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A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

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Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#301

Post by Jtsummers »

dylan604 wrote: post #262
ludicrousdispla wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are an actual federal employee then they will need a 'cooling off' period before they can work in the private sector in an area related to their government work (I don't see that happening).

Does that also applied to all of the employees that have been DOGEd? For example, would someone that just got fired from NOAA need a cooling off period before getting hired at AccuWeather? That seems to be the MAGA solution for all of the NOAA employees.

Not necessarily, see my other comment. If they were involved in, say, a contract selection to integrate with AccuWeather's other data sources and models then they could be restricted from working at AccuWeather or in what they can do at AccuWeather. It looks like a quid pro quo if you're involved in contract selection and get hired by that same company. Introducing the delay reduces that appearance, it also makes a real quid pro quo less likely.

If they were a meteorologist conducting analysis and improving models, they could get hired on without difficulty. If they were the developer tasked with doing that integration after the contract was awarded, it also shouldn't be an issue to get hired by AccuWeather.

Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#302

Post by soulofmischief »

ttyprintk wrote: post #171
soulofmischief wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 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.

GP 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.

And I would beware any professed expert who has such a oversimplified heuristic of what makes a good engineer.

> Whether a LLM coding model demonstrates understanding of unnecessary comments might be interesting

I think it would be an interesting experiment, that sounds like a great idea for you to pursue. Make sure to sample a wide variety of models, and include a caveat that LLMs are not a source of truth regarding such matters, as they are simply providing probabilistic text completions based on prior training data.

Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#303

Post by forgotpwd16 »

WD-42 wrote: post #291
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does 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?

It 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.

Let's skip the statement that Musk being the head to both DOGE (a public agency) & X (a private company) somehow makes it acceptable for one to have access to the other's sensitive data, the downloader project could be unrelated to their DOGE work.

Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#305

Post by brookst »

bavell wrote: post #296
brookst wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compilations of data can have value. That’s the whole point of the “facts aren’t copyrightable, but databases are” principle.

Yeah, 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?

You seem to think you’re on Reddit. Handwaving away assistance because someone else “could have” done it is pretty on brand there.

Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#306

Post by zamadatix »

jmull wrote: post #230
breckenedge wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? The only news I’ve heard is that they fired 12 of 85 staffers and prohibited hiring seasonal workers, which was then rescinded a few days later. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/federal-firings-coul... Not to attack you personally, but I’ve noticed there is a lot of hyperbole here based on dramatic headlines, extrapolation based on feeling rather than facts, so important but difficult to stay informed.

Where's the hyperbole you're complaining about? The comment you're responding to says "...while letting the condition of the lakes further erode", which the article you linked to supports. > ...extrapolation based on feeling rather than facts... 12 of 85 is a fact. It's basic logic to estimate the effect of this. The administrator in the best position to understand the impact of this has provided an analysis: "Cuttin…

Saying something involved hyperbole means you think part of the claim was exaggerated, not that you think the entire affair was invented from the ground up.

E.g. if your coworker comes into work and says "Wow, you guys wouldn't believe it - I was passed by this maniac doing at least 140 mph on the way in to work today. What a crazy speeder!" then you see on the news the police arrested the driver for driving up to 95 mph. You might say "140 mph sounds like hyperbole, it looks like it was significantly less". If they respond "what's the hyperbole, you don't think he was speeding? You're irrational!" you might be a bit confused as, leaving the unnecessary bit at the end aside, the hyperbole was the clear and excessive exaggeration of the rate of speed, not an implication the individual was driving safely this morning.

In the above the hyperbole was "they canceled invasive species control programs for the Great Lakes". Well no, they are risking it being ineffective and causing great harm due to a personnel cut somewhere on the order of 15%-20%. The exaggeration here is the amount it was cut. At no point was it claimed the exaggeration was there could be some level of a negative impact as a result.

Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#307

Post by soulofmischief »

paulyy_y wrote: post #209
soulofmischief wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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?

You'd get the spirit roasted out of you at any FAANG (at least, back when people gave a shit) if you ever sent out a change review with such a dumbass comment.

I have no problem adapting to style guidelines of specific codebases I contribute to. It would, however, behoove you to have similar respect for other coding styles which have zero impact on the quality of code itself and serves a particular purpose for a particular kind of person who might not particularly care what someone at a FAANG (lol appeal to authority) thinks about their code style.

Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#308

Post by rwyinuse »

deltarholamda wrote: post #249
rwyinuse wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, here's a pretty good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no Indeed I believe that the current administration's end-goal is the collapse of the US as we know it. Thiel and other billionaires need the collapse to create their own cyberpunk states inside current US territory. The remaining territory will be probably taken by Project 2025 guys, who want to rule it as a Christian theocracy / far-right u…

Another possibility is that the uber-rich techbros can see that, if we keep heading the way we're going, the whole thing comes crashing down. We've been speedrunning a far-left utopia for quite a while now, and it's not going well. Whether it's some kind of currency collapse, internal civil war, or something else, this is a death slide towards something bad. Assuming that's the explanation, then radical change isn't…

Depends from the definition of "far-left utopia" I guess.

I admit that I'm an outsider, but in terms of social welfare and equality, the US still seems closer to capitalist dystopia than a far-left utopia. Expensive healthcare mostly tied to work / insurance, very expensive education, high wealth inequality and pretty poor social safety nets.

At the same time, on many "culture war" issues America has seemed too extreme for my taste. For instance, discriminating people based on their "race" in university admissions is absolutely insane. But the solution to fixing these crazy ideas shouldn't be going all the way to far-right, with its own crazies like anti-vaxxers, Putin fanboys and climate-change deniers. I miss the times when most popular politicians were centrists.

Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#309

Post by dingnuts »

aisenik wrote: post #298
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Numerous other claims have been shown to account for entire contract amounts, even though they only cancelled the remaining balance of the contract. They are building this live and it's been a month as a side quest. They have fixed those issues that you have said, and have been updating the website, fixing different pricing, etc. etc. every single day. They have not been preparing for months... that's not how system…

Project 2025 has been an open plan for years and the level of coordination between political elites aligned with the Heritage Foundation and tech industry radicals is obvious on its face. If the goal was reducing fraud and waste, accurate accounting would be a core principle and this wouldn't happen. They aren't because it's not. Their goal was rapid destruction of the US government apparatus to prevent oversight and…

To me it "seems like" the CIA is being attacked and its extinction burst through the media it controlled for the last generation is causing a blast of hysteria. Everything published in media organizations that until recently were receiving federal funds should be viewed through that light. They're mainly mad because their gravy train stopped.

I don't like the Yarvinists doing the attacking but the old regime acting like it was a representation of the will of the people at this point is pretty offensive.

There's a reason people voted against them. It's just a shame that we couldn't have voted for liberal ideals instead of neoreactionary ones.

If we get very lucky maybe we will wind up with the CIA defanged and without completely sliding into authoritarianism! a person can dream, anyway..

Re: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

#310

Post by DrNosferatu »

bavell wrote: post #289
DrNosferatu wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the leakers didn’t know that! :D What can you do? Those DOGE staffers are young and inexperienced. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sounds like you didn't know that either.

What I do know, is that Russia seems to be remarkably fond of other people’s undersea links:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Baltic_Sea_submarine_ca...

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