Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Live Presidential Forecast

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 318 posts

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#21

Post by the_duke »

cruisestacy wrote: post #15

Watch live streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60wDzZt8yg

Off topic, but I might as well say it here:

I just tuned in to CNN: I think the way they cover the results is ridiculous.

They just babble off random, pointless numbers without pause, with their fancy interactive maps in the background.

They announce small changes with a sensationalism that's almost pathetic (KEY RACE ALERT! ALL OFF A SUDDEN Clinton takes the lead in Florida!! (by 20k votes... with a vote count of 30%).

Very little actual, substantive discussion of key results to watch out for, of key states, ...

One of the biggest news channels in the world should be able to do a bit better than that, IMO.

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#22

Post by shostack »

positr0n wrote: post #20
mattnumbe wrote: post #10

I feel that I'm an educated person, and I try to keep up with politics in America, but I really don't understand our system. How can some states be called with less than 20% of the votes being counted?

I believe each individual network calls them at their own discretion. It's not an official "call" by the government or anything. As to why so early, they have enough confidence in exit polls and other previous polls to say that, for example, Hillary is not going to win Oklahoma.

Is there any research on this news impacting voter participation? Ie if they feel their party is losing do they throw in the towel even though they still might have had a chance?

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#23

Post by refurb »

Arkaad wrote: post #3

Wouldn't that influence the voters?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

I know in Canada they have a media blackout for each timezone until polls close (or are almost closed). The assumption is people will change their vote based on early counts.

However, that may have changed with the internet since you can't stop anyone from getting early results.

Edit: yup, looks like Canada stopped that back in 2014 [1]

[1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/election-reforms-include-end...

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#24

Post by carlob »

artursapek wrote: post #19
revelation wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's random, there is no network activity. Screams "black pattern", who on earth randomizes a graph on election results. Come on.

NYT is not known for accuracy

Well in this context, it's good to make it wobble to show people that accuracy is meaningless so far, because we have very low precision.

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

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#25

Post by Steko »

the_duke wrote: post #8
Rexxar wrote: post #5

Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?

I just checked. They gauges moving around is definitely random. The updates are done with a "president.json" file, fetched every 15 seconds, but the timestamp in the json data only changes every 30-180 seconds. So all of the movement is just random jitter to make it engaging. Maybe a bit disingenuous. (Note: I first thought they might be using websockets, but no WS connection is made on the page. Only a ajax fetch of…

I think the idea is to indicate these numbers have error bands:

The estimates below include an estimate of uncertainty. We expect the uncertainty around these estimates to narrow, especially after races are called.

I don't see any reason why we'd expect the uncertainty to be updated more than every 30-180 seconds or why any of this is the least bit "disingenuous".

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#26

Post by _RPM »

Why is voting actually hard to do? Even though we're so encouraged to vote, there is a lot of red tape. For example, depending on your street address, you may have to vote at a garden variety pick of a building. At my university, I couldn't vote in building A because my apartment was on street X. I ultimately was not able to vote today because it was actually _hard_ to vote.

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#27

Post by susw »

Rexxar wrote: post #5

Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?

Disable jitter by running the following in console:

  require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return 0;}

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#28

Post by yankyou »

the_duke wrote: post #8
Rexxar wrote: post #5

Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?

I just checked. They gauges moving around is definitely random. The updates are done with a "president.json" file, fetched every 15 seconds, but the timestamp in the json data only changes every 30-180 seconds. So all of the movement is just random jitter to make it engaging. Maybe a bit disingenuous. (Note: I first thought they might be using websockets, but no WS connection is made on the page. Only a ajax fetch of…

I'd venture further to say it's a perversion of "news" for a news site to be injecting garbage into the data for entertainment purposes.

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#29

Post by Tinyyy »

Rexxar wrote: post #5

Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?

I think it's an interesting way to represent uncertainty; it seems pretty intuitive to me.

Re: Live Presidential Forecast

#30

Post by mattnumbe »

shostack wrote: post #22
positr0n wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe each individual network calls them at their own discretion. It's not an official "call" by the government or anything. As to why so early, they have enough confidence in exit polls and other previous polls to say that, for example, Hillary is not going to win Oklahoma.

Is there any research on this news impacting voter participation? Ie if they feel their party is losing do they throw in the towel even though they still might have had a chance?

I also feel like that would be the case, but they usually call it after the polls have closed in that state.
Post reply on HN