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Re:Silicon Valley Prefers Obama 2 to 1 by tptacek on Friday October 12, 2012 @07:44PM (#4647337)
The demographic here is "people will who answer questions like this from Paul Graham". It's not exactly a representative sample. We don't even know its operator vs. investor makeup. Some of the people in the sample don't even live in the Valley. But the headline...

I flagged it after 'ssclafani did, hoping it might just vanish (I've since unflagged it), but for what it's worth: I don't so much think it's radically inappropriate for HN (though it sets a disquieting precedent, because the world is full of cohorts that someone can claim are interesting to HN), just that it's not particularly valuable, and a little transparent.

(For whatever it's worth, I'm an Obama supporter).

Re:Silicon Valley Prefers Obama 2 to 1 by Jd on Friday October 12, 2012 @09:52PM (#4647604)
Additionally, when there is a potentially negative association with a particular political choice (i.e. the choice of something other than pg's preferred option), one will obviously refuse to report, and will usually not make one's refusal explicit. That is to say, that even were we to assume that the 32 people pg asked were utterly representative of the startup community as a whole (which I don't think we have grounds to do, esp. given pg's own sensationalist headline), we have every reason to suspect that the 9 people who have refused to answer (including explicitly and implicitly) may have an answer other than the expected norm.

Take that into account, and you have 15 Obama 6 Romney 9 Refuse to answer

Where does that leave us? Well, with more questions than answers, to start with.