11–20 of 139 posts
Usually I read comments on HN before the article, but there were no comments when I saw the link, so I went straight to reading it. What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? For me, I did not realize until the very end -- and even then I still wasn't sure. It could just as well have been written by some delusional non-technical employee at Facebook.
Very entertaining! How did no one realize this was fake by the first graph? Does xkcd design the graphs for fb premium partners?
The only "mistake" is that the CONFIDENTIAL watermark is a lower z-order than the chart, which defeats the purpose of the "watermark."
Very entertaining! How did no one realize this was fake by the first graph? Does xkcd design the graphs for fb premium partners?
The aesthetics of the chart are pretty standard for a 2D Stacked Area chart. The only "mistake" is that the CONFIDENTIAL watermark is a lower z-order than the chart, which defeats the purpose of the "watermark."
However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves.
EDIT: They turned ~$150K into ~$2.8 MM USD over about three years, before being caught, mostly through options trades it seems.
1. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one...
Nice piece of fiction
Very entertaining! How did no one realize this was fake by the first graph? Does xkcd design the graphs for fb premium partners?
The aesthetics of the chart are pretty standard for a 2D Stacked Area chart. The only "mistake" is that the CONFIDENTIAL watermark is a lower z-order than the chart, which defeats the purpose of the "watermark."
Usually I read comments on HN before the article, but there were no comments when I saw the link, so I went straight to reading it. What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? For me, I did not realize until the very end -- and even then I still wasn't sure. It could just as well have been written by some delusional non-technical employee at Facebook.
I started to wonder if it was real around the point that it theorized without explanation the predictive powers of the in house tool and I was pretty convinced it was fiction about the point where they were going to start a company within a company using bitcoin. Using Facebook internal data to trade in ways no one can match isn't far fetched. Makes me wonder if Facebook should pivot to be a hedge fund based on signa…