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AMA with Barack Obama

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Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#241

Post by SilasX »

elliottcarlson wrote: post #239
timsally wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I don't have much sympathy for him, considering he took out $160,000 in debt with only a 50/50 shot to pay it back (that's your chance to get a high enough salary coming out of a top law school to service that debt, outside of Harvard and Yale). His poor decision is further compounded by the fact that he decided to go to law school after the legal market crashed in 2008 and people started to realize how ridiculo…

I don't disagree with a single thing you said - but I do find some irony in the fact that this community for the most part is centered around startups - some taking huge risks with either bootstrapped money, or angel money - and the failure rate is often estimated between 30% to 40%.

Sure, and the "woe is me" rate is estimated between 0% and "why don't you fire up that bong again" -- much lower than that of the (formerly) wealthy students that gambled on an expensive education.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#242

Post by pjscott »

SilasX wrote: post #241
elliottcarlson wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with a single thing you said - but I do find some irony in the fact that this community for the most part is centered around startups - some taking huge risks with either bootstrapped money, or angel money - and the failure rate is often estimated between 30% to 40%.

Sure, and the "woe is me" rate is estimated between 0% and "why don't you fire up that bong again" -- much lower than that of the (formerly) wealthy students that gambled on an expensive education.

The difference is who takes on the risk. With startup investment, the investors risk their money, and if the company dies, the investors take that loss. They do this because they can make a lot of money from the startups that make it big. With student loans, the risk lies with the student.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#243

Post by Achshar »

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…

I believe it was a surprise AMA, so no heads up to Reddit team.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#244

Post by bierko »

I'm 18 years old. I'd consider myself politically indifferent, in part because I did research at an organization investigating lobbying and money.

No matter how much of a publicity stunt this was, though, I registered to vote today. Obama was pretty persuasive.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#245

Post by Two9A »

heyadayo wrote: post #236

1. Check out the up and down votes on reddit! 158,753 up votes 152,631 down votes with a net difference of 6k or so positive. That's crazy! Are those partisan lines or something? Why wouldn't everyone on reddit be excited to see the president? 2. Why has this had such low rank on HN given the number of votes? It had 200+ in the first hour and never seemed to get in the top 3.

For 1, Reddit has a fuzzing algorithm on large vote counts, so voting bots don't know how much influence they're having. Refresh the page and you'd probably see a different number of up and down, but the same "net".

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#246

Post by deno »

ljd wrote: post #160
deno wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beanstalk has nothing to do with the database, which is the point of contention. Spinning up more app servers only helps with serving signed in users.

You can configure beanstalk to scale your database out as well.

Scaling out database is nothing at all like spinning up stateless app servers.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#247

Post by xtracto »

forensic wrote: post #186
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?

It's a stupid question because the particular dialect of assembler this was written in is completely irrelevant for performance considerations. You've been brainwashed by the idiotic pop culture language wars that pretend a question like Ruby vs Python vs whatever has any meaning. These are debates over buzzwords, not reality. All that matters is the database configuration and associated architecture. Not some buzzwo…

Wow, news.ycombinator surely has become very offensive and attacking. So much that a person cannot ask questions about IT.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#248

Post by Alex3917 »

twoodfin wrote: post #225
Alex3917 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me, in Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, there is a great section on why everyone always hates reality-based thinkers. Essentially before and during when the war crimes (or whatever) are being committed, everyone hates the truth-tellers because they think they are wrong and they are challenging their worldview or whatever. And then afterwards, everyone hates the truth-tellers becau…

Michael Moore, truth teller? Ha.

Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find those WMDs any day now.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#250

Post by freehunter »

Lukeas14 wrote: post #171
learc83 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit doesn't track or verify geographical location, so in reality someone from Iran could be asking the President a question just the same as someone from Virginia. That's awesome.
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