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- Hacker News
- This is a great service for everyone who appreciates thoughtful analyses about politics. Losing FiveThirtyEight was a big loss, but this archive helps. Bravo!by petros
- Did FiveThirtyEight really get that much right other than the 2016 election?
I remember thinking they were the best data journalists out there, and they had some nice visualizations but did their other predictions actually hold up?
by aeternum - Yes, they forecast thousands of U.S. elections and thousands of sports games, and their forecasts had excellent calibration—e.g., events they said would happen 30% of the time actually happened about 30% of the time.by akio
- by ChocMontePy
- I'm seeing a lot about this. What makes this situation different than any other website going offline?by internet2000
- In a sense, nothing - and any other website should be archived, too.
In another sense, it's a journalistic source with information and commentary on past elections. Even aside from the political context that muddies the waters around or outright denies results, matters of public discourse on the web should not be ephemeral or subject to the decisions of the publication - they should be archived.
by mold_aid - https://www.natesilver.net/p/disney-erased-fivethirtyeight
Here are some numbers roughly in the right ballpark: during the Disney era, which lasted about 10 years, FiveThirtyEight published about 20 stories a week. Let’s say that each story took about 20 hours to produce between research, writing, graphics and editing.3 Do the math, and that works out to about 200,000 person-hours of work that ABC News just deleted.by f311a - I think it's the fivethirtyeight of of historical significance, and Disney is one of the largest and wealthiest companies on the planet. So it's just kinda like "whoa, this is stratospheric negligence" or "whoa, what is the reason for this... assuming they are not idiots?"by patcon
- Related: Disney erased FiveThirtyEightby 7777777phil
- FWIW, the site now indexes 13,000 graphics and 3,000 illustrations, which I clawed out of the Wayback Machine's HTML and preserved separately in an archive.org collection.
https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/graphics/ https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/illustrations/
The archive.org backend is at https://archive.org/details/fivethirtyeight-collection and will almost certainly outlive my site.
by palewire - I'm not a soccer guy, but I still think the piece on Lionel Messi was awesome
https://web.archive.org/web/20140701122958/http://fivethirty...
by arlattimore - This is because whoever owns Fivethirtyeight now (ABC?) deleted the whole archive of articles on the site.by nl
- Don't we need more than an index of Archive.org because whomever controls the domain could robots.txt these out of existence if they wanted to?by bombcar
- I am certainly missing a lot of nuance here, but it seems to me Nate Silver managed to have his cake and eat it too. He surely got good money for selling FiveThirtyEight, and now that the buyer has erased the product, Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers since he offers very similar analyses on his personal site. Sure, natesilver.net has less brand recognition than fivethirtyeight.com, but it's still decently well-known and can only go up from here.by alberto-m
- > Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers
The downside is this furthers the divide between folks who pay for subscriptions and masses who get shoveled ad-powered slop.
- > He surely got good money for selling FiveThirtyEight
Yes, he did: https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/residential/cny-na...
by gaws - It’s possible NS may have signed a contract saying that he cannot engage in elections prediction for X YZ months to same extent that he did with FiveThirtyEight.by xattt
- He may also finally shake off the comment trolls who piled onto him after 2016, seemingly blaming him for the election results (absurd but people are absurd).
After that election, a certain group would tirelessly work to discredit him any time his election predictions were not entirely one-sided.
by iamnothere - I think the nuance is that it is notable historical articles about predictions and discussions of political elections, during a time when politics is quite at the fore-front of many people's minds
- Unfortunately most of the most important visualizations are broken in the archived version. Including the gun deaths visualization and I think the P-hacking interactive
https://web.archive.org/web/20230205124354/https://fivethirt...
It's kinda sad to know no one else will get to experience those interactive visualizations. Though its nice to see the approval comparison page still works
https://web.archive.org/web/20241031232233/https://projects....
by culi - Curious why they're broken, as the wayback machine seems to be able to run javascript. Do the visualisations rely on a server (or some other assets not included in wayback machine's crawl)?by nomilk
- I fixed that:
https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/graphics/ https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/illustrations/
by palewire - Couldn't figure out why archiving FTE aricles matters, but a quick search yields:
> Thousands of FiveThirtyEight articles seemingly vanish from the internet
https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/thousands-of-five...
And discussions here on hn:
ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553
Disney erased FiveThirtyEight (article by Nate himself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197703
by nomilk - I don’t really know much about it, but remember it as being _fantastic_ journalism every time I encountered one of their articles. As a bonus, great infographics and interactive data visualizations.by ricardobeat
- For any, like myself, wondering "Who is Ben Welsh" ?
~ https://palewi.re/who-is-ben-welsh/Hello. My name is Ben Welsh. I'm an Iowan living in New York City. I am a reporter, an editor and a computer programmer. My job is to use those skills, together, to find and tell stories. I work at Reuters, the world's largest multimedia news provider, where I founded the organization's News Applications Desk. In that role, I lead the development of dashboards, databases and automated systems that benefit clients, inform readers, empower reporters and serve the public interest. [...]by defrost - Don't click that link if you have any feelings of inadequacy about your achievements LOLby gib444
- Can't believe Ben Welsh is not Welsh, and FiveThirtyEight has nothing to do with Walesby yogorenapan
- (Submitted title was "Ben Welsh made an index of all FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive" - we've since changed it)by dang
- Ben is one of my favorite people in the world of data journalism. He's the author of many excellent training courses in the field, including:
- https://github.com/palewire/first-python-notebook
by simonw