131–140 of 150 posts
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Some people on the Wall Street did take it up a bit seriously perhaps going by the price movement today.
My investment account seems to disagree too. The stock was down more than $1 before the market even opened based on that sham study by Princeton.
This only speaks more towards an argument that Facebook isn't being serious enough with its own statistics. Of all organizations Facebook should be the first to spot a trend especially with esteemed data scientists like Mr. Develin.
As a Princeton student, it's been pretty frustrating to watch this devolve into (drawing from comments on this page) a "sham study by Princeton", with this response being a criticism of "Princeton's methodology", and that "Princeton was deserving of a response like this". It's been pointed out by a few other HNers, but this type of logic does a massive injustice and disservice to all the institution's undergraduate a…
Note that all the press now is about how "Facebook" responded to the study. It was actually a single person, Mike, who posted a note to his personal wall with some help from friends.
Being a member of an institution means you represent the institution in all your actions. That's what being a member of an institution means.
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These students did absolutely nothing wrong. They submitted their paper to a well known, well regarded preprint service (arXiv), which is pretty normal for a number of fields. Then, presumably, the paper would go to peer review. Where one would hope the reviewers would point out a few glaring flaws (like that an SIR model without either the creation of new susceptibles or waning immunity must go to 0 and they are 'do…
> These students did absolutely nothing wrong. > The paper would get rejected, or heavily revised, and the world would keep spinning. Which means they did something wrong. Sure it might have been just a mistake, not quite the cardinal sin the GP makes it out to be, but you don't have to publish papers with flawed arguments on ArXiv. It's one thing to write up a silly LaTeX PDF with wild speculations, put it on your w…
Beyond that, the paper isn't pants-on-head crazy. The objections most people have to it can be solved by adding a single term to one of the equations, and some very straightforward sensitivity analysis.
Which is, you know, exactly the kind of thing pointed out in peer review.
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> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. Should there be consequences for people who publish buggy code on github? Because that situation is completely equivalent to what these phd students did. ArXiv isn't a repository of peer-reviewed accepted papers, it's just a repository of papers, just like how github is repository of code. The people to blame here aren't the students themselves.…
What matters is the effect. If someone puts up code on GitHub which purports to compute the Fibonacci series, but mistakenly does a `rm -r ~/*` then surely there should be a way to flag that code or author ("consequences").
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what the heck is "real" science? A lot of the greatest science started the same exact way. Making connections that nobody else could see. Finding purposefully playful, surprising analogies. Doing things so ludicrous that everyone said would not work. Exploring ideas and sharing them.
Real science is something you prove
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Why are you so sure that was the cause of the price decline?
The other big news was that Facebook was testing ads outside of their own platform. The possibility of taking on Google's Adwords and adding more than a few billion dollars in revenue should have increased the price?