Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/thermometer.js

by bithive123 • 14 years ago

270 93 14 years ago

FaceKicker• 14 years ago

This is used to decide what dollar amount to display on the donation meter on this page: https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/

You can infer from the Javascript, but it just displays a dollar amount equal to the number of seconds elapsed since a certain time (edit: whoops, see below), according to your computer clock. If you refresh every second it will go up by $1 each time. If you set your clock back a year, the donation meter will read $-17 million.

Edit: Actually, this isn't quite accurate, it's closer to one dollar per two seconds. 1/(vchange*1000) = 1.7976923076923077 seconds to be exact...

paulbjensen• 14 years ago

Mark-to-market accounting, or window-dressing as the accountants refer to it.

d0mine• 14 years ago

Largest DOUBLE value: 1.79769E+308

sikhnerd• 14 years ago

Looks like they took the page down

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /stillneedhelp/ on this server.

paulgb• 14 years ago

In case they change it, here is a copy: http://pastebin.com/3Wv4AJSF

wizzard• 14 years ago

This is awesome. I know of scammy companies that have gone out of their way to use actual live subscriber counts on their sites, yet this idiot uses a fake one.

Osiris• 14 years ago

I find it most disturbing that they are polluting the global namespace with all those variables and functions. Don't JavaScript developers these days understand how to properly scope their JavaScript?

adrianparsons• 14 years ago

I like that bad namespacing is what you find disturbing here.

hrabago3• 14 years ago

I can't help it. It's just the way I'm wired.

shaggyfrog• 14 years ago

Are you really asking why a developer tasked with creating something intentionally deceptive didn't use best practices? I'm thinking not a lot of care or attention to anything was paid that day.

zerostar072• 14 years ago

Probably wanted to make it more readable, it's not even minified.

UnFleshedOne• 14 years ago

Different kind of ethics: "It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter." (lost the source of the quote)

luigi4• 14 years ago

I find the 8 space indentation most disturbing.

hrabago3• 14 years ago

It's the Tab character.

Deestan2• 14 years ago

As long as it's "single page bound" JS like this, I honestly don't think it matters one bit.

Reusable components and utility libraries is something different, of course.

sjs• 14 years ago

It's still incredibly error prone and just bad practice. It's a telltale sign of a bad developer because a good dev would instinctively just use var without thinking about it. Good devs may make a mistake here or there but this is clearly well beyond a forgotten var keyword.

aaronasterling3• 14 years ago

But when writing code, how do you know that it's always going to be "single page bound"? YAGNI is frequently useful poison and nothing more. When it's so easy to do it right the first time, why not?

wavephorm• 14 years ago

The web developers they hired were liberal.

stevewilhelm• 14 years ago

Was just looking at namespace best practices today for a utility library I was implementing. Is there a defacto standard?

aaronasterling3• 14 years ago

The defacto standard is to put nothing in an enclosing namespace unless it's needed there. The purpose of functions (especially in a language like JS) is to wrap up everything that's needed to accomplish a given task and leave no mess behind.

erreon• 14 years ago

Though I have no idea how much has truly been donated to Rick Santorum, but I would bet that growing thermometer did help contribute to that. Perception is an incredibly strong tool that can be used to elicit reactions like donating "because everyone else seems to be". Sad that they're using such a tacky tactic.

caseydurfee• 14 years ago

"The right to private variables is not the right to a common good. It’s a me-centered right, that obviously started in the sexual revolution with contraception and obviously quickly evolved to abortion, and now has found its way into the marriage debate. And all those acts that were self-giving acts, self-sacrificing acts, have been polluted by this right to privacy." -- Rick Santorum

Canuteson• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure PEP 8 makes a sImilar argument for why privacy of underscore variables isn't strictly enforced in python.

thomasluce• 14 years ago

What? A politician being disingenuous? I'm shocked! SHOCKED!

sold• 14 years ago

This is not reddit.

RegEx• 14 years ago

This is an insightful comment.

dangoldin• 14 years ago

Pretty amusing. Google actually does something similar on the Gmail homepage to indicate the amount of free storage but they're doing an actual estimate using linear interpolation. You can view the source on the gmail home page and look at the updateQuota method.

brackishlake• 14 years ago

Also funny: "We ran a strong race and practiced fiscal discipline."

For a fundraising drive to fix their debt problems.

hodgesmr• 14 years ago

Aren't there rules about political candidates disclosing donations? And doesn't this violate those rules?

jlgreco• 14 years ago

Is he technically still a candidate? Maybe he's getting around those rules by not being a candidate anymore.

mc322• 14 years ago

I think he suspended his campaign. Suspending means that while for all intents and purposed but one, the campaign is ended. The exception is that it allows the candidate to raise money (usually to pay off campaign debt). Ending a campaign means you hold the bag, if you're in the red, as I understand it.

So, technically, yes, still a candidate.

luigi4• 14 years ago

They have to accurately disclose itemized contributions to the FEC, but a public website counter ain't the FEC.

nikcub• 14 years ago

wait, did anybody actually think those donation counters were real?

encoderer2• 14 years ago

Honestly in other cases they are. I had personal experience developing tools used for Howard Dean's 2004 primary campaign (as a volunteer not staff) and in that case it was certainly real.

I'd be very, very surprised if the ones used by Ron Paul and Obama weren't real. They have good engineering talent there, and (in the case of Obama at least) good political talent. This runs contrary to both.

cbr• 14 years ago

I was going to check and get back to you, but I can't find one on either of their sites.

ashconnor• 14 years ago

It wouldn't be impossible to implement. Maybe it would only reflect online donations but still...

barrkel• 14 years ago

I don't think there's anything wrong, in principle, with this approach, so long as the simulated rate is calibrated frequently to the actual average donation rate.

Having it all wired up properly would require a whole lot of infrastructure, particularly for donation mechanisms that aren't online and aren't all tied in to a single system.

thebigshane• 14 years ago

There doesn't appear to be anything in this code to calibrate to the actual average donation rate. In fact it's not tied to any real amounts or rates at all. It's just a function of the current datetime.

UPDATE: They took the donation page down...

   Forbidden
 
   You don't have permission to access /stillneedhelp/ 
   on this server.

artursapek4• 14 years ago

That was a fast response. Does someone on HN work for Santorum?

ars• 14 years ago

> There doesn't appear to be anything in this code to calibrate to the actual average donation rate. In fact it's not tied to any real amounts or rates at all. It's just a function of the current datetime.

I would assume that while the campaign was active they would periodically adjust the constants to reflect the current average.

newhouseb• 14 years ago

Unless they've changed the code, there are some manually adjusted values that estimate the average donation rate based on some magic number they plugged in from their own projections (/propaganda if you think this was intentionally misleading).

    val1 = 44000;
    val2 = 70000;
    maxVal = 100000;
    deltav = val2 - val1;

    vchange = deltav / deltat;

    if (now < t1 && val1 == '0')
        val = val1;
    else
        val = Math.floor((now - t1) * vchange) + val1;

If I had to guess, val1 was how many committed donations they had at 11am April 24th and val2 is how much they anticipated raising in the following 13 hours of April 24th. Note that Santorum suspended his campaign April 10th, so it looks like someone probably was updating this manually until the campaign was fully disbanded.

Animus7• 14 years ago

Well, theoretically they could just have a guy manually pushing new rate values to reflect reality.

But that's a big theoretically. This is almost certainly malice.

And it would almost certainly have gone unchecked if the developer had only hidden the BS generator script on the server side.

But as others have pointed out, that's probably asking too much given the state of this code and given that the main page 403's but they left the BS script serving.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

This is how I do it on my personal website (http://samryan.co.uk/). It makes no sense for me to put together a real automatically updating counter so every couple of days I check the real growth rate and adjust it manually. It obviously looks shady on a politicians website and I think doing it with something like donations where it's tied to a real world action is a bit... silly and they should have disclosed that it was an ESTIMATE however I don't think it is as heinous as other people suggested. It's only an issue if the donations don't exist.

hk_kh• 14 years ago

In this [your] case, it should be just a matter of personal taste.

We choose to go to the moon!

tylermenezes• 14 years ago

It's a shame, because having an actual working one would be a really cool feature to do technically. But because of how easy to fake, it doesn't look like much. Then again, the more practical side of me says having a working one is a total waste of time 99% of the time. Everything's an estimate in some way.

Havoc• 14 years ago

How does one tell when a politician is lying...

noomerikal• 14 years ago

NICE! Looks like he's giving back - http://imgur.com/PeVdv

VikingCoder• 14 years ago

For comparison, does someone want to post the source code to GMail's meter:

"Over 10250.602608 megabytes (and counting) of free storage."

duskwuff• 14 years ago

GMail's meter is fine -- it's displaying the state of a value which Google has decreed will increase at a set rate. Unlike Santorum's donations, it's not an unpredictable measurement.

artursapek4• 14 years ago

Indeed. It looks like they have their goals set for a long time. http://i.imgur.com/WvYcq.jpg

It finds the closest entry in there to the current value of "new Date().getTime()". Then it just adds (what roughs out to) .000004 for every second's difference between the 0 value and the current getTime() value. So today it reads 10250 MB, which must come from index 2 of that array + enough seconds to add 10 MB and some. Definitely more legit than Santorum's.

Here's the code for the counter (it's embedded in that HTML file) http://pastebin.com/8tebjT79

The actual subtractions of the current time from the one in the array seem to be more detailed than what's put on the page, which is being rounded. A sample of input for format():

    10250.60874337952
    10250.608747448896
    10250.608751518273
    10250.608755583586
    10250.608759652963
    10250.608763722339
    10250.608767787651

duaneb• 14 years ago

IIRC GMail's meter is updated at a rate which is actually accurate, and is simulated so that the page doesn't need to keep asking google for the capacity.

ejesse• 14 years ago

To be fair, it's not any less accurate than prayer.

luigi4• 14 years ago

I just donated $17.99 so that they can buy Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts.

ender7• 14 years ago

var statements are for commies.

sophacles• 14 years ago

If your variables aren't doing anything wrong, what do they have to hide?

zem• 14 years ago

someone seems to have thrown a hasty 403 atop https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/

evolve2k• 14 years ago

It fascinates me that Americans might see this as acceptable or even that it is regarded as most likely to be totally legal and hence acceptable in nature. In Australia I would be very confident that this type of falsified campaign disclosure would be illegal or at least fall foul of a whole range of parliamentary and governmental standards.

derleth• 14 years ago

> Americans might see this as acceptable

Do you have any evidence we do?

IDisposable• 14 years ago

Same thing as the Google GMail "space available" counter. As long as you back it up by real numbers and adjust the rate appropriately no harm, no foul.

lightyrs• 14 years ago

pander.js

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

What? You mean a politician was using a simulation and presenting it as definitive? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!

(with apologies to Captain Renault :-)

You could just read the quarterly reports he files with the FEC if you actually wanted to know how much he was bringing in. I suppose you could get him in hot water as an ethics violation for campaign reporting but outrage? A bit over the top I think. There are billboards that had a running total of the California state deficit, does anyone think they were repeatedly reading some sort of get_balance() api at the state treasury and putting it up? No, its a prop, a gimmick, an illustrative tool, and nothing more.

ryguytilidie• 14 years ago

Seems a like a bit of an exaggeration to peg the OP as "outraged". They simply provided a link to an untruth.

RollAHardSix• 14 years ago

Actually this raises some interesting questions when you think about how the average person is going to think when they see something like this. First impressions to normal people are that they would be real-time given the instantaneous nature of the internet.

Regardless, it's almost certainly false advertising which as you mentioned is ethically questionable especially since this is supposed to be a 'leader' of citizens.

grobot• 14 years ago

CiviCRM (which appears to be Santorum's campaign tool) comes with a fundraising thermometer out of the box.

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

I bet there are left-wing politicians that do the same thing...but we won't ever see them here because republicans are the only ones that are bad.

joshuahedlund• 14 years ago

Wasn't there a post on HN recently about YouTube's viewcounts being extrapolated and not actually real-time?

ravloony• 14 years ago

Witch hunt anyone?

rsanchez1• 14 years ago

Alright, we got our Santorum fix for the month. Thanks, Reddit.

Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

Related Stories