71–80 of 139 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Post 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…
It is a fun story and one that comes at the question of "how much data is too much data and is too hard to resist?" Something that anyone who has worked in a popular Internet facing application has to come terms with. I found 'Manna'[1] a more compelling emergent AI story, but the data as predictor aspects of this story have their own particular flavor. One of the things that immediately flashed it as fiction for me…
The funny thing is that if the implications noted in the story were true and Facebook could accurately forecast events into the far future, building a social network would be the least of their priorities.
Worth noting that Robin is also the author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore [1] that others around HN would probably find pretty enjoyable. I thought it was quite fun. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Books...
And if you are looking for a longer, slightly better, fictionalized account of Facebook, "The Circle" by David Eggers is a quick, engrossing read and quite hard to tear yourself away from once you begin.
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…