16 ms·

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 web

by danso 2y ago

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 https://github.com/usds/website

darth_avocado 2y ago
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.
- bozhark 2y ago
  You mean the next incoming people
TheGRS 2y ago
Yea so far DOGE doesn't seem like they take any time to ask questions or research before doing anything.
- abuani 2y ago
  [flagged]
- niceice 2y ago
  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.
  - _elf 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - niceice 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - caycep 2y ago
        and accepting of their particular safety records I'm sure.
      - dingnuts 2y ago
        come back and argue after you take your Tesla down the Dragon's Tail without touching the steering wheel
  - esalman 2y ago
    It works? Are you sure?
    - orthecreedence 2y ago
      Sure, it works great. And if the federal government fails, just call your favorite VC buddies and start a new federal government. Maybe one without one of those pesky constitutions. Why has nobody thought of this?
      - monocasa 2y ago
        The VCs trying to build a new federal government is ironically what we're seeing here.
  - lionkor 2y ago
    It works as long as you have investors shoving millions or billions into your behind so you can fix the fuckups
- decremental 2y ago
  [dead]
- danso 2y ago
  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.
  - Someone1234 2y ago
    USDS really did represent the best of the federal government. They modernized hundreds of websites, brought accessibility and mobile access to the forefront, improved usability, and a lot of that work is invisible, slow, internal politics/battles. Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
    - niceice 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - unsui 2y ago
        [flagged]
      - genewitch 2y ago
        [flagged]
        tomrod 2y ago
        Sound fcc.gov has not been using the USDS playbook.
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Odd claims and you didn't really support it (I use Google to find everything doesn't matter how well organized the site is). Why do you have inherent bias against public sector tech workers >My tax dollars are better spent not having a website in most of these cases. Blame your rep for it then. We don't set the budget. We vote in people we trust are in our best interest to set such spending.
- doodlebugging 2y ago
  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.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    This stuff was incredibly valuable when my SO and I were on vacation overseas. Also, I'm sure there are a ton of consular and embassy employees around the world that rely on USGS data. It's just an accident that it's also exporting the work product of the US government overseas.
  - yujzgzc 2y ago
    Is this DOGE's doing?
    - doodlebugging 2y ago
      Yes. It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible. I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  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.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    This is so clearly not the case of an underexperienced team trying to accomplish something complicated and failing at it. The goal is to dismantle the government and that's exactly what they're doing. There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
    - drunkpotato 2y ago
      Exactly. All of this was stated in advance, in Project 2025 and in tech bro interviews about how much democracy sucks. These people are not subtle, smart, or original; however, they are completely amoral sociopaths who think they can destroy the US and own/control what’s left. I don’t think it’s going to work out as well for them as they think, but in the short and medium term Elon and his shitheels will do a lot of damage, and cause a lot of pain and death.
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      Oh, I am certain they are trying to destroy things on purpose, but I also think they are terrible at it. For example, watch the scramble as they try to rehire those safe guarding the nuclear arsenal[1]. It's a mess and someone competent could be doing it far better. I don't know if that's a small mercy or not. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-take-ax-us-government-offices-2025-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-...
- Spooky23 2y ago
  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.
caycep 2y ago
I see recent changes being made, are the prior timestamps available for archiving?
- skywhopper 2y ago
  If you’ve checked out the git repo, you can go back to any point in the history and build that revision.
  - glitchdout 2y ago
    That is, until DOGE decides to rewrite (git) history.
    - dataviz1000 2y ago
      > rewrite (git) history Is that possible? Every commit id includes the hash of the parent commit forming a chain.
      - pfg_ 2y ago
        Yes, you modify the history uodating every commit after the changed one and then force push. Git has built in ommands to help. Anyone who has the repository cloned can tell if that happened because all the hashes will be different.
        Doxin 2y ago
        As long as your git hasn't garbage collected the old commits you can still them back. you can just create a branch pointing to the previous HEAD and the whole history will still be there.
ivewonyoung 2y ago
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: curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh
- ethbr1 2y ago
  A vein pops out in my forehead every time I see a shell script echoed from the internet into a prompt.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
    It's much better when it's done importing javascript snippets ...
  - ivewonyoung 2y ago
    Based on the heavy downvoting of my comment, I guess it's considered a good practice by folks now. shrug
    - frogsRnice 2y ago
      It could be pulling these resources over http ;) Edit: Whoops sorry, morning fog
muglug 2y ago
[flagged]
- wrs 2y ago
  What's moral about it?
  - brianwawok 2y ago
    The possible moral argument, is the government is funding a service that costs businesses revenue. However it would be pretty insane to argue that a citizen of a country should need to pay money for someone to fill out a basic tax return to pay taxes…
    - Freedom2 2y ago
      I've had someone on this site say to me that it's because America embraces the free market, as well as it being the only country to have granular enough taxes to require a third party to handle it. It's incredibly hard because you can point to any other country to show examples of good (not perfect) implementations but then American exceptionalism takes over and they simply dismiss any advice.
      - ericrallen 2y ago
        It sounds like that particular someone might have had a vested interest in maintaining the current (terrible) status quo around filing taxes in America. The rest of us hate it.
        muglug 2y ago
        The one thing I've discovered as I’ve got older is that most people don’t have some insidious vested interest. Complex political issues sometimes just come down to "I want my side to look good and I want the other side to look bad". In a system that treats Silicon Valley billionaires very differently to someone selling lumber in rural Ohio, sometimes that naked tribalism is the only thing that truly unites people in political parties. Some people hate the IRS self-filing system because it works, and because the "other side" is taking credit for it.
ks2048 2y ago
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.
- thomasfedb 2y ago
  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.
- grandempire 2y ago
  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.
  - joshuaturner 2y ago
    Bad websites make the times we interact with the government much less efficient than it otherwise would be, especially if a artifice has no reasonable online alternative and instead required in person appointments, costing you time, requiring additional staff, and requiring office space. One of the best examples of this is passport renewal. In the US until very recently you were unable to do this online, either having to print and mail in a form or go in person to an office. Another example is the work of 18F to allow Americans easy direct filing of their taxes without the need (or cost) of a third party.
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    > It IT and bad websites the problem with the government? It is and was a pretty significant one, now less important compared to a literal seig-heiling nazi running the government. Last time literal seig-heiling nazis ran a government, it wasn't great.
Xen9 2y ago
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.

by danso 2y ago

darth_avocado 2y ago

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.

bozhark 2y ago
You mean the next incoming people

TheGRS 2y ago

Yea so far DOGE doesn't seem like they take any time to ask questions or research before doing anything.

abuani 2y ago
[flagged]
niceice 2y ago
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.
- _elf 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - niceice 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - caycep 2y ago
      and accepting of their particular safety records I'm sure.
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      come back and argue after you take your Tesla down the Dragon's Tail without touching the steering wheel
- esalman 2y ago
  It works? Are you sure?
  - orthecreedence 2y ago
    Sure, it works great. And if the federal government fails, just call your favorite VC buddies and start a new federal government. Maybe one without one of those pesky constitutions. Why has nobody thought of this?
    - monocasa 2y ago
      The VCs trying to build a new federal government is ironically what we're seeing here.
- lionkor 2y ago
  It works as long as you have investors shoving millions or billions into your behind so you can fix the fuckups
decremental 2y ago
[dead]
danso 2y ago
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.
- Someone1234 2y ago
  USDS really did represent the best of the federal government. They modernized hundreds of websites, brought accessibility and mobile access to the forefront, improved usability, and a lot of that work is invisible, slow, internal politics/battles. Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
  - niceice 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - unsui 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - genewitch 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - tomrod 2y ago
        Sound fcc.gov has not been using the USDS playbook.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Odd claims and you didn't really support it (I use Google to find everything doesn't matter how well organized the site is). Why do you have inherent bias against public sector tech workers >My tax dollars are better spent not having a website in most of these cases. Blame your rep for it then. We don't set the budget. We vote in people we trust are in our best interest to set such spending.
doodlebugging 2y ago
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.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  This stuff was incredibly valuable when my SO and I were on vacation overseas. Also, I'm sure there are a ton of consular and embassy employees around the world that rely on USGS data. It's just an accident that it's also exporting the work product of the US government overseas.
- yujzgzc 2y ago
  Is this DOGE's doing?
  - doodlebugging 2y ago
    Yes. It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible. I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
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.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  This is so clearly not the case of an underexperienced team trying to accomplish something complicated and failing at it. The goal is to dismantle the government and that's exactly what they're doing. There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
  - drunkpotato 2y ago
    Exactly. All of this was stated in advance, in Project 2025 and in tech bro interviews about how much democracy sucks. These people are not subtle, smart, or original; however, they are completely amoral sociopaths who think they can destroy the US and own/control what’s left. I don’t think it’s going to work out as well for them as they think, but in the short and medium term Elon and his shitheels will do a lot of damage, and cause a lot of pain and death.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    Oh, I am certain they are trying to destroy things on purpose, but I also think they are terrible at it. For example, watch the scramble as they try to rehire those safe guarding the nuclear arsenal[1]. It's a mess and someone competent could be doing it far better. I don't know if that's a small mercy or not. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-take-ax-us-government-offices-2025-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-...
Spooky23 2y ago
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.

caycep 2y ago

I see recent changes being made, are the prior timestamps available for archiving?

skywhopper 2y ago
If you’ve checked out the git repo, you can go back to any point in the history and build that revision.
- glitchdout 2y ago
  That is, until DOGE decides to rewrite (git) history.
  - dataviz1000 2y ago
    > rewrite (git) history Is that possible? Every commit id includes the hash of the parent commit forming a chain.
    - pfg_ 2y ago
      Yes, you modify the history uodating every commit after the changed one and then force push. Git has built in ommands to help. Anyone who has the repository cloned can tell if that happened because all the hashes will be different.
      - Doxin 2y ago
        As long as your git hasn't garbage collected the old commits you can still them back. you can just create a branch pointing to the previous HEAD and the whole history will still be there.

ivewonyoung 2y ago

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: curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh

ethbr1 2y ago
A vein pops out in my forehead every time I see a shell script echoed from the internet into a prompt.
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
  It's much better when it's done importing javascript snippets ...
- ivewonyoung 2y ago
  Based on the heavy downvoting of my comment, I guess it's considered a good practice by folks now. shrug
  - frogsRnice 2y ago
    It could be pulling these resources over http ;) Edit: Whoops sorry, morning fog

muglug 2y ago

[flagged]

wrs 2y ago
What's moral about it?
- brianwawok 2y ago
  The possible moral argument, is the government is funding a service that costs businesses revenue. However it would be pretty insane to argue that a citizen of a country should need to pay money for someone to fill out a basic tax return to pay taxes…
  - Freedom2 2y ago
    I've had someone on this site say to me that it's because America embraces the free market, as well as it being the only country to have granular enough taxes to require a third party to handle it. It's incredibly hard because you can point to any other country to show examples of good (not perfect) implementations but then American exceptionalism takes over and they simply dismiss any advice.
    - ericrallen 2y ago
      It sounds like that particular someone might have had a vested interest in maintaining the current (terrible) status quo around filing taxes in America. The rest of us hate it.
      - muglug 2y ago
        The one thing I've discovered as I’ve got older is that most people don’t have some insidious vested interest. Complex political issues sometimes just come down to "I want my side to look good and I want the other side to look bad". In a system that treats Silicon Valley billionaires very differently to someone selling lumber in rural Ohio, sometimes that naked tribalism is the only thing that truly unites people in political parties. Some people hate the IRS self-filing system because it works, and because the "other side" is taking credit for it.

ks2048 2y ago

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.

thomasfedb 2y ago
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.
grandempire 2y ago
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.
- joshuaturner 2y ago
  Bad websites make the times we interact with the government much less efficient than it otherwise would be, especially if a artifice has no reasonable online alternative and instead required in person appointments, costing you time, requiring additional staff, and requiring office space. One of the best examples of this is passport renewal. In the US until very recently you were unable to do this online, either having to print and mail in a form or go in person to an office. Another example is the work of 18F to allow Americans easy direct filing of their taxes without the need (or cost) of a third party.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  > It IT and bad websites the problem with the government? It is and was a pretty significant one, now less important compared to a literal seig-heiling nazi running the government. Last time literal seig-heiling nazis ran a government, it wasn't great.

Xen9 2y ago

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.