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A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub
- louthy 2y agoThis tells me all I need to know: # Read the CSV file df = pd.read_csv(csv_file) Thanks for the explanatory comment Jordan /s
- Mizza 2y agoYou can even tell that's ChatGPT rather than, say, Claude. Redundant obvious comments are a stylistic signature of their models.
- LoganDark 2y agoI wonder if they programmed that into them through RLHF, as a way of trying to teach the model that a preceding comment should be completed by whatever code is described by the comment
- soulofmischief 2y agoI make comments like this all the time because I write code for people to read, not robots. Well-commented code allows you to skim very quickly, and gives a sanity check, allowing others to ensure a line or block of code does what it is expected to do.
- kelnos 2y agoThat's not well-commented code, that's just noise. When you are calling a function named "read_csv()", you do not need to add a comment that says "Read the CSV file". These sorts of comments make code harder for humans to read. The hill that I will die on is that if you need to comment what your code is doing, your code is either a) bad and should be rewritten to be clearer, or b) the result of tricky, clever optimization that you needed to do after profiling. Comments should tell readers why you're doing something, when it's not obvious based on the code itself.
- soulofmischief 2y agoI agree that there should be "why" comments. Those are great to have in any codebase. However, that does not preclude descriptive comments. Obviously, the best way to make code self-documenting is to wrap logic in a method whose name clearly describes its intended function. For one-liners however this can lead to overabstraction, and leaving a "what" comment can be entirely appropriate if the engineer decides it is. This cult-like behavior of engineers who think that well-commented code is some sign of weakness or unprofessionalism is beyond silly. Absolutisms are a sign of a bad engineer, but I can give you the benefit of the doubt and not assume you're a bad engineer just because you employ such absolutist statements and use erroneously use them to judge code by oversimplified metrics instead of relying on deeper analysis.
- cactacea 2y agoEvery word of the comment is in the code except "the". That level of redundancy is always bad. Yes, always.
- soulofmischief 2y agoA well-placed comment serves as an anchor for the eye when skimming large amounts of code, and provides a sanity check. This is something you would come to appreciate when working in certain environments. Does this mean every line of code needs an accompanying comment? No, that is absurd. But what's also absurd is the amount of judgement and unwarranted extrapolation over this particular bit of code, and the general defensiveness which most people in this thread seem to be engaging in. I leave comments like this sometimes if I think it helps increase code clarity.
- paulyy_y 2y ago"Absolutisms are a sign of a bad engineer" Oh the tasty irony.
- soulofmischief 2y agoI didn't say always. I made a general statement and avoided absolutist terms. "Are" is not an absolutist term if you charitably interpret my comment and I'm happy to clarify if you need it, however I don't need to append every comment with a disclaimer so that people like you don't respond with meaningless criticism towards some straw man. Please review the Hacker News guidelines, especially this excerpt: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- UncleMeat 2y agoThis is a bad comment. It adds nothing to clarify anything, since the function in the line below is "read_csv." This would be a textbook example of a comment that is not useful to improve legibility by humans and it demonstrates a lack of expertise among the people who are currently dismantling our government.
- soulofmischief 2y agoI'm sorry, but a code comment does not demonstrate lack of expertise, although such a perspective certainly brings your own expertise into question. Perhaps we should all assume a little less?
- ttyprintk 2y agoI think it does, objectively. In a pull request, I’d comment: “You imported pandas with an abbreviation. You economize the variable name `df` instead of dataframe. Those anticipate a reader who already knows when to chose the read_csv method.”
- soulofmischief 2y agoIf you are in charge of reviewing someone's pull request and ensuring they adhere to specified company guidelines, you can do whatever your organization wants. Outside of that though, you lack the authority to tell programmers how many comments are too much. I too know how to write self-documenting code, but that doesn't mean your code should have no comments or shouldn't be liberally commented.
- ttyprintk 2y agoGP mentions that this is a textbook unnecessary comment and I would beware any textbook and professed expert that disagrees. Whether a LLM coding model demonstrates understanding of unnecessary comments might be interesting, as would any differentiation in quality if my prompt asked for more or fewer lines of comments.
- LoganDark 2y agoThis is not a case of "code for people to read". If you want that, maybe try literate programming[0]. I prefer in the case where the code is blindingly fucking obvious for there not to be an extra comment above it that adds no value whatsoever. I much prefer for comments to be about the theory of the code rather than to explain in a worse way what I can already clearly see simply by reading the code. In other words I much prefer comments about, say, why some particular data structure was chosen, over comments that only say shit like "create a new linked list". [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
- soulofmischief 2y agoHow about we don't tell other people how to code? It's one thing to make suggestions, it's another to make demands. I've been doing this for a long time and I can code laps around most people. I also like well-commented code that allows me to quickly skim code and check it for correctness. You can have your preferences all you want and that's great, but when you start passing irrational judgement about the value of someone's code just because it's liberally commented, your perspective becomes less respectable.
- LoganDark 2y ago> How about we don't tell other people how to code? It's one thing to make suggestions, it's another to make demands. I've been doing this for a long time and I can code laps around most people. I also like well-commented code that allows me to quickly skim code and check it for correctness. I'm sorry, that was not intended to be received as a demand, I edited my comment to hopefully clarify. > You can have your preferences all you want and that's great, but when you start passing irrational judgement about the value of someone's code just because it's liberally commented, your perspective becomes less respectable. I didn't say anything about the value of your or anyone's code other than that obvious comments don't add any to me. (I do tend to find it funny when a comment manages to obviously contradict the code that it's about, but here that's not the case.) My point was more that comments are more useful to me when they're non-obvious. See, again, the data structure example.
- meindnoch 2y ago// This is my reply: No. You have "well-commented code" completely backwards. This is not it. // This is the end of my reply.
- soulofmischief 2y agoYes, we can take anything to the extreme and hyperbolize in order to prove a point, but that doesn't really add anything useful to the discussion.
- rectang 2y agoA long time ago I picked up the habit of "coding in commented paragraphs": https://www.perl.com/pub/2005/07/14/bestpractices.html/#7-code-in-commented-paragraphs https://www.perl.com/pub/2005/07/14/bestpractices.html/#7-co... This style allows me to scan only natural language comments, generally rendered in a distinct highlight color, to get a high-level view of what the code does. My colleagues have rarely followed the same idiom, but my code has been well-regarded everywhere I've been. When you do this, there are occasionally times where you wind up with a single line that isn't grouped with the others, and to be consistent the easiest thing is to insert a comment like the one that started this thread. However, I've adapted this style over the years to avoid any hint of redundancy because some people feel so strongly that they will fixate on it and decide you're a terrible engineer for this one tiny detail. It's easier just to work around them.
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoI get redundant obvious comments from Claude Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7 all the time.
- geon 2y agoThat would be expected of generative predictive ai. The comments that are most likely to correlate strongly with the code are the useless redundant ones.
- kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago[dead]
- oefrha 2y agoGenerating boring one off analysis scripts is the best use case for AI code writing, so can’t fault them for doing so. For serious projects I found LLMs—even cutting edge Claude Sonnet 3.7 in agent mode—just can’t generate a large amount of code with the level of consistency and quality I expect and fixing such code is barely faster than writing it myself with AI autocomplete. But little scripts that I throw away after a single use? What used to take fifteen minutes or longer now takes thirty seconds.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoYes you can because they are accessing sensitive government data with it and that requires more time effort and care than the barest of bare minimum...
- blitzar 2y agoThat is chatgpt generated code too.
- faizshah 2y agoThere’s a good chance the reason this is public is because he was using gist to transfer ChatGPT code between his personal computer and his government computer.
- jerpint 2y agoInteresting, that would be a pretty blunder
- elif 2y agoGood catch this is actually my workflow when I code on my phone in the hot tub.
- kubectl_h 2y agoProbably true. I work in a regulated space and I have done this to get my zsh config to a secure laptop, but I have always had the common sense to mark the gist as hidden (can still be accessed if you know the hash, obvs).
- xiaoyu2006 2y agoProbably. By the time I check this it's already gone.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amarcheschi 2y agoif you don't want to open twitter, here is xcancel link which i should have put as the og link https://xcancel.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390#m https://xcancel.com/SollenbergerRC/status/189560929481046439...
- agumonkey 2y agoAh, many thanks for that tip
- 867-5309 2y agofinally, a nitter replacement
- esskay 2y agoIt's just a copy of nitter on a different domain.
- 867-5309 2y agoI hadn't seen one since X took over
- DaSHacka 2y agoPoast runs one https://nitter.poast.org https://nitter.poast.org
- ikt 2y agoit does look like nitter but I thought it was dead after twitter changed the api after musk took over?
- codetrotter 2y agoIt’s a nitter instance https://status.d420.de/ https://status.d420.de/
- 2y ago
- TomK32 2y agoSounds like a conflict of interest.
- input_sh 2y ago[flagged]
- conartist6 2y ago[flagged]
- RadiozRadioz 2y agoBuild in public!
- gradientsrneat 2y agoHe made his GitHub account activity all private once people started paying attention. What does he have to hide?
- amarcheschi 2y agoA bit more on Jordan Wick: https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/doge-agent-jordan-wick/ https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/doge-agent-jordan-wick/ I'm a bit on the edge regarding to why someone on DOGE should collect data on critical infrastructure, even if it's available to the public audience for free. I'm also quite worried by the possibility to filter federal workers based on the union status
- 6stringmerc 2y agoSaying “the quiet part out loud” is kind of a hallmark with this team’s approach though, so watching it steamroll over any auspices of ethical behavior is noteworthy.
- JackFr 2y ago> I'm also quite worried by the possibility to filter federal workers based on the union status Well, from a purely day-to-day, operational HR standpoint, that information is important. Like many things, in the wrong hands it’s easily abused.
- amarcheschi 2y agoYup, that's what I was talking about, it's not happening in a vacuum, it's concerning given the context
- maxlin 2y agoA nothingburger. Not common to see such blatant misinfo high on HN. I do have higher expectations on this and people here instead of people jumping on a hatewagon :/ Community note on the post: The geospatial data the reporter claims is "sensitive data" is not actually sensitive data. It is open source data. The source files in the DOGE employee's GitHub repository point to an open source site accessible by anyone. https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038118/Global---International-Ports https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038118/Glo...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- withinboredom 2y agoUntil they accidentally cut funding to it, anyway.
- agumonkey 2y agoSadly his github is now private and the archived pages are mostly previews, not full repos.
- LoganDark 2y agoJust search for forks: https://github.com/PatrickFanella/x-dm-downloader https://github.com/PatrickFanella/x-dm-downloader for example. We will probably have a short while (day or two) before false DMCA notices about this are actioned by GitHub
- agumonkey 2y agoah, obviously, thanks a lot
- notdian 2y agoLooks like they used it to scrape the DMs for the @doge account, as they are calling for people to report "fraud" there. Crazy that the US government is allowing a third party such as X to have such control.
- zmgsabst 2y agoWhat makes them false DMCA claims? I don’t see a license on the repo.
- LoganDark 2y agoI mean false as in filing a DMCA claim just to take down something you don't like rather than to protect material that actually means anything. So, false as in morally, not legally. Besides, this shit was clearly at least 90% AI-generated anyway, and I think the jury is still out on whether some specific arrangement of AI-generated chunks of code actually even counts as a copyrighted work. But everyone knows the drill is DMCA notices now, lawsuits years to decades later.
- newsclues 2y ago[flagged]
- BoredPositron 2y agobureaucrats? Don’t kid yourself.
- newsclues 2y agoWhat else do you call government employees?
- BoredPositron 2y agoIt implies that he works and operates in the reigns of a bureaucratic system he is everything but. I would call government employees, just that.
- Jtsummers 2y agoMechanics, technicians, soldiers, pilots, doctors, nurses, IT specialist, programmers, researchers, ...
- amarcheschi 2y agoEnglish is not my first language, government workers would have been more apt
- amarcheschi 2y agoI don't care about the twitter DM thing, I care about gathering ton of open source sensitive data by an organization which is disemboweling the bureaucratic apparatus from within
- newsclues 2y agoPosting linked in followers seems egregious to me. Guilt by association publicized for people to troll or harass people? What happened to pretending or trying to be better than the people you hate? Why sink to their level? Gathering open source data is a problem? lol it’s open!
- kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago[dead]
- DrNosferatu 2y ago[flagged]
- delusional 2y agoGenuinely curious here. How does this relate to Putin being captured by Russia/Putin? This, to me, looks like textbook ineptitude not foreign interference. I want to be clear. I'm not casting doubt on observations that Trump does currently echo Russian talking points. I'm also not trying to argue that he's not captured by Russian interests. I'm merely wondering how this specific piece of information points to that conclusion.
- DrNosferatu 2y agoI understand your question's fairness, but consider what's actually being exposed here: geospatial data on undersea cables, ports, and "critical minerals" - precisely the vulnerable infrastructure points that would interest foreign intelligence services, particularly Russia. This isn't mere incompetence - it's a clear alarming pattern. The Trump administration has consistently mishandled classified information while simultaneously adopting positions that align perfectly with Russian strategic interests regarding NATO, Ukraine, and European security. When a DOGE staffer carelessly exposes sensitive infrastructure data that maps America's strategic vulnerabilities, and does so while the administration pushes policies beneficial to Russia, the connection becomes impossible to ignore. This incident isn't separate from Russian influence - it's another manifestation of how this administration's OpSec is compromised at the most fundamental level, creating opportunities for exploitation by the very foreign powers they seem reluctant to oppose.
- rayiner 2y ago[flagged]
- DrNosferatu 2y agoI remember the anti-interventionist Democrats of the 80s and 90s quite well. They criticized military adventures but never suggested dismantling NATO, abandoning treaty allies, or praising dictators while undermining their own intelligence agencies. Funny how this "anti-interventionism" only applies to defending democracies against Russian aggression, but not to inserting troops into cities to confront protesters or threatening military action against political opponents. The neocons accused the left of being soft. They never had evidence of infrastructure data being leaked while presidential rhetoric perfectly aligned with a specific foreign power's strategic objectives. But please, continue your historical revisionism. It's fascinating how "America First" now means "Russia's interests first."
- tokioyoyo 2y agoA bit tangent, and since I’m an outsider who doesn’t live in the states and have no skin in the game — my understanding is, they will do literally anything to make sure DOGE succeeds, because a failure is basically unacceptable. I can’t even imagine how you can backtrack this, and fix stuff up. They obviously prepared for it months in advance. Targeting ex-employees of successful product companies and putting them in charge (especially the ones with a lot of money, but a bit lost because they want can’t find meaning in life) is also kinda funny. That being said, if it doesn’t succeed, they will start doing the usual — pretending that it was successful. And that’s when the team-sports based politics come into play. If you’re so deep into supporting one side that you can’t objectively see failures, the narrative pushers will keep winning. It applies to both sides, by the way. But burden of proof lies on the government in power. Good luck to you, guys!
- kelnos 2y ago> Good luck to you, guys! Unfortunately I think we're going to need a lot more than luck. But I appreciate the sentiment.
- maxerickson 2y agoSucceed at what? For example, they canceled invasive species control programs for the Great Lakes. Is it a success that they saved a modest amount of money, while letting the condition of the lakes further erode?
- PartiallyTyped 2y agoDidn’t they cancel some cancer treatment research projects? I am sure the Head of the health department — one that doesn’t consider measles a problem — has given his stamp of approval for that, after all, he has a whole 0 years in all tangentially related fields combined!
- dragonwriter 2y ago> Didn’t they cancel some cancer treatment research projects? “Cancel” suggest more decision-making than appears to have happened, at least in the research projects I am aware of—a number had to be canceled by those running them because the unprecedented blanket payment pause notionally to evaluate programs existing programs made it impossible for them to continue operating.
- anacrolix 2y agoWell I can tell you the Python code was written with the help of an AI
- zarathustreal 2y ago[flagged]
- brookst 2y agoYeah it’s like looking at text and saying “oh they used a word processor”.
- MobiusHorizons 2y agonot really, unless your word processor outputs significant portions of text for you
- lesuorac 2y agoReally not sure where this tangent is going but looking at hypothetical text it can be pretty obvious that various word processors were used. Like if an email has the same font/etc as google doc then it's pretty obvious they wrote it in a doc and then copy-paste it.
- TeaBrain 2y agoThey were making the point that using a word processor as a tool isn't the same as having an LLM write something, then retain the LLM generated changes such that it is immediately obvious the bulk of the code was generated by an LLM, not that it isn't possible to discern whether someone is using a word processor.
- brookst 2y agoNo, it just does the layout, not the text. Much like LLMs do the code tokens but not the goal. Abstraction in all things, and automation of the lower levels does not devalue the higher levels (that is, a traffic sign works the same regardless if hand painted or commercially printed).
- belter 2y agoAccording to official documentation submitted to the court by the current US Administration, the person running DOGE, was on holiday in Mexico when nominated.
- belter 2y ago"Gleason told a CBS reporter on Tuesday that she was in Mexico, with The New York Times later reporting that she was on a previously scheduled vacation." - https://www.thedailybeast.com/doges-mystery-leader-finally-unmaskedand-its-not-elon-musk/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/doges-mystery-leader-finally-u...
- somenameforme 2y agoA surprisingly large amount of data one might think is classified is not at all. In this case all the examples listed are from freely available public data outside of the Twitter thing which seems to be just setting up the environment for some local tool. Here are the sites: --- datacatalog.worldbank.org opendata.arcgis.com mrdata.usgs.gov / www.usgs.gov --- Sharing things like this isn't very useful because it just causes further divides. People who think DOGE is not a big deal will use this to confirm that 'oh no the worst they could dig up is somebody posting publicly accessible data in public!' And those who do think it's a big deal will often just double down on stupid and insist this was leaking secret information, even when they probably know it wasn't. So you end up with people living in two different worlds, but only one of them is real.
- bburnett44 2y agoYeah the "sensitive geospatial data" is just open data. He also created the geospatial gists before trump was in office so he definitely didn't have access to critical data then https://web.archive.org/web/20250228230950/https://gist.github.com/Jomanw https://web.archive.org/web/20250228230950/https://gist.gith...
- chris_wot 2y agoThe problem is, compiling the list like he has, and being on the DOGE team, makes it all very, very suspicious. And it is sensitive data - even if it is open. Those are important infrastructure locations.
- fallingknife 2y agoThis is nonsense. If infrastructure locations are not classified then every potential malicious actor already knows them.
- amarcheschi 2y agoHe is saying the malicious actor is doge itself, if I understood what is being said by the previous comment. Which is the idea behind which I posted the news here on hn
- st3fan 2y agoUseful for Russia. Easy download.
- EasyMark 2y agoit's public info
- brookst 2y agoCompilations of data can have value. That’s the whole point of the “facts aren’t copyrightable, but databases are” principle.
- bavell 2y agoYeah, the Russians definitely couldn't have done this themselves... they needed the help of this one guy to compile publicly available data. Am I on Reddit or HN?
- brookst 2y agoYou seem to think you’re on Reddit. Handwaving away assistance because someone else “could have” done it is pretty on brand there.
- DrNosferatu 2y agoAs the Germans say: You need to be smart to be that stupid ;)
- Molitor5901 2y agoI wish people paid this close attention to federal workers and their agencies all the time.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoMost federal workers aren’t openly and flagrantly breaking the law. Given each DOGE bro has violated several laws in the past weeks, it’s prudent to focus attention on them. Not too much. But enough that there is a public record for litigation and prosecution at the state and local level in the future.
- juancampa 2y agoHonest question. Which laws?
- ceejayoz 2y agohttps://www.vox.com/politics/398618/elon-musk-doge-illegal-lawbreaking-analysis https://www.vox.com/politics/398618/elon-musk-doge-illegal-l... Most obviously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impoundment_Control_Act_of_1974 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...
- ceejayoz 2y agoQuite a few people do. Most of them just have editors who fact-check things prior to publication.
- therealdrag0 2y agoWhy? A good government is one that runs well without half the public frothing at the mouth.
- throw930404945 2y ago[flagged]
- porphyra 2y agoWorks created by U.S. federal government employees as part of their official duties are in the public domain, according to 17 U.S.C. § 105, except for classified or restricted information (but none of what he posted is classified or restricted)
- jonahbenton 2y agoImplying that DOGE bozo is law-compliant while breaking laws and destroying trust is...humor too soon?
- raverbashing 2y agoSeems like a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day"
- addicted 2y agoSimilarly, wearing a seatbelt on your way to assassinate somebody.
- selfhoster 2y ago[flagged]
- a12k 2y ago“Bozo” is pretty lightweight for someone actively trying to destroy the foundations of this country’s government and democratic policies.
- FreebasingLLMs 2y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> administrative state (created during FDR) is going away Created by FDR through acts of the Congress. DOGE is ironically recapitulating the lawlessness that tanked Sourh Africa’s economy. Also, we’re seeing a breathless expansion of federal executive power. The administrative state isn’t going away. It’s being subsumed. The size of the government is being increased, not decreased—that’s why the GOP budget calls for $2 trillion in new deficits over ten years. One can celebrate cost cutting. But other than USAID, there is no sign anything durable is being done. The power of the central government is being expanded in ways that should be obviously problematic for anyone thinking ahead: next cycle, a Dem President can just cancel student debts by firing everyone in loan collections and shredding the loan documents.
- greesil 2y agoOhh, any credentials? Like is this guy the kind of guy who hard codes a resource key?
- billy99k 2y agoNone of the info listed is classified or secret. This article reeks of disinformation.
- CGamesPlay 2y agoDid anything other than your gut reaction tell you that the information was classified or secret? I take issue with your use of the word "disinformation". This whole thing is a nothing burger, to be clear.
- elicash 2y agoWhat made me suspicious, immediately, was that in their org chart has "union status". For payment systems, it's incredibly important for the employer to know whether to withhold some portion of the paycheck for union dues, obviously. But given how they are likely using this information, which isn't tied to payroll, it's worrying and only increases the need for feds to move over to direct pay systems that they are already transitioning to, for their safety. Especially given some other moves the administration made last week in the space of collecting union activity (specifically on stewards) data.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoOrg charts!? Our government is saved! /s
- orenlindsey 2y agoThe account has been privated now.
- Clubber 2y agoI wish I could downvote all these political topics to get them off the front page; they're so toxic. I feel like the submission system has been taken over by political operatives, which is disappointing.
- yalogin 2y agoThis may or may not be breaking the law, but who is checking? Where are the controls? Forget checks and controls, there is no willingness on anyone in power to even ask the question. Ironically, fear of losing power has paralyzed everyone that objectively have no power in Washington as they just exist to please the two presidents.
- throwway176253 2y ago[dead]
- papichulo4 2y agoWe need politics out of here. Maybe make the line between HN and the rest of news a bit more clear.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> We need politics out of here DOGE is a creature of Silicon Valley. Paul Graham spends his time now opining on woke [1]. One can escape base partisanship. But the political economy makes any attempt to escape politics pretend. [1] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
- ghouse 2y agoWhile I too find it distasteful and distracting, the inclination to expunge politics from conversation may have played a role in getting us (at least in the US) where we are: 1) where people have forgotten to talk about politics politely, and 2) where politics have been weaponized by tuning to especially divisive issues specifically for high-engagement. And that is where many of us have played a role: increasing engagement.
- dang 2y agoHN's approach to political stories has been stable for many years: most are off-topic, but some are ok; but only some. 'Stable' here means stable over time. The proportion of political stories goes through pretty big fluctuations (mostly in response to macro social events, e.g. elections), but HN's principles remain the same, and the swings eventually subside*. If you (or anyone) want to read about what those principles are, I've posted about that many times. Here's one pointer into those explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... * perhaps ironically, this 'stability' includes the phenomenon of users complaining that HN is turning too much into a political site. For a glimpse into how far back that goes, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
- selfhoster 2y agoAnother politically motivated asinine post on Hacker News, I wonder why, right President Trump is in office and doing a great job. Makes sense.
- ghc 2y agoThe cynic in me thinks these kids were recruited as "useful idiots." Musk has shown he is capable of recruiting competent people, but it's pretty clear these aren't them. History has shown that it's a lot easier to radicalize and weaponize incompetent young adults whose self-image has been built up in an environment of privilege. Without personal accountability, it's a lot easier to be angry at the world for denying you the success everyone tells you that you deserve.
- thomasjudge 2y agoIt turns out that DOGE is USDS rebranded
- bsimpson 2y agothat's how they were able to turn up an new "Department" in a week with no oversight. the D in USDS now stands for Department.
- asveikau 2y agoIf you think that's bad, in one of those screenshots, he is using HTML tables.
- ibejoeb 2y agoThey're underrated if you're doing reporting.
- asveikau 2y agoMy comment was tongue in cheek. I'm not a web focused guy and I learned HTML long enough ago that I have no specific moral objection to tables. I used them in a quick personal project a few months ago.
- ibejoeb 2y agoI get it. I'm just adding, as an aside, that they actually do have a perfectly good place. For one thing, there are off-the-shelf libraries that'll turn an HTML table into a pretty good PDF. Saved me weeks of work back when I was buried in financial reporting.
- KolmogorovComp 2y agoCan someone be more specific about what's potentially illegal on these screenshots?
- JohnnyLarue 2y agoThe answer is...nothing.
- ibejoeb 2y agoI don't the author of the tweet, but I don't know how he's arrived at the conclusion that there's some smoking gun. A datavis script? And, I mean, really, a tweet downloader? It's not like he made a gee you eye in VB or something...
- pr337h4m 2y agoThis is literally nothing - visualizing an org chart using D3 (a JS dataviz library), playing around with open source geospatial datasets, and a Twitter DM downloader for personal use. Look at the screenshots, not the description by this "politics reporter" who seems to be indulging in evidence-free witch hunts.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoevidence free witch-hunts. Hm. I wonder where else I've seen that recently.
- rectang 2y agoThe DOGE staffer gets infinite chances, infinite understanding, and infinite excuses. The staffers DOGE targets, if they're lucky, get one chance to prove loyalty.
- WD-42 2y agoExactly, these look like baby’s first JavaScript projects. Surprising considering these doge employees are supposed to be genius coder whiz kids, and yet this looks like the work of someone following a tutorial to write their first tweet downloader.
- forgotpwd16 2y agoDoes being a 'genius coder whiz kid' imply knowledge of every technology? Should one only be allowed to publish code according to your standards? What kind of nonsense is this?
- WD-42 2y agoIt implies knowing your boss owns X and you shouldn’t need to write a downloader at all, direct DB access is more efficient, they should know this they’ve been doing a lot of it lately.
- 2y ago
- throwupp 2y agoSoftware industry is now filled with maga supporters
- calvinmorrison 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- calvinmorrison 2y agoThese? Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
- dang 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426
- jordanb 2y agoI was working at a MNC a few years ago and some junior developer did this to one of our codebases "so he could work on it at home" (pre-covid). When it was discovered his access to everything was immediately shut off, company assets confiscated and he was escorted out the building by security.
- ingohelpinger 2y agoit's a none issue and the ones depending on the scam, are screaming the loudest now. lol
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y agoThis is messed up... The guy took his github down now... This witch hunt against doge is just so incredibly unnerving... all public information, obviously using cursor to write basic scripts(i.g. //insert your script here, and inline comments describing basic code) and posting it on his github for future use, sharing, and boosting his 'hireability'. He seems to be rapid fire coding and sharing what he can... he had 35 repo's last time i checked. He also wasn't the only doge team member who seems to be doing it, hopefully they don't all stop posting their code because of this...
- routerl 2y agoFrom the perspective of wanting to maintain the integrity of the American federal government, it seems like all this DOGE stuff (and the whole Trumpist movement in general) serves the purpose of a red team, in the cybersecurity sense; people with nebulous intent have gotten access to everything. So now, if Americans care about the integrity of their government, there needs to be a blue team: how can this catastrophic level of access be dealt with, and how can it be safeguarded against in the future. Alas, I'm not seeing this perspective being enacted. The obvious security compromise is being allowed to stand and continue, usually on the basis that "separation of powers" and "checks and balances" are relied on to be effective; congress will stop this, or the courts will stop this. But we're watching these mechanisms fail. So, what's the plan here? Where's the counter-offensive? We're watching a system being hacked, and I've yet to see anyone talk about a recovery plan, or a prevention plan.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Kelvin506 2y agoAnyone grab a copy of the repos before jomanw set their account to private?
- DrNosferatu 2y agoGuess what - it seems quite many others are asking the same questions - a US Senate Committee has just directly asked, “is Trump a Russian asset”? - via Forbes: https://youtu.be/ibfVfAETlmA?t=16s https://youtu.be/ibfVfAETlmA?t=16s