AMA with Barack Obama • Hacker News Board

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#251

Post by freehunter » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 1:53 PM UTC

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.

1. Reddit doesn't show the real numbers, like mentioned. If a post is getting a lot of upvotes, it will register a handful of downvotes as well. If you look through the highest ranking posts of all time, you'll notice most of them are quite old. Some time ago, they implemented an algorithm to keep votes from getting out of control; as the number of upvotes gets higher, the number of downvotes does as well. This is to normalize it at a certain level of votes. There's a ceiling that the votes practically cannot get above.

2. HN doesn't allow downvotes but it does allow you to flag a post. I don't know the algorithm for this, but it's possible people were flagging this post.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#252

Post by 13rules » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 4:01 PM UTC

pjscott wrote: post #242

SilasX wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With the number of government-backed education loans that are defaulted on, you could also say the risk lies with the taxpayers.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#253

Post by bolasanibk » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 4:15 PM UTC

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…

AskReddit thread about the stats: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/z2fo7/admins_of_r...

Page views/uniques http://i.imgur.com/vPnEK.png

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#254

Post by B-Con » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 4:25 PM UTC

revorad wrote: post #38

untog wrote: post #30

Can't wait for the top post to be another asinine "comment phrased as a question" about legalising marijuana! Joking aside, I predict disappointment. Reddit users will want hard-hitting answers, Obama will definitely not give them (already the internet freedom question has been fluffy-answered). In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through R…

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.

It was a perfectly valid prediction, one that I also made, and it came true. The answers were only a handful and they were very fluffy.

If he was right, it just shows that he understands how these things work.

If he was wrong, he would be pleasantly surprised that the expected lack of substance was averted.

One can hold a pessimistic opinion and be realistic at the same time.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#255

Post by EternalLight » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 7:49 PM UTC

jberryman wrote: post #218

drcube wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 3 minutes per question, given the half hour he allotted. I don't think that's too disappointing. Did you really expect him to answer 12,000 questions?

For perspective: I read a bit in the most recent New Yorker describing a fund-raiser dinner with the president; it was $50,000 a plate and the president had one hour which equated to 1 minute per person. His staff knew he wouldn't have time to eat so he was prepared a meal he ate quickly in the kitchen beforehand. A staffer with a watch would tap him on the shoulder every 5 minutes when he needed to move onto the nex…

And 3 times as long seems perfectly reasonable to me when you're giving answers in writing compared to talking...

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#256

Post by forensic » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 8:00 PM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #247

forensic wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"become" ?

4 years ago, stupid comments were brutally discouraged. People with stupid things to say would be dogpiled by negative comments.

It is pop culture that thinks asking stupid questions is a virtue.

Most people are just too tactful to tell the truth.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#257

Post by meej » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 11:15 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #214

untog wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment was one step away from "fucking stoners" No it wasn't, in any way, shape or form. I support legalisation, I'm just tired of it being treated like it's the most important thing you could possibly ask the President about. If you think the "jailbait" scandal defined reddit at any point Defined for who? It was on national television. I assure you that a lot of non-tech savvy people will have had their first…

"I'm just tired of it being treated like it's the most important thing you could possibly ask the President about." If you're too jaded to care about millions of Americans dying for no reason, the destruction of the black community, the spread of AIDS and hepatitis, and our crumbling infrastructure, all direct consequences of prohibition, then that says a lot more about you than it does about those who would challeng…

Thank you.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#258

Post by natrius » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 12:41 AM UTC

emidln wrote: post #213

natrius wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vanish can cache snippets of content. They refer to this as Edge Side Includes.

Reddit's customization is far more than snippets. I've used ESIs with Varnish extensively, and I don't think it would help much for authenticated Reddit users.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#259

Post by pippy » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 2:59 AM UTC

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…

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Both Python, PHP and Varnish are (mostly) written in higher level languages.

Also performance has a massive effect on how and what language a site is written in.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#260

Post by pippy » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 3:01 AM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #247

forensic wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main issue with his post is he has no idea what he's talking about. He mentions languages neither interpreter is written in and talks about 'buzzwords', while all the products I mentioned are real things.