FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive
fivethirtyeightindex.com258 points by ChocMontePy 11 hours ago
258 points by ChocMontePy 11 hours ago
For any, like myself, wondering "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.
[...]
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
(Submitted title was "Ben Welsh made an index of all FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive" - we've since changed it)
Cheers for the clarity, that'll help me look less weird wrt above comment to future historians of archived HN threads :-)
TBH I enjoyed looking up Ben and finding out what he's about and done in the past far more than I did just knowing there's a 538 archive on IA.
What do you think was perceived wrong with the old title?
At a guess (my Telepathy/IP is weak today, I'm not reading dang at usual strength) .. the initially submitted title was "invented" for submission and didn't match the content title.
HN veers toward "the guts of the content w/out decoration" - limited additional information, framing, weasel words, perceived slanting, etc.
It's uncommon to name an author unless the author themself is an important part of "the story".
I personally have no issue with the original title, however it's not really for me (non US citizen) to judge whether the reporter in question has a name / identity that carries weight in US IT circles.
Can't believe Ben Welsh is not Welsh, and FiveThirtyEight has nothing to do with Wales
Don't click that link if you have any feelings of inadequacy about your achievements LOL
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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 put up a substantial number of articles for free during the 2024 election, it felt less paywalled than much of the MSM these days.
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
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.
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....
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)?
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...
This is because whoever owns Fivethirtyeight now (ABC?) deleted the whole archive of articles on the site.
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?
Archive.org mostly ignores robots.txt
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
The robots.txt file should be used to restrict (and, in some cases, slow down) crawling at the time it is being crawled, not for SEO or for restricting access to mirrors or for any other purpose. It should never apply retroactively. (Unfortunately it is sometimes used badly despite this.)
People always use that link as reference to say that Internet Archive ignores robots.txt but it only actually says they are ignoring it for government sites. It suggests that they might do it for other sites in the future (of 2017), but does not actually say that that they have done it.
https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims... which is a year later mentions that they have an automated process which is still following robots.txt for displaying old pages where the robots.txt was added later.
https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/ does say they follow it for scraping, but this is phrased in such a way that would still be true for past sites whether or not they changed the policy. There is a page https://www.sysjolt.com/2021/archive-org-no-longer-honors-ro... which claims they don't follow it, but the site owner misspelled "robots" as "robot".
That first link is confusing; it seems to say they ended up removing the pages not because of a legal threat but because of robots.txt “automated”.
If archive.org can be manipulated to remove content either via legal threats or simple robots.txt it loses a significant portion of its societal value.
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Please, say that again in comprehensible English.
The ownership relationship was always load-bearing? The journalism in this case was a tenant, I highly recommend that people promote forms of independent journalism?
EDIT: dude have you heard of the s in https, http://johntantalo.com gets flagged.
I'm seeing a lot about this. What makes this situation different than any other website going offline?
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?"
Also, they don’t any plans for the IP, and Nate would’ve paid above-market rate just to take over and preserve the content for posterity. He estimates that they deleted 200,000 hours of human labor.
This is just some Disney suits being extraordinarily petty.
Yes, just to add to this: in the article by Nate [0] he says that he tried to buy the IP but Disney refused because they were unhappy with some of his prior comments.
"I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. ...
We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight. It apparently wasn’t a long conversation, so I don’t have a lot more color to report than that."
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.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.
This is the first article that I popped open at random:
> Biden wins 53 times out of 100 in our simulations of the 2024 presidential election. Trump wins 47 times out of 100.
Oof. Not to be a jerk but… maybe there’s a reason it folded.
538: "We have no idea who will win. It seems like basically a coin toss."
Reality: someone wins.
Internet: "How did 538 mess this up so badly?"
It's a bit more loaded than that. 538 post-Nate Silver had a model setup that was apparently kind of a mess. 538 was apparently sending strange messages to Republican leaning polling agencies, demanding they gave far more detailed audit information than usual (with the implication obviously being that they were fraudulent pollsters), and the guy running the site had fairly openly tuned his model on the assumption people cared about certain talking points. 538 was predicting Biden victories even when the polls were so overwhelmingly against him that not even the most Democratic leaning polling agencies had trust in him; even if you aren't running difficult math, that means something has gone wrong with the model.
(Something which got worse after Harris was picked, although every polling aggregator went barmy - there's suspicions that a lot of polling agencies aggressively normalized their data to avoid being seen as biased, leading to an almost 50/50 split.)
... so an event that had a (simulated) 47% percent chance of happening happens, and an event that had a 53% chance of happening didn't.
You must _hate_ it when you need <= 4 and you roll a 5...
Related: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
If I wanted to get the complete WARC archive of 538 - how do you do this in a friendly way? No interest in history tracking, just want the last available version from Internet Archive.
Love Ben but title can simply be: Index of FiveThirtyEight articles preserved by the Internet Archive
But that would be a false attribution. The Internet Archive did not create the index, Ben did. And the Internet Archive is not hosting the index, Ben is.
Ah, yes, could be worded better, fairplay. Point is the Ben attribution isn't needed in that place to avoid unnecessary confusion about who that is etc.
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Those 2015-16 ones sure aged poorly, I'm reminded of this https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg
This is why people don't really buy the "but he had Trump at 30%, you just don't understand statistics" apologist line. Sure he hedged in the dying days of the campaign (a cynic might think to try to protect his credibility), but the tone overall was of a person who comprehensively failed to understand the mood of the country from beginning to end.
Which is a problem because these election predictions are not just pure "mathematical models" and "data driven" like 538 would have had you believe. What mathematical model should be used? What data should and should not be used? At some point those things are based on the modeller's understanding of reality.
I think Nate did a phenomenal job calling out pollsters in that time. Since 538 was predominately a poll aggregator that did tricky stats to rank the reliability of each poll. I remember specifically an interview with him griping about some of the unusual data he was seeing from pollsters that made it look like, and I quote, 'Someone has their finger on the scales'
Perhaps critiquing statistical methods used by polling was something he was good at. I have no real opinion of his work there, which I didn't pay attention to.
But predicting an election requires a lot more than polling datasets and statistics textbooks. That's the problem that he made himself out to be an election prediction wizard, but really that was off the back of his good prediction in quite a bland and conventional election.
When things got slightly more spicy and reality diverged from his vaunted "models", his "data science" predictably fell in a heap. The worst thing is almost not even that he got it wrong, it's that he seemed incapable of recognizing that present reality was quite significantly different from the past data he had used to build his models. Even after being wrong in so many of these predictions. He just kept churning out these pieces about how Trump was probably finished this time.
Okay, this is clearly an LLM response, but for the sake of being polite:
> But predicting an election requires a lot more than polling datasets and statistics textbooks. That's the problem that he made himself out to be an election prediction wizard, but really that was off the back of his good prediction in quite a bland and conventional election.
> When things got slightly more spicy and reality diverged from his vaunted "models", his "data science" predictably fell in a heap
The models were correct in two elections - arguably three because a 30% chance means that an outcome will occur in thirty times out of hundred. That is not zero.
To the person who is running this LLM, please find better things to do with yourself.
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> bviously you don't believe that yourself, you're just incapable of a coherent response to the post
I definitely think a human was involved in signing up for the account and occasionally checks in.
I think my response was plenty coherent.
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There was no substance to the text generated in the earlier comments. Good luck out there.
Sure, that explains why you had to respond with insults and delusional conspiracy theories.
I'm actually flabbergasted anybody would become so unhinged upon seeing a differing opinion about Nate Silver that they go berserk calling people LLMs and making up fantasies about them being paid to post negative opinions of Nate Silver. It's possibly the funniest thing I've ever seen somebody get enraged about on the internet.
