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Obama: I will be the Democratic nominee
- rms 18y agoWhile this is awesome, this is covered on the TV News, so it does fall within what the rules consider off-topic. But threads like this have come up rarely enough (one previous Obama thread?), that the rules can be broken. Go Obama. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Though I guess Obama is kind of an interesting new phenomenon, but probably not new to anyone here.
- helveticaman 18y agoYeah...however, the outcome of the presidential election would deserve to be on the front page.
- rms 18y agoAgreed... but I don't make the rules. Do your worst, editors.
- breily 18y agoBut this isn't the outcome of a presidential election. And anyways, why should the outcome of the presidential election be on HN? Its not especially relevant to hackers, and I'm quite certain people will see the news elsewhere - it usually gets a lot of coverage.
- helveticaman 18y agoI think it is relevant to hackers. It might not be hacker-specific, but it significantly affects all kinds of things, many IP related.
- breily 18y agoYou could say that about basically any politics story - the point is that when politics are involved, discussions like this one happen. Politics has made Reddit's frontpage basically unreadable to me, and I would hate to see that happen here.
- helveticaman 18y agoAll I'm saying is the outcome of a presidential election is a legitimate exception to the politics rule. The rest, sure, it's irrelevant to hacker news. I stand by my downvoted opinions.
- hugh 18y agoI think in an idealized HN, even the outcome of the Presidential Election wouldn't get upvoted, although I'm sure that in the real HN it probably will.
- davidw 18y agoIt's not more relevant to hackers than other people. It's very relevant to hackers, miners, accountants, lawyers and everyone else. That's a good sign that it's not "hacker news". The key factor is relative importance, not absolute importance.
- eru 18y agoNo. That will be on every news source.
- tonystubblebine 18y agoWell, if we need to tweak it for more relevancy, I'd be interested to hear any strong public speakers pick apart what makes him such a good speaker.
- menloparkbum 18y agomaybe the moderators are off on a honeymoon, or something?
- icey 18y agoNews? Sure. Hacker News? Not so much.
- dmpayton 18y agoI was about to say, word for word, the exact same thing. Had it typed out and everything. Then I had to check on dinner, came back, and got the unknown/expired link error. Needles to say, I'm in agreement.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- icey 18y agoLook, I'm an Obama supporter. It's just that as far as I see it, this sort of thing is better left to other venues.
- breily 18y agoHow is this not dead? Politics should not be the top story - I thought there was a strict ban on politics?
- andreyf 18y agoNo strict ban, just caution - the reason given as politics tending to be divisive, even among intelligent groups.
- antidaily 18y agohow l33t of him.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mynameishere 18y agoMy god, this whole comment thread is people wondering out loud if "this is hacker news" or not. Give it a rest. No it's not hacker news, and no it doesn't matter. If you're really concerned with the purity of a website, you're going to have to find out who upmodded the thing and then ban them. As I said a long time ago: The democrats have one chance to lose this election, and that is to nominate Barack Obama. Oddly, given that McCain is basically a moderate democrat himself, a loss by Obama would probably tend to neuter the GOP and result in an overall advantage for the leftist program.
- rms 18y agoThe prediction markets like Obama. http://www.intrade.com http://www.intrade.com McCain has been around for a long time and has said a lot of contradictory things -- it is easy to edit videos together to make him look like a fool. A flip-flopper, if you will.
- mynameishere 18y agoIf I could legally bet against him I probably would. McCain is an idiot. He's old. He's ugly. He's got awful cancer scars. He's sick as a pike. He's a hypocrite. He's a criminal. He's (possibly) insane. I'm aware of his faults, but I'm also aware that none of them "stick". Obama and his various followers have consistently broken a key rule of politics: Do not insult the voters. I expect more of the same. Obama is a pyschologically interesting person, and I can't help hoping he wins, in a way. (Only because it would be interesting, though). McCain is as interesting as Franco, which is to say: Not at all. Obama, by contrast, grew up politically as a strict identity-politician. That is, a "black" politician, who mainly tried to divert public money and favors to a particular race. Read his bio. This attitude is somewhat artificial and I'm not sure that he has the sort of natural bigotry of Jesse Jackson or Sharpton. Nonetheless, his politics are damn close. His goal now is to divorce himself from his past: First, whatever his "real" personality is, plus the somewhat phony personality he concocted during his Chicago inner city days. He's got a lot of contradictions to cover up, and a lot of hard acting to do. I think he'll crack, frankly, before it's over. Another thing: He's a wimp. Wimps lose. McCain is a bully. Bullies win.
- MaysonL 18y agoOne point to bring it on topic: Obama has by far the best use of the Internet any candidate has ever had. From fundraising to volunteer recruitment to local organization to event coordination, he blows the competition away.
- rms 18y agoThe man has his own social network to recruit volunteers.
- Darmani 18y agoNumber of Obama Meetup groups: 71 Number of Obama Meetup group members: 4,037 Number of Ron Paul Meetup groups: 716 Number of Ron Paul Meetup group members: 28,870 Source: http://www.ronpaulstats.org/Meetup_Groups.html http://www.ronpaulstats.org/Meetup_Groups.html Largest single day online Ron Paul fundraiser: $6.2 million Largest single day Barack Obama fundraiser: Errrrmmmm....a lot less. Of course, if you want to get semantic, I suppose you could say Barack Obama's done a better job using the Internet; the Internet has done more in the way of using Ron Paul.
- dgabriel 18y agoNot to bag on RP, who is a very interesting candidate, but those fundraising numbers are pretty misleading. Let's look at the totals (http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/ http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/) Barak Obama - $265,439,277 Ron Paul - $34,442,643
- Darmani 18y agoThe comment I was responding to was solely about the Internet. Barack Obama has done much more in the way of the traditional $2000 dinner events, while probably 90% of Ron Paul's funds came over the Internet.
- rms 18y agoIf anyone wants to read his tech policy, here it is. This election is a battle for net neutrality. http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/ http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/ The education policy is also good, it basically comes down to "spend more money on education." http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education/ http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education/
- Darmani 18y agoIf throwing money at problems worked well, startups would be screwed.
- rms 18y agoIf education could be solved by the government it would be well worth eliminating many potential startups in the education space. It would make more opportunities for startups, because everyone would be more educated, producing more wealth to spend.
- _h4xr 18y agoIs there even a positive correlation between throwing more money at education and having better-educated kids? It looks like at some point over the last thirty years, we got to the point that the administrative cost of distributing the next dollar for education exceeds one dollar, so the extra money gets soaked up by bureaucratic inefficiencies. But whatever! It's only billions and billions of taxpayer dollars spent by a monopolist that buys its product from a cartel! Clearly, the important thing is to give more money to this completely deranged system, rather than fixing it.
- TFrancis 18y agoRight, let's reduce education! Ignore the order of magnitude more funding provided to the Department of Defense. This never made any sense to me. I target my voting like I optimize my code. Look for the biggest inefficiencies and start there.
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- andreyf 18y agoThis sucks for the Democratic campaign in '08 - Obama/AP/CNN says he will be nominee, Hillary campaign says they are mistaken, Democratic party can't say much until the convention. Doesn't seem like much of a time of unity... hopefully, we'll all come together by November.
- rms 18y agoShe actually said they were mistaken? From what I watched of her speech she completely ignored the issue.
- andreyf 18y agoThe AP story is incorrect. Senator Clinton will not concede the nomination this evening. From: http://blog.hillaryclinton.com/blog/main/2008/06/03/163233 http://blog.hillaryclinton.com/blog/main/2008/06/03/163233 That's pretty fishy wording, and her newer posts seem to be very close to conceding...
- jobeirne 18y agoLet's hear it for a crippling capital gains taxes!
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- trekker7 18y agoI half-agree that this isn't HN material. Half, because I'd really like to hear about HN users' views and opinions about politics.
- davidw 18y agoI can sum it up for you: they pretty much represent the normal political spectrum, but there are a lot more libertarians, and probably fewer Bush style conservatives. If you want to see the results of such a discussion: libertarians vs more left-leaning (a lot more in some cases) vs a few lonely moderates, have a look at reddit. It's generally not that entertaining, and I'd much rather talk about things we all have in common rather than those that divide us.
- khafra 18y ago> things we have in common Right, like the undeniable facts that vim is better than emacs, Macs are fundamentally more secure than Linux, the gphone will be better than the iPhone, 37signals is overrated, ruby is better than python...
- davidw 18y agoemacs rules, dude! But at least in those debates, we're some of the more qualified people to comment, whereas with politics, it's just the same tired old blah blah blah that you hear everywhere else.
- flipbrad 18y agoIthink the Dems have the right man fr the job - Obama is a wonderfuly intelligent man who will bring all the requisite nuance and intelligence to the presidency (his choice of favourite films, for example, reveals a man very sensitive to different aspects of culture within America, and indeed the world) - but unlike Kerry, he's got the charisma and power to not have that come off as 'flip flopping' (the most ridiculous branding to ever decide an election on - a shameful year for the USA, that was). Internationally, he comes off as a sensitive and reasonable American patriot - I think this is a very good combination for international relations.
- tokipin 18y agoawww. i wanted hillary to win, because she has bill
- axod 18y agoThere has to be a better, quicker way to choose a new president. This is worse than big brother (the tv show). Is it any wonder so few vote when they have to endure years of this before hand?
- dmpayton 18y agoThe rampant down-modding for differing political views on this thread (which has no business being on Hacker News in the first place) is ridiculous.
- technoguyrob 18y agoIt is not ridiculous, since people aren't downmodding to express a difference of opinion about what the person said. They are downmodding to assert they do not want to hear any political opinion on Hacker News, because--as has been said--there are countless other venues for hackers to express and debate political opinion; Hacker News is not one of them. Notice therefore we see something interesting regarding the HN system. In essence, this is exactly what pg had in mind. Karma is taken away for comments and not just submissions, so that users will adapt to the Hacker News atmosphere. As we have seen from this thread, politics (even "news" like the first ever black general election presidential candidate) is simply not something people are interested in seeing on HN, and if people keep discussing it, they will be downmodded into oblivion, effectively maintaining the current HN mindset (since, presumably, people with negative, or quickly decreasing karma, will not want to continue posting on HN). The only thing that could break such a system is a vast shift in the mentality of the community (which is not a bad thing since it would still keep the community happy, although it's very unlikely to happen), or a massive influx of new people into the community (which is why pg wants to keep the number of new signups per day low).
- rms 18y agoCorrect analysis, but the downmodders are acting uselessly.
- technoguyrob 18y agoI disagree. Read my post again, I added two paragraphs. It's very useful behavior, in fact (imho). It preserves the nature of the community quite effectively (albeit at the expensive of causing temporary upset).
- tokipin 18y ago
- rms 18y agoWarning: Posting in the thread for Obama winning the presidency will get you downmodded uselessly.
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoHi guys. I love discussing politics. Talking about your philosophy of life, government, and moral obligations to your fellow man (or not). Even the idea that political choices are mostly emotional and then justified by logic is a way cool topic. Just let's not do that here, okay? I like you guys, and I'm not interested in pissing off half the crowd with my political views. Nor am I interested in reading a bunch of "heck yeah!" posts about any party or candidate -- I find them pedantic. I've got plenty of other places on the net for that stuff. Now a story about opportunities for how startups are making big bucks with new technology in the campaigns? -- love to see some of that stuff.
- edw519 18y agoI'm just the opposite. I hate discussing politics. When I'm with family or friends and stuff like this comes up, I go in the other room. Oddly, political discussions here don't bother me so much, just as long as they are "occasional", not regular. I like to hear what people here have to say. And it's easier to click the back button than to go in the other room.
- nkohari 18y agoWhy is it that every time a political link is posted on here, it gets up-modded like crazy, while at the same time collecting dozens of comments full of meta-discussion about what types of links should and should not be on HN? Seems to me that if you don't like a link, you should just not up-mod it, and certainly not waste your own time by commenting.
- Harkins 18y agoBecause ignoring them doesn't work. If you don't fight to keep things on-topic, you'll just end up with another Reddit in a few months.
- hugh 18y agoAgreed. Without a downmod arrow, bitching about upmodding is part of the system. The idea is that if every political article degenerates into a bunch of people bitching that political articles shouldn't be posted, then eventually people will learn not to post political articles.
- DougBTX 18y agoTrue. Even with a down arrow, it's not helped Reddit (helped == make me want to read the front page), hopefully the bitching is more effective.
- icey 18y agoSay 100 people really liked it, and 1,000 people did not. Well, you'd have an article that had 100 upmods and far more comments inside saying that the article sucked and should not have been upmodded.
- lst 18y agoI'm so happy this happened, because this will finally save the world! (Not) (To all non-US folks, like me: if the US were really so important as they think to be, it would suffice to save them, and all of the world would be safe and happy. There's only one big problem here: the progress of US is often based on regress of too many other countries, and especially very poor ones...)
- bkmrkr 18y agoPLEASE DONT MAKE THIS REDDIT V2