I’ve thought about it and you’re right, this was just confirmation bias on my part. There is in fact no evidence that DOGE is in any way involved. Apologies.
I've popped back to this thread again (in the midst of another argument:) and noticed you've edited a preceding comment (perhaps unnecessarily but certainly magnanimously), which, along with this apology, I think, shows you in a good light and HN in general. Thank you, it's so good to see people being reasonable in amongst the tribalism.
This is exactly how the HN community responded to Twitter, too. The amount of baseless speculation paraded as fact is crazy for a supposedly rationalist community.
Maybe if I remembered or looked at how HN handled Trump's first election win then I'd have a more accurate impression, but both the Twitter/Musk takeover and now Trump's win and DOGE seem to have sent a lot of people into strange hysteria that I've rarely seen on HN. I just want people to calm down and provide better commentary but I think that would be downvoted to hell with responses like "don't you know <insert apocalyptic event here> is happening? Are you <select from stupid/bigoted/evil>?"
The other day, I had a chat with a friend (IRL) and he told me his friend told him that planes are falling from the sky because Trump had fired all the air traffic controllers (which, as Trump would put it, is fake news, driven by irresponsible headlines). The commentary here is on that, very low, very misguided, tribal (not even partisan, worse) and very unhelpful level. That's not the kind of plurality of opinion HN needs, in my opinion.