By seeing the title along with the domain facebook.com I couldn't resist but click. Perfect click bait. Though a good story.
Julie Rubicon
61–70 of 139 posts
Re: Julie Rubicon
#62The first graph immediately looked too fake. Spike after an event would follow something like a log normal distribution, rather than sudden spike and day after back to normal. What's more, the world is not equally using the internet. The uneventful graph should follow something like a sin wave, with the highest point 2x higher than the lowest.
Re: Julie Rubicon
#63Nice piece. When I saw that first from-future graph, I thought Facebook is faking their data. As they are known for faking page likes.
Yeah that's what I suspected too.
No matter what you query, you get a convenient spike right around your time of interest – that must be nice to show clients!
Re: Julie Rubicon
#64Identified as fiction because VW isn't traded on the US stock market.
Re: Julie Rubicon
#65Very entertaining! How did no one realize this was fake by the first graph? Does xkcd design the graphs for fb premium partners?
Facebook has client facing products that look worse than that. No joke.
Re: Julie Rubicon
#66This piece scared the hell out of me (seriously, I felt panicked) until I discerned that it was fiction. Great read.
Re: Julie Rubicon
#67It still makes me excited about the future of neural networks :)
Re: Julie Rubicon
#68Usually 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.
> What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? Longer than it would have taken if I'd never worked in analytics. I doubt there is anyone who has ever worked on analytics software who doesn't have stories about articles with negative page views, impossible traffic spikes, or data from the future. (And in fact Facebook's APIs are some of the worst offenders for producing garbage d…
Yup yup. I think this is one of those cases where knowing a little about the topic can throw you, because (a little too much drama aside) it does feel remarkably authentic.
Re: Julie Rubicon
#69Post is fiction. Spoilers follow. . . When I started reading this, I didn't realize it was fiction. When I got to the point where the protagonist left the end-date off a query and saw a spike, I thought it was going to be explained by falsified data and lead into a (real) accusation of providing fraudulent metrics to advertisers. It wouldn't be the first such accusation. But it turned out to be a science-fiction stor…
I read 2-3 paragraphs into this and then thought, hmm, maybe I should check the comments first. Thank you.
Does it help that "Crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a point of no return?
Re: Julie Rubicon
#70Post is fiction. Spoilers follow. . . When I started reading this, I didn't realize it was fiction. When I got to the point where the protagonist left the end-date off a query and saw a spike, I thought it was going to be explained by falsified data and lead into a (real) accusation of providing fraudulent metrics to advertisers. It wouldn't be the first such accusation. But it turned out to be a science-fiction stor…
I read 2-3 paragraphs into this and then thought, hmm, maybe I should check the comments first. Thank you.
For once I'm glad I didn't read the comments before reading the story. jimrandomh comment would have spoiled it.