This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did:
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
throw0101c · 15d ago
> This part is really damning: a real efficiency audit
There were already people auditing departments, but they got fired early on:
> The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise
These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.
If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.
That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
acdha · 14d ago
It certainly needs a full investigation but I don’t want to presume the results. It wouldn’t be the first time some tool reported a wildly incorrect location for an IP address and the focus should be on DOGE breaking a number of federal laws and doing things which no legitimate auditor ever needs to do.
lostlogin · 14d ago
The login attempt was made by someone 115 years old, receiving social security payments and living in Russia.
jmcgough · 14d ago
> That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
Or perhaps someone got invited to the wrong group chat again.
Wololooo · 14d ago
No need to have your laptop compromised if your just hand over the information...
not_kurt_godel · 14d ago
Is it really a compromise if the opps (or should I say: "opps") are deliberately welcomed in with open arms? Granting Russians access here wouldn't even crack the top 10 gifts this administration has given to Putin in the last month.
Terr_ · 14d ago
Reminder that Trump wanted the US to partner with a foreign country to protect American elections (!?) and the country he wanted to help "secure" fair elections was the Russian dictatorship. (!!)
>A real efficiency audit might need a lot of access to look for signs of hidden activity, but they’d never need to hide traces of what they did
In fact I would imagine they would do exactly the opposite because they would look at the mere ability to hide what they did as an audit finding.
Terr_ · 14d ago
"The new bank-manager has hired some friends of his to improve the security of the bank vault."
"We already have an audit from last year, we just need the funding to improv--"
"Oh, and they want to turn off all the security cameras next weekend. You'll know it's them because they'll be wearing masks."
"Sir, we have a responsibility to our customers, we can't ju--"
"Do it or you're fired."
avs733 · 14d ago
monday morning:
manager: "the auditors found all of our money missing"
::silence::
manager: "they are clearly doing an amazing job, and you are all fired for allowing such fraud waste and abuse"
z3c0 · 15d ago
The use of DNS tunneling and skirting logs makes my head spin. Even if justification of exfiltrating 10GB of sensitive data could be made, there's widely available means of doing so that aren't the methods of state-sponsored hackers and the like.
codedokode · 14d ago
"DNS tunneling" (abnormal number of DNS requests) actually might be caused by a software that doesn't use DNS cache. I was once banned by 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server) for sending too many requests because youtube-dl was making a DNS request for each tiny segment of a video (and there were thousands of them).
Well, maybe one shouldn't be using Google DNS server when violating ToU to download Google's video.
z3c0 · 14d ago
But an abnormal number of DNS requests AND recorded outbound data totaling 10GB, with no other obvious indication of a less-subversive means of data transfer? I'd be very surprised if youtube-dl could come close to even 10MB of DNS requests at its chattiest
tjpnz · 15d ago
Everything's going to have to be replaced and it's going to be hugely expensive. But that's not going to happen until at least 2029 - plenty of time for bad actors to get settled in and cause real damage.
No comments yet
jmyeet · 14d ago
So NLRB handles confidential complaints. The complainant's idenity might be kept confidential. Exact details may be kept confidential.
Why aren't we to believe that this is Elon Musk going after anyone filing a complaint to the NLRB (from X, Twitter or SpaceX) or, worse yet (from Elon's POV), anyone potentially organizing any unionization effort?
There's absolutely no reason DOGE should have access to this information. There's absolutely no reason their activity, such as what information they accessed, should be hidden.
freejazz · 15d ago
It also contradicts the idea that they are acting transparently.
Applejinx · 15d ago
Compromised implies they're not the Russian team to start with. I'd be looking for one of them to lose nerve and betray that ALL of them are the Russian team.
dionian · 8d ago
I'm going to wait a while and see if this information pans out. Remember when there was a huge scandal about Trump communicating with Russia but then it just turned out to be a spam email? https://theintercept.com/2016/11/01/heres-the-problem-with-t...
ndsipa_pomu · 15d ago
> criminal or state-sponsored hackers
It looks to be both
tomaskafka · 12d ago
It appears that “appearing dumb and clumsy while opening the doors for enemies” is a plausibly deniable mode of whole Trump’s administration.
chrisweekly · 14d ago
"Interviewed by NPR" -- ok we can stop right there. Remember, they're dangerous enemies of the state, along with PBS and Fred Rogers.
acdha · 14d ago
Sarcasm isn’t appropriate for something this serious.
mindslight · 14d ago
Sarcasm isn't the problem per se. But it's very important to remember Poe's law, and to avoid adding to the noise. If what you're going to say is just a parody of something a Kool-aid drinking anti-American destructionist might say, there's no need.
chrisweekly · 14d ago
Sorry, I'm sure you're both right. I'm just having a very hard time figuring out how to respond to the awful / obscene / insane / absurd nightmare unfolding in this country I love. It's destroying things I care deeply about. My sarcasm was probably the wrong response. I wish I could better approximate the heartfelt, erudite, conflicted brilliance of pieces like this:
By which I mean, stoicism is really becoming a survival stance for me. And I recommend it for others.
Some people will retreat from the news, but that’s not me.
What is happening is going to cause a great deal of lasting mental hardships, as well as the practical damage.
Second tack: remember we are still in history. History has always been crazy, with only short periods of less crazy.
A third tack is considering how to support other people, instead of needing support.
Best to find a way to reliably maintain internal peace and health right now. Things are unlikely to stabilize soon, without a miracle. Or eventually bounce back. But that could take a long time. And this could just be the preamble for much worse disasters. Gulp.
At least, this is how I am prepping myself! Scary times.
zelon88 · 14d ago
> Best to find a way to reliably maintain internal peace and health right now. Things are unlikely to stabilize soon, without a miracle. Or eventually bounce back. But that could take a long time. And this could just be the preamble for much worse disasters. Gulp.
This is woefully ignorant of the fact that some people will be thrown into an El Salvadorian prison, killed, disappeared, threatened, lose civil liberties, lose human rights, ect.
Must be nice to just put on some headphones and wait for it to all blow over. Unfortunately for many immigrants, LGBTQ members, activists, union members, government workers don't have that luxury. The news you're ignoring are their lives being shattered.
Nevermark · 13d ago
Stoicism isn't denial. It's just one mental discipline for dealing with harsh realities, in a way that makes it easier to remain clear and functional, and respond to difficult circumstances mindfully and actively, instead of reflexively and emotionally.
I made no implication that very bad things are not happening. Or that anyone is immune. Quite the opposite.
But I don't want to be afraid, regardless of what happens. Not the, "I can't sleep at night" afraid. Nor the, "I can't speak up and take action" afraid. That is quite literally what the main actors want.
People's ability to maintain their mental health is going to matter. There are so many ways to spiral, internally and externally, during traumatic times, and we all need to be at our best. For ourselves, for each other.
Now might be a good time to be generally supportive of each other. A systemic lack of tolerance for differences of thought is a prime contributor to the fiasco we are in.
No comments yet
nativeit · 14d ago
I recommend reading A Refuge from Reality, à la Russe by Viv Groskop.
If there is one lesson you should take to heart, it is this: the later you act, the more impossible it will become.
Right now, at this moment, society has a small window of opportunity.
People cannot get rid of autocracy by themselves, they have become controlled resources. It took millions of free people to get rid of the Nazi's.
Act now.
chrisweekly · 14d ago
Act how?
exceptione · 14d ago
Bottom up.
Have conversations with your friends, the grocery store owner.
Join grassroots organizations, or start a local one. Keep people accountable. Your local politician bends over because he is afraid of consequences. Now give people no way out but do the right thing. When people are transported to concentration camps, than such is not an act of God, but people doing unconstitutional things while not being held accountable.
Fascism is not Hitler. It is collective, sociological behavior. Trump is a nuisance. The problem is a society engineered to give consent to the .1%, the Dark Mirror tech bro's, the christian cultists.
bjoli · 14d ago
I think it is. These people need to know we find them ridiculous. We should not, however, understate the danger of what they are doing.
acdha · 14d ago
The problem is that a comment like the one I replied to reads like support. Echoing that thinking is not the same as rejecting it.
chrisweekly · 13d ago
I think you're implying that you could easily detect my sarcasm, but it wasn't sufficiently obvious sarcasm for the broader HN readership, thus risked being taken literally.
I disagree. It seemed blindingly obviously sarcastic to me -- and the rest of the comments it generated indicate the same.
EDIT: PS the peer comment by blindsight has a much more cogent critique
DavidPiper · 14d ago
(Non-American here.) If they weren't already, it seems like private businesses, security researchers, and I suppose the general public, should start treating US government agencies as privacy and security threats, just like you'd treat any other phisher, scammer, etc.
If government agencies are compromised - via software backdoors or any other mechanism - any data and systems they can access should be considered compromised too.
garte · 14d ago
this sounds exactly like that's the goal behind all this.
exceptione · 14d ago
Neoliberalism -> Corporatism -> Fascism/Autocracy
You are a Human Resource to be commercialized. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
One is not a person. One has no rights. Unless one can free themself and their loved ones of neoliberal brainwashing.
tlogan · 15d ago
The unfortunate reality is that a half of the US population sees the NLRB as a burden on small businesses—primarily because its policies shift frequently, making compliance costly and complex for those without deep legal resources. [1]
And the same half of the population do not trust anything what npr.org says.
Understanding the above dynamic is key to grasping the current state of discourse in the U.S.
That's because NPR is pure left wing propaganda, run by an ex-CIA spook who thinks the truth is inconvenient.
axus · 15d ago
Some may claim that NPR is retaliating for getting defunded for the next 2 years.
nilamo · 14d ago
"Defunded" NPR gets less than 2% of their income from the government. Defunding them isn't as big of a deal as claims appear.
s1artibartfast · 14d ago
I wish that were true. But 2% number is essentially disinformation. NPR gets a large portion of its budget from affiliate stations, which are funded by the government.
greenie_beans · 8d ago
kinda true but also misleading without adding more facts. vermont public receives ~10% of revenue from the CPD ($2,044,000). they spent a total of $2,253,926 on "Program acquisitions" in 2024. it's not clear from their financial report how much of this goes to NPR license fees. so you are sharing as much disinformation as anybody. https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/5b/64/62bb42da4ec8b5f858176dc4...
brendoelfrendo · 15d ago
An odd claim, since NPR getting defunded is itself a retaliation from the current administration for not reporting positively enough about Trump.
axus · 15d ago
Oh yeah I'm predicting a claim will be made I disagree with. But I can imagine the mental gymnastics, post a prediction and watch for the outcome.
Usually there's a shakedown, did Trump ever make NPR an offer they "couldn't" refuse?
rbanffy · 15d ago
Similar to the one he made to Harvard? Do they even have to make such a thing explicitly these days? I would just assume they won't fund anything that's critical to the current government.
bilekas · 15d ago
This isn't really a shock to me, but what's more frustrating I guess is that absolutely nothing will come of this. I have zero confidence any of this will even be cleaned up, just the same ranting about "fake news".
Really feels like the fox is already in the coop.
stevenwoo · 14d ago
That the intrusion came over Starlink from Russia with valid login credentials would be unbelievable in a tale from speculative fiction. Reality Winner looks like a hero compared to these clowns.
inemesitaffia · 7d ago
Over Starlink from Russia. Very evident there's no networking knowledge here.
deepsun · 14d ago
Politicians are only afraid of not being re-elected. So I see that the only way is to advocate voters to hold their representatives accountable. Start a campaign in you state about that, and I think you'll get an answer pretty fast, since they are very sensitive to popularity and competition matters.
casenmgreen · 12d ago
Just read of this on BSky.
Has some of the protected disclosure document from the whistleblower.
Looks like Elon's staff went in and made a copy of everything - which in this case NLRB, so sensitive stuff, but any state department going to have a ton of sensitive stuff - and sent it who knows where; this after disabling all logging and a ton of security, presumably to try to cover their tracks.
This is bad. These guys are looking like bad actors, with State-level authorization for access to everything.
Also looks like they're kids and don't have the hang of security, and the professional Russian State run APTs have hacked them.
jonnycomputer · 14d ago
I think we should be trying to understand what NxGenBdoorExtract is. NxGen is a system for NLRB. Bdoor is pretty evocative of a back door. He took he git offline or made it private. I can't find it on archive.org.
snypher · 14d ago
Or who has access to DogeSA_2d5c3e0446f9@nlrb.microsoft.com?
On the other hand, there are two things about that screenshot of the repo which is a little weird. First, the timestamp of that repo is cutoff, but, the items seem to be in reverse chronological order, which would put that repo sometime in 2021-ish, or before.
The owner could, of course, just make it public again, or put it back up, and end all the speculation.
anthonygarcia21 · 14d ago
I'm intrigued by the "Mission 2" notation. That suggests, perhaps, that DOGE has a "Mission 1" (its public, ostensible purpose) and a hidden "Mission 2" known only to Musk and his minions.
e2le · 14d ago
archive.today has a snapshot taken on 28 Feb 2025, although it doesn't show any repository with that name.
This confuses me greatly. Comparing your link, I can find the repos in that screenshot in the archive snapshot, but as you say, the NxGenBdoorExtract repo is not there, and the repo where it would be is a tinder-react-native clone (updated Sep 20 2020)...
I'm trying to think through this:
1. if the screenshot is not doctored, then the implied ordering of last updated would have had it last updated before January 20, 2021; which would mean it has nothing to do with what is alleged in the article.
2. But in the archive.ph snapshot from 2/28/25 doesn't have it at all anywhere.
3. Archive.org's 3/21/25 snapshot shows the same thing as archive.ph
4. The article states that after this tweet (https://x.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390) dated 2/28/25 (the date of the archive.ph 2/28/25 snapshot), Berulis noticed NxGenBdoorExtract in the repo: "After journalist Roger Sollenberger started posting on X about the account, Berulis noticed something Wick was working on: a project, or repository, titled "NxGenBdoorExtract." Wick made it private before Berulis could investigate further, he told NPR.
Of course, if it really only was public for a very brief moment then it might not be in the snapshot, and the article isn't clear exactly how long after that tweet that Berulis supposedly discovered this.
All I can say is this: I can't figure out for the life of me what all this adds up to.
softwaredoug · 15d ago
Some context as I understand it is DOGE employees are all temporary gov't employees whose employment expires (in June?). Assuming they follow the law there (big If), then they scramble around these agencies with tremendous urgency trying to please Elon (or the powers that be?).
And they absolutely should be resisted with this deadline in mind...
tootie · 15d ago
They are using heavy-handed tactics. Per this article, the whistleblower was threatened. At the SSA, a 26-year veteran was dragged out of the building. Similar story at the IRS. DOGE has the backing of US Marshalls and the president. They can resist, but they'll just end up locked out.
deepsun · 14d ago
Well, being locked up is not the worst thing that can happen, especially for a noble purpose. And maybe later someone would film movies about their [in]actions.
DrillShopper · 12d ago
Until you get sent to an Salvadorian concentration camp or a Guantanamo concentration camp
_hyn3 · 14d ago
If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country, specifically to take these actions that he'd clearly stated he would take.
The resistance is actually the violation of federal law. It's no different from contempt of court; within the President's domain, he has a huge amount of power. The President can also modify existing policy (regulations) at any time and literally make new laws (Executive Orders have the force of law) as long as they don't conflict with current law, as well as overturning previous President's Executive Orders.
Of course, then the shoe will be on the other food someday, too, just as it was when Biden took over from Trump and then they switched places again.
As President Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
> If the CEO of your company empowers a team to audit your work, would you 'resist'?
If he ordered you to break the law or professional standards, would you obey? This is not hypothetical for many people: if you’re a lawyer, professional engineer, healthcare professional, work in HR, etc. it is not at all uncommon to suggest legal ways to accomplish a goal.
According to the article, that’s exactly what happened here: they have various federal laws and regulations covering their work, but as at other agencies, DOGE decided they don’t need to follow those. This confirms that their stated purpose is not their true motivation but it remains to be seen whether there will be any consequences.
jjav · 14d ago
> The resistance is actually the violation of federal law.
Your misunderstanding seems to be to think that the word of the president is the law, like in a dictatorship. In the US system of separation of powers, that's not how it is supposed to work.
distortionfield · 14d ago
The president is currently ignoring a Supreme Court order, not explaining why they’re ignoring it, and even if they tried to charge him, last year the Supreme Court ruled that he has immunity from everything anyway. So where exactly is it different from a dictatorship now?
the_other · 14d ago
(Non-US here)
As I understood it, this "immunity" is granted for POTUS doing things in the course of their responsibility as POTUS. Could it be argued that breaking laws & orders which bind the activity of POTUS is _inherently not_ the work someone in that role?
dbdr · 14d ago
Isn't the point of immunity that it's immunity from prosecution on actions that are / would potentially be illegal? You don't need immunity if what you are doing is legal anyways.
fc417fc802 · 13d ago
Immunity is generally scoped. Challenging the determination of scope is not the same as challenging the action.
Immunity also isn't absolute. For example police in the US typically enjoy broad immunity but that doesn't imply not getting dragged into court. They just have sweeping legal defenses available to them that other people don't.
the_other · 12d ago
Probably, but I’d like to see it tested.
pizza · 14d ago
What would you do if your CEO tells you to do something illegal? What would you do if your CEO then tells you to intimidate people who refuse to carry out the illegal requests by tailing them and then taping the surveillance footage to their door as a threat?
nobody9999 · 14d ago
>And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country,
Except said "chief executive" was not elected by "a majority of the country."
He wasn't even elected by a majority of those who voted (~35-40% of the population), but rather a plurality of those who voted (~20% of the population).
Note that I am not claiming that there was anything nefarious (I have no evidence to support making such a claim), just that those who voted for that person represent only ~20% of the US population, not a "majority of the country."
jasonjayr · 14d ago
The CEO of the company is bound by laws and rules that the same country enacted. We the people are the board. The CEO answers to the board.
There are procedures to do the things that he said he wanted to do, because we are well aware of how an unchecked executive can destroy our government by doing what they want however they want.
Allow me to illustrate Exhibit A, unfolding now.
_DeadFred_ · 14d ago
The only agencies the President gives orders to like this are the military ones. We don't have a dictator that dictates from on high. That is why we have the Administrative Procedures act, the executives 'executiving' needs to be consistent and based on logical reasons.
We used to have a government like this, a spoils system, and it didn't work. So both parties created the civil service. Both parties passed things like that Administrative Procedures act.
tootie · 14d ago
President isn't CEO. Laws and budgets are set by Congress. EOs do not have the force of law and many have been invalidated by courts.
_hyn3 · 14d ago
> President isn't CEO
The President is literally the Chief Executive officer in the United States.
You seem to underestimate the power that is vested in the office of the President as the Chief Executive.
> have been invalidated by courts
As have many, many legislatively-passed laws; this is simply checks-and-balances and allows the judiciary to act on other laws (which originate from Congress) and regulations (which originate from the Executive Branch).
_DeadFred_ · 14d ago
Chief Executive officer does not mean dictator other than to military agencies. Please read the history of the bipartisan creation of the civil service, of the Administrative Procedures act, all created bipartisanly to reinforce that the President is not a dictator/king.
tootie · 13d ago
The executive has discretion in how funds are disbursed, but they have to fulfill all the obligations laid out by Congress. Impoundment is expressly illegal, not just due to Article 1, but also the Impoundment Act to avoid any ambiguity. The Dept of Education, for example, is created by act of congress and has a list of obligations in the congressional budget and the president has no authority to deny that. They have discretion in terms of how it is fulfilled and who gets paid when, but they are assuredly not allowed to just cancel programs or agencies that explicitly funded by congress.
jayd16 · 14d ago
If the CEO brought in their friends as temps to screw around? Which they were only allowed to do until the next board meeting when they will very likely not be approved? Yeah, I'd probably resist any royal fuck ups until then.
iamdbtoo · 14d ago
> And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country
No, he was not. He was elected by ~30% of the possible voters in this country because most people chose no one and stayed home.
theteapot · 14d ago
> ... DOGE employees demanded the highest level of access ... When an IT staffer suggested a streamlined process to activate those accounts in a way that would let their activities be tracked, in accordance with NLRB security policies, the IT staffers were told to stay out of DOGE's way, the disclosure continues.
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
SpicyLemonZest · 14d ago
It sounds to me like there's some application-level logging on this NxGen system, and DOGE obtained permissions to read the underlying storage without going through the application. But the article does also say later on that there are specific controls and monitoring systems Berulis did find turned off.
drooopy · 14d ago
If there are elections again in the future and more sane, qualified people take office, the Justice Department will have its hands full for decades.
MysticOracle · 14d ago
The whistleblower and his lawyer gave interviews on CNN & MSNBC:
The only point of DOGE is to cause as much irreparable damage as possible to American infrastructure.
It will go down as the most successful assault on America since 9/11 once the true scale of the damage is understood.
ck2 · 15d ago
That backdoor code is going to lurk for decades.
Not only will Musk be able to tap into it for years but foreign governments.
bilbo0s · 15d ago
This is the real problem, and the reason we never should have allowed access to sensitive government and societal data in this fashion.
the_doctah · 15d ago
Pure ridiculous conjecture.
DrNosferatu · 15d ago
The “young and inexperienced” staffers narrative is very convenient to perform target operations on (specially) sensitive data.
DrNosferatu · 14d ago
*targeted
tehjoker · 14d ago
Makes sense, this is a lawless reactionary attack on the republic. Their purpose is to put capital ever more firmly in charge. That means attacking workers.
sherdil2022 · 14d ago
Why isn’t this considered helping the enemy from within / treason?
Why are people being deported for no crimes or for far lesser crimes?
deepsun · 14d ago
It is. But since citizens don't do anything about it, they don't need to care.
jokoon · 14d ago
It's likely that this team was infiltrated by adversary countries
autoexec · 14d ago
I'd always assumed that we had three letter agencies whose entire job was to keep this sort of thing from happening, but it seems that none of them are concerned about protecting our government's secrets or even our democracy. What good is the panopticon if the watchers are asleep on the job?
jokoon · 14d ago
Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.
But those agencies cannot do anything if an elected/named official decides to work for an adversary, since those agencies are under command of the elected/name official.
That's why democracy is beyond the scope of those agencies.
Those agencies are "fences" to protect a teenager from doing mistakes. But it cannot protect the teenager from setting himself on fire.
In my view, democracy was always vulnerable if the people or elected official can be convinced of whatever.
autoexec · 13d ago
> Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.
My understanding was that they routinely do their work far outside of the law. Because such agencies have demonstrated a willingness to violate the constitution of the US, lie to both congress and the president, overthrow the democratically elected leaders of sovereign nations, perform acts of torture, rape, human experimentation, assassination, etc. it seems odd that they'd suddenly shy away from taking any action now.
timschmidt · 12d ago
I only learned recently that during his first term, Trump didn't take the president's daily briefing from the CIA, but instead paid a private intelligence service to prepare one. With all the talk about draining the swamp, ending the deep state, releasing / attempting to release Kennedy assassination and Epstein documents, revoking security clearances, it seems like there would be means, motivation, and opportunity, so to speak.
autoexec · 12d ago
I hadn't heard that he'd paid an outside agency for them, but I did hear that he had the attention span of a toddler and in order to get him to read them at all they had to change the briefings to include a lot of exciting pictures and very short bullet points or write as if they were telling him a story instead of delivering a report while also adding his name as many times as possible in the text.
timschmidt · 12d ago
I'm not racing horses, but it seems like Dems took a similar attitude toward this administration to the polls, and found out. Underestimating folks is so dangerous. I'm just paying attention.
IOT_Apprentice · 14d ago
They’ve all been either fired or out in a leash as musk collects all the PII and secrets in every agency & department and feeds it into a private subnet of his AI. His minions are certainly doing that.
pjc50 · 14d ago
The template here is not Nazi Germany but Pinochet. The CIA have backed right-wing authoritarianism everywhere else in the Americas, why not in America itself?
"Supporting democracy" in Latin America always meant anti-communism, even to the extent of ending free elections.
therealpygon · 14d ago
What is that saying they like to say all the time? “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to fear.” Certainly seems like they are afraid of people seeing what they are doing for “not doing anything wrong”.
tyrrvk · 15d ago
This coupled with the hot mike incident yesterday where Trump was saying how El Salvador needed to build more mega prisons for the "home grown..terrorists" is beyond concerning. Sure sounds like DOGE is compiling lists of 'less desirable s' that will soon be swept off the streets in unmarked vans. America has turned fully fascist.
No comments yet
campuscodi · 15d ago
DOGE staff are just behaving like a foreign cyber-espionage group at this point
9283409232 · 15d ago
It should be clear at this point that DOGE is trying to create a unified database of all persons in the US for targeting. Every single bit of data that they can get about you from the government or social media will be tagged to you Minority Report style. They were clear about wanting to deport citizens to El Salvador as well. Once you are identified as the other side they will come for you. If you are waiting for it to get worse before taking action and getting involved, we are already at that point.
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
Possibly looking for lawyers for Trump to target with EOs or blackmail.
ActorNightly · 15d ago
If someone is incompetent enough to understand Cobol databases, I doubt they are thinking about it on this level.
Given all of Musks actions, he is probably wanting to destroy any agency that went against him, because he truly believes he is the humanities savior and his companies are doing things the right way.
wormlord · 15d ago
How you are getting downvotes is beyond me. People are finally waking up to the idea that the whole point of the Trump admin is to privatize the government, but haven't woken up to the fact that we are entering an era of state terror. Keep your heads buried HN, you'll be dragged kicking and screaming into reality in a few months anyways.
giraffe_lady · 15d ago
It's extremely frustrating and something I've thought a lot about over the years where we were pretty obviously building towards this outcome. A couple things:
First the "average" american is softly but ideologically committed to liberalism¹ & democracy as fundamental values. From that perspective the mind kind of recoils from accepting this. If this is really what's happening, what does civic obligation demand of me? How does that reconcile with my inability to keep my family safe in the face of a motivated & powerful state that wishes to harm me through them? Easier to believe this isn't what is happening, I don't need to take action yet. A powerful example of motivated reasoning.
Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
¹ Like in the traditional sense, ie "a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law" from wikipedia.
9283409232 · 15d ago
> Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
People support what they claim to do doing and are naive enough to believe they are doing what they say without asking questions about why they seem to be going out of there way to avoid transparency or providing any real evidence to their claims.
ActorNightly · 15d ago
If the administration was even remotely competent, this would be scary. There is EASILY a list of things that they could do if they truly cared about going full authoritarian.
But when they start doing stuff like tarrifs for no reason what so ever, to the point where even Musk thinks its stupid, the situation is sad more than scary. US has lost its edge for literally nothing in return.
9283409232 · 14d ago
Ignoring court orders, grabbing people off the streets to disappear, and publicly wondering how they can deport citizens isn't scary to you?
ActorNightly · 14d ago
I mean, scary is a relative term. Its just as scary as Trump being legally immune to anything he does, as granted by Supreme Court.
The Republicans are basically still at the mercy of the economy - Trump backed of tariffs real quick when Japan started selling off US debt on the cheap. So I don't think its going to get levels of Saddam Hussein authoritarian. But time will tell.
The thing is, just like in Russia, smart people will know when to leave, and will leave, which is good. As soon as it becomes economically better to work in EU, you will have lots of talented people immigrating there which will bolster their economy.
const_cast · 15d ago
They're downvoting it because it feels bad. And well, it does! This sucks major ass.
Part of me is sympathetic to them because a lot of these people are people who live privileged lives and have never before been in any political pressure. These people have previously been able to just detach from politics because they knew, no matter what, they would end up on top. And now, that assumption is no longer true and they have the enter a world that a variety of minority groups have already been living in. They have to face the reality that politics isn't just something on the TV, but something that affects their lives.
keepamovin · 13d ago
I think it's obvious that some of those affected by these reforms, or by fraud/abuse cutting, are going to come at DOGE with everything they got, so while I think people should review and monitor DOGE's actions, accusations should be taken with a grain of salt (and maybe a kickback).
tssva · 13d ago
What reforms or fraud/abuse cutting? I haven't seen any signs of either coming from DOGE. I have seen plenty of signs of DOGE creating and participating in fraud/abuse.
amai · 8d ago
DOGE might have hired too fast without the necessary background checks. So DOGE might now employ a lot of foreign spies (Russian, Chinese, etc) which take their chances.
VagabundoP · 8d ago
You say its a bug, but maybe thats a feature.
jonahbenton · 13d ago
Every single DOGE access to any level of protected government data is a security breach. Not snark. None of them have clearances.
jki275 · 13d ago
what do you mean by "clearances"?
If they're accessing data that requires clearances, they have the required clearances. That's mandatory, and no one is going to show them anything without them.
My guess, based on the fact you use terms like "protected government data" is that you don't even know enough about this topic to make up words about it.
watwut · 13d ago
No, access to data does not imply clearance. And they are forcing access to data. No it is not legal, but neither Trump nor DOGE nor Musk care about legality.
jki275 · 12d ago
You're making broad blanket statements that have no basis in anything other than media BS.
There is no "forcing access". It simply doesn't work that way.
If the President clears them, they are cleared. That's perfectly legal. The President is the federal government's OCA.
jonnycomputer · 14d ago
And what is NxGenBdoorExtract?
g42gregory · 14d ago
Here is the thing that blows my mind: why is there an implicit assumption that this article is an honest reporting and not a propaganda piece? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it is. What I am saying is that, at the very least, this question should always be asked first about any reporting.
Llamamoe · 14d ago
Because this would be very in line with how DOGE has conducted itself so far.
zelon88 · 14d ago
NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted. From Wikipedia...
.....Regarding financing;
>Funding for NPR comes from dues and fees paid by member stations, underwriting from corporate sponsors, and annual grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.[4] Most of its member stations are owned by non-profit organizations, including public school districts, colleges, and universities. NPR operates independently of any government or corporation, and has full control of its content.[5]
.....Regarding governance;
> NPR is a membership organization. Member stations are required to be non-commercial or non-commercial educational radio stations; have at least five full-time professional employees; operate for at least 18 hours per day; and not be designed solely to further a religious broadcasting philosophy or be used for classroom distance learning programming. Each member station receives one vote at the annual NPR board meetings—exercised by its designated Authorized Station Representative ("A-Rep").
Now, I do question the authenticity of your question. Everyone knows that NPR is reputable and everyone knows why. Their reputation precedes them. But I entertained your charade and now I implore you to entertain one of mine.
Can you provide me the same detailed information which demonstrates why someone should trust OAN? How about Breitbart? How about Newsmax? Can you please pick one and demonstrate why they are trustworthy using a similar format that I provided for you?
timschmidt · 12d ago
> NPR is a public entity. It's funding, governance, and leadership structure are well known and well trusted.
Ehhhh... I remember vividly a moment during the Iraq war in which NPR's ombudsman spent 20 minutes justifying the network's use of the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" when speaking about torture conducted by the CIA and others. It was terminology being pushed by the then-current administration, which NPR chose not only to parrot, but to justify. To the benefit of the administration and the detriment of human rights. I haven't had illusions about the network's accuracy, neutrality, or journalistic integrity since.
24 years?
I guess you could call that well known. Not in a good way.
sitkack · 13d ago
> So what that data spike correlated with was data that was transferred off of an internal record-keeping device that was only used for internal case data. So this system only has the private information about union organizers. The privileged business proprietary, technologies, competitors, those kind of things are in that system only. There's no other data. There's nothing else except that.
...
> This is a difficult topic for Dan to discuss, but prior to our filing the whistle-blower disclosure this week, last week, somebody went to Dan's home and taped a threatening note, a menacing note on his door with personal information.
> While he was at work, and it also contained photographs of him walking his dog taken by a drone. So…
cratermoon · 13d ago
DOGE is a significant security breach.
pnutjam · 15d ago
This checks out because all those DOGE hires appear to be hackers, and they are now state sponsored.
Most of them could never pass a basic background check, much less a TS or even public trust from one of the more invasive Federal agencies.
matthewdgreen · 14d ago
It is worth pointing out that many of these people are probably violating Federal and possibly even some state laws. Violations of Federal laws can be pardoned, if the President is so inclined. State laws can't. No prosecution will occur during this administration, but this administration will not last forever.
tremon · 12d ago
This administration will last as long as the People allow it to. There is no other way this will end.
> The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
BurnGpuBurn · 14d ago
> Reuters could not independently verify EGodly's boasts of cybercriminal activity
_hyn3 · 14d ago
Those darn hackers. They probably hang out and get their news... someplace.
1970-01-01 · 13d ago
More evidence the current POTUS is in cahoots with Russia.
I've said this repeatedly, but write this down: before this administration is out we are going to have a major (probably multiple) scandal where DOGE staffers get caught with some kind of horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering. It could be simple insider trading, it could be selling the data to a FBI sting, it might take lots of forms. But it's going to happen.
These are a bunch of 20-something tech bro ego cases convinced of their crusade to remake government along libertarian axes they learned from Reddit/4chan/HN. These are simply not people motivated out of a genuine desire to improve the public good. And they've been given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers.
f38zf5vdt · 15d ago
Personal enrichment? There's already an enormous amount of evidence here to indicate that DOGE is working on behalf of a foreign nation state. It is seeming more and more likely that members of the DOGE team are simply secret agents for a foreign military.
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.
JohnMakin · 14d ago
or even worse, they’re compromised in some fashion and don’t know it
ajross · 14d ago
FWIW, that's getting too far out on the spy novel spectrum. Yes, they could be compromised. But to my point above, if they're indeed working for Putin or Xi or whoever, it's FAR more likely (given the demographic) that it's just because they took a fat bribe.
JohnMakin · 14d ago
Not saying they’re compromised by foreign agents, although, I wouldnt put that out of the realm of possibility - but that either they and/or theyre tooling/setup is pwned
this is exactly what you save a zero day for, and something gives me the vibe about some of these guys that they dont take opsec very seriously, probably would not even need one
ndsipa_pomu · 15d ago
I think it's worse than that as the DOGE staffers are presumably picked according to Musk's preferences and he's not going to be looking for generous, well adjusted do-gooders, but selfish, arrogant, greedy racists. Presumably, they're also going to be targetted by other countries intelligence services with a mind to getting hold of the same data.
potato3732842 · 15d ago
Doesn't matter if they're good people or not "given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers" that scandal WILL happen eventually.
pjc50 · 14d ago
> horrifying self-enrichment scam based on the data they're hoovering.
Did you miss the presidential cryptocurrency?
DOGE guys will probably end up wiring money directly to their own bank account, proudly brandish the receipts on national television, and no Republicans will make a move against them.
olyjohn · 14d ago
Also it's right there in the name DOGE. It's Elon's favorite coin and of course he's trying to pump it by naming a goddamn government department after it. It's plain as day.
IIsi50MHz · 11d ago
Still a pseudo-department, isn't it? I believe its name makes the ersatz claim of being a department, but is in fact a private entity.
LadyCailin · 14d ago
Sounds like they need to file a CVE.. oh wait.
AIPedant · 15d ago
Even by the standards of this administration...... yikes:
Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
9283409232 · 15d ago
This is exactly what I expect from this administration. Mob tactics. Take the silver or get the lead.
404mm · 15d ago
I’d not want to be a whistleblower during this presidency. Whistleblowers tend to have really bad luck crossing the street on a good day.
9283409232 · 15d ago
That's what they want. Now is when we need whistleblowers the most so they want to put the fear into them.
zombiwoof · 14d ago
Welcome to Elon Musks America
JohnMakin · 15d ago
This seems important and incredibly relevant on a site called hackernews. It's credible and from a credible source. Why are we flagging it?
asveikau · 14d ago
JD Vance is a poster boy for Y Combinator adjacent fascists. Marc Andreessen, when he is not cheering on opiate overdoses in his hometown and praising the British Raj, loves what's going on. We need to accept that Silicon Valley has major culpability here. After all, how much do you see on HN that you should ignore the law because it's better to ask forgiveness than permission?
remarkEon · 14d ago
"Fascism" today just means "right wing politician I do not like" or "conservative who is successful at pushing back the left".
Plenty of people here can have a problem with this administration and Vance himself, or not, without those who disagree pretending that we're a week away from goose stepping down 5th Avenue in NYC.
mikeyouse · 14d ago
There’s lots of fascism before the goose stepping but in the past week the President confirmed he’d like to send US citizens to a foreign gulag, he continues to ignore a Supreme Court ruling to bring home a previously and illegally deported man, he threatened Harvard that he’d strip their nonprofit status since they resisted his inane demands for conservative-DEI, he initiated several investigations using the state security apparatus of former government employees he deemed enemies and the richest man in the world (who donated 9 figures to get the President elected) continues to illegally impound funding from across the government including every organization that regulates the companies he runs. Oh and they’re planning a $100M military parade for the president’s birthday. Things aren’t great!
autoexec · 14d ago
Considering the amount of nazi salutes being thrown around I wouldn't be surprised to see goose stepping at the parade.
pjc50 · 14d ago
The Abrego Garcia case is one of those critical lines of actual fascism: Pinochet-style disappearances. Not really connected to DOGE though, they're the administrative wing of fascism.
hooverd · 14d ago
If by "successful at pushing back the left", and by "the left", you mean the rule of law and due process itself, then yes, I am against fascism. The executive is not a king and everyone within our borders deserves due process.
asveikau · 14d ago
Plainclothes officers are hijacking people on the street without showing any credentials, then sending them to Salvadorean gulags without any court hearing.
Your lack of paying attention to this or lack of understanding how bad that is is not a problem in the rest of us.
Before you give me this nonsense of "they are criminals", number one this is still an inhumane way to treat convicted people, and number two they have not been convicted of anything, number three there have been tons of reports of the accusations made against these people being total BS.
Earlier this week, Trump was on microphone telling El Salvador's president that he wants him to build five more gulags and that we will send American citizens there.
hooverd · 14d ago
Hypocrisy is a virtue to fascists. It's about signalling power.
arunabha · 15d ago
I am not sure how it's possible to defend the kind of stuff DOGE is doing anymore. Even the veneer of looking for efficiency is gone. There have only been claims of 'fraud' with no real evidence backing up the claimed scale of fraud.
At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.
This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.
Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
GolDDranks · 15d ago
> Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
Why would that be, because it's too "political" for tech news? Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
ethbr1 · 15d ago
> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
The /active page is helpful, thanks! I also just recently realized that the 'hckr news'[0] interface doesn't hide or remove flagged stories if you're using the Top 10/20/50 view options, so if something is getting discussed/upvoted it will be there.
> I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
From what I see, even good comments with facts and sources that go against the prevalent narrative are either downvoted or flagged a good chunk of the time, which discourages people from commenting(as it's meant to be) because of lack of visibility. It can also make the commenters unable to post comments for hours because HN's rate limiter kicks in, so they are effectively silenced.
Also, many times they're attacked personally and those comments violating HN's etiquette are not downvoted or flagged. Not to mention very low quality Redditesque are also not downvoted or flagged, but are upvoted, which lowers the quality of HN as a whole.
outer_web · 15d ago
"People don't like my opinions therefore I am going to sabotage the discussion from obscurity."
ivewonyoung · 14d ago
A good chunk of the time, it's sourced and documented facts that are flagged and downvoted, to reduce visibility.
shkkmo · 14d ago
Are you sure? There can be absolutely be voting and flagging biases, but the majority if the time it happens it is due to issues of tone for comments that are picking fights rather then prompting interesting discourse. When you get flagged or down voted, the most productive response is to look at how you were presenting your information or opinion and if there was a way to do so that would be more inclined to produce a productive conversation. Even when it's borderline, there's usually something you could have changed that wouldn't have drawn as much partisan ire and it is valuable to consider this, as partisan ire turns off brains.
ivewonyoung · 14d ago
I'll give you one example that I saw just now of someone else's comment that was downvoted.
The tone policing one has to do has to be done only by one side, the other "side" can write very low quality comments with personal attacks and not get downvoted or flagged as frequently. It's same on Reddit too. Absolute misinformation and FUD gets voted up if they favor the prevalent side and countering comments are downvoted creating a chilling effect to reduce visibility and discourage participation of folks that don't agree 100% with the political narrative.
That is exactly how Reddit became more and more extreme leading to popular subs becoming full of death threats at one point. And HN is on it's way there.
ethbr1 · 14d ago
^ Honestly, the most useful approach.
I can't change other people, but I can change myself.
Sometimes, it is what it is. But often I can find a way to more effectively say what I was trying.
Exhibit A: avoiding the dangling ad hom after an otherwise solid point. Seductive but unproductive.
ivewonyoung · 13d ago
I just gave a couple of examples in the other comment in this thread:
And I see this all the time. Not to mention only one "side" is subject to this suppression so it's no surprise that they prefer to(or are forced by the site mechanics to) disengage from commenting.
If sourced verifiable facts stated in a neutral way are punished, what chance do opinions or personal takes have? It's a textbook example of an echo chamber.
shkkmo · 13d ago
The comments with sources doesn't appear to be downvoted. Your comment has no sources and the tone feels a little combative so I'm not surprised it picked up a couple of downvotes given the topic. In general, many of your comments have a slight bitter, combative air to them that probably hampers your communication effectiveness.
Anything Musk related on here has always been prone to less constructive conversation, even before he became a part of the partisan political circus.
ivewonyoung · 13d ago
>The comments with sources doesn't appear to be downvoted
It was downvoted for a while.
> In general, many of your comments have a slight bitter, combative air to them that probably hampers your communication effectiveness
Comments that are much more bitter and combative than mine and without sources are upvoted all the time, because they fuel a certain political narrative.
outer_web · 14d ago
I stand corrected. Please flag anything you disagree with.
hintymad · 15d ago
I used to discuss my different views and presented data or facts that I gathered The facts, of course, could be wrong, as I have limited faulty to verify everything. Yet, instead of pointing out what I said was wrong, I got angry posts attacking my motives and my posts were flagged. So, now I know the game, and for such politically charged posts, I know what I can do easily: flag it away.
throwworhtthrow · 15d ago
It's true that HN has shown itself _mostly_ incapable of having a useful discussion on topics that involve the current US president. (But sometimes a useful thread of conversation emerges!) Users that are frustrated by a flagged topic will retaliate by flagging comments they disagree with. And vice versa.
I think retaliating like this just makes HN worse. If you stop flagging perfectly good stories, HN will be a marginally nicer place for discussion. I'll say the same to anyone here who admits to blanket flagging of comments.
Please keep trying to discuss your views. Sometimes they'll get smacked down unfairly, but other times they'll stick around. The more you try, the more they'll stick, and hopefully it can shift the tone of discussion here.
outer_web · 15d ago
You flag posts with politics because you don't like having been flagged?
hintymad · 14d ago
The Iron Rule, right? The benefit of the Iron Rule is that those who break rules face consequences, preventing them from escalating their behavior. So you cancel me, I cancel you, only harder. You play law fare, I do the same to you, only more legally but in a harsher way. Hada yada yada. It’s the only way to keep the society civil, eventually.
cosmicgadget · 14d ago
You post something and based on its content you assume someone from an ideological group flagged it. And for that reason you flag and opinion of someone you assume is from that group?
What a way to live.
hintymad · 14d ago
Actually, good point. Thanks for pointing that out.
blargey · 14d ago
I can't fathom the thought process that claims the goal is "preventing escalation" and immediately decides the only method is escalation.
It seems to me like people were mostly receptive to your facts and data. You got angry posts attacking your motives when you wrote angry posts such as this:
> Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.
Perhaps you ought to look in the mirror.
hintymad · 14d ago
Interestingly, that one was not flagged. The ones that gave simple data points were. That said, was that comment angry? I was happy because I finally saw a president deliver his campaign promises. Or maybe I was angry but angry as a liberal: we are supposed to keep government in check, yet when doge found out so much potential issues of the government and ngos, the first reaction of the left was to attack the motives of doge and to protect the institution? Where was the liberalism?
ethbr1 · 15d ago
110%, people can be braindead assholes in their replies, and fail to substantially engage with comments.
Or just drive-by up/down according to if they agree with you or not.
Sorry that was your experience, and hopefully we can all be less... that... together.
mvdtnz · 15d ago
I don't need to defend it. I flag this stuff because I don't care. I'm not American and I'm tired of seeing American politics on this site. It's not what I come here for.
bmacho · 14d ago
> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
AFAIK a small number of them is enough to hide stuff from the front page. I don't know why is this the case, honestly I don't see any benefit over full time-moderators hiding problematic stuff, only negatives. Like why should a small political group be able to distort the news on the front page?
rbanffy · 14d ago
> too "political" for tech news?
Politics are everywhere. It’s how we negotiate consensus and make collective decisions. From what a government should do down to what features will be worked on this sprint and where are we having lunch today.
Tech being apolitical is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.
_DeadFred_ · 15d ago
Sahil Lavingia founder of Gumroad is DOGE. Joe Gebbia co-founder of Airbnb is DOGE. Not sympathetic to, they are DOGE. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head from listening to basic reporting. The All In podcast is super pro-Trump/DOGE, with Sacks being the Trump regime's crypto czar (bringing that cohort on board). Peter Thiel. Musk. That's a lot of pro-DOGE headspace in HN related circles. A lot of people that HN related circles look up to and aspire to emulate. A lot of people that HN circles network with/have perverse incentives to support.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
GolDDranks · 15d ago
That's chilling. I always thought HN as a kinda level-headed corner of the internet.
tomhow · 12d ago
I'd hate for you or others to read the GP comment and for your perception of HN to be altered, without any further detail or nuance to be presented for consideration.
Gumroad is not a YC company and its founder has no influence over HN or YC. Joe, whilst being one of the most successful, is still just one YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000, and doesn't represent YC. Paul Graham, YC's co-founder (who, whilst retired, is still actively involved and is very influential at YC) heavily criticises the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter. The other figures named in the GP comment have no involvement or influence on YC, and indeed some have had very hostile disputes with YC partners and notable founders in the past.
This is not to claim that we moderators are perfectly impervious to every influence and incentive at every moment. Awareness of our own potential to be biased and influenced is essential to being able to do this job effectively.
I just think it's important to point out that things are not nearly as simple as the GP comment purports.
rozap · 15d ago
Easy to think that until you start viewing /active and see all the stuff that's flagged and doesn't appear on the front page. Any article, even those explicitly about tech, science and academia are flagged if they have even the gentlest suggestion that this administration is flawed.
i80and · 15d ago
Been here since '09.
There are worse places on the internet, but HN's role first and foremost is to serve as advertising and a job board for YC. There's a structural bent away from anything that might be seen as harmful to that core purpose.
It's unfortunate.
hsuduebc2 · 14d ago
It's funny that even on hacker news wiki there is a proclamation from Paul Graham that they do not help feature stories of their startups from YC. If that wouldn't be a quote from from 2013 I would call it an straight up lie.
It's important that HN give things back to YC in exchange for funding it. Otherwise the lack of balance would eventually make the site, and thus the community, unsustainable. For all of us who care about HN, this is the way to ensure its long-term survival. But there's no reason not to be transparent about what those things are, which is what the FAQ does.
For example, there's a startup launch on the front page right now which our software placed there this morning:
One nice thing about startup launch threads is that, to judge by the comments and upvotes they receive, the community often (though not always!) finds them interesting. They fall off the front page more quickly if they're not resonating.
malachismith · 14d ago
I haven't commented here in years.
I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).
This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.
And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.
So let's just say it like it is...
If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.
"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!"
Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.
For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.
i80and · 14d ago
You joined in 2011.
Let me assure you: the trash can bully vibes were default here far before you were.
HN is fine for what it is, but it's never ever been good.
deckard1 · 15d ago
It pretends to be. But in reality it's always been a VC honey pot.
I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.
This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.
archagon · 15d ago
I wish there was a similarly active community for hackers in the traditional sense.
I think that Tony Stark legend is dead for a while. The few remaining believers are running on copium.
pjc50 · 15d ago
There's always been a right wing / libertarian contingent here. These days I recognize most of the top 20 or so usual suspects. Says nothing about how many flags happening though.
GuinansEyebrows · 15d ago
i would love for this to be true but it's hosted by a venture capital firm. hard to ignore possible conflicts of interest since tech/VC culture is so intertwined with american rightwing politics.
int_19h · 15d ago
I don't think it's that simple. If you look at the comments here, and in general on political stories, it's the comments defending DOGE and Trump that tend to be downvoted.
archagon · 15d ago
The name is ironic given that the site was founded by a venture capitalist.
Founders are (generally) not hackers and not your friends. They are money men and will always follow the money.
leotravis10 · 15d ago
It's censorship plain and simple.
And the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.
pjc50 · 15d ago
sigh it's just how any site with algorithmic ranking works: some things are going to get down voted. Politics is one of them, for a bunch of reasons articulated in this thread. Complaining about censorship is not going to make any difference.
Things have stabilized on roughly one thread on the evils of Republicans per day. Unfortunately they're managing a lot more evil per day than that.
zzleeper · 15d ago
You really don't need many users to flag a post. Get five users constantly flagging anything that makes Trump look bad (and a complicit mod that doesn't undo this) and that's all you need.
knowaveragejoe · 14d ago
Anyone who knew anything about the public sector knew there were already efficiency initiatives. USDS(which became DOGE) was this, and they were doing a great job. If you care about efficiency this is what you would support, not taking an axe to everything and having a near-singular focus on lower headcount.
JohnMakin · 15d ago
It’s flagged now - pretty embarrassing for a site called “hacker” news
leotravis10 · 15d ago
Yep, it's blatant censorship and the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.
dang · 14d ago
The admins/mods turned off the flags on this story as soon as we found out about it, restoring it to HN's front page.
SamLL · 14d ago
Are there any structural or systematic changes that should be made to how the site works right now, so that remedies such as this do not need to be hand performed one-offs?
dang · 14d ago
Maybe? I'm wary of technical solutions to non-technical problems. The base problem here seems non-technical to me—it's the combination of:
1. there's a tsunami of intense (and important) political stories right now
2. HN has 30 slots on its frontpage
3. HN is not a current affairs site
In other words, the fundamentals themselves are twisted in a knot. I don't see how one gets around that.
bmacho · 14d ago
I think you are describing a different, hypothetical problem?
The current problem is that news that are critic of the current administration are suppressed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462783 (U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat) was off the front page for like ~24 hours?
You are describing the problem that there are too many actual politic related news on the front page. That is not a problem right now.
dang · 14d ago
That's an inaccurate perception. HN has had a high number of political threads on the front page in recent months, and most (nearly all, in fact) have been critical of the current administration.
If you find that hard to believe, see these lists:
They are a couple months old now, but the point hasn't changed: the most-discussed (by far!) topic on Hacker News gets perceived as totally-suppressed-and-silenced by the passionate portion [1] of the audience that wants more of this material. I call this the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. [2]
This is not a new phenomenon [3]. Here's an example of the same thing from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. That was me responding to someone complaining that the most-discussed-by-far topic on HN was being "aggressively removed from discussion".
Meanwhile, the audience that wants less of this material perceives the site as being completely-overrun-by-politics. To these we have to give the inverse of the current explanation. You can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 how far back that goes.
Both of these perceptions are wrong. Both are consequences of the fundamentals I listed in the GP comment. And both are special cases of a more general phenomenon: for anyone passionate about topic X, the HN front page never contains enough X.
The most passionate users rarely express their preference as "I would prefer more X on HN". Rather they say: "It's unbelievable how X is completely and utterly suppressed and censored on HN".
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I use 'passionate' or 'passion' a lot to describe these segments of the audience (on any topic and/or side). This is not intended disrespectfully. People have legitimate reasons for feeling passionately, and often the topics are far more important than most stories on HN. However, mitigating the power of these passions to shape HN is critical to keeping this the kind of site that it's supposed to be. If we didn't do this, HN would turn into a current affairs site overnight.
[3] The reason this is not a new phenomenon is because of what I said in my GP comment: it follows from the fundamentals of the site.
p.s. The thread you linked to spent 15 hours on HN's front page. That's a lot.
JohnMakin · 15d ago
I don't know if there's anything to admit from their public stance on this kind of stuff, and I'm certainly not wanting this account to receive retaliation for whatever I post regarding this - they've mentioned that they do get swarms of downvoting groups on particular topics and have taken steps to un-flag things that fall victim to it. I'm not sure what that mechanism is, or if they've seen it, or maybe it's auto-flagging off certain keywords - giving massive benefit of the doubt as possible. Regardless though I've seen this trend on similar news, I think a lot of my favorites contain flagged submissions that are highly relevant for a site like this.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
JohnMakin · 15d ago
seems like it was unflagged. This story is horrifying, thank you.
buttercraft · 15d ago
Who, exactly, is being censored?
bedane · 15d ago
[flagged]
dang · 14d ago
hn staff turned off the flags on this story as soon as we found out about it, restoring it to HN's front page.
exe34 · 15d ago
most of this stuff is getting flagged within minutes.
consumer451 · 15d ago
It is hilarious what does, and does not, get flagged on this website in 2025.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
dang · 15d ago
There's always a ton of randomness with these things. People tend to underestimate how that affects nearly every aspect of HN. That is, they misinterpret a random outcome as some sort of meaningful thing and then attribute a meaning to it.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If these stories mostly didn't get flagged or otherwise moderator, HN would turn overnight into a current affairs site, which it is not and never has been.
That still leaves room for some stories with political overlap, though not nearly as many as the politically passionate would prefer. Btw, this is a special case of a more general principle: there are not nearly as many stories on any topic X as the X-passionate would desire. The front page, in that sense, satisfies no one!
But back to the politics thing—here are some links to past explanations about how we deal with that:
Thanks Dan, I never mean to point fingers at moderation here. I always assume it's users. Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
dang · 15d ago
Oops, I hear you! Well, maybe the explanation is helpful to others who are worrying about the moderation side.
(Also, if anyone is weary of my inveterate self-linking: sorry, I am too. It's just somehow the only semi-efficient way I've found to give enough background information on various points of HN.)
thaumasiotes · 14d ago
> Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
Now that dang has confirmed it's incorrect, maybe stop sticking with it.
consumer451 · 15d ago
Follow-up: I should add that in 2025, deleting stories with a tinge of US politics is highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening in the business world.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
dang · 15d ago
These stories aren't being deleted—there was quite a large thread (in fact maybe two large threads?) about precisely that, within the last couple weeks. I'll see if I can dig up the links, or maybe someone else remembers?
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
I meant "deleted" from by being flagged, which is a deletion from the lurkers. And yes.. absolutely I have seen some of these stories get through the gauntlet.
I am really not complaining about moderation, just attempting to appeal to the users who I have assumed are doing the flagging, in general.
pvg · 14d ago
They're probably doing some of the flagging because they disagree (I think correctly) with a characterization of HN in which HN can be "highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening". HN has newsy stuff but its purpose is not really news - there are much better sites for that. The 'News' in 'Hacker News' is more like the 'News' in Huey Lewis & The News.
hayst4ck · 14d ago
The problem is capture. How many platforms for news and discussing news are not completely captured by people with an agenda of personal power?
You are funding and dang is running a forum for curiosity while the basis for curiosity is under attack.
Your dilemma is to support free inquiry and a platform for curiosity resulting in you being an enemy of the administration or to obey their wishes in order to protect yourself and your assets. What happens when everyone in every position of power rationally protects themselves in the short term by selling out their values in the long term, when they bury their head in the sand and stay in denial, or they run away to another safer country?
How many of your peers have any form of integrity? How many of them wouldn't sell out their mother for a dollar? How many of them fund and participate in building a world anyone would want to live in instead of a world where they are the supreme rulers of the ruins. Concentration camps were built by business men excited by cheap labor.
You cannot have curiosity without solidarity against forces that would submit reason to power. You cannot have curiosity without a consent based society. Curiosity fundamentally challenges power, because it elevates reason above authority. Curiosity presumes that reason is the ultimate form of legitimacy.
Hacker news has a goal of staving off Eternal September, when new students, people uninitiated to academic rigor or professional social conventions, would flood Usenet every September when they received credentials from their academic institutions. Those very same universities which helped build the type of culture you hold in high regard are under direct attack.
Curious environments won't survive neutrality. Curious environments won't survive lack of solidarity with other institutions that inspire curiosity. Systems, like authoritarianism, that demand obedience rather than reason are the default, and they require active maintenance to prevent. Neutrality under these conditions is neglect of curiosity.
pvg · 14d ago
You are funding
You've got me confused with someone else cause I ain't funding anything beside my burrito habit.
As to the rest of this stuff... I don't find it terribly persuasive, personally. We do all have all sorts of moral responsibilities, individual and collective ones and it behooves us to meet them. We do not have a responsibility to turn every single facet and corner of our lives into some instrument of political power and expression - those are important individual (and group) choices and there's a name for disregarding them and imposing them on others - totalitarianism.
Capricorn2481 · 15d ago
Because, naturally, people on here want to harm you. We can't say it out loud, but that's where the U.S. climate is right now. HN is not immune from it, and is likely more susceptible to it given the demographic. They flag to keep people from saying it.
leotravis10 · 15d ago
Indeed, I'm sure there's a LOT of people, especially in the HN space are pro-fascist.
belter · 15d ago
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
- Peter Thiel
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."
- Elon Musk
"Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”."
- Marc Andreessen
"Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."
- Curtis Yarvin
johnnyanmac · 15d ago
I mean, there were Tesla earnings calls this year flagged, which would be front page news even a year ago. Tech earnings calls are almost never flagged otherwise.
I'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
consumer451 · 15d ago
This is a fair take from my POV. I am very happy not to be modding any forum these days.
edit: and to be clear, I was not originally critiquing the modding here.
taeric · 15d ago
Honestly looks like a fairly heavy handed bot. Is very close to the "if it has trans" decisions we know they did in the search for things to cancel.
linkregister · 15d ago
Several users have stated in political threads that they spend the day flagging political stories. I don't think there's any reason to believe a bot is doing it.
consumer451 · 14d ago
I have been calling them "The Guardians of New."
But maybe the far more appropriate term has been there all along:
Fair. It doesn't have to be a bot to look like one. Is certainly a hive mind behavior that is not any less heavy handed than "see a word, click flag button."
jmyeet · 15d ago
Welcome to the Internet.
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conspiracy theory territory, it could just be that people get tired of reading the same bullshit everyday.
soco · 15d ago
I'm not american so can somebody please explain me, how is deleting logs and every trace of your actions helping with government efficiency?
rsynnott · 15d ago
Nothing they are doing is related to government efficiency. You can't really put too much faith in names.
XorNot · 15d ago
The basic rule of government naming: the more of GOOD THING in the name, the less of that it will be.
FireBeyond · 15d ago
This quote (from Lord of War) really encapsulates a lot of what you say:
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
viraptor · 15d ago
That generalises to a lot of naming. Papers like Fakt or Pravda, country DPKR, political parties that mention law, justice and order, etc.
rsynnott · 15d ago
I always particularly liked the Committee of Public Safety, for this (they're the ones who did the Reign of Terror, which doesn't seem _particularly_ public-safety-oriented.)
pchristensen · 15d ago
Don’t forget Truth Social
JKCalhoun · 15d ago
В « Правде » нет известий, а в « Известиях » нет правды
sham1 · 14d ago
> В « Правде » нет известий, а в « Известиях » нет правды
For the sake of context, this is an old Soviet-era joke, that translates to about the following:
> In "Pravda" (The Truth, CPSU's newspaper) there are no news. In "Izvestiya" (The News, national newspaper of the USSR, under the control of the Supreme Soviet) there is no truth.
_heimdall · 15d ago
In the same way that finding waste while increasing the federal budget isn't efficiency.
Technically, maybe you can squint and find small pieces that are more efficient but in the grand scheme of things they goal doesn't seem to be a smaller government.
croes · 15d ago
How is firing people helping government efficiency?
_heimdall · 15d ago
Well you have to put context around what is being made more efficient.
Reducing headcount reduces labor costs and can be a form of financial efficiency. Reducing headcount also usually reduces the sheer number of people involved in any project, much like a small startup can move drastically quicker than a large, established org.
That said, there goal here doesn't seem to be clear as to what is being made efficient and they definitely aren't reducing the budget or size of government (outside of literal headcount, most people complain instead of red tape and regulations).
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 15d ago
Yes, how?
lesuorac · 15d ago
Log storage is expensive.
skeeter2020 · 15d ago
It's not the storage, but processing with NR and DataDog is what's expensive. That's why the efficiency team asked to not have their actions logged in the first place.
phanimahesh · 15d ago
I can honestly not tell if this comment was intended to be taken seriously, or if it was tongue in cheek.
const_cast · 15d ago
I really want to believe it's tongue in cheek because the thought of asking not to be audited in order to save some compute on Splunk queries or whatever is very funny to me.
int_19h · 15d ago
When in doubt, check the comment history.
EdwardDiego · 13d ago
It is.
alistairSH · 15d ago
Nothing about DOGE or the Trump administration is about efficiency. It's just a label they use to con gullible voters.
Their real goal is more likely a combination of grift and settling grudges.
Edit - typos
dandanua · 15d ago
The next administration won't be able to spend time and money investigating crimes of the current one /s
delusional · 15d ago
That way they can save some money litigating Elon and his goons. It's not like that litigation would get anywhere anyway, so better to save the public the waste /s
actionfromafar · 15d ago
To more efficiently rout trouble-makers and unions.
vaxman · 15d ago
They didn't use StarLink?! ROFLMAO
I hope he doesn't think Trump is his boy and will keep DOJ off his back. The problem is that the institutional funds and market makers will not support this level of Watergate/Enron/WorldCom-like risk and Trump isn't going to become entangled in that (since it means the corporate death penalty as far as public equity and access to bank capital is concerned).
BUT the Report is from a super controversial NGO that has long been targeted by Republicans and may soon be DOGEd, so it could be filled with speculation, half-truths, innuendo and lies.
Still...They didn't use StarLink?! I mean, is that not the greatest evidence you could ever hope for of an obvious NSA backdoor in StarLink? They were willing to risk obscure premises-based (bandwidth) monitoring over holding a mini-dish out the window for a few seconds..Too much! I feel like I owe someone $20 for a ticket.
vaxman · 13d ago
Not even 24 hours later, I called it --the Administration IS asking Congress to de-fund NPR:
Meanwhile NPR has new reporting that DOGE has sent two of its boys back to NLRB, but they're going to work remotely. Is the hope here that this will provide ongoing justification for DOGE remote data access as the Feds sort out what they did in the first visit? Like even though NPR's first report stated that Russia has tried to login remotely using valid DOGE credentials just after DOGE personnel left the first time?
> particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets
This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something.
The discussion with the “whistle blower” and other experts is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it.
Am I reading it wrong?
JumpCrisscross · 15d ago
There is evidence DOGE went out of its way to illegally conceal what it was doing. That, alone, is enough to put these kids in jail one day.
flanked-evergl · 14d ago
What law would they have broken?
grandempire · 14d ago
My original comment here has not been flagged - but all my responses to other comments have. This is distorting the conversation. There is only one DOGE narrative allowed on this site.
DustinBrett · 14d ago
Indeed and sad, it's becoming like Reddit. There is no discourse going on here or nearly anywhere. Sadly on X it's the opposite but equally one sided.
Robotbeat · 14d ago
Agreed entirely. The comments in this article read exactly like Reddit, the tone, the downvoting, etc. and I agree about your comments on X being a sort of rightwing mirror of that, too. Super disappointed in Hackernews.
muddi900 · 10d ago
I came from a mobile app to the site just to see your flagged comments.
I would say you were treated with far more respect than you deserve. If i didn't know any better, I would say you were paid to act this stupid.
None of your arguments were in good faith, you constantly moved goal posts, and actively disregard every piece of eveidence that was presented.
You can claim I am biased. I would agree with you. I am biased against this blatant display of imbecilty.
jasonlotito · 15d ago
Yes. You claim:
"This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something ...[and] is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it."
This paragraph makes it clear it's not just about misusing data and large file sizes.
> Those forensic digital records are important for record-keeping requirements and they allow for troubleshooting, but they also allow experts to investigate potential breaches, sometimes even tracing the attacker's path back to the vulnerability that let them inside a network.
Let's be clear:
> Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.
Neither of these have to do with "large file size" or misusing data.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
Yes. Now, before you go moving goal posts, you made claims, and I've debunked those claims with quotes you said you needed. Because clearly the article is ALSO talking about these other things as problematic as well, so it's not "the entire article". (Also, the "entire article appears"? Appears? Just read it, it talks about numerous things, and is very clear on the different elements it's talking about.)
This isn't the only stuff mentioned, so be careful about claiming "oh, I just missed that" or some such because there are other things that can be referenced, such as the massive amount of text spent on the whistleblower issues and the threats made to them.
And before you talk about this just being "speculation," that's why we have the process we have, so people can make claims that can then be investigated. And that's what's being stopped.
Finally, "no evidence besides large file size" is also not true.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
As someone said, it's more likely you didn't even read it.
arunabha · 15d ago
I am genuinely curious as to what your point is. Not saying it's wrong, but a succinct summary might be useful.
Sonnigeszeug · 15d ago
There were already news from weeks ago how they started to put servers on the internet with access to systems, which should not have access to/from the internet for security reasons.
This is just on top of all the other things. happened.
9283409232 · 15d ago
Someone exfiltrated sensitive data. That isn't in question. The only question is who did it and why. As far as DOGE's involvement, there is no proof but there is plenty of evidence.
No comments yet
insane_dreamer · 15d ago
> Am I reading it wrong?
Yes
grandempire · 14d ago
Good comment.
intermerda · 15d ago
> Am I reading it wrong?
Based on your comments, you're not reading the article at all.
> Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise-but given how these are not very technically skilled and are moving very fast in systems they don’t understand, I’d be completely unsurprised to learn that they unintentionally left something exposed or that one of them has been compromised.
There were already people auditing departments, but they got fired early on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_general#United_State...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
There's even an entire agency devoted to auditing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
Trying to find efficiency by bringing in the private sector is not a new thing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
No comments yet
These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.
If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.
That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
Or perhaps someone got invited to the wrong group chat again.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/16/trump-putin-russia...
ftfy
In fact I would imagine they would do exactly the opposite because they would look at the mere ability to hide what they did as an audit finding.
"We already have an audit from last year, we just need the funding to improv--"
"Oh, and they want to turn off all the security cameras next weekend. You'll know it's them because they'll be wearing masks."
"Sir, we have a responsibility to our customers, we can't ju--"
"Do it or you're fired."
manager: "the auditors found all of our money missing"
::silence::
manager: "they are clearly doing an amazing job, and you are all fired for allowing such fraud waste and abuse"
Well, maybe one shouldn't be using Google DNS server when violating ToU to download Google's video.
No comments yet
Why aren't we to believe that this is Elon Musk going after anyone filing a complaint to the NLRB (from X, Twitter or SpaceX) or, worse yet (from Elon's POV), anyone potentially organizing any unionization effort?
There's absolutely no reason DOGE should have access to this information. There's absolutely no reason their activity, such as what information they accessed, should be hidden.
It looks to be both
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords
At least I can share it. And wait. And hope.
By which I mean, stoicism is really becoming a survival stance for me. And I recommend it for others.
Some people will retreat from the news, but that’s not me.
What is happening is going to cause a great deal of lasting mental hardships, as well as the practical damage.
Second tack: remember we are still in history. History has always been crazy, with only short periods of less crazy.
A third tack is considering how to support other people, instead of needing support.
Best to find a way to reliably maintain internal peace and health right now. Things are unlikely to stabilize soon, without a miracle. Or eventually bounce back. But that could take a long time. And this could just be the preamble for much worse disasters. Gulp.
At least, this is how I am prepping myself! Scary times.
This is woefully ignorant of the fact that some people will be thrown into an El Salvadorian prison, killed, disappeared, threatened, lose civil liberties, lose human rights, ect.
Must be nice to just put on some headphones and wait for it to all blow over. Unfortunately for many immigrants, LGBTQ members, activists, union members, government workers don't have that luxury. The news you're ignoring are their lives being shattered.
I made no implication that very bad things are not happening. Or that anyone is immune. Quite the opposite.
But I don't want to be afraid, regardless of what happens. Not the, "I can't sleep at night" afraid. Nor the, "I can't speak up and take action" afraid. That is quite literally what the main actors want.
People's ability to maintain their mental health is going to matter. There are so many ways to spiral, internally and externally, during traumatic times, and we all need to be at our best. For ourselves, for each other.
Now might be a good time to be generally supportive of each other. A systemic lack of tolerance for differences of thought is a prime contributor to the fiasco we are in.
No comments yet
https://archive.ph/fkyDF
Right now, at this moment, society has a small window of opportunity.
People cannot get rid of autocracy by themselves, they have become controlled resources. It took millions of free people to get rid of the Nazi's.
Have conversations with your friends, the grocery store owner.
Join grassroots organizations, or start a local one. Keep people accountable. Your local politician bends over because he is afraid of consequences. Now give people no way out but do the right thing. When people are transported to concentration camps, than such is not an act of God, but people doing unconstitutional things while not being held accountable.
Fascism is not Hitler. It is collective, sociological behavior. Trump is a nuisance. The problem is a society engineered to give consent to the .1%, the Dark Mirror tech bro's, the christian cultists.
I disagree. It seemed blindingly obviously sarcastic to me -- and the rest of the comments it generated indicate the same.
EDIT: PS the peer comment by blindsight has a much more cogent critique
If government agencies are compromised - via software backdoors or any other mechanism - any data and systems they can access should be considered compromised too.
You are a Human Resource to be commercialized. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
One is not a person. One has no rights. Unless one can free themself and their loved ones of neoliberal brainwashing.
And the same half of the population do not trust anything what npr.org says.
Understanding the above dynamic is key to grasping the current state of discourse in the U.S.
[1] https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docum...
Usually there's a shakedown, did Trump ever make NPR an offer they "couldn't" refuse?
Really feels like the fox is already in the coop.
Has some of the protected disclosure document from the whistleblower.
https://bsky.app/profile/mattjay.com/post/3ln2dgoksce2e
Looks like Elon's staff went in and made a copy of everything - which in this case NLRB, so sensitive stuff, but any state department going to have a ton of sensitive stuff - and sent it who knows where; this after disabling all logging and a ton of security, presumably to try to cover their tracks.
This is bad. These guys are looking like bad actors, with State-level authorization for access to everything.
Also looks like they're kids and don't have the hang of security, and the professional Russian State run APTs have hacked them.
https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/demo...
The owner could, of course, just make it public again, or put it back up, and end all the speculation.
https://archive.ph/fUa5Q
I'm trying to think through this:
1. if the screenshot is not doctored, then the implied ordering of last updated would have had it last updated before January 20, 2021; which would mean it has nothing to do with what is alleged in the article.
2. But in the archive.ph snapshot from 2/28/25 doesn't have it at all anywhere.
3. Archive.org's 3/21/25 snapshot shows the same thing as archive.ph
4. The article states that after this tweet (https://x.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390) dated 2/28/25 (the date of the archive.ph 2/28/25 snapshot), Berulis noticed NxGenBdoorExtract in the repo: "After journalist Roger Sollenberger started posting on X about the account, Berulis noticed something Wick was working on: a project, or repository, titled "NxGenBdoorExtract." Wick made it private before Berulis could investigate further, he told NPR.
Of course, if it really only was public for a very brief moment then it might not be in the snapshot, and the article isn't clear exactly how long after that tweet that Berulis supposedly discovered this.
All I can say is this: I can't figure out for the life of me what all this adds up to.
And they absolutely should be resisted with this deadline in mind...
And this Chief Executive was elected by the majority of the country, specifically to take these actions that he'd clearly stated he would take.
The resistance is actually the violation of federal law. It's no different from contempt of court; within the President's domain, he has a huge amount of power. The President can also modify existing policy (regulations) at any time and literally make new laws (Executive Orders have the force of law) as long as they don't conflict with current law, as well as overturning previous President's Executive Orders.
Of course, then the shoe will be on the other food someday, too, just as it was when Biden took over from Trump and then they switched places again.
As President Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...
If he ordered you to break the law or professional standards, would you obey? This is not hypothetical for many people: if you’re a lawyer, professional engineer, healthcare professional, work in HR, etc. it is not at all uncommon to suggest legal ways to accomplish a goal.
According to the article, that’s exactly what happened here: they have various federal laws and regulations covering their work, but as at other agencies, DOGE decided they don’t need to follow those. This confirms that their stated purpose is not their true motivation but it remains to be seen whether there will be any consequences.
Your misunderstanding seems to be to think that the word of the president is the law, like in a dictatorship. In the US system of separation of powers, that's not how it is supposed to work.
As I understood it, this "immunity" is granted for POTUS doing things in the course of their responsibility as POTUS. Could it be argued that breaking laws & orders which bind the activity of POTUS is _inherently not_ the work someone in that role?
Immunity also isn't absolute. For example police in the US typically enjoy broad immunity but that doesn't imply not getting dragged into court. They just have sweeping legal defenses available to them that other people don't.
Except said "chief executive" was not elected by "a majority of the country."
He wasn't even elected by a majority of those who voted (~35-40% of the population), but rather a plurality of those who voted (~20% of the population).
Note that I am not claiming that there was anything nefarious (I have no evidence to support making such a claim), just that those who voted for that person represent only ~20% of the US population, not a "majority of the country."
There are procedures to do the things that he said he wanted to do, because we are well aware of how an unchecked executive can destroy our government by doing what they want however they want.
Allow me to illustrate Exhibit A, unfolding now.
We used to have a government like this, a spoils system, and it didn't work. So both parties created the civil service. Both parties passed things like that Administrative Procedures act.
The President is literally the Chief Executive officer in the United States.
https://people.howstuffworks.com/president4.htm
> Laws and budgets are set by Congress
That's correct, under Article 1, but the President does not have to spend every dime that was allocated.
> EOs do not have the force of law
"Both executive orders and proclamations have the force of law, much like regulations issued by federal agencies"
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publicat...
You seem to underestimate the power that is vested in the office of the President as the Chief Executive.
> have been invalidated by courts
As have many, many legislatively-passed laws; this is simply checks-and-balances and allows the judiciary to act on other laws (which originate from Congress) and regulations (which originate from the Executive Branch).
No, he was not. He was elected by ~30% of the possible voters in this country because most people chose no one and stayed home.
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
CNN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsqgXfrSksI
It will go down as the most successful assault on America since 9/11 once the true scale of the damage is understood.
Not only will Musk be able to tap into it for years but foreign governments.
Why are people being deported for no crimes or for far lesser crimes?
But those agencies cannot do anything if an elected/named official decides to work for an adversary, since those agencies are under command of the elected/name official.
That's why democracy is beyond the scope of those agencies.
Those agencies are "fences" to protect a teenager from doing mistakes. But it cannot protect the teenager from setting himself on fire.
In my view, democracy was always vulnerable if the people or elected official can be convinced of whatever.
My understanding was that they routinely do their work far outside of the law. Because such agencies have demonstrated a willingness to violate the constitution of the US, lie to both congress and the president, overthrow the democratically elected leaders of sovereign nations, perform acts of torture, rape, human experimentation, assassination, etc. it seems odd that they'd suddenly shy away from taking any action now.
"Supporting democracy" in Latin America always meant anti-communism, even to the extent of ending free elections.
No comments yet
> And Berulis noticed that an unknown user had exported a "user roster," a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.
Possibly looking for lawyers for Trump to target with EOs or blackmail.
Given all of Musks actions, he is probably wanting to destroy any agency that went against him, because he truly believes he is the humanities savior and his companies are doing things the right way.
First the "average" american is softly but ideologically committed to liberalism¹ & democracy as fundamental values. From that perspective the mind kind of recoils from accepting this. If this is really what's happening, what does civic obligation demand of me? How does that reconcile with my inability to keep my family safe in the face of a motivated & powerful state that wishes to harm me through them? Easier to believe this isn't what is happening, I don't need to take action yet. A powerful example of motivated reasoning.
Second a significant part of the userbase here, as with the general population, supports some or all of these actions. Simple as.
¹ Like in the traditional sense, ie "a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law" from wikipedia.
People support what they claim to do doing and are naive enough to believe they are doing what they say without asking questions about why they seem to be going out of there way to avoid transparency or providing any real evidence to their claims.
But when they start doing stuff like tarrifs for no reason what so ever, to the point where even Musk thinks its stupid, the situation is sad more than scary. US has lost its edge for literally nothing in return.
The Republicans are basically still at the mercy of the economy - Trump backed of tariffs real quick when Japan started selling off US debt on the cheap. So I don't think its going to get levels of Saddam Hussein authoritarian. But time will tell.
The thing is, just like in Russia, smart people will know when to leave, and will leave, which is good. As soon as it becomes economically better to work in EU, you will have lots of talented people immigrating there which will bolster their economy.
Part of me is sympathetic to them because a lot of these people are people who live privileged lives and have never before been in any political pressure. These people have previously been able to just detach from politics because they knew, no matter what, they would end up on top. And now, that assumption is no longer true and they have the enter a world that a variety of minority groups have already been living in. They have to face the reality that politics isn't just something on the TV, but something that affects their lives.
If they're accessing data that requires clearances, they have the required clearances. That's mandatory, and no one is going to show them anything without them.
My guess, based on the fact you use terms like "protected government data" is that you don't even know enough about this topic to make up words about it.
There is no "forcing access". It simply doesn't work that way.
If the President clears them, they are cleared. That's perfectly legal. The President is the federal government's OCA.
.....Regarding financing;
>Funding for NPR comes from dues and fees paid by member stations, underwriting from corporate sponsors, and annual grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.[4] Most of its member stations are owned by non-profit organizations, including public school districts, colleges, and universities. NPR operates independently of any government or corporation, and has full control of its content.[5]
.....Regarding governance;
> NPR is a membership organization. Member stations are required to be non-commercial or non-commercial educational radio stations; have at least five full-time professional employees; operate for at least 18 hours per day; and not be designed solely to further a religious broadcasting philosophy or be used for classroom distance learning programming. Each member station receives one vote at the annual NPR board meetings—exercised by its designated Authorized Station Representative ("A-Rep").
Now, I do question the authenticity of your question. Everyone knows that NPR is reputable and everyone knows why. Their reputation precedes them. But I entertained your charade and now I implore you to entertain one of mine.
Can you provide me the same detailed information which demonstrates why someone should trust OAN? How about Breitbart? How about Newsmax? Can you please pick one and demonstrate why they are trustworthy using a similar format that I provided for you?
Ehhhh... I remember vividly a moment during the Iraq war in which NPR's ombudsman spent 20 minutes justifying the network's use of the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" when speaking about torture conducted by the CIA and others. It was terminology being pushed by the then-current administration, which NPR chose not only to parrot, but to justify. To the benefit of the administration and the detriment of human rights. I haven't had illusions about the network's accuracy, neutrality, or journalistic integrity since.
24 years?
I guess you could call that well known. Not in a good way.
...
> This is a difficult topic for Dan to discuss, but prior to our filing the whistle-blower disclosure this week, last week, somebody went to Dan's home and taped a threatening note, a menacing note on his door with personal information.
> While he was at work, and it also contained photographs of him walking his dog taken by a drone. So…
> The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
These are a bunch of 20-something tech bro ego cases convinced of their crusade to remake government along libertarian axes they learned from Reddit/4chan/HN. These are simply not people motivated out of a genuine desire to improve the public good. And they've been given essentially unsupervised access to some outrageously tempting levers.
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.
this is exactly what you save a zero day for, and something gives me the vibe about some of these guys that they dont take opsec very seriously, probably would not even need one
Did you miss the presidential cryptocurrency?
DOGE guys will probably end up wiring money directly to their own bank account, proudly brandish the receipts on national television, and no Republicans will make a move against them.
Plenty of people here can have a problem with this administration and Vance himself, or not, without those who disagree pretending that we're a week away from goose stepping down 5th Avenue in NYC.
Your lack of paying attention to this or lack of understanding how bad that is is not a problem in the rest of us.
Before you give me this nonsense of "they are criminals", number one this is still an inhumane way to treat convicted people, and number two they have not been convicted of anything, number three there have been tons of reports of the accusations made against these people being total BS.
Earlier this week, Trump was on microphone telling El Salvador's president that he wants him to build five more gulags and that we will send American citizens there.
At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.
This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.
Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
Why would that be, because it's too "political" for tech news? Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
Switching to https://news.ycombinator.com/active (/active) with showdead is a better HN experience, nowadays.
[0]https://hckrnews.com/
From what I see, even good comments with facts and sources that go against the prevalent narrative are either downvoted or flagged a good chunk of the time, which discourages people from commenting(as it's meant to be) because of lack of visibility. It can also make the commenters unable to post comments for hours because HN's rate limiter kicks in, so they are effectively silenced.
Also, many times they're attacked personally and those comments violating HN's etiquette are not downvoted or flagged. Not to mention very low quality Redditesque are also not downvoted or flagged, but are upvoted, which lowers the quality of HN as a whole.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710265
It happens all the time.
Here's an example of my comment on the same topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256114
The tone policing one has to do has to be done only by one side, the other "side" can write very low quality comments with personal attacks and not get downvoted or flagged as frequently. It's same on Reddit too. Absolute misinformation and FUD gets voted up if they favor the prevalent side and countering comments are downvoted creating a chilling effect to reduce visibility and discourage participation of folks that don't agree 100% with the political narrative.
That is exactly how Reddit became more and more extreme leading to popular subs becoming full of death threats at one point. And HN is on it's way there.
I can't change other people, but I can change myself.
Sometimes, it is what it is. But often I can find a way to more effectively say what I was trying.
Exhibit A: avoiding the dangling ad hom after an otherwise solid point. Seductive but unproductive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710568
Zero ad hominem or anything else.
And I see this all the time. Not to mention only one "side" is subject to this suppression so it's no surprise that they prefer to(or are forced by the site mechanics to) disengage from commenting.
If sourced verifiable facts stated in a neutral way are punished, what chance do opinions or personal takes have? It's a textbook example of an echo chamber.
Anything Musk related on here has always been prone to less constructive conversation, even before he became a part of the partisan political circus.
It was downvoted for a while.
> In general, many of your comments have a slight bitter, combative air to them that probably hampers your communication effectiveness
Comments that are much more bitter and combative than mine and without sources are upvoted all the time, because they fuel a certain political narrative.
I think retaliating like this just makes HN worse. If you stop flagging perfectly good stories, HN will be a marginally nicer place for discussion. I'll say the same to anyone here who admits to blanket flagging of comments.
Please keep trying to discuss your views. Sometimes they'll get smacked down unfairly, but other times they'll stick around. The more you try, the more they'll stick, and hopefully it can shift the tone of discussion here.
What a way to live.
> Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.
Perhaps you ought to look in the mirror.
Or just drive-by up/down according to if they agree with you or not.
Sorry that was your experience, and hopefully we can all be less... that... together.
AFAIK a small number of them is enough to hide stuff from the front page. I don't know why is this the case, honestly I don't see any benefit over full time-moderators hiding problematic stuff, only negatives. Like why should a small political group be able to distort the news on the front page?
Politics are everywhere. It’s how we negotiate consensus and make collective decisions. From what a government should do down to what features will be worked on this sprint and where are we having lunch today.
Tech being apolitical is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Gumroad is not a YC company and its founder has no influence over HN or YC. Joe, whilst being one of the most successful, is still just one YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000, and doesn't represent YC. Paul Graham, YC's co-founder (who, whilst retired, is still actively involved and is very influential at YC) heavily criticises the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter. The other figures named in the GP comment have no involvement or influence on YC, and indeed some have had very hostile disputes with YC partners and notable founders in the past.
This is not to claim that we moderators are perfectly impervious to every influence and incentive at every moment. Awareness of our own potential to be biased and influenced is essential to being able to do this job effectively.
I just think it's important to point out that things are not nearly as simple as the GP comment purports.
There are worse places on the internet, but HN's role first and foremost is to serve as advertising and a job board for YC. There's a structural bent away from anything that might be seen as harmful to that core purpose.
It's unfortunate.
It's important that HN give things back to YC in exchange for funding it. Otherwise the lack of balance would eventually make the site, and thus the community, unsustainable. For all of us who care about HN, this is the way to ensure its long-term survival. But there's no reason not to be transparent about what those things are, which is what the FAQ does.
For example, there's a startup launch on the front page right now which our software placed there this morning:
Launch HN: mrge.io (YC X25) – Cursor for code review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692476 - April 2025 (89 comments)
One nice thing about startup launch threads is that, to judge by the comments and upvotes they receive, the community often (though not always!) finds them interesting. They fall off the front page more quickly if they're not resonating.
I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).
This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.
And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.
So let's just say it like it is...
If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.
"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!" Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.
For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.
Let me assure you: the trash can bully vibes were default here far before you were.
HN is fine for what it is, but it's never ever been good.
I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.
This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.
Founders are (generally) not hackers and not your friends. They are money men and will always follow the money.
And the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.
Things have stabilized on roughly one thread on the evils of Republicans per day. Unfortunately they're managing a lot more evil per day than that.
1. there's a tsunami of intense (and important) political stories right now
2. HN has 30 slots on its frontpage
3. HN is not a current affairs site
In other words, the fundamentals themselves are twisted in a knot. I don't see how one gets around that.
The current problem is that news that are critic of the current administration are suppressed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462783 (U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat) was off the front page for like ~24 hours?
You are describing the problem that there are too many actual politic related news on the front page. That is not a problem right now.
If you find that hard to believe, see these lists:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43227619
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527
They are a couple months old now, but the point hasn't changed: the most-discussed (by far!) topic on Hacker News gets perceived as totally-suppressed-and-silenced by the passionate portion [1] of the audience that wants more of this material. I call this the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. [2]
This is not a new phenomenon [3]. Here's an example of the same thing from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. That was me responding to someone complaining that the most-discussed-by-far topic on HN was being "aggressively removed from discussion".
Meanwhile, the audience that wants less of this material perceives the site as being completely-overrun-by-politics. To these we have to give the inverse of the current explanation. You can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 how far back that goes.
Both of these perceptions are wrong. Both are consequences of the fundamentals I listed in the GP comment. And both are special cases of a more general phenomenon: for anyone passionate about topic X, the HN front page never contains enough X.
The most passionate users rarely express their preference as "I would prefer more X on HN". Rather they say: "It's unbelievable how X is completely and utterly suppressed and censored on HN".
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I use 'passionate' or 'passion' a lot to describe these segments of the audience (on any topic and/or side). This is not intended disrespectfully. People have legitimate reasons for feeling passionately, and often the topics are far more important than most stories on HN. However, mitigating the power of these passions to shape HN is critical to keeping this the kind of site that it's supposed to be. If we didn't do this, HN would turn into a current affairs site overnight.
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] The reason this is not a new phenomenon is because of what I said in my GP comment: it follows from the fundamentals of the site.
p.s. The thread you linked to spent 15 hours on HN's front page. That's a lot.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If these stories mostly didn't get flagged or otherwise moderator, HN would turn overnight into a current affairs site, which it is not and never has been.
That still leaves room for some stories with political overlap, though not nearly as many as the politically passionate would prefer. Btw, this is a special case of a more general principle: there are not nearly as many stories on any topic X as the X-passionate would desire. The front page, in that sense, satisfies no one!
But back to the politics thing—here are some links to past explanations about how we deal with that:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 has a good list of more.
For those who are up for a more complex explanation, this is really how I think about this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306. The basic idea is to avoid predictable sequences: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
But of course there's no rhyme or reason to "users" either, since that's really just a statistical cloud (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(Also, if anyone is weary of my inveterate self-linking: sorry, I am too. It's just somehow the only semi-efficient way I've found to give enough background information on various points of HN.)
Now that dang has confirmed it's incorrect, maybe stop sticking with it.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
---
Edit: I found these ones. Admittedly most weren't on the frontpage for all that long:
EU issues US-bound staff with burner phones over spying fears - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680556 - April 2025 (46 comments)
How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43630624 - April 2025 (338 comments)
Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43555597 - April 2025 (36 comments)
How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43480730 - March 2025 (98 comments)
Is it safe to travel to the United States with your phone? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452474 - March 2025 (164 comments)
EFF Border Search Pocket Guide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43441895 - March 2025 (32 comments)
Ask HN: Are you afraid to travel to US to tech conferences? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422350 - March 2025 (198 comments)
I am really not complaining about moderation, just attempting to appeal to the users who I have assumed are doing the flagging, in general.
You are funding and dang is running a forum for curiosity while the basis for curiosity is under attack.
Your dilemma is to support free inquiry and a platform for curiosity resulting in you being an enemy of the administration or to obey their wishes in order to protect yourself and your assets. What happens when everyone in every position of power rationally protects themselves in the short term by selling out their values in the long term, when they bury their head in the sand and stay in denial, or they run away to another safer country?
How many of your peers have any form of integrity? How many of them wouldn't sell out their mother for a dollar? How many of them fund and participate in building a world anyone would want to live in instead of a world where they are the supreme rulers of the ruins. Concentration camps were built by business men excited by cheap labor.
You cannot have curiosity without solidarity against forces that would submit reason to power. You cannot have curiosity without a consent based society. Curiosity fundamentally challenges power, because it elevates reason above authority. Curiosity presumes that reason is the ultimate form of legitimacy.
Hacker news has a goal of staving off Eternal September, when new students, people uninitiated to academic rigor or professional social conventions, would flood Usenet every September when they received credentials from their academic institutions. Those very same universities which helped build the type of culture you hold in high regard are under direct attack.
Curious environments won't survive neutrality. Curious environments won't survive lack of solidarity with other institutions that inspire curiosity. Systems, like authoritarianism, that demand obedience rather than reason are the default, and they require active maintenance to prevent. Neutrality under these conditions is neglect of curiosity.
You've got me confused with someone else cause I ain't funding anything beside my burrito habit.
As to the rest of this stuff... I don't find it terribly persuasive, personally. We do all have all sorts of moral responsibilities, individual and collective ones and it behooves us to meet them. We do not have a responsibility to turn every single facet and corner of our lives into some instrument of political power and expression - those are important individual (and group) choices and there's a name for disregarding them and imposing them on others - totalitarianism.
I'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
edit: and to be clear, I was not originally critiquing the modding here.
But maybe the far more appropriate term has been there all along:
> The Knights Who Say "Ni!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIV4poUZAQo
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
[1]: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorshi...
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
For the sake of context, this is an old Soviet-era joke, that translates to about the following:
> In "Pravda" (The Truth, CPSU's newspaper) there are no news. In "Izvestiya" (The News, national newspaper of the USSR, under the control of the Supreme Soviet) there is no truth.
Technically, maybe you can squint and find small pieces that are more efficient but in the grand scheme of things they goal doesn't seem to be a smaller government.
Reducing headcount reduces labor costs and can be a form of financial efficiency. Reducing headcount also usually reduces the sheer number of people involved in any project, much like a small startup can move drastically quicker than a large, established org.
That said, there goal here doesn't seem to be clear as to what is being made efficient and they definitely aren't reducing the budget or size of government (outside of literal headcount, most people complain instead of red tape and regulations).
Their real goal is more likely a combination of grift and settling grudges.
Edit - typos
I hope he doesn't think Trump is his boy and will keep DOJ off his back. The problem is that the institutional funds and market makers will not support this level of Watergate/Enron/WorldCom-like risk and Trump isn't going to become entangled in that (since it means the corporate death penalty as far as public equity and access to bank capital is concerned).
BUT the Report is from a super controversial NGO that has long been targeted by Republicans and may soon be DOGEd, so it could be filled with speculation, half-truths, innuendo and lies.
Still...They didn't use StarLink?! I mean, is that not the greatest evidence you could ever hope for of an obvious NSA backdoor in StarLink? They were willing to risk obscure premises-based (bandwidth) monitoring over holding a mini-dish out the window for a few seconds..Too much! I feel like I owe someone $20 for a ticket.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-p...
Meanwhile NPR has new reporting that DOGE has sent two of its boys back to NLRB, but they're going to work remotely. Is the hope here that this will provide ongoing justification for DOGE remote data access as the Feds sort out what they did in the first visit? Like even though NPR's first report stated that Russia has tried to login remotely using valid DOGE credentials just after DOGE personnel left the first time?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366851/doge-nlrb-whist...
This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something.
The discussion with the “whistle blower” and other experts is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it.
Am I reading it wrong?
I would say you were treated with far more respect than you deserve. If i didn't know any better, I would say you were paid to act this stupid.
None of your arguments were in good faith, you constantly moved goal posts, and actively disregard every piece of eveidence that was presented.
You can claim I am biased. I would agree with you. I am biased against this blatant display of imbecilty.
"This entire article appears to be speculation about data they MAY have taken with no evidence besides large file size that they are misusing something ...[and] is only about how serious it would be IF they misused it."
This paragraph makes it clear it's not just about misusing data and large file sizes.
> Those forensic digital records are important for record-keeping requirements and they allow for troubleshooting, but they also allow experts to investigate potential breaches, sometimes even tracing the attacker's path back to the vulnerability that let them inside a network.
Let's be clear:
> Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.
Neither of these have to do with "large file size" or misusing data.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
Yes. Now, before you go moving goal posts, you made claims, and I've debunked those claims with quotes you said you needed. Because clearly the article is ALSO talking about these other things as problematic as well, so it's not "the entire article". (Also, the "entire article appears"? Appears? Just read it, it talks about numerous things, and is very clear on the different elements it's talking about.)
This isn't the only stuff mentioned, so be careful about claiming "oh, I just missed that" or some such because there are other things that can be referenced, such as the massive amount of text spent on the whistleblower issues and the threats made to them.
And before you talk about this just being "speculation," that's why we have the process we have, so people can make claims that can then be investigated. And that's what's being stopped.
Finally, "no evidence besides large file size" is also not true.
"Am I reading it wrong?"
As someone said, it's more likely you didn't even read it.
This is just on top of all the other things. happened.
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Yes
Based on your comments, you're not reading the article at all.
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