you understand the world well enough to intervene in the fate of foreign people. It’s the classic liberal conceit.
> Strange how your selective anti-interventionism consistently aligns with Russian strategic objectives while claiming to represent American interests.
It’s not just Russians: most of the world would prefer the U.S. to simply leave it alone. That’s why BRICS is a thing. And the anti-interventionists finally have a majority of Americans opposed to spending American lives defending the borders of countries they couldn’t find on a map. The american people and third worlders have common cause in opposing the liberal internationalists.
Nope, they've got a leader who is obsessed with the idea of turning Gaza, Panama and Greenland into American colonies and making agreements with Russia on the future of Ukraine. Pretty much every other leader manages a less interventionist first few weeks than that...
If there were prizes handed out for intellectual dishonesty arguing that the people who don't think that ethnically cleansing Gaza to build casinos there is a route to peace in the Middle East are the ones who are arrogantly presupposing they understand the world well enough to intervene in the fates of foreign people would be a surefire winner.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-trump-war-zelensky...
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5151545-trump-uk...
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?
Funny how skepticism disappears when billionaires dismantle democracy—that's just "innovation," right?
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.
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.
Yes. But Musk is also a useful distraction. Cabinet confirmed and deficit blown out while the DOGE bros take the cannon fire. Round two will be drawing out their inevitable days in court.
BTW the ad is in this article for anyone who's interested:
I'll try to be more reasonable and assume it's pure coincidence that incompetence consistently aligns with foreign interests. Much more plausible.
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!
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
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.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
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...
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...
Ironically, fear of losing power has paralyzed everyone that objectively have no power in Washington as they just exist to please the two presidents.