Barack Obama Breaks Promise, Flip Flops, and supports Telcos | Hacker News Reader

Barack Obama Breaks Promise, Flip Flops, and supports Telcos

techcrunch.com

25 pointsnickb35 comments

I usually am not one to make such comments, but a recent trend in HN has been submissions unrelated to the guidelines (see http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Not too long ago there was an article on Obama and I defended its relevancy and was heavily downmodded (and deservedly so).

Digg and Reddit have become almost useless to me and HN is my main community to participate in. I have noticed that with its growing popularity, the articles have increasingly become weaker and so have the conversations. The length and depth of posts have been reduced to the level of both Digg and Reddit. People attempt to get in their "clever" one liners and the the site becomes watered down with its popularity. I strongly believe that if the community reaffirms the core guidelines to the newer users (I am quite new myself even though I was a lurker for some time), HN can retain its quality while it scales.

I strongly believe that if the community reaffirms the core guidelines to the newer users

nickb is #1 on the leaderboard ... http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

And he submits a lot of stuff. 17 people voted the thing up, though.

I voted it up.

A government that wants to surveil its citizens without any accountability is not one that will tolerate an open Internet for long. This story is totally relevant.

Six Degrees of Hacker News is based on a variation of the concept of the small world phenomenon and states that any news story can be found to fit within the submission guidelines of Hacker News.

See also: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon)

Hah! I've been thinking the same thing for a while.

I think that you win more points in the SDOHN game the more tenuous the connection is: "This Obama article is really about hacker news because ... ... facebook ... ... futures trading ... ... venture capital ... hackers!"

It's extremely important, but not so relevant to this and only this site. It's relevant to everyone - we all use the web, email and talk on the phone. Between that and a big red politics flag, to me that means it shouldn't be here. There are much better places to discuss and act on this and the numerous other serious problems with the current government.

Even nickb is allowed to misfire once in awhile.

I doubt it. I think the only real way to keep quality up is to improve the system. Asking people to play nice only goes so far.

Of course, there is something to be said for the ability to exist within a free (non-systemic) community, no?

I mean, we can have a "system" where the members of the community come to a consensus about appropriate content, downmod people who violate that consensus, etc.

I dislike very much the knee-jerk reaction to create rules, order, etc.

I disagree, this is an extremely relevant article to hacker news. What percentage of internet traffic is carried by telephone companies?

Before people criticize this political story on hacker news, note that it's as relevant as a story about a time bomb planted in Silicon Valley. This law brings an end to constitutional separation of powers in the U.S. government, in that the executive branch is no longer answerable to the judiciary.

Obama, as the presumptive Democratic nominee, is in a position where the media cannot ignore him. He could have pointed out that the 1978 FISA law already allowed for retroactive warrants, so no "modernization" was necessary. It would not have hurt him politically to vote against this bill.

Obama does not uphold U.S. law or the U.S. Constitution, but I'm going to vote for him because McCain is worse.

It's like this. He tried to get it amended, but it failed. And as it stands, he can't go about filibustering this close to an election.

If he voted no, it'd give the republicans a chance to jump on it and use it as a weapon.

So he had no choice but to say Yes.

Can't? No - won't.

The interesting question is what won't Obama do to win the election.

And, is the election actually that close or is Obama more willing to abandon his principles than his chances?

Well I think we already know the answer to that.

If this were 6 months ago I would say you had a point. But now he's in a position where his message on any issue is going to get out. Voting in a way that protects the Constitution would have handed him a much bigger weapon than any handed to the Republicans.

In addition to the two options you mentioned (voting "Yes" or filibustering) he could have voted "No" or abstained.

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume that he was actually convinced by the merits of the bill, at least as a general compromise on some very difficult issues. If he genuinely thought it was as terrible a bill as some people here do, he would have voted "No" and used it as a weapon against McCain.

It's interesting to note that Clinton opposes the FISA bill.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/07/09/obama-clinton-split...

I suspect that a large part o this is good old fashioned politicin'. If very liberal Democrats find Obama's position to be too moderate,t they'll likely still vote for him. However, the gamble is that this will make him seem less alienating to the center and more liberal Republicans.

I am expecting more of these "moderate" shenanigans from both Obama and McCain in coming months. There is an aggressive (perceived) battle to be won for so-called "swing" voters.

fyi: please note that comments should not be signed. thanks!

Even if the article can be defended as appropriately tech-related rather than political, the politically-charged headline can't.

Appropriate candidate for flagging?

Not every story with the name of a politician is strictly political news. And it's the original headline, not spin added by a submitter. So while it annoys me to see on the page, I don't think it should be killed.

I think the FISA bill is relevant to a technical site, as evidenced by coverage on very many technical sites. But I usually don't upmod these stories - and I like that mechanism much more than 'killing'.

That's actually the sad part about killing a story - it wouldn't need to be killed if the community was diligent about sticking to a theme.

How can we impress on people that "no politics" means just that, not "no politics, unless it's something I really agree with and want everyone to see" or "no politics, unless I think it's really really important"?

People should upmod things that they find interesting, and they should do it here if they are hackers or working on a startup. You don't really need to go deeper than that.

I'm not convinced that that's enough to keep people who aren't really hackers or working on a startup to crowd out those who are with politics and such. Reddit being the number one example. I suppose we can hope that PG as moderator will keep things from getting that bad, but it's not an easy job.

The problem is that everyone has an opinion about "bike sheds" like politics, so it's very easy to get big discussions going that draw people in.

Let's try and see... flagged.

I really really really don't want to see political stories here.

Well, it's dead now. We'll have to await confirmation that the flagging had any effect, or whether it was doomed in any case.

... and now it's not dead anymore. Hrmph.

And now it's dead again?

And alive again. Are the mods having a fight over if this is relevant or not?

Unless Obama's flip flop involves using LGPL vs GPLv3, then it doesn't belong on YC, if you ask me.

Or bubble sort.

Even Obama knows bubble sort is probably inappropriate.

http://featureorbug.com/post/25634511/david-barack-obama-how...

(video)

a better title would be: "Techcrunch once again reports non-tech news in order to get more page views"

"Techcrunch once again reports non-tech news in order to get more page views"

But that wouldn't even be news.

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