Worth noting that the U.S. Digital Service (USDS, i.e the org that DOGE has now subsumed) has for a long while been experts at building and deploying static websites for the federal government. And doing it completely in the open. Within minutes you can literally clone and re-deploy all of httsp://usds.gov — 150MB of 2,700 assets and documents, built on Jekyll — locally or on S3. They've even written out the complete deployment instructions:
There's nothing moral about it. The profitability of the tax prep industry depends on taxes being hard to file. Lack of official free e-file is regulatory capture. Any associated blather about making taxes cumbersome to keep people mistrustful of taxes is a fig leaf, as is this case with most "conservative" viewpoints.
1. To people saying that the government should have a direct way to file taxes. This is an outdated way of thinking. Most ordinary people shouldn't have to file taxes at all. Withholding is sufficient for income taxes and taxes on liquid investments.
2. 18F was an openly partisan organisation. They were likely disbanded not to kill the products they produced, but rather for their inability to remain politically neutral.
I've learned about the USDS in the past on hackernews and was always impressed. If someone wanted to really make a "DOGE" in good-faith (i.e. improve efficiency of government instead of just destroying everything), I think it would look like expanding the power and scope of things like USDS.
I agree. Have always felt that USDS/18F are best in class examples of tech innovation being brought to perhaps slightly tech-backwards areas of government, and doing the interpersonal work to bring other agencies along as well.
The UK’s Government Digital Service is similar. They’ve got some good examples of doing unglamorous but impactful work -e.g. replacing dozens of different payment processing systems with one quality one, the same thing for sending physical letters, etc.
I use many SOPs daily. The principle is that if you can forget everything about it but the name, obtain the documentation, and relearn it, you should do about the same thing as without.
Though you can find SOPs similar to modern from 1950s USSR docs, the U.S. Navy ones like folding SOP or military shower SOP are especially pragmatic.
What's especially unfortunate is that experienced USDS employees had already achieved the one software engineering task that is basically impossible for a 19-year-old (or a newly hired USDS employee of any age): convincing a federal department manager that using a static website is a great solution — nevermind also publishing all of its source code and documents on a public github.
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
They are just henchmen following whatever playbook was developed by some reactionary jerks. That’s why Elon and co look for dysfunctional personalities that are easy to control.
But that’s only useful if the incoming people in charge don’t have any contempt towards existing employees and want to leverage best practices instead of pretending that they know better. Twitter had the same problem after Elon took over.
Does anyone want to talk about the hack itself? Can anyone give more details than "left their database open"? I came to this site hoping for a real discussion about that and didn't see it here yet...
Just checked the DOGE website; I'm not too sure about this theory given that POST requests are blocked and the only APIs you can find (ie. /api/offices) only supports GET requests and if the UUID doesn't match, it 404s.
I don't see any CRUD endpoints for modifying the database
I mean the article is paywalled but it sounds like this is isolated to their site-displayed twitter feed; basically the site was hosted by cloudflare and you could insert your own fake tweets into what was recorded on the site (but not on the actual DOGE twitter feed). I don't think any data was actually compromised
I can't speak to any data that may or may not be compromised, but this isn't about inserting fake tweets. Anything in their "government org chart" can be edited unauthenticated.
Yeah, it's just tremendously embarrassing. These are supposed to be the tech geniuses who can parse 50 years of accumulated legacy code and find all the government waste? In 3 weeks?
Looks like they started posting sole data - not sure what FPDS is but the documents all look rendered in OSX aqua theme lol.
A lot of cuts looks “sensical” at first, until you realize things like “cutting magazine subscriptions” are more like “cutting financial news sources off from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” or “not renewing reputable news subscriptions for people who really need to understand current events”.
And then there’s a lot of DEI/diversity training cuts which feel targeted not at their war on Actually Being Nice to People, but at the groups those trainings help employees serve - cutting DEI for SNAP…so, there’s a reported (haven’t verified but allegedly from USDA data) 5 ethnic groups, as well as “race unknown”, that are enrolled in SNAP. Now imagine how you’d train people to understand, interact with, and help people in different ethnic backgrounds _who need this assistance_. I believe empathy and understanding are incredibly good skills to have in a role like this, and DEI helps train that - for all involved.
The going notion on the right is that DEI is racist, and against white people, but it leaves out the idea that anyone non-white might also need this training? Like, DEI is about understanding differences, and then the right reads it as “understanding non-whites” and get offended that they even have to think about other cultures.
And another cut funding for training on gender, and that training was for an office involved in tech and engineering…a professional field notoriously male-dominant for a long time. Again, it makes sense to me that this kind of training would be good, because I’ve heard the way people in tech talk and act towards women and queer folx, so yeah let’s have some training.
These kinds of programs aren’t meant to tell people what to think - if they can’t empathetically interact with the world, work training won’t change that - but it will tell them that in a professional capacity they need to know how to interact and be productive. In business this is so you make more money, in government it’s how you help more people - including your own employees and also the communities you serve.
So Trump is doing what he said, and the details are grim.
> Maybe they should fire these kids and replace them with REAL engineers.
Nah, they'll want reasonable pay, reasonable hours, and won't confuse their boss for a living god. They may even have some self-confidence and morals, which would be a total deal breaker.
Yup. At 28 you’re going to have way more things in your life distracting you from the job, you’re probably prioritizing work life balance which is a red flag.
Does anyone else see what’s really going on here? Naming a “government agency” after a meme coin? Wearing a hat in the Oval Office while talking over the (literally) sitting president? Elon is attempting to telegraph that he has no respect for the institutions of our country. Why do you think Trump did something as petty as renaming the Gulf of Mexico? It’s a litmus test to see who will follow his most inane power plays. Today, it was put into action when they banned the AP from the Oval Office and AF1 for not bending the knee on this issue. This is far darker than Elon just running amok.
I don't really disagree, but it's also becoming pointless to use these terms. Naming Trump/Musk as fascists is mostly correct but all this does is make his adherents question whether fascism is "really all that bad" (or reject with lines like "NAZIs were socialist [nonsense] and Trump isn't a socialist, ergo..."
It's not enough to point out that Trump is fascist and therefore bad. You need to go the next step and say why fascism is bad.
(Yes, we've gotten to this timeline, where we have to go back and actually describe why fascism is bad -- where the press is reporting on proposed ethnic cleansing in Gaza with statements like "outlandish plan" and "unrealistic" rather than naming it for what it is: a brutal and immoral plan to exterminate an entire people. Oh, and now we need to explain why that is actually a Really Awful Thing)
This is so much worse than 9-11, so, so much worse. Maybe the first tower still has yet to fall, maybe the fireball has faded and the firefighter are climbing the stairs and you think they'll soon be able to rescue you, but the fire is burning white hot under the surface and the steel getting hotter and softer by the minute.
You do not need to look far at all to find tiny changes made by past administrations that have had massive unforeseen consequences. We are absolutely cooked.
America's entrepreneurial spirits have worked up a persecution complex and want their revenge. They will implement protectionist policy, push on spending cuts before tax reforms ("look at what we saved!") and then expect the market to climb while they liquidate their hundred-billion dollar portfolios and move to an island to retire.
At least, that's the theory. I don't think America wants to admit that the CCP has their industrial capacity by the balls and can direct it with centralized planning to displace America's EV market or naval tonnage at will. There's an assumption that deregulation will finally be the panacea to America's issues, but we can't pursue that consistent with a policy of global trade. We can't sanction the ICC and demand other countries extradite their criminals to the US. We can't abandon the Human Rights Council and then demand other countries respect our moral authority.
It's going to be another 4 years of the civilized world proving they don't need America. And Trump is going to spend it flattering dictators abroad while everyone else taps their foot waiting for another primary. Stagnation is a best case scenario, a-la 2016 - our saving grace is that most of America's serious adversaries are also hurting quite a bit right now. Trump sitting in the Nixon or Regan seat would have been game-over for America.
Assuming he makes it that long, he’ll have a third term. They’ll make some lunatic reading of the law to justify state legislatures selecting electors. The supine courts will rubber stamp anything.
I think that while Euro-American split was to be expected - we don't care about Pacific, they don't care about Russia - I think nobody expected USA to actually become hostile, and not just become neutral.
Every other intelligence agency on the planet is about to scoop a ton of American data via cyber and basic HUMINT. It's free for all out there, I guess.
Its not just this website. Since DOGE, China probably canceled all vacation days for their hackers, as its a free for all. Firing of most so many people including security departments and most likely the (good) femboy furry hackers.
Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
The data and access gained currently by China, Russia, NK and SA will continue to be useful until and way after the next war.
Oh I have no doubt about that. You have people, who would not be able to obtain a security clearance in a 100 years if they tried, running around, accessing government databases and taking "backups" offsite. Maybe law enforcement/Pentagon/intelligence data is not under threat at the moment, but in a couple of years who knows. Meanwhile people get fired, proper access protocols and communications continue to breakdown, and you get chaos. And every spy agency loves chaos.
> Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
Someone willing to work without morals for money can just be bought by the next highest bidder. Anything they touch should be treated as compromised.
They don't even need to: they have direct access via their agents. Such as the new intelligence chief and a couple of the DOGE boys who've already been caught directly selling NDA'd information.
I think the good thing is that the DOGE team seem extremely humble and willing to learn from their mistakes, rather than pass the blame in ignorance. Just like their leader!
Important to clarify that USDS (DOGE) does not have access to any military systems or intelligence systems. They only have the current access due to the historic process of the USDS.
I've been wondering this myself, not that I necessarily believe it. If they _were_ acting at the behest of a foreign adversary (pick your reason: leverage over an individual because of a targeted campaign, leverage over all of them because of the SolarWinds/Salt Typhoon hack, cash, etc.), how different would their actions look?
I think you are missing the entire point of this. It's not that it had sensitive data or anything of importance. It is that a .gov domain under the command of the self proclaimed Mr. Efficiency and smartest person of Earth about servers and car manufacturing was wide open for script kiddies to deface and access data from. It is a show of hypocrisy and how cutting corners like Dr. Emerald Mine Child here wants will shape the rest of this administration.
I am wondering if it would have been more of an effect to
instead of this add some DEI trolling ... April 1st level of foolery so people think it is real and then get Twitter riled up on it.
DOGE is a complete farce, but I think there's an important to not just write this off as a stage show and the people buying into it as idiots. There are a lot of people who feel that government isn't working for them and so when they see things like "8 million dollars spent on condoms for Palestinians" they're already primed to get angry about it. Musk/DOGE's actions may all be for spectacle, but he's tapping into some very real emotions that he wouldn't be able to tap into if people felt the government was working for them. DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem. Even if Musk and DOGE are completely discredited, if we don't figure out a way to make it so the average citizen feels like they're getting their money's worth from the government, it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain.
Re: this report that USAID was sending condoms to Gaza, that was actually in Gaza, Mozambique (which has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS), not Palestine. Maybe they knew, maybe not. Anyway, I know many people who have been parroting that stat, so it was effective propaganda.
if people felt the government was working for them
There's two things you need to make people feel the government is working for them:
* good social policies
* adequate education
One of the US parties has been working for decades to sabotage both, and with the help of the media they've successfully managed to deflect all the blame for it. So no, I don't agree that DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem -- unless you mean that the problem is 50 years of consistently undermining the government.
Any time the government tries to do something for The People, the wealthy and their mouthpieces get a portion of the population to believe the much needed help is actually evil socialism/communism and will destroy their way of life.
America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
It is absolutely possible to have feelings and still be an idiot for acting on them in certain ways. Someone who "feels" that vaccines are a hoax and they should drink bleach instead is still an idiot despite that feeling. There is also a sort of gray area where a person may act irrationally due to intense feeling in a way that's perhaps excusable (e.g., someone's relative dies and they start smashing things in a fit of grief), but it's still a bad idea. We have to hope that more people are the latter category and will wake up and realize what a mess they've made.
This strikes a chord with me, perhaps because I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
- government spending has been rampant and completely disconnected from available funds
- "shutdown" threats, typically a sign that a red line is being crossed, has been treated as political currency
- funds going from taxpayer (individual and corporations) to government, to be redistributed for an ever-increasing list of grants, programs, and studies
- locked-in mega spending areas of the budget showing plenty of warning signs of unsustainability, with nothing being done to address
Even if DOGE is "all for spectacle," I'm having trouble finding the downsides of DOGE's actions for generations coming after us. But maybe someone could help me understand why they feel differently?
Anyone on "the other side" (problems with that framing aside for now) who doesn't understand and accept this is only serving to make the problem worse. This is the result of people's disillusionment with government from both sides of the aisle reaching a boiling point. Anyone could have seen it coming, and anyone who wants to fix it needs to understand where the other side is coming from, and not just paint them as evil stupid idiots.
Compromise. It's essential to peaceful co-existence of a group of humans of any size. At some point along the line, America seems to have lost that quality.
The real question is when does something break that causes near-universal outrage. Unless something breaks in the near-term that most people care about, nothing will change.
The numbers they claim to save are like trying to turn your household budget around by cutting out a weekly latte.
If you really want to make big financial changes, you need a lot more income, or cut serious costs - like a car payment or downsize your house. In the case of DOGE, I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
If they do cut $2T, there will be a huge recession — worldwide impact, but potentially has EU and China (and India?) all trading more with each other than at present, so plausibly results in China having a larger nominal GDP after the dust settles.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
> I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
Have you considered that they are going after the low-hanging fruit, getting in "reps & sets" before they attack programs that have vastly greater inertia and potentially bi-partisan support? DoD and healthcare cover a ton of jobs, and might actually trigger pushback from Congress, in ways that annihilating the CIA's propaganda arm (which is basically a handful of overpaid bougie Dem-leaning "journalists") doesn't.
They are doing tremendous damage for something that is supposed to be a stage show. Among everything they've done over the past three weeks, HUD is being gutted as we speak and the company a friend works at lost $100 million in contracts practically overnight.
Its an inverse Robin Hood attack. Take from the poor to give to the rich. The middle class is about to get moved from business class to coach.
https://www.rawstory.com/gop-budget-2671154997/
it may be a stage show, but it has real consequences. A huge number of NIH grants awards have not gone out. Already, I am facing a 15% shortfall in my budget from a grant that was all set to be awarded. This is not tenable kind of behavior form a major institution, and DOGE dog and pony show disgusts me.
Trump/Elon fascism/heroism (depending on your point of view) aside, one thing that concerns me is how quickly is it possible to decide that 1000 employees at a place like the Department of Energy, including 300 at the National Nuclear Security Administration, can be dismissed without any impact on the effectiveness of these agencies.
Even if you do believe that these agencies are bloated with workers who are doing "unnecessary" work, which is possible, it seems very unprudent to make cuts so quickly. And who is qualified to make these decisions? Elon? Some Tesla or SpaceX engineer who wrote some code and put up a website? Come on. WTF do they know about how all these agencies operate and the downstream effects? You think they're taking the time to really think it through?
Now it's possible that prior to taking office, Trump had people with deep understanding of government operations go through everything, and really think things through, and prepare a list of jobs that could be cut without any impact, but if that is the case, it's never been said. Given who Trump has around him to lead these agencies (McMahon for Dept of Ed? An Oil and Gas Lobbyist for BLM? Really?) that doesn't seem likely.
Move fast and break things works fine for a start-up, and might even be fine for more cultural type stuff ("DEI"), but Dept of Energy?
It's like firing two-thirds of your sysadmins because "well, we haven't had any issues with our servers lately, and no breaches, so those people must not be needed".
To my point, found this article linked to in another thread: [0]
> Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.
> It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
> The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.
Part of the strategy might be:
1. Fire large swaths of the government. Declare victory!!
2. Hire those people back because it turns out that they're actually needed (who would have thought?). But that doesn't get news.
So in the end, things remain the same, but Trump/Elon get the headlines and their followers think they've done an amazing job.
I have been waiting 30 years for this to happen so I am excited while remaining optimistic.
If the systems and Nation is as fragile we have bigger problems than the Chaos Monkey unleashed at the Federal level.
Do people think Nuclear reactors will go unmanaged or Prisoners will go unfed? I suppose it is possible and time will tell.
We were lied to by the Government. The new administration may be lying as well. I think we will all learn a lot.
Considering the powers that be attempted to remove the current President through kinetic means I would imagine he is going to move as fast as possible.
The “powers that be tried to remove the current President” , not sure who those powers are (please spare me the “deep state” nonsense I expect higher order thinking here), but Trump attempted a violent overthrow of a democratic election. If you’re okay with that, then you and I have very different ideas of what democracy is.
Coincidentally I’ve been hugely critical of the US government (regardless of party) most of my life, especially US foreign policy and military, and inherently like the idea of a shake up a la Young Turks style.
But all that aside democratic ideals are the only thing that makes the US better than China or Russia, and Trump lost what little credibility he had left as someone who upholds democracy when he tried to stay in power 4 years ago and then doubled-down by pardoning the rioters. And that, my friend, trumps everything else.
No, the administration is lying. We Canadians were getting the blunt end of it.
I don't think it's been covered much in American media but President Trump is throwing threats of 25% tariffs on both Mexican and Canadian imports for the last month or so. First it was about how it would make manufacturing move back to the US. Then it was about how Canada is a national threat to the US because we're allowing fentanyl and illegal immigrants to cross in the US. Then it was about how the US was in terrible the trade deal with Canada and Mexico was (it was his deal, the USMCA that replaced NAFTA). Then it was how the US subsidizes Canada because Canada is a failing state and that the US was spending $200 billion a year propping up Canada. Then it was that Canada wasn't meeting it's NATO spending targets. Then it was that Canada is a failed state, and that everything would be better if Canada became the 51st state.
Every day it seemed like his narrative is changing. And when we had our retaliatory tariffs at the ready to cause harm to Republican states, you know what he did?
He blinked. The tariffs for Canada and Mexico were postponed until March. He's been consistent about telegraphing what his actions are going to be, but his justifications are so wildly all over the place that frankly it's probably safe to assume he's lying at least about his motivations.
And if he's willing to lie to one of the oldest allies to the United States, is it really that much of a stretch to think that he could be lying to Americans as well?
Sorry off topic, but isn't that x.com plastered on every single post not a flagrant conflict of interest? I mean other government sites subtly have a link to social media hidden somewhere and from multiple platforms basically x.com and Meta.
My thought exactly... When Musk was asked about potential conflict of interest he basically replied "Of course not, we're transparent and document everything on X"...
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
I'm on your side, but that's not a good argument. Nancy Pelosi openly stated she has a right to be financially entangled with the companies she regulates. At least 60% of the democratic party is firmly pro-oligarch, too. Just like 2 or 3 republicans get to performatively dissent on unpopular votes, Democrat resistance is largely performative, too. Those economic winners and losers are also campaign donors. Citizen's United, the ruling that made America structurally a plutocracy, happened under Obama.
> So according to the World Bank (not a Russian source!), Russia just flipped Japan to become the fourth largest global economy in GDP-by-PPP:
After reading this line you can easily identify that author is either propagandist or moron.
This is how Russia "increased GDP":
1 - Paid to restore tons of USSR weaponry garbage to just burn it yesterday.
2 - Funded building of new weaponry that will be burned today.
3 - Moved 5-10% of population to "military economy" building some military crap that have no other use other than get burned tomorrow.
4 - Took 300,000 random people out of real economy via forced mobilization and thrown them on frontlines.
5 - Hired 500,000+ poor or destitute people who had annual salary of $3600. Hired them for $2000 / month and paid them out $40,000 sign up bonus to go die on frontlines.
6 - Killed at least 100,000 of them and paid out $50,000 for each dead body to a family.
7 - Made like another 200,000+ of cripples that wont be able to work like until they die. So more spending.
And in process doubled mass of local currency in economy from 2022 from 65 trillion rubles to 117 trillions.
It looks like the defacement was already cleared, but archives are available [0][1]. I posted these separately because of 404Media's soft-paywall, which is also linked separately here.
Pretty gross to think of these people doing code reviews for projects they have no familiarity with - along with of course this bafflingly incompetent tweet: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961#m Donald Trump said DOGE were "super-geniuses," and according to his standards they probably are.
(The way Trump's election directly led to "retard" being a common pejorative again hasn't been discussed enough. Just awful.)
Games are written for Windows, therefore webapps should be written with "Microsoft C++" (presumably meaning Visual C++, though I suppose there's an outside chance that he means "Microsoft C/C++", from the early 90s).
Reading that set of quotes, it really is incredible how little Musk knows about even extremely basic things. He doesn't understand there are different problem spaces in tech, and that different problem spaces require completely different approaches and skill sets. To him, something like World of Warcraft is very impressive, so if you build Paypal on the same technology it will be impressive too. Like, honestly it's shocking that this guy is allowed near anything that has a button.
Having never read that - it reads incredibly similar to how Trump talks but with better sentence structure. It all sounds believable, but it’s really useless platitudes.
It's all very bullshit-ese, but it's worth pointing out that the majority of Google's important backend services are written in C++ (on Linux though). And not just stuff written in that same era, but all the way up to about 5-10 years ago.
Granted: Google was not so dumb to imagine deploying on NT / IIS. And their reasons for doing C++ were nothing like what Musk is blathering about here.
The biggest issue here isn't even about the technology. It's Musk as management stepping outside of his domain trying to tell the professionals working under him exactly what to do... because he's an egomaniac narcissist.
It's a "team" of junior hackers. What do you expect? I don't quite understand the motive. I mean the motive of the masses who cheer this on. Is it just to own the libs? They have to all be evil or completely misinformed. I assume most are ignorant and only a few are evil.
For some reason quite a number of people seem to believe the purpoted goals of DOGE, removing waste and increasing efficiency of the government.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
> whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
It befuddles me too. My understanding is that government spending is approved by congress and that all organizations except the Pentagon have passed their audits. This is not to say that there isn't _some_ waste, fraud and abuse in between the cracks, but any large expense is approved by Congress and the executive can't unilaterally override those spending choices.
Most people consider anything they don't like to be a waste of public funds. After all, they pay for the government through taxes, so it should serve only their needs. People in America do not view the government as a source for public good, but merely a piggy bank from which they should be able to extract funds. Just look at the student loan forgiveness crowd. I'm perfectly happy paying my dues, but a lot of people have decided that they want the government to give them a load of free money instead of using it for something productive.
I have seen some people who are undeniably very smart get drawn into this line of thinking.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
And, currently, firing everyone without just-cause protections (probationary workers, as well the contractor workforce - nearly equal in size to federal employees.)
The great american problem is that American bureaucracy is broken. Whether it's lottery systems for hiking in national parks, fixing roads, healthcare, or hiring across federal employers, all of these require a functioning bureaucracy and there is not one. And so what do Americans do? The left complains the bureaucracy is broken and the right complains the bureaucracy exists. There is little room left for ever fixing the bureaucracy in this situation. It leaves lots of room for people to grab power and change things unilaterally to their own benefit.
Efficiency-wise it is impossible for DOGE to move the needle. That line of reasoning is a smokescreen for destroying government agencies. Maybe they need to be folded, so petition the people. They have the Congress and Senate.
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
They are they are shrinking the government to find ~4T$ for for corporate tax cuts. You can call it legitimate policy but calling it "efficiency" is bit misleading.
Yeah even on HN where I would expect above average observational and critical thinking skills, there are plenty of people who don’t see or refuse to see what’s going on. Pretty shocking really.
Because the parts they don't like align with the parts DOGE doesn't like. They agree with dear leader and so all that woke BS is wasteful. This way they will pay lower taxes now because we got rid of all this "waste".
Ever heard of the banality of evil?
Ignorance is in some ways worse than being genuinely evil.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
I don't think it's ignorance. It's indifference. The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
Sometimes- it also just rains. The end of WW2 and free trade + technology, have given the futurist ideology that every problem is solveable way to much credibility. Some problems are just hard and inherently not solveable and sometimes not even workaroundable by technology.
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
The masse cheering this on have been told for decades that this is what they want. This is a response to Reagan's welfare queens, The $600 dollar hammer, and "activist judges". They think this is freedom. That this is good governance.
The way I’ve been saying it is the Right did such a good job of inventing phony boogeymen to get them elected (and then never do anything about said boogeymen) that they finally bred a generation that thinks their BS is real.
Wheel-warring with democrats, who previously carried out their own subtle power grabs, perhaps. I wouldn't really know, but I suppose "corruption" might mean "things that benefit the other side".
The people cheering them on are an anti-elitist bunch, the see themselves as the revolution for the people. But they don’t understand the finer details of all the things going on in a modern government-society system, and most importantly they lost faith in it.
> They have to all be evil or completely misinformed. I assume most are ignorant and only a few are evil.
I thought that after 2016, I no longer do. It's the reverse. Maybe "evil" is a strong word but they are definitely what I would consider "bad people" based on their extreme selfishness. Most pretend to be ignorant, or "low information" in person but they follow news very closely.
Agreed. The 2016 were self-serving grifters that didn’t understand the mechanisms of government and were mostly bumbling around. The 2024 team are also self-serving grifters but have a much more coherent plan to shape things to their liking and much smarter people in play. Miller - arguably one of the smartest but also someone to whom the “evil” label perhaps best applies - plays a much bigger role this time around.
The media are absolutely craven, too, constantly normalizing insanity and pretending like even idiotic things are legitimate proposals that should instead be laughed out of the room. Like, maybe the Earth is flat? Let's HAVE THAT DEBATE!!
"Stupid or Evil" has been my go-to logic for approaching far-right agenda items for a long time.
You're either so dumb you believe every piece of propaganda you are shown, and never notice the harm being done, or you are fully aware of what's happening and you're cheering on the chaos and suffering.
Commonly the propaganda or myth is a better story than the truth. It's nicer to be in a story about pedos conspiring in a fast food restaurant than being forced to work to pay for universal healthcare in Israel but not getting it yourself.
The toil and confusion and nastiness of everyday life under capitalism is not as fun and exciting as an imminent invasion at the southern border or the coming rise of the God Emperor or the final solution to groceries being expensive. Running a soup kitchen and washing clothes for the homeless just hasn't the same attraction as doing nothing by chasing the next Q-drop.
Well, the ministry of propaganda says this is la creme de la creme and we can trust their handling of government data blindly. So showing that DOGE is unable to even secure their website is a good exercise of hacker activism.
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.
> I don't quite understand the motive. I mean the motive of the masses who cheer this on. Is it just to own the libs?
You're surely being obtuse. I'm a progressive independent and even I understand why they are doing it, even if I'm not convinced this is the correct way to do it.
I think you're the one who's being obtuse. He said the movtive of the masses, not the Trump administration. The masses know nothing of the US national debt. They just hate liberals, feel that the liberals have had power over them for the last 4 years, and want their revenge. This is the pendulum swinging the other way.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". I think for those cheering on it's a mix of both. Culture wars have made them gleeful when they see opportunities for others to suffer and they're ignorant of how this is negatively affecting them, their morals and society.
But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.
During the first Trump administration I regularly tried to discern the difference, but ultimately that was a mistake--a kind of engaging and draining analytical junk food--and one I'm not going to make a second time.
> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.
I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.
It might be prudent to consider emigration or at least divesting from real estate assets. I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.
It's incredibly hard to imagine anybody cheering this on to be thoughtful or intelligent. I see no critical thinking, intellectual rigour, or even any interest in real evidence or data. In what way is any of this intelligent or thoughtful? It's the complete opposite of both.
I'll leave the imagining to you. I'm using my actual senses to observe, and what I observe is that the people who cheer it on are bringing the national average IQ down. If you think anything about the way this is being done is OK, you have been utterly, irreversibly brainwashed. I voted conservative. I did not vote for this.
I'm going to assume good faith here. Yesterday they just asked congress for $4.3 trillion in deficit spending (debt increase) to fund tax cuts for the people who pay the lowest taxes already. The majority of government spending is on defense, which hasn't been auditable in decades. You're either wildly misinformed, or trolling.
Lower tax bills for the rich. Proposed tax cuts would make the higher incomes less taxed and the not 1% incomes (or something around that 1%) more taxed
The problem is that “waste” is now “anything Trump and Musk don’t like”.
I’d be happy if they actually saved real money by cutting the military budget in half, but that’s not going to happen because the US is an industrial-military based economy.
How much did Trump’s 2017 tax cuts lower your tax bills? They didn’t lower mine. I benefited more from Biden’s tax policies (child tax credits) than Trump’s. Even taking it from the point of view of “fuck the gov, fuck climate change and our future, I want what’s mine, now” Trump did nothing for me in his 4 years on power and is doing nothing for me now - gutting a bunch of gov agencies doesn’t put money in my pocket.
Why do you guys keep going back to this? No one ever said that whatsoever. We have problems with the way this is being done. If you can't gather that and process it after reading this thread, you may have a problem with ADHD that you should see someone about. No one in this entire thread has said they want to waste taxpayer money.
That’s a straw man. Show the waste they are cutting. Musk didn’t even know which Mamas he was talking about when he found out”waste” at USAid and, when told, just shrugged and said it was the press’ job to correct those mistakes.
The odds of a junkie recognizing good or bad spending is very low.
They were always fine with it until we found out on what that money was spent on. It turns out, that the most of it was a waste at best and grift at worse.
As for 'juniors', it's not like we've seen this sort of thing before such as those here happy to propel the opinions of so-called 'climate expert / activist' (Greta Thunberg) who didn't finish school and was used by the media as the face of 'saving the planet' and throwing unfounded claims of disaster by 2023, despite a significant lack of understanding of climate change and what she was talking about.
But then again, I have not heard back from Netflix's elite team for a postmortem of that live-streaming disaster which there were no juniors to blame this time despite being inexperienced in delivering live-streaming on their platform reliably.
Responsible disclosure is for researchers in it for more than the lulz. In practical terms, do you think there’s a nonzero chance Musk would give rewards or credit for the report?
I wouldn’t do that because I don’t want a felony. I could see some 16 year old working for their their chance at glory.
And I am not surprised some 16 years old doesn't care. I am more surprised HN ctowd doesn't seem to even mention it. 16 years old can learn, but only if there's a culture to teach them.
/active shows the threads that are accumulating comments most quickly. If we ranked the frontpage that way, then HN would be a flamewar site. Therefore we don't rank the frontpage that way.
fair enough; thanks for the explain. I do appreciate that HN doesn't turn into a flamewar while allowing discussions and not flagging everything just because it's controversial, especially with all the impactful stuff going on. kudos on the moderating and threading that needle; tough job
Unauthorized access or modification of any government website, even if it is left openly accessible, is illegal under laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in the U.S.
Who here has listened to Elon/Trump extensively (and not opinions by news outlets) and has concluded that they are doing net damage?
My opinion: Some mistakes will be made but remedied. But overall it's a net positive. As to how much of a positive it is, it need to be see. If the income tax, property tax (and other unavoidable taxes) are eliminated, I'd say America is greater again.
I wonder if Trump ordered all the F22s to be flown into the ground, the aircraft carriers to be run aground, would anyone do anything? What about blowing up all the government buildings?
How does Musk get to destroy millions of dollars of investment? These are all government assets. What the fuck is going on here?
> What the fuck indeed. And where the fuck are the people who are supposed to stop this?
Which people? The paramount officers of the executive branch? They actively support it. They quasi-independent inspectors-general in the executive branch departments? Those in areas of concern have been (fairly blatantly illegally) fired, and in at least one case physically ejected by security personnel.
The majority of both houses of Congress? They at least tacitly support it out of partisan loyalty. The courts? They’be issued orders, but ultimately rely on executive compliance or a different part of the executive enforcing those orders, and see “the paramount officers of the executive branch...”, previously.
The electorate? They voted in the people supporting it in the executive and legislature. A sufficient number of safeguards have failed that there is likely no effective recourse within the system, and none of those failed safeguards are likely to reset into their functional state without some extreme force being applied to change their present direction.
Relative to the XKCD, this is like if someone found out you could vandalize hundreds of thousands of posters and publish it under a US federal government website using an REST API.
Feds getting DDOSed? Nothing new. Public read/write access to a government distributed resource? That needs to be taken offline as a matter of public security.
Musk has said that he like Xavier Milei's way of "deleting" government departments without too much investigation of their importance because if they're important, you can always put them back. He's probably taking a similar approach with DOGE. Some researchers and aid organizations lose their funding today but if they really are important and not just grift, they or their successors will probably get it back later. This isn't like social welfare where people might starve if their regular payment is stopped. Nobody's going to starve if research funding is cut. Researchers might have to get another job but that's an expected and normal part of life, especially for academics.
You can't just turn people off and on again like computers and expect them to carry on as before.
You cut funding for cancer trials people are already enrolled in, people die.
You cut funding for HIV drugs, patients' viral loads go up. Even if you put the funding back before they die, their viruses have already evolved resistance to the drugs they used to be on.
You cut military aid to US allies, those countries learn the US isn't a reliable ally. Soft power centuries in the making evaporates, just like that.
Well, except for everyone on USAID food, NIH funded trials, god I can go on. Just because you don't know precisely what you're cutting doesn't mean it's not important.
“So rather than having a physical server or even something like Amazon Web Services, they’re deploying using Cloudflare Pages which supports custom domains.”
Many of their supporters wouldn't know a webpage from a database schema and once thought Bill Gates would send him $$ for forwarding emails. Like my 60+ BIL.
I'm not sure you've actually heard from their supporters - they have proven again and again that there is literally nothing they won't excuse or handwave away.
It is insane how tone deaf most of the comments are, jarring even. I forget how insular so much of the community is and I often make the mistake of equating intelligence, which exists here in spades, with critical thought.
Understand that most of the sentiment expressed here is identical to the pre-digested mass media pablum intended for 100 IQ consumers.
Think of mass media coverage of a subject you're an expert in and how horrifyingly wrong it typically is on so many levels, and try to rectify the two.
Is it me or mods are actively hiding everything that is critical of the current admin? This post is 6 hours late, 308 points and at the bottom of the 3rd page. This is not the first post that is either flagged or just made invisible. Is HN still a place we can trust?
If you take a look at those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Trust as you please, but we're moderating HN the same way we always have.
Edit: Actually we wouldn't expect or ask anyone to trust in the first place. I do think it's reasonable to ask regular users to familiarize themselves with the principles by which we moderate the site. Then if you see something that doesn't fit those principles, or if you want to make a case for different principles, we have something to discuss.
These principles go back a long time and have held up well in terms of preserving HN for its intended purpose over the years. If you (or anyone) want to familiarize yourself with them, see the link I marked above. It contains a partial list, and pointers to lots of past explanations.
These posts have a high political index, which given America's current culture wars tends to bring out the kind of behavior which none of us want on HN.
It's a damn tough balancing act.
Also, look at my post history, I'm pretty strongly anti-DOGE. I'm defending Dang because I love HN and appreciate what he is doing under extremely tough conditions.
Moderation is decentralized, downvoted comments tend to disappear.
Flagging is a power people who have a lot of karma have, if you think are one of them you can vouch (unflag) for a comment.
There is one mod, dang
Here are the moderator last comments so you can have idea of the work he is doing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
It’s not mods. Dang and his team are phenomenally fair. It’s users flagging it because we’re massively tired of this content and if I want to read it and hear endless thoughtless comments, I’ll go to Reddit.
I also believe there are a bunch of Musk fanboys on this site that would flag this. Or people who don’t want to understand the implications of what’s going on and avoid anything that’s “political”.
I also trust dang, but the “Elon has built cool companies so I’m going to set aside what critical thinking skills I have and put my trust in him and Trump and forget that Trump Is an inveterate liar and Elon has been saying shit for a long time now” is really getting to me. I expect that from Reddit or Fox News watchers. I expect higher order thinking from HN and it’s pretty disappointing.
There are at least 60 recent DOGE stories on HN with comments on. I guess people get a bit DOGEd out.
It's probably part of the Trump/Musk strategy. 'Flood the zone' with so many things people can't follow it.
Executor -- "It's about time White people realize that the holocaust is used as a mind fuck to demoralize us and beat us down into submission." : https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Executor
Is there any evidence that random non site maintainers can push data to this website other than the two examples pushed to the site by non site maintainers in front of witnesses and since viewed by many?
No they're going to be insufferable for the next 4 years celebrating literally every action the current admin takes no matter what and blaming every problem on the last guy in office.
Having a front row seat to the fall of the biggest empire in history is certainly something.
so most people here are salty about Doge actually delivering on transparency, albeit imperfectly, vs promises and SLS style multi billion "effort" unable to deliver for decades?
mind you, it's totally legit to ridicule the noob security lapses, but the rest of the sentiment here seems a bit meh
I'm generally trying to keep away from the whole political madness going on, but when I do follow a story, Iat least try to verify what I am seeing. This requires a fair bit of mental energy, intelligence and frustration tolerance, and is frankly impossible to do for more than a fraction of what is going on.
For example, the recent headlines of the state department trying to buy $400m worth of armored Tesla vehicles was obviously a Democrat plant. It was done under the Biden administration in December, with no chance of fulfilling before the handover. Some.one thought it would be a simple way of making the Trump admin look bad.
You have to always be wary of being misled by the media in today's age. That said, the shit-slinging coming out of Doge has been largely false and illegal. If Congress assigns money to fund impressionist dancers in Pakistan, then that's what it has to be spent on. The real issue here is that to get a bill passed in the US a lot of fluff has to get attached to it. Doge can't unilaterally cancel payments without breaking the law.
Even in the cases I looked at were real corruption is plausible, ie. the money given to the Clinton Foundation, Doge just straight up lied about the amounts and purpose.
Outside of corruption, there is no good reason to move this fast and reckless. At least no good reason for the American people. They are moving this fast because they know what they do is illegal and idiotic and false, and they are trying to drown us in bullshit.
Musk gets a nice kickback for every single link going back to his own website (that is actually corruption), but more importantly, they are building up outrage fatigue for normal people and a frenzy for their fanatics. This is all about paving the way to paint legality as corruption so that they can justify ignoring the courts and Congress going forward.
Most people here on HN are idiot savants - little to no experiences that expose them to govt bureaucracy and corruption (example:taxes beyond simple salaried income tax, buying/selling property,run a business,run a payroll, investing, inflation etc. )
Minimizing government spending is a good thing. Bloated and inefficacious programs need to be scrapped. Optimistically, programs that do not enrich only the legislative class will spring forth due to the new demand for better audit trails/logs.
The doge.gov website is just amazing. You can browse through the entire org chart of a typical government, average age of employees, avg salary in that department and so on. I hope they upload this data on GitHub and open sources for the future keeping. I am becoming fairly certain that all these will be removed when ruling party changes. Doge guys truly rock for doing this.
And now, keep in mind that US govt is likely still way more "efficient" than most others on the planet.
I took a look at this (the "Workforce" section) and the "Regulations" section. A chill went down my spine. The first tool is purpose built for cutting jobs from areas that someone might consider "unprofitable".
For example, you (and by "you" I mean an external party holding a scalpel) can drill down into Executive Branch > Cabinet Level Agencies > Department of Education > Office of the Secretary > Office Of Civil Rights, and think, "Hey, why does the DoE need an office of civil rights? Does it need a 570 headcount? We can save $78M by cutting out that entire office".
I've seen this phenomenon in corporate, where cuts happen to areas that seem like they're not contributing to immediate profits, because their outcomes are long term, and there is enough organizational momentum to go forward for months, if not years, before their absence is noticed. For example, certain types of quality teams, technical/platform teams and employee safety/welfare related positions.
Meanwhile the second section seems to be a tool for dismantling the regulatory system of the US. It is disingenuously called the "Unconstitutionality Index" ignoring the fact that a country cannot be run by a legislature and its acts alone, let alone a constitution.
Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on.
Hope they used good proxies, because this seems like a felony.
> One of the sources told 404 Media that they were able to push updates to a database of government employment information after studying the website’s architecture and finding the database’s API endpoints.
> push updates to a database of government employment information
Huh, what would be the goal of connecting this database to an API on or near doge.gov? Surely it's not the "actual"/"source of truth" database, more likely a copy: I can imagine the geniuses thought ""let's mirror everything online on a single system so it's easier for all of us to access it and do queries like "WHERE gender NOT IN ('m', 'f') OR race NOT IN ('white')" and get results from all the databases we know of."". (I assume there is no single federal employee database?)
And since the truth is whatever they say nowadays, maybe it IS the "source of truth" database.
The massive difference here is that the Doge team is acting as quickly making decisions about government funding and classifications of that spending e.g. if it's a "scam". If they're supposed computer experts making incorrect decisions about something as simple as web hosting you can be sure that they're making incorrect decisions in more important topics.
> Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on.
What data are you basing this on? Federal websites have an approval process which includes a security review so I’d expect some familiarity with that in your response.
> This person showed me two database entries they were able to push to the website, which are live on doge.gov as I write this (archived here and here)
All you had to do was actually read the article; it’s the very next paragraph from the one I quoted.
> Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on
Would like to see a source on this.
Governments are similar to large enterprises whereby every bit of code going into Production requires a full security, architecture and site reliability review.
There is no doubt bugs in bespoke web applications but for your typical website.
https://archive.ph/wy1Wt
Worth noting that the U.S. Digital Service (USDS, i.e the org that DOGE has now subsumed) has for a long while been experts at building and deploying static websites for the federal government. And doing it completely in the open. Within minutes you can literally clone and re-deploy all of httsp://usds.gov — 150MB of 2,700 assets and documents, built on Jekyll — locally or on S3. They've even written out the complete deployment instructions:
https://github.com/usds/website
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There's nothing moral about it. The profitability of the tax prep industry depends on taxes being hard to file. Lack of official free e-file is regulatory capture. Any associated blather about making taxes cumbersome to keep people mistrustful of taxes is a fig leaf, as is this case with most "conservative" viewpoints.
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All this good work by 18f destroyed by this maniac.
It's not a moral crusade, it's just a kleptocracy that uses a moral crusade as a fig leaf.
What's moral about it?
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Two things:
1. To people saying that the government should have a direct way to file taxes. This is an outdated way of thinking. Most ordinary people shouldn't have to file taxes at all. Withholding is sufficient for income taxes and taxes on liquid investments.
2. 18F was an openly partisan organisation. They were likely disbanded not to kill the products they produced, but rather for their inability to remain politically neutral.
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I've learned about the USDS in the past on hackernews and was always impressed. If someone wanted to really make a "DOGE" in good-faith (i.e. improve efficiency of government instead of just destroying everything), I think it would look like expanding the power and scope of things like USDS.
I agree. Have always felt that USDS/18F are best in class examples of tech innovation being brought to perhaps slightly tech-backwards areas of government, and doing the interpersonal work to bring other agencies along as well.
The UK’s Government Digital Service is similar. They’ve got some good examples of doing unglamorous but impactful work -e.g. replacing dozens of different payment processing systems with one quality one, the same thing for sending physical letters, etc.
Are you sure this isn’t bias from your personal interest? Is IT and bad websites the problem with the government?
I also don’t buy Elon’s messaging that a database upgrade will save social security, or whatever.
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A SOP for static content, it feels great.
I use many SOPs daily. The principle is that if you can forget everything about it but the name, obtain the documentation, and relearn it, you should do about the same thing as without.
Though you can find SOPs similar to modern from 1950s USSR docs, the U.S. Navy ones like folding SOP or military shower SOP are especially pragmatic.
Are they just running shell scripts off the public web for deploying federal gov sites that are targeted by nation states?
From the docker file:
A vein pops out in my forehead every time I see a shell script echoed from the internet into a prompt.
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I see recent changes being made, are the prior timestamps available for archiving?
If you’ve checked out the git repo, you can go back to any point in the history and build that revision.
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Yea so far DOGE doesn't seem like they take any time to ask questions or research before doing anything.
What's especially unfortunate is that experienced USDS employees had already achieved the one software engineering task that is basically impossible for a 19-year-old (or a newly hired USDS employee of any age): convincing a federal department manager that using a static website is a great solution — nevermind also publishing all of its source code and documents on a public github.
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Move fast and break things.
Where have we heard this before?
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
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That's what you get when you only have a handful of complete juniors reporting directly to a capricious CEO. There needs to be adults in the room.
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They are just henchmen following whatever playbook was developed by some reactionary jerks. That’s why Elon and co look for dysfunctional personalities that are easy to control.
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Move fast and break things is what built Silicon Valley and the modern world. It works, demonstrably.
The way the government has been run the past decades doesn't work, demonstrably. Every important metric has worsened.
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But that’s only useful if the incoming people in charge don’t have any contempt towards existing employees and want to leverage best practices instead of pretending that they know better. Twitter had the same problem after Elon took over.
You mean the next incoming people
Does anyone want to talk about the hack itself? Can anyone give more details than "left their database open"? I came to this site hoping for a real discussion about that and didn't see it here yet...
Someone unminified the js, and it turned out that a bunch of the rest endpoints it knew about were just unverified crud endpoints for the site.
https://archive.ph/2025.02.14-132833/https://www.404media.co...
Smells exactly like llm created solution.
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Just checked the DOGE website; I'm not too sure about this theory given that POST requests are blocked and the only APIs you can find (ie. /api/offices) only supports GET requests and if the UUID doesn't match, it 404s.
I don't see any CRUD endpoints for modifying the database
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Good thing we have the best and brightest at DOGE!
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It's been a while since I last saw a CMS pulling data from a database... It's a miracle the website didn't crumble under the load.
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=woPff-Tpkns&pp=ygUSdW5kZXJ0YWx...
According to a source of mine, there were unsecured API endpoints for modification
> The database it is pulling from can be and has been written to by third parties, and will show up on the live website.
Not enough detail to say for sure; could be SQL injection, could be credentials exposed in the frontend.
...or endpoints not requiring any credentials at all.
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My bet is on SQL injection
They used one of those databases which are easy to connect directly to the internet, it's the same thing as about 90% of modern data breaches.
Every generation we make things much easier, lower the bar, and are rewarded when amateurs make amateur mistakes like this.
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In the year of our lord 2025? I doubt it. I'd put money on "some third party cloud service was configured in a silly way".
But, I would love to see details.
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I mean the article is paywalled but it sounds like this is isolated to their site-displayed twitter feed; basically the site was hosted by cloudflare and you could insert your own fake tweets into what was recorded on the site (but not on the actual DOGE twitter feed). I don't think any data was actually compromised
I can't speak to any data that may or may not be compromised, but this isn't about inserting fake tweets. Anything in their "government org chart" can be edited unauthenticated.
Yeah, it's just tremendously embarrassing. These are supposed to be the tech geniuses who can parse 50 years of accumulated legacy code and find all the government waste? In 3 weeks?
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Ironically enough, the WHOIS record points to CISA – the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Very confidence-building.
Guys, ALL .gov records point to CISA. That’s one of the requirements for getting a .gov domain in the US. This is standard practice.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5288883/cisa-staffers-d...
if you think you own everything then there are no external threats
And internal threats, well, you just have to deal with those, no matter the cost!
They claimed the savings site would show receipts not later than Valentine's Day
https://www.doge.gov/savings
Now it says "Receipts coming over the weekend!"
Next time it's: The site is receipt-ready
Oh you mean like FSD and other Musk promises?
FSD is fantastic, not sure what the knock is here
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Looks like they started posting sole data - not sure what FPDS is but the documents all look rendered in OSX aqua theme lol.
A lot of cuts looks “sensical” at first, until you realize things like “cutting magazine subscriptions” are more like “cutting financial news sources off from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” or “not renewing reputable news subscriptions for people who really need to understand current events”.
And then there’s a lot of DEI/diversity training cuts which feel targeted not at their war on Actually Being Nice to People, but at the groups those trainings help employees serve - cutting DEI for SNAP…so, there’s a reported (haven’t verified but allegedly from USDA data) 5 ethnic groups, as well as “race unknown”, that are enrolled in SNAP. Now imagine how you’d train people to understand, interact with, and help people in different ethnic backgrounds _who need this assistance_. I believe empathy and understanding are incredibly good skills to have in a role like this, and DEI helps train that - for all involved.
The going notion on the right is that DEI is racist, and against white people, but it leaves out the idea that anyone non-white might also need this training? Like, DEI is about understanding differences, and then the right reads it as “understanding non-whites” and get offended that they even have to think about other cultures.
And another cut funding for training on gender, and that training was for an office involved in tech and engineering…a professional field notoriously male-dominant for a long time. Again, it makes sense to me that this kind of training would be good, because I’ve heard the way people in tech talk and act towards women and queer folx, so yeah let’s have some training.
These kinds of programs aren’t meant to tell people what to think - if they can’t empathetically interact with the world, work training won’t change that - but it will tell them that in a professional capacity they need to know how to interact and be productive. In business this is so you make more money, in government it’s how you help more people - including your own employees and also the communities you serve.
So Trump is doing what he said, and the details are grim.
Move fast and break things, government edition.
Fail Fasterer™
ow, put it back
I guess DOGE lives up to "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" even better than Twitter.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
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This isnt "getting hacked". This is basic 101 kids stuff. Any competent org wouldnt allow this anywhere near their dev environments let alone prod.
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Found the DOGE employee
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Imagine Google doing this performative stunt and getting hacked.
Maybe they should fire these kids and replace them with REAL engineers.
And I know some of those kids probably read Hackernews, so here’s the advice: put away ChatGPT and learn what the fuck you’re doing.
> Maybe they should fire these kids and replace them with REAL engineers.
Nah, they'll want reasonable pay, reasonable hours, and won't confuse their boss for a living god. They may even have some self-confidence and morals, which would be a total deal breaker.
Most importantly, they will refuse to participate in the administration's regular human centipede rituals.
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Sadly you're both right.
[dead]
The one good thing about them all being so young is it explains why I never got an interview; at 28 I was too old to ever get a job there
Why would you apply to work in this debacle. Ever.
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Yup. At 28 you’re going to have way more things in your life distracting you from the job, you’re probably prioritizing work life balance which is a red flag.
These are ideologues, not earnest professionals.
You need someone who is
1. Good experienced engineer
2. Without ethics
3. Happy to be paid below market rate of a good experienced engineer without ethics.
Not just below market rate… my understanding is a number of DOGE “employees” are actually volunteers.
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Does anyone else see what’s really going on here? Naming a “government agency” after a meme coin? Wearing a hat in the Oval Office while talking over the (literally) sitting president? Elon is attempting to telegraph that he has no respect for the institutions of our country. Why do you think Trump did something as petty as renaming the Gulf of Mexico? It’s a litmus test to see who will follow his most inane power plays. Today, it was put into action when they banned the AP from the Oval Office and AF1 for not bending the knee on this issue. This is far darker than Elon just running amok.
Correct. It is a fascist coup by neo-nazis.
I don't really disagree, but it's also becoming pointless to use these terms. Naming Trump/Musk as fascists is mostly correct but all this does is make his adherents question whether fascism is "really all that bad" (or reject with lines like "NAZIs were socialist [nonsense] and Trump isn't a socialist, ergo..."
It's not enough to point out that Trump is fascist and therefore bad. You need to go the next step and say why fascism is bad.
(Yes, we've gotten to this timeline, where we have to go back and actually describe why fascism is bad -- where the press is reporting on proposed ethnic cleansing in Gaza with statements like "outlandish plan" and "unrealistic" rather than naming it for what it is: a brutal and immoral plan to exterminate an entire people. Oh, and now we need to explain why that is actually a Really Awful Thing)
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This is so much worse than 9-11, so, so much worse. Maybe the first tower still has yet to fall, maybe the fireball has faded and the firefighter are climbing the stairs and you think they'll soon be able to rescue you, but the fire is burning white hot under the surface and the steel getting hotter and softer by the minute.
You do not need to look far at all to find tiny changes made by past administrations that have had massive unforeseen consequences. We are absolutely cooked.
Exactly, you make up nonsense, call it official, and when they won’t go along with it you ban them for spreading lies. Autocracy 101.
America's entrepreneurial spirits have worked up a persecution complex and want their revenge. They will implement protectionist policy, push on spending cuts before tax reforms ("look at what we saved!") and then expect the market to climb while they liquidate their hundred-billion dollar portfolios and move to an island to retire.
At least, that's the theory. I don't think America wants to admit that the CCP has their industrial capacity by the balls and can direct it with centralized planning to displace America's EV market or naval tonnage at will. There's an assumption that deregulation will finally be the panacea to America's issues, but we can't pursue that consistent with a policy of global trade. We can't sanction the ICC and demand other countries extradite their criminals to the US. We can't abandon the Human Rights Council and then demand other countries respect our moral authority.
It's going to be another 4 years of the civilized world proving they don't need America. And Trump is going to spend it flattering dictators abroad while everyone else taps their foot waiting for another primary. Stagnation is a best case scenario, a-la 2016 - our saving grace is that most of America's serious adversaries are also hurting quite a bit right now. Trump sitting in the Nixon or Regan seat would have been game-over for America.
> 4 years
What makes you think they’ll respect that law?
Assuming he makes it that long, he’ll have a third term. They’ll make some lunatic reading of the law to justify state legislatures selecting electors. The supine courts will rubber stamp anything.
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I think that while Euro-American split was to be expected - we don't care about Pacific, they don't care about Russia - I think nobody expected USA to actually become hostile, and not just become neutral.
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Wondering why DOGE articles where we apparently are leaking classified info over the internet are being flagged.
This for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050833)
it's unfortunate to see negative posts about musk the nazi get flagged, while positive posts about musk the nazi get unflagged by mods
If I click Join I am immediately redirected to a "Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access doge.gov" CloudFlare page. That's odd.
same, i'm assuming they've set up a firewall rule on the cloudflare dashboard to block non-internal ips for certain routes
It's a block for non-US IPs, I think. The page is an application form for joining them, and it only accepts US citizens.
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Everyone knows investing in cybersecurity is just wasteful spending!
Every other intelligence agency on the planet is about to scoop a ton of American data via cyber and basic HUMINT. It's free for all out there, I guess.
Its not just this website. Since DOGE, China probably canceled all vacation days for their hackers, as its a free for all. Firing of most so many people including security departments and most likely the (good) femboy furry hackers.
Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
The data and access gained currently by China, Russia, NK and SA will continue to be useful until and way after the next war.
Oh I have no doubt about that. You have people, who would not be able to obtain a security clearance in a 100 years if they tried, running around, accessing government databases and taking "backups" offsite. Maybe law enforcement/Pentagon/intelligence data is not under threat at the moment, but in a couple of years who knows. Meanwhile people get fired, proper access protocols and communications continue to breakdown, and you get chaos. And every spy agency loves chaos.
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> Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
Someone willing to work without morals for money can just be bought by the next highest bidder. Anything they touch should be treated as compromised.
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They don't even need to: they have direct access via their agents. Such as the new intelligence chief and a couple of the DOGE boys who've already been caught directly selling NDA'd information.
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I think the good thing is that the DOGE team seem extremely humble and willing to learn from their mistakes, rather than pass the blame in ignorance. Just like their leader!
Important to clarify that USDS (DOGE) does not have access to any military systems or intelligence systems. They only have the current access due to the historic process of the USDS.
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> Firing of most so many people including security departments and most likely the (good) femboy furry hackers.
Why is this not a joke?
Edit: Rethorical question.
Is there a source for the vacation days thing? That's the kind of story that has an apocryphal vibe to it like the Pentagon Domino's Pizza meter has.
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Tinfoil hat mode: "What if" this results from a foreign influence?
But I guess that you don't need to find answers externally when stupidity is a much simpler reason
I've been wondering this myself, not that I necessarily believe it. If they _were_ acting at the behest of a foreign adversary (pick your reason: leverage over an individual because of a targeted campaign, leverage over all of them because of the SolarWinds/Salt Typhoon hack, cash, etc.), how different would their actions look?
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foreign influence like a South African blood diamond heir?
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Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the situation, but isn't this similar to Hillary’s E-Mail?[1]
>Over at OPM, reports indicate that individuals associated with DOGE connected an unauthorized server into the network.
[1]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
Or they could just, like, call Tulsi Gabbard.
Unfortunately she is too busy for that.
She'll just invite her friend Bashar al-Assad to assist.
I have read on the news he recently became #opentowork.
Is there any evidence that the contents of the database are accessible? The linked article doesn't make these claims.
Is there any evidence that the database for this microblog of a cloud flare hosted website has anything of importance in it?
Are you also (alone) suggesting there's a tunnel from cloud flare (where this is hosted) to some larger government database?
You may want to RTFA: https://archive.ph/wy1Wt
I think you are missing the entire point of this. It's not that it had sensitive data or anything of importance. It is that a .gov domain under the command of the self proclaimed Mr. Efficiency and smartest person of Earth about servers and car manufacturing was wide open for script kiddies to deface and access data from. It is a show of hypocrisy and how cutting corners like Dr. Emerald Mine Child here wants will shape the rest of this administration.
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They got it long ago, don't kid yourself.
Can someone help me with what roro means?
It's common to sign your handle to exploit/pwn'ed messages.
I'd wager the person who did the edit goes by the name "roro".
I think they meant "ruh roh" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3SaxRRfJ4E
Scooby dooby Doo...
I am wondering if it would have been more of an effect to instead of this add some DEI trolling ... April 1st level of foolery so people think it is real and then get Twitter riled up on it.
For a while the /join page was blocked by cloudflare WAF yesterday - I wonder if this is why.
They're promising to deliver security next quarter.
You mean Full Self Security?
Full SS by 2028 :(
I thought this was a feature to make it easier to leech information ?
Elon Musk needs it most of all, he’s the most insecure human in existence.
Is that really a surprise to anyone. DOGE is theater, a stage show.
DOGE is a complete farce, but I think there's an important to not just write this off as a stage show and the people buying into it as idiots. There are a lot of people who feel that government isn't working for them and so when they see things like "8 million dollars spent on condoms for Palestinians" they're already primed to get angry about it. Musk/DOGE's actions may all be for spectacle, but he's tapping into some very real emotions that he wouldn't be able to tap into if people felt the government was working for them. DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem. Even if Musk and DOGE are completely discredited, if we don't figure out a way to make it so the average citizen feels like they're getting their money's worth from the government, it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain.
Re: this report that USAID was sending condoms to Gaza, that was actually in Gaza, Mozambique (which has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS), not Palestine. Maybe they knew, maybe not. Anyway, I know many people who have been parroting that stat, so it was effective propaganda.
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if people felt the government was working for them
There's two things you need to make people feel the government is working for them:
* good social policies
* adequate education
One of the US parties has been working for decades to sabotage both, and with the help of the media they've successfully managed to deflect all the blame for it. So no, I don't agree that DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem -- unless you mean that the problem is 50 years of consistently undermining the government.
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"... it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain." Someone just did ...
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Any time the government tries to do something for The People, the wealthy and their mouthpieces get a portion of the population to believe the much needed help is actually evil socialism/communism and will destroy their way of life.
America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
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> ... it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain.
This is quite literally what is happening.
It is absolutely possible to have feelings and still be an idiot for acting on them in certain ways. Someone who "feels" that vaccines are a hoax and they should drink bleach instead is still an idiot despite that feeling. There is also a sort of gray area where a person may act irrationally due to intense feeling in a way that's perhaps excusable (e.g., someone's relative dies and they start smashing things in a fit of grief), but it's still a bad idea. We have to hope that more people are the latter category and will wake up and realize what a mess they've made.
This strikes a chord with me, perhaps because I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
- government spending has been rampant and completely disconnected from available funds
- "shutdown" threats, typically a sign that a red line is being crossed, has been treated as political currency
- funds going from taxpayer (individual and corporations) to government, to be redistributed for an ever-increasing list of grants, programs, and studies
- locked-in mega spending areas of the budget showing plenty of warning signs of unsustainability, with nothing being done to address
Even if DOGE is "all for spectacle," I'm having trouble finding the downsides of DOGE's actions for generations coming after us. But maybe someone could help me understand why they feel differently?
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Anyone on "the other side" (problems with that framing aside for now) who doesn't understand and accept this is only serving to make the problem worse. This is the result of people's disillusionment with government from both sides of the aisle reaching a boiling point. Anyone could have seen it coming, and anyone who wants to fix it needs to understand where the other side is coming from, and not just paint them as evil stupid idiots.
Compromise. It's essential to peaceful co-existence of a group of humans of any size. At some point along the line, America seems to have lost that quality.
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The real damage that has already been done is almost certainly incalculable. As just a very small taste:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
The real question is when does something break that causes near-universal outrage. Unless something breaks in the near-term that most people care about, nothing will change.
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The numbers they claim to save are like trying to turn your household budget around by cutting out a weekly latte.
If you really want to make big financial changes, you need a lot more income, or cut serious costs - like a car payment or downsize your house. In the case of DOGE, I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
If they do cut $2T, there will be a huge recession — worldwide impact, but potentially has EU and China (and India?) all trading more with each other than at present, so plausibly results in China having a larger nominal GDP after the dust settles.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
> I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
Have you considered that they are going after the low-hanging fruit, getting in "reps & sets" before they attack programs that have vastly greater inertia and potentially bi-partisan support? DoD and healthcare cover a ton of jobs, and might actually trigger pushback from Congress, in ways that annihilating the CIA's propaganda arm (which is basically a handful of overpaid bougie Dem-leaning "journalists") doesn't.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/wikileaks-usaid-has-been...
If they are small and don’t matter than why will it bother anyone? Let them mess around with their ineffective side project?
The answer is it does matter because it’s funding things both parties have an interest in.
The recent executive order for filling vacancies or whatever basically said doge can't touch dod or dohs.
They are doing tremendous damage for something that is supposed to be a stage show. Among everything they've done over the past three weeks, HUD is being gutted as we speak and the company a friend works at lost $100 million in contracts practically overnight.
Its an inverse Robin Hood attack. Take from the poor to give to the rich. The middle class is about to get moved from business class to coach. https://www.rawstory.com/gop-budget-2671154997/
I agree. My apologies. I didn't mean to diminish the damage they are doing.
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$100 million to do what?
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it may be a stage show, but it has real consequences. A huge number of NIH grants awards have not gone out. Already, I am facing a 15% shortfall in my budget from a grant that was all set to be awarded. This is not tenable kind of behavior form a major institution, and DOGE dog and pony show disgusts me.
YOU HAVE COMMITTED AN ACTUAL CRIME
Trump/Elon fascism/heroism (depending on your point of view) aside, one thing that concerns me is how quickly is it possible to decide that 1000 employees at a place like the Department of Energy, including 300 at the National Nuclear Security Administration, can be dismissed without any impact on the effectiveness of these agencies.
Even if you do believe that these agencies are bloated with workers who are doing "unnecessary" work, which is possible, it seems very unprudent to make cuts so quickly. And who is qualified to make these decisions? Elon? Some Tesla or SpaceX engineer who wrote some code and put up a website? Come on. WTF do they know about how all these agencies operate and the downstream effects? You think they're taking the time to really think it through?
Now it's possible that prior to taking office, Trump had people with deep understanding of government operations go through everything, and really think things through, and prepare a list of jobs that could be cut without any impact, but if that is the case, it's never been said. Given who Trump has around him to lead these agencies (McMahon for Dept of Ed? An Oil and Gas Lobbyist for BLM? Really?) that doesn't seem likely.
Move fast and break things works fine for a start-up, and might even be fine for more cultural type stuff ("DEI"), but Dept of Energy?
It's like firing two-thirds of your sysadmins because "well, we haven't had any issues with our servers lately, and no breaches, so those people must not be needed".
Separate thread on DoE:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43055119
To my point, found this article linked to in another thread: [0]
> Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.
> It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
> The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.
Part of the strategy might be:
1. Fire large swaths of the government. Declare victory!!
2. Hire those people back because it turns out that they're actually needed (who would have thought?). But that doesn't get news.
So in the end, things remain the same, but Trump/Elon get the headlines and their followers think they've done an amazing job.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-...
I have been waiting 30 years for this to happen so I am excited while remaining optimistic.
If the systems and Nation is as fragile we have bigger problems than the Chaos Monkey unleashed at the Federal level.
Do people think Nuclear reactors will go unmanaged or Prisoners will go unfed? I suppose it is possible and time will tell.
We were lied to by the Government. The new administration may be lying as well. I think we will all learn a lot.
Considering the powers that be attempted to remove the current President through kinetic means I would imagine he is going to move as fast as possible.
The “powers that be tried to remove the current President” , not sure who those powers are (please spare me the “deep state” nonsense I expect higher order thinking here), but Trump attempted a violent overthrow of a democratic election. If you’re okay with that, then you and I have very different ideas of what democracy is. Coincidentally I’ve been hugely critical of the US government (regardless of party) most of my life, especially US foreign policy and military, and inherently like the idea of a shake up a la Young Turks style. But all that aside democratic ideals are the only thing that makes the US better than China or Russia, and Trump lost what little credibility he had left as someone who upholds democracy when he tried to stay in power 4 years ago and then doubled-down by pardoning the rioters. And that, my friend, trumps everything else.
No, the administration is lying. We Canadians were getting the blunt end of it.
I don't think it's been covered much in American media but President Trump is throwing threats of 25% tariffs on both Mexican and Canadian imports for the last month or so. First it was about how it would make manufacturing move back to the US. Then it was about how Canada is a national threat to the US because we're allowing fentanyl and illegal immigrants to cross in the US. Then it was about how the US was in terrible the trade deal with Canada and Mexico was (it was his deal, the USMCA that replaced NAFTA). Then it was how the US subsidizes Canada because Canada is a failing state and that the US was spending $200 billion a year propping up Canada. Then it was that Canada wasn't meeting it's NATO spending targets. Then it was that Canada is a failed state, and that everything would be better if Canada became the 51st state.
Every day it seemed like his narrative is changing. And when we had our retaliatory tariffs at the ready to cause harm to Republican states, you know what he did?
He blinked. The tariffs for Canada and Mexico were postponed until March. He's been consistent about telegraphing what his actions are going to be, but his justifications are so wildly all over the place that frankly it's probably safe to assume he's lying at least about his motivations.
And if he's willing to lie to one of the oldest allies to the United States, is it really that much of a stretch to think that he could be lying to Americans as well?
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Well, they did claim they were transparent. Transparently juvenile. Befits the plan.
It seems Elon's DOGE boys aren't as tech-savvy as he made them out to be
That's what happens when you believe the l337 hacker hype the script kiddie tells you about themselves.
Pretty par for the course for so called "10x Developers".
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Sorry off topic, but isn't that x.com plastered on every single post not a flagrant conflict of interest? I mean other government sites subtly have a link to social media hidden somewhere and from multiple platforms basically x.com and Meta.
My thought exactly... When Musk was asked about potential conflict of interest he basically replied "Of course not, we're transparent and document everything on X"...
Oh, absolutely, but Republican legislators have decided that it's OK for the federal government to arbitrarily pick economic winners and losers now.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
I'm on your side, but that's not a good argument. Nancy Pelosi openly stated she has a right to be financially entangled with the companies she regulates. At least 60% of the democratic party is firmly pro-oligarch, too. Just like 2 or 3 republicans get to performatively dissent on unpopular votes, Democrat resistance is largely performative, too. Those economic winners and losers are also campaign donors. Citizen's United, the ruling that made America structurally a plutocracy, happened under Obama.
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https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem
Might have something to do with all this.
> 8) Less sanction efficiency than ever
> So according to the World Bank (not a Russian source!), Russia just flipped Japan to become the fourth largest global economy in GDP-by-PPP:
After reading this line you can easily identify that author is either propagandist or moron.
This is how Russia "increased GDP":
And in process doubled mass of local currency in economy from 2022 from 65 trillion rubles to 117 trillions.
Economy is booming!
Your post is more a criticism of including military spending in GDP, not anything particular to Russia's GDP-PPP calculation.
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It looks like the defacement was already cleared, but archives are available [0][1]. I posted these separately because of 404Media's soft-paywall, which is also linked separately here.
[0]: https://archive.md/XzvTY
[1]: https://archive.md/cMeco
I still see them live.
Pretty gross to think of these people doing code reviews for projects they have no familiarity with - along with of course this bafflingly incompetent tweet: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961#m Donald Trump said DOGE were "super-geniuses," and according to his standards they probably are.
(The way Trump's election directly led to "retard" being a common pejorative again hasn't been discussed enough. Just awful.)
This is about the level of Musk's understanding of tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729
Games are written for Windows, therefore webapps should be written with "Microsoft C++" (presumably meaning Visual C++, though I suppose there's an outside chance that he means "Microsoft C/C++", from the early 90s).
He's not new to being... bad at this.
Reading that set of quotes, it really is incredible how little Musk knows about even extremely basic things. He doesn't understand there are different problem spaces in tech, and that different problem spaces require completely different approaches and skill sets. To him, something like World of Warcraft is very impressive, so if you build Paypal on the same technology it will be impressive too. Like, honestly it's shocking that this guy is allowed near anything that has a button.
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Having never read that - it reads incredibly similar to how Trump talks but with better sentence structure. It all sounds believable, but it’s really useless platitudes.
Developer tools, along with availability of developers, was probably the number one reason to have chosen a Microsoft stack around the year 2000.
The annoyances of IIS were borne by sysadmins, but your developers were probably able to be more productive.
It's all very bullshit-ese, but it's worth pointing out that the majority of Google's important backend services are written in C++ (on Linux though). And not just stuff written in that same era, but all the way up to about 5-10 years ago.
Granted: Google was not so dumb to imagine deploying on NT / IIS. And their reasons for doing C++ were nothing like what Musk is blathering about here.
The biggest issue here isn't even about the technology. It's Musk as management stepping outside of his domain trying to tell the professionals working under him exactly what to do... because he's an egomaniac narcissist.
It took twelve hours to get one of the vandalized pages taken down.
https://bsky.app/profile/pxtl.ca/post/3li5vddrkw227
Only the most viral ones: https://bsky.app/profile/boehs.org/post/3li5m3cekec2s
They still have not successfully purged the database, though the endpoint has been secured.
Hah, that one's still up even now.
Well it was probably faithfully outsourced to people with correct documentation and certificates with their weight in gold then...
That would be very inefficient spending.
They hired some cheap Upwork freelancers instead.
Wonder if the pitchforks will come out this year or the next?
So many programs and jobs have been gutted so the orange man and his kleptocracy cabinet can get their $4.5T in tax cuts for the ultra wealthy [1]
I’m not impacted but this shit is really tiring. It’s painful to see American public be so ignorant and buy into the neoclassical economic lies.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Those DOGE 10Xers are so efficient they're outsourcing website content to the general public.
Ofcourse, democracy applies to HTML as well. Truly a noble deed.
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Not flagged? Amazing. Why not?
Idiocracy in full effect!
Just wait until we have a huge outbreak of Measles or are prescribed essential oils for cancer...
Too late. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/science/measles-vaccinati...
It's a "team" of junior hackers. What do you expect? I don't quite understand the motive. I mean the motive of the masses who cheer this on. Is it just to own the libs? They have to all be evil or completely misinformed. I assume most are ignorant and only a few are evil.
For some reason quite a number of people seem to believe the purpoted goals of DOGE, removing waste and increasing efficiency of the government.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
> whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
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It befuddles me too. My understanding is that government spending is approved by congress and that all organizations except the Pentagon have passed their audits. This is not to say that there isn't _some_ waste, fraud and abuse in between the cracks, but any large expense is approved by Congress and the executive can't unilaterally override those spending choices.
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Most people consider anything they don't like to be a waste of public funds. After all, they pay for the government through taxes, so it should serve only their needs. People in America do not view the government as a source for public good, but merely a piggy bank from which they should be able to extract funds. Just look at the student loan forgiveness crowd. I'm perfectly happy paying my dues, but a lot of people have decided that they want the government to give them a load of free money instead of using it for something productive.
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I have seen some people who are undeniably very smart get drawn into this line of thinking.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
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And, currently, firing everyone without just-cause protections (probationary workers, as well the contractor workforce - nearly equal in size to federal employees.)
The great american problem is that American bureaucracy is broken. Whether it's lottery systems for hiking in national parks, fixing roads, healthcare, or hiring across federal employers, all of these require a functioning bureaucracy and there is not one. And so what do Americans do? The left complains the bureaucracy is broken and the right complains the bureaucracy exists. There is little room left for ever fixing the bureaucracy in this situation. It leaves lots of room for people to grab power and change things unilaterally to their own benefit.
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Efficiency-wise it is impossible for DOGE to move the needle. That line of reasoning is a smokescreen for destroying government agencies. Maybe they need to be folded, so petition the people. They have the Congress and Senate.
From Reuters:
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
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There's no reason to believe anything they say. Believe only what they do.
They are they are shrinking the government to find ~4T$ for for corporate tax cuts. You can call it legitimate policy but calling it "efficiency" is bit misleading.
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Yeah even on HN where I would expect above average observational and critical thinking skills, there are plenty of people who don’t see or refuse to see what’s going on. Pretty shocking really.
Because the parts they don't like align with the parts DOGE doesn't like. They agree with dear leader and so all that woke BS is wasteful. This way they will pay lower taxes now because we got rid of all this "waste".
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Ever heard of the banality of evil? Ignorance is in some ways worse than being genuinely evil.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
I don't think it's ignorance. It's indifference. The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
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Sometimes- it also just rains. The end of WW2 and free trade + technology, have given the futurist ideology that every problem is solveable way to much credibility. Some problems are just hard and inherently not solveable and sometimes not even workaroundable by technology.
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
I would make a stronger claim: ignorance + power + conviction is exactly equal to evil.
Mao killed tens of million of his own people because of his misconceptions about farming, economics, and ecology.
Hitler killed millions because of his misconceptions about jews.
9/11 was executed becuase of a small group that were very confused about the basic facts of reality ("god").
There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
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The masse cheering this on have been told for decades that this is what they want. This is a response to Reagan's welfare queens, The $600 dollar hammer, and "activist judges". They think this is freedom. That this is good governance.
The way I’ve been saying it is the Right did such a good job of inventing phony boogeymen to get them elected (and then never do anything about said boogeymen) that they finally bred a generation that thinks their BS is real.
Wheel-warring with democrats, who previously carried out their own subtle power grabs, perhaps. I wouldn't really know, but I suppose "corruption" might mean "things that benefit the other side".
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The people cheering them on are an anti-elitist bunch, the see themselves as the revolution for the people. But they don’t understand the finer details of all the things going on in a modern government-society system, and most importantly they lost faith in it.
Exactly, those people are happy because "Musk will show them!". That is it.
> They have to all be evil or completely misinformed. I assume most are ignorant and only a few are evil.
I thought that after 2016, I no longer do. It's the reverse. Maybe "evil" is a strong word but they are definitely what I would consider "bad people" based on their extreme selfishness. Most pretend to be ignorant, or "low information" in person but they follow news very closely.
Agreed. The 2016 were self-serving grifters that didn’t understand the mechanisms of government and were mostly bumbling around. The 2024 team are also self-serving grifters but have a much more coherent plan to shape things to their liking and much smarter people in play. Miller - arguably one of the smartest but also someone to whom the “evil” label perhaps best applies - plays a much bigger role this time around.
As they say power corrupts - true for most people.
One lesson I've learned in my life is that evil is just another word for extreme selfishness.
> I assume most are ignorant and only a few are evil.
Wilful ignorance equates to evil in this case.
> Wilful ignorance equates to evil in this case.
The media are absolutely craven, too, constantly normalizing insanity and pretending like even idiotic things are legitimate proposals that should instead be laughed out of the room. Like, maybe the Earth is flat? Let's HAVE THAT DEBATE!!
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The motive of people to cheer any team on is, generally, tribalism.
"Stupid or Evil" has been my go-to logic for approaching far-right agenda items for a long time.
You're either so dumb you believe every piece of propaganda you are shown, and never notice the harm being done, or you are fully aware of what's happening and you're cheering on the chaos and suffering.
Commonly the propaganda or myth is a better story than the truth. It's nicer to be in a story about pedos conspiring in a fast food restaurant than being forced to work to pay for universal healthcare in Israel but not getting it yourself.
The toil and confusion and nastiness of everyday life under capitalism is not as fun and exciting as an imminent invasion at the southern border or the coming rise of the God Emperor or the final solution to groceries being expensive. Running a soup kitchen and washing clothes for the homeless just hasn't the same attraction as doing nothing by chasing the next Q-drop.
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Sadly we can explain most bad things that happen by understanding that most people are f*cking idiots.
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Well, the ministry of propaganda says this is la creme de la creme and we can trust their handling of government data blindly. So showing that DOGE is unable to even secure their website is a good exercise of hacker activism.
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.
Excuse me if you think I referred to Elon Musk as a hacker. He's a marketer. I meant the nazi kids he hired.
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I mean the motive of the masses who cheer this on. Is it just to own the libs?
Yes, in many respects. See this paper for a good model of the basic behavior: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
> I don't quite understand the motive. I mean the motive of the masses who cheer this on. Is it just to own the libs?
You're surely being obtuse. I'm a progressive independent and even I understand why they are doing it, even if I'm not convinced this is the correct way to do it.
This is why they are doing it: https://www.usdebtclock.org/
It's just their idea of austerity.
I think you're the one who's being obtuse. He said the movtive of the masses, not the Trump administration. The masses know nothing of the US national debt. They just hate liberals, feel that the liberals have had power over them for the last 4 years, and want their revenge. This is the pendulum swinging the other way.
I don't know every motive or even most motives for cheering it on. But I know my take on it: I'm an anti authoritarian.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". I think for those cheering on it's a mix of both. Culture wars have made them gleeful when they see opportunities for others to suffer and they're ignorant of how this is negatively affecting them, their morals and society.
But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.
I think the cheering is more a told-you-so cheer from people who suspected that Musk and his team aren't as compotent as they claim.
During the first Trump administration I regularly tried to discern the difference, but ultimately that was a mistake--a kind of engaging and draining analytical junk food--and one I'm not going to make a second time.
> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.
I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.
It might be prudent to consider emigration or at least divesting from real estate assets. I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.
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It's incredibly hard to imagine anybody cheering this on to be thoughtful or intelligent. I see no critical thinking, intellectual rigour, or even any interest in real evidence or data. In what way is any of this intelligent or thoughtful? It's the complete opposite of both.
The guy leading the charge is calling people “retards” on twitter. How does that effect your “who’s the idiot” calculus?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961?mx=2
I'll leave the imagining to you. I'm using my actual senses to observe, and what I observe is that the people who cheer it on are bringing the national average IQ down. If you think anything about the way this is being done is OK, you have been utterly, irreversibly brainwashed. I voted conservative. I did not vote for this.
What would lead me to assume that at this point?
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I'm going to assume good faith here. Yesterday they just asked congress for $4.3 trillion in deficit spending (debt increase) to fund tax cuts for the people who pay the lowest taxes already. The majority of government spending is on defense, which hasn't been auditable in decades. You're either wildly misinformed, or trolling.
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Lower tax bills for the rich. Proposed tax cuts would make the higher incomes less taxed and the not 1% incomes (or something around that 1%) more taxed
The problem is that “waste” is now “anything Trump and Musk don’t like”.
I’d be happy if they actually saved real money by cutting the military budget in half, but that’s not going to happen because the US is an industrial-military based economy.
How much did Trump’s 2017 tax cuts lower your tax bills? They didn’t lower mine. I benefited more from Biden’s tax policies (child tax credits) than Trump’s. Even taking it from the point of view of “fuck the gov, fuck climate change and our future, I want what’s mine, now” Trump did nothing for me in his 4 years on power and is doing nothing for me now - gutting a bunch of gov agencies doesn’t put money in my pocket.
You have no problems with wasteful spending of tax payers money?
Why do you guys keep going back to this? No one ever said that whatsoever. We have problems with the way this is being done. If you can't gather that and process it after reading this thread, you may have a problem with ADHD that you should see someone about. No one in this entire thread has said they want to waste taxpayer money.
That’s a straw man. Show the waste they are cutting. Musk didn’t even know which Mamas he was talking about when he found out”waste” at USAid and, when told, just shrugged and said it was the press’ job to correct those mistakes.
The odds of a junkie recognizing good or bad spending is very low.
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They were always fine with it until we found out on what that money was spent on. It turns out, that the most of it was a waste at best and grift at worse.
As for 'juniors', it's not like we've seen this sort of thing before such as those here happy to propel the opinions of so-called 'climate expert / activist' (Greta Thunberg) who didn't finish school and was used by the media as the face of 'saving the planet' and throwing unfounded claims of disaster by 2023, despite a significant lack of understanding of climate change and what she was talking about.
But then again, I have not heard back from Netflix's elite team for a postmortem of that live-streaming disaster which there were no juniors to blame this time despite being inexperienced in delivering live-streaming on their platform reliably.
There's always a relevant XKCD.
https://xkcd.com/932/
If the government has nothing to hide, it has nothing to fear.
So, responsible disclosure isn't a thing anymore?
Responsible disclosure is for researchers in it for more than the lulz. In practical terms, do you think there’s a nonzero chance Musk would give rewards or credit for the report?
I wouldn’t do that because I don’t want a felony. I could see some 16 year old working for their their chance at glory.
Responsible disclosure is not about rewards.
And I am not surprised some 16 years old doesn't care. I am more surprised HN ctowd doesn't seem to even mention it. 16 years old can learn, but only if there's a culture to teach them.
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Transparency maximum.
This post now appears on page 5 of HN despite being number 1 at /active
:<
/active shows the threads that are accumulating comments most quickly. If we ranked the frontpage that way, then HN would be a flamewar site. Therefore we don't rank the frontpage that way.
fair enough; thanks for the explain. I do appreciate that HN doesn't turn into a flamewar while allowing discussions and not flagging everything just because it's controversial, especially with all the impactful stuff going on. kudos on the moderating and threading that needle; tough job
TIL about /active.
There have been so many of these types posts that have been hidden from the front page.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-...
Unauthorized access or modification of any government website, even if it is left openly accessible, is illegal under laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in the U.S.
well then, good thing they're gutting the law enforcement agencies
Thats lucky, only the US is able to access the internet
The DOGE website currently does not have an acceptable use policy.
Modification of the site is as unauthorized as access to the site -- undefined.
The domain ends in dot gov
Oh now you want laws
Russians, who happen to also have Internet access, are definitely afraid of violating CFAA.
Hack the planet.
Is it a government website?
Who here has listened to Elon/Trump extensively (and not opinions by news outlets) and has concluded that they are doing net damage?
My opinion: Some mistakes will be made but remedied. But overall it's a net positive. As to how much of a positive it is, it need to be see. If the income tax, property tax (and other unavoidable taxes) are eliminated, I'd say America is greater again.
I wonder if Trump ordered all the F22s to be flown into the ground, the aircraft carriers to be run aground, would anyone do anything? What about blowing up all the government buildings?
How does Musk get to destroy millions of dollars of investment? These are all government assets. What the fuck is going on here?
What the fuck indeed. And where the fuck are the people who are supposed to stop this?
> What the fuck indeed. And where the fuck are the people who are supposed to stop this?
Which people? The paramount officers of the executive branch? They actively support it. They quasi-independent inspectors-general in the executive branch departments? Those in areas of concern have been (fairly blatantly illegally) fired, and in at least one case physically ejected by security personnel.
The majority of both houses of Congress? They at least tacitly support it out of partisan loyalty. The courts? They’be issued orders, but ultimately rely on executive compliance or a different part of the executive enforcing those orders, and see “the paramount officers of the executive branch...”, previously.
The electorate? They voted in the people supporting it in the executive and legislature. A sufficient number of safeguards have failed that there is likely no effective recourse within the system, and none of those failed safeguards are likely to reset into their functional state without some extreme force being applied to change their present direction.
You're all overreacting. This is a poster for a government agency. https://xkcd.com/932/
Relative to the XKCD, this is like if someone found out you could vandalize hundreds of thousands of posters and publish it under a US federal government website using an REST API.
Feds getting DDOSed? Nothing new. Public read/write access to a government distributed resource? That needs to be taken offline as a matter of public security.
Musk has said that he like Xavier Milei's way of "deleting" government departments without too much investigation of their importance because if they're important, you can always put them back. He's probably taking a similar approach with DOGE. Some researchers and aid organizations lose their funding today but if they really are important and not just grift, they or their successors will probably get it back later. This isn't like social welfare where people might starve if their regular payment is stopped. Nobody's going to starve if research funding is cut. Researchers might have to get another job but that's an expected and normal part of life, especially for academics.
You can't just turn people off and on again like computers and expect them to carry on as before.
You cut funding for cancer trials people are already enrolled in, people die.
You cut funding for HIV drugs, patients' viral loads go up. Even if you put the funding back before they die, their viruses have already evolved resistance to the drugs they used to be on.
You cut military aid to US allies, those countries learn the US isn't a reliable ally. Soft power centuries in the making evaporates, just like that.
Well, except for everyone on USAID food, NIH funded trials, god I can go on. Just because you don't know precisely what you're cutting doesn't mean it's not important.
“So rather than having a physical server or even something like Amazon Web Services, they’re deploying using Cloudflare Pages which supports custom domains.”
So? Also, the distinction is moot.
Not a good look, when you're doing a blitz of obviously criminally -- treasonously -- reckless things.
It's harder for supporters to even pretend that you're even minimally competent.
Many of their supporters wouldn't know a webpage from a database schema and once thought Bill Gates would send him $$ for forwarding emails. Like my 60+ BIL.
Sure, because half of the country is stupid (that’s the only explanation!) unlike you oh, enlightened one
I'm not sure you've actually heard from their supporters - they have proven again and again that there is literally nothing they won't excuse or handwave away.
It is insane how tone deaf most of the comments are, jarring even. I forget how insular so much of the community is and I often make the mistake of equating intelligence, which exists here in spades, with critical thought.
Understand that most of the sentiment expressed here is identical to the pre-digested mass media pablum intended for 100 IQ consumers.
Think of mass media coverage of a subject you're an expert in and how horrifyingly wrong it typically is on so many levels, and try to rectify the two.
Time to lay off low performers!
oh good i hope someone other than China can now access all the natsec data
Classical snake oil sales
I am shocked, SHOCKED! that this Elon Musk thing staffed by a bunch of weirdos he found wherever isn't very competent.
loyalty >> competence
Is it me or mods are actively hiding everything that is critical of the current admin? This post is 6 hours late, 308 points and at the bottom of the 3rd page. This is not the first post that is either flagged or just made invisible. Is HN still a place we can trust?
I've been answering this a lot lately. Here are some links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979382
If you take a look at those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Trust as you please, but we're moderating HN the same way we always have.
Edit: Actually we wouldn't expect or ask anyone to trust in the first place. I do think it's reasonable to ask regular users to familiarize themselves with the principles by which we moderate the site. Then if you see something that doesn't fit those principles, or if you want to make a case for different principles, we have something to discuss.
These principles go back a long time and have held up well in terms of preserving HN for its intended purpose over the years. If you (or anyone) want to familiarize yourself with them, see the link I marked above. It contains a partial list, and pointers to lots of past explanations.
Going to defend dang here.
These posts have a high political index, which given America's current culture wars tends to bring out the kind of behavior which none of us want on HN.
It's a damn tough balancing act.
Also, look at my post history, I'm pretty strongly anti-DOGE. I'm defending Dang because I love HN and appreciate what he is doing under extremely tough conditions.
I see you are new here. It's not about being political or not, it's about whether this is going to end up in a flamewar or not.
Here are the guidelines : https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Moderation is decentralized, downvoted comments tend to disappear. Flagging is a power people who have a lot of karma have, if you think are one of them you can vouch (unflag) for a comment. There is one mod, dang Here are the moderator last comments so you can have idea of the work he is doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
I wonder if site being hacked belongs to hacker news.
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It would be so uncivil to have a conversation about how the US govt is being carelessly lit on fire because it might lead to a flamewar.
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It’s not mods. Dang and his team are phenomenally fair. It’s users flagging it because we’re massively tired of this content and if I want to read it and hear endless thoughtless comments, I’ll go to Reddit.
A group of users flags it all but dang has done a good job of overriding it lately.
I'd still like if threads indicated whether or not flags were turned off. Dang must be tired of answering these questions
I trust dang.
I also believe there are a bunch of Musk fanboys on this site that would flag this. Or people who don’t want to understand the implications of what’s going on and avoid anything that’s “political”.
Knowing how petty Elon is with Diablo and PoE, I do not at all put it past him to have some bots/cheap labor just flag anything about him.
I also trust dang
Don't know how to square these thing either, though
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I also trust dang, but the “Elon has built cool companies so I’m going to set aside what critical thinking skills I have and put my trust in him and Trump and forget that Trump Is an inveterate liar and Elon has been saying shit for a long time now” is really getting to me. I expect that from Reddit or Fox News watchers. I expect higher order thinking from HN and it’s pretty disappointing.
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Those post are flagged because many of us do not want to see ANYTHING about US politics in here, no matter if it’s dressed up as a technical article
why don't you click "hide"?
I've suspected the same when people are critical of AI.
Yes, they're all being hidden. I've yet to see a good reason why.
Please see my response to parent
(copied from an earlier comment)
There are at least 60 recent DOGE stories on HN with comments on. I guess people get a bit DOGEd out. It's probably part of the Trump/Musk strategy. 'Flood the zone' with so many things people can't follow it.
(on zone flooding https://youtu.be/iTSgL_R1CC4)
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Executor -- "It's about time White people realize that the holocaust is used as a mind fuck to demoralize us and beat us down into submission." : https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Executor
Are you really looking for evidence?
Is there any evidence that random non site maintainers can push data to this website other than the two examples pushed to the site by non site maintainers in front of witnesses and since viewed by many?
Isn't that evidence enough that it is possible?
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No they're going to be insufferable for the next 4 years celebrating literally every action the current admin takes no matter what and blaming every problem on the last guy in office.
Having a front row seat to the fall of the biggest empire in history is certainly something.
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Please stop sharing paywall content. We are not paying subscriptions because some headline.
Well, it seems to be working fine now.
It's still working today.
so most people here are salty about Doge actually delivering on transparency, albeit imperfectly, vs promises and SLS style multi billion "effort" unable to deliver for decades?
mind you, it's totally legit to ridicule the noob security lapses, but the rest of the sentiment here seems a bit meh
I agree the website itself is fine -- not that the information wasn't publicly available before, but having it consolidated is nice.
But as for transparency, DOGE isn't at all being transparent about what it is doing. I'd give them an F so far on that.
I'm generally trying to keep away from the whole political madness going on, but when I do follow a story, Iat least try to verify what I am seeing. This requires a fair bit of mental energy, intelligence and frustration tolerance, and is frankly impossible to do for more than a fraction of what is going on.
For example, the recent headlines of the state department trying to buy $400m worth of armored Tesla vehicles was obviously a Democrat plant. It was done under the Biden administration in December, with no chance of fulfilling before the handover. Some.one thought it would be a simple way of making the Trump admin look bad.
You have to always be wary of being misled by the media in today's age. That said, the shit-slinging coming out of Doge has been largely false and illegal. If Congress assigns money to fund impressionist dancers in Pakistan, then that's what it has to be spent on. The real issue here is that to get a bill passed in the US a lot of fluff has to get attached to it. Doge can't unilaterally cancel payments without breaking the law.
Even in the cases I looked at were real corruption is plausible, ie. the money given to the Clinton Foundation, Doge just straight up lied about the amounts and purpose.
Outside of corruption, there is no good reason to move this fast and reckless. At least no good reason for the American people. They are moving this fast because they know what they do is illegal and idiotic and false, and they are trying to drown us in bullshit.
Musk gets a nice kickback for every single link going back to his own website (that is actually corruption), but more importantly, they are building up outrage fatigue for normal people and a frenzy for their fanatics. This is all about paving the way to paint legality as corruption so that they can justify ignoring the courts and Congress going forward.
Most people here on HN are idiot savants - little to no experiences that expose them to govt bureaucracy and corruption (example:taxes beyond simple salaried income tax, buying/selling property,run a business,run a payroll, investing, inflation etc. )
It's just an information page about the cuts that have been made, 404 could have reported this to the admins first but needed the clicks...
The same dudes who stood up this page are now writing COBOL to determine what cuts to make. Sounds like a great outcome.
Minimizing government spending is a good thing. Bloated and inefficacious programs need to be scrapped. Optimistically, programs that do not enrich only the legislative class will spring forth due to the new demand for better audit trails/logs.
You don’t know that though.
I bet if you poke around nvidia.com you can find some bad Wordpress sites. Does that mean the GPU engineering is bad?
Nah, this is an important story about how incompetent the developers are who have taken it upon themselves to dismantle the US federal government.
It's just an information page about spending cuts, everyone in the thread is overreacting and embellishing.
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It’s all bluffing and posturing and smoke and mirrors
Is that really how Elon became the President :)
The doge.gov website is just amazing. You can browse through the entire org chart of a typical government, average age of employees, avg salary in that department and so on. I hope they upload this data on GitHub and open sources for the future keeping. I am becoming fairly certain that all these will be removed when ruling party changes. Doge guys truly rock for doing this.
And now, keep in mind that US govt is likely still way more "efficient" than most others on the planet.
I took a look at this (the "Workforce" section) and the "Regulations" section. A chill went down my spine. The first tool is purpose built for cutting jobs from areas that someone might consider "unprofitable".
For example, you (and by "you" I mean an external party holding a scalpel) can drill down into Executive Branch > Cabinet Level Agencies > Department of Education > Office of the Secretary > Office Of Civil Rights, and think, "Hey, why does the DoE need an office of civil rights? Does it need a 570 headcount? We can save $78M by cutting out that entire office".
I've seen this phenomenon in corporate, where cuts happen to areas that seem like they're not contributing to immediate profits, because their outcomes are long term, and there is enough organizational momentum to go forward for months, if not years, before their absence is noticed. For example, certain types of quality teams, technical/platform teams and employee safety/welfare related positions.
Meanwhile the second section seems to be a tool for dismantling the regulatory system of the US. It is disingenuously called the "Unconstitutionality Index" ignoring the fact that a country cannot be run by a legislature and its acts alone, let alone a constitution.
Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on.
Hope they used good proxies, because this seems like a felony.
> One of the sources told 404 Media that they were able to push updates to a database of government employment information after studying the website’s architecture and finding the database’s API endpoints.
Oof, not something to put in your article.
> push updates to a database of government employment information
Huh, what would be the goal of connecting this database to an API on or near doge.gov? Surely it's not the "actual"/"source of truth" database, more likely a copy: I can imagine the geniuses thought ""let's mirror everything online on a single system so it's easier for all of us to access it and do queries like "WHERE gender NOT IN ('m', 'f') OR race NOT IN ('white')" and get results from all the databases we know of."". (I assume there is no single federal employee database?)
And since the truth is whatever they say nowadays, maybe it IS the "source of truth" database.
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The massive difference here is that the Doge team is acting as quickly making decisions about government funding and classifications of that spending e.g. if it's a "scam". If they're supposed computer experts making incorrect decisions about something as simple as web hosting you can be sure that they're making incorrect decisions in more important topics.
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> Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on.
What data are you basing this on? Federal websites have an approval process which includes a security review so I’d expect some familiarity with that in your response.
"Able to" and "Did" are two very different things.
> This person showed me two database entries they were able to push to the website, which are live on doge.gov as I write this (archived here and here)
All you had to do was actually read the article; it’s the very next paragraph from the one I quoted.
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> Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on
Would like to see a source on this.
Governments are similar to large enterprises whereby every bit of code going into Production requires a full security, architecture and site reliability review.
There is no doubt bugs in bespoke web applications but for your typical website.
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> Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on
Citation?
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