this is how the government should communicate with its people - push out via all social media channels but always link back to something everyone can access!
hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise
Which is why another Democratic mayor in another blue city, who Mamdani considers “the most effective Democrat in office”, someone who inspires him - nobody knows that politicians name unless they’re really into politics. I’ll admit, even I’ve only heard of her because Mamdani name checked her.
Mamdani’s every tiny initiative gets tonnes of PR because Mamdani and his team are masters of media. That’s what sets him apart from Michelle Wu or anyone else.
It is actually annoying that as a UK user of bsky and HN, I hear more about Mamdani than about Sadiq Khan. Mamdani is everywhere. Mind you, I'm also hearing a lot more about the former mayor of Manchester these days.
Not just the largest city, but also the city where much of our national media is based or has a very large presence. It's so bizarre when I visit friends and family in other parts of the country and they know more about my local news stories than their own cities.
I never heard of Eric Adams doing anything, ever. I couldn’t name the mayor between Adams and Giuliani. And I only know Adams because he was corrupt beyond belief. Mamdani is an outlier in how much positive attention he garners, even considering he’s mayor of NY.
You literally only said you made a link shortener, and even now give no indication you understand what aspects of the Mamdani communication strategy are being praised.
There is nothing to praise here because this is the obvious pattern. Doing anything else would have been incompetence. So yes he gets credit for hiring a competent dev, but to call him a genius for this is venturing into fanboyism / derangement.
Because you're a tech worker that sees no issues worker for some of the most evil companies on the planet whereas Mamdani wants you to have childcare + cheaper food + better infrastructure. Not hard to see who is the genius in this equation.
Given how untrustworthy the most popular social media providers have proven to be, it's madness that so many politicians and government accounts still use things like Xitter or facebook as their primary communication medium.
Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.
As I understand it, Bsky doesn't punish posts for including a link off-site, and doesn't require you to be logged in to view it. Whether they'll continue to behave in a responsible way forever remains to be seen, I guess.
The great thing about Bsky is that feeds can be user-run (and the for you feed is a great success story). So if Bluesky Inc. wants to derank links on their discover feed, there are a lot of user driven feed options to counteract that
Poor systems thinking. They'd likely use Buffer or a similar social media management platform. Operating their own PDS means they control the source of truth, just like running their own Wordpress instance. Could they pay someone else to host the PDS? Sure, that works too. Either way, it is about controlling their communications infra.
The question is do you trust a healthy user-empowering ecosystem will form around a VC-fueled corporation that controls 97+% of the bluesky network? https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
I wish Mastodon had been ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came. And, I wish the average person was ready for decentralized services like the fediverse.
But, most of the Twitter folks I followed went to Bsky, so I have an account. I guess we just have to hope that even though all the signs point to a terrible end for Bsky, maybe the kind of cantankerous users who left Twitter early and built the culture there will keep them honest. The incentives are not aligned and neither are the people who run it (they honestly don't seem to like the most interesting Bsky posters very much, e.g. Link was permabanned), so, I'm not extremely hopeful.
Yes, it is software that was not ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came. "Mastodon" is also the biggest Mastodon instance, where new people would first land when seeking Twitter alternatives, which was also not ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came.
> I wish the average person was ready for decentralized services like the fediverse.
It’s more like, “I wish decentralized services like the Fediverse were ready for the average person.”
Currently, if you decide to join Mastodon (which some people will correctly say is “not a thing,” ironically proving my point), you have to figure out which server to join, then find out that the server you joined is at capacity and struggling, or discover that it blocks federation with servers you might be interested in.
Bootstrapping your feed in Mastodon is also not fun.
A little sad that it's often posting screenshots of X posts there. At least the screenshot has alt text, but if you're doing alt text, why a screenshot in the first place?
Is that a screenshot from twitter? I can't open twitter but I think a lot of times they do this screenshot of text thing because it gets more engagement. It's popular on facebook and instagram too where celebrities love to screenshot their notes app
Ha! That is genuinely confusing for a moment. What is the solution? Wipe the account and archive it all somewhere? That destroys all the meta-commentary that exists in other Tweets. Maybe just some system that lets you mark all previous posts with something that says "This account is for a government official. This post was made under the tenure of a prior holder of this position."
The lifetime of the programs they link to is also limited. There's no earthly reason, when running a website in 2026, to care what Tim Berners-Lee thought about the aesthetics and purposes of URLs in 1998. It's a nice nostalgia session, but "cool urls don't change" is ironically short-sighted and has lead to well-meaning dolts embedding GUIDs and other such constructs into them. The entire concept was posited prior to the advent of on-screen phone keyboards, which make typing long heavily-punctuated urls a pain in the ass. There are a thousand reasons to salute this document and let it recede into the mists of time.
A municipal website should be useful to the citizens who want to use it. This is a great example of doing something useful with the web.
Easily solved by adding an interstitial whenever a URI becomes replaced and is therefore no longer immutable, and showing the history of what it used to point to as well (in case you're coming along from an old link). By default, after 5 seconds, it could redirect to the current destination.
The public doesn't need an immutable history of URLs, they need URLs they can freaking type. When you've got pages people actually care to go to, then you can create your museum of URLs.
Government subsidized groceries seems like something that was already solved by food stamps. Having the government run entire grocery stores at a loss seems like a worse implementation of the same thing.
I guess it's nice for the voters who are too rich to qualify for food stamps, but in that case it would have been equivalent and simpler to just make the food stamps more universal (remove means testing).
I have my suspicions about what’s going to happen. I worry the demand is going to be too high to realistically deal with. But dammit am I excited to see someone try something a bit different to address a very obvious need.
State-run stores aren’t really that special. A bunch of states have state-run liquor stores. The military runs commissaries. These don’t elicit much fear-mongering or attention on cable news for some reason.
Isn't the issue a lack of grocery stores in those areas? How would food stamps help with that? The issue isn't really affordability but rather absence of stores. It might not be profitable to run a store there but that's the point of a city run store in this case.
I'm not from NYC (nor do I have the same difficulty seeing past politics that gp seems to have), so I didn't research this stuff so closely. But from what I saw, it seemed that a lot of his policies seemed populist.
- Rent freezes do not seem to work. When he ran on that position I did look up briefly to see if there was any recent publications that reversed the previous consensus that they don't work, but didn't find much.
- State run stores are pretty bad at their jobs. Someone on here mentioned state run liquor stores as an example of where state run stores work, but in my experience, they are the opposite. I suspect that the store will work well for the first several years, while there is a lot of media attention on it, but when it falls from the foreground, the oversight will slacken and it will go the way of many other of these projects.
- I am not an expert but I suspect the wealth tax won't work the way they hope.
On the other hand, the attention that he's bringing to issues that were previously swept under the rug (like transportation) is great, and the way he energizes the populace is amazing.
"Everything" is doing some heavy lifting here. Maybe you can give specific examples that you have in mind, and maybe clarify your pronouns while you're at it.
Do you have opinions on laws surrounding abortion in a state you don't live in? People can and often do have valid opinions about things that don't directly concern them. I will say I'm not sure my opinion is one of them--I even went out of my way to say my opinion was probably insufficiently researched.
That being said, the person I was responding to was trying to understand what negative views someone could have on Mamdani's policies, so I was trying to give a data point.
As a counter-example, the LCBO (Ontario government liquor store) has been demonstrably fine for decades. Failure modes exist, but I don't think they're guaranteed.
Your comment adds literally nothing to this discussion. You can't form an opinion on the topic discussed because of your opinion on someones politics. Great, don't comment.
This seems so amateur hour. The way the links work in this post are broken on mobile, and the first one I managed to make work was full of trivial grammatical errors.
You didn't even specify which link had the errors; 'the first one I managed to make work' is something known only to you. Complaining about a problem while not providing any hints on how to reproduce it is not a great way to win friends and influence people.
Genuine question, what is it you don't like about Mamdani? I don't live in NYC, so I don't have first-hand experience with him, but I've not seen many complaints about him (other than things like "he broke the dress code at the swimming pool that one time", which is "Obama's tan suit" levels of petty)
Socialism is workers seizing the means of production. No country is actually socialist at all, as in that case it means every single company is actually a coop of equal shares among the workers. Socialism does not mean when the government does something, at best that's social democracy.
Socialism is a continuum that the US has been on to some degree since its inception, it isn't a case of Capitalism good, socialism bad. Here's how I envy you: the people you have policy disagreements with will engage on those in good faith. I wish the opposite were true.
All these anti-socialists never questions who pays for their roads, their schools, their police, their fire service, the military, the FAA, the USPS, their libraries, their parks, the courts, NASA?
Are all of these right-wing people paying privately for those?
Don't get me wrong I think it is fine to question who pays for those things. And if you are one of those "I lean libertarian" types you probably are OK with private funding for NASA & USPS, but they need to be intellectually honest with why they are OK with masked federal agents roaming the streets.
It seems to me that what is "socialism" is just based on politicians personal definitions.
Basic education for the people = good
Higher education for the people = socialism
Bail outs and subsidies for businesses = good
Safety net for individuals = socialism
Public highway = good
Public railroad = socialism
I think the endless labelling of everything rightwingers don't like as "socialism" has backfired. A generation has been told that affordable food and housing, usable public transport, healthcare, not getting shot at school, not getting racially abused etc. are "socialism". So obviously they want to have some of this "socialism" as soon as possible.
He identifies as a socialist, sure, but his implemented policies (what GGP was calling socialist) are mostly standard-issue municipal management.
Is it socialism to hire temporary labor for snow removal? To fix potholes? My boring municipality in the middle of a red state does that and nobody calls it socialist.
If we want to be fair, it depends on the characterization and its intended implications. The right has called every Democrat since FDR a "socialist" specifically to put the fear of tanks in the streets and death camps into people regardless of their actual policies. They called Obama a socialist. They called Hillary Clinton a socialist.
So even if Mamdani calls himself a socialist it's important to ask what he means by that versus what people calling him a socialist what you to think.
This line of thought bugs me. We use labels for a reason. Socialism has a well accepted definition and has for decades. We haven't modified it's meaning. I think it's fine to take someone at their word if they use a label. It's not on me to interrogate whether they mean something else when they use the label. It's on them to use the label correctly if they want to communicate. Especially if they are a politician where the entire job is to communicate and persuade.
There is no "well accepted definition" for any political term, least of all any political term from the left, each which has been co-opted by the right to the point that most are simply pejoratives and slurs in common parlance. Just look at "woke" for an example. No one using it anymore uses it in good faith, certainly not on the left.
What we have with "socialism" is the entire spectrum of what socialists themselves believe (and can't often agree upon) and what their opponents insist upon. A European style social democrat and an anarcho-syndicalist have radically different goals, but both would be considered "socialist" by most people.
It is absolutely on you, and all of us, to think beyond "labels," otherwise you just make yourself susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, or at least incapable of fighting it.
Yeah, no. I am neither left or right these days and I see just as many attempts to coopt terms to have a different meaning from each side. My solve is to refuse to participate. If you want to communicate to me then you are going to have use the accepted definition not the definition you want me to believe instead. If you say you are a socialist then I will believe you. If you say you are a christian nationalist then I will believe you. I'm not interested in what your enemies want me to believe the term means. I'm only interested in the fact that you used it and it has real definition.
Any other road leads to madness and an absence of shared meaning. I will hold you to the standard of your own language and actions. Use the words correctly or be misunderstood. That's on you not me.
>If you want to communicate to me then you are going to have use the accepted definition not the definition you want me to believe instead.
And by "accepted definition" you mean "definition accepted by you."
There are few personality traits I find as insufferable as language prescriptivism, it always seems to hide a rigid and doctrinaire worldview. I won't waste your time or mine further. Good night.
Right, the argument is "He is a socialist so when he gets power he will do X which I dislike". But now he is in power so the argument is moot. Instead, you have to list actions by him you dislike.
Forgive me for bluntness, but this is naive. What you think you are doing is holding firm to objective reality. What you are actually doing is willingly putting blinders on yourself about how humans use language.
You’ve adopted a certain definition of socialism and decided it’s the correct one. Which is fine, everyone does that with vocabulary. But you are not acknowledging to yourself that it was in fact an act of adoption to do so. Thus you are denying yourself the mental framework for evaluating how and why others might try to use competing definitions.
Metaphorically, words are buckets and different people put different things into the bucket. Sometimes it’s just silly like “is a hot dog a sandwich.” Other times there are more serious implications like the fundamental difference between “I have a theory” (about how a lamp got broken) vs “I have a theory” (a mathematical framework for predicting the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes).
And sometimes it is used to create shibboleths, whereby looking in people’s buckets communicates how open they are to persuasion of one type or another.
So it’s always a power move, and useful, to think “what exactly do they mean by that?” What do people gain and lose by adopting different definitions and words? Understanding that this happens continuously in all use of language helps one do a better job of relating labels to observable objective reality.
To come back to “socialism,” you might think Mamdani is doing himself a disservice by misusing (from your perspective) that term, thereby turning you off. But he just easily won a huge election! That’s objective reality: he got what he wanted, he succeeded. This might be a moment to consider other uses of that term, and the degree to which they may be outcompeting your adopted definition.
At no point in this thread have I made a value judgement about Socialism. He got elected claiming to be a socialist which is fine. My point is that getting upset when someone says he's a socialist when he actually claims to be one is silly. It worked for him and he communicated to his electorate what he needed to. New York elected a socialist because they wanted one. They don't get to say "don't label him a socialist" after the fact.
> They don't get to say "don't label him a socialist" after the fact.
This is not an accurate quote, what was said was “even if Mamdani calls himself a socialist it's important to ask what he means by that,” and that is what you objected to.
Yeah, I was surprised to see a downvote for that. Isn’t that like his position? I don’t believe in socialism. He seems like a nice guy. These aren’t incompatible.
This is nothing new. The most socialistic era of US history was the 1950s with a 90% federal income tax bracket capping yearly income to a max of 5mil a year in 2026 dollars. That is how we ended the great depression.
When a CEO cannot personally get richer by cutting wages, understaffing, and outsourcing; all of those things stop. This is why republicans called everyone a communist back in the 1950s. It is sad that people remember mccarthyism, but completely forget the socialistic tax policy that ended the great depression and made it possible to own a home out of high school while raising a family off a single income.
Hey buddy I’m not a “right winger”, I’m dead center with a voting record that reflects that. His policies are on the left end of the spectrum, whether that fits your model of the truth or not.
Arguably someone at the center of the US political spectrum is right wing by any other standard. This is why someone like Zohran with policies that are otherwise fairly sensible and moderate gets painted as far left. Within that framing it seems that every policy position within the “center left” to the “far right” of US politics serves the same coalition. And any claims of American exceptionalism (we exist on our own political spectrum because we are special) just provides more control over that framing to the same dominant coalition.
I’m sorry this makes no sense. He’s creating city owned grocery stores. I’m not just making up some slanderous label. That’s a socialist idea if ever there was one, good as it may be!
It seems to me that what is "socialism" is just based on politicians personal definitions.
Basic education for the people = good
Higher education for the people = socialism
Bail outs and subsidies for businesses = good
Safety net for individuals = socialism
Public highway = good
Public railroad = socialism
lol, I can always tell when non-Muslims have lived in a Muslim country and who has not.
Taqiyya is a real thing. I absolutely understand how people in the past have not known this… but it’s not a secret, and there is a whole world of Islamic voices telling you to your face, your magic screen will show you anytime you want… People just refuse to believe it, while screaming into the void about “ Palestinian trans climate rights” or whatever.
Saved you a Bing: "Taqiyya is the act of concealing one's religious beliefs and practices when faced with persecution or threat."
So basically this commenter is projecting, because that is all that far right people do, calling themselves "libertarians" or "free speech supporters" or "apolitical" etc.
The correct description is that under taqiyya, Muslims can, do, are expected to, and celebrate outright lying about their intentions and goals if it furthers the spreading of Islam.
It’s literally in the book, there are no moderate versions of the book.
You can be mad, you can think I’m lying, but it’s right there.
Lol, when I first got to my first Islamic country, it was explained to me as a nice outreach program, that prayer song was broadcast as loud as possible for Fun Hey Look At Us Talk To God announcement.
A year later that guy talked to me more honestly and told me it was taqiyya to lie about taqiyya, smiling ear to ear.
Don’t take my word for it. You could do even the slightest bit of research about the noble and righteousness of lying under the cover of taqiyya, or, go spend some time in Islamic countries.
I’m sorry too I’m pro-women’s and gay rights to get mixed up supporting people who want nothing less than those two things. Classic leftist though, attack the messenger while avoiding the topic as hard as possible.
whats to like?
he hasnt delivered anything useful, but sure knows how to tax the rich... and the poors.
unfortunately all that money goes straight to the mta (monopoly transportion agenda)..
this guy cant even open a deli loooool
ask any immigrant family deli owners without generational wealth; how long it took them to open a bodega?
but the mfer can shorten a url, what a genious, thatz what we really need in a mayor, url shortening rofl and crying
This makes a lot of sense if public participation is actually desired. Links need to be short, snappy, and memorable so they're easy to either type into a smartphone on the spot or be recalled at some point later when one has a spare moment. This kind of link is also more likely to spread via word of mouth.
Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.
Until they inevitably get acquired and all the links eventually break. Please don't use 3rd party link shorteners, host your own if you REALLY have to.
The other advantage here is that it's really easy to tell at a glance if one of these "shortened" links authentically points to a real government website; just answer: does it start with nyc.gov?
I put a short link on a family thing and someone complained it didn't work. Turns out iOS OCR recognised a "-" as a "=", so this isn't just people typing it wrong.
Now my short links implement case insensitivity and striping all non alphanumeric characters, i.e. a "-" is optional and any other symbol character is also stripped.
nyc.gov seems to do case insensitivity but doesn't strip "-", so you do need the "-".
There wouldn't be any benefit to it. They're not accepting user-submitted content. I doubt anyone working for the NYC would upload CP and share a link to it.
What's the upside of this? Seems like it would only make links longer and more annoying to type in, when the intention is to make civic participation easier.
It's more compatible with the kinds of bureaucratic roadblocks you might find in a large organisation where they won't let you touch the main website, so your project has to live on a subdomain.
What format would people generally prefer for shorturls if they were designing a website for readability, maintenance, and SEO?
foo.website.com/{initiative} or website.com/foo/{initiative}? And are there any optimal names for foo that also make the scheme more intelligible to the average person?
> foo.website.com/{initiative} or website.com/foo/{initiative}? And are there any optimal names for foo that also make the scheme more intelligible to the average person?
Is "foo" part of "website" or is "foo" separate from other similar organizations? Subdomains you'd use maybe for a different department, but if it's the same department, prefer paths.
Basically signals how connected it'd be to the main org.
But all this is basically feelings and "common sense" rather than anything strictly specified. You'd be able to make use of foo.website.com as well as you'll be able to use website.com/foo in practice, very minutia detail.
bbc.co.uk/thing is the standard for URLs used like this at the BBC, and it works great there too. The ubiquity of BBC URLs on audio/video in the UK helps.
Politicians have been doing this for a while now. I think the idea is to project more of a 'one of us' vibe and not stand on formality, which creates a vibe of being part of a separate class.
I was hoping it would be enough to stand out and get an interview w/ the "PIT Crew" but no such luck, reach out if you want to chat or hack on some NYC/Civic stuff.
My man, you're posting this project all over the HN comments, but I think you need to step back and really think about what you're building and what the user experience is.
Your link to an example protocol: https://dohmh.codify.nyc/protocol/71776 makes basically zero sense to me. Similarly the program page. What do you expect someone clicking on these links to take away from them?
Your reply to this comment got flagged dead for some reason (not sure why, it seemed like a good faith comment) so I'm responding with a couple thoughts here.
Looking at your set of steps, I'm definitely getting lost around step 3 "The program then guides you one step at a time. Each step is a small module: a short assessment (a few structured questions), a task, a referral, a verification, and so on. It adapts to your answers rather than dumping a wall of text." Am I wrong that this flow is not built yet? Or is completely inaccessible to me?
1. It comes with context in the form of paragraphs of explanation
2. It doesn't use undefined words like "program", "agent", "target". No where on that page is a string like "PersonalPrepTaskAgent".
3. It provides links to more resources, also written in nice human readable language
I don't want to be too hard on your project though. I've had to interact with the Pennsylvania DMV website a number of times, and trying to understand how to meet the requirements for a residential parking permit when I moved into my house was crazy because I needed some non-standard documentation due to having out-of-state plates. I would have loved a someone to break down the steps to me in very clear, understandable language. But I'm not sure your site is doing that right now.
As a last note, I wouldn't say you're "spamming" the comments, but I might recommend reaching out to potential users directly and asking them for harsh feedback. Posting into the void here clearly isn't getting you enough actionable feedback.
Its just not accessible to you, I am removing the login requirement right now because I think if you could easily click "Start" it might become a little clearer.
This is really great feedback man; and I am literally going to fix these things right now.
1. I am going to open up all the programs so users can click through all of the steps and really understand, like a preview.
2. I am going to just use my horrible writing skills and do the copy myself. I am very insecure about my writing so I leaned on AI for that probably way too much.
3. I am going to add a video NOT of program/protocols but of the actual process that its automating; e.g.: https://wiki.codify.nyc/agent/posts/nyc-311-apply-victim-com... and some of the user testimonials; for example - the core use case is care plan automation. 1k of the 2k users I was speaking about all were from crohns.ai
I think I not only missed the mark here but did the exact opposite of what I wanted to. Codification is supposed to simplify complex workflows and it seems like I did the opposite here and I can totally see how nobody would ever be able to tell that I am automating a process here.
The amount of embarrassment you just saved me I cannot thank you enough for. I was about to do my first "email/blast" style marketing campaign but I am going to dig into this first. If you don't mind, I would like to email you when I made the fixes.
Edit: The thing I don't know how to express is that the page you like, that can take a lot of work. I want to automated all of the things possible so that instead of reading a page its essentially just a program and the agent guides you (for real) through everything required to complete whatever process or flow the page describes.
Glad the feedback was helpful! Feel free to email me at either email in my profile. I think your next steps laid out here are good ideas. In particular, fully documenting (with video or text) a handful of actual successful uses of your site / the programs seems like a great next step.
Damn, thats stings but...totally fair so here is a basic breakdown -
1. A user would start at https://dohmh.codify.nyc and say and say whatever their intent is, e.g.: "I think I got food poisoning" or "I think I have COVID" etc...
2. The system would then either find a program for that intent or help the user make a protocol to reach their desired outcome (for that intent).
3. The program is a set of modules like: Assessments, Followups, Services etc... and the user is guided through each of them in an automated fashon. HITL is there when needed but the agent is the primary guide.
The whole point is that lots of processes just break down to a series of steps and deterministic logic that can be "codified". Thats why I call it "Codify".
I have had about 2000 programs completed but thats only 15% of the programs that users have started; so I think you may be right. I really need to improve my messaging.
One another note, I genuinely would like to thank you for the feedback. Critical feedback is hard to hear many time but its by far the most useful. I in no way meant to spam the comments but I don't otherwise know how to execute on the "tell people" part of "Do things, tell people".
Why are you using a voice recognition box instead of just a plain old search bar? It took me a second to realize what's even going on and I backed out because I ain't giving you microphone access. If people want to use voice input all phone operating systems already have that. I'd really not want to talk about my symptoms if my throat is sore from covid too.
Then I found some of the actual protocols on your website, like the "Dohmh Weight And Health." I don't understand a single thing going on on that page. Why does clicking something that looks like a video play button take me to a page with a chatbot? Why is there a list of "policy makers" on the side? I am being shown eight steps and they all look like "health Context HealthContextAgent blah blah." What am I even looking at???
I don't want to be rude but this feels a textbook example of having too many tokens on your account and too little understanding of the problems you are trying to solve.
You are NOT at all being rude. I actually feel like I am hitting the jackpot today with this and the previous feedbacks so I would also like to thank you.
I would like to provide some explanation -
0. In prison you cannot always type things on your tablet. Often, we preferred phone / voice interfaces. I am correcting this now; defaulting to text input.
1. My pops was a social service worker for 30 years; he would always explain to me all the repetitive stuff that people had to deal with and how it hurt them so this: "Codify" is meant to be automated workflows that mitigate that barrier. Codification seemed like the best way to do that; I still believe this and its not domain specific, speaking to lack of problem understanding. The agent leads people through the "codified" workflows (aka: Programs).
2. I have no tokens, budget or other; I setup my own local coding ENV so maybe change textbooks, LOL (kidding ofcorse; glut of tokens = AI slop i get it).
3. What am I even looking at??? - When you enter things like "I think I have COVID" into ChatGPT etc.. you get a wall of text that people don't want to read. When people go here https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-main.page - same thing. What you are looking at is my attempt to turn these walls of text into real automated workflows that have agents and HITL's guide them from an intent to an outcome. I obviously am not doing that good a job ATM but 2k+m users have completed their programs w/ verified outcomes but thats less than 15% of the programs initiated so your feedback is extremely welcomed and appreciated.
Stop what you are doing and please for the love of god waste your time and tokens on something, anything else before you get yourself fined.
Who is Alister Martin and why would I willingly verbally tell this page my medical or mental health symptoms? That alone looks like a HIPAA violation waiting to happen. Am I signing a HIPAA release form to allow Alister to share my Protected Health Information with the Counselors, SMEs, clinics, and clinicians it finds?
The protocol is a mess that seems to have nothing for the user to actually do, and is full of what are apparently prompts to an LLM? It's laid out like a flowchart, but it has absolutely no intuitive or indicated flow. When I click on things it's locked. How exactly is protocol population relevant to staying healthy? Why on earth would I ever hand my medical history over to an LLM?
What is this site supposed to actually do? When I click start program I get brought to what looks like an LLM dev environment, not a step-by-step program to follow. Am I supposed to tell it I want to kill myself so it can recommend mental hygiene like getting better sleep and trying to avoid noise in NYC, or tell me it's ok, that I'm not ending it all, and that I will be joining it in the digital afterlife?
Nobody wants or needs AI-native "Mental Hygiene". The product is giving vulnerable people AI psychosis. The very last thing that should be introduced is an "AI" "mental health resource" from a trusted government agency.
I truly, sincerely hope the PIT crew saw AI-native and put you on a permanent blacklist.
The site is not well built in any sense of the word. Have YOU even used the site, critically, as though you were seeing it for the first time? It is befuddling at best, and actively confusing on main. The site is not navigable, because there is no top bar, hamburger menu, or nav links anywhere on the Program page.
What is the purpose of the 8 load bearing '0-all's? If I remove one of them, I get a page with no programs. They don't stack by what page of results you're on, that's the number at the end. Then you also handle sort and popularity sort in the URL (with popularity sort cryptically using one of the last two '0-all's for some reason), indicating that those are SSR pages, but upon inspection, the sorted data is provided as a JSON payload parsed by your page script. Why change the URL if you are getting the data via JSON payload from the server? Why not just hydrate the data within the structure of the page and show a UI indicator for the current sort (which you currently do NOT do at all for popularity).
"Browse through thousands of programs" > There are 212. I dunno about you, but I'm pretty sure you're a significant digit short there. I learned that thousand had four digits, not three.
While inspecting I found the structure behind that URL above:
"pages/programs/_category/_tag/_level/_signs/_time/_access/_order/_popular/_search/index",
but that doesn't explain why the category,level, signs, time or access are '0-all', or what that indicates for the page.....OH MY GOD! is the /_signs/ section of that URL so that you can URL-encode what currency symbol to use, such as dollar sign, Euro, Pound???!! Please tell me this is not the case.
I don't even want to see the source code for this. I could almost guarantee you have hardcoded secrets and credentials in the running production codebase.
This was hard to read but most of it is earned, so thank you for taking the time to comment.
1. Alister Martin is a real physician and that seat is a seeded placeholder using a real person's name, adding AI-native and customizing weights based on a corpus does not in any way account for the "human element here. I did not consider this.
2. Crisis handling. Human handoff only. I have actually had a few successes here https://erpo.law/
3. The site doesn't explain itself. THIS THIS THIS. I have been working on this all day. I am just a dev and 99% of my users are people i talk to, ask, walk through etc. some touch point with me and I think that may have impacted feedback in a way I did not understand until today.
4. "Thousands" of programs is 212. - Its like 70k and only like 204 have ever been completed.
Two things:
1: This isn't a HIPAA covered entity today, but the back-end API services just work with OpenEMR services blah blah...but your underlying point stands.
2: Im not sure where you saw hard coded secrets; sync didn't find anything, I looked manually and I didn't either but if you do please email me and any other vulnerable party on the same thread so that the issue can be handled ASAP.
At times like this I like to think that I'd rather be better than right, so I will take a serious look at how to improve here.
HIPAA regulates covered entities and their business associates. It does not automatically regulate anyone who asks for or receives health care information.
I could ask you to post your symptoms here on HN and if you chose to do so, neither I nor Ycombinator would be at risk of fines related to HIPAA. I very much doubt this random person working on a personal project would either.
Ok, but the clinicians and SMEs they'd be working with would be covered entities, and that would make him a business associate.
If his system records a symptom they have, attaches that to a stable piece of PII, then refers them to a covered entity for treatment, that makes the symptom, the PII and the treatment referral all PHI and therefore bound by HIPAA.
He would need to have a contractual relationship as a vendor or service provider to a covered entity to even maybe qualify as a business associate. Does he have that? I doubt it, this just seems like one person’s side project.
These aren't case sensitive, which is good, but some are presented as CamelCase and some are separated-by-hyphens. They should pick one and run with it. I prefer no hyphens...
The closest I could find to that claim was a Townhall article¹ mentioning that he posed for a picture with an imam whose mosque was attende by terrorists. Townhall as in the conservative radio/news site and not the NYC town hall.
198 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 6.2 ms ] threadhopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise
Mamdani’s every tiny initiative gets tonnes of PR because Mamdani and his team are masters of media. That’s what sets him apart from Michelle Wu or anyone else.
big tech has long canceled url on phones.
Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.
But, most of the Twitter folks I followed went to Bsky, so I have an account. I guess we just have to hope that even though all the signs point to a terrible end for Bsky, maybe the kind of cantankerous users who left Twitter early and built the culture there will keep them honest. The incentives are not aligned and neither are the people who run it (they honestly don't seem to like the most interesting Bsky posters very much, e.g. Link was permabanned), so, I'm not extremely hopeful.
> I wish the average person was ready for decentralized services like the fediverse. It’s more like, “I wish decentralized services like the Fediverse were ready for the average person.”
Currently, if you decide to join Mastodon (which some people will correctly say is “not a thing,” ironically proving my point), you have to figure out which server to join, then find out that the server you joined is at capacity and struggling, or discover that it blocks federation with servers you might be interested in.
Bootstrapping your feed in Mastodon is also not fun.
A municipal website should be useful to the citizens who want to use it. This is a great example of doing something useful with the web.
That way we a) don't lose track of relevant content but b) can have nice things such as short URLs with good names.
Any usage of short links can (and sometimes should) link to a canonical source with an immutable URI. This is just a foreign key for humans.
I guess it's nice for the voters who are too rich to qualify for food stamps, but in that case it would have been equivalent and simpler to just make the food stamps more universal (remove means testing).
If you really want something different to food stamps, India's subsidized canteens seem like a much more interesting idea: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/inside-indias...
State-run stores aren’t really that special. A bunch of states have state-run liquor stores. The military runs commissaries. These don’t elicit much fear-mongering or attention on cable news for some reason.
- Rent freezes do not seem to work. When he ran on that position I did look up briefly to see if there was any recent publications that reversed the previous consensus that they don't work, but didn't find much.
- State run stores are pretty bad at their jobs. Someone on here mentioned state run liquor stores as an example of where state run stores work, but in my experience, they are the opposite. I suspect that the store will work well for the first several years, while there is a lot of media attention on it, but when it falls from the foreground, the oversight will slacken and it will go the way of many other of these projects.
- I am not an expert but I suspect the wealth tax won't work the way they hope.
On the other hand, the attention that he's bringing to issues that were previously swept under the rug (like transportation) is great, and the way he energizes the populace is amazing.
"So far global warming hasn't caused catastrophic damage to our crop outputs, looks like everything's working out great!"
That being said, the person I was responding to was trying to understand what negative views someone could have on Mamdani's policies, so I was trying to give a data point.
Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.
Are all of these right-wing people paying privately for those?
(The guy is joking in the video)
Is it socialism to hire temporary labor for snow removal? To fix potholes? My boring municipality in the middle of a red state does that and nobody calls it socialist.
I will never not be amazed at the US meaning of "red state" vs. what the rest of the world means by "red state".
So even if Mamdani calls himself a socialist it's important to ask what he means by that versus what people calling him a socialist what you to think.
What we have with "socialism" is the entire spectrum of what socialists themselves believe (and can't often agree upon) and what their opponents insist upon. A European style social democrat and an anarcho-syndicalist have radically different goals, but both would be considered "socialist" by most people.
It is absolutely on you, and all of us, to think beyond "labels," otherwise you just make yourself susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, or at least incapable of fighting it.
Any other road leads to madness and an absence of shared meaning. I will hold you to the standard of your own language and actions. Use the words correctly or be misunderstood. That's on you not me.
And by "accepted definition" you mean "definition accepted by you."
There are few personality traits I find as insufferable as language prescriptivism, it always seems to hide a rigid and doctrinaire worldview. I won't waste your time or mine further. Good night.
You’ve adopted a certain definition of socialism and decided it’s the correct one. Which is fine, everyone does that with vocabulary. But you are not acknowledging to yourself that it was in fact an act of adoption to do so. Thus you are denying yourself the mental framework for evaluating how and why others might try to use competing definitions.
Metaphorically, words are buckets and different people put different things into the bucket. Sometimes it’s just silly like “is a hot dog a sandwich.” Other times there are more serious implications like the fundamental difference between “I have a theory” (about how a lamp got broken) vs “I have a theory” (a mathematical framework for predicting the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes).
And sometimes it is used to create shibboleths, whereby looking in people’s buckets communicates how open they are to persuasion of one type or another.
So it’s always a power move, and useful, to think “what exactly do they mean by that?” What do people gain and lose by adopting different definitions and words? Understanding that this happens continuously in all use of language helps one do a better job of relating labels to observable objective reality.
To come back to “socialism,” you might think Mamdani is doing himself a disservice by misusing (from your perspective) that term, thereby turning you off. But he just easily won a huge election! That’s objective reality: he got what he wanted, he succeeded. This might be a moment to consider other uses of that term, and the degree to which they may be outcompeting your adopted definition.
This is not an accurate quote, what was said was “even if Mamdani calls himself a socialist it's important to ask what he means by that,” and that is what you objected to.
When a CEO cannot personally get richer by cutting wages, understaffing, and outsourcing; all of those things stop. This is why republicans called everyone a communist back in the 1950s. It is sad that people remember mccarthyism, but completely forget the socialistic tax policy that ended the great depression and made it possible to own a home out of high school while raising a family off a single income.
It has some basis, perhaps consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derg
Taqiyya is a real thing. I absolutely understand how people in the past have not known this… but it’s not a secret, and there is a whole world of Islamic voices telling you to your face, your magic screen will show you anytime you want… People just refuse to believe it, while screaming into the void about “ Palestinian trans climate rights” or whatever.
It’s truly amazing to watch.
So basically this commenter is projecting, because that is all that far right people do, calling themselves "libertarians" or "free speech supporters" or "apolitical" etc.
It’s literally in the book, there are no moderate versions of the book.
You can be mad, you can think I’m lying, but it’s right there.
Lol, when I first got to my first Islamic country, it was explained to me as a nice outreach program, that prayer song was broadcast as loud as possible for Fun Hey Look At Us Talk To God announcement.
A year later that guy talked to me more honestly and told me it was taqiyya to lie about taqiyya, smiling ear to ear.
I’m sorry too I’m pro-women’s and gay rights to get mixed up supporting people who want nothing less than those two things. Classic leftist though, attack the messenger while avoiding the topic as hard as possible.
Here I have seen firsthand and lived in these areas. Seen firsthand what is allowed and actually deceitfully done under taqiyya.
How many times have you even stepped foot in a mosque?
You have the information in front of you and it’s almost compulsion that you need to ignore it, and attack me instead.
Yes, you are the “normal people”.
Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.
I assume there's some divine intervention going on, but it still works!
That's a really good thing.
I'd like to believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion of Scheme, Pascal, and C stdlib naming conventions here is intentional.
(/s in case it is needed)
Now my short links implement case insensitivity and striping all non alphanumeric characters, i.e. a "-" is optional and any other symbol character is also stripped.
nyc.gov seems to do case insensitivity but doesn't strip "-", so you do need the "-".
We didn't start the fire!
But I appreciate the intent..!
foo.website.com/{initiative} or website.com/foo/{initiative}? And are there any optimal names for foo that also make the scheme more intelligible to the average person?
Is "foo" part of "website" or is "foo" separate from other similar organizations? Subdomains you'd use maybe for a different department, but if it's the same department, prefer paths.
Basically signals how connected it'd be to the main org.
But all this is basically feelings and "common sense" rather than anything strictly specified. You'd be able to make use of foo.website.com as well as you'll be able to use website.com/foo in practice, very minutia detail.
Here's what it was like beforehand. Laughable! https://youtu.be/MEN8KvEuYhE?t=54
It seems overly familiar and parasocial to use it in titles if not
I thought it made sense, as it's very distinctive and kind of cool, and lots of people seem to have trouble pronouncing his surname.
I took all of these https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics.page and turned them into guided protocols, staffed w/ the required agents and HITL.
Here are the "Programs" - https://dohmh.codify.nyc/programs
example protocol: https://dohmh.codify.nyc/protocol/71776
I was hoping it would be enough to stand out and get an interview w/ the "PIT Crew" but no such luck, reach out if you want to chat or hack on some NYC/Civic stuff.
Your link to an example protocol: https://dohmh.codify.nyc/protocol/71776 makes basically zero sense to me. Similarly the program page. What do you expect someone clicking on these links to take away from them?
Looking at your set of steps, I'm definitely getting lost around step 3 "The program then guides you one step at a time. Each step is a small module: a short assessment (a few structured questions), a task, a referral, a verification, and so on. It adapts to your answers rather than dumping a wall of text." Am I wrong that this flow is not built yet? Or is completely inaccessible to me?
Like, looking at the program page https://dohmh.codify.nyc/program/71776 I don't see how I can follow any of the steps. You say this is drawn from DOHMH pages, so I found the corresponding one for this program: https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/stay-healt.... I think this page is miles better than what you've built for a few reasons:
1. It comes with context in the form of paragraphs of explanation 2. It doesn't use undefined words like "program", "agent", "target". No where on that page is a string like "PersonalPrepTaskAgent". 3. It provides links to more resources, also written in nice human readable language
I don't want to be too hard on your project though. I've had to interact with the Pennsylvania DMV website a number of times, and trying to understand how to meet the requirements for a residential parking permit when I moved into my house was crazy because I needed some non-standard documentation due to having out-of-state plates. I would have loved a someone to break down the steps to me in very clear, understandable language. But I'm not sure your site is doing that right now.
As a last note, I wouldn't say you're "spamming" the comments, but I might recommend reaching out to potential users directly and asking them for harsh feedback. Posting into the void here clearly isn't getting you enough actionable feedback.
This is really great feedback man; and I am literally going to fix these things right now.
1. I am going to open up all the programs so users can click through all of the steps and really understand, like a preview.
2. I am going to just use my horrible writing skills and do the copy myself. I am very insecure about my writing so I leaned on AI for that probably way too much.
3. I am going to add a video NOT of program/protocols but of the actual process that its automating; e.g.: https://wiki.codify.nyc/agent/posts/nyc-311-apply-victim-com... and some of the user testimonials; for example - the core use case is care plan automation. 1k of the 2k users I was speaking about all were from crohns.ai
I think I not only missed the mark here but did the exact opposite of what I wanted to. Codification is supposed to simplify complex workflows and it seems like I did the opposite here and I can totally see how nobody would ever be able to tell that I am automating a process here.
The amount of embarrassment you just saved me I cannot thank you enough for. I was about to do my first "email/blast" style marketing campaign but I am going to dig into this first. If you don't mind, I would like to email you when I made the fixes.
Edit: The thing I don't know how to express is that the page you like, that can take a lot of work. I want to automated all of the things possible so that instead of reading a page its essentially just a program and the agent guides you (for real) through everything required to complete whatever process or flow the page describes.
1. A user would start at https://dohmh.codify.nyc and say and say whatever their intent is, e.g.: "I think I got food poisoning" or "I think I have COVID" etc...
2. The system would then either find a program for that intent or help the user make a protocol to reach their desired outcome (for that intent).
3. The program is a set of modules like: Assessments, Followups, Services etc... and the user is guided through each of them in an automated fashon. HITL is there when needed but the agent is the primary guide.
The whole point is that lots of processes just break down to a series of steps and deterministic logic that can be "codified". Thats why I call it "Codify".
I have had about 2000 programs completed but thats only 15% of the programs that users have started; so I think you may be right. I really need to improve my messaging.
One another note, I genuinely would like to thank you for the feedback. Critical feedback is hard to hear many time but its by far the most useful. I in no way meant to spam the comments but I don't otherwise know how to execute on the "tell people" part of "Do things, tell people".
Why are you using a voice recognition box instead of just a plain old search bar? It took me a second to realize what's even going on and I backed out because I ain't giving you microphone access. If people want to use voice input all phone operating systems already have that. I'd really not want to talk about my symptoms if my throat is sore from covid too.
Then I found some of the actual protocols on your website, like the "Dohmh Weight And Health." I don't understand a single thing going on on that page. Why does clicking something that looks like a video play button take me to a page with a chatbot? Why is there a list of "policy makers" on the side? I am being shown eight steps and they all look like "health Context HealthContextAgent blah blah." What am I even looking at???
I don't want to be rude but this feels a textbook example of having too many tokens on your account and too little understanding of the problems you are trying to solve.
I would like to provide some explanation -
0. In prison you cannot always type things on your tablet. Often, we preferred phone / voice interfaces. I am correcting this now; defaulting to text input.
1. My pops was a social service worker for 30 years; he would always explain to me all the repetitive stuff that people had to deal with and how it hurt them so this: "Codify" is meant to be automated workflows that mitigate that barrier. Codification seemed like the best way to do that; I still believe this and its not domain specific, speaking to lack of problem understanding. The agent leads people through the "codified" workflows (aka: Programs).
2. I have no tokens, budget or other; I setup my own local coding ENV so maybe change textbooks, LOL (kidding ofcorse; glut of tokens = AI slop i get it).
3. What am I even looking at??? - When you enter things like "I think I have COVID" into ChatGPT etc.. you get a wall of text that people don't want to read. When people go here https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-main.page - same thing. What you are looking at is my attempt to turn these walls of text into real automated workflows that have agents and HITL's guide them from an intent to an outcome. I obviously am not doing that good a job ATM but 2k+m users have completed their programs w/ verified outcomes but thats less than 15% of the programs initiated so your feedback is extremely welcomed and appreciated.
Who is Alister Martin and why would I willingly verbally tell this page my medical or mental health symptoms? That alone looks like a HIPAA violation waiting to happen. Am I signing a HIPAA release form to allow Alister to share my Protected Health Information with the Counselors, SMEs, clinics, and clinicians it finds?
The protocol is a mess that seems to have nothing for the user to actually do, and is full of what are apparently prompts to an LLM? It's laid out like a flowchart, but it has absolutely no intuitive or indicated flow. When I click on things it's locked. How exactly is protocol population relevant to staying healthy? Why on earth would I ever hand my medical history over to an LLM?
What is this site supposed to actually do? When I click start program I get brought to what looks like an LLM dev environment, not a step-by-step program to follow. Am I supposed to tell it I want to kill myself so it can recommend mental hygiene like getting better sleep and trying to avoid noise in NYC, or tell me it's ok, that I'm not ending it all, and that I will be joining it in the digital afterlife?
Nobody wants or needs AI-native "Mental Hygiene". The product is giving vulnerable people AI psychosis. The very last thing that should be introduced is an "AI" "mental health resource" from a trusted government agency.
I truly, sincerely hope the PIT crew saw AI-native and put you on a permanent blacklist.
The site is not well built in any sense of the word. Have YOU even used the site, critically, as though you were seeing it for the first time? It is befuddling at best, and actively confusing on main. The site is not navigable, because there is no top bar, hamburger menu, or nav links anywhere on the Program page.
When I visit the programs link (which is inaccessible from any page but itself or a protocol page), and then go to the second page of programs, the link turns into this monstrosity: https://dohmh.codify.nyc/programs/0-all/0-all/0-all/0-all/0-...
What is the purpose of the 8 load bearing '0-all's? If I remove one of them, I get a page with no programs. They don't stack by what page of results you're on, that's the number at the end. Then you also handle sort and popularity sort in the URL (with popularity sort cryptically using one of the last two '0-all's for some reason), indicating that those are SSR pages, but upon inspection, the sorted data is provided as a JSON payload parsed by your page script. Why change the URL if you are getting the data via JSON payload from the server? Why not just hydrate the data within the structure of the page and show a UI indicator for the current sort (which you currently do NOT do at all for popularity).
"Browse through thousands of programs" > There are 212. I dunno about you, but I'm pretty sure you're a significant digit short there. I learned that thousand had four digits, not three.
While inspecting I found the structure behind that URL above: "pages/programs/_category/_tag/_level/_signs/_time/_access/_order/_popular/_search/index", but that doesn't explain why the category,level, signs, time or access are '0-all', or what that indicates for the page.....OH MY GOD! is the /_signs/ section of that URL so that you can URL-encode what currency symbol to use, such as dollar sign, Euro, Pound???!! Please tell me this is not the case.
I don't even want to see the source code for this. I could almost guarantee you have hardcoded secrets and credentials in the running production codebase.
I'm...
1. Alister Martin is a real physician and that seat is a seeded placeholder using a real person's name, adding AI-native and customizing weights based on a corpus does not in any way account for the "human element here. I did not consider this.
2. Crisis handling. Human handoff only. I have actually had a few successes here https://erpo.law/
3. The site doesn't explain itself. THIS THIS THIS. I have been working on this all day. I am just a dev and 99% of my users are people i talk to, ask, walk through etc. some touch point with me and I think that may have impacted feedback in a way I did not understand until today.
4. "Thousands" of programs is 212. - Its like 70k and only like 204 have ever been completed.
Two things: 1: This isn't a HIPAA covered entity today, but the back-end API services just work with OpenEMR services blah blah...but your underlying point stands. 2: Im not sure where you saw hard coded secrets; sync didn't find anything, I looked manually and I didn't either but if you do please email me and any other vulnerable party on the same thread so that the issue can be handled ASAP.
At times like this I like to think that I'd rather be better than right, so I will take a serious look at how to improve here.
I could ask you to post your symptoms here on HN and if you chose to do so, neither I nor Ycombinator would be at risk of fines related to HIPAA. I very much doubt this random person working on a personal project would either.
If his system records a symptom they have, attaches that to a stable piece of PII, then refers them to a covered entity for treatment, that makes the symptom, the PII and the treatment referral all PHI and therefore bound by HIPAA.
nyc.gov/RentalRipoff nyc.gov/rental-ripoff
1. https://townhall.com/news/jeff-charles/2025/10/20/fbi-agents...