This is a temporary restraining order (TRO), so the judge did not need to, and did not actually, rule that they did violate the Privacy Act, but that they likely did so, and that this probability of success on the merits coupled with the fact that the disclosure of their banking information would constitute irreparable harm justifies a TRO while the case proceeds.
You remember that, because it was last Friday. It was also discussed in this article.
Judges of different political persuasion are ruling differently on the same issue (in different cases), and the headline is misleading -- the opinion of a single judge, pre-trial, is of low significance wrt the merits of the case itself.
You could just as easily write a headline that "judges are split on US gov't violating privacy law", and it would be completely factual.
Most headlines seem to be extra-misleading these days, even from the left. I have not seen so much outrage lately over things that turn out to be meh, in a long time.
Like that woman from the town meeting with the corrupt local sheriff, that was escorted out by 'unidentified' 'black shirt' security... nobody seemed to realize that she was already yelling at them on several occasions that night, was told to stop yelling, then kept doing it, and THAT is when they asked her to leave, and she still refused, prompting them to 'assault' her out of the building.
I agree about the too-much-outrage-over-meh-shit problem, and even think it's the defining problem of our age (although, that is just because it is one form of "attention is the most important commodity now" theory — same root cause gives us new measles outbreaks and other self-owns).
But, it is worth noting in this case that the conduct of these 'unidentified, black-shirt' security men was completely illegal in Coeur d’Alene, and subsequently the woman has had all charges against her dropped, while the security company, LEAR Asset Management, has had their license revoked for violating the law.[1]
The only thing that seems to get anyone to engage is ever increasing outrage. So, people are trying to increase outrage to get people to engage.
If it’s worth engagement, or engagement does anything worthwhile? Or if people are getting away with things under the cover of all this outrage, because people are outraged out?
I think it makes perfect sense to say that states do not experience irreversible harm from the order, but the individuals suing do. A TRO has. very high bar, as you essentially have to prove—without a trial!—not only that you will probably win at trial, but also that there is a harm that the remedies available at trial fundamentally cannot fully address that you are experiencing from the wrong at issue, and when you’ve established those things you’ve only met 2 of the 4 requirements for getting a TRO.
So, even with the same facts (but for the plaintiff's situation) and legal question ultimately at issue, and even if judges view the law and facts identically, its not at all surprising that differently situated plaintiffs get different results at the TRO stage.
If it were prosecuted the same way as the peasants, the direction of prosecution is generally in the direction of the person who granted access, as asking people to do illegal stuff seems to be considered fair game bait to get people prosecuted.
TROs are preliminary injunctions in all but name. I expect SCOTUS to issue writs of mandamus reining them in otherwise Congress will simply remove the nationwide ability to issue them from the lower courts.
I don’t believe Congress can simply remove the ability for courts to issue restraining orders, and I don’t see why the supreme court would write any writs like that considering it’s not clear that 1. DOGE is even fully legal in the way it’s acting, and 2. that it has legal mandate for what it asks for, like in this case.
Tech-bros that invented and deployed nearly every privacy-invading technology of the last 20 years, tracked your every movement, scanned your email to show you ads, sold data for profit, now come to HN to cry privacy concern about a government audit.
How come there isn’t much discussion of DOGE on this site? Seems rather important and relevant to the question of whether the Silicon Valley approach to breaking things and moving quickly works for government. Also whether such an agency should have access to our data.
It is by far the most-discussed topic on HN of recent weeks. I've included a partial list below.
It's odd how the most-discussed topic can feel like the least-discussed, but if you think about it it kind of makes sense. I call it the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
There's another variant of this phenomenon: I've been spending most of my time posting dozens of in-depth explanations of this over the same time period, and yet somehow these explanations don't make it through to many users. I assume you haven't run into any of those, since you probably wouldn't have asked your (perfectly legitimate!) question if you had. Here are a couple to get you started, if you (or anyone) want to understand what's been going on here:
If you (or anyone) will take a look at those, and then still have a question that isn't answered there, let me know and I'll be happy to take a crack at it.
Thanks for explanations! I'm really curious if it looks like brigading has increased based on what your seeing in the data, or if this looks like roughly the same patterns you've seen historically.
I assumed that brigading had increased. This is mostly due to seeing things go from unflagged to flagged in the amount of time it took me to read the article. I've been a many-times-a-day reader for about 12 years now, and I hadn't really encountered that until recently. But, after reading about MOTs, those seem like a playable reason too
It gets [flagged] and [flagged][dead]ed very quickly. Some people flag because they don't care about politics, others flag because they're in favor of what's happening, the rest flag because all the discussions turn into flamewars and are unproductive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
He's not concerned with what's going on in DC? Does he think Elon is qualified to waltz in and start slashing and burning the Federal Bureaucracy? Congress hasn't approved DOGE.
In 2014, under Obama, the United States Digital Service was established with by Congressional appropriations with the mission to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design" and in 2025 it was renamed to DOGE.
Have you considered that it might have been renamed DOGE for the same reason that Tesla car models spell out the word SEXY? The mission has not changed very substantively. The order directs them to modernize federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity.
Maybe what is happening benefits him so he is quietly cheering on. If he stays quiet and makes no mentions of current events I will continue to assume so. I feel that if this ultimately escalates a few more rungs everybody will have to lose.
The posts tend to get quickly flagged and thus buried. Search the archives for relevant names and keywords, and you’ll see lots of relevant yet flagged posts. Even discussions about this fact tend to get flagged.
> How come there isn’t much discussion of DOGE on this site?
hopefully saving @dang a job.
this meta comment provide some links to other comments from dang about Major Ongoing Topics (MOTs), what happens with flagging, why some groups feel there isn't enough discussion, others feel there's too much discussion, and how moderation works for MOTs (substantively new information is often key).
If you use https://news.ycombinator.com/active, [flagged] and [dead] threads are shown, so long as there is engagement. I wish that @dang would make this the HN front page in these harrowing and hectic times. It is currently too easy for important threads to be smothered.
Search below for “doge” and limit to this week. There are thirty stories with more than ten upvotes, and 8 with over 100. That’s a major story more than once a day, and doesn’t include every Trump related disaster that was covered.
I start to see suspicious voting patterns (persistent trickle downvoting - preventing a inconvenient post to take off, to counter positive votes one by one), professional-level rhetoric, and close to 100% talking point alignment on some very specific topics.
I use http://hckrnews.com which is a nice timeline view of what's happening, isn't gamed by algorithms.
It also nicely shows that the site has had massive chasms of popular but killed posts, which you can them go read (but no longer contribute to).
Ironic that so many of the right used to clambor fo "free speech" & make claims of censorship, but many are likely here suppressing things they don't like rather than just moving along. No cost to them to just skip.
It is constantly discussed, every day, in multiple threads.
It gets flagged because the comments are very repetitive. There are only so many ways to say that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are lying, and that everything they do a pretext for destroying the government. Nobody ever discusses anything in good faith, it is just rounds of "youre a shill" "stop reading the nyt" "stop reading twitter" blah blah blah...
Management here are aligned with the VC startup scam that Elon represents and so they don’t want any bad press discussed related to him, and so all relevant discussion is flagged.
This is a blatant lie. HN does the opposite: threads critical of YC are more lightly moderated and the flags are removed a lot of the time. Flags come from users, not the mods.
I can't blame YC for feeling the heat. VC has gone off the rails in the past few years, and their proudest alumni is an ex-Worldcoin CEO that wants everyone to invest in technology that's been "around the corner" for the past 8 quarters.
I'm not saying there's a directive on-high shutting down this discussion, but if the majority of users are really YC-affiliated then this entire Trump admin thing is understandably embarassing.
As a data scientist, I'd have to know the context: how many threads in the same scope have been flagged to death? I realize that my observations are not a representative sample, but I would estimate for every 1 thread about the current admin that isn't killed, 2-3 are killed. It is a common observation, amd spoken about by others.
Alternatively, we could recognize the importance of electing officials who are serious and competent - a strategy that proved reasonably effective for over 200 years.
> "In Finland schools teach media literacy maybe that's a start."
When I was a school-goer in the 70's, 80's, and 90's they used to teach that and basic critical thinking and research skills in "Current Events", "Civics", and "History" classes here in the U.S. too, but it seems to have gone away in more recent decades. Pretty sure that "social media" destroyed a lot of that in the adult population, too (for those who even had those skills to lose in the first place). :(
I think everyone recognizes the importance of that. I think a large part of the country would disagree with your assessment of the current administration and might take issue with your total lack of similar assessment for the previous administration.
I also think anyone with a passing understanding of history would doubt your claim that this has been "reasonably" effective for 200 years. As if no prior generation had to deal with an administration they felt was incompetent or as if there aren't prior presidents that are demonstrably worse than any Trump administration.
Finally, again, if you're going to rely on an "electorate that recognizes social issues identically to me" to protect federal data, I think you've actually made the problem worse. Perhaps your social moors shouldn't be nation wide existential issues?
What does you mean? The following sounds to me like a pretty reasonable concern and not farfetched that a judge would make this interpretation
>The American Federation of Teachers and other "plaintiffs have shown that Education and OPM likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing their personal information to DOGE affiliates without their consent"
Where did you learn this? I learned in fourth grade that the proper process is an appeal to a higher court, of which the supreme court is the last word. They are called judicial "opinions" for a reason. Do they not teach this stuff anymore?
Congress should take checks and balances seriously, which includes respecting judicial independence rather than calling for impeachment just because a ruling goes against their political preferences.
NB: your followup (immediate parent) is far superior to, and lends context which greatly improves, your original comment.
Consider making your full thinking clearer up front rather than leading with a vague-but-ominous statement.
Your original comment could be read as an implied endorsement of the stated question, or as a concerned inquiry. Your follow-up suggests the latter. Regardless of viewpoint, it lends a further avenue for discussion the original comment lacked. Given the frequency, heat, and importance of current political discussion, veering from tropes and generic tangents.
The issue is that the executive branch still has prosecutorial power with impeachment as one of the only remaining checks against that (if I’m understanding correctly).
Lol, that is just a piece of paper that doesn't mean shit unless someone is willing to enforce the words on it. There has been a shortage of enforcers recently.
What part of the Constitution says that? The article about the judiciary is pretty brief. It says that they get to decide things, but it doesn't actually clarify that everyone has to abide by their decisions.
Just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's legally valid.
She did write "This continuing, unauthorized disclosure of the plaintiffs’ sensitive personal information to DOGE affiliates is irreparable harm that money damages cannot rectify"
> The American Federation of Teachers and other "plaintiffs have shown that Education and OPM likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing their personal information to DOGE affiliates without their consent," said the order
The issue isn't employers accessing their own records but the government improperly sharing sensitive personal data with DOGE affiliates without consent or a legitimate need-to-know justification, likely violating the Privacy Act.
> It may be that, with additional time, the government can explain why granting such broad access to the plaintiffs' personal information is necessary for DOGE affiliates at Education to do their jobs, but for now, the record before the Court indicates they do not have a need for these records in the performance of their duties
You need to have a reason to look at that information. It is not yours to do whatever you want with.
No, this lawsuit is not about employee records. It is about customer records. Just like I can't share customer data with whoever the hell I want, they are arguing that there is a process and it was violated. Its the same lawsuit as if a company had a privacy policy on their website and just said 'nah bro' I'm going to give your social security number to some random drug addict to train a nazi AI.
> No, this lawsuit is not about employee records. It is about customer records.
That's not what the article says...
> The plaintiffs include "unions and membership organizations representing current and former federal employees and federal student aid recipients and six military veterans who have received federal benefits or student loans,"
I wonder how much of this employee data is actually "personal", and not data relevant to their employment, which presumably isn't "private" from the perspective of the employer. So for example, I imagine their home address and birth date would be considered private; but their job title , primary place of work, start date, etc would not be "private data"...?
I can't even fathom why anyone is listening to him. If a bunch of teenagers and discount Tony Stark turns up at your office and starts trying to fire people and demanding access to your data, isn't the correct response to tell them to fk off?
This is a temporary restraining order (TRO), so the judge did not need to, and did not actually, rule that they did violate the Privacy Act, but that they likely did so, and that this probability of success on the merits coupled with the fact that the disclosure of their banking information would constitute irreparable harm justifies a TRO while the case proceeds.
It's progress. I remember the alst judge rejecting a TRO because no damages were proven yet. And that's still the judgment as 14 states are suing.
You remember that, because it was last Friday. It was also discussed in this article.
Judges of different political persuasion are ruling differently on the same issue (in different cases), and the headline is misleading -- the opinion of a single judge, pre-trial, is of low significance wrt the merits of the case itself.
You could just as easily write a headline that "judges are split on US gov't violating privacy law", and it would be completely factual.
Most headlines seem to be extra-misleading these days, even from the left. I have not seen so much outrage lately over things that turn out to be meh, in a long time.
Like that woman from the town meeting with the corrupt local sheriff, that was escorted out by 'unidentified' 'black shirt' security... nobody seemed to realize that she was already yelling at them on several occasions that night, was told to stop yelling, then kept doing it, and THAT is when they asked her to leave, and she still refused, prompting them to 'assault' her out of the building.
I agree about the too-much-outrage-over-meh-shit problem, and even think it's the defining problem of our age (although, that is just because it is one form of "attention is the most important commodity now" theory — same root cause gives us new measles outbreaks and other self-owns).
But, it is worth noting in this case that the conduct of these 'unidentified, black-shirt' security men was completely illegal in Coeur d’Alene, and subsequently the woman has had all charges against her dropped, while the security company, LEAR Asset Management, has had their license revoked for violating the law.[1]
Those details do matter.
[1]: https://cdapress.com/news/2025/feb/24/coeur-dalene-prosecuto...
The only thing that seems to get anyone to engage is ever increasing outrage. So, people are trying to increase outrage to get people to engage.
If it’s worth engagement, or engagement does anything worthwhile? Or if people are getting away with things under the cover of all this outrage, because people are outraged out?
Lost in the noise.
I wonder if the ads are still visible when you're fuming with rage.
I think it makes perfect sense to say that states do not experience irreversible harm from the order, but the individuals suing do. A TRO has. very high bar, as you essentially have to prove—without a trial!—not only that you will probably win at trial, but also that there is a harm that the remedies available at trial fundamentally cannot fully address that you are experiencing from the wrong at issue, and when you’ve established those things you’ve only met 2 of the 4 requirements for getting a TRO.
So, even with the same facts (but for the plaintiff's situation) and legal question ultimately at issue, and even if judges view the law and facts identically, its not at all surprising that differently situated plaintiffs get different results at the TRO stage.
But how else should Elon's AI know who to send to "wellness camps" for processing?
Pray tell why the govt has our personal information... particularly in light of all of the massive leaks that have occured from govt databases
Please prosecute while there's still someone with integrity to do it.
And someone to prosecute without immunity.
Except the second it looks like their might be a chance for prosecution... there will be a pardon.
You can't pardon Civil cases. Nor civil contempt, given the course of how likely these people are to follow court rulings.
If it were prosecuted the same way as the peasants, the direction of prosecution is generally in the direction of the person who granted access, as asking people to do illegal stuff seems to be considered fair game bait to get people prosecuted.
TROs are preliminary injunctions in all but name. I expect SCOTUS to issue writs of mandamus reining them in otherwise Congress will simply remove the nationwide ability to issue them from the lower courts.
I don’t believe Congress can simply remove the ability for courts to issue restraining orders, and I don’t see why the supreme court would write any writs like that considering it’s not clear that 1. DOGE is even fully legal in the way it’s acting, and 2. that it has legal mandate for what it asks for, like in this case.
How are all the Silicon Valley tech bros feeling about their divine king Musk now
Left a taste of feet?
At what point can we start calling them Texas Tech Bros? The two primary ones are pretty much living mostly in Texas and Florida at this point.
If you want the responsibility to be properly deflected, you should now call Musk an "DC bureaucrat". That's technically what he is now after all.
Tech-bros that invented and deployed nearly every privacy-invading technology of the last 20 years, tracked your every movement, scanned your email to show you ads, sold data for profit, now come to HN to cry privacy concern about a government audit.
I've been consistently pro privacy and tried to withdraw as much of my 2010's data as possible once learning.
So yes, i will cry privacy concern about a government audit from a non-auditer. Where is the GOA in all of this?
I agree, the irony is astounding morally, but legally easily explainable: the constitution protects us from the government, not private enterprise.
IMO, the government should protect us from private enterprise, when said enterprise becomes predatory.
How come there isn’t much discussion of DOGE on this site? Seems rather important and relevant to the question of whether the Silicon Valley approach to breaking things and moving quickly works for government. Also whether such an agency should have access to our data.
It is by far the most-discussed topic on HN of recent weeks. I've included a partial list below.
It's odd how the most-discussed topic can feel like the least-discussed, but if you think about it it kind of makes sense. I call it the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
There's another variant of this phenomenon: I've been spending most of my time posting dozens of in-depth explanations of this over the same time period, and yet somehow these explanations don't make it through to many users. I assume you haven't run into any of those, since you probably wouldn't have asked your (perfectly legitimate!) question if you had. Here are a couple to get you started, if you (or anyone) want to understand what's been going on here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
If you (or anyone) will take a look at those, and then still have a question that isn't answered there, let me know and I'll be happy to take a crack at it.
---
It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43150085 - Feb 2025 (761 comments)
Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43139172 - Feb 2025 (289 comments)
DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138238 - Feb 2025 (1436 comments)
SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43127819 - Feb 2025 (133 comments)
Every .gov Domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125829 - Feb 2025 (265 comments)
Treasury agrees to block DOGE's access to personal taxpayer data at IRS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121306 - Feb 2025 (170 comments)
DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43120231 - Feb 2025 (690 comments)
DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112084 - Feb 2025 (1664 comments)
Doge Claimed It Saved $8B in One Contract. It Was $8M - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101757 - Feb 2025 (125 comments)
A SpaceX team is being brought in to overhaul FAA's air traffic control system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101009 - Feb 2025 (146 comments)
"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098705 - Feb 2025 (1278 comments)
USDA fired officials working on bird flu, now trying to rehire them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097709 - Feb 2025 (179 comments)
US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066182 - Feb 2025 (788 comments)
Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year-Olds Way Off Base? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43056993 - Feb 2025 (108 comments)
Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43045835 - Feb 2025 (1123 comments)
USAID funding freeze disrupts global tuberculosis control efforts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038727 - Feb 2025 (119 comments)
DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037426 - Feb 2025 (179 comments)
DOGE staffer is trying to reroute FEMA funds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036042 - Feb 2025 (285 comments)
DOGE as a National Cyberattack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977 - Feb 2025 (211 comments)
NOAA's public weather data powers the local forecasts on your phone and TV - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018643 - Feb 2025 (113 comments)
Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981756 - Feb 2025 (1801 comments)
Announcing the data.gov archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42970039 - Feb 2025 (132 comments)
Elon Musk's Demolition Crew - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42968430 - Feb 2025 (345 comments)
DOGE staffer resigns over racist posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42966412 - Feb 2025 (105 comments)
DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42951458 - Feb 2025 (381 comments)
20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42950790 - Feb 2025 (548 comments)
What's happening inside the NIH and NSF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940257 - Feb 2025 (1535 comments)
Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936421 - Feb 2025 (133 comments)
Payments crisis of 2025: Not “read only” access anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933219 - Feb 2025 (654 comments)
Words flagged in search of current NSF awards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932760 - Feb 2025 (155 comments)
The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910910 - Feb 2025 (2990 comments)
CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937 - Feb 2025 (721 comments)
CDC data are disappearing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696 - Feb 2025 (589 comments)
Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42892278 - Jan 2025 (125 comments)
NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42886661 - Jan 2025 (488 comments)
Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881367 - Jan 2025 (238 comments)
US pauses all federal aid and grants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42851248 - Jan 2025 (485 comments)
'Never seen anything like this' – NIH meetings and travel halted abruptly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817910 - Jan 2025 (111 comments)
NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42798960 - Jan 2025 (440 comments)
Thanks for explanations! I'm really curious if it looks like brigading has increased based on what your seeing in the data, or if this looks like roughly the same patterns you've seen historically.
I assumed that brigading had increased. This is mostly due to seeing things go from unflagged to flagged in the amount of time it took me to read the article. I've been a many-times-a-day reader for about 12 years now, and I hadn't really encountered that until recently. But, after reading about MOTs, those seem like a playable reason too
Thank you.
It gets [flagged] and [flagged][dead]ed very quickly. Some people flag because they don't care about politics, others flag because they're in favor of what's happening, the rest flag because all the discussions turn into flamewars and are unproductive.
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.
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.
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.
Not thousands of people. Millions of people. At least.
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
>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.
> How come there isn’t much discussion of DOGE on this site?
The exact same reason any negative story about Elon, Twitter, Tesla or SpaceX disappears from the front page. They get flagged to death immediately.
It also doesn't help that Paulg is still an Elon fan.
This thread is literally on the front page and not flagged.
He's not concerned with what's going on in DC? Does he think Elon is qualified to waltz in and start slashing and burning the Federal Bureaucracy? Congress hasn't approved DOGE.
> Congress hasn't approved DOGE.
In 2014, under Obama, the United States Digital Service was established with by Congressional appropriations with the mission to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design" and in 2025 it was renamed to DOGE.
Have you considered that it might have been renamed DOGE for the same reason that Tesla car models spell out the word SEXY? The mission has not changed very substantively. The order directs them to modernize federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service
[2]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-29/pdf/2025-0...
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Maybe what is happening benefits him so he is quietly cheering on. If he stays quiet and makes no mentions of current events I will continue to assume so. I feel that if this ultimately escalates a few more rungs everybody will have to lose.
paulg is more concerned with “wokeism” than he is with the federal government being stripped for parts.
If it had any "parts," there would be seven trillion dollars' worth.
But it's actually all just taxes.
The posts tend to get quickly flagged and thus buried. Search the archives for relevant names and keywords, and you’ll see lots of relevant yet flagged posts. Even discussions about this fact tend to get flagged.
> How come there isn’t much discussion of DOGE on this site?
hopefully saving @dang a job.
this meta comment provide some links to other comments from dang about Major Ongoing Topics (MOTs), what happens with flagging, why some groups feel there isn't enough discussion, others feel there's too much discussion, and how moderation works for MOTs (substantively new information is often key).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645
There's ten or so submissions per day that hit the front page and then instantly get flagged off.
If you use https://news.ycombinator.com/active, [flagged] and [dead] threads are shown, so long as there is engagement. I wish that @dang would make this the HN front page in these harrowing and hectic times. It is currently too easy for important threads to be smothered.
It shows up in news.ycombinator.com/active if you want to go looking for it.
Search below for “doge” and limit to this week. There are thirty stories with more than ten upvotes, and 8 with over 100. That’s a major story more than once a day, and doesn’t include every Trump related disaster that was covered.
For the last month if you want to learn anything from this site you go to "new" and only read the flagged threads.
too many stans
I start to see suspicious voting patterns (persistent trickle downvoting - preventing a inconvenient post to take off, to counter positive votes one by one), professional-level rhetoric, and close to 100% talking point alignment on some very specific topics.
- What’s your experience?
I use http://hckrnews.com which is a nice timeline view of what's happening, isn't gamed by algorithms.
It also nicely shows that the site has had massive chasms of popular but killed posts, which you can them go read (but no longer contribute to).
Ironic that so many of the right used to clambor fo "free speech" & make claims of censorship, but many are likely here suppressing things they don't like rather than just moving along. No cost to them to just skip.
It is constantly discussed, every day, in multiple threads.
It gets flagged because the comments are very repetitive. There are only so many ways to say that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are lying, and that everything they do a pretext for destroying the government. Nobody ever discusses anything in good faith, it is just rounds of "youre a shill" "stop reading the nyt" "stop reading twitter" blah blah blah...
ok i'll bite and in good faith: how do you think DOGE is a pretext for destroying the govt?
I don't.
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Management here are aligned with the VC startup scam that Elon represents and so they don’t want any bad press discussed related to him, and so all relevant discussion is flagged.
I've seen flagged threads, but I've also seen plenty of popular discussions where the discussion is overwhelmingly against the neofascists.
Out of curiosity, how do you square that understanding with the 40 threads listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527?
This is a blatant lie. HN does the opposite: threads critical of YC are more lightly moderated and the flags are removed a lot of the time. Flags come from users, not the mods.
I can't blame YC for feeling the heat. VC has gone off the rails in the past few years, and their proudest alumni is an ex-Worldcoin CEO that wants everyone to invest in technology that's been "around the corner" for the past 8 quarters.
I'm not saying there's a directive on-high shutting down this discussion, but if the majority of users are really YC-affiliated then this entire Trump admin thing is understandably embarassing.
Out of curiosity, how do you square that understanding with the 40 threads listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527? There have been many more than just those, btw.
Just read jtsummers comment. I am responding to the parent's question in context, I don't care about the numbers or who they absolve.
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Out of curiosity, how do you square that understanding with the 40 threads listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527?
As a data scientist, I'd have to know the context: how many threads in the same scope have been flagged to death? I realize that my observations are not a representative sample, but I would estimate for every 1 thread about the current admin that isn't killed, 2-3 are killed. It is a common observation, amd spoken about by others.
We should possibly recognize that building federal troves of data that rely on the "good deputy" model are outmoded and need massive overhaul.
Alternatively, we could recognize the importance of electing officials who are serious and competent - a strategy that proved reasonably effective for over 200 years.
Not alternatively. They're both important and competent officials do not stop database abuse, they only lessen it.
That will require inoculating the population against propaganda.
In Finland schools teach media literacy maybe that's a start.
> "In Finland schools teach media literacy maybe that's a start."
When I was a school-goer in the 70's, 80's, and 90's they used to teach that and basic critical thinking and research skills in "Current Events", "Civics", and "History" classes here in the U.S. too, but it seems to have gone away in more recent decades. Pretty sure that "social media" destroyed a lot of that in the adult population, too (for those who even had those skills to lose in the first place). :(
In America, we fund religious and separatist schools! Yippee!
How does one synthesize a mind vaccine?
When people reflexively associate the techniques used with so much pain and suffering that they lash out and destroy anyone using those techniques.
Come to think of it, similar to normal vaccinations I guess.
None of what is going on is really a vaccination though, it’s a real infection.
> a strategy that proved reasonably effective for over 200 years.
not a student of US history, I see.
I think everyone recognizes the importance of that. I think a large part of the country would disagree with your assessment of the current administration and might take issue with your total lack of similar assessment for the previous administration.
I also think anyone with a passing understanding of history would doubt your claim that this has been "reasonably" effective for 200 years. As if no prior generation had to deal with an administration they felt was incompetent or as if there aren't prior presidents that are demonstrably worse than any Trump administration.
Finally, again, if you're going to rely on an "electorate that recognizes social issues identically to me" to protect federal data, I think you've actually made the problem worse. Perhaps your social moors shouldn't be nation wide existential issues?
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What does you mean? The following sounds to me like a pretty reasonable concern and not farfetched that a judge would make this interpretation
>The American Federation of Teachers and other "plaintiffs have shown that Education and OPM likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing their personal information to DOGE affiliates without their consent"
Where did you learn this? I learned in fourth grade that the proper process is an appeal to a higher court, of which the supreme court is the last word. They are called judicial "opinions" for a reason. Do they not teach this stuff anymore?
Congress should take checks and balances seriously, which includes respecting judicial independence rather than calling for impeachment just because a ruling goes against their political preferences.
Presidents can be impeached too. Next election is only two years away.
What did the judge do wrong?
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If you want to keep a democracy, yes. Checks and balances are critical to a functioning democracy
Our executive doesn't want that rn.
That shouldn't matter
We should have a congress that cares about the law.
They can't even bother to enforce their own subpoena's. They have a jail and a jailer.
No, it should not.
That is why I ask. The president has immunity and unlimited right (?) to pardon.
So are they going to listen?
NB: your followup (immediate parent) is far superior to, and lends context which greatly improves, your original comment.
Consider making your full thinking clearer up front rather than leading with a vague-but-ominous statement.
Your original comment could be read as an implied endorsement of the stated question, or as a concerned inquiry. Your follow-up suggests the latter. Regardless of viewpoint, it lends a further avenue for discussion the original comment lacked. Given the frequency, heat, and importance of current political discussion, veering from tropes and generic tangents.
The next election cycle begins soon.
Unless the US is transitioning into an authoritarian regime.
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The issue is that the executive branch still has prosecutorial power with impeachment as one of the only remaining checks against that (if I’m understanding correctly).
> with impeachment as one of the only remaining checks against that
impeachment appears to be a wet noodle of a check that carries all the weight of nanny saying "you've been a very naughty boy".
Two impeachments and a felony conviction didn't check squat, if I'm not mistaken.
he was impeached by the house, but the not the senate. if the senate had also voted to impeach he would have been removed from office.
Lol, that is just a piece of paper that doesn't mean shit unless someone is willing to enforce the words on it. There has been a shortage of enforcers recently.
If one party doesn't want to abide by that piece of paper, then there's no reason to consider them legitimate.
The papers, ya, that one party doesn't consider them legitimate and is in power at the same time.
What part of the Constitution says that? The article about the judiciary is pretty brief. It says that they get to decide things, but it doesn't actually clarify that everyone has to abide by their decisions.
Just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's legally valid.
You would have to ask John Marshall, who authored the opinion in Marbury v Madison
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She did write "This continuing, unauthorized disclosure of the plaintiffs’ sensitive personal information to DOGE affiliates is irreparable harm that money damages cannot rectify"
Anyways, for people who want the primary source, here's the opinion/restraining order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.576...
Yes. That's what I said -- one of the requirements of a temporary order like this, ahead of trial is that the potential damages are irreversible.
It's not a judgment on the case itself.
> The American Federation of Teachers and other "plaintiffs have shown that Education and OPM likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing their personal information to DOGE affiliates without their consent," said the order
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The issue isn't employers accessing their own records but the government improperly sharing sensitive personal data with DOGE affiliates without consent or a legitimate need-to-know justification, likely violating the Privacy Act.
No they disclosed your private information as a citizen.
> It may be that, with additional time, the government can explain why granting such broad access to the plaintiffs' personal information is necessary for DOGE affiliates at Education to do their jobs, but for now, the record before the Court indicates they do not have a need for these records in the performance of their duties
You need to have a reason to look at that information. It is not yours to do whatever you want with.
No, this lawsuit is not about employee records. It is about customer records. Just like I can't share customer data with whoever the hell I want, they are arguing that there is a process and it was violated. Its the same lawsuit as if a company had a privacy policy on their website and just said 'nah bro' I'm going to give your social security number to some random drug addict to train a nazi AI.
> No, this lawsuit is not about employee records. It is about customer records.
That's not what the article says...
> The plaintiffs include "unions and membership organizations representing current and former federal employees and federal student aid recipients and six military veterans who have received federal benefits or student loans,"
I wonder how much of this employee data is actually "personal", and not data relevant to their employment, which presumably isn't "private" from the perspective of the employer. So for example, I imagine their home address and birth date would be considered private; but their job title , primary place of work, start date, etc would not be "private data"...?
Federal student aid recipients are not employees of the department of education.
That is a useful clarification (that it is customer records, not employee records)
> They're arguing that employers can't access their internal records on their employees.
How are they doing that?
Elon Musk is not a government employee and he is not their boss.
I can't even fathom why anyone is listening to him. If a bunch of teenagers and discount Tony Stark turns up at your office and starts trying to fire people and demanding access to your data, isn't the correct response to tell them to fk off?