It’s not really obfuscation. It goes back to when Android OS’s used to be named after desserts. While in development they would be referred to just by the letter as the dessert name wasn’t usually finalized
Numbers are exactly as obfuscatory as letters. "Android 14" doesn't tell me anything other than it comes after 13 and before 15, and "V" tells me the same relative to U and W.
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it"
This applies equally to institutions and individuals, so from investors to CEOs to politicians to tech community leaders to individuals picking where they work, this is a very "interesting" time
Both the USDS and PIF programs were inspiring to me as they were almost like a New Deal for digital natives & coders. They did a good job of attracting smart hard workers to be underpaid for unglamorous & often-frustrating but impactful work. A lot of good people!
Yep. I’ve been subscribed to get emails when application to their jobs open, because they really represented a portion of the government that I thought was doing good work and was an area I could contribute meaningfully to (given my skillset). I never made the jump, it was such a large paycut and iirc looked like it’d require relocation, but I’d like to think I might in the future (if it ever comes back).
The people I met at USDS took that kind of pay cut for the mission, which I was in awe of. Senior, Staff, Principal engineers from big tech who likely had been making twice as much as top government salary.
They're behind U.S. Web Design System (USWDS)? This is going away?
USWDS have a cool palette system where color pairs from their palette have predictable WCAG color contrast (unlike in e.g. Tailwind's default palette), but I rarely hear of projects using USWDS colors:
That’d be something for sure. Section 508 accessibility laws are built into most federal IT contracts. DHS has an entire trusted tester certification program around it. The changes required to existing federal contracts if they do this are staggering.
> Sec. 3. DOGE Structure. (a) Reorganization and Renaming of the United States Digital Service. The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.
I wanted to work for them since Obama announced it, but they didn’t pay as well as a big funded private corp startup. If I was a bit older and more comfortable with my savings I would have.
I would have loved serving my country and working on software as a way to give back.
I talked to some people at USDS during my time in govt. They took a 50% pay cut to serve their country. Wish more people understood a lot of civil servants often do it for the mission.
There is a sad side to my desire, I’ve told people this before in social circles and most people respond with confusion as to why I would want to do that.
The general expectation with USDS and others was that you only stay for 2-3 years. So it’s more like a temporary tour.
At least that’s what was pitched to me a few years ago when I spoke to their counterparts in the US gov. Incredibly smart, no-BS people that wanted to do good work and have high impact.
Still the only job I regret not taking in all my career.
I wanted to join them a few years ago but I wasn’t in the right life position to do so. I was hoping to one day in the near future. Maybe that day will one day come again.
I never really saw anyone bad mouthing USDS even here. Can you explain why you think people didn't like USDS?
I'm sure there was some resentment from other agencies that USDS helping them implied they didn't know what they were doing or something, but on HN it has basically been non-stop positive from what I've seen. Echos of the same things in this thread: that they wish they were in a position to sacrifice their pay in order to contribute meaningfully to the government where they have the most chance at impact.
IIUC Login.gov and the much more unified design system based on Material Design for government websites came from USDS.
I updated my comment with response to your deleted comment. The last line specifically about emotional anecdotes. However your example has a lot of other comment threads that do not support the “usds is disliked” conclusion.
What is disliked in your example is bureaucracy and domain guarding which can be found inside and outside of the government. That does not mean USDS is a bad or disliked program because it has inefficiencies. It also does not mean we need to audit and dismantle services and programs as a way to root out inefficiency.
Hey taxes are MY MONEY and I need that 2 cents back (so I can be scammed hundreds of dollars by corporations that no longer need to comply with the CFPB)
When I worked at a podcast host I was tasked to implement WebPubSub support to our podcast feeds. This introduced a “push” updates rather than requiring an indexer to constantly recheck the xml file. The idea seeems to not have caught on. At the time I think Google was the only indexer supporting the feature and I’m not sure if that has continued with the switch to YouTube for podcasts
YouTube still supports WebSub (PubSubHubbub)[0] via their own hub[1].
There's very little documentation on how to actually use it though, and it seems like it's been on life support for quite awhile, a lot of small oddities have crept in over time and recently there was extended outages where notifications stopped being pushed. The current documentation isn't even correct, since is specifies an incorrect topic URL (should be /xml/feeds/ rather than just /feeds/, the /feeds/ link is for the base atom feed, and while it actually does "work" if you supply it to the WebSub Hub, it won't send you correct notifications).
Was at a rest stop and heard talking coming from a box on a pole. It was reading out the weather in TTS voice, guessing it was the transmitter for one of these stations.
Which is why I think this whole thing is really dumb. You know what would be actually useful for requiring in cars that wouldn't otherwise be included? A NOAA weather radio mode in the car, along with the option to have it automatically alert me when it detects an alert. In a disaster I'll be listening to that, not trying to hunt down an AM radio station I haven't willingly listened to in decades.
Oh this is good info to know! I never had a desire to create an HN account but i've been using it more frequently since this whole thing started and finally made an account.
I have an actual question about the implementation of this. It currently seems like there is no way to maintain your location history if you switch device platforms. Your on device history seems to be synced to iCloud, but if you switch from iOS -> Android, it seems like your SOL?
