> 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...
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.
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.
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.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?
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.
Really feels like the fox is already in the coop.
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.
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.
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.
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).
But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
It will go down as the most successful assault on America since 9/11 once the true scale of the damage is understood.
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.
Not only will Musk be able to tap into it for years but foreign governments.
> 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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> 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.
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.
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.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.
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 relationships 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!"
- Peter Thiel
- Elon Musk
- Marc Andreessen
- Curtis YarvinMany 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...
.....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 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?
"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.
Yes
Based on your comments, you're not reading the article at all.