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Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

ricksantorum.com

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Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#81

Post by cbr »

encoderer wrote: post #24
nikcub wrote: post #19

wait, did anybody actually think those donation counters were real ?

Honestly in other cases they are. I had personal experience developing tools used for Howard Dean's 2004 primary campaign (as a volunteer not staff) and in that case it was certainly real. I'd be very, very surprised if the ones used by Ron Paul and Obama weren't real. They have good engineering talent there, and (in the case of Obama at least) good political talent. This runs contrary to both.

I was going to check and get back to you, but I can't find one on either of their sites.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#83

Post by encoderer »

cbr wrote: post #81
encoderer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly in other cases they are. I had personal experience developing tools used for Howard Dean's 2004 primary campaign (as a volunteer not staff) and in that case it was certainly real. I'd be very, very surprised if the ones used by Ron Paul and Obama weren't real. They have good engineering talent there, and (in the case of Obama at least) good political talent. This runs contrary to both.

I was going to check and get back to you, but I can't find one on either of their sites.

They run them during specific fund-raising drives.

You can also see them on peoples personal MyBO pages.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#84

Post by mc32 »

jlgreco wrote: post #17
hodgesmr wrote: post #14

Aren't there rules about political candidates disclosing donations? And doesn't this violate those rules?

Is he technically still a candidate? Maybe he's getting around those rules by not being a candidate anymore.

I think he suspended his campaign. Suspending means that while for all intents and purposed but one, the campaign is ended. The exception is that it allows the candidate to raise money (usually to pay off campaign debt). Ending a campaign means you hold the bag, if you're in the red, as I understand it.

So, technically, yes, still a candidate.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#85

Post by entropy_ »

aaronasterling wrote: post #73
stevewilhelm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was just looking at namespace best practices today for a utility library I was implementing. Is there a defacto standard?

The defacto standard is to put nothing in an enclosing namespace unless it's needed there. The purpose of functions (especially in a language like JS) is to wrap up everything that's needed to accomplish a given task and leave no mess behind.

Then why oh why are variables global by default? (this is not meant as an attack on your point, I fully agree, I just find this awfully frustrating about JS. Sane languages have scoped by default and a global keyword, not the other way around)

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#86

Post by btilly »

mc32 wrote: post #84
jlgreco wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he technically still a candidate? Maybe he's getting around those rules by not being a candidate anymore.

I think he suspended his campaign. Suspending means that while for all intents and purposed but one, the campaign is ended. The exception is that it allows the candidate to raise money (usually to pay off campaign debt). Ending a campaign means you hold the bag, if you're in the red, as I understand it. So, technically, yes, still a candidate.

Actually your candidacy is its own separate legal entity, so you're not legally holding the bag. However your reputation is at stake, if you ever want to run for public office in the future, nobody will lend you money if you've proven to be a bad credit risk in the past.

See http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/the-business... for more.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#87

Post by tylermenezes »

citricsquid wrote: post #62
barrkel wrote: post #27

I don't think there's anything wrong, in principle, with this approach, so long as the simulated rate is calibrated frequently to the actual average donation rate. Having it all wired up properly would require a whole lot of infrastructure, particularly for donation mechanisms that aren't online and aren't all tied in to a single system.

This is how I do it on my personal website ( http://samryan.co.uk/ ). It makes no sense for me to put together a real automatically updating counter so every couple of days I check the real growth rate and adjust it manually. It obviously looks shady on a politicians website and I think doing it with something like donations where it's tied to a real world action is a bit... silly and they should have disclosed that…

It's a shame, because having an actual working one would be a really cool feature to do technically. But because of how easy to fake, it doesn't look like much. Then again, the more practical side of me says having a working one is a total waste of time 99% of the time. Everything's an estimate in some way.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#88

Post by raphman »

Jach wrote: post #61
artursapek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a fast response. Does someone on HN work for Santorum?

My guess is the same barely-competent webmaster who wrote the JS noticed a huge traffic spike in that directory, and disabled the index but not the cause of the spike. But we'll see... (Ed: downvotes make me think you were right. :)

You being downvoted could also be caused by you accusing the webmaster to be 'barely-competent'. This is an (afaics) unfounded accusation.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#89

Post by Jach »

raphman wrote: post #88
Jach wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is the same barely-competent webmaster who wrote the JS noticed a huge traffic spike in that directory, and disabled the index but not the cause of the spike. But we'll see... (Ed: downvotes make me think you were right. :)

You being downvoted could also be caused by you accusing the webmaster to be 'barely-competent'. This is an (afaics) unfounded accusation.

Yeah, I figured that was the real reason, the edit is tongue-in-cheek. But I don't think it's unfounded. Just look at all the comments criticizing the coding! (Particularly in Osiris' thread.) I don't consider myself a master programmer but at least I use 'var' by habit. Now one other objection I considered was the use of "barely-competent" as a term, which seems like a strange one since typically people are either competent or incompetent. But that's not really the whole picture in general and certainly not in coding. I don't just mean the levels of mastery[1], "barely-competent" here is the Just Good Enough (hey, it "works" for its purpose and most people won't know any better if they pay attention at all) and the Just Good Enough is often just fine in practice but it's not the actual goal. The goal is to do better, but if you never want to do better than the Just Good Enough, well, I for one don't want to work with you.

[1] http://www.zanthan.com/japan/archives/001004.html

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#90

Post by derleth »

evolve2k wrote: post #44

It fascinates me that Americans might see this as acceptable or even that it is regarded as most likely to be totally legal and hence acceptable in nature. In Australia I would be very confident that this type of falsified campaign disclosure would be illegal or at least fall foul of a whole range of parliamentary and governmental standards.

> Americans might see this as acceptable

Do you have any evidence we do?

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