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Comment by nop_slide | Hacker News Reader

I find the following bizarre. Ignoring who this marko guy is, why would a random person post such a "take down" of the repo? I have never randomly passed by a repo and wanted to just dunk on it. Also this critique reeks of being AI generated.

> On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundamental engineering failure.”

Link from quote: https://github.com/markoelez/async-ip-rotator/issues/1

The follow comment is interesting to be a coincidental, such a weird interaction.

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It's only "bizarre" if you "ignore who this marko guy is." It's not a coincidence, it's somebody pointing out that DOGE's "cracked coders" are wearing no clothes.

And the follies here seem to be many. I’m not following why this Marko guy would make a publicly-visible fork of a repo (though he seems to have deleted it since this story went big), and why they would openly request to have their accounts exempted from logging when they were apparently already privileged users.

I must be missing something here; surely the level of elite technical skill implicit in his résumé would preclude this kind of thing

Well yeah they're junior developers. By all account from good schools but literally everyone here has dealt with junior developer brain.

I would say that Elmo picked a bunch of junior devs because they don't have enough maturity to talk back and will do anything they're asked but I think that's too charitable. I think he actually went this route because Elmo is a sad man in his 50s who is desperately trying to pretend that he is, and has not matured beyond, his 20s.

Not just junior developers, but zoomer junior developers. I'm guessing Marko was just following Grok's advice.

On February 6th, Marko Elez announced his resignation from DOGE after the WSJ discovered many racist posts he made in 2024 (which they published on the 5th). That likely made someone really interested in what his actual coding skill levels were, and they took a look at a repo he had made.

Musk did a "poll" on X that voted for rehiring Elez to DOGE, by February 20th Elez had a US Government email address again, and on Febrary 21st he was reported as working for DOGE at the Social Security Administration.

> Upon learning of your resignation, following reports that you were linked to an account advocating to “normalize Indian hatred” and for a “eugenic immigration policy,” I can’t help but address the staggering hypocrisy of these views within the context of the IT industry

the 2nd comment in the issue explains why the 1st was posted pretty clearly

They took down the repository ~20 minutes after OP's comment. Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250423135719/https://github.co...

Surely Elez is currently reading this thread right now too. Probably reveling in the attention like all the juvenile hacker boys.

Are there forks of this repo out in the wild and available?

Why wonder? The user who wrote it seems to be a pretty well established user, and their public repositories suggest that they work in adjacent contexts, so it's entirely plausible they attempted to use async-ip-rotator in one of their projects.

???

The public repos for this person that I could find that weren't forks with no activity to upstream consisted of a dice-rolling guessing game, rock-paper-scissors, and some kind of framework for downloading and transcribing audio files that does not yet download or transcribe, but implements a whole bunch of boilerplate. I find it rather difficult to believe this person engaged in a good-faith review of the async-ip-rotator code base.

I wouldn't expect somebody to use their main non throwaway account, which probably ties to their job or school to write this today... when if someone in the gov doesn't like what you say they do things like cancel your visa or sanction your employer.

Cool. I'd expect such a throwaway account to be a bare throwaway account and not have multiple learning-project style repos with activity spreading out over a period of a few years, such as you see with the author of the critique/rant posted on the DOGE guy's repo.

I wouldn't. I use a throwaway for multiple years myself lol. And he or she could just use some friend's anonymous account.

And I like how you request good faith review of a guy who is part of the team busy dismantling US government from the inside. Like who would even think to review that if not because of it. What matters is is it correct or not.

I think you're bending over backwards here to rationalize this 'review'. Assuming this person does use throwaway accounts as you suggest, you'd have to believe that in February of last year, they were busy writing a dice-guessing game and a rock-paper-scissors implementation and in February of this year, they are experienced enough to write a lengthy critique of the architecture of someone else's project. A review, by the way, that is longer than the code it criticizes.

If you believe that, that's fine. I don't.

As for the correctness of the 'review', it is absolutely nuts. Total nonsense.

> you'd have to believe that in February of last year, they were busy writing a dice-guessing game and a rock-paper-scissors implementation

Or teaching their kid. Or it was their friend. Etc.

You're bending over backwards to judge it on reputation in a case where there would not be one. If it's nonsense on merit then criticize that

It's also worth noting that Feb 6 may very well be after Marko Elez became a public figure with DOGE. The article doesn't do a great job of expanding on any of this.

Ah yeah that would make more sense

Are you genuinely puzzled or just wanted an excuse to point us all toward that comment? If "the comment" is correct word for what amounts to full article in length.

Why would they want an excuse to point everyone to that comment when it's literally linked in the article?

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