I do understand wanting to avoid “politics” (however that gets defined) on HN but in this particular moment it feels like a real loss.

I’ve read articles about how DOGE might have misinterpreted data because of COBOL, just today I saw the announcement of all these “5 things” emails being plugged into AI… there are a lot of people on HN well positioned to comment knowledgably on this stuff but the threads get flagged very quickly.

Do a search for "doge" or "musk". There are plenty threads that don't get flagged.

It’s all so speculative.

I was contacted by a reporter asking about the possible security implications of the Doge stuff.

All I could think of was the false/misleading claims about DNS traffic on Trumps server back in 2016.

I said something like, “if the humans in charge grant access to another human, a secure system would grant the new human access.”

They didn’t use my quote.

> It’s all so speculative.

Yes and no. DOGE already set up a site that gave the public write access. There are stories to be told already.

Sorry I don’t know about this. How can you know what permissions a web app has?

I’m a little flustered by all this talk of “read-access” and “write-access” in reference to DOGE.

Reading and writing what?

If these transactions systems are well designed, everything is written. They should be using special “write-once, read-many” media ensure everything is immutably recorded.

Even if it’s just a conventional SQL database and not some kind of transaction ledger, you can recreate the state of the DB by rerunning all SQL commands, which should be recorded.

What does “write” mean exactly here?

> Sorry I don’t know about this. How can you know what permissions a web app has?

https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-...

The cobol thing was just some random guys tweet, that had a wrong premise to start with as the first of all dates were stored as strings not dates, and then later proven further wrong when they released the number of each person in each age bracket. These things are too politicized to get much value, hell people even think Elon waving to the crowd was a nazi salute. In all its all speculation except for the details posted on doge.gov anyways. Unfortunately since Elon's trump endorsement people are mostly just one side picking their favorite or picking on their least favorite.

> hell people even think Elon waving to the crowd was a nazi salute.

Because it was. To describe what he did as a “wave” is simply not plausible.

Also HN is not that efficient at flamewars. When a new iphone generates 2k comments, you have to logout to visit (enables cache/cdn/?), cause it stops responding otherwise. Now imagine 10 politics threads on the frontpage with thousands of flamers piling in. HN simply can’t do that. It’s a niche lisp server for discussing this week’s ai-generated ts frameworks. Politics go reddit.

dang rewrote things so it's more efficient now. They don't have to paginate large threads anymore and performance remains good.

It used to be that a single thread with ~200 comments could slow down the server, on the front page there are 3 discussions I saw (quick scan) at or over 200 and one over 600.

Oh, good to know!

>Politics go reddit.

Aka completely undiscussable woth any sense of nuance, which ironically enough is a great way to bury a lede.

But on the technical side... Man, reddit cannot handle more than 500 comments, old or new. Open thst pagination and you get repeats, orphaned replies, and a disgusting amount of lag for what should ideally just be static text.

While I don't flag them, I also don't typically vouch/upvote them. I just comment for however long they might last, with the idea that a certain amount of off-topic-ness is inevitable and a kind of safety-valve.

As much as I like a good politics/law discussion, for this "DOGE stuff" on HN I try to limit my support to items which are either:

1. News about technical details

2. Discuss information-security policies and principles

3. Contain a significant niche educational component, like how Impoundment has been historically used and how Nixon's abuses of it led to the Impoundment Act of 1974.

Fourth option: the articles are basically flamebait, as this one happens to be. Nothing of substance has occurred here; a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order for a couple of weeks until the case can move forward.

I don't know. Is it really not important that a single guy, the richest in the world and heavily dependend on government subsides, able to access personal data of every single government employee ? (And send them pretty childish emails over the weekend !)

Given the fact that people with very questionable backgrounds "work" on this data, it all looks like a massive potential for data leaks. It happens in plain sight, and apparently not many people object. Or more accurately, as on this website, they are silenced.

The argument about politics here is that it is more important than most tech discussions, so could easily crowd out the tech and 'interesting' (but perhaps kind of obscure) articles.

For instance a discussion about Ukraine... what happens there is life-or-death for thousands of people.

It's tough to look away from it right now though. At nearly 50, I still think tech is fun and interesting, but I'm getting to an age where I want to leave a better world for my kids and it looks like what they'll actually get is perhaps much worse than what I grew up with.

Not thousands of people. Millions of people. At least.

In theory, yes. In practice I rarely see more than one topic on the front page a day. It's still about popularity among the audience, and of course HN's own algorithms (and dang) tend to do a good job of avoiding multiple like-minded topics being scattered out like Reddit does.

There is a huge amount of relentless work from 'dang' and others moderating the site. That's a big reason you don't see that stuff.

I don't know, but this temporary restraining order doesn't tell you anything new about the question.

Except it does. A TRO means the judge believes it likely that your case has merit and will win and that there is irreparable public harm without a TRO.

It's the opinion of a single judge, before a trial has occurred. It has some meaning, but just last week a different judge said the opposite in a related case (as the article notes), so clearly, opinions will vary.

Must we have blaring headlines and political flamefests every time a judge issues an intermediate ruling related to DOGE?

Yes. Because of the second part of what is required for a TRO. Irreparable public harm.

It should be news worthy

"Irreparable harm"...IF AND ONLY IF the case is decided in favor of the plaintiffs, and there is determined to be harm from the behavior. Neither of which has actually occurred yet.

All the judge has done is to decree that:

a) her opinion is that the plaintiffs are "likely to" prevail, and

b) you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so it makes sense to pause the behavior in question while trial is pending.

You're getting worked up over theoretical outcomes. TROs happen all the time, even in cases where the eventual outcome is in favor of the defendants.

>Must we have blaring headlines and political flamefests every time a judge issues an intermediate ruling related to DOGE?

I believe that's how case ruling posts commonly work on HN (plenty of "the case may proceed" with tech company news), so I don't see why not. The whole process of law is slow so it's nigh impossible for it to flood HN.

A temporary restraining order is an extraordinary measure, never granted as a right. To grant one, the plaintiff needs to succeed on all four factors: irreparable harm, likelihood of success on the merits, balance of equities, and public interest.(Yes, I've read enough TRO-related stuff that I can recite the verbiage from memory.)

Winning a TRO essentially requires that the judge agree you're going to win your case eventually and that you can't even wait until a preliminary injunction hearing to get some relief. On the flip side, losing a TRO doesn't mean all that much.

> Nothing of substance has occurred here; a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order

A TRO is something of a substance, both literally in itself and its immediate effect, and also as an indicator on the merits since a TRO requires a finding of probability of success on the merits.

> Nothing of substance has occurred here; a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order

Maybe nothing of substance to you.

But it's certainly something of substance to US citizens. Which are, I argue, a majority of HN users given YCombinator's location.

>Nothing of substance has occurred here; a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order for a couple of weeks until the case can move forward.

Given the hesitancy a few weeks ago, I'd say this is important news to know of.

But sure, politics is popular flame war just like a topic about X vs Y or any AI news.

fwiw, I flag nearly every time because of the latter reason. Almost universal cheap, knee-jerk, low-effort comments in every thread I've seen.