U.S. Government Database of Dad Jokes | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Government Database of Dad Jokes

fatherhood.gov

312 pointssebg109 comments

So, I read one, went into the next room and told it to my 18-year old daughter, and got an exasperated smile, just like every dad joke should. Five out of five stars, would recommend.

50 out of 50 stars was right there!

Hugged to death?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230126220339/https://www.fathe...

I got a 504

Would that this area code was associated with responsible fatherhood.

Verified as gov site.

Ya you can tell a govt site when it falls over from a finger flick

Nah, the US govt is actually usually pretty good these days about solid infrastructure, website designs, security practices, etc.

It is unknown why this particular website (if it ever existed?) got hugged to death, but much of the Government uses AWS govcloud and similar solutions.

Seconded. At this particular point in my career “govcloud” sounds like a normal word. Our project has an overbuilt but robust cloud native architecture (even if I’m not a cloud services evangelist myself) that I think would surprise many folks in the private sector regarding its sophistication.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of waste, inefficiency, and BS in government contracting. But some aspects of it are getting better. In our case, we were explicitly told by our “customer” to allocate more resources to scaling than we may in the private sector so that our application would not get hugged to death.

FedRAMP vetted sites and vendors still get hacked too tho

eh i disagree, I've been in govt IT for 16 years working as a group that supports all agencies. I would definitely not say "much of the Government uses aws govcloud and similar solutions" but thats just my experience

You know someone said that there will never be more than 100 requests per second in a meeting

Next meeting: "our page went down because of a hacker attack!!"

“Well, Sir, they do call themselves Hacker News.”

Yup and you know what? That's exactly the kind of detail I don't need a government IT worker sweating over. They should just pay the premium to cloud providers and move on to more important things

I could not disagree more. Government already suffers a huge stigma of waste and overspending, no need to add to that stigma by overspending on checks notes a list of dad jokes.

That's not to say I'm not glad this exists - I am! But I don't think it deserves a large budget.

Just toss the page into a pool that should be served to the public. No need to advance SOTA on a government budget to serve content.

If it's running on some faas type thing, it's about free when not being used, so hardly a waste.

They certainly shouldnt be spending to scale a ton on dad jokes, in case it's very popular for a day

You can think that but dont tell your dad.

% host -t a fatherhood.gov fatherhood.gov has address 15.197.252.44 fatherhood.gov has address 3.33.237.102

% host -t ptr 44.252.197.15.in-addr.arpa 44.252.197.15.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer a05e7be9b6fd75377.awsglobalaccelerator.com.

% host -t ptr 102.237.33.3.in-addr.arpa 102.237.33.3.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer a05e7be9b6fd75377.awsglobalaccelerator.com.

It is on AWS.

Isn't AWS Global Accelerator just the edge CDN (like Cloudflare) here? When the actual web server went down it will not able to cover it, looks like AWS Global Accelerator lacks the Cloudflare feature of showing you the last cached result.

Global accelerator is an anycast solution that routes your traffic to an specific AWS region (an EC2 instance or load balancer) via AWS's backbone network. It improves latency mostly, but can also be used for cases where a static IP is required (zero-rated billing, customers using egress firewall rules, etc)

CloudFront is the AWS CDN offering.

Or more than 100 families with a Dad around.

Certified DHHS

After clicking through a few, its kind of timely to go with today's other post about how random is random.

what a missed opportunity to utilize http status code 418

Redesigned the FDIC's online deposit insurance calculator to be 100% client side just before WAMU fell over and the crash that followed.

Before the three-step one pager it was a UX that only a mother could love on payday. The bigger problem was every time it would end up on somewhere like Yahoo finance (don't laugh, this was 2007 and earlier) it would fall over like this database. The key to scaling it seems pretty obvious today, write all the searchable data out to a single JSON file and have the browser poll that. It was doing multiple millions of user sessions a day I was told and couldn't have been deployed at a better time.

Some projects you get lucky with I suppose. I check it out every once in a while and the UX is basically still the same.

Sounds like you're in a good position to make a lot of people's dreams come true: could you make the TreasuryDirect webapp not so terrible to use? :-)

My prayers were answered when they removed the infernal virtual password keyboard.

That was infernal indeed, but the rest of it still needs a ton of work. Accidentally double-click on a link? Goodbye, session!

I can’t remember if I’ve ever encountered a UI that annoyed me as much as that virtual password entry.

I ended up getting locked out of my account due to some issue trying to enter what my password manager generated for me and eventually just gave up on ever converting the one small paper bond I was given as a kid to a digital one.

If the goal was to frustrate people away from converting paper bonds, they certainly succeeded.

Actually a feature designed to prevent depletion of the strategic pun reserve.

I was curious just how much traffic a front-page HN post generates and found this excellent post: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/how-much-traffic-comes-from... In their case traffic peaked just under 10000 requests per hour.

(RoyalSloth's blog survived the hug while hosted on Hetzner's smallest 1 vCPU instance.)

I was on the cheapest plan Heroku offers when my startup hit #1. Things got sluggish so I had to spin up another dyno, but it was fine after that. Of course things depend heavily on time of day and day of week. Since it's currently the holidays in much of the world, things could be slower than normal.

You'll never guess what bill funded this site...

... the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 of course!

It's in Sec 7103: Grants for Healthy Marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood

Efforts to reduce single motherhood probably serve to reduce welfare expenses more than most other efforts

On those grounds, you can probably argue that any spending anywhere reduces the deficit in the long run.

EDIT: to clarify, an argument that providing dad-jokes leads to less single motherhood (which then leads to less spending) is so tenuous, that if you accept it, you can accept almost any kind of mental gymnastics.

I agree that reducing single motherhood would probably lead to less spending. It's the connection to dad-jokes that tenuous (at least without any further evidence).

How does that follow?

Can you explain how your statement follows from the parent? To me it reads like a slippery slope type statement.

Almost any kind of spending that anyone, including the government, does is coupled with some arguments about the benefits it brings.

For most claimed benefits, it doesn't require a lot of mental gymnastics to find some arguments why they would reduce some spending in the long run.

If you give me an example as a challenge, I can (most probably) spin you the argument of how it reduces spending.

I still don’t understand why that’s an argument against government spending.

It's not an argument against government spending, nor was it intended as one. What makes you think so?

It's an argument against this specific argument for government spending.

Making bad arguments is excessively easy, independent of whether the thing argued for is good or bad, or true or false.

To give a simple example: consider a faulty proof of Pythagoras' theorem. See eg https://www.cut-the-knot.org/pythagoras/FalseProofs.shtml

Pointing out flaws in these purported proofs is not an argument against Pythagoras' theorem; it's still true after all. It's merely an argument against the faulty arguments.

My comment was in response to the comment above mine. Not to the article directly.

Oh, I wasn't even complaining about using government money for dad jokes.

I don't know whether it's a good use of tax money (probably not), but it's such a minuscule amount in the grand scheme of things, that it doesn't really matter.

Eg repealing the Jones act would do a lot more, if one wanted to get riled up about something. It's basically a very inefficient re-distribution from Hawaiians to a few domestic ship owners.

These jokes contribute to single motherhood.

What a change, now the government penalizes marriage through the ACA. I wonder why the shift from promoting to penalizing marriage.

https://thefinancebuff.com/marriage-penalty-under-obamacare-...

For anyone curious.

ACA was a bag of compromises intended to increase health care access without disrupting the insurance industry. It succeeded on both counts.

Remember when we were told that insurance companies would go bankrupt without the individual mandate and then it was ruled unconstitutional and not implemented after the first few years and insurance companies made more money than ever?

The insurance industry could've tolerated quite a bit of disruption. The ACA was successful in ensuring the donor class got to keep the profit levels they are accustomed to, the only thing it was ever designed to do.

> The ACA was successful in ensuring the donor class got to keep the profit levels they are accustomed to, the only thing it was ever designed to do.

So it reducing the number of uninsured by many millions was just an unintentional consequence, or what?

Health insurance != Healthcare.

Now a bunch of people are paying hundreds a month for a ten thousand dollar deductible. Those people already pay for socialized medicine (the US spends the most on socialized medicine per captia), so I don't see that as a win as much as a gift to the insurance companies.

These levels of irony shouldn't be possible! You could probably fuel a FTL spacecraft using this stuff, and it would probably work better than running it on government money.

Why did the HTTP 504 Gateway Time-out error go to therapy? It had too many unresolved issues that kept dragging on

I've been using this in my shell profile for a few years now:

curl -H "Accept: text/plain" https://icanhazdadjoke.com/

`-m 1` might be good with that.

"Dadabase" was right there.

What's an avant-garde artist's favorite way to store information?

Ceci n'est pas une blague.

Take my a well considered upvote for a clever reply.

A distributed Léger?

An Arp table?

Ooh, this one I had to look up for both sides. Well played

That’s what my travel mug says. Best Father’s Day gift ever.

Here’s a freebie for you new dads:

What do you call a spider with twenty eyes?

A spiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiider.

You call it a S20r

Only works in print unfortunately.

Don’t give the Cyrillic Unicode people any more ideas.

Related: Dad Joke APIs

https://www.dadjokes.io/documentation/endpoints/random-jokes

https://api-ninjas.com/api/dadjokes

https://icanhazdadjoke.com/api

I’m using dadjokes.io, would recommend.

Thanks for the links! I spent my free morning setting up a Mastodon bot [1] posting one joke per hour, the APIs made it easy and the whole thing made me laugh.

[1]: https://mastodon.social/@pleasestop

These are funny, but there is something jarringly dystopian about the words "National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse".

The one for irresponsible fathers is called the “Office of Child Support Enforcement,” for better or for worse.

Does anyone know what backend dadabase they use to store these jokes?

I worry for the server's uptime ... its days are numbered

That there is a Federally funded Natural Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse at fatherhood.gov and not an equivalent motherhood.gov reminds me of Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say" [0][1][2].

How much suffering could we avoid for children if we could convince more pregnant women to not smoke and drink and consume drugs?

[0]: https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html [1]: https://paulgraham.com/resay.html [2]: https://paulgraham.com/saynotes.html

Paul Graham is obviously saying these things.

The “I‘n being suppressed because I can’t say these things” articles by extremely well placed people who constantly say these things is tedious.

I think we read different essays. Graham did not complain that he was being suppressed.

You mean like this? https://health.gov/myhealthfinder/pregnancy/doctor-and-midwi...

"Don’t smoke or drink alcohol"

It is apparently not working. Maybe it should be at motherhood.gov.

Mothers get this kind of advice during prenatal care. Fathers have fewer touch points with parenting educators.

In my experience, many mothers are not getting any prenatal care. Many are pregnant before they know it and do not discontinue activities which will harm their child.

That's a problem. Is the solution to defund father education programs?

Absolutely not. I think we should fund a Natural Responsible Motherhood Clearinghouse and host it at motherhood.gov. But telling women to be responsible mothers is not as politically easy as telling men to be responsible fathers.

> But telling women to be responsible mothers is not as politically easy as telling men to be responsible fathers.

But as I said, we do that already, and far more directly as part of women's healthcare. It is not a men's health issue, so it can't be done through existing systems. The effectiveness of telling women to be responsible mothers, which you objected to earlier, does not negate the fact that we do tell them, so your political narrative does not make sense.

You are intentionally missing the point because you are upset about some supposed political alignment of the other commenter. In the spirit of the Paul Graham post about taboo I'm going to tell you to take a deep breath, separate logic and emotion, and do better.

What point? That there should be a separate website for telling mothers about motherhood? Why would it be necessary if it's already in existing websites and programs?

I don't get this one:

Did you hear about the two satellites that got married?

The wedding wasn't much, but the reception was incredible.

Should the punchline be "out of this world"?

Signal reception

That would be the punchline for a kids joke. As a dad joke, it subverts the expected punchline with something even cheesier.

reception is a play on words, in an actual wedding it would mean the that the attendees had a good reaction. In the sense that the newly weds are satellites, the reception can also refer to radio signal reception.

Distributed Dadnial of Service is happening I think.

Slashdotted!

504 Timed Out isn't as funny as a 410 Gone

That domain participates in the US gov's digital analytics program but the page demand isn't registering: https://analytics.usa.gov/

Our tax dollars hard at work on the important issues.

frankly id rather have a database of dad jokes than more bombs

Why not both? Slava Ukraini, dad jokes slava!

...Yes?

Joke's on you: those are not my tax dollars. Foreigners get those premium dad jokes free of charge.

(Though I wonder whether the Chinese can claim dumping with the WTO? That's what the Americans do with Chinese goods that are delivered cheaper than they would like to compete with.)

Realistically we borrowed me the money from you.

That's probably true. My adopted home of Singapore holds enough foreign reserves to more than back every Singapore dollar they issued. In practice, 'foreign reserves' is mostly another name for US government debt.

Yes, it is: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/12/12/u-s-child...

It may seem silly on the surface, but solving issues at the root is often way more effective than treating the symptoms. In plain words: we're better off solving crime by having a kid grow up in a healthy household, rather than throwing that kid in prison after they commit a crime, who may in turn have a kid who grows up in an unhealthy household without a father.

Just so I’m clear - you are then saying that Federal government spending on this is something you support?

I do. I doubt it cost much in relative terms, and it's drawn a lot of attention to the issue of fatherhood and spawned a lot of debate.

Yes, and I wish we spent 100x on initiatives like this, that attempt to influence behavior for the better.

It's an line to draw in terms of spending given how absolutely nothing this is in terms of spending. This website probably costs about half that of a single one of the millions of shells made for the US military in a year.

Ernest Scribbler helped win WWII for the British with a joke that was over 60,000 times as powerful as Britain's great pre-war joke.

> Browses to motherhood.gov, iphone _freaks out_.

i believe we need an strategic reserve of these, Biden need to step in

> Biden need to step in

I agree, slapstick is very funny

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