401–410 of 1001 posts
“Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, just like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There…
If DOGE wants to be effective it really should be going after the big ticket items like medicare or defense, some estimates have medicare at 40% fraud and waste and the DoD can't even pass an audit so no one really knows what %. And that is just getting what we've paid for, not even evaluating if what we've paid for is effective. Of course to do that would require actual coalition building, hard choices that upset vo…
Posts here talk about the legality of this, that what they are doing is not allowed, or that they're doing something naively without understanding. But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.
The GAO doesn't even audit in the intuitive sense. They audit that spending is being recorded properly, and for many agencies even that low bar isn't met. In other words GAO is okay with you dumping money into a hole as long as you count how much.
DOGE is doing a practical audit of the spending. i.e. taking high-level spending principals from trump and identifying specific budget items to eliminate.
Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII. Feels like Chesterton fences are getting torn up left and right by people too young and incurious to possibly understand why those fences might be there.
Elon is also now claiming to have "deleted" 18F ( https://18f.gsa.gov/ ): https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886498750052327520
This is nuts, 18F was one of the few groups in the federal government that is/was good at making software! (login.gov is a good example of craft you don't generally see in commercial enterprise software, let alone government software) According to that tweet they were apparently “far left” because they also worked on Direct File, which sought to cut out the middleman (TurboTax et al.) and let Americans file taxes dir…
I don’t know how this will shake out, but I do worry that these 19-24 year olds, some of whom are known to HN for other achievements, are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy. Edit: by the way, this post isn’t off-topic. It is about the activities of the US Digital Service (now known as Doge), and the exploits of young hackers who came up through top tech companies. It has implications for information systems se…
> I do worry that these 19-24 year olds, some of whom are known to HN for other achievements, are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy. They 100% are. This is a full blackhat attack on a nation. Did they take no ethics class? (software or otherwise)?
I don’t know how this will shake out, but I do worry that these 19-24 year olds, some of whom are known to HN for other achievements, are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy. Edit: by the way, this post isn’t off-topic. It is about the activities of the US Digital Service (now known as Doge), and the exploits of young hackers who came up through top tech companies. It has implications for information systems se…
> I do worry that these 19-24 year olds (…) are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy. On one side you have a handful of arrogant young adults doing the bidding of a couple of wannabe despotic man-babies. On the other you have an entire nation made up of millions of people and with major influence over the rest of the world. I’m having a hard time understanding why your concern lies with the former.
If only other babies could launch and land rockets. Call Musk what you want, but he is not a baby.
They have interesting pedigrees: Meta, Palantir, Neuralink, xAI, SpaceX, Databricks, Energize AI. It seems clear where this is going. Data mining and algorithmic (claimed!) efficiency improvements while working on an essential and critical production system. Since these people claim that "AI" does not need to respect privacy and copyright, perhaps they'll also train a model on this. Where are the Democrats on all thi…
They should try coming up with some popular policies and winning elections.
Posts here talk about the legality of this, that what they are doing is not allowed, or that they're doing something naively without understanding. But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.
Between Elon's stated goals, the systems under scope and my personal experience from state & local finance, they are performing a strategic efficacy audit of treasury spending. The US Treasury normally doesn't audit transactions -- they execute requests for transfers from other agencies and defer governance to congressional oversight. The GAO doesn't even audit in the intuitive sense. They audit that spending is bein…
DOGE's unique approach is to use the Treasury as the "chokepoint" for telemetry so they can cluster and classify all of the transactions .
Imagine a massive microservices platform with 10k services and you want to know which ones are viable ( cost/benefit). Rather than survey all 10k, you would surveil a router or LB chokepoint to measure the input & output of all 10k services. That seems to be their approach with the treasury.
Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII. Feels like Chesterton fences are getting torn up left and right by people too young and incurious to possibly understand why those fences might be there.
But of course, that’s exactly what would be oligarchs want.