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AMA with Barack Obama

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Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#171

Post by Lukeas14 »

learc83 wrote: post #128
ConstantineXVI wrote: post #32

No flying cars or moon bases; just average people off the street able to talk directly to the "leader of the free world" on level ground. Not the future we were expecting, but I'll take it.

While, cool, this is no different than town hall meetings we've had since the inception of the Republic.

It's also very different since our population is now 300+ million as opposed to 3+ million at the inception. Any one of those 300 million could potentially have asked the president a question, not limited by geography or social/financial status.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#172

Post by 001sky »

CLIFF NOTES: 10x

______________________

REMEMBER TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER - if you need to know how to register, go to Gottaregister.com.

It's hard - truthfully the main thing other than work is just making sure that I'm spending enough time with michelle and the girls. ...

I understand how tough it is out there for recent grads....

Money has always been a factor in politics....

The decision to surge our forces in afghanistan. Any time you send our brave men and women into battle, you know that not everyone will come home safely, and that necessarily weighs heavily on you. ...

Win or lose, I'll be thanking everybody who is working so hard - especially all the volunteers in field offices all across the country, and the amazing young people in our campaign offices.

We've really focused on this since I came into office - 18 tax cuts for small business, easier funding from the SBA. Going forward, I want to keep taxes low for the 98 percent of small businesses that have $250,000 ......

Jordan - I'm a Bulls guy.

Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although there will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform.

Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. ......

__________________________

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#173

Post by RandallBrown »

cf0ed2aa-bdf5 wrote: post #159
RandallBrown wrote: post #147

Does this seem like it could be fake to anyone else? Could someone have simply hacked his twitter? He only posted it on the @BarackObama twitter. Not any of the other ones related to his campaing. Reddit didn't advertise this AT ALL. Most big celebrity AMAs are known for days. The photo of him is just him sitting in front of a laptop. There's no proof at all that he's doing an AMA. Reddit is going down HARD. I doubt…

There is also his campaign site "Redditors for Obama" https://barackobama.com/reddit Not definite proof but if someone hacked the POTUS's Twitter Account and posted a fake IAMA to reddit it would probably have been shut down by now.

The Redditors for Obama wasn't there the first time I had the page load. That definitely helps the legitimacy.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#174

Post by natrius »

ashray wrote: post #131
pippy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid question: is the because reddits backend is in python? I often hear that PHP + varnish is only limited by the size of the pipe. Can this scale on cloud platforms?

No, it's probably due to the massive number of reads/writes pumping through their system. I'm pretty sure that their database isn't able to handle what's going on at the moment. Also, if you were to use Varnish as a cache, that wouldn't help you much with write access because every time there is a write (a new post..) you'd have to invalidate the cache. In a high volume scenario such as this (tons of posts coming in.…

Varnish can only really help Reddit with users who aren't logged in since every page is customized. It'd still help in high volume scenarios since Varnish solves the thundering herd problem: only one request (at most) will hit the database for each invalidation.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#175

Post by acomar »

ChiperSoft wrote: post #64
mindcrime wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird... I am guessing that if Obama was going to be on Reddit, they would have given the Reddit staff some early notice, in order to add some extra preparations for the load. Or maybe not, does anybody know if there's any sort of normal protocol around this sort of thing?

The reddit admins knew. Heuypriest himself confirmed the validity of the AMA.

Kn0thing jumped in to confirm it too.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#176

Post by fr0sty »

untog wrote: post #156
FlukeATX wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to chime in, it looks like Obama is heading out[1] after answering only ten questions. I think it's fair to call that disappointing when the thread had more than 12,000 comments. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obam...

Is it? It appears that his AMA was online for maybe 45 minutes. How long should we expect the President of the United States to stay on the site for? Presumably has has other things to do.

He answered questions on these topics:

  1. Space Race
  2. Internet Freedom
  3. Favorite Basketball Player
  4. Small-Business tax breaks
  5. First Activity on Nov 7
  6. Most Difficult Decision
  7. Money in Politics
  8. White House Beer Recipe
  9. Jobs
  10. Work/Life Balance
Hard hitting stuff there

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#177

Post by iso-8859-1 »

pippy wrote: post #119
ashray wrote: post #86

It looks like the Obama AMA has really caused some serious fires in reddit's backend infrastructure. The site's been down for the last 10 minutes. I would've thought that they'd have brought in some additional computing power for such an event, should've been easy for them considering they have a cloud deployment. Maybe this gives them greater reason to hire more engineers. I found it impressive that they served bill…

Stupid question: is the because reddits backend is in python? I often hear that PHP + varnish is only limited by the size of the pipe. Can this scale on cloud platforms?

Why ask it if you know it's stupid?

No, PHP+Varnish can not always scale. You're forgeting the most important important factor in this equation, the database. Varnish is simply for caching and you won't find any large site that doesn't have it. PHP is a scripting language and the runtime performance differences to other common web application languages (i.e. Python, Java) is negligible since you're using caching anyway. Here's what you should worry about if you want scaling: Your database, your data structures and your code quality.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#178

Post by smokinjoe »

pav3l wrote: post #140
gfodor wrote: post #132

Gotta admit, found this hilarious: "By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD!"

Which further confirms that this whole AMA is a carefully crafted PR stunt.

Well, this wasn't going to be a forum to influence future policy. I think it's pretty cool that this happened - even now my Mom might know what the "AMA" stands for.

And great timing to do it during the RNC and steal some buzz away.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#179

Post by revorad »

hooande wrote: post #96
revorad wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The President of United States is doing a Reddit AMA and all you can do is predict disappointment ? Really? Why bother? If you're wrong, your comment will seem too negative and cynical (which it is). If you're right, well, that'd be disappointing, right? Comments like yours make me want to rename this site Hater News.

"In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through Reddit." If understanding how the world works and telling others makes you a hater, then sign me up.

Maybe you're right, but I think I'm done with this site.
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