skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could share why privatization of 18f is good in your eyes? When I heard about the creation of 18f and USDS all those years ago, I remember thinking, finally! It was embarrassing and frankly disheartening to have such crucial public websites and services be so behind the times. Especially when Silicon Valley, the cradle of technical innovation, lied within our borders. Then comes along 18f and all the good work they did too bring a consistent design structure and modernize these crucial public resources with a passion and focus for security and accessibility. Blog articles written by folks who work at 18F work very clearly written by passionate people who care deeply about their work and are more than competent. They had a positive and notable impact on millions of Americans' interactions with digital services.

So why is getting rid of them and going private a good thing?
Private orgs fund themselves.. hmm, bailed out corps and subsidies beg to differ
They confusing Linux and GNU/Linux in that article.
Scam? Duplex worked.
> Our employers have all the data they need to train AI models to replace us. How long will it be until this actually happens?

If employers did have this data they probably would understand how our jobs work better.

The dysfunction you see in the workplace woulf, by definition, only be exacerbated by AI.

Automation is just, do the same thing but more of it, harder, and without remorse. Managers have (I know it's hard to believe sometimes) remorse that interrupts their misunderstandings on how things function. AI "replacing jobs" would be just the misunderstandings
Oh, the American Enterprise Institute agrees with the Republicans, does it?
>I was actually generous by picking a computer, with the amount of cheap and non updatable smart TVs, I doubt that more than 20% work with the strongest DRM.

DRM doesn't care that you're on the latest patch level with all CVEs patched, only that your system is vaguely "secure" (ie. has a TEE, even if it's full of holes). The netflix app works on phones with Android 5 from over a decade ago, so similarly old smart TVs are probably fine as well. Failing that, they can buy an up-to-date roku/fire stick for $25.
> The way you combat the creep of bureaucratic miasma is by regularly turning a critical eye inward

It certainly can’t hurt. Alas for the current moment, but it seems the eye we’re turning inward is as far from “critical” as can be.
Git Rev News Edition 120 (February 28th, 2025)
My experience as a consultant with both (local) administrations (in Germany) and much larger corporations is that the corporations weren't even close to being as dysfunctional.

I'm certain there are great parts of government, but I've never experienced it, and all I'm hearing from friends who work at the federal level is that it's no different there.
Alan Turing took his own life on purpose or by accident, he wasn't murdered
It’s very easy. Waste in private organisations costs the owners money and the organisation disappears when the money runs out. Waste in public organisations costs all of us, including me, money, and the organisation never disappears, if anything, it keeps growing and consuming more money forever.

If Mark Cuban wants to spend his money on this I don’t see the issue. It’s his to waste.
Goodreads does indeed suck in many ways, but I am in favor of a 5 star system! I think oftentimes we need to commit to one rating or another and not waffle around with this "4.12425/5" type reviews :)
I think most people looking for an alternative to Goodreads are using Storygraph.
The only thing I can think of would be.... weakening the federal government and giving up on the idea of centralized control outside of the military and the dollar. Which is exactly what republicans are doing now.

On the bright side, this might also mean the end of rampaging around the globe in the name of democracy. I think that ship has fully sailed, alhamdulillah.
And AfD now has 152 seats in the Bundestag, and as a result the CDU/CSU will have to become equally anti-immigrant.

This is the only way Germans will learn, just like the only way us Americans will learn about the dangers of populism is getting burnt and abused by DOGE.
Ah yes, the world is very simple, isn’t it? Private organizations like all of Musk’s companies, built on government subsidies?
> In a sense (American) politics is experiencing a vanishing middle of epic proportions

Is that true? Democrats are pretty centrist by non-American standards.
https://archive.ph/jowpM
There is at the root here an ideological presupposition that profit (and competition) is the only real motivation that produces quality or efficiency.

Community service as a motivation is actually extremely strong, but becoming more and more invisible in public discourse. With expected results. Which is strange from a nation that is constantly proclaiming its "Christian" foundations?

I have many friends (and a spouse!) who take lower compensation packages so they can work in non-profit or government or other areas where they personally feel they are obtaining some meaning.

I can assure you they work damn hard without fear of "competition."

(EDIT: There are frankly other presuppositions about the nature of private vs public funding and what taxation means/is, but they end up in pointless controversial discussions or downvote fests that I have no interest in getting into this morning...)
How does this compare to https://www.thestorygraph.com/ ?
I miss bbs’s, gopher and nntp.

I’m serious: They were much more user-respecting than the web.
Honestly, Goodreads is bothering me since it is Amazon. Was looking for some simple service to track books I'm reading. This is nice!
Will definitely need to tone down the American Corporate Alacrity for the UK market..
Well, let’s find that with DOGE. DOGE had already revealed things that are so unnecessary for a government to do. Humans can do much better governance than what we do now.
Do not forget government contracts, too.
I would argue that their opposition to civil rights was populist. It was amoral and intended only to get votes from racists, as an “ends justify the means” way to pursue deregulation and corporatism.
Should've stayed in soviet union then
> 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars)

Does one really get anything meaningful out of saying this was a 6-star book vs a 7-star book?

Personally I think 4 levels is sufficient. Either it's rather bad, not bad but not good, good but not great or it's great.

Anything beyond that will have to be written in words.
I don't think any of those have remote services (like Firefox Sync, etc), so Firefox has to have some sort of privacy policy.
A plurality (49.8%) of voters voted for Trump. More voted for something else.
This is already untrue, leaving 18F aside - lots of core infrastructure is outsourced and the vast agencies are mostly operating or maintaining things. Plus where does that road end - they don’t build their own operating system after all. They have to outsource some of it.
The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The exception is companies propped up by government regulation. The problem with modern big companies is that the exception has become the rule.

Regulation is so pervasive it's become a "what the hell is water" situation. People don't even recognize that the dysfunctional companies are protected from failure by the government. Seemingly beneficial regulations create barriers to entry that prevent dysfunctional companies from being replaced. IP law, even copyright (in its current, out-of-control practically perpetual form) is regulation that protects large incumbents in media and tech and other sectors from competition.
They are working on cancelling their legal status. We have allowed Haitian migration because of the incompetence and corruption down there (and our role in a lot of that in the past)
Yalta is being covered in two different ways:

The right in ascendancy treats Yalta like a movement by the Roosevelt left to give Stalin concessions in a New World Order. That’s the phrase they want promoted. In particular, the UN and adjacent developments stem from a small number of great men. So, the right is happy about a new Yalta between Musk, Trump, and Putin.

Or is it Putin, Trump and Xi? That’s how I see it: Trump has hinted that the Panama Canal and Greenland are for sale. So the left way of looking at a New Yalta reflect multipolar colonial ambitions.
Or Mattermost, Zulip, or... Briar, among others. :P
Delusion belief in market forces that completely ignores the reality when companies reach monopoly status.
I cannot accept that sending 100B to an NGO where 90-95B ends up in politicians’ pockets and 10-5% ends up as actual aid or whatever is the most efficient system.
Sounds great! I think I’ve actually stumbled across info-Beamer before. We use pretty much the exact same approach in re: configurable zip deployment for BrightSigns.

It would be great to chat some time!

I’ll shoot you an email.
GNU IceCat is still based on Firefox. Sure, it may remove tracking and some other sketchy stuff, but ultimately it's not a replacement for Firefox because if Firefox dies then GNU IceCat does as well.
This title is pretty misleading (I appreciate it's basically the same as the article's title). He's not saying he'll fund the govt department, he's saying he'll fund a private venture made up of the people formerly employed in 18f. And he predicts that venture will be able to gouge the public purse when the govt inevitably realises the cuts they made were far too deep.

As others have pointed out, this is a deeply right-wing idea and exactly what the Republican party wants to see happen.
A centralized dictatorship is what held the actual Balkans together...
A company that makes birthday party banners that fails can be replaced. If your electric company runs itself into the ground, there is no replacement without government assistance. So why add the overhead of a for profit company?
There are US citizens, former employees of USAID, who have been abandoned after trying to stop a cholera outbreak in the middle of a civil war in South Sudan.

With their families.

Their security detail: fired.
Their logistics team: fired.

No water, no power, no fuel.

Look: sufficiently advanced incompetence and/or carelessness is equivalent to malice.

I don’t care if you WANT to attend to the nuclear weapons, if you are so unserious, or understaffed, or incompetent, or distracted, or whatever to fail to actually do the thing.

Intent is irrelevant. Outcomes are everything.
How's that working in the long term?

What has bound us together as a people is the massive ocean of cash we collectively float on. Abundance that's actively being slashed and burned as we speak. Apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Programs like BlackRock’s Quantitative Master’s Internship Program have long been a staple on Wall Street. Launched as a pilot for summer 2024, the firm’s Quantitative Master’s Internship Program specifically targets graduate students in analytics, computational finance, engineering, mathematics, and quantitative master’s programs, providing valuable hands-on experience developing and implementing state-of-the-art quantitative and statistical models.
DOGE is working like a governing board which landed on top of a big corporation, and started reaping things down without understanding "why" part of the equation.

Ignoring Chesterton's Fences in the short term might look good on paper, but we have seen how companies enshittified themselves for profits (let's reduce the OPEX part).

Doing this to a government will have catastrophic results, and we will watch the slow downfall. It'll be dramatic and painful.
I keep seeing this argument. Can you help me understand what parts are serving a hidden agenda?
Thought-terminating Cliche.
Why do we have both CSRF protection and CORS?
Ah yes, the long-term viable strategy of replacing Firefox with a Firefox fork, that will somehow still receive upstream updates from... somewhere.
Amen, I have a lot of respect for the amount of work federal agencies do despite constantly being stymied by political leadership.

Imo and ime, much of the bloat that exists in the federal service is becuase of legislative and executive pork barrel politics that drastically expands mission scope with no equivalent increase in resources, forcing these agencies to have to resort to semi-privatized solutions.

There can and is a healthy way to manage public-private relations but the DOGE model is obviously wrong.
> I’m surprised that DOGE engineers (who presumably have deployed a load balancer or two) don’t understand this.

You're surprised that the same geniuses who launched a site with an obvious exploit don't understand something about infrastructure? I'm more surprised that they haven't done something like rewriting a critical system in JS (with AI, obviously).
The fact that the budget is being reduced after it has been negotiated means a cut. And you obviously have no facts to back up your claim that this money was used for "adminstration expenses"
Indeed what I've been using, since I learned that Goodreads was owned by Amazon
I could keep up side projects before I had kids, but now... I've learned you have to focus on your health with whatever time you have left in the day/weekend, no matter how excited you are about some idea.
It sounds like you're saying we need to consider the flexibility and articulation that classes enable when they reflect considerations beyond concrete presentation.
That's corruption and is universally bad. That's nothing to do with efficiency (remember the E in DOGE). Let's not move the goalposts, shall we?
Germany ain't the US.

Organizational culture in one might be different than the other.
The JSON spec only defines the JSON text format. It doesn't say what the text means. There are obvious interpretations, but every program that reads or writes JSON can decide what it does with it.

On the other hand, the thing that makes JSON actually useful is the interoperability, that JSON written by one program, on one platform, can be read by another preterm on another platform.
Those programs have to agree on a protocol, what the JSON text must satisfy and what it means.
It's usually not considered valuable to require object properties to be in a specific order, so they don't. But they could.
Firefox does not use chromium.
(For now anyway...)
I would love a simple feature where I can get suggestions based on what's on my shelf. I'd even love to explore other shelves and see how people stack their books.
More in this thread by Brian Krebs - https://hachyderm.io/@briankrebs@infosec.exchange/1140895564...
It definitely feels like someone is trying to inflict Project Mayhem on our government. What's the appropriate response here by law enforcement?
Congrats, you invented hollywood style AGI in the eyes of many.

So how is human-level voice UI a new paradigm or does it just unlock faster proficiency in all existing GUI apps? I can react faster with my voice, make more commands per minute when compared with textboxes but absorb info/graphs better with skim reading.
I agree that large organizations work similarly in government and business.

The difference is that large businesses constantly competed by other businesses. This either keeps them effective enough to compete, or they get replaced with more functional ones.

The accumulated dysfunction in a 20-50 year old company is large, but on a whole different scale than a 250 year old government.
We currently don't have that on the website. I'm planning to add it soon though, probably next week.
Who said anything about a hidden agenda? Can you consider that the current efforts are outright foolish?
> let’s find that with DOGE.

I think this whole logic of letting an unproven entity come in and destroy a working system to just “find out” if it works is negligent and malicious.
This is incredibly simplified Econ 101 style thinking though, it is nowhere near that simple and our markets are often incredibly inefficient.

It's also not true that the organization never disappears. The government functions across all sorts of areas, and departments change or are eliminated all the time.
Yeah, the browser that has had multiple huge incidents where they've been caught doing sketchy stuff is definitely who we should turn to...
> i think one of my records is something like 12 hours after dosage to start feeling the effects.

ugh that would suuuuck. Can't imagine waking up for work on a Monday after a seemingly failed trip the Sunday before lol
Unfortunately for us Americans, that is
They shouldn’t be taking pay cuts, for one. The government should be paying competitively and fairly.
> > The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.

> There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.

Sure, but that's why the GP said "curiosity of researchers" and "the greed of corporations". They didn't claim it was mere scientific curiosity so this criticism of their argument does not hold.

> Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies.

The fact that people are bad at monetizing it doesn't negate the fact that expectations of future profit were a driving factor.
Countries compete to keep skilled young workers
>I am sorry, I don't quite understand where the "abuse" comes in. Attaching function pointers to structs?

i had the same reacion, then i realized

(and yes, i know the following opinion is a minority oldschool boomer opinion, no need to downvote me to hell to make sure i know)

JSON itself is the abuse of C/unix, like XML before it.
The more relevant quote is Grover Norquist: shrinking government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”
The problem with Python CLI tools is startup time. Just firing up the interpreter and importing modules can take a frustratingly long time if you're a twitchy CLI user. That's much less of a problem for a GUI tool that tends to sit open for a while.
What good ideas?

The entire platform of the GOP is that the government is the problem.

The ACA would have been much better had the GOP not tried to stop it any way possible. Suing to remove critical aspects of it, voting at every turn against it, arguing that there would be death panels for grandparents.

Even once it was law, no attempt to improve, or replace.

A good faith effort would include an alternative health care plan. Where is it?

Two options: either incapable of producing a plan or are at best indifferent to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people, if not more.

The GOP has only tirelessly worked to ensure that the ACA would be less effective than it could have been.

Note: not repeal it. It’s entirely too popular and effective for that.
I'm not sure. Only about 34 per cent of schools in India have internet facilities and more than 50 per cent do not have functional computers (https://theprint.in/india/education/only-34-indian-schools-h...). This is hundreds of million of people only in India and there is Africa & Southern Asia hugely in need too.
Might be begging the question. Perhaps it's not really that random. We common people don't usually get pictures that convey depth and orientation, and probably wouldn't care even if we did. Might only be as random as a solar system with varying orbital inclinations and directions.

If not, the forces that turn some solar systems and galaxies into rotating disks might not act the same at the supergalactic scale in time and space?
UGN -- unusable game notation. That has a ring to it.

UGN was designed with SPARK and AWS S3 pbzip2-aware threading JSON readers in mind. For an analysis of a year's worth of lichess games -- over a billion, maybe more -- I believe UGN is a good solution. Try bucketing clock time vs. blunders or castling analysis or opening vs. ELO on 1 billion PGNs. Not simple search; aggregation. In the end, UGN is an information architecture; JSON is used as a convenient implementation/representation but it happens work well with SPARK and S3. And you can reliably use jq or even grep on the same UGN files. I didn't feel the need to create yet another binary format.

Anyhoo.... We're up to 60 downloads!
I like it. Very clean UI. I don't think "UI still looks like it's from 2005." is a bad thing (nor do I know if that's true).

I'm working on importing my library from a simple checklist app I made years ago. I posted one review.

Any idea why The Metabarons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabarons) isn't in the library? I guess comic books aren't in the data source.
Mark Cuban is welcome to advocate for a wealth tax that can fund 18f and many other portions of the government, while keeping it public and free of interference from private billionaires.
That's fair, but the initial point I was replying to was about intent.
I like the interface its easier to use compared to goodreads.
Neovim's future could have AI and brain-computer interfaces
Apple Delays Major iOS 19 Feature Announcement
It’s under the legislative branch.
Well, that post you link to has assertions but no data to back it up.

Not sure what you think this shows?
Moved from Firefox Dev Edition to Librewolf. No deal breakers yet.

Procedure to transfer over painlessly:
Install and run Librewolf.
On both browsers go Help > More troubleshooting information > profile folder > Open.
Close both browsers.
Delete everything inside the librewolf profile.
Copy everything from Firefox Dev profile directory into Librewolf profile directory.
Run Librewolf with "--allow-downgrade" once.
First run was a tad slow with extensions doing some 'recombobulation'.
You can now run Librewolf normally without the above allow downgrade option.
Enjoy.
Hearing it on TV does not make it so.

At best it is a regional annoyance but at the same time the war in Ukraine has worked out very well for the US so far.

China is the main, and really only, strategic threat. Hence pivot to Pacific, which is also a much more dynamic area economically. Hence perhaps also attempt to build better relations with Russia as otherwise they are pretty much completely aligned with China.
No, and that's why Netflix switched to thumbs up/down instead of 5 stars.
An investment fund that pays out for nature? Mongabay podcast explains the TFFF
I couldn’t get half of my liberal friends to even vote. And, it wasn’t because they didn’t like Kamala - I sensed that they were just tired of globalism.