51 comments

[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread
Do either support microformats? Maybe there's a microformat for politics, like hLiar or hBullshit.
I think it would be great if more Voter clients supported microformats other than hApathy.
Maybe a 3rd Party candidate, oops, micro-format would be suitable for them.
I hope this is satire. Please tell me you're not trying estimate how good a president they'd be based on how their websites are designed.
Great satire has that quality that many of the people it's targeted at don't get that it's satire.

However, in this case, I think it's just a bit of light humour. Cheer up!

joke ---- whoosh ---->

          O <--- Yuo
        --|--
          |
        / \
Holy crap, he's a centaur!
And Korean, apparently.
Just messing with the OCD crew a bit :)
It's not OCD, it's CDO. And the letters are in proper alphabetical order, just like they should be.
It's an awful way to evaluate a leader but it's better than so many of the arguments we're getting from news pundits.
Maybe thats not such a bad idea. Clearly the person I want in office is the candidate who is the brightest. Who therefore attracts the brightest people to volunteer for his campaign. And results in a sensible web site.

hm... I think CampaignWebSite will be my personal irrelevant and irresponsible metric for electing the Most Powerful Person On Earth.

Can't be any worse than the factors other people use.

hilarious. thanks for the great read!
All I know is when I try to go to Obama's homepage at work and click the link for my home state, IE7 tries to download it rather than view the page.

Clearly Obama doesn't give a crap about us average middle-class working Americans stuck in rough jobs (forced on IE instead of Firefox/Chrome) or anyone from Pennsylvania for that matter.

http://www.imagesocket.com/view/obama_pa_fail0ac.PNG

Edit: Oh wait, the satire is only legitimate when it supports Obama?

(comment deleted)
Honestly, I'm not going to vote on a candidate based on the version of HTML their website uses. Nor do I care what web server they use, or what their 404 page looks like.

I don't think anyone else cares either.

No, we don't. But this article was humorous and awesome. Geez, lighten up.
Yeah, it's hard to tell these days whether someone is being funny or if they are just being stupid. Usually it's the second one, especially when politics is involved :)
(comment deleted)
I always thought Open Source was fairly conservative, at least in the Burkean sense. It's a decentralized set of customs, handed down from person to person without being imposed from above or overthrown from below.
Open source is like capitalism in process and communism in result.
It's neither. Both capitalism and communism deals specifically with the ownership of scarce goods. Software specifically isn't a scarce good.

But it's free market at its best. Both process and result.

i like obama, but what i will like even more is watching his die-hard cadre of valley-based obamatrons go on suicide watch when he loses, which i think is in the bag since mccain put a pair of tits on the ticket
Please don't start pimping politics here. Save it for Digg.
This is story #17 on a variation of "My Candidate is more tech-friendly than yours"

The formula is simple. Whatever the board's topic, just add something about your candidate to that. Then claim it is on-topic. Everybody who doesn't like your candidate is stuck having to figure out how to respond, not wanting to get into a political discussion, yet not wanting to see the board go to hell either.

Ok. Ok. Enough already. Candidate X has technology Y. We can argue how Y is cool (or not), how X is cool (or not) or how X choosing Y demonstrates, yet again, that X is cool.

Substitute parameters and repeat ad-infinitum.

it is not about politics,dude,don't comment before you read
This is exactly what I thought. This item was meant to be a geeky satire that pokes fun at both candidates.

Call it a bit comic relief for something that is taken so seriously!

From the Hacker News Guidelines:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)

Although the article is satire, it does show the decision making process each candidate/staff took (although it might not have carried much weight, and may not actually affect the way they govern) when they were faced with the task of "I need a campaign website."
No, it doesn't. It shows that Obama's staff / volunteers are more tech savvy than McCain's. Anyone surprised?

The candidate's aren't sitting around picking web servers and figuring out 404 pages. Nobody that was that obsessive of a micromanager could have gotten as far as they have.

Sure the candidates are not picking web servers and what not, but I'm sure they had some influence by hiring the most qualified staff, who were versed in the subject at hand, who hired (or hired the staff who hired ...) the people who made the website.
Exactly. Any fool can see that all Obama did was set up some Gentoo instances, compile Apache and PHP with the appropriate CFLAGS, and let his people do their work.
The impressive part is that he did that while holding a speech. With his toes.
Well then it might show ability to pick the right person for the job. Or more likely, the right person to pick the right person.
One bit of code may demonstrate that Obama is wasteful, using this expensive DOM method:

  jQuery(document).pngfix()
instead of

  $("img[@src$=png]).pngfix();
Intrigue!
What it proves is that Obama is trying to fix EVERYTHING, and is not selecting a specific class for fixing.
One of the co-founders of facebook is the head of the obama campaign website. That article was both funny and enlightening at the same time.
My favorite line:

Obama is inclusive in his support for PNGs, accommodating even disadvantaged (Internet Explorer) users.

I might be getting prematurely old and cranky at 25, but I am so tired of real smugness from Obama supporters that I can't laugh at faux-smugness.
Unbunch thy panties. And stay away from DC, you'd lose your mind here :^)
I'm old and cranky at 43.

It doesn't get any better.

Wow, exceedingly intelligent comments on this thread. (Yes, that's sarcasm.) I'm not going to complain that this is on the front page, but seriously... #1? 77 upvotes?
obama is the clear choice for the future