251–260 of 1001 posts
I used to hang around with the late 90s's versions of these guys. I grew up, had a family, have had a successful career. They went to prison. I expect the same will happen to this lot.
The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?
Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd encourage folks to go look at the source code for the referenced project https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master . This does not strike me as nefarious in any way and there is a really valid reason for generating the ballot images -- testing, which is exactly how it is used in the project.
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Worth noting that some of the most well-known cybersecurity experts today are former cyber criminals. It may be worth investigating his past, but a person's past is often used to attack their character when there is no other argument to make. If we were all judged solely on our past, we'd all be perpetually guilty.
We should be judging someone’s recent behavior and possible skeletons when it comes to a security clearance. Otherwise, that’s how someone is able to be compromised.
All: if you're going to comment here, please make sure you're up on the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , and don't post low-information / high-indignation comments that could just as easily appear in any related thread. Such generic comments make discussion less interesting and more activating. That's not what we're trying for here. Rather, we want curious conversation. I know that's n…
I spent all day responding to the replies here, and then detaching them in order to save space at the top of the thread. But I just had a better idea. This is a stub comment so we have a single root to collapse the replies. This way (1) replies can stay close to their parent (the top comment) without flooding the screen with offtopicness; and (2) we can all re-experience the timeless truth of https://en.wikipedia.org…
No it won't. That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment. You're projecting your desire for a good civil discussion onto them without considering the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith, ie with a view to shaping the outcome of the discussion rather than optimizing the quality thereof.
Why isn't all government budgetary information public to begin with?
Much of it is! Journalists are already using it to debunk some of Elon’s claims like the one they only 10% of USAID reached intended targets (which appears to be based on his complete misreading of a breakdown) The real question now is where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? There are massive claims of rampant corruption, such as calling the USAID corrupt to their core, but literally zero evidenced has be…
It has been a fairly common story, and part rumor, that intelligence agencies like to recruit young people active in the cyber criminal scene, and that the IT security industry also adapted this approach. They basically becomes part informer and part subject expert, especially since IT security expertise seems to be a difficult subject matter to teach in universities. When I studied IT security in university, about 1…
while I agree there's typically a big event where the state has incredible leverage over the subject that is part of the flip. As far as we can see in this story; there is no leverage. So for all we know this guy is doing what he did in his last job and selling secrets gained working here to competitors. Imagine if DOGE feeds all the data they get their hands on into an LLM and he sells a copy of that to a foreign na…
That feels a little different to hiring people with cracking credentials for auditing jobs, giving them full access to extensive government records (and possibly the right to backdoor them) in a move fast break things environment on the understanding that they're probably above the law and they're less likely to be punished than anyone barring their way.
I doubt the success rate of converting teenage tearaways to scrupulous white hats in boring businesses is 100% either....
And now musk is calling for the impeachment of Judge Paul Engelmayer who blocked his department from accessing government payment/financial systems. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5134725-elon-musk-impe... This should be mandatory reading for everyone who argues this is just fine: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/022...
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If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line item? That is effectively what going after USAID is. To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration. She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later th…
Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn’t listening to orders. They were a rogue agency. From other things I’ve read it has been an issue for multiple administrations. Watch here: https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46
They listen to orders from many parts of the government, some of those are even conflicting orders. It's not like they are just doing whatever they want 90% of the time. Their money comes from who again?
The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?
One might as well ask "if you want to stop HIV/AIDS in Africa why pay a bunch of young kids with international relations degrees instead of AIDS researchers". Grunt work takes grunt effort.