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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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?
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”
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
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 "-".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
* Jurisdictional: Food stamps can't be adjusted by NYC itself (as far as I know), so if they're insufficient this works around that issue
* Store access: Food stamps don't necessarily solve the problem of "there's no grocery store close to me", and if the market can't be nudged in that direction, a direct intervention solves it faster.
Respectfully, maybe spend 5 minutes reading about it from the horse’s mouth. The Mamdani admin has done a pretty good job, imo, of laying out the case, and explaining the plan for these 5 grocery stores.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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