Zohran and the Short Link | Hacker News Reader

Zohran and the Short Link

iamwillwang.com

333 pointswxw217 comments

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.

At least some traditional link shorterners let you choose the string.

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.

About twenty years ago I used tinyurl.com/lvorv to link to a flash animation.

I assume there's some divine intervention going on, but it still works!

It links to https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/mudah

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?

That's a really good thing.

This is similar to Singapore’s https://go.gov.sg links.

Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.

it would be nice if they added a link preview

not sure why they have never done that before

What's a "link preview"?

I think it means you can see the full URL before you click on it, so you can decide if it's a phishing scam. But why would Zohran send you to a phishing scam. If you think Zohran would phish you then don't enter his links at all.

And who is "they" in this case?

I'm not a huge fan of Zohran, but man, I will admit that it is so refreshing to have a leader that isn't senile and is actually in touch.

Just admit you’re a fan. No shame in that.

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)

His policies are socialist. Some of us still perceive that as a bad thing.

I mean, as far as I'm aware, "socialism" just means that the means of production are owned socially, instead of privately. But is there anything that he's actually done that is disagreeable, or is it just that many news outlets are saying "socialism = bad, Mamdani is socialist, therefore Mamdani = bad"?

“Just” is doing a lot of work in your argument.

The government grocery store tender is filled with exceptionally bad ideas.

When he’s a normal politician doing normal things, he seems great. When he’s sticking to his guns on naive populist things he’s part of a worrying affection for counterproductive government programs.

Yeah but under the norm none of us owe you anything including food or healthcare; that is... we don't have to care you exist

Why volunteer such?

Under capitalism there is no honorific obligationism. Pay me to give a shit you exist or go hungry and die

What's that? You want a social and communal society?

Sounds like naive populism.

>Pay me to give a shit you exist or go hungry and die

Socialism has the same problem, except it's "go to work and give a shit for less money or all of society dies"

Isn't that a description of capitalism?

Almost like the philosophy is meaningless and its innate human condition to exploit the power a philosophy defines

> filled with exceptionally bad ideas.

Name one, just for discussion's sake.

Its probably socialist to expect a rando on the internet to support their nonsense with evidence, have you even paid the man to support/substantiate his shitposting?

Take the case of "city owned stores" to "combat food price inflation".

Well. The city does not actually produce food. Stores get their produce from wholesalers. This is where the "city stores" will get them as well. Only now, regular stores know the city will undercut them in price using taxpayer money. So any location next to a city store will become poison. And soon all you will have (for some people) are the city stores.

Of course, with prices much cheaper than in other parts, you will likely get crowding at these stores. Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you. Basically, if something is cheaper than the market price, you get shortages.

Ironically, the city sets prices based on a relative level to "normal stores". So it's not as if this is some "good capitalist competition". It's not as if it's a "temporary measure until catastrophe A is over".

There is put simply no way this experiment ends in a way that is positive for New Yorkers. And yes, this is socialism and there are very logical, rational economic reasons for why it always fail. This will be no different.

I agree with everything you said, but I think it's also a fairly low stakes experiment that might even be worth trying, and the real test of his competence as mayor is how quickly he realizes it that it won't work and shuts it down, rather than doubling or tripling down on it. Sometimes it's worth it to just take your best shot at implementing a probably bad but popular idea, as long as the consequences for failure are not too harsh.

There's a version of this, I think, that _doesn't_ fail, where they give up selling below cost and focus on setting up ABC-like grocery stores in "food deserts" that sell staple goods that bodegas don't carry.

I agree with everything you said, but is worth mentioning that while, “There is put simply no way this experiment ends in a way that is positive for New Yorkers,” is true, the most likely outcome is that (a) the stores will open and consistently lose a small amount of money, relative to the NYC budget, (b) some small grocers or bodegas will be either priced out or receive city subsidies which incur another small cost on the city’s budget, and (c) customers will experience some kind of annoying quota or identity check system which prevents aggressive arbitrage, but which ultimately doesn’t make the stores unbearable.

This will indeed be far from Pareto optimal, and a slow drain on the city’s budget and local economy, but could be successful enough that the stores can remain in operation in perpetuity, which boosters will frame as a “win”

It could end up having positive effects on the population which could help with income for the city. I'm not an economist, but it seems possible to me

Even if you support "helping struggling people" to pay their groceries. There are already programs for this such as SNAP. Basically means-tested programs that try to benefit people in need.

There are many ways to do redistribution for purposes of social welfare without actually competing with retailers that actually live on slim margins.

That doesn't give you as spectacular political ads or showmanship, however.

Means testing programs are intentionally burdensome to get into, put into place by conservatives who don't want free loaders. Removing that friction is a good thing

Conservatives dont want poor freeloaders, they are the biggest freeloaders and rich freeloaders are nowhere on their radar, besides wanting to emulate/become them

Which takes us back to the root of this thread.

His perception when he was running was "popular, well intentioned, and naive" for the reasons you're outlining. Yet what people have been experiencing isn't a mayor trying to try a bunch of bad-sounding ideas; it's a mayor who is visibly trying to make the city more livable.

In an overpriced and dysfunctional city with a history of self-aggrandizing, useless governance; livability is appealing.

The moderate take is "I don't care if he calls himself a socialist as long as he's making the city run better."

Grocery stores aren't evenly distributed throughout the city, though, and there are neighborhoods were either there is no store at all nearby, or the store that exists has poor quality and high prices. In those locations, the dynamic of a city-owned store undercutting a "normal" store isn't really going to apply since there isn't really a "normal" store in the area.

So much, of course, depends on the execution -- a crappy city store won't be a help to anyone -- but the concept isn't inherently bad on its face.

Ya but some rich dick like Buffet might notice that and a government store would stop them from swooping in and exploiting it

If cheaper grocery prices would pull people away from more expensive stores then Wholefoods wouldn't exist. People don't simply go to the cheapest grocery store.

"Of course, with prices much cheaper than in other parts, you will likely get crowding at these stores. Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you."

There are over 100+ no-questions-asked community-run pantries in NYC where you can get groceries for free, not to mention others that ask for some sort of ID. You'd think that the crowding and bread lines would form here first no?

>People don't simply go to the cheapest grocery store.

You should look into how dollar stores eviscerated rural markets. Or even what walmart did.

People absolutely go to the cheapest stores. Whole Foods selling to a wealthier minority is not a counter factual here.

This isn't a rural market. We have Dollar stores here in NYC too. Point stands.

> The city does not actually produce food. Stores get their produce from wholesalers.

> Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you.

These two statements don't follow one another. If the city stores are getting their goods from the same distributor any other grocery store is, why would the availability of that food dry up leading to breadlines?

> Ironically, the city sets prices based on a relative level to "normal stores". So it's not as if this is some "good capitalist competition". It's not as if it's a "temporary measure until catastrophe A is over".

This happens in "normal" stores as well. There's a concept called a "loss leader" where a store deliberately sells some goods at lower than market rates specifically to attract shoppers.

> There is put simply no way this experiment ends in a way that is positive for New Yorkers.

My state, Idaho, has had state ran liquor stores for my entire life. Our socialist alcohol hasn't resulted in booze lines or bedlam. I see no reason why a grocery store in a very wealthy city couldn't work.

> Only now, regular stores know the city will undercut them in price using taxpayer money.

IDK why he calls that a city-owned store, he should just say that the city has started a VC program aimed to fund startups in the retail sector.

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.

That's one (Marxist) definition of it, but the movement is much broader and more varied than that.

What else could it mean? There are anarcho- and democratic socialists, sure, but their end goal is still workers owning the means of production.

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.

Socialism is when the government does stuff, it would seem.

Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgiC8YfytDw

(The guy is joking in the video)

To be fair Mamdani has stated that he is a "socialist" numerous times. So I don't think that the characterization is wrong necessarily.

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.

> 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".

There is a long tradition in America of Socialist mayors maintaining cities really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_socialism Glad to see Zohran is bringing it back.

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. As would - just to point out the absurdity of it - Joe Biden, to half the country.

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.

Not by me. By the rest of the world along with me.

"The rest of the world" you say to a literal thread of people explaining why you're wrong

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.

> His policies are socialist.

Depends on how one defines "socialist"

> Some of us still perceive that as a bad thing.

Then what's wrong with you? Look at other first world countries.

All this "socialism bad" bullshit needs to stop. It has no basis in reality.

> It has no basis in reality.

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

That’s totalitarian communism. Parent is talking about social democracy with a larger safety net. I’m not aware of gulags in the Netherlands or Sweden but maybe I haven’t looked hard enough.

I was just in here a while ago calling leftist class war stuff conspiracism BTW, so I’m equal opportunity.

Just so much bullshit everywhere. We’d have a much better discourse if words meant things and if we could toss the hyperbole and the conspiracy theories from all sides.

I agree, and I am also a centrist, but to say “socialism bad” has “no basis in reality” is wrong.

This is an unhelpful comment. What socialist policies has he enacted? (I live here btw)

Well he's the government and he did stuff, and socialism is when the government does stuff, so he's socialist.

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!

You can omit the first part, being neutral towards a controversial figure is okay!

I have been working on something for NYC. Its not ready yet but its basically an AI-native DOHMH.

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.

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?

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.

I have no idea either LOL.

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".

> https://dohmh.codify.nyc

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? What kind of data protections does this LLM have against erroneously sharing HIPAA PHI, because 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?

If you have not even conisdered HIPAA compliance, which it looks like you haven't, now that you've been made aware that this needs addressed it can be considered neglect and YOU ARE RISKING UP TO A $73,000 FINE PER HIPAA VIOLATION!!!!

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 give it all my personal information and medical history then 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?

You're really trusting these agents to make the determination that someone is in crisis? When I'm in crisis, I shut down. I'm not reaching for my phone or laptop. I don't even interact with my loved ones in that state; interacting with a chatbot who tells me to call 988 would be the very thing that makes me actually kill myself. It's already insulting enough when I'm googling my thoughts trying to find other real people who have dealt with them and gotten through and it takes up the whole page to tell me to call some person ignorant of my situation so they can say "damn that's crazy, don't kill yourself tho it gets better" for 40 minutes while I sob.

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, when I was 4 years old.

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 (price sign, as you put it) 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 sorry, I know that this strays pretty far from the HN guidelines and ethos but I just can't restrain myself here. This is so unbelievably, utterly dispiriting as someone who's cared about technology and it's development and good practices for much of my life. I can't approach this with anything but a sharp tongue and critical eye, because if you won't look at it yourself (and you didn't), someone else has to tell you what they see.

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.

Edit: 1 more, the agents done "make decisions" in the way I think you mean. Its more like an attempt at MAXING the deterministic element of the workflows: https://wiki.project20x.com/

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.

People are discovering go links from first principles.

Mamdani+ his team are genius at PR

In an age where cameras are everywhere, all one has to do for good PR is good.

Only if you own the camera system, otherwise they won't publish the video of you doing good

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.

I know her name, but I definitely can't name anything she's done.

Mamdani is the mayor of the largest city by far. Of course he has the most visibility of all the mayors.

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.

"All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success."

It's an url shortener. I implemented 3 of these this year and nobody is calling me a genius.

Because a genius would have only needed to implement a single one this year

3 different clients.

Yeah but a genius wouldn't have left themselves open to a zinger like that.

I'm not claiming to be a genius. Nothing in this article is evidence of genius. Competence maybe.

You literally complained nobody is calling you one in your first post

Sigh. I was pointing out the difference between when Mamdani does something and when a regular person does the same thing.

You’re making the usual HN mistake of focusing on the technical aspects

I did the non-technical aspects too and yet I'm somehow still just a shmuck doing his job while these guys are geniuses.

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.

Perhaps the reason nobody called you a genius is explicitly because you fail to understand the article

Bro, your handle is hackernud3s.

Did you put a URL like hacker.nudes/nudes on advertising posters?

That's not the genius part, its application of said tool to a sharp problem.

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.

The meta on this post is that the minimalist blog design by iamwillwang.com is itself really cool. Great work!

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...

Idk how they pick the one they use in the video, but it looks like they reserve all casings:

nyc.gov/RentalRipoff nyc.gov/rental-ripoff

That makes sense. You’d basically want to standardize/slugify the path on creation and each access.

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

What if I told you there’s an existing protocol for doing Really Simple Syndication?

Sorry, we're on the wrong timeline. The worse one, in fact.

sounds like something only nerds would be aware of

Aka POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

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.

I’ve seen website.com/z/{initiative} before, and it worked quite well.

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.

https://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov

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

NYC could also pipe their own PDS right into NYC mobile apps, email notifications, etc. in this context.

Why would they use a PDS as a source of truth for that? Surely they just have a guy with an excel spreadsheet who posts on all platforms

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.

Ok so why would they use a PDS instead of using Buffer?

What do you do if you want to cancel Buffer in the future? Buffer is the orchestration and scheduler, PDS is persistent storage.

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.

Mastodon is not a social media site, it is software for running social media sites. Many of them exist.

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.

Mastodon instances struggled before the influx.

> 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

What makes you think it’s a screenshot from X (formerly Twitter)?

Given how untrustworthy politicians have proven to be, it's madness that so many people on social media and still keep falling for the same acts.

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.

Here's what it was like beforehand. Laughable! https://youtu.be/MEN8KvEuYhE?t=54

Imho they should def be using a separately managed go.nyc.gov or link.nyc.gov DNS record

But I appreciate the intent..!

I’m genuinely curious: why should it be on a separately managed DNS record?

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.

bingo

That would make sense if it was third-party content, but its not.

I like click to cancel. Should have a year at least in url

Left NYC around when he got elected (non political, just a job offer) Does he market by his first name now?

It seems overly familiar and parasocial to use it in titles if not

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.

https://imgur.com/GB6fbxA

Now? As an outsider just observing from acoss the internet, I always saw campaign materials featuring "Zohran" prominently.

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.

This is what happens when Boomer politicians are finally kicked to the curb.

Feels good, man. They need to eph off

> click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer

I'd like to believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion of Scheme, Pascal, and C stdlib naming conventions here is intentional.

Flame wars. City council will soon debate two vs four spaces between traffic cones.

I will not stand and watch tabs getting discriminated!

Typical, all this DEI naming, promoting minority formats no one uses, while they refuse to recognize the majority are perfectly happy with camelCase!

(/s in case it is needed)

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 "-".

> "click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer"

We didn't start the fire!

does it matter?

big tech has long canceled url on phones.

I can type a URL on today's iPhone just fine.

The problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced.

Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Luckily these are merely redirects!

Brings to mind this: https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/1971618033115550180

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."

While clunky, I think what you suggest is the best method.

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.

In this day and age it makes sense to amend Tim's statement to "canonical urls don't change". And cool web sites have a canonical URL for most pages.

That way we a) don't lose track of relevant content but b) can have nice things such as short URLs with good names.

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.

Particularly here where the context is ephemeral.

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.

The internet isn't an append-only archive. It changes quite frequently in fact. Sorry dawg.

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