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Julie Rubicon

facebook.com

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Re: Julie Rubicon

#41

Post by stygiansonic »

carsonreinke wrote: post #32
stygiansonic wrote: post #15

Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT:…

Can someone explain why this is illegal (besides any data/privacy breach within Capital One)?

The answer is right in the article linked:

"People have asked me if this is insider trading and, you know, sure it is? (If the allegations are true, I mean.) This is not "classical" insider trading -- trading or tipping by an insider at Chipotle or whatever -- but rather "misappropriation" insider trading..."

Re: Julie Rubicon

#43

Post by Mahn »

StavrosK wrote: post #22
chatmasta wrote: post #3

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 realized it was fiction when querying after today's date produced a spike that completely matched reality. If anyone can do this, they sure as hell won't do it by omitting an end date in a query.

At first I thought it was plausible their internal reporting system had some sort of bug that just happened to "predict the future" by accident. But yeah, it's just entertaining fiction :)

Re: Julie Rubicon

#44

Post by GreaterFool »

carsonreinke wrote: post #32
stygiansonic wrote: post #15

Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT:…

Can someone explain why this is illegal (besides any data/privacy breach within Capital One)?

Possibly something to do with privileged information. Keep in mind that even things such as intent may get you on the wrong side of the line*

* example: you post a trade but you don't intend to execute it but instead hope to fool the market, then you cancel the trade and switch to other direction. forgot what that's called exactly

Re: Julie Rubicon

#45

Post by badusername »

chatmasta wrote: post #3

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.

As soon as I read the fellow employee name, Julie Rubicon.

Re: Julie Rubicon

#46

Post by Mahn »

Fiction, but that was entertaining. To the author, you should probably consider writing a book in this style :)

Re: Julie Rubicon

#47

Post by jboggan »

chatmasta wrote: post #3

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.

As soon as they divulged exact numbers concerning search terms and emoji usage.

Re: Julie Rubicon

#48

Post by yoodenvranx »

kevando wrote: post #9

Very entertaining! How did no one realize this was fake by the first graph? Does xkcd design the graphs for fb premium partners?

If this would've been posted to medium.com instead of facebook.com it would've taken me much longer to figure out that this is just a story of fiction. If this somehow would've been true then Facebook most likely would have deleted it within a short time.

Re: Julie Rubicon

#49

Post by arielweisberg »

pookeh wrote: post #20
arielweisberg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Given that the posts can be from folks that work in the company Facebook would be trading stocks for, that would count as insider trading.

That's if you use insider information. That's only one kind of signal that Facebook has access to. There are signals that aren't based on insider information that FB could legally trade on.

Information that other people don't have access to isn't by definition insider information. It's just stuff others can't or haven't figured out.

Re: Julie Rubicon

#50

Post by basch »

basch wrote: post #34
stygiansonic wrote: post #15

Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT:…

It sounds like a retelling of this story from a decade ago. But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too. For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people ar…

I forgot how impressive http://noosphere.princeton.edu is, quite a bit of work. Science or quackery, it gives me an xfiles "i want to believe" feeling.

it is still running, here is the data chart from monday http://noosphere.princeton.edu/data/eggsummary/2016/summary-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Consciousness_Project

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