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.
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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.
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.
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
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
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.
This is a great service for everyone who appreciates thoughtful analyses about politics. Losing FiveThirtyEight was a big loss, but this archive helps. Bravo!
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?
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 46.7 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/palewire/fivethirtyeightindex.com
> 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
https://web.archive.org/web/20140701122958/http://fivethirty...
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.
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....
https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/graphics/ https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/illustrations/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197703
Yes, he did: https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/residential/cny-na...
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?
https://archive.is/sId82
https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/checking-our-work-data
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.