10 ms·

Julie Rubicon

784 points by ISL 11y ago

raverbashing 11y ago
Nice piece of fiction
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
chatmasta 11y ago
Usually I read comments on HN before the article, but there were no comments when I saw the link, so I went straight to reading it. What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? For me, I did not realize until the very end -- and even then I still wasn't sure. It could just as well have been written by some delusional non-technical employee at Facebook.
- arielweisberg 11y ago
  I started to wonder if it was real around the point that it theorized without explanation the predictive powers of the in house tool and I was pretty convinced it was fiction about the point where they were going to start a company within a company using bitcoin. Using Facebook internal data to trade in ways no one can match isn't far fetched. Makes me wonder if Facebook should pivot to be a hedge fund based on signals no one else has access too.
  - chatmasta 11y ago
    I've wondered that before as well. Same for Google. Both companies have absolute treasure troves of data that could certainly be used for trading signals. Interestingly, the data could be equally effective for building actuarial models and selling insurance to customers (I believe Google has stated an interest in this in the past). Does anyone know what the SEC implications would be for a company using its proprietary user-generated data as trading signals? Is there any precedent?
    - sangnoir 11y ago
      > Both companies have absolute treasure troves of data that could certainly be used for trading signals. Here's what Eric Shmidt had to say on the subject:"There are many, many things that Google could do, that we chose not to do. One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."
  - pookeh 11y ago
    Given that the posts can be from folks that work in the company Facebook would be trading stocks for, that would count as insider trading.
    - arielweisberg 11y ago
      That's if you use insider information. That's only one kind of signal that Facebook has access to. There are signals that aren't based on insider information that FB could legally trade on. Information that other people don't have access to isn't by definition insider information. It's just stuff others can't or haven't figured out.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      As long as they agreed to let Facebook use the data by signing up, then no, it's not insider trading.
  - wepple 11y ago
    When she started the repetition of 'championships..'; for some reason it seemed too doctored to be part of real story telling.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- StavrosK 11y ago
  I realized it was fiction when querying after today's date produced a spike that completely matched reality. If anyone can do this, they sure as hell won't do it by omitting an end date in a query.
  - drostie 11y ago
    Right. I was initially credulous to the idea that there is data in the system after the present, thinking, "Holy crap! That means that some other department in Facebook consists of chatbots which have randomly woven themselves into peoples' lives and have advance-scheduled chatter!" But once it was like, "hey, we're predicting the outcome of a sports game before it happened based on this" then it's like "ooh, this is a cool fake story which just took a turn towards the supernatural, I get it..."
  - Mahn 11y ago
    At first I thought it was plausible their internal reporting system had some sort of bug that just happened to "predict the future" by accident. But yeah, it's just entertaining fiction :)
- badusername 11y ago
  As soon as I read the fellow employee name, Julie Rubicon.
- jboggan 11y ago
  As soon as they divulged exact numbers concerning search terms and emoji usage.
- y04nn 11y ago
  When it mentions Volkswagens, if you see a spike, how do you know it's in favor or not for them. After this it seems completely ridiculous.
  - inaccessible 11y ago
    Actually it was mentioned in the post: "I told Julie it had to be something terrible. I mean, a car company? We’d run reports on the launches of new vehicles, lots of them. They never looked like this." So they knew it wasn't about a new car model, but some negative event.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  > What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? Longer than it would have taken if I'd never worked in analytics. I doubt there is anyone who has ever worked on analytics software who doesn't have stories about articles with negative page views, impossible traffic spikes, or data from the future. (And in fact Facebook's APIs are some of the worst offenders for producing garbage data.)
  - eropple 11y ago
    Yup yup. I think this is one of those cases where knowing a little about the topic can throw you, because (a little too much drama aside) it does feel remarkably authentic.
  - merraksh 11y ago
    The flatness before and after the huge spikes (for Adidas/Vernix/VW) and the fact that the plot goes back to pre-spike levels also suggest that this is not real data---though I thought of that after realizing it is fiction.
- aab0 11y ago
  For me it was until the sports part. User chatter has nothing to do with future victories and the bookies would have priced in anything the public knows. Then it occurred to me that this sort of thing was hugely illegal and I noticed the facebook.com URL - no way FB would be hosting some insiders blowing a whistle like that. At that point my suspicions curdled and I checked the comments.
- 0xffff2 11y ago
  The first tip-off for me was that it was hosted on Facebook. If this were somehow real, there's no way it would stay up on Facebook's own servers for more than 15 minutes. I'll also eat my shoe if there's a single person with the legal name "Julie Rubicon" in the world.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    > I'll also eat my shoe if there's a single person with the legal name "Julie Rubicon" in the world. It doesn't seem impossible. I mean I'm not having a ton of luck but there are references to some people that may legally have the name[1]. [1] http://instaliga.com/lil_jeep_babe_ http://instaliga.com/lil_jeep_babe_
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Startup idea: delicious steak and bacon sandals. Have a big mouth? Put steak where your mouth is!
  - timinman 11y ago
    You may want to consider masking the shoe flavor with BBQ sauce. :) Google Trends reports that people have been searching for Julie in bursts over the last decade. It's interesting to say the least: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=julie%20rubicon&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B7 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=julie%20rubicon&cmpt...
- underwater 11y ago
  The references to the Facebook offices are all a little bit off. For example building 20 is engineering, it wouldn't make sense for the author to go there for a walk without a good reason. Also, if you've ever analysed any traffic the graphs are clearly fake. Trends don't decay that quickly. And the normal levels would have waves due to seasonal changes, weekends and so on. Type "VW" into Google trends to see what I mean.
  - gideon_b 11y ago
    Totally agree on the graphs, but the office references are bang-on. The roof of building 20 is built for strolling around and poring over hard problems. It's a 3 minute walk from the rest of campus and they have cold pressed juice up there. The MPK20 reference set a perfect scene.
- daveloyall 11y ago
  I'm embarrassed to report that -- for just a moment -- I had a chilling thought. I thought I was about to learn that we are digital copies of ourselves living in a full-earth simulation carried out by some future facebook. Facebook! The horror... :( I checked my calendar--nope, not April 1... And kept reading.
- heurist 11y ago
  I was suspicious when every prediction was perfect and I figured it out after it started talking about the stock market. Read much more like fiction at that point.
- mbostleman 11y ago
  I didn't pay attention to the url when I opened it. As I was reading, when I realized the implications of the story I looked and saw it was facebook.com. At that point I figured it was a hoax / fiction as it wouldn't have remained posted that long if it were true.
- stray 11y ago
  At first, I expected it to be a setup for a joke about crossing the Rubicon. Or something something ides of march.
- greenyoda 11y ago
  I got skeptical as soon as the PIG group was mentioned. I don't think any company would give one of their groups such an unfortunate acronym in real life - it would be bad for the morale of the people who worked there. (If there was really a PIG group in some company, I'd imagine that their work space would be known as the "PIG pen", not the "PIG pod".)
- tripzilch 11y ago
  When he said "Julie Rubicon" was someone's real name I had my first doubt; "isn't 'Rubicon' some mythical thing, then how can it be someone's last name?" wasn't yet sure but I started to pay attention, noticed extra "woolly" style of writing (not bad btw, just another marker), the bit where he said it was a neural network that accidentally started preducting the future sealed it.
- nimnio 11y ago
  I realized it was fake in the first paragraph thanks to the cheesy, melodramatic hook: "The last thing I want to do is write this down, but I’m doing it anyway, partially because people ought to know what’s happening with the things they post here, but mainly (like 99%) because of Julie Rubicon and the spike." Oh, I've just discovered a world changing dark secret brewing in the heart of Facebook. I'd better tell the world! But first I must build some... suspense! If it had turned out to be real, I'd thank the whistleblower right after I slapped them for being a twit.
FlyingLawnmower 11y ago
I think the HN audience will "see through" this story, but anyone who isn't familiar with the current state of neural nets/has read the many pieces fortelling the future of AI might just find it plausible. I really liked the writing style.
tfgg 11y ago
Lovecraft does data science? (the variance on the graphs intuitively felt a bit low, but then again it is facebook)
Kevin_S 11y ago
As someone who is non-technical, I pretty much was mind blown until the very end. Had a feeling it was fiction haha. Glad the comments here clarified. Entertaining read.
kevando 11y ago
Very entertaining! How did no one realize this was fake by the first graph? Does xkcd design the graphs for fb premium partners?
- minimaxir 11y ago
  The aesthetics of the chart are pretty standard for a 2D Stacked Area chart. The only "mistake" is that the CONFIDENTIAL watermark is a lower z-order than the chart, which defeats the purpose of the "watermark."
  - elbigbad 11y ago
    We circulate internal drafts like that all the time. The purpose of the "Confidential" or "Draft" marking isn't to be in front of the data, it's to clearly indicate to anyone internally who has a copy that it shouldn't be released.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- teraflop 11y ago
  I assumed the punchline was going to be that Facebook was generating fake graphs to scam their advertising partners, and the author was blowing the whistle.
- yoodenvranx 11y ago
  If this would've been posted to medium.com instead of facebook.com it would've taken me much longer to figure out that this is just a story of fiction. If this somehow would've been true then Facebook most likely would have deleted it within a short time.
- ethanbond 11y ago
  Facebook has client facing products that look worse than that. No joke.
- duderific 11y ago
  I fell for it...I figured the graph was just an illustration to give a general idea of what the data looked like, not the actual graph itself.
minimaxir 11y ago
The funny thing is that if the implications noted in the story were true and Facebook could accurately forecast events into the far future, building a social network would be the least of their priorities.
- guftagu 11y ago
  How do you know that's not true today? Any effort to expand the social network would just be helping the prediction engine in reality.
thomasahle 11y ago
Was I the only one, whos first impression was, that facebook was somehow involved in insider trading. And that for some reason they were brave enough to also use this information for load balancing...
stygiansonic 11y ago
Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT: They turned ~$150K into ~$2.8 MM USD over about three years, before being caught, mostly through options trades it seems. 1. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one-fraud-researchers-may-also-have-done-some-fraud http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one...
- carsonreinke 11y ago
  Can someone explain why this is illegal (besides any data/privacy breach within Capital One)?
  - ojbyrne 11y ago
    It's in the article: 'The "misappropriation theory" holds that a person commits fraud "in connection with" a securities transaction, and thereby violates § 10(b) and Rule 10b-5, when he misappropriates confidential information for securities trading purposes, in breach of a duty owed to the source of the information. ... Under this theory, a fiduciary's undisclosed, self-serving use of a principal's information to purchase or sell securities, in breach of a duty of loyalty and confidentiality, defrauds the principal of the exclusive use of that information. In lieu of premising liability on a fiduciary relationship between company insider and purchaser or seller of the company's stock, the misappropriation theory premises liability on a fiduciary-turned-trader's deception of those who entrusted him with access to confidential information.'
  - carsonreinke 11y ago
    Oh, duh, it explains it in the article: "misappropriation" insider trading
  - stygiansonic 11y ago
    The answer is right in the article linked: "People have asked me if this is insider trading and, you know, sure it is? (If the allegations are true, I mean.) This is not "classical" insider trading -- trading or tipping by an insider at Chipotle or whatever -- but rather "misappropriation" insider trading..."
asadlionpk 11y ago
Nice piece. When I saw that first from-future graph, I thought Facebook is faking their data. As they are known for faking page likes.
- benmmurphy 11y ago
  same. when i saw this line: 'I spent the day haunting the roof of MPK20, feeling jangly and nervous, staring out across the bay.' i thought it was about her confronting the ethical dilemma about whether she should rat out on her employer or not. it feels more likely you would accidentally disclose your fake data generator than your future predictor.
- baking 11y ago
  Providing super-duper proprietary info to their biggest advertisers that no one else has and no one else can verify? Absolutely!
- ethanbond 11y ago
  Yeah that's what I suspected too. No matter what you query, you get a convenient spike right around your time of interest – that must be nice to show clients!
Jacksonb 11y ago
"Published on the day Julius Caesar was murdered 2060 years ago, after crossing the Rubicon. Julie Rubicon. Nice touch."
maxaf 11y ago
I'm "technical" and "hands-on", yet I was gullible enough to believe the story, IM-ed it to my wife, and was surprised when she hadn't panicked like I did. I read way too much science fiction. Back to work now! Kind of relieved though.
- oolongCat 11y ago
  Sigh I did the same, sent her the link as I was reading the article halfway. Once I finished, when they repeated the name Julie I scrolled up, came back here and boom, fiction. lol
bpp 11y ago
Very enjoyable, and almost plausible...
fsiefken 11y ago
Who could be the real author if it's fiction? This Robin Sloan might certainly have the means and the motive. Either it is fiction, with a plot which is not to far fetched as any company with these kinds of databases can exploit it in the prediction market. "Information is power and currency in the virtual world we inhabit" Billy Idol once said. It's also an important element in Asimov's Foundation series: extrapolating history through psychohistory. Or it's not entirely fiction or perhaps even factious. I remember Rupert Sheldrake mention in one of his mindboggling talks that he wanted to investigate potential psi effects on a much larger scale and was in talks with Google. If there were 'results' pertaining to precognition (or AI enhanced precognition of the crowd) would the public get to know about it?
state 11y ago
Worth noting that Robin is also the author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore [1] that others around HN would probably find pretty enjoyable. I thought it was quite fun. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Bookstore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Books...
- Cenk 11y ago
  +1 on this, a great book
  - Falcon9 11y ago
    I enjoyed it, though less than Ready Player One which has a similar vibe. I was amused that my Google-employed friend docked it a star for showing Google as a nerdy utopia which she did not feel began to accurately reflect the truth of the company.
    - state 11y ago
      Interesting! It was the exact opposite for me. Couldn't get through Ready Player One, but couldn't quite put my finer on exactly why.
      - Falcon9 11y ago
        The writing is poorer in RPO, but the exuberance and energy of the story itself made that not matter for me.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  Interesting, I will check it out. Thanks for the reference!
- turar 11y ago
  Yes, it all seems like a very creative marketing scheme.
- lt 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cavisne 11y ago
Great piece of fiction, it feels like the author works at Facebook or knows someone who does though. That said, what's described could possibly be done with existing technology . Could Facebook accurately move forward statements like "next Monday is going to be massive for Volkswagen" over time you could weight private messages from people who work for regulators higher. For more public events like an apple launch they could predict a spike easily just by all the media mentions of the date
avipars 11y ago
I think April Fools has come early this year
- orblivion 11y ago
  Oh thank God they didn't waste this story on that.
chrome_x 11y ago
Even when you feel its fiction, it just sounds like something that I could be reading off tomorrow's newspapers. This was a great read!
chrome_x 11y ago
Even when you feel its fiction, it just sounds like something that I could be reading off tomorrow's newspapers. This was a great read!
ktusznio 11y ago
This piece was written by Robin Sloan, who is an author of fiction. :) Great story.
jkkorn 11y ago
The big short, Facebook edition. Entertaining read.
Mahn 11y ago
Fiction, but that was entertaining. To the author, you should probably consider writing a book in this style :)
- jat850 11y ago
  The author did write a fiction book, Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store. It's decent enough :)
ChuckMcM 11y ago
It is a fun story and one that comes at the question of "how much data is too much data and is too hard to resist?" Something that anyone who has worked in a popular Internet facing application has to come terms with. I found 'Manna'[1] a more compelling emergent AI story, but the data as predictor aspects of this story have their own particular flavor. One of the things that immediately flashed it as fiction for me was that the graphs had all the same shape, which if you've ever looked at trend graphs you will see they might all have a similar outlier quality to them but they build and sustain in different ways. At Blekko (a search engine company) we did an interesting study on query traffic to see if you could "predict" the "hallmark" holidays based on search queries. The idea was that holidays like Valentines Day come up, people start thinking about plans or gifts before that, could we advise an advertiser when the "peak" planning session was so that they could maximize the impact of their advertising spend by focusing it during the peak? And if so what sorts of queries were people making that indicated they were doing holiday planning? The results were mixed. For things like Valentines it was easy, flowers, chocolates, bed & breakfast reservations sort of rose out of the general query stream, St. Patrick's Day? Not so much. But the data peaks all had different shapes appropriate for different levels of impact (Christmas shopping really starts in August among the back to school traffic for the really prepared). So looking at (and for) "interest spikes" like the ones in the story had a bunch of different shapes, some with slow onset and rapid decline, some with rapid onset and rapid decline, and some which were like soft swells on a breezy afternoon at the beach. That said, the dataset made possible by Facebook's chat stream would be even better for those sorts of investigations. [1] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
- daemin 11y ago
  I don't want to contemplate a world where Christmas decorations are being put up in stores in August. Them being installed before the start of December is too early already (for me).
jimrandomh 11y ago
Post is fiction. Spoilers follow. . . When I started reading this, I didn't realize it was fiction. When I got to the point where the protagonist left the end-date off a query and saw a spike, I thought it was going to be explained by falsified data and lead into a (real) accusation of providing fraudulent metrics to advertisers. It wouldn't be the first such accusation. But it turned out to be a science-fiction story with unexplained time travel in it. Oh well.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  I read 2-3 paragraphs into this and then thought, hmm, maybe I should check the comments first. Thank you.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Does it help that "Crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a point of no return?
    - wodenokoto 11y ago
      I've never heard that before, so it didn't tip me of. I did think the PIG abbreviation was too good to be true and decided that I didn't want to read it if it wasnt anything to do with real life internals
  - avian 11y ago
    For once I'm glad I didn't read the comments before reading the story. jimrandomh comment would have spoiled it.
    - jimrandomh 11y ago
      Edited to add a spoiler warning. My apologies to anyone I spoiled the ending for.
      - reneherse 11y ago
djsumdog 11y ago
Haha..it's like a modern campfire ghost story. It's written in a believable manner too. It had me going. I like it. Good job!
EGreg 11y ago
Did John Titor write this?
gizmodo59 11y ago
By seeing the title along with the domain facebook.com I couldn't resist but click. Perfect click bait. Though a good story.
kozikow 11y ago
The first graph immediately looked too fake. Spike after an event would follow something like a log normal distribution, rather than sudden spike and day after back to normal. What's more, the world is not equally using the internet. The uneventful graph should follow something like a sin wave, with the highest point 2x higher than the lowest.
steven2012 11y ago
Identified as fiction because VW isn't traded on the US stock market.
thomble 11y ago
This piece scared the hell out of me (seriously, I felt panicked) until I discerned that it was fiction. Great read.
thadd 11y ago
It still makes me excited about the future of neural networks :)
wallflower 11y ago
This is some fantastic writing. And if you are looking for a longer, slightly better, fictionalized account of Facebook, "The Circle" by David Eggers is a quick, engrossing read and quite hard to tear yourself away from once you begin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 11y ago
I enjoyed the oracle discovery very much and even more its use on themselves. Cute.
dynofuz 11y ago
reminds me of the movie primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29
- phpnode 11y ago
  Yeah it's really similar, not just in premise, the writing style really reminded me of the narration in that awesome film.
personjerry 11y ago
It's disturbing to me how many comments on here assert that the piece is fiction with little to no evidence. It occurs to me that perhaps Facebook is trying to make it seem like it's fiction by posting on various forums!
- tarblog 11y ago
  The burden of proof that facebook can see months into the future would be on the poster. No evidence is needed to simply disbelieve this.
mwcampbell 11y ago
Reminds me of this interpretation of Minority Report, only with AI instead of human precogs. http://mjyoung.net/time/minority.html http://mjyoung.net/time/minority.html
dluan 11y ago
Enchilada?
- buremba 11y ago
  PrestoDB, I guess.
hatsunearu 11y ago
I thought this was real, but man that's probably the best creepypasta I've read in a while.
wallzz 11y ago
I really got scary reading this
api 11y ago
I figured it was fiction by the end, but I couldn't really tell. I can't tell the difference between fiction/satire and reality anymore. The world is too strange.
daveheq 11y ago
Hmm, fact-fic; I wonder who run with it make it an urban legend.
chejazi 11y ago
Facebook has the data to make a solid prediction market. That should be their new biz model - they'll still exploit our data but they won't be degrading our user experience with ads.
KerryJones 11y ago
This could easily be a Black Mirror episode
PSeitz 11y ago
Obvious fiction. Nice story, but I don't like fiction masked as real.
malkia 11y ago
Oh, somehow I've got the Pollyhop breeze from House Of Cards
Thane2600 11y ago
i thought the following into existence yesterday and read the post today. that facebook uses users as a layer of abstraction above one brain. a brain of brains. putting queries (thoughts) into the system (brain) and obtaining a result that is the average of many.
lawnchair_larry 11y ago
Not a very useful submission title.
Animats 11y ago
Aw. It's in the tradition of "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline", by Isaac Asimov.
dekhn 11y ago
Best version of this is still "Vaxen, my children..." http://www.hactrn.net/sra/vaxen.html http://www.hactrn.net/sra/vaxen.html (read to the end, and check the meaning of the date)
mat_jack1 11y ago
It's funny that I've received the notification for the HN500 while I was reading "Mr. Penumbra's 24h bookstore" and noticed it after having finished the book. Clicked the link and the author was Robin Sloan as in the book :) Apart from the funny combination I just chime in to recommend the book here, I think most of you here would enjoy that.
jbscpa 11y ago
Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick as devlopers of Psychohistory would approve. (Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" universe) "Psychohistory is the name of a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, which combined history, psychology and mathematical statistics to create a (nearly) exact science of the behavior of very large populations of people" source: Wikia
lucb1e 11y ago
So I figured this was too epic to be real, but what part of it is real? Is there a team selling statistics from all posts from advertisers? Because that part I believed without a second thought and honestly, it does make sense.

Julie Rubicon

784 points by ISL 11y ago

raverbashing 11y ago

Nice piece of fiction

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

chatmasta 11y ago

Usually I read comments on HN before the article, but there were no comments when I saw the link, so I went straight to reading it. What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? For me, I did not realize until the very end -- and even then I still wasn't sure. It could just as well have been written by some delusional non-technical employee at Facebook.

arielweisberg 11y ago
I started to wonder if it was real around the point that it theorized without explanation the predictive powers of the in house tool and I was pretty convinced it was fiction about the point where they were going to start a company within a company using bitcoin. Using Facebook internal data to trade in ways no one can match isn't far fetched. Makes me wonder if Facebook should pivot to be a hedge fund based on signals no one else has access too.
- chatmasta 11y ago
  I've wondered that before as well. Same for Google. Both companies have absolute treasure troves of data that could certainly be used for trading signals. Interestingly, the data could be equally effective for building actuarial models and selling insurance to customers (I believe Google has stated an interest in this in the past). Does anyone know what the SEC implications would be for a company using its proprietary user-generated data as trading signals? Is there any precedent?
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    > Both companies have absolute treasure troves of data that could certainly be used for trading signals. Here's what Eric Shmidt had to say on the subject:"There are many, many things that Google could do, that we chose not to do. One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."
- pookeh 11y ago
  Given that the posts can be from folks that work in the company Facebook would be trading stocks for, that would count as insider trading.
  - arielweisberg 11y ago
    That's if you use insider information. That's only one kind of signal that Facebook has access to. There are signals that aren't based on insider information that FB could legally trade on. Information that other people don't have access to isn't by definition insider information. It's just stuff others can't or haven't figured out.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    As long as they agreed to let Facebook use the data by signing up, then no, it's not insider trading.
- wepple 11y ago
  When she started the repetition of 'championships..'; for some reason it seemed too doctored to be part of real story telling.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
StavrosK 11y ago
I realized it was fiction when querying after today's date produced a spike that completely matched reality. If anyone can do this, they sure as hell won't do it by omitting an end date in a query.
- drostie 11y ago
  Right. I was initially credulous to the idea that there is data in the system after the present, thinking, "Holy crap! That means that some other department in Facebook consists of chatbots which have randomly woven themselves into peoples' lives and have advance-scheduled chatter!" But once it was like, "hey, we're predicting the outcome of a sports game before it happened based on this" then it's like "ooh, this is a cool fake story which just took a turn towards the supernatural, I get it..."
- Mahn 11y ago
  At first I thought it was plausible their internal reporting system had some sort of bug that just happened to "predict the future" by accident. But yeah, it's just entertaining fiction :)
badusername 11y ago
As soon as I read the fellow employee name, Julie Rubicon.
jboggan 11y ago
As soon as they divulged exact numbers concerning search terms and emoji usage.
y04nn 11y ago
When it mentions Volkswagens, if you see a spike, how do you know it's in favor or not for them. After this it seems completely ridiculous.
- inaccessible 11y ago
  Actually it was mentioned in the post: "I told Julie it had to be something terrible. I mean, a car company? We’d run reports on the launches of new vehicles, lots of them. They never looked like this." So they knew it wasn't about a new car model, but some negative event.
Alex3917 11y ago
> What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? Longer than it would have taken if I'd never worked in analytics. I doubt there is anyone who has ever worked on analytics software who doesn't have stories about articles with negative page views, impossible traffic spikes, or data from the future. (And in fact Facebook's APIs are some of the worst offenders for producing garbage data.)
- eropple 11y ago
  Yup yup. I think this is one of those cases where knowing a little about the topic can throw you, because (a little too much drama aside) it does feel remarkably authentic.
- merraksh 11y ago
  The flatness before and after the huge spikes (for Adidas/Vernix/VW) and the fact that the plot goes back to pre-spike levels also suggest that this is not real data---though I thought of that after realizing it is fiction.
aab0 11y ago
For me it was until the sports part. User chatter has nothing to do with future victories and the bookies would have priced in anything the public knows. Then it occurred to me that this sort of thing was hugely illegal and I noticed the facebook.com URL - no way FB would be hosting some insiders blowing a whistle like that. At that point my suspicions curdled and I checked the comments.
0xffff2 11y ago
The first tip-off for me was that it was hosted on Facebook. If this were somehow real, there's no way it would stay up on Facebook's own servers for more than 15 minutes. I'll also eat my shoe if there's a single person with the legal name "Julie Rubicon" in the world.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > I'll also eat my shoe if there's a single person with the legal name "Julie Rubicon" in the world. It doesn't seem impossible. I mean I'm not having a ton of luck but there are references to some people that may legally have the name[1]. [1] http://instaliga.com/lil_jeep_babe_ http://instaliga.com/lil_jeep_babe_
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Startup idea: delicious steak and bacon sandals. Have a big mouth? Put steak where your mouth is!
- timinman 11y ago
  You may want to consider masking the shoe flavor with BBQ sauce. :) Google Trends reports that people have been searching for Julie in bursts over the last decade. It's interesting to say the least: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=julie%20rubicon&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B7 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=julie%20rubicon&cmpt...
underwater 11y ago
The references to the Facebook offices are all a little bit off. For example building 20 is engineering, it wouldn't make sense for the author to go there for a walk without a good reason. Also, if you've ever analysed any traffic the graphs are clearly fake. Trends don't decay that quickly. And the normal levels would have waves due to seasonal changes, weekends and so on. Type "VW" into Google trends to see what I mean.
- gideon_b 11y ago
  Totally agree on the graphs, but the office references are bang-on. The roof of building 20 is built for strolling around and poring over hard problems. It's a 3 minute walk from the rest of campus and they have cold pressed juice up there. The MPK20 reference set a perfect scene.
daveloyall 11y ago
I'm embarrassed to report that -- for just a moment -- I had a chilling thought. I thought I was about to learn that we are digital copies of ourselves living in a full-earth simulation carried out by some future facebook. Facebook! The horror... :( I checked my calendar--nope, not April 1... And kept reading.
heurist 11y ago
I was suspicious when every prediction was perfect and I figured it out after it started talking about the stock market. Read much more like fiction at that point.
mbostleman 11y ago
I didn't pay attention to the url when I opened it. As I was reading, when I realized the implications of the story I looked and saw it was facebook.com. At that point I figured it was a hoax / fiction as it wouldn't have remained posted that long if it were true.
stray 11y ago
At first, I expected it to be a setup for a joke about crossing the Rubicon. Or something something ides of march.
greenyoda 11y ago
I got skeptical as soon as the PIG group was mentioned. I don't think any company would give one of their groups such an unfortunate acronym in real life - it would be bad for the morale of the people who worked there. (If there was really a PIG group in some company, I'd imagine that their work space would be known as the "PIG pen", not the "PIG pod".)
tripzilch 11y ago
When he said "Julie Rubicon" was someone's real name I had my first doubt; "isn't 'Rubicon' some mythical thing, then how can it be someone's last name?" wasn't yet sure but I started to pay attention, noticed extra "woolly" style of writing (not bad btw, just another marker), the bit where he said it was a neural network that accidentally started preducting the future sealed it.
nimnio 11y ago
I realized it was fake in the first paragraph thanks to the cheesy, melodramatic hook: "The last thing I want to do is write this down, but I’m doing it anyway, partially because people ought to know what’s happening with the things they post here, but mainly (like 99%) because of Julie Rubicon and the spike." Oh, I've just discovered a world changing dark secret brewing in the heart of Facebook. I'd better tell the world! But first I must build some... suspense! If it had turned out to be real, I'd thank the whistleblower right after I slapped them for being a twit.

FlyingLawnmower 11y ago

I think the HN audience will "see through" this story, but anyone who isn't familiar with the current state of neural nets/has read the many pieces fortelling the future of AI might just find it plausible. I really liked the writing style.

tfgg 11y ago

Lovecraft does data science? (the variance on the graphs intuitively felt a bit low, but then again it is facebook)

Kevin_S 11y ago

As someone who is non-technical, I pretty much was mind blown until the very end. Had a feeling it was fiction haha. Glad the comments here clarified. Entertaining read.

kevando 11y ago

Very entertaining! How did no one realize this was fake by the first graph? Does xkcd design the graphs for fb premium partners?

minimaxir 11y ago
The aesthetics of the chart are pretty standard for a 2D Stacked Area chart. The only "mistake" is that the CONFIDENTIAL watermark is a lower z-order than the chart, which defeats the purpose of the "watermark."
- elbigbad 11y ago
  We circulate internal drafts like that all the time. The purpose of the "Confidential" or "Draft" marking isn't to be in front of the data, it's to clearly indicate to anyone internally who has a copy that it shouldn't be released.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
teraflop 11y ago
I assumed the punchline was going to be that Facebook was generating fake graphs to scam their advertising partners, and the author was blowing the whistle.
yoodenvranx 11y ago
If this would've been posted to medium.com instead of facebook.com it would've taken me much longer to figure out that this is just a story of fiction. If this somehow would've been true then Facebook most likely would have deleted it within a short time.
ethanbond 11y ago
Facebook has client facing products that look worse than that. No joke.
duderific 11y ago
I fell for it...I figured the graph was just an illustration to give a general idea of what the data looked like, not the actual graph itself.

minimaxir 11y ago

The funny thing is that if the implications noted in the story were true and Facebook could accurately forecast events into the far future, building a social network would be the least of their priorities.

guftagu 11y ago
How do you know that's not true today? Any effort to expand the social network would just be helping the prediction engine in reality.

thomasahle 11y ago

Was I the only one, whos first impression was, that facebook was somehow involved in insider trading. And that for some reason they were brave enough to also use this information for load balancing...

stygiansonic 11y ago

Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT: They turned ~$150K into ~$2.8 MM USD over about three years, before being caught, mostly through options trades it seems. 1. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one-fraud-researchers-may-also-have-done-some-fraud http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one...

carsonreinke 11y ago
Can someone explain why this is illegal (besides any data/privacy breach within Capital One)?
- ojbyrne 11y ago
  It's in the article: 'The "misappropriation theory" holds that a person commits fraud "in connection with" a securities transaction, and thereby violates § 10(b) and Rule 10b-5, when he misappropriates confidential information for securities trading purposes, in breach of a duty owed to the source of the information. ... Under this theory, a fiduciary's undisclosed, self-serving use of a principal's information to purchase or sell securities, in breach of a duty of loyalty and confidentiality, defrauds the principal of the exclusive use of that information. In lieu of premising liability on a fiduciary relationship between company insider and purchaser or seller of the company's stock, the misappropriation theory premises liability on a fiduciary-turned-trader's deception of those who entrusted him with access to confidential information.'
- carsonreinke 11y ago
  Oh, duh, it explains it in the article: "misappropriation" insider trading
- stygiansonic 11y ago
  The answer is right in the article linked: "People have asked me if this is insider trading and, you know, sure it is? (If the allegations are true, I mean.) This is not "classical" insider trading -- trading or tipping by an insider at Chipotle or whatever -- but rather "misappropriation" insider trading..."

asadlionpk 11y ago

Nice piece. When I saw that first from-future graph, I thought Facebook is faking their data. As they are known for faking page likes.

benmmurphy 11y ago
same. when i saw this line: 'I spent the day haunting the roof of MPK20, feeling jangly and nervous, staring out across the bay.' i thought it was about her confronting the ethical dilemma about whether she should rat out on her employer or not. it feels more likely you would accidentally disclose your fake data generator than your future predictor.
baking 11y ago
Providing super-duper proprietary info to their biggest advertisers that no one else has and no one else can verify? Absolutely!
ethanbond 11y ago
Yeah that's what I suspected too. No matter what you query, you get a convenient spike right around your time of interest – that must be nice to show clients!

Jacksonb 11y ago

"Published on the day Julius Caesar was murdered 2060 years ago, after crossing the Rubicon. Julie Rubicon. Nice touch."

maxaf 11y ago

I'm "technical" and "hands-on", yet I was gullible enough to believe the story, IM-ed it to my wife, and was surprised when she hadn't panicked like I did. I read way too much science fiction. Back to work now! Kind of relieved though.

oolongCat 11y ago
Sigh I did the same, sent her the link as I was reading the article halfway. Once I finished, when they repeated the name Julie I scrolled up, came back here and boom, fiction. lol

bpp 11y ago

Very enjoyable, and almost plausible...

fsiefken 11y ago

Who could be the real author if it's fiction? This Robin Sloan might certainly have the means and the motive. Either it is fiction, with a plot which is not to far fetched as any company with these kinds of databases can exploit it in the prediction market. "Information is power and currency in the virtual world we inhabit" Billy Idol once said. It's also an important element in Asimov's Foundation series: extrapolating history through psychohistory. Or it's not entirely fiction or perhaps even factious. I remember Rupert Sheldrake mention in one of his mindboggling talks that he wanted to investigate potential psi effects on a much larger scale and was in talks with Google. If there were 'results' pertaining to precognition (or AI enhanced precognition of the crowd) would the public get to know about it?

state 11y ago

Worth noting that Robin is also the author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore [1] that others around HN would probably find pretty enjoyable. I thought it was quite fun. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Bookstore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Books...

Cenk 11y ago
+1 on this, a great book
- Falcon9 11y ago
  I enjoyed it, though less than Ready Player One which has a similar vibe. I was amused that my Google-employed friend docked it a star for showing Google as a nerdy utopia which she did not feel began to accurately reflect the truth of the company.
  - state 11y ago
    Interesting! It was the exact opposite for me. Couldn't get through Ready Player One, but couldn't quite put my finer on exactly why.
    - Falcon9 11y ago
      The writing is poorer in RPO, but the exuberance and energy of the story itself made that not matter for me.
rpgmaker 11y ago
Interesting, I will check it out. Thanks for the reference!
turar 11y ago
Yes, it all seems like a very creative marketing scheme.
lt 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

cavisne 11y ago

Great piece of fiction, it feels like the author works at Facebook or knows someone who does though. That said, what's described could possibly be done with existing technology . Could Facebook accurately move forward statements like "next Monday is going to be massive for Volkswagen" over time you could weight private messages from people who work for regulators higher. For more public events like an apple launch they could predict a spike easily just by all the media mentions of the date

avipars 11y ago

I think April Fools has come early this year

orblivion 11y ago
Oh thank God they didn't waste this story on that.

chrome_x 11y ago

Even when you feel its fiction, it just sounds like something that I could be reading off tomorrow's newspapers. This was a great read!

chrome_x 11y ago

Even when you feel its fiction, it just sounds like something that I could be reading off tomorrow's newspapers. This was a great read!

ktusznio 11y ago

This piece was written by Robin Sloan, who is an author of fiction. :) Great story.

jkkorn 11y ago

The big short, Facebook edition. Entertaining read.

Mahn 11y ago

Fiction, but that was entertaining. To the author, you should probably consider writing a book in this style :)

jat850 11y ago
The author did write a fiction book, Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store. It's decent enough :)

ChuckMcM 11y ago

It is a fun story and one that comes at the question of "how much data is too much data and is too hard to resist?" Something that anyone who has worked in a popular Internet facing application has to come terms with. I found 'Manna'[1] a more compelling emergent AI story, but the data as predictor aspects of this story have their own particular flavor. One of the things that immediately flashed it as fiction for me was that the graphs had all the same shape, which if you've ever looked at trend graphs you will see they might all have a similar outlier quality to them but they build and sustain in different ways. At Blekko (a search engine company) we did an interesting study on query traffic to see if you could "predict" the "hallmark" holidays based on search queries. The idea was that holidays like Valentines Day come up, people start thinking about plans or gifts before that, could we advise an advertiser when the "peak" planning session was so that they could maximize the impact of their advertising spend by focusing it during the peak? And if so what sorts of queries were people making that indicated they were doing holiday planning? The results were mixed. For things like Valentines it was easy, flowers, chocolates, bed & breakfast reservations sort of rose out of the general query stream, St. Patrick's Day? Not so much. But the data peaks all had different shapes appropriate for different levels of impact (Christmas shopping really starts in August among the back to school traffic for the really prepared). So looking at (and for) "interest spikes" like the ones in the story had a bunch of different shapes, some with slow onset and rapid decline, some with rapid onset and rapid decline, and some which were like soft swells on a breezy afternoon at the beach. That said, the dataset made possible by Facebook's chat stream would be even better for those sorts of investigations. [1] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

daemin 11y ago
I don't want to contemplate a world where Christmas decorations are being put up in stores in August. Them being installed before the start of December is too early already (for me).

jimrandomh 11y ago

Post is fiction. Spoilers follow. . . When I started reading this, I didn't realize it was fiction. When I got to the point where the protagonist left the end-date off a query and saw a spike, I thought it was going to be explained by falsified data and lead into a (real) accusation of providing fraudulent metrics to advertisers. It wouldn't be the first such accusation. But it turned out to be a science-fiction story with unexplained time travel in it. Oh well.

wodenokoto 11y ago
I read 2-3 paragraphs into this and then thought, hmm, maybe I should check the comments first. Thank you.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Does it help that "Crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a point of no return?
  - wodenokoto 11y ago
    I've never heard that before, so it didn't tip me of. I did think the PIG abbreviation was too good to be true and decided that I didn't want to read it if it wasnt anything to do with real life internals
- avian 11y ago
  For once I'm glad I didn't read the comments before reading the story. jimrandomh comment would have spoiled it.
  - jimrandomh 11y ago
    Edited to add a spoiler warning. My apologies to anyone I spoiled the ending for.
    - reneherse 11y ago

djsumdog 11y ago

Haha..it's like a modern campfire ghost story. It's written in a believable manner too. It had me going. I like it. Good job!

EGreg 11y ago

Did John Titor write this?

gizmodo59 11y ago

By seeing the title along with the domain facebook.com I couldn't resist but click. Perfect click bait. Though a good story.

kozikow 11y ago

The first graph immediately looked too fake. Spike after an event would follow something like a log normal distribution, rather than sudden spike and day after back to normal. What's more, the world is not equally using the internet. The uneventful graph should follow something like a sin wave, with the highest point 2x higher than the lowest.

steven2012 11y ago

Identified as fiction because VW isn't traded on the US stock market.

thomble 11y ago

This piece scared the hell out of me (seriously, I felt panicked) until I discerned that it was fiction. Great read.

thadd 11y ago

It still makes me excited about the future of neural networks :)

wallflower 11y ago

This is some fantastic writing. And if you are looking for a longer, slightly better, fictionalized account of Facebook, "The Circle" by David Eggers is a quick, engrossing read and quite hard to tear yourself away from once you begin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

agumonkey 11y ago

I enjoyed the oracle discovery very much and even more its use on themselves. Cute.

dynofuz 11y ago

reminds me of the movie primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29

phpnode 11y ago
Yeah it's really similar, not just in premise, the writing style really reminded me of the narration in that awesome film.

personjerry 11y ago

It's disturbing to me how many comments on here assert that the piece is fiction with little to no evidence. It occurs to me that perhaps Facebook is trying to make it seem like it's fiction by posting on various forums!

tarblog 11y ago
The burden of proof that facebook can see months into the future would be on the poster. No evidence is needed to simply disbelieve this.

mwcampbell 11y ago

Reminds me of this interpretation of Minority Report, only with AI instead of human precogs. http://mjyoung.net/time/minority.html http://mjyoung.net/time/minority.html

dluan 11y ago

Enchilada?

buremba 11y ago
PrestoDB, I guess.

hatsunearu 11y ago

I thought this was real, but man that's probably the best creepypasta I've read in a while.

wallzz 11y ago

I really got scary reading this

api 11y ago

I figured it was fiction by the end, but I couldn't really tell. I can't tell the difference between fiction/satire and reality anymore. The world is too strange.

daveheq 11y ago

Hmm, fact-fic; I wonder who run with it make it an urban legend.

chejazi 11y ago

Facebook has the data to make a solid prediction market. That should be their new biz model - they'll still exploit our data but they won't be degrading our user experience with ads.

KerryJones 11y ago

This could easily be a Black Mirror episode

PSeitz 11y ago

Obvious fiction. Nice story, but I don't like fiction masked as real.

malkia 11y ago

Oh, somehow I've got the Pollyhop breeze from House Of Cards

Thane2600 11y ago

i thought the following into existence yesterday and read the post today. that facebook uses users as a layer of abstraction above one brain. a brain of brains. putting queries (thoughts) into the system (brain) and obtaining a result that is the average of many.

lawnchair_larry 11y ago

Not a very useful submission title.

Animats 11y ago

Aw. It's in the tradition of "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline", by Isaac Asimov.

dekhn 11y ago

Best version of this is still "Vaxen, my children..." http://www.hactrn.net/sra/vaxen.html http://www.hactrn.net/sra/vaxen.html (read to the end, and check the meaning of the date)

mat_jack1 11y ago

It's funny that I've received the notification for the HN500 while I was reading "Mr. Penumbra's 24h bookstore" and noticed it after having finished the book. Clicked the link and the author was Robin Sloan as in the book :) Apart from the funny combination I just chime in to recommend the book here, I think most of you here would enjoy that.

jbscpa 11y ago

Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick as devlopers of Psychohistory would approve. (Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" universe) "Psychohistory is the name of a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, which combined history, psychology and mathematical statistics to create a (nearly) exact science of the behavior of very large populations of people" source: Wikia

lucb1e 11y ago

So I figured this was too epic to be real, but what part of it is real? Is there a team selling statistics from all posts from advertisers? Because that part I believed without a second thought and honestly, it does make sense.