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 This is an outdated way of thinking.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.
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 also don’t buy Elon’s messaging that a database upgrade will save social security, or whatever.
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.
From the docker file:
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.shWhere 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.
The way the government has been run the past decades doesn't work, demonstrably. Every important metric has worsened.
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.
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.
This is quite literally what is happening.
- 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?
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.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
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.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
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...
The answer is it does matter because it’s funding things both parties have an interest in.
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.
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.
Why is this not a joke?
Edit: Rethorical question.
But I guess that you don't need to find answers externally when stupidity is a much simpler reason
>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...
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 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
https://archive.ph/2025.02.14-132833/https://www.404media.co...
I don't see any CRUD endpoints for modifying the database
Not enough detail to say for sure; could be SQL injection, could be credentials exposed in the frontend.
Every generation we make things much easier, lower the bar, and are rewarded when amateurs make amateur mistakes like this.
But, I would love to see details.
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.
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 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.
Wilful ignorance equates to evil in this case.
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.
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.
Yes, in many respects. See this paper for a good model of the basic behavior: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. Good experienced engineer
2. Without ethics
3. Happy to be paid below market rate of a good experienced engineer without ethics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43019507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003751
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 (<-- principles listed here)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
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.
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'd still like if threads indicated whether or not flags were turned off. Dang must be tired of answering these questions
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”.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Modification of the site is as unauthorized as access to the site -- undefined.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Citation?
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".
> 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-...
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.
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?
(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).
He's not new to being... bad at this.
The annoyances of IIS were borne by sysadmins, but your developers were probably able to be more productive.
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.
Now it says "Receipts coming over the weekend!"
Next time it's: The site is receipt-ready
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.
I'd wager the person who did the edit goes by the name "roro".
mind you, it's totally legit to ridicule the noob security lapses, but the rest of the sentiment here seems a bit meh
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.
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.
Might have something to do with all this.
> 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.
Economy is booming!
They still have not successfully purged the database, though the endpoint has been secured.
:<
There have been so many of these types posts that have been hidden from the front page.
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.
It's harder for supporters to even pretend that you're even minimally competent.
This for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051135
(EDIT: Looks like others are wondering too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050833)
They hired some cheap Upwork freelancers instead.
Just wait until we have a huge outbreak of Measles or are prescribed essential oils for cancer...
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.
How does Musk get to destroy millions of dollars of investment? These are all government assets. What the fuck is going on here?
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.
And now, keep in mind that US govt is likely still way more "efficient" than most others on the planet.
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.
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...
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.
So? Also, the distinction is moot.
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 that really how Elon became the President :)