Hacker News: aristocracyhttps://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aristocracyHacker News RSShttps://hnrss.org/hnrss v2.1.1Wed, 15 Apr 2026 20:42:52 +0000<![CDATA[New comment by aristocracy in "How to stop being boring"]]>Would agree wholeheartedly with this. Once you drill down into a person, you will eventually find an aspect of them that approaches life in a way you do not, and in a way which increases your appreciation for the depth of human experience if you listen closely enough. The signals the author are clued in on here are superficial to me. Idiosyncratic consumptions, a controversial political take or two? Sure, those can tickle one's curiosity, but they are only entrances to possible points of uniqueness and can be easily faked. Obviously you can't know everyone, nor should you want to, so these are just proxies the author uses to find people they want to spend their limited time with rather than in my opinion actual "not-boring" people.

]]>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:26:21 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089192aristocracyhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089192https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089192<![CDATA[New comment by aristocracy in "DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data"]]>DOGE is not necessarily about fraud. Their summary of cancelled projects for USAID for example is often vague. For example, "$14M for "social cohesion" in Mali." As a reader, I have no context for this program, its impact, or who ran it. I don't even have the ability to discern whether other things were lumped in. Can I guess this was aimed at preventing further in-roads of Al Qaeda? Who knows.

An actual cherry-picked example of DOGE's potential fraud finding is at the SSA where Musk showed his query of "DEAD" = "FALSE" (I am paraphrasing a bit) yielded a huge number of folks over ages 115. Context is what is scarce. Are they receiving payments, are there other reasons for why the query returned those results, what other context do I have to interpret these results? Again, I have no idea.

I think the safest way of couching what is going on, is a drastic curtailment of government programs and employees. Equivalents to this? Maybe Gorbachev. I am sure there are other historical parallels, but they are probably apples to peaches comparisons at a certain level.

And to your last question, I am not sure if anyone really knows the problem/s that are being addressed right now other than debt and the capability to pass a tax cut.

]]>Thu, 20 Feb 2025 18:03:26 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118016aristocracyhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118016https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118016