[HN Gopher] NIH.gov DNS servers down, making PubMed, BLAST, etc....
___________________________________________________________________
NIH.gov DNS servers down, making PubMed, BLAST, etc. unreachable
[fixed]
Author : raphman
Score : 458 points
Date : 2025-03-02 10:50 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nslookup.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nslookup.io)
| raphman wrote:
| It seems someone shut down all NIH DNS servers. Right now the NIH
| website, PubMed and BLAST are up, but not resolvable.
|
| Cloudflare's 1.0.0.1 DNS resolver seems to still have cached the
| records. Google and most others I tried did not. This probably
| explains why some people on social media could access the sites
| while others couldn't.
|
| Workaround via /etc/hosts : 156.40.212.210
| nih.gov 96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov 34.107.134.59
| pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10
| ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10
| ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
|
| EDIT:
|
| While ns.nih.gov, ns2.nih.gov, and ns3.nih.gov do not respond,
| the nameserver at lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) does.
|
| Also see https://tldr.nettime.org/@ww/114089972404202687
| anotherpaul wrote:
| Thank you for writing this down. Might become relevant if they
| don't solve that before Monday.
|
| One can only hope this is not intentional.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Cool, thanks! While the chaos monkey is at work, the true
| ARPANET spirit is still alive!
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Nice work!
| stwrzn wrote:
| They were not shut down.
|
| Confirm yourself using: dig +tcp @$(dig +short
| ns.nih.gov @a.ns.gov) www.nih.gov
| raphman wrote:
| Yes. As noted elsewhere in this thread, they still respond to
| TCP requests. I did not know this at the time of writing.
| nektro wrote:
| well this is.. uh.. not good
| jjallen wrote:
| FYI it has been like this for at least sixteen hours as last
| night I was trying to read something there too and it wouldn't
| work. I hope there's backups somewhere. I definitely wouldn't
| feel bad about using non sanctioned sources at this point.
| letthegamesbegn wrote:
| The whole country is getting much more unreliable. Feels
| especially bad when I'm reading this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I'm not fromm the US, but these servers are not mirrored, at
| least to have the information? Or is that not allowed?
| maelito wrote:
| Trust in the US is failing day after day.
| fhd2 wrote:
| As someone in Europe, I'm honestly starting to wonder if the
| companies whose tech I oversee aren't better off eliminating
| reliance on US tech companies. Hard to tell what they'll do,
| being strong armed by Musk and Trump, or even just trying to
| win their favour.
|
| With server hardware, I can't think of real alternatives, at
| least x86. But then again, I guess they'll just continue to
| work once bought :P
|
| Cloud hosting and PaaS: We have some major, reliable hosters
| (Hetzner, OVH etc), but it's a bit lower level than AWS or
| Heroku. This part I'm pondering the most, since I mostly want
| to use stuff you can easily find freelancers to work on. With
| anything closer to self hosting, that's a bit tricky.
|
| Stuff like Google Workspace, Notion etc is non-trivial but
| possible to replace with stuff like Fastmail and the Atlassian
| suite. Not an "as good" replacement, but a workable one.
|
| I still feel a bit paranoid even thinking about this, and I'll
| ponder it some more before I act. But I can't help but wonder
| how many European CTOs are in the same boat after the oval
| office meeting with Zelenski. Kinda brought it home to me that
| the US is a very different country now, and using anything made
| there is no longer the no brainer it used to be. If the actual
| government can't resist their commands, private companies most
| definitely can't. And with a trade war looming, it'd be easy to
| just take competitors that rely on AWS et al off the market
| quickly, spy on competitors in Google Workplace, and stuff like
| that.
| xena wrote:
| Look into Scaleway!
| asmor wrote:
| We got a few OpenStack-based clouds.
|
| https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/en
|
| https://www.stackit.de/en/
| fhd2 wrote:
| I'd love to go with Hetzner (reliable for decades, well
| known etc), which has almost everything I need in their
| cloud offering, except an AWS RDS equivalent. OpenStack is
| probably worth a look!
|
| Sounds naive I guess, but my tech choices are pretty
| heavily biased towards "can I quickly find someone
| affordable to work on it?". Makes the market leader the
| obvious choice, quite often. And that's currently usually a
| US company.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Hetzner is great. I've used their services for some time
| and always had a great experience.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Is it possible to fully self-host the Atlassian suite with no
| external connectivity nowadays?
| fhd2 wrote:
| No, but it's an Australian company.
| benrutter wrote:
| It's definitely a thought I've had too. In particular, there
| are some tech stacks I know of dealing with critical energy
| infrastructure which are tied to US cloud companies, I think
| those represent a huge risk, and I wouldn't be suprised to
| see a few of them start shifting soon.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Almost everything has been infected by a zero-sum mindset in
| the US. Some other group of country wins means I must be
| losing, etc.
|
| The administration doesn't see that the entire world order is
| built on many positive sum relationships and coalitions that
| the US has asymmetrically benefited from. And the same goes for
| social order. Wealthy people suddenly see themselves as
| victims(?) of their employees, and investors blame entitled
| tech employees for companies problems. When the reality is that
| employee and management - and social classes - benefit
| economically by supporting each other.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| _Non-zero: the Logic of Human Destiny_ was a very influential
| book for me growing up, talking about how society 's very
| premise is non-zero sum thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...
|
| Thanks for this idea suggestion, this spin. Its a framing
| that, now that I see it, maps well & explain so much. The
| limited world view is collapsing our world, in horrible ways.
| Mankind became better than the animals because we grew to
| encompass more than short transactional views of ourselves,
| and it's so heartbreaking watching vicious dark side anger
| unmake the core of spirit that propelled us so far.
| buyucu wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better, that trust was very low to
| begin with.
| gilleain wrote:
| For quick reference, BLAST refers to the 'Basic Local Alignment
| Search Tool' that's a commonly used part of the bioinformatics
| toolkit. You 'BLAST' sequences by sending a query sequence of
| interest against a database of other sequences to find similarity
| hits.
| bow_ wrote:
| I have been out of the field for some time, so I am not sure
| how much BLAST is used these days.
|
| Therer was a time when BLAST-ing a DNA and protein sequence you
| have is like doing a Google search on it: it simply tells you
| where the sequence might come from. This is useful especially
| when your research is to figure out what that specific sequence
| is doing. It won't give you the answer immediately (otherwise
| why bother doing the research at all), but it certainly gives
| context: sequence similarity often hints at similar / related
| functions.
|
| As an analogy: imagine if StackOverflow is suddenly down and
| you don't know *if* it's going to be up again.
| dharmab wrote:
| My sibling is a molecular biologist working in the industry
| and they do use BLAST data. She's been telling her company
| for months they need to secure access with an alternative
| source or offline backup, hopefully their software team
| started it in time.
| wisidisi wrote:
| Everyone can set-up their own blast database. Usually if
| you are specialized on a certain species you have your own
| DB cached in memory somewhere locally for efficiency. Also
| there are alternatives. NCBI blast is just one of many.
| Also all the sequences are globally kept and in sync in
| different regions of the world, so if one Datacenter goes
| down you still have the option to use the exact same data
| from Europe or Japan and so on.
| dharmab wrote:
| Yup, her company's software was set up to only use NCBI
| and she's been warning that that was a risk :)
| arthur2e5 wrote:
| Not a professional, but still use it like that. They also
| have a new smartblast thing, which works much faster (really,
| really like Google!) but only on highly similar proteins.
| gilleain wrote:
| Fair, and to be totally clear, even when I was in the field
| (an age ago), sequence stuff was never really my thing.
| However, sequence comparison is a fairly fundamental tool.
|
| Of course, yes you can run these things locally, other
| providers (such as EBI Europe and Japan) have them, etc. It's
| still a bad sign on the pile of other bad signs, IMO.
| qgin wrote:
| At some point we have to consider the possibility that these
| aren't just cuts to the budget, but an intentional plan to visit
| each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it
| bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| IMO we don't need to attribute malice to it, which will drag
| everyone into a debate about what's going on inside the clearly
| broken minds of a few rich men.
|
| The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.
|
| In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument
| lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.
| croes wrote:
| Given the sheer amount of incompetence malice becomes a lot
| more probable
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I'm not saying what's true, I'm saying what is _useful to
| argue_.
|
| The goal is to convince other people, not to rah-rah the
| already-believers.
|
| Trivially: these websites go back up in a few days, is that
| more convincingly malice or just "these people don't know
| how to operate a government?"
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Democratic turnout was a problem in the 2024 election.
| Rah-rah is important, like it or not.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| And do you have evidence to suggest more people would've
| been activated by more "he's a fascist" messaging?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| You open with "IMO" but want evidence from me? Lol.
|
| There were many dems who remembered Trump as the funny
| orange man, didn't really care to turn out against him,
| and fell for the "both sides bad" messaging that was
| absolutely rampant on the left (esp with regard to Kamala
| and Palestine). So no, I don't think the most important
| rally-the-base rhetoric was to ratchet up "Trump is
| Fascist" so much as suppress "Both Sides Bad" while we
| had an election to win.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Both sides were bad. Biden and Kamala were terrible
| candidates for the Democrats to run, and their campaign
| positioning lacked a unifying aspirational message.
|
| What was Kamala's 2024 campaign slogan?
| someothherguyy wrote:
| We're not going back?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Exactly.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Which was a horrendously stupid tag line. All people saw
| was "prices not going back." Everyone in America
| remembers simpler, better times. 1990s race relations
| alone were far better than they are now.
|
| I saw that slogan and cringed immediately.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Sorry downvoters, I'm no MAGA cultist, it's just the
| worst slogan ever.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| "IMO" means "in my opinion." You made a statement as a
| fact, which is why I asked for evidence. Lol.
|
| Agreed the "both sides bad" messaging was a huge factor
| here. But that's exactly why we should talk about these
| fuckups as questions of competence. They are unambiguous
| evidence of a difference in both sides' ability to
| actually operate a government!
| croes wrote:
| Then incompetence as as reason isn't useful.
|
| If it's malice then it's an attack. You have react
| differently to an attack than to incompetence.
|
| The EU made the same mistake with Trump's appeasement to
| Putin. They hoped it's some kind of clever negotiation
| tactic but they learned it's not. It's just two autocrats
| teaming up at the expense of Ukraine.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| That is not even close to analogous.
|
| Meh, feel free to disagree. How many MAGA voters do you
| talk to on a daily basis?
| croes wrote:
| In person? None.
|
| Online? More than enough and they show the same kind of
| malice like our own type of MAGA: AfD voters
| derbOac wrote:
| To borrow a phrase, any sufficiently incompetent
| organization becomes indistinguishable from malice.
|
| Although I agree with others' sentiment that focusing on
| incompetence can be more persuasive to certain segments of
| society.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It is not incompetence to put people with no relevant
| experience into cabinet positions. It's purpose. Destruction
| with a huge amount of distraction is the purpose.
| lkrubner wrote:
| What we are seeing is clearly an act of malice. We need to be
| honest about that. Trying to obfuscate what we are seeing
| helps no one. We should use plain English and talk in a
| straightforward way about what is happening.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| "Helps no one" except probably winning elections, given the
| "he's a fascist" messaging (while true) didn't seem to
| resonate.
| raphman wrote:
| I disagree. The nameservers still respond to requests on
| 53/tcp. It seems like someone messed up a firewall
| configuration or rolled out a bad server configuration.
| Shit happens - maybe exacerbated by the DOGE insanity. But
| there is no indication that this was done on purpose.
| kube-system wrote:
| The insanity that has/will lead to functions no longer
| being properly staffed is on purpose.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/02217acf-
| ac64-49c2-acd5-ef4f107f0...
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-
| fas...
|
| There can be incompetence and malice together in all this.
| The malicious often leverage the incompetent to further their
| goals.
|
| One way to get more people on board with destroying
| government structures is to render the government structures
| as ineffectual and incompetent as possible.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I didn't say there isn't malice.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| You want to downplay the malice to avoid arguments about
| whether it's really malicious. I want to spotlight the
| malice because it's really fucking bad and a lot of
| people are going to get hurt, and that's not an
| accidental outcome.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| And when these websites are back up? What then?
| genter wrote:
| This isn't a possibility. They've publicly stated it's their
| goal.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225342
| throw0101c wrote:
| >> _https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225342_
|
| > _Everyone should watch the director of the Office of
| Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government
| workers:_
|
| Russell Vought is the architect of Project 2025:
|
| * https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
|
| You know, the thing that Trump publicly said he wasn't part
| of.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| That was a master class in weasel words.
|
| "I haven't read it, I don't know what's in it."
|
| "I know nothing about it."
|
| I absolutely believe he never read it during the campaign,
| probably hasn't done more than skim a summary to this day.
| He doesn't need to. None of that matters to him.
|
| Keeping his distance gave him "plausible"
| deniability...kinda. Anyone who actually thought Trump
| wasn't going to let Heritage Foundation people take over
| substantial control of government should take a long hard
| look at their sources of information, internal biases, and
| critical thinking capability.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| If history is any indication, it won't even go towards fixing
| the debt. Capital Gains tax cut incoming in 3... 2... 1...
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| What capital gains? Everyone will be getting tax relief next
| year for market losses.
| bloopernova wrote:
| That's already planned. The republicans want to pass
| _another_ 4.5 trillion of tax cuts for the richest 0.1%
|
| They simply lie to their supporters, and are believed because
| republicans are indoctrinated throughout life to believe that
| "government bad, corporations good, taxes bad, money good,
| collective power bad, individual power good"
|
| trump said before the election he didn't know what project
| 2025 was. He lied, pure and simple.
| twoodfin wrote:
| The TCJA made $4.5T in cuts for the richest 0.1%? Can you
| explain more about that? Is that by income, wealth?
| elif wrote:
| It's deeper than lying about P25. P25 was allegedly an
| intentionally public document, designed to grab the media
| spotlight. It is actually plausible that trump had never
| seen a single page of that document by design.
|
| There is a secret runbook that goes much further than P25
| which the same authors ensured was never printed or emailed
| anywhere which could be susceptible to FOIA. That is the
| runbook they have been using since day 1, which likely
| contained all 74 of his day 1 orders pre-written.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| somebody needs to FOIA donald trump jr's etc chatgpt
| account
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Trump is too reactionary to have an N-step plan. The man
| thrives in chaos and uncertainty. Furthermore project 25
| is large enough I'd be a lot more surprised if whatever
| happens wasn't on that wishlist somewhere.
| amelius wrote:
| Trump lied about a lot of things.
|
| The concept of "electoral fraud" is enshrined in law, so I
| guess more lawsuits are coming.
| exe34 wrote:
| The entire federal workforce is 4% of expenses. If they
| wanted to cut costs, they would halt all private contracts
| and audit those first.
| ldoughty wrote:
| There's a proven track record with the Republican plan and USPS
| that they like to sabotage the agency and then point to the
| dysfunction they created as a reason to get rid of it. I fully
| suspect that we're going to hear that several agencies have
| been non-productive since January 20th and should thus be
| cut... Despite the fact that they BLINDLYfired not only the new
| employees, but all the employees that have had promotions over
| the last year as well (And were probationary in their new
| role).
| i80and wrote:
| I don't know how to fix this ratchet of "Republicans shatter
| things for fun and self-profit; Democrats try to tape things
| back together but it's harder to fix things than break them;
| so voters punish them by electing Republicans" that's been
| going on my entire life
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's not that simple. Democrats are responsible for plenty
| of stupid ideas, and Republicans have pushed through some
| good ideas.
|
| Being overly reductionist makes one easier to reject as
| partisan.
|
| What is new is the MAGA/2025 hijacking of the Republican
| party to enact its goals. To the extent that the current
| Republican leadership is essentially a different party than
| it was 6 years ago.
| aswanson wrote:
| 10 year dominance of a political party by one man is not
| a hijacking. It's a revealed preference.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I think they believe the hijacking happened 12 years ago.
| natebc wrote:
| It started in 2008 and kicked into super high gear in
| 2010.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yeah, this might be correct. It's possible Trumpism is a
| natural extension of tea-party-ism.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Especially ironic, given one of the tenets of tea
| partyism was paying down the national debt.
| i80and wrote:
| The national debt is too abstract and wonk-ish to be an
| actual tenet of a populist movement. I remember people
| _talked_ about it a lot, but only in trite ways and I
| really think it was just a fig leaf.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The national debt is concrete, but no president likes
| having their ability to spend constrained.
|
| It should be handled in the way all >4 year payback US
| problems are: by empowering a commission to do the
| neccessary unpopular things and give members longer-
| than-4-year terms.
| djeastm wrote:
| How is it a hijack? He got and is still getting
| overwhelming support from the GOP rank and file.
|
| It mightve been a hijack at one point, but MAGA owns the
| whole airline now.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Many Republicans don't realize this. The party you've
| voted for all your life is not the same party running
| America today. Today's Republican party has been co-opted
| by an Anarcho-capitalist wing. And step 1, which they're
| well on track to do is to dismantle the Federal
| government. Step 2, which will be coming within the next
| year or two is to sell off previous government services
| to private entities.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| When the Soviet Union collapsed the US sent over
| "economic consultants" to steer what happened next
| towards "free markets."
|
| What happened next is that various chancers marched into
| state institutions, usually with private security details
| made of low-grade armed thugs promoted from street crime,
| and said "This is ours now."
|
| The US aristocracy saw this and apparently thought
| "Perfect - let's make that happen here too."
|
| The fact there's been no significant state or media push
| back against Musk's takeovers is all anyone needs to
| know. The aim is a kleptocratic imperium drowning in
| gold, drugs, delusion, and corruption - which is exactly
| what Russia turned into.
| Muromec wrote:
| The best part is where the plant is still state property
| on paper, but operates at loss because it exports
| everything to a shell company in Austria who resells it
| at profit paid to the actual benefociary controller.
|
| And if report on this, the president orders you to be
| behaded
| ethagnawl wrote:
| It's an evolution, not a hijack. Even Mitt Romney accepts
| it as the new normal:
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/15/politics/video/mitt-
| romney-ma...
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| David Brooks, at the Alliance for Responsible
| Citizenship, had a session called "How the Elite rigged
| Society (and why it's falling apart)"
|
| I included a link just below to at the exact timestamp he
| talks about this:
|
| How Brooks sees Trumpism: not conservative, they don't
| have a conservative or positive vision for society, they
| just want to destroy the institutions "dominated" by
| left. In his words, this means, they are astoundingly
| incompetent. "Elite Narcissicm" leads to the destruction
| of every thought system it encounters.
|
| https://youtu.be/QSa52TR9tCA?si=Uckncgw-WbAfA5tZ&t=277
| i80and wrote:
| I attended GOP caucuses circa 2010-2014. I would like to
| believe there was once a healthy sensible conservative
| party, but I'm sorry to say that to my eyes nothing has
| been hijacked: MAGA is what the Republican party has been
| for my entire adult life. It's just loud about it in
| public now instead of behind the doors of political
| machinery.
| aswanson wrote:
| Facts. All Trump did was take the top talking points of
| AM radio & fox (birtherism/racism, illegal immigration,
| and no factory jobs) and parroted them to power.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| That's a fundamental shift in historical Republicanism
| though.
|
| For most of its history, the Republican party was fairly
| anti-populist (defined by whatever populism was at the
| time).
|
| The Republican southern strategy from 1980+ was
| predicated on attracting southern white votes by
| attacking civil rights (explicitly or implicitly), but
| ultimately focusing on business priorities (with some
| headline-catching red meat).
|
| However, in the decades since, the explosion of hardline
| conservative talk radio then dragged the party to answer
| to its more egregious populist demands.
|
| Hence Trump.
| aswanson wrote:
| That bait-and-switch reveals the core, though. The R base
| wanted what Trump is doing all along but was tricked by
| the establishment business class. The reason they are so
| loyal to Trump is because he ripped away the fasaud and
| acts out their longstanding wishes.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| selimnairb wrote:
| There is a through line from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan
| to Gingrich to Trump. Connective tissue has been provided
| by the likes of Roger Stone. This has been a 60-plus year
| project to overturn the New Deal.
| markhahn wrote:
| Non-MAGA republicans gave up; they are now extinct.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| There were two paths, the examples I would give are
| Cheney and Graham. Both thought Trump was terrible, one
| stuck to her convictions and is now out of government,
| the other rolled over and is now licking Trump's boots.
| hedora wrote:
| Name a single good idea the Republican Party has proposed
| and implemented at the federal level since 2000.
|
| The most recent thing I can think of was getting Clinton
| to balance the budget, and he was a democrat.
| neaden wrote:
| PEPFAR started in 2003 under Bush and has saved millions
| of lives. Of course Trump is dismantling it now but I
| think it's inarguably the best thing Bush did as
| president.
| freen wrote:
| The GOP fought against AIDS interventions since its
| discovery.
|
| Had they not, PEPFAR or something similar would have
| existed a decade or more earlier.
|
| Lotsa people died because of that.
|
| By 2003, it was no longer tenable to refuse to fight
| AIDS, plus, notable GOP family members got AIDS.
|
| Just like Nancy Reagan's 180 on gay people once her
| daughter came out.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| I totally agree with you, but as someone who has seen the
| impact on the ground in parts of Africa, and how HIV/AIDS
| is no longer the death sentence it once was, PEPFAR is an
| amazing program that came too late, but let's not
| discount the actual good that it has done.
| freen wrote:
| Of course not! Better late than never.
| freen wrote:
| 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.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Takes like this only focus on domestic politics and ignore
| the harrowing neoliberal foreign politics both parties
| uphold in order to perpetuate class inequality and create
| consumer demand. Both parties are invested in selling this
| country out, even if some Democrats really do care about
| social services.
| i80and wrote:
| I actually agree, but I'm not sure this is a relevant
| observation. It's not fawning over Democrats to say that
| they are, as a group, pro-institution.
| npteljes wrote:
| The two-party system in itself doesn't work well. So I'm
| not holding my breath.
| exe34 wrote:
| > "probationary in their new role"
|
| This is such a big tech "move fast and break things" thing to
| do. The cancer has now metastasized and reached the executive
| function.
| zaik wrote:
| Don't worry, a privately owned monopoly will pick up the
| slack.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| This is an explicit Project 2025 goal.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| It's surprising to see how many people still don't get this.
| None of what happened so far was in any way surprising. You
| can literally go right now and read up what else they have
| planned. We're in for a wild ride.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I distinctly 'member people _even right here on this site_
| taking dumps on anyone who dared accuse the Republicans of
| being hellbent on implementing Project 2025. Called us
| "conspiracy nuts", said that this was just "enemy
| propaganda" or that there was no connection between Trump
| and Project 2025, downvoted and flagged our warnings...
| where the fuck are y'all now? Where the fuck are y'all with
| your guns and "don't tread on me" flags now that MAGA is
| tearing down the government and installing an autocracy in
| all but name? And where the fuck are the even more people
| who did just the same on Reddit?
|
| The thing is, almost no one was used to politicians
| actually following through with their plans and promises.
| Trump is the first Western leader since I'm alive (other
| than the current Spanish government) to actually do what he
| has promised, and I fear this image of him being an
| "accomplisher" will send him for a wave of support in both
| the midterms and the next election (and yes, I also believe
| that there will be no one left to enforce the "two terms"
| regulation).
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Democrats don't believe in guns or storming the white
| house... they'll either wait 4 years or wishfully dream
| that orange man dies of a heart attack.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I also believe that there will be no one left to
| enforce the "two terms" regulation).
|
| I don't want to suggest what Trump himself suggested:
| https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-2nd-amendment-
| folks-st...
|
| I think that's a bad option.
|
| What I am saying is: Every single time I've seen a
| headline about school shootings, someone suggests gun
| control.
|
| Someone reacts that guns keep the government from
| becoming despots.
|
| I said then, no, the military are the ones who decide
| such things. Militia don't make a dent, despite their
| self image.
|
| And yet, Trump, who just narrowly avoided being killed,
| signed more support of the 2nd amendment.
|
| https://www.nraila.org/articles/20250207/nra-statement-
| on-pr...
|
| Did he sign because he's afraid, or because he's not?
| mindslight wrote:
| > _Where the fuck are y 'all with your guns and "don't
| tread on me" flags now that MAGA is tearing down the
| government and installing an autocracy in all but name?_
|
| The same place they were when Breonna Taylor was
| summarily executed by government agents retaliating for
| Kenneth Walker exercising his second amendment right to
| home defense at night (the exact type of scenario they
| continually grandstand about!) - following the twisted
| logic and misdirection of their mainstream media so they
| can continue lazily attacking a strawman of their fellow
| citizens ("oWn tHe lIbS!1!") rather than reflect on what
| it would actually take to live their purported values.
|
| At this point the only real question for so-called
| "conservatives" is _when_ will they realize their leaders
| have betrayed us and given away our country 's future to
| China?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Reminds me of how 9/11 turned into the GWoT and Iraq I etc.
| The Project for the New American Century posted their
| playbook for that on their website too. Most people
| downplayed it.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| They get it, they just know it looks bad so they act as if
| they are surprised.
| plagiarist wrote:
| There are still some people (even in this thread)
| pretending it is not deliberately sabotaging the
| government in favor of billionaires.
| agumonkey wrote:
| And at some point it's time to take action to go around a rogue
| non government. We have the technology, we can rebuild it.
| lkrubner wrote:
| We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the
| government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt.
| It might take 20 years, but eventually the USA will get back
| to where it was in late 2024, in terms of state capacity. But
| the damage being done right now almost guarantees a "Lost
| Generation" that has to spend its life rebuilding what we
| had, rather than moving into the future.
| danieldk wrote:
| It is possible, but why do you believe this is a necessity?
| It's also possible that the US becomes an oligarchy
| dictatorship like Russia. All the assets are seized by a
| small group (crashing the economy, removing oversight,
| removing national park maintenance, etc. makes it
| possible). Then give people just enough money and fear not
| to revolt. Feed them propaganda all day, find some enemies
| to direct their hate towards. I mean, it's pretty much
| Vance and Thiel's playbook, rule by 'wise' tech CEOs.
| Loughla wrote:
| I'm genuinely afraid of what we're doing to our
| childrens' futures.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| We're already far too balkanized as a country for a
| central dictatorship to make much sense in the long run.
| Especially when the money tap starts running dry. I think
| we'll just have an extremely weak federal government (or
| perhaps we will finally split.)
| whatshisface wrote:
| A centralized dictatorship is what held the actual
| Balkans together...
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I was hinting at building an alternative system that would
| be resilient to this kind of tampering. Decentralization
| fanatics might be of use right now.
| qgin wrote:
| Can you sketch out a bit more how this could work?
| agumonkey wrote:
| With precision no, I'm a newb, but a distributed system
| ala DHT, or git so that there is no single path of
| access.
| i80and wrote:
| I cannot emphasize enough that _this is not a technology
| problem_ , nor is it one where solutions can be usefully
| informed by technology.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Sorry if I misjudged the way to approach this, I still
| think that the 'method' (or technology) matters because
| it influence the social and political layer too. How
| would you approach it, genuinely curious.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| 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.
| edoceo wrote:
| Every citizen of age is entered into a lottery. From this
| pool you will be selected, at random, to be assigned into
| a government management role (eg: president, law maker,
| justice) supported by staff. Any citizen, randomly in
| roles of power. No voting. Then you serve your role for 4
| years and never get another one. Now the incentive is to
| do the least harm?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild
| the government. All of these agencies will eventually be
| rebuilt. It might take 20 years,
|
| They're going to a lot of effort, and exposing themselves
| to a lot of risk, if this is all likely to be undone in a
| few years time. My worry is that they won't be able to
| resist trying to permanently lock-in these changes, even if
| the most obvious way to do that is to abandon democracy.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Our global influence and wealth will almost certainly never
| be this high again. I think that's probably a very good
| thing for the globe in itself, but we can wreak a lot of
| destruction on our way out of power.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| It is well-known, but it seems like it is hip to be indifferent
| on this sinking ship.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _At some point we have to consider the possibility that these
| aren't just cuts to the budget_
|
| "At some point"? That point was a few weeks, like when they
| blindly purged the folks that did maintenance on nuclear
| weapons:
|
| * https://time.com/7225798/doge-fires-national-nuclear-
| securit...
|
| Or when they purged people dealing with bird flu:
|
| * https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-
| trump-...
| csomar wrote:
| Given that they Kennedy retracted on the vaccine mandate
| suggests gross incompetence might be at play here.
| kennysoona wrote:
| I normally defer to Hanlon's Razor, but with this
| administration it's 50/50 if their actions are due to
| incompetence or malice.
|
| The only thing we know is their intent is never to benefit
| the majority of the people they are meant to be serving.
| tedivm wrote:
| I don't think we need to pick between incompetence and
| malice here. I think both apply to most of their actions.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Select non-malicious but incompetent people to head
| departments, gives you plausible deniability when people
| claim that what's happening is malicious. "No, look, RFK
| Jr is sincere in his desire to help the American people."
| He's just really bad at it. Of course, that doesn't speak
| well to the judgment of the people at the top. They'll
| try and claim that RFK Jr did a fine job and it was the
| Deep State that caused the problems.
| brookst wrote:
| Probably exactly what will happen. "Oh, with the dramatic
| reduction in vaccinations the American people would have
| been so much healthier, but the Deep State sprayed
| measles from chemtrails just to make us look bad"
| marcosdumay wrote:
| At this point, I don't see why it should matter if it's
| criminal negligence or malice.
|
| They know what they are doing is illegal. Or, if they
| don't, it's because they are actively insisting on not
| learning it, what shouldn't make any difference.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _I normally defer to Hanlon 's Razor, but with this
| administration it's 50/50 if their actions are due to
| incompetence or malice._
|
| The incompetent people were hired / appointed[1] as a
| form of malice against the "Deep State" (read: civil
| service) specifically, and government and civil society
| in general.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
| jrflowers wrote:
| Hanlon's razor is funny because it assumes that malicious
| actors can't be incompetent and incompetent people can't
| act maliciously. It is a fun logical trick that functions
| by pretending that huge swathes of the population don't
| exist, like a sort of inverted cognitive behavioral
| therapy exercise
| kennysoona wrote:
| I don't think it is assuming that malicious actors can't
| be incompetent or that incompetent people can't act
| maliciously, it's just asserting that incompetence is so,
| so much more widespread than actual malice.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| Indeed, as Gary Kasparov eluded to
|
| "These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power
| any time soon, or ever."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/pu.
| ..
|
| or
|
| https://archive.is/l4kLV
| devin wrote:
| Not sure why you took a downvote. I think it is plain to
| see that we are unlikely to have free and fair elections in
| 2028, possibly even the next cycle.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| That's exactly the attitude a number of right-wing people
| had after Trump's 2020 election loss.
| oblio wrote:
| The thing is, are these situations really comparable?
|
| Biden has just transferred power peacefully and
| gracefully, his supporters didn't initiate any coups.
|
| And after Trump's 2020 loss, Biden basically enacted a
| bunch of sensible policies, including continuing some
| reasonable Trump policies (some specific tariffs, for
| example). Trump in 2025 instead decided to ban paper
| straws (!!!!).
| orblivion wrote:
| I think if your argument is that they're making hasty
| decisions, you've provided good evidence for that. But the
| remainder of the sentence you quoted was:
|
| > but an intentional plan to visit each government department
| and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over
| the course of the next year or two.
|
| If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die,
| and you're using the above as _evidence_ for this, then you
| 'd have to convince me that they _want_ the government to
| lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _If your argument is that they 're trying to make
| agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for
| this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the
| government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu._
|
| I'm saying they want to get rid of government:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43218884
| orblivion wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree, but unless they're
| literally ready to jump to anarcho-capitalism in the next
| four years I don't think they're trying to let the
| nuclear bombs go unattended. I think the specific
| examples you gave aren't your best examples to this
| point. If anything it's a counter-argument.
| freen wrote:
| 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.
| orblivion wrote:
| That's fair, but the initial point I was replying to was
| about intent.
| freen wrote:
| Again, intent is irrelevant.
|
| Sure, criminal negligence vs murder, but do you really
| care if it's your kid?
| orblivion wrote:
| And again, I'm responding to another post (two, actually)
| about intent. If you have an issue with it, take it up
| with them. I acknowledge your point as fair, but a
| separate point.
| philistine wrote:
| Do not worry about world-ending neglect towards the staff
| responsible for the maintenance and security of our
| nuclear arsenal, their intent was only for a smaller
| government!
| orblivion wrote:
| I don't know what's going on with HN right now, there
| usually is a lot more reading comprehension and level
| headed conversation, even on controversial topics.
| philistine wrote:
| It's not me minimizing a series of catastrophic events
| because in my great wisdom I have perfectly ascertained
| the intentions of an unpredictable administration, it's
| reading comprehension.
| freen wrote:
| The foundations of the American government and its
| ability to care for its citizens. People are loosing
| their livelihoods, people are dying, etc.
|
| You have been desperately attempting to defend the
| "intent" of the perpetrators.
|
| That might rub folks the wrong way, huh?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| They have spoken their intent out loud, over and over.
| orblivion wrote:
| I think I did a poor job of articulating my point. My
| point is that they've spoken their intent to smash the
| bureaucratic state. Their intent is not to dismantle 100%
| of the government, including the military and the nuclear
| bombs. So I don't think the nuclear bombs incident is a
| great example of them enacting their intent. Unless you
| actually think they want to do that, but then that's a
| much different claim you're backing up.
| freen wrote:
| Sufficient active disregard for consequences is equivalent
| to actively seeking said consequences.
|
| If someone consistently drives extremely recklessly,
| refuses to service their brakes, allows their tires to
| become completely tread worn, removes their mirrors, etc.
| etc.
|
| What could one reasonably infer about their desire to get
| into a car crash?
|
| Would loud and repeated claims of a desire to drive safely
| convince you? Moreover, would you consider such claims to
| be in good faith, especially if said reckless behavior
| continues?
|
| Besides, the GOP has said time and time again: let's make
| the government so small we can drown it in the bathtub.
|
| What private sector entity would find it profitable, or
| even be able to, control the bird flu or manage the nuclear
| arsenal.
|
| Much less, do you want there to be a profit motive in those
| places?
| digdugdirk wrote:
| "Yes, your honour, I did shoot him point blank in the
| chest. But you can't use that fact as evidence that I
| wanted to kill him, that's just evidence of how he died."
|
| Murder, manslaughter, intent, accident, purpose, neglect.
| We have many words that try to put a degree of malice on
| the act of taking a life, but the life is still gone.
|
| At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and say
| "They're going where I can't follow.". Right now, it seems
| like you're drawing the line right _after_ they come out
| and tell the world that they specifically intend to burn
| America to the ground and auction off the remains for their
| personal profit. Where you draw your line is your own
| personal choice, but it 's worth thinking about ahead of
| time.
| orblivion wrote:
| What is your model of this group of people behind DOGE?
| If it's a group of radical right wingers with libertarian
| leaning who want to smash the bureaucratic state, that's
| probably accurate and most people (even supporters) can
| get behind that characterization. Do you think _this
| group of people_ , ushered in by Donald John Trump, want
| to dismantle the military? If not, then why would they
| _purposely_ try to lose control of the nukes? There
| probably exist some radical libertarians (or even left-
| wing anarchists) who would actually advocate for let 's
| say decommissioning the nukes, but I think it's pretty
| clear that that's not who's in office.
|
| What I see is a ham-fisted approach to slashing the
| Department of Energy. That's the actual goal. Plenty of
| anti-Trump outlets report it that way. The idea that they
| actually _want_ the nuclear weapons to lapse is a pretty
| bold implication, assuming I 'm not misunderstanding the
| argument.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I don't think there is one unified plan to destroy the
| federal government; however, many influential people in the
| current administration are motivated to destroy particular
| parts of the federal government and will not get in each
| other's way. I believe the result of this is that the
| current administration will attempt to destroy the union
| (inclusive OR) of all the agencies that influential
| individuals within the administration want to destroy.
|
| Here's a quote from the conservative political operative
| and self-described Christian Nationalist Russ Vought, who
| is both the current and former head of the Office of
| Management and Budget under Trump:
|
| _"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.
| When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want
| to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the
| villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the
| EPA can 't do all of the rules against our energy industry
| because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We
| want to put them in trauma."_ [1]
|
| This is a visceral and radical statement which has gotten
| some airtime on the news recently. However, it's
| interesting to note that Project 2025, which Vought helped
| lead and authored key sections of, does not advocate for
| the dismantling of USAID, rather recommending that its
| mission be narrowly aligned to national security goals[2].
| In 2025, however, Elon Musk wanted USAID shuttered, and
| Vought was happy to oblige in his position as "the nerve
| center of the federal budget."
|
| However, Project 2025 advocates for eliminating or
| defunding the Department of Homeland Security, Department
| of Education, EPA, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and
| other government agencies. It's likely that these will also
| come under fire.
|
| Finally (and this is my opinion), I believe it is
| impossible to understand this current administration's
| policy agenda without at least a surface level
| understanding of the writing of Curtis Yarvin, a software
| developer and reactionary political blogger. One this
| topic, Yarvin says the following:
|
| _"What is government? A government is just a corporation
| which owns a country. Nothing more, nothing less. It so
| happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly
| managed and there's a very simple way to replace that,
| which is what we do to all corporations that have failed.
| We simply delete them."_
|
| [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-
| russ-v...
|
| [2] https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadershi
| p_FUL... (pg 253-255)
|
| [3] https://apnews.com/article/trump-doge-russell-vought-
| project...
| 47282847 wrote:
| See also https://project2025.observer/.
| orblivion wrote:
| Could you imagine any Project 2025 type wanting the
| government to disband the military? I imagine not. So why
| would they want to lose control of the nukes? I think _in
| the case of the nukes_ it was just a ham-fisted attempt
| to downsize the Department of Energy. To that point, last
| I heard they were scrambling to re-hire those people.
|
| Curtis Yarvin isn't a libertarian (anymore), he's a
| monarchist. I also don't think he would advocate for the
| government to lose control of the nukes.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I think the DoE thing was a mistake. Kind of frightening
| that nobody in the chain of execution for that decision
| knew what the DoE actually does, but I don't think that
| was intentional.
| orblivion wrote:
| Okay cool. Well maybe I misinterpreted, but it sounded
| like the person I was responding to in my initial post
| was implying that it was on purpose. Or at very least,
| they would have to imply that it was on purpose for their
| argument to make sense. That was my point. Perhaps I
| haven't been clear.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I think the person I responded to did insinuate that, and
| I think that the evidence they provided doesn't support
| their premise.
|
| I am making the argument that the current administration
| _is_ trying to make government agencies die, but that it
| isn 't one centrally orchestrated conspiracy. I am using
| different evidence than the parent comment to make that
| argument.
|
| More importantly, the purpose of my original comment is
| to inform readers of the thread on highly influential
| second-tier actors (Russ Vought is well-known, but he's
| not Elon Musk) and help foster a more nuanced discussion
| of the current administration, its motivations, and its
| actions.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Yeah. Remember when Mitt Romney planned a speech
| promising to abolish the DoE, forgot which agency when
| giving the speech, and then got put in charge of the DoE?
| I imagine this is the sequel.
| chao- wrote:
| You are misremembering Rick Perry as Mitt Romney.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Keep in mind that this my be an internal revolt.
| amelius wrote:
| Argentina style. We've seen Musk with a chainsaw, he's not
| trying to hide it.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly25yny3ego
| yapyap wrote:
| Don't wanna be that guy but if not really being about budget
| cuts seemed pretty obvious from the start, if Elon and Donald
| got a hand in it it's pretty much always ego driven.
| akudha wrote:
| Eh? "At some point"? You must've been sleeping. This has
| nothing to do with efficiency or improving the budget. Bill
| Clinton laid off thousands of employees, but he did it in an
| orderly fashion, got congressional approval etc. This is the
| exact opposite. The goal here is to cause havoc, be cruel, cut
| regulations (by reducing budget and reducing personnel) etc.
| After the carnage, divvy up what's left among the billionaires.
| So far, it seems going according to plan.
|
| Did you hear what Russell Vought said? "We want the bureaucrats
| to be traumatically affected,"
|
| Anyone genuinely interested in efficiency should start with why
| the Pentagon has failed audits and is unable to account for
| tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars
| xg15 wrote:
| I wonder how long until they pull the "who needs public
| libraries when you have Jeff Bezos?" shtick again.
| ck2 wrote:
| and it's not like private industry is going to do this work,
| there's no profit in such services, at least not short term
|
| AND if they are doing this to NIH, imagine what they are doing
| to food and drug inspection for safety
|
| just assume all regulation is gone or being ignored without
| penalty, now scale that out for four years
|
| Forget "great depression" it's a dark ages of sorts with
| smartphones for distraction
| DevX101 wrote:
| TurboTax makes a lot of profit. This a perfect example of
| what should be a government service being privatized. That
| model will be replicated.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| It's really hard to have private companies charge for doing
| work that a functional government agency performs.
| sneak wrote:
| The US mismanaged the pandemic about as badly as anyone
| could; other than the ubiquitous surveillance of the
| population I don't know many us federal agencies that I
| personally would describe as "quite functional".
|
| I certainly don't know any that require they be run by the
| state.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Curtis Yarvin has been writing about this forever. JD Vance has
| spoken publicly about his agreement with ideas like RAGE
| (Retire All Government Employees). Musk has similarly spoken
| publicly about how CEOs are the best people to run the world.
| Although Thiel is not directly in power, he's also a Yarvin-ite
| and has been instrumental in both Vance's rise and also the
| pipeline for the various people working at DOGE to destroy the
| government.
|
| Alongside these budget cuts, the GOP is proposing massive tax
| cuts and massive _increases_ in funding for parts of the
| government related to law and immigration enforcement that will
| massively outweigh any savings from DOGE destroying entire
| programs overnight. DOGE is also demolishing organizations that
| are revenue positive and Trump has fired Inspector Generals,
| who are responsible for identifying waste and inefficiency in
| government operations.
|
| It isn't a possibility. It is very very clear.
| hedora wrote:
| In blue states, the middle class taxes are going to be hiked
| to pay for all this, just like under Trump 1.
|
| Also, half of the "law and immigration enforcement" budget
| increase is actually going towards deploying the military
| inside the US, which is illegal.
| layer8 wrote:
| This article is giving some background on the planning and
| setup of the new DOGE: https://archive.ph/oJRrI
| dcow wrote:
| HN was in the same uproar after Musk reformed Twitter. Minor
| disruption? "The sky is falling!" Brief outage? "It's malice!"
| "You see! Musk is obviously driving it into the ground."
|
| Could there be a world in the middle where maybe the government
| is bloated and irresponsibly spending money and republicans
| aren't just myopic nitwits and do care for our country? And
| they're executing on cleaning things up but in a way you
| disagree with?
|
| Why is it always malice and ruin? It's tiring. Twitter BTW
| pulled 1.25B in profit last year...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The government is bloated but rather than attacking the bloat
| (DoD budget that never shrank after ending two wars,
| subsidies for profitable businesses) they're going after the
| regulatory infrastructure that protects Americans from
| corporate greed.
| dcow wrote:
| Extraneous regulation stifles innovation and is the
| definition of bloat. I certainly haven't been protected
| from corporate greed lately, have you? The main function if
| gov't is to provide a military. That's appropriate spend.
| hooverd wrote:
| Because it's the explicit goal of the people doing it. Why go
| after the CFPB and 18F and IRS Direct File? They've been very
| outspoken about destroying administrative capacity and making
| the executive branch a king to punish the enemies of their
| national conservatism project. Red states are already trying
| to roll back women's and LGBT people's rights. How does
| trying to overturn Obergefull balance the budget?
| dcow wrote:
| There is waste everywhere. I sincerely don't understand
| how, when the stated plan is to look closely at all orgs
| and cut waste across the board, when the lens focuses on
| specific instances of orgs, the response is "not this one,
| cutting here will ruin everything". I don't buy it.
| hooverd wrote:
| What is developing in-house capabilities with 18F waste?
| Why is protecting consumers from scams and even recouping
| that money by the CFPB waste? Why is allowing people to
| e-file without private middlemen waste?
| dcow wrote:
| Well, we don't need two identity providers, for one. I'm
| sure the non wasteful things will be sustained under
| different management that isn't insubordinate.
| hyoomen wrote:
| You're sure... Based on what?
|
| Non wasteful things... Such as? Says who?
|
| "Different management" ffs the govt isn't supposed to
| pivot like a company every 4-8 yrs. That's an unthinking
| suggestion for a federal govt & heterogenous population.
|
| "Insubordinate"... To a unitary executive?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Ah yes, tech companies that provide zero personal support
| just scaling storage and delivery are the same as government
| which is MOSTLY providing support and person to person work,
| the OPPOSITE of scalable using tech.
| catlover76 wrote:
| It's already well-known that crippling the government and
| destroying things is the point. To have ever entertained
| anything else is to have been naive, morally defective, and
| stupid.
| jordanpg wrote:
| ** WAKE UP FOLKS! ** THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. NO ONE IS
| COMING TO SAVE US.
|
| If you're in the US, it's time to start asking yourself what
| you are going to want to be able to say to your kids or
| grandkids when they ask what you did about it when the
| constitutional republic was falling.
| sizzle wrote:
| What's the end goal here though?
| sirolimus wrote:
| Really pubmed?!?! USA is a disgrace!
| bananapub wrote:
| the level of malice towards like...the entire world displayed by
| Trump and Musk is just beyond comprehension.
|
| how did they become so sociopathic and why did Americans let them
| have the most powerful jobs in the world?
| bloopernova wrote:
| They are being directed by putin to destroy the USA's influence
| and power in the world.
|
| trump, thiel, and musk also see how rich russia's oligarchs
| are, and want to replicate russia in the USA.
| derbOac wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.
|
| It's a viable explanation.
|
| Russian state media were allowed into the Zelensky meeting
| while other traditional news orgs were not.
|
| The use of tariffs and customs against trading partners to
| shape general foreign policy, via a compromised president, as
| well as other things, is strongly reminiscent of Russian
| interference in Ukraine pre-2014.
|
| Even the Mueller report is best read as concluding there was
| obstruction of justice into the investigation.
|
| Thiel has openly discussed disappointment with democracy and
| advocated for autocracy, and his companies have celebrated
| the current state of things in shareholder meetings.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| It's being downvoted because it's idiotic!
| walls wrote:
| What would it look like if it were true? What would be
| different from what is happening?
| bloopernova wrote:
| russian propagandists and useful idiots try to hide or
| dismiss discussions about it.
|
| russia owns trump. elon talks to putin regularly, and he
| was promised access to Ukrainian mineral wealth. The whole
| Panama canal, Canada, and Greenland sabre-rattling is so
| eventually russian oil tankers can traverse the world with
| impunity.
|
| russia is dividing and conquering. They still dream of
| being a superpower, instead of a failed mafia state with
| nuclear weapons.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Our White House is filled with the Friends of Russia.
| They want to turn Ukraine over to Russia and loot it. JD
| Vance erupted on Zelenski because he showed people what
| was happening instead of just glad-handing his way
| through the talks and eating shit. This is a clear
| indication of what happens to YOU should you dare not
| fully submit.
|
| Our only hope now is that the American economy rebels
| against this insanity.
|
| The Orange One spent a lot of time praising Zelenski
| before throwing him to the wolves. That had to be a jolt
| to everyone, admitted or not.
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| there are way better theories than this out there. is this
| pro-elon/thiel/trump black propaganda? just sloppy and low-
| effort
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| They have spoken loudly about their intentions...
|
| Published them, even. Many times. Bloody held conferences
| about them.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Lol
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| How ?
|
| One is a convicted felon and the other one openly stated that
| he's going to prison if said convicted felon is not elected
| president.
|
| WAKE UP AMERICA
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Eggs were getting too expensive thanks to H5N1, so they thought
| they'd vote in a bunch of scientifically-illiterate antivax
| clowns.
|
| Think about it this way.. when tech folk got hooked up to
| mainline net access 24/7, it wasn't exactly good for us. Think
| 1970s cocaine consumption.
|
| When the rest of the population got Facebook, that's a refined
| and potent strain being sold into a population with no natural
| immunity or defensive mechanisms. Now it's 1990 and there's a
| crack dealer on every corner in poor neighborhoods.
|
| Those politicians who were at the wheel in 2008-10 must bear a
| share of the blame. They could see this coming, or should have
| done. There was far too much complacency about what was
| festering online and how easily it spread.
|
| Did none of our leaders hear about Gamergate in, what, 2015 and
| go, hang on we've got a BIG problem brewing here? Even GG
| wasn't really that much of a shock/surprise if you'd been
| paying attention since the mid 00's.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| Eggs were getting expensive due to an egg monopoly raising
| prices, according to the egg monopoly. The H5N1 was just the
| reason given to the public.
| ciconia wrote:
| I for one welcome our new overlords, they're gonna make our lives
| so much better at some point we're gonna have to ask them to stop
| winning!
|
| /s
| bloomingeek wrote:
| I will only bend my knee to a Pizza Overlord. (I've heard they
| will have a stuffed crust and extra cheese, at no extra cost!)
| All they require is I give up most of my freedoms and stop any
| critical thinking.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Who needs critical thinking when you have stuffed crust!
| DangerousPie wrote:
| European alternatives:
|
| https://europepmc.org/
|
| https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/home
|
| https://www.ensembl.org/
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's been great seeing the pan-European effort on genomics and
| biotech.
|
| Denmark's ecosystem is definetly a North Star for this.
|
| That said, BLAST seems to be up [0]
|
| [0] - https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| not for me
| fabian2k wrote:
| Pubmed is essentially Google for scientists. Anytime you search
| for scientific publications you usually use Pubmed. Of course
| there are alternatives, but until now you didn't really have to
| know about those. Everyone just used Pubmed, I'd bet that even
| most European scientists didn't know the local alternatives until
| now.
|
| And there's a lot more functionality made available to scientists
| by the NIH.
| InkCanon wrote:
| What I'm astounded by is how Musk/DOGE haven't been stopped, sued
| or even arrested. Isn't this interfering with the proper
| functioning of government, or vandalism, or gross negligence,
| some other illegal act?
| timods wrote:
| They are most definitely being sued:
| https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal...
| InkCanon wrote:
| Not an expert on law, but isn't there some mechanism to get
| policemen to stop DOGE while he's being sued? Like I imagine
| if I started taking down traffic lights the police would stop
| me then ask questions.
| derbOac wrote:
| I think that's the question on everyones minds. A judge has
| to order it though, which would trigger a direct
| confrontation between law enforcement divisions.
|
| They could also order assets frozen or something though (I
| think?) which I don't understand why they don't do.
| chewbacha wrote:
| Yes, court orders. But the officers that enforce them are
| part of the executive branch, so under Trump. They have
| been purging all career agents so there's few left to
| willingly enforce court orders.
|
| Its a coup.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_crisis
| kube-system wrote:
| Law enforcement is under the executive branch. The judicial
| branch doesn't have any physical ability to project force.
| The courts rely on the executive's respect to carry out the
| rule of law.
| Brybry wrote:
| Here's an informative Congressional Research Service
| article on Enforcement of Court Orders Against the
| Executive Branch.[1]
|
| TLDR; courts issue TRO (temporary restraining order),
| preliminary injunction, or permanent injunctions. Normally
| people comply. If the government does not comply then
| individuals can be found in civil contempt and the U.S.
| Marshals would enforce that. Civil contempt can't be
| pardoned.
|
| There have been some TROs and injunctions issued but also
| some ignoring of them by the government (and also the
| supreme court has temporarily stayed at least one). I don't
| believe any contempt rulings (findings?) have been made, so
| not yet appropriate for the cops (Marshals).
|
| [1]
| https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11271
| lesuorac wrote:
| I dunno, if there were like 30 of you all wearing orange
| vests and had relevant department of transportation
| stickers on actual work pickup trucks I think you might be
| able to get away with it as long as you threw some cones to
| dead-end one way of the intersection.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Vandalism and gross negligence _is_ the function of the
| government now. Failure is the goal.
| badgersnake wrote:
| This is what the US electorate voted for.
| technion wrote:
| I find this an interesting position after the news I just saw
| that police departments are getting cybertrucks. I know that
| doesn't technically mean anything but it sure has the optics of
| police being very unlikely to arrest doge staff.
| cetu86 wrote:
| Given what we've seen so far it wouldn't surprise me if Musk
| had built a kill switch into these vehicles to stop the
| police from taking action against him.
| buyucu wrote:
| What Trump has done in 1 month is probably enough to keep
| courts busy for the next two years. So, get in line.
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| It definitely feels like someone is trying to inflict Project
| Mayhem on our government. What's the appropriate response here
| by law enforcement?
| kennysoona wrote:
| The people that see this as an issue are trying to respect the
| rule of law, while the other half celebrate anything Musk and
| his assistant Trump do even if it's clearly terrible.
|
| When half the people are fine with it and all branches of
| government are allied with them, there isn't much the rest of
| us can do except try to clean up the mess when we get a chance
| to.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| It works for me.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I did a quick test, it looks like if you have set a DNS server
| like 1.1.1.1 you can still access it. But if you haven't, you
| can't.
| fweimer wrote:
| It's been pointed out that these servers still respond over TCP:
| https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114089755401568345
| https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2025-Mar...
|
| Given that the service is still partially operational (albeit not
| in a useful way), it's difficult to say from the outside what is
| going on.
| thomasingalls wrote:
| Pubmed is one of the most reliable services in the history of
| the internet. Sure the exact issue is opaque, but the fish rots
| from the head.
| prepend wrote:
| Pubmed is running. (Thankfully as it is one of the building
| blocks of science)
| raphman wrote:
| Can confirm.
|
| Thanks for pointing this out. This makes it much more likely
| that someone messed up a server/firewall configuration than
| that Musk is ripping out network cables at NIH.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| OTOH it's possible this is the easiest way to disrupt a site
| - screw with the DNS
| daveguy wrote:
| So we are looking at reckless incompetence, and not malice?
| Sorry, but at this point, prove it.
| hooverd wrote:
| Biden was sleepy though!
| stwrzn wrote:
| This is for sure a firewall misconfiguration. If there would be
| malicious intent, the bad actor would for sure not just close
| UDP.
| prepend wrote:
| Why are people assuming this was done intentionally? Is there
| more info somewhere describing the outage? I would typically
| assume that there's some error or intentional crash.
| Tyrubias wrote:
| I would believe it was an accident or bug if it was any other
| administration under any other circumstance. Given the
| vandalism that's already been committed against basic U.S.
| government functions, I have to conclude it's malice until
| proven otherwise.
| wisidisi wrote:
| It is certainly intentionally that NCBI is miraculously down
| for no real reason. But usually when the political debates
| are heated it happens more often. What one can observe now is
| just funny nothing of unhappy political activists.
| prepend wrote:
| I hope you're proven wrong.
|
| I suppose the good news is that there's no report that this
| is malicious and it's all just assumptions. That makes me
| happier than if there was some intentional shutdown.
|
| And fortunately, pubmed is up and running as of 822amEST
| quink wrote:
| As for me, I believe it not only because of the current
| administration per se, but because it's basically same as how
| the usaid.gov shutdown happened.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Don't worry bigballs is on it. What a clown show.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Apparently the FAA database that tracks accident investigations
| is down also, and probably a bunch of other systems that regular
| people aren't aware of that various organizations rely on.
|
| If this was a Chinese cyberattack, it would be the scandal of the
| decade. But it's on purpose.
| juujian wrote:
| Possibly has something to do with Musk's limit on credit card
| payment? Very smart all around.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I don't think we can guess the specific problem here, but the
| credit card limits could indeed easily take services offline as
| hosting isn't payed. So it would not surprise me at all to see
| a bunch of cases like this caused by the inability to pay their
| hosting bills.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| AFAIK cloudflare has a contract with CISA to provide DNS for
| .gov
| sunils34 wrote:
| The entire 18f org was let go. Many of these employees oversaw
| the building of digital services.
|
| Login.gov is a most critical SSO resource for logging into
| services such as the IRS for tax payments. It'll see peak usage
| next month for taxes. The teams maintaining these have been
| indiscriminately let go.
|
| More of these online services will start to go down, rapidly.
|
| If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these
| moves are incredibly shortsighted.
|
| (Yesterday the 18F former employee put https://18f.org/ as a
| transparent warning of what's to come)
| wil421 wrote:
| Isn't the leader of the 18f or digital whatever the so called
| "head" of DOGE aka the face for Elon. Btw, he's totally not in
| charge. Wink wink.
| smallerize wrote:
| I used to get them confused too, but 18f was a separate
| organization from USDS which got renamed DOGE.
| https://18f.org/
| thecopy wrote:
| >If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit
|
| It is obvious it is not. The purpose of a system is what it
| does.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| > If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all
| these moves are incredibly shortsighted.
|
| The point is to shutter or kneecap every last government
| service. When it becomes obvious which services were/are
| mission critical, they'll be replaced with private solutions --
| most of which will conveniently be on offer from X.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| In my 30+ years working at about everywhere and on everything
| the only place I've worked, inclusive of federal roles, with
| intentionally bottom productivity, are private government
| contractors. Federal employees while fairly kushy in benefits
| space were often pretty mission driven and believed deeply in
| what they were doing as they had taken a long term commitment
| on their role vs more money on the private side. The
| contractor space is a constant churn of bids and re orgs with
| the mission being keeping the contract in the next bidding
| cycle but losing it due to random political whims. It's the
| most depressing form of employment I've ever experienced, and
| I've worked at multiple FAANG, so that's really saying
| something.
| decasia wrote:
| It basically is like having politically motivated human chaos
| monkeys running around the data center randomly killing systems
| and seeing whether anyone notices.
| sneak wrote:
| ...which seems like not the worst idea?
|
| The very fact that it takes such a battle to even get read only
| access to analyze where the money is going is evidence enough
| that there is insanely baroque levels of waste and unnecessary
| services happening here.
|
| If it's that important it can be put back.
|
| Why is it so scandalous that conservatives want a smaller
| government, got elected, and are now making the government
| smaller?
| whatshisface wrote:
| You wouldn't be saying "if it's important it can be put
| back," if it was a government service important to you, like
| water service to your house. Scientists actually need to use
| pubmed.
| sneak wrote:
| Equating government-funded research programs (completely
| optional) to water provision isn't remotely coherent. Pipes
| in the ground are a natural monopoly.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I'm glad I have the chance to explain this to somebody.
| Research is also a natural monopoly, because a
| fundamental particle can only be discovered once.
| Repeated development of what's under the hood of a car
| isn't wasted because every car is different, but repeated
| invention of internal combustion would be wasted time and
| energy.
| sneak wrote:
| I don't believe your second sentence to be true; in fact
| quite the opposite: research seems infinitely
| parallelizable.
|
| The discovery part is what happens at the end.
| whatshisface wrote:
| What I mean by wasted time and energy is, it is wasteful
| for 1,000 researchers working in secret at private
| companies to independently discover the same protein,
| without telling anyone, when instead one person could
| have discovered it and then shared the information. It's
| like 1,000 companies digging trenches for water pipes
| under the same road.
| sneak wrote:
| This seems to conveniently ignore how patents work.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Working with the most charitable interpretation of your
| view, is the idea that Peter Higgs would have patentented
| the Higgs boson, CERN would have paid him royalties to
| attempt to produce it, and CERN and Higgs together would
| have sold the rights to a trust that was able to collect
| royalties on all products whose invention required the
| use of electroweak theory? It would have to be a patent
| term that lasted about 100 years, otherwise Maxwell
| wouldn't have been able to fund Maxwell's laws.
| fareesh wrote:
| possibly vandalism by someone looking to be the next Vindman-
| esque hero in their discord group
| belorn wrote:
| So looking at this from a technical point. NIH.gov has three name
| servers. Each host are still up, but only answering dns on TCP
| and not UDP. All three are located under the same AS, which
| implies that there is a single operator responsible. No ipv6.
| From the outside I can't see any sign that they have delegated
| operation of either the servers or the service to any external
| company.
|
| Doing some more looking around, it seems like NIH has a
| department/group/structure called Center for Information
| Technology, which is the IT support side of NIH and are the
| operators for the DNS servers.
| g-clef wrote:
| I'm going to regret this, I bet, but here we go: Many years ago
| I was the manager of the team inside NIH/CIT that ran both the
| border firewalls and the DNS servers in question (to be
| specific, at the time it was NIH/CIT/DNST/NEB/NSS). Obviously,
| since I'm not there anymore I don't have any special inside
| information, but given that the DNS servers were responding to
| TCP and not UDP during the outage, my bet would be a simple
| firewall screwup, rather than malice.
|
| Stuff happens - maintenances have unintended consequences,
| people typo stuff, etc. Don't freak out about every event -
| save your powder for the real outrages (like 18F).
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| Editing to remove an unproductive comment.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| And you believe that DOGE employees are tweaking firewall
| rules at NIH IT?
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| Like the vast majority of Americans, I have no idea what
| DOGE is actually doing.
| brigandish wrote:
| Then why speculate when we have a real expert responding
| on the thread?
| dcow wrote:
| This is exactly how the HN community responded to
| Twitter, too. The amount of baseless speculation paraded
| as fact is crazy for a supposedly rationalist community.
| nick__m wrote:
| HN is not rationalist community, there is a plurality of
| opinions and it is part of what make this site great.
|
| Another important part is the excellent moderation that
| try to insure civil discussions.
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| I've thought about it and you're right, this was just
| confirmation bias on my part. There is in fact no
| evidence that DOGE is in any way involved. Apologies.
| raphman wrote:
| FWIW, nameservers lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) and
| lhcns2.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.128) still resolve nlm.nih.gov
| subdomains.
| belorn wrote:
| Interesting, those IP addresses are under a different AS and
| under a different organization, that of National Library of
| Medicine. They don't seem to use the IT infrastructure of
| nih.gov.
| g-clef wrote:
| Yeaaaahhhh...NLM is/was a special beast inside NIH.
|
| At the time I was there they had a budget to die for, and
| Pubmed was in the top 300 websites in the world (both are
| probably still true). NLM pushed so much traffic because of
| Pubmed that they had their own internet connection to avoid
| DoS'ing the commodity desktop traffic of the rest of the
| NIH.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| What am I doing wrong?
|
| I can't ping 130.14.55.128
| edoceo wrote:
| Maybe those goats don't do ICMP?
| belorn wrote:
| I can give two tips on how to test this.
|
| The most accessible tool I would recommend is
| zonemaster.net, a tool developed by AFNIC and The Swedish
| Internet Foundation. Go to advanced and type in nlm.nih.gov
| as domain, and then the two nameservers listed above and
| their ip addresses. Run the test and it will present a
| status summery of the domain and its name servers. (or just
| use this link:
| https://zonemaster.net/en/result/4a7d593dce6e167b)
|
| Alternatively you can use the tool dig command tool which
| is the industry standard for dns debugging and probing.
| Installing it on windows/mac is a bit of work, but is very
| easy and convenient on linux. The command here would be
| "dig @130.14.55.128 nlm.nih.gov". The @ sign is for saying
| which nameserver to use, and the last part is the domain
| name you are looking for.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Is this page correct, indicating they are undergoing maintenance?
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/down/
| Maxious wrote:
| Last modified header of Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:06:32 GMT so I
| think not - they probably put this html page up one time and
| redirected requests from other URLs to it and just forgot to
| remove
|
| Same message is in the internet archive back in 2020
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201009054447/https://www.ncbi....
| koliber wrote:
| Move fast and break things.
|
| We don't know the root cause, but the kinds of moves that Musk is
| pulling are straight from a sabotage manual.
| bleachmix wrote:
| The US is being liquidated
| possibleworlds wrote:
| Apologies in advance if this is too off topic, it's something
| that has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to mention it
| somewhere.
|
| I occasionally use the Unifi Wifiman app to quickly test my
| network, even though I don't use Unifi gear.
|
| One reason I like it is as soon as you open the app you see a
| bunch of latency metrics for various domains.
|
| X is one of the default test domains. I don't know when this
| happened but x.com does not seem to be running anycast in
| Australia anymore, I get 110ms latency to x (for many this would
| be 130 to 160 or higher, my provider uses premium transit). A
| traceroute shows the server I am hitting is in Japan.
|
| Why? This is highly irregular, I can't imagine any other major
| website not having a POP in Australia.
| ekianjo wrote:
| I don't see PubMed as being down?
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=study
| paulnpace wrote:
| Title is wrong. Sites are reachable, but not resolvable (except
| for servers still caching, such as 1.1.1.1).
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| Another cute and recent development is that they've really
| restricted the hours on the federal payment system, making it
| difficult for everyone to draw down funds owed. It's all
| electronic banking, why does it ever have to go offline?
|
| https://pmsapp.psc.gov/pms/app/login
| notorandit wrote:
| Elon?
| stainablesteel wrote:
| BLAST is totally outdated, not because it's a bad algorithm but
| because people should be able to run their own version locally. i
| find it disappointing that there isn't a lot of innovation in
| determining protein homogeneity, i thought of multiple ideas when
| i was doing bioinformatics but never had the time to implement
| it. slow and bad slackademia strikes again
| colingauvin wrote:
| How can you claim to have insight into bioinformatics, but not
| realize the reason BLAST is run in the cloud is that having all
| the sequence data of all existing organisms would be absolutely
| massive and exceed the storage capacity of most laptops?
| niklasbuschmann wrote:
| Fuck Elon Musk
| creatonez wrote:
| PubMed has been sabotaged.
|
| RFK Jr. and Elon Musk gaining political power will be one of the
| most challenging disasters the human race has ever encountered.
| acomjean wrote:
| Seems like it's back. One of my projects when in bioinformatics
| was making an alternative search with NIH data. They update
| pubmed yearly with daily updates after that. It really is a great
| resource.
|
| We link to their pages: eg
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=24827528,%2020832466,%...
| geertj wrote:
| I will go out on a (small) limb here and note that it really
| looks like the intention of this submission is is to associate a
| technical issue with DOGE and find a friendly audience to further
| a point. Normally a DNS issue of a government site would not be
| news. Since the submission does not give any evidence or fact, it
| is lazy in that respect. And if indeed it had an unstated motive
| (my small limb), you could also say it's disingenuous and
| brigading. Am I wrong? I would be happy to stand corrected.
| raphman wrote:
| I submitted this post and can guarantee that it was not my
| intention to associate this technical issue with DOGE. Quite
| the opposite: both in this thread and on Bluesky (where a lot
| of people blame DOGE for 'shutting down PubMed'), I have
| advocated for Hanlon's razor. My aim was to document that this
| was just a DNS problem, and to suggest a workaround to affected
| people.
|
| I actually find it a little bit sad that the DOGE angle is so
| prominent in this thread.
| geertj wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying!
| buyucu wrote:
| well, it looks like Elon's teenage boys fired the wrong people
| :)
| greatgib wrote:
| Things like PubMed are probably some of best good to the world
| that did the US in recent years. Especially because of its great
| openness with widely open API and so...
|
| If it becomes unavailable, my feeling is that the world will
| really enter in a dark age.
| daveguy wrote:
| At this point, if this isn't reckless incompetence, it's malice.
| stellababe wrote:
| It is a DNS issue. Try and change which net you are using. If you
| are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network
| and cell provider are the same that wont help. A solution is to
| change which DNS you are using. Its a bit nerdy but actually very
| easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for
| browsing" On your computer you can add following to your hosts
| file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc add this
| 156.40.212.210 nih.gov 96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov 34.107.134.59
| pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
| 130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110
| blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
| stellababe wrote:
| It is a DNS issue. Try and change which net you are using. If you
| are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network
| and cell provider are the same that wont help. A solution is to
| change which DNS you are using. Its a bit nerdy but actually very
| easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for
| browsing" On your computer you can add following to your hosts
| file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc add this
| 156.40.212.210 nih.gov 96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov 34.107.134.59
| pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
| 130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110
| blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
| fortran77 wrote:
| FWIW, I just tried going to pubmed, searching for something, and
| everything seemed to work. DNS servers go down every now and
| then. It's always DNS, after all.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| DNS servers may be down temporarily, e.g., NIH is doing
| maintenance, but this is not making websites unreachable
|
| Perhaps "unreachable" in the title is a figure of speech
|
| I have no problem reaching these websites and can provide IPs to
| anyone who needs them
|
| For example,
|
| www.nih.gov 23.41.4.71 (Akamai)
|
| www.nih.gov 2.22.31.155 (Akamai)
|
| www.nih.gov 60.254.143.7 (Akamai)
|
| www.nih.gov 95.101.74.96 (Akamai)
|
| www.nih.gov 88.221.24.17 (Akamai)
|
| www.nih.gov 184.51.148.226 (Akamai)
|
| www.nih.gov 54.235.145.223 (Amazon)
|
| pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 34.107.134.59 (Google)
|
| blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110
|
| Usage example
|
| echo 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e
| 1r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts
|
| echo 34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e
| 1/r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| 130.14.29.110 redirects me to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
|
| which is unreachable
|
| 23.41.4.71 shows the following text
|
| "Invalid URL The requested URL "[no URL]", is invalid.
|
| Reference #9.47532217.1740935192.27b71986
|
| https://errors.edgesuite.net/9.47532217.1740935192.27b71986"
| hacker934 wrote:
| I still can't access blast. Am I supposed to put
| `130.14.29.110` into my web browser?
| chriskanan wrote:
| The main pubmed website seems to be working for me as well and
| I'm in upstate NY: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
|
| NIH/NSF pages have always gone down periodically for
| maintenance or otherwise, where this tends to happen over the
| weekend. It seems like this reaction by the HN community is a
| bit hasty. I've been reading HN since 2008 or so, and I feel
| like the comment quality is not what it once was....
| chriskanan wrote:
| I'm using PubMed to prepare for a lecture I'm giving on Monday
| right now and it is working fine:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
| raphman wrote:
| DNS resolution seems to work again now.
| https://dnschecker.org/#A/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
| dang wrote:
| Ok, I added [fixed] to the title above. Please let me know if
| that's not accurate!
| slater wrote:
| nih.gov seems to be back up.
|
| And if you search for "trans", you get search results, tho
| unrelated (e.g., "transnational", etc.).
|
| If you search for "transgender", it just redirects you to the
| homepage.
|
| The cruelty is the point.
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