Hacker News Reader

Comment by superdude | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell if this is real or a satirical article.

"Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who created the program, said that to get software for the site, 'I personally traveled to Washington state and discovered a Microsoft program that helped NASA map the moon.'"

View on HN

we like to joke that our company builds the typical corporate all-encompassing software, but shit, we should just take a pilgrimage to washington and get that stuff. a program that has the breadth to do moon-mapping and web sites pretty much has the full spectrum of computation

Upvotes to whoever writes "The Ballad of McCarthy" commemorating this epic quest.

Lol, I was trying put into words how silly the man is for thinking that travelling to Washington is in any way talking-point worthy. You nailed it. Epic quest, lol.

FWIW, he's probably referring to .NET, which appears to be powering the Republican web site as well as NASA World Wind, which can be used to view lunar data sets.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/download.html

Honestly, they could have just used the Reddit software for something like this. It's open source, and it has basically all the same functionality as this site does. The only thing I can really see that would have to be change would be the user registration, the rest is just changing how things are rendered.

Also, their servers were really straining last night. It just absolutely would not load for me.

Of course. Besides up-votes, how else could you determine the location of so many craters?

I can't either! Does this mean they took apart the software and remolded it to their own purposes (proprietary & doubtful besides), or ar they really using a GIS to show upvotes?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com