WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/9507/announcing-the-webkit-tracking-prevention-policy/ <comment><USER2> One advantage of Google's dominance and their business model being so reliant on tracking, is that it's become the moat for its competitors: investing energy into tracking protection is a good way for them to gain a competitive advantage over Google, since it's a feature that Google will not be able to copy.

So as long as Google's competitors remain in business, we'll probably at least have some alternatives that take privacy seriously.

<comment><USER3> That's a very interesting point. But tracking-free services won't really have a major mindshare with the general public because you really can't compete with "free."

And there's nothing preventing Google from leveraging Youtube/Gmail/Search to push out other browsers which have tracking protection. Youtube already plays less well with Firefox. Gmail isn't exactly snappy on Safari either.

<comment><USER2> Yes, competing with Google is still a main challenge. Still, Apple seems to be managing by providing the browser for free as a value-add when you buy their hardware, and by preventing other browser engines from running on iOS.

Mozilla's financial dependence on Google is still a major challenge, which they'll hopefully be able to fix before push comes to shove.

Microsoft unfortunately did not seem to be able to financially justify the maintenance of their own engine - though then again, their bet appears to be on Windows integration rather than tracking protection.

<comment><USER4> When MS prevented other browsers from working well in Windows it was slapped with antitrust. Why is it ok when Apple does it? Is it because macos and ios don't have the same level of os monopoly that MS had back then?

<comment><USER2> I'm not saying it's OK when Apple does it; in fact, I've heavily criticised that in the past. I do think, however, that plays a role in Apple's ability to keep WebKit relevant, so it does have positive side-effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actual link to the policy: [https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention- policy/](https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/). One thing that I found interesting was these two quotes:

> Our current anti-tracking mitigations in WebKit are applied universally to > all websites, or based on algorithmic, on-device classification.

> If a party attempts to circumvent our tracking prevention methods, we may > add additional restrictions without prior notice. These restrictions may > apply universally; to algorithmically classified targets; or to specific > parties engaging in circumvention.

Is this trying to say that WebKit will now apply restrictions to specific parties that the project feels is circumventing tracking prevention? I'm all for these features, but only if they're applied evenly and in a clear way. The solution to circumvention should be mitigations against bypasses, not selective enforcement :/

<comment><USER6> We're willing to do specifically targeted mitigations, but only if we have to. So far, nearly everything we've done has been universal or algorithmic. The one exception I know of was to delete tracking data that had already been planted by known circumventers, at the same time as the mitigation to stop anyone else from using that particular hole (HTTPS super cookies).

This is in contrast to Mozilla and Edge tracking protections, which are based on block lists to a significant extent. The disconnect.me list is likely to be trustworthy, but ultimately it is manually curated. We've tried to stay away from using lists like that.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for doing this work. I don't know what effect it has on Apple as a whole but for customers like me it reinforces my loyalty to Apple.

<comment><USER8> Totally true. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is worth reminding that Google Chrome and Chromium no longer use WebKit but Blink.

[https://www.chromium.org/blink](https://www.chromium.org/blink)

<comment><USER10> Wow, thanks. Somehow I missed that. Things move so fast.

<comment><USER11> Google forked WebKit (itself a fork of KDE Konqueror's KHTML). Blink is from 2013. [1]

I wonder how source incompatible these are? Is it difficult to backport? Because KHTML was LGPL the source must remain available. Or is it just that these are API incompatible?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_\(browser_engine\))

<comment><USER12> After the fork both WebKit and Blink were able to delete large amounts of no- longer-shared code. Not half the codebase, but still quite a lot. The fork was a recognition of their having been growing apart for a long time.

Both groups still watch each other's changes, but it's very rare that a patch would apply cleanly.

<comment><USER6> It is still possible to make changes that are mostly reusable for both, but it takes some effort, and some parts (JS engine, multiprocess architecture) are so different that you just have to write it twice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _A first party is a website that a user is intentionally and knowingly visiting, as displayed by the URL field of the browser, and the set of resources on the web operated by the same organization. In practice, we consider resources to belong to the same party if they are part of the same registrable domain: a public suffix plus one additional label. Example: site.example, www.site.example, and s.u.b.site.example are all the same party since site.example is their shared registrable domain._

 _A third party is any party that does not fall within the definition of first party above._

This policy doesn't distinguish between companies that own multiple top level domains. I understand that it may be technically hard to figure out but at the policy level are two domains owned by one company really third party to each other?

Are example.com and example.us really always different first parties? What about apple.com and iCloud.com? Or those redirect chains that happen after logging into google such that login cookies are set on youtube.com and whatnot?

It does say 'in practice' but I feel like this is mistaking a technical limitation that it's hard to know if two TLD's are controlled by the same legal entity for a policy.

<comment><USER6> We have mixed feelings about this. Most people could probably figure out that google.com and google.co.uk are owned by the same entity. And probably many people are aware that youtube.com and google.com are related. But some entities own hundreds of domain names with no clear lexical relationship. I doubt a lot of people would expect TechCrunch.com and huffpost.com to be related and would not really expect to be tracked between the two. So common ownership might not be enough to give users a reasonable expectation of a cross-site relationship.

<comment><USER14> Also, a tracking service could just ask to be CNAMEd to a random subdomain and become everybody's "first party", couldn't it?

<comment><USER6> It could, but access through these various CNAMEs would not give it stateful cross-site tracking ability, since each would be a different Origin. It would be providing a hosted first-party analytics/ads/whatever service within the storage space of the first party.

<comment><USER15> Additionally, people who own the sites can use them together via methods like this, while third parties will have a more difficult time. Bravo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Related to the way they classify between first party and third party (based on domain names, with its subdomain being the same party), the Public Suffix list [1] is a resource of great value. It allows to know when subdomains actually refers to different parties (e.g., xxx.github.io is neither the same party as yyy.github.io nor as github.io).

[1] [https://publicsuffix.org/](https://publicsuffix.org/)

<comment><USER17> The public suffix list is a gross hack. The public-ness of a particular domain level ought to be returned as part of the DNS response instead of being looked up out-of-band.

<comment><USER16> I understand your point, but the problem is that anybody can make their DNS response say whatever they want. And you can't even rely on crypto signatures (e.g. DNSSEC), as the people controlling some DNS records are not necessarily the same as their users.

For example, GitHub controls DNS for *.github.io so if they wanted to track people across all GitHub Pages, they could.

Also, the Public Suffix list isn't something that needs to be polled every time. It is reasonable for browsers to cache it for several days even.

<comment><USER17> I don't think we'd in practice see people lying one way or the other about a particular name level being "public". If GitHub wants to track people across all *.github.io pages, it can, trivially. It controls the infrastructure, after all.

<comment><USER12> _> If GitHub wants to track people across all _.github.io pages, it can, trivially. It controls the infrastructure, after all.*

If WebKit fully implements what they're describing here then GitHub should not be able to use their control of *.github.io to track people across those pages.

<comment><USER16> quotemstr was talking about the infrastructure that they control. It's true that they can track visitors _server-side_ if they want to.

<comment><USER12> With what WebKit describes here GitHub won't be able to tell the difference between:

A: a browser visits both foo.github.io and bar.github.io

B: one browser visits foo.github.io, another visits bar.github.io

Both should look identical to github.io, client side and server side.

(This is not the case today, but my reading of the policy is that they consider all the ways in which it is not the case to need fixing.)

<comment><USER16> What about the IP address and the other information that leaks at network levels that are lower in the stack than what the browser controls?

<comment><USER12> Many people are behind NATs and so share IPs. This can be millions of people; see Wikipedia's documentation on IP banning: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_IP_addresse...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_IP_addresses)

What are you thinking other than IPs? Everything else should be under the browser's control.

<comment><USER16> I don't know. I just suppose that it's not that simple. It is never a good idea to assume something is safe for good. The TTL of the packet could also be used maybe?

Also, there are also many people that are not behind a NAT. I've always had a public IP address at home, for example. Plus NAT may become less used because _insert rant about NAT and IPv6_.

Anyway, it's good that browsers make all they can to ensure privacy :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would "Sign In With Apple" be considered a "Privileged Third Party" if they make sure it works but break other Single Sign On providers as an "Unintended Impact"?

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure what you mean by this; WebKit Tracking Prevention doesn't break third-party login. Third-party login works by handing a token back to the first party, who then stores it directly and validates it on the backend. After the initial login with the third party, the third party isn't involved anywhere that the browser can see. And the initial login happens in a browser window that's navigated directly to the third party, making them the first party for the login form (and therefore able to access any saved login data from previous logins).

In fact, this WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy explicitly states that third- party login is implied consent for the third party to identify the user as having the same identity in these multiple places.

<comment><USER20> TBH a browser prevents Medium from showing a Google iframe in the top-right corner with "Hi geofft, I know your name is geofft, please click the login button geofft," that would be delightful....

<comment><USER5> I'm not quite sure about this, but I think Safari will prevent cross-site tracking in this case until you interact with the thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there a specific list of the web features that are being restricted? I couldn't find it in the document, and to me pretty much _any_ web feature could be used for fingerprinting. It would be good to have a roadmap for workarounds developers will need to implement to keep legitimate applications working on Webkit.

<comment><USER6> Parties that are motivated to do tracking on the web are very creative. Too creative to list every feature they could use. That said, our goal is to as much as possible remove tracking without removing capabilities for non- tracking use cases.

<comment><USER21> I appreciate the efforts, and thanks for replying. My fears are mostly for performant web apps (e.g. games, 60hz+ refresh) where timers are inexplicably inaccurate on one web engine with no documentation explaining why. I hope the restrictions are more subtle, and I understand the desire to keep them somewhat secret this early on.

<comment><USER6> The limitation on high precision timers isn't due to privacy, it's because of the Spectre/Meltdown family of attacks. We'd like to lift those restrictions, at least conditionally, and are looking into it. I appreciate the note about your use case.

(BTW requestAnimationFrame should give you precise callbacks at the screen's refresh rate, and is probably better than using timer-related APIs.)

<comment><USER21> Fundamentally Spectre is a privacy issue, just not in the tracking sense here, right - it's a side channel by which memory can be leaked.

Anyway, the reason I brought up timers is that things like getting the screen's refresh rate, or measuring how long a canvas render takes with a particular font, (etc.) are all data points that can be used in a fingerprinting profile. I worry about the negative impacts of mitigations against those kind of measurements. I don't think it's possible to catalog all the various routes by which data could be inferred by timing. If things like this are in the scope of what Webkit is trying to prevent, I'm fairly nervous.

Off topic, but just for some game industry perspective: often we don't want to sequence exactly at the refresh rate (especially if it's variable or frames are being dropped) in contexts like logic loops or physics simulations that need to happen at specific frequencies regardless of how quickly frames are drawn. For example, synchronizing a client "tick rate" with a game server's requires millisecond precision.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the info. For dual use technologies we are considering a machine learning approach to identifying fingerprinters (as opposed to legit clients). Also, to my knowledge, screen refresh rate is not currently a top fingerprinting vector.

As for Spectre, we treat it primarily as a security threat. It can admittedly be privacy invasive but it would be awkward to use it for tracking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I expect that tracking will just move to being proxied server side. It will be more annoying for the people setting it up but services will spring up to help. Little will change in the advertising and tracking space.

<comment><USER23> That annoyance may be enough to keep many actors from just plugging 10 random trackers into their sites, especially when it means running code from less- than-trust-worthy parties on their own servers instead of their user machines.

At the very minimum it aligns incentives better for developers to think about these things.

And with IPv6 privacy extensions IP addresses will also be less useful for server-side tracking.

<comment><USER24> "IPv6 privacy extensions...."

I recall these extensions are just optional. How many implementations actually implement these extensions? I recall Windows 10 had this broken for a year and almost nobody noticed...

<comment><USER23> They were broken in the sense that the preferred address would revert back to the permanent address. IPv6 still worked.

<comment><USER24> If the address reverts to the permanent address, than the IP can still be useful for tracking, right?

<comment><USER23> Yes, that was the issue that was fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just want to say thanks. I use Safari by choice and feel good about it, and this ongoing effort is part of the reason.

</comment><comment><USER26> So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web?

I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

<comment><USER27> I came here to say exactly this. Most profits for online ventures come from retargeted ads, and most businesses lose money on cold audiences just so that they can build retargeting audiences. As a result, when tracking dies, so does most online ad spend.

I am really curious what the web itself (outside of apps) will look like in a world where the quality of content and services implodes because of the inability of publishers to generate revenue to pay for it. You may have your privacy, but you may also not have much left to do on the web. This is definitely a "be careful what you wish for" scenario.

<comment><USER28> Not to suggest offense, but I wonder how old you are? I may not quite be a greybeard just yet, but I remember being enraptured by the content on the internet long before it was caught in the stranglehold of advertisers. Big- budget affairs would be more scarce, but there would be no dearth of content.

<comment><USER27> I am old enough to have seen the Internet emerge. You were enraptured by content and services provided by companies that lost billions of dollars, courtesy of investors, during the dot com era. Those investors provided that capital in large part because they knew how lucrative it could be if online advertising became as efficient and effective as it is today. You will not see that kind of subsidy in the post-ad world.

<comment><USER5> > You were enraptured by content and services provided by companies that lost > billions of dollars, courtesy of investors, during the dot com era.

What about the independent blogs?

<comment><USER27> Of course anyone who wanted to spend their time back then doing what we now call blogging, who wanted to pay for their own hosting, could have done so. However, I am not sure that the ability to read the thoughts of independent bloggers was a major driving force behind the mass adoption of the Internet. It was quality content and services, subsidized by investors who for the most part hoped companies could generate revenue from advertising, that drew the public to the Internet.

<comment><USER29> Yes, and the companies who are making products which are actually good own the whole ecosystem, end to end, like google and Facebook, and will be almost totally unaffected by this change or future changes.

It's _everyone else_ who makes click bait ad spam that will suffer; and frankly, why should we care?

Gmail isn't going to disappear.

Kotaku or TechCrunch might... or maybe some of those spam cooking sites. ...but, seriously? The whole internet exist because of personalised tracking > big marketing spend?

Come on.

You're vastly overstating the case here: yes, there would be some impact, no it wouldn't really make a big difference at this point.

Maybe if you go back in time, it would, but you can't, so it's a mute point.

What's important is where we want to go from here, and personalised ad tracking driving content farms of fake cooking videos isn't really the ideal "endstate" for the internet imo.

...even if some spammy companies I don't like end up going out of business, along with some companies I do like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am not caught up on browser engines, but WebKit is mostly just Safari and iOS browsers right?

<comment><USER5> WebKit is also used in a number of other places, such as GNOME Web and browsers for many consoles.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, the Gtk+ and WPE ports, as well as Sony's Windows port, are the most active after the Apple-maintained ones.

<comment><USER31> Sony's Windows Port?

<comment><USER32> Thanks to these comments today I am finally running WebKit on Windows for preliminary Safari compatibility testing purposes.

This blog[1] explains how to get Windows builds[2] from the WebKit Build Archives on S3 that require Apple Application Support[3].

[1] [https://medium.com/@alSkachkov/how-to-load-the-latest- webkit...](https://medium.com/@alSkachkov/how-to-load-the-latest-webkit-on- windows-962a9219c1e1)

[2] [https://build.webkit.org/builders/Apple%20Win%2010%20Release...](https://build.webkit.org/builders/Apple%20Win%2010%20Release%20%28Build%29)

[3] 7-zip the iTunes installer to extract & install just AppleApplicationSupport.msi [https://www.apple.com/itunes/download/win64](https://www.apple.com/itunes/download/win64)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I only with that with the advent of all these different anti-tracking movements, that there was a clear, documented way for "good faith actors" that require technology like localstorage.

We've worked really hard to implement a embedded experience via an iframe, but it's becoming increasingly difficult for our software to walk on egg shells as to not trigger it being labelled as a tracker (as it is definitely not, we only utilize localstorage for storing authentication details). Combine that with the fact that without using cookies, there isn't any way for us to support AMP sites, which often incorrectly labels us as a third party tracker.

edit: I do realize that the WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy essentially is a guide of how it works, I'm mostly interested in a "this is how to work within these defined walls to not be flagged as harmful"

<comment><USER6> Sounds like we need to expand WebKit's implementation of Storage Access API to cover LocalStorage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The fact that this makes behavioural targeting even harder makes me very happy.

What makes me even more happy is that this helps to eliminate the argument stating that 3p cookies can be replaced with heuristics/non-deterministic targeting. So, instead of assigning resources to just another way of targeting users (e.g. hacks, fingerprinting) a developer/PM can already say that these approaches will be prevented in the exact same way. Any further work in this direction would be pointless.

Ideally, we'd put more focus on contextual targeting, which is arguably more useful, significantly less creepy and less dubious from the ethical point of view.

I just wish Microsoft moved in the same direction with IE. So far they've been more quiet on that subject than Google. That's wishful thinking, I know.

</comment><comment> awinter-py does anyone have insight to the webkit governance side of this? is this a case of apple fighting their ads battle against google in upstream FOSS?

<comment><USER35> Google hasn't been involved with WebKit since they forked it to create Blink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Given the definition of cross-site tracking and the note on single-site analytics in Unintended Impacts, is it safe to say this will impact all site analytics tools served by a 3rd party (eg Google Analytics, but really almost all "drop-in" frontend analytics)?

<comment><USER37> Google analytics still works since it uses first party cookies but you lose data on repeat vs new visits.

There are ways to make GA work around these limitations, but it requires more work than just dropping it in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That surveillance economy strongly reminds me Tobacco industry. It was cool and trendy until everyone woke up and regulated it to death, as it should be. GDPR is just the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good thing Qt ditched awful WebKit for glorious Chrome. Tracking is "mm mm!" good. It also helps make sure Google's predatory non-compliance and Google- board optimizations continue to spread through all websites.

#ThanksQt

</comment><comment><USER39> Strange for a page espousing anti-tracking [0] to load media in from apple.com. Granted Mozilla's page [1] is even a worse offender with google- analytics and newrelic embeds.

Really makes you think what really drives the underlying narrative for such initiatives at corporates if not sabotaging competitors? OpenDNS founder, u/davidu, pointed out that DNS over HTTPS, something that takes aim at trackers and advocates privacy, also, in fact, had support of BigAdTech [2].

The content blocker ecosystem has been fighting the dragnet for a long time without expecting anything in return save for examples like Brave and Adblock. It'd be a shame to see those subject to embrace, extend, extinguish.

> And we will create new web technologies to re-enable specific non-harmful > practices without reintroducing tracking capabilities.

I wonder what this means. Another standard that AdTech can rally behind? Or, Apple's way of wrestling control away from AdTech? Remember, not long ago Apple disallowed 3p browsers for a long time, on AppStore...and they are likely going to act as gate-keepers here, as well?

> we will typically prioritize user benefits over preserving current website > practices. We believe that that is the role of a web browser, also known as > the user agent.

Where have I heard that before? [3]

And now... what about apps on AppStore? When do we get anti-tracking measures there? Pretty soon, would be really great, because that's a present and clear danger, in my eyes, wrt privacy... but one that hurts Apple's bottomline?

[0] [https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention- policy/](https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/)

[1] [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Anti_tracking_policy](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Anti_tracking_policy)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18257318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18257318)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542656)

<comment><USER40> At least for your second point [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14)

<comment><USER39> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If this tweet is accurate, Apple's choices here are pretty hard to explain as anything but "leverage / abuse mobile phone monopoly to kneecap competitors", especially because nowhere in this document does it actually describe how this makes users' lives better in any concrete, specific way

[https://mobile.twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1161779661644...](https://mobile.twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1161779661644300293)

<comment><USER19> > _Google Analytics_

Website analytics should not rely on cross-site tracking. Breaking any cross- site tracking ability of GA is unambiguously good for users.

> _Google Ads conversion tracking_

Apple already proposed a mechanism of privacy-protecting click attribution. If Google doesn't want to use that, it's because they don't respect your privacy. Again, unambiguously good for users.

> _Using same login across different sites like Gmail & YouTube_

The only way this is "broken" that I can see is the user has to log in separately to each site. Which seems fine to me. In fact, this is a good thing; just because I log into Gmail with one account doesn't mean that's what I want to use for YouTube.

<comment><USER36> I don't disagree with your note on cross-site analytics (though there are some in my mind valid use cases, such as tracking conversions when the payment process occurs on a separate domain), but the tracking policy is fairly vague as to the impact on single-site.

<comment><USER6> Our goal is not to break single-site analytics, and if it gets affected as an unintended consequence, we will try to come up with alternate solutions.

<comment><USER36> Noted--thanks for the reply, both here and to my other comment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An attempt to create the highest resolution real-time map of global temperature - <AUTHOR> http://blog.forecast.io/project-quicksilver/

<comment><USER2> Celsius please. But besides that: Very nice, very clear and way better than supid sun and cloud icons with temperatures next to them over some vague areas.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely.

Only about 320 million [1] out of 7 billion people still use fahrenheit.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#Usage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#Usage)

<comment><USER4> It's less than the percentage of the world still using IE6!

<comment><USER5> Even if normalized for people that actually have Internet access? Honest question.

<comment><USER6> The IE6 share is going to be higher when normalized for people with Internet access, so the comparison is going to hold by a wider margin.

<comment><USER5> Doh. You're right. Not sure what I was think at that moment :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am proud of forecast.io for sticking with a 'normal' color palette here, rather than the non-standard purples they have chosen for radar; as a meteorologist the purple radar hurts my brain, but this map is completely cool.

Also there are definitely some quality control issues with the RTMA data, so you can bump into the garbage-in-garbage-out issue with it, but overall, this is a very nice start to something that could ultimately be quite useful.

<comment><USER8> Also: Validation is tricky, since we can't just compare the output to ground station observations, as we incorporate ground station data into the model. Eventually I want to generate alternative versions that randomly exclude specific stations so we can use them for comparison.

<comment><USER9> I think RTMA already includes ground station measurements, so analyzing performance using a leave-N-out strategy wouldn't be a good verification:

[http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/txt_descriptions/RTMA_doc.shtml](http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/txt_descriptions/RTMA_doc.shtml) [http://eamcweb4.usfs.msu.edu/mm5-case/RAWS/RTMA%20papers/pon...](http://eamcweb4.usfs.msu.edu/mm5-case/RAWS/RTMA%20papers/pondeca_2012_RTMA.pdf)

Instead, I think you'd need to find temperature measurements that are completely independent and use them for verification. Along this line, I'm not sure how refitting the data to ground stations would produce a better match anywhere except at those ground stations (overfitting). Or are you using ground stations that are truly independent?

<comment><USER8> When we compare it to RTMA, we leave out RTMA from the list of data sources. Likewise, eventually I'd like to do the same with a subset of the ground stations we use.

(The problem with finding completely independent measurements is that we'd want to use them as an input!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty impressive, i wonder what the update interval and source is.

[http://www.mapbox.com/labs/forecast/temperature/](http://www.mapbox.com/labs/forecast/temperature/) I really like the interface, even the zoom buttons could be removed or hidden as you can scrool-zoom.

Make the temperature in Celsius please!

EDIT: There seem to be a problem with the algorithms, the largest zoom displays colder temperatures( look at the temperature map ).

Largest zoom,

[http://i.imgur.com/GVt3iSy.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/GVt3iSy.jpg)

Normal zoom, picture was resized by me

[http://i.imgur.com/t1GgrOM.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/t1GgrOM.jpg)

<comment><USER8> The color palette adjusts based on the zoom level in order to improve contrast. Roughly a bazillion people pointed out that it's "broken", so I guess that was a dumb call on my part!

<comment><USER11> The legend doesn't update properly, so it really is broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This isn't a map. This is a simulation. You made a simulation, and are outputting the results.

This teaches you nothing whatsoever except that your model has pretty colors.

Next thing someone is going to take these results, use them as input data for a new model, then send the results of that new model back as data for the first.

<comment><USER9> _This isn 't a map._

What would a better map be? Is your point that they are doing interpolation on something that is already interpolated? Or are you implying that there is no way to create a map of temperature using only point measurements? I would like to know how well this data matches the raw station measurements (and verification measurements) but I think it's a decent visualization of likely real time temperature across a region.

<comment><USER12> > Is your point that they are doing interpolation on something that is already > interpolated?

Yes.

> but I think it's a decent visualization of likely real time temperature > across a region.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but to me this is a 2D visualization of a simulation. But it is not a map.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hmm, there are some superlatives ("highest resolution") in here I'm not sure about. Lots of groups create maps like this for modeling purposes. One for sea surface temperature is:

[http://ourocean.jpl.nasa.gov/SST/](http://ourocean.jpl.nasa.gov/SST/)

This is a blended product (i.e., multi-instrument, and gaps filled) with 1km resolution. There is also a 1km MODIS land surface temperature data product:

[http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dataprod/dataproducts.php?MO...](http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dataprod/dataproducts.php?MOD_NUMBER=11)

Neither of these is real-time (more like daily).

<comment><USER8> "Real-time" is the key. As far as we know, there isn't another real-time global data product that is this high resolution.

And while we actually use MODIS data as an input to our temperature correction model, it is, as you mentioned, land surface temperature, whereas our map represents near-surface air temperature (i.e., what you'd get in a normal weather report).

<comment><USER13> Good point about "near-surface air temperature".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just for the fun of it, for those of you in the bay area, here's a surface temperature _forecast_ for today, 16:00 PST. It is from the forecast site that I've been maintaining for some time now - [http://www.norcalsoaring.org/BLIP/BYRON/index.html](http://www.norcalsoaring.org/BLIP/BYRON/index.html)

[http://raspbucket.s3-website-us- west-2.amazonaws.com/BYRON/F...](http://raspbucket.s3-website-us- west-2.amazonaws.com/BYRON/FCST/sfctemp.curr.1600lst.d2.png)

(Based on 3km/750m WRF model run two times a day based on the NCEP data. )

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if they are aware of the super high resolution weather satellites that NOAA is putting up into orbit and will come on line, I believe, end of this year. I was talking to a high level NOAA official on the technical side and he was saying that it will essentially provide a remarkable, i.e., revolutionary increase in prediction accuracy and be able to provide on the ground climate level predictions.

<comment><USER16> I believe most of what they do is aggregation, including of NOAA's data, so this may just improve forecast.io.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice work!

There seems to be a typo in the Stats (my emphasis):

>Pixels: 16-bit unsigned ints, representing " _deci_ -kelvin" (i.e., divide by _100_ to get the temperature in Kelvin).

It should either be centikelvin or divide by 10.

On another note: It would be cool if you could hover over a certain area to see its temperature.

<comment><USER8> Oops, it should read centikelvin. Fixed! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Please use Celsius or at least show both.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't get where the data is coming from. A lot of it must be interpolated.

</comment><comment><USER20> Amazing stuff! It's things like this that makes me proud to be a developer.

This leaves me wondering, how does one go about designing such a system? Are you planning on doing a technical write up soon?

</comment><comment><USER21> I didn't realize how hot eastern china was!

<comment><USER22> Most of China's 3million+ cities are on the east coast, the west is relative unpopulated. I was there in November and while the results of this map shouldn't have surprised me, considering the extreme city expansions I saw, I was still very surprised to see that half the country is at the same level as Saudi Arabia!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In lowest zoom level, if you scroll the map, it snaps back to the original center after scrolling fades out.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a cool project, but...

>>It regenerates every hour, providing a constantly updating snapshot of air temperature around the globe.

Once per hour is not "real-time." It's "once per hour."

<comment><USER25> Having done a lot of real-time programming myself, it's really in the eye of the beholder. And there are snobs who think that nothing less than several kilohertz is real-time.

But historically, "real-time" means "not batch mode" \- where batch jobs are executed whenever there are available resources, in an unpredictable manner.

Real-time is responding to real world input on some periodic schedule that is appropriate. In this case, one hour sounds fine for a world temperature map. Are you expecting to make minute-to-minute decisions based on the global temperature distribution?

Local temperature I'd expect to be updated faster, but really it's a matter of your use-case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> very cool</comment>


Bitcoin Survey. Stability - Security - Adoption - <AUTHOR> http://visual.ly/bitcoin-survey?fb_action_ids=10153525898080654&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B1436134936614509%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.likes%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

<comment><USER2> A backwards time-series and expressing percentages as a ratio of font sizes? What?</comment>


Show HN: RoastMe.io – A neural network that has learned to insult - <AUTHOR> http://roastme.io <comment><USER2> Here's how I suspect this thing works:

[1]: Crawl reddit.com/r/roastme

[2]: Map images to an array of "roast" comments

[3]: Compare input photo to all images from [2]

[4]: Return top three roasts from most similar image

Pretty neat, though! I've got to caution people on sharing this with coworkers as there's a very high risk of NSFW racial/ethnic/gender humor.

<comment><USER3> I posted in r/roastme about a year ago, and when I uploaded my photo it said the same comments that were in the thread. Funny that it recognized me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "504 Gateway Time-out / nginx/1.10.1 (Ubuntu)" what kind of insult is that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahaha, we're just getting too much traffic. We've added more compute, should be better now!

<comment><USER5> Hi, Could you reveal what you used to train the model ?

The subreddit ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the subreddit was used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "You look like Kevin Smith fucked Mario and then you developed a heroin addiction. "

"Your face is rounder than the "O" in your sign "

"I thought we already roasted Saddam Hussein."

The image I uploaded:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Einstein...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Einstein_patentoffice.jpg)

<comment> squeaky-clean > You look like Kevin Smith fucked Mario and then you developed a heroin > addiction

Awful but hilarious! I tried googling this one with quotes and couldn't find any matches for the whole or large portions of the jokes, unlike some of the other jokes in this thread. Is this one an original joke?

<comment><AUTHOR> It might be! If a joke makes less sense, it probably is original.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It gave me

        1. Be Black
        2. Get Welfare
        3. Ask people to roast you.

Fully-automated racism.

<comment><USER8> > Fully-automated racism.

I'm not sure what else one would expect from an automated "roasting" whose input is a photo.

It's not like it's working from a bio or CV.

<comment><USER7>
        > your hair is dumb and your glasses make you look like a frog

vs

        > you're black, so you must be on welfare

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes spurious usage of machine learning is "cute" and can be massaged by its implementer to come across as a valid instance of more art than science. Other times, it manages to let people who want to play with off-the-shelf libraries muddy the waters of what really comprises a quite difficult specialization. Other times still, it helps to reinforce some of the more atrocious biases of its source material and hold up another needless mirror to the uglier sides of humanity that no one is ignorant of.

Your project has managed to both. Well done. Have you heard about this really cool game called Cards Against Humanity?

<comment><AUTHOR> Username checks out ;)

We had three main intentions with this project, two of them which you've mentioned. This was a hackathon project, and we decided not to go the generic route of what usually wins at such events. We wanted to have fun, and enjoy the process of creation. We ended up insulting our judges, and came last place :)

<comment><USER10> Thats hilarious! The last hackathon I was in went similarly: we built an ML- powered sign language app and lost to something a team copied from an Instructable lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well it thinks Kirk Douglas [1] has a chin beard. The other insults eluded my understanding:

"well the good news is, youll totally be able to pay off all that medical debt with your art degree."

"You remind me of when I draw faces on my thumb."

"Oh fuck man, you have that disease that makes you think that a chin beard looks acceptable. Are you alright? How are your parents taking it?"

[1] [https://www.biography.com/.image/t_share/MTE4MDAzNDEwNTA3MTA...](https://www.biography.com/.image/t_share/MTE4MDAzNDEwNTA3MTA1ODA2/kirk- douglas-9278036-1-402.jpg)

<comment><USER12> All three are top comments here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/comments/4h1hj2/so_i_heard_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/comments/4h1hj2/so_i_heard_they_roast_eggs_for_passover_preheat/?st=jdepxw2m&sh=eb3ecba0)

So much for a neural network.

<comment><USER13> Maybe it's just trained on full comments, not the composing words?

<comment><USER14> So it finds similar images to a person and shows those comments?

<comment><USER15> Combined into one image for a quick comparison: [https://i.imgur.com/ery4SA1.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ery4SA1.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am of Indian origin, I got:

      "Uh yeah, let me get 20 on pump 3 please. Thanks goopta."
      "You look like you date rape goats."
      "Sorry you got in trouble for making that clock."

Automated racism! :o

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I uploaded a picture of my Chinese friend with a phone and it said "I thought you'd be sick of that after so many years at the factory" and "The space between your eyes could fill the entire great wall of China"

It does seem quite racist. Which is even more uncomfortable if that's unintentional, if you think about it.

<comment><USER18> The AI is fed from the roastme subreddit, where these kinds of comments will appear consentually at times (to my knowledge), so it's not surprising the AI picked up on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Rude

(but accurate [https://i.imgur.com/kCPdTTB.png](https://i.imgur.com/kCPdTTB.png))

</comment><comment><USER20> If you are able to reveal something of the architecture, is this just classifying the image based off other similar images from r/roastme, and then outputting a random insult that was deemed acceptable for that classification of image? Like there's no NLP happening here, correct?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a very generic off-the-shelf CNN + LSTM, with a few bells and whistles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not responding for me right now. HN did it in, maybe?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeap, traffic is high. Our GPUs are whirring. Keep trying!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not bad.

[https://i.imgur.com/qaK3x1B.png](https://i.imgur.com/qaK3x1B.png)

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this thing detect ethnicity? Because the roasts were on point.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's usually racist.

<comment><USER23> Yeah I tested a few images and it seems pretty accurate in detecting race/ethnicity. I wonder where they collected all of the insults from.

<comment><USER24> [https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/](https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How did you set up your back end here? (what's taking the photos and running the algorithms on them)

Is there something off the shelf you've used?

Great site by the way, I'm impressed.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is awesome, thanks for sharing. I've been doing it with a few friends and we all love it.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can you link to the reddit comments? It'd be interesting to see the photos they are roasting

</comment><comment><USER28> Well i tried it with and without glasses.

It really homes in on glasses...

</comment><comment><USER29> How do you know people upload pictures of themselves? What if this becomes a tool for bullies?

</comment><comment><USER30> Wont load for me

<comment><USER31> Seems to only work in Chrome :/

Besides that: Hilarious site!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> this web site it a piece of garbage. literally not a site.

<comment><USER32> it was a roast people</comment></comment>


YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for $1 Billion? - <AUTHOR> http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/youtube-to-acquire-videogame-streaming-service-twitch-for-1-billion-sources-1201185204/ <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that Twitch partially became popular because it _wasn 't YouTube_, and gamers could stream without content restrictions (e.g. copyright and region)

Miraculously, this could end up making YouTube comments _even worse_.

<comment><USER3> I think it's important to take notice that Twitch's recent problems (the buffering problem, chat problems, the delay in general) are problems with their ability to cater to the big tournaments which causes me to really not be all that surprised if this turns out to be true.

The ways they've handled the tournaments have really disillusioned many streamers. I don't know if there's any better way for them to have dealt with the scaling problems they faced as I can only imagine the work that must go into supporting a live stream, with real time chat, that has 100k+ viewers (and for some of the bigger tournaments that's a small number). Something like a 30s+ delay in the stream makes it very difficult to have real interactions between the streamer and the viewers which is particularly bad for smaller streams. For the big guys it doesn't matter as much since their interaction is less back-and-forth and more broadcaster in style and there's absolutely no interaction with the tournaments.

The point is that if this is true it really doesn't surprise me at all. And whether or not it is I think there's definitely an opening for some serious competition to Twitch by making a service that is essentially an exact copy but from a business focus standpoint caters more towards the small-to-medium sized streamer and their audience.

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure the delay in general is due to them moving to a new system about a year or so ago.

<comment><USER5> It was to fix stuttering. Specifically in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's sad. Less competition, worse both for those watching and making content.

Makers of (gaming-related) content for YouTube – worried about the future of YouTube – have often already been relying on Twitch to provide them some stability, to stand on more than one leg. This competition also insured that YouTube couldn't do literally anything. Makers of content had a place to go if things didn't work out.

This is a potentially great move for Google and more specifically YouTube, but I don't see any upside for anyone else (ignoring those profiting from the sale for the moment).

<comment><USER7> Don't forget Kamcord, the other player in this space (and another YC company). Twitch isn't everything.

<comment><USER8> I'm an avid gamer and this is the first time I've heard about Kamcord, so that's must mean something.

<comment><USER9> Kamcord is Mobile Gaming focused first, whereas Twitch is on PC~

<comment><USER10> Who streams mobile games?

<comment><USER11> Who fucking _plays_ mobile games?

<comment><USER12> About 75% of the people on my daily commute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congrats to Justin and everyone involved in Twitch!

As a side note: most of my friends are LoL fans, and I seriously believe professional gaming will be one of the major professional sports in the next few years, perhaps on the level of Hockey. They're super normal, social, extroverted people - yet they'll interrupt a trip to make us watch a LoL match on Twitch. They all came of it independently too.

I really believe Twitch could have been a big, independent company. They did what they thought was right and I NEVER want to be that guy that craps on acquisitions, but I wish this one hadn't happened. I was rooting for Twitch big time. Still, very happy for them, hope YouTube does this right! I assume if everyone doesn't Riot (pun intended) the technical chops at YouTube will actually make Twitch a much more pleasant place.

<comment><USER14> Same here.

As a user of Twitch, I do not want this to happen. As a person with common sense, if I had an acquisition offer for $1 billion on the table, I'd sell out so freaking fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Compared to recent other aquisitions, 1 billion somehow seems like a bargain. Twitch has clear potential to play an important role in the future in TV and entertainment. Compare that to i.e. Snapchat...

<comment><USER16> $1 billion but _all in cash_. Sensible sellers...

<comment><USER15> Well, the buyer also happens to have plenty cash laying around in offshore locations, waiting to be used for things like this.

<comment><USER17> Can offshore cash be used for acquisitions without being taxed on repatriation?

<comment><USER18> it'll be taxed on repatriation, but it doesn't have to be repatriated to be used. if you buy something with foreign cash, it's the seller's job to get it into their country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is now probably Y Combinator's largest acquisition!

<comment><USER9> Biggest out of any incubator ever, if it happens -- beating out Angelpad's Mopub being acquired by Twitter for 350M.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting that YouTube is acquiring Twitch and not Google. I realize that's sort of a smallish point, but it's interesting how that might be announced officially. Google obviously owns YouTube, but in terms of branding and identity and control, it's interesting.

<comment><USER21> I think this is not a smallish point. It implies that Twitch will be under YouTube, and not kept independent in parallel to YouTube inside Google. That says something about the plans for integration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One summer night in 2007, I found myself playing poker with Justin Kan in a living room of the "Y-Combinator" building in San Francisco. Emmett Shear may have been there, but amongst the crowd in the living room was Steve Huffman, who was playing around with a new electric guitar, and Alexis Ohanian who was doodling on paper. I didn't know what reddit was at the time, nor did I know that the acquisition by Conde Nast had occurred -- I only connected the dots a several years later.

After seeing this headline, I can't help but think that the power of networks is real, as is the results of deliberate, focused dedication to one's direction and craft. Pretty awesome stuff, congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER23> WSJ confirms talks -- "early stage" "deal isn't imminent"

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230442270...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304422704579570601736756672?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories&mg=reno64-wsj)

</comment><comment><USER24> Twitch is massive in the Eve Online community along with other MMOs precisely because it isn't Youtube and allows streamer to play whatever background music they chose.

I can a fairly substantial move away from it _if_ Youtube begin applying the policy that removes all audio, if even a snippet of something copyrighted is detected.tracks for

</comment><comment><USER25> If confirmed, this would definitely be a smart decision. Twitch will be extremely important in ecosystem development as e-sports break in the mainstream worldwide. Lots of engaged eyeballs.

Google near monopoly on online video market bugs me though, community at large would benefit from multiple players and more competition.

<comment><USER26> One will argue that 'e-sports' already peaked in 2002.

<comment><USER27> As time goes on the non-gamer generations die off. The gamers grow richer and their willingness to pay increase. The new generations will probably also game.

<comment><USER28> You're forgetting that people grow out of gaming. Once you have a job and a family, gaming just isn't as fun anymore.

<comment><USER29> It's still fun, you just don't have the time anymore (I feel really bad if I take out a 3-hour chunk of time to play a game, or a real-time game which demands 1-hour of continuous focus).

Much as I don't play football anymore but still watch it, I also follow some games :) and so do many friends in their late 30s / 40s with families (mostly the same ones as others in the thread, like Magic: The Gathering, League of Legends, Hearthstone, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My son watches a lot of Starcraft tournaments on Twitch and his immediate response was that YouTube might actually improve the infrastructure so that they could handle streaming to everyone who wants to watch.

<comment><USER31> Their infrastructure is good enough, they're able to stream to 180k+ viewers in HD without problems.

<comment><USER30> Big tournaments often refuse HD connections and revert to 720p or 480p ... it's not our Internet connection.

<comment><USER32> 720p is HD though.

<comment><USER33> Even if it's technically 'hd' 720p is still an ugly rescaling experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wow - what an amazing ride to acquisition. To think it all started when Justin strapped a camera to his head! Congrats guys!

</comment><comment><USER35> This is disappointing. YouTube's 'community' is extremely toxic, I can imagine if Twitch is rolled into it, it'll die a long, slow death.

<comment><USER36> Twitch community is also pretty toxic.

Most of the time the biggest streamers put their chats in sub mode (paying supporters) to avoid it.

<comment><USER37> The Twitch chat is half the value of the stream-watching experience for me.

The "character" of the Twitch chat is valuable. The manically insane hivemind, with all the juvenilia and "shittiness" that is inherent to it, is a roiling primordial stew of genuinely worthwhile culture. It's the birthplace of memes in both the vulgar sense and the higher sense of that word, and, to me, feels like 4chan in its early days. The ecstatic chaos of the chat during an unmanageably large event is a unique and deeply valuable thing.

It was why Twitch Plays Pokemon was such a massive phenomenon. Channels which set their chats to subscriber-only mode are shooting themselves in the foot.

I've always desperately craved a comparable live mass chat experience for non- gaming-related events, eg during a football game, or a televised cultural event or major news story.

<comment><USER32> >Channels which set their chats to subscriber-only mode are shooting themselves in the foot.

I think both chat modes (sub and free for all) have their place and time. I enjoy chats that are put into sub-mode, just to read a sensible conversation and have the streamer answer interesting questions, that she otherwise wouldn't have picked up on. On the other hand, some stream chats live off of the chaos that is twitch chat.

<comment><USER37> Good point. I would amend that to "large events and tournaments with subscriber-only chats are poisoning their own hype."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If they do acquire Twitch I hope that they still let it run separately and just improve the back end (as while it has improved it still lags for a lot of people around the world).

I worry if they tried to roll it into youtube that it would turn people away. Their numbers are pretty dependent on a small number of League/ Dota/ Hearthstone and a few other games casters and steamers.

<comment><USER39> I agree, Twitch livestreams is unwatchable for me most of the times I have tried to use it.

Youtube on the other hand, while available, have worked quite good.

<comment><USER40> It's funny that my experience is the complete opposite, I wonder if it's just our confirmation bias, or the fact that we are too small a sample. It could also be that us being in different countries (I assume) impacts a lot in our experiences.

<comment><USER39> I didn't provide enough information, streaming from both Twitch and Youtube works flawlessly from London where I am located now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wonder how companies like Sony feel about this considering a part of their service is now owned by Google.

<comment><USER42> I hadn't even considered this, as both the PS4 and Xbox One have stuff in the core system for streaming to twitch (though PS4 also has UStream IIRC). That's an... interesting wrinkle.

<comment><USER43> Yes, this could be really interesting. Microsoft's Xbox One has Twitch integration, while Google refuses to make a YouTube app for Windows phone. I could imagine Microsoft looking for alternative streaming services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I hate YouTube with a passion, this is terrible news for Twitch users. YouTube is absolutely dreadful and makes design decisions that just go against common sense. This is a terrible loss. :/

Will I still be able to see Twitch streams on my PS4? Blergh.

</comment><comment><USER45> Semi-related question... Do you know who came up with an idea of allowing companies to own other companies (and when)?

<comment><USER46> In most free countries, things are allowed by default. If you want to restrict something, _then_ the onus is on you to pass a law.

<comment><USER45> So if I want my chair to own a website and collect revenue from ads it can? And I won't be taxed a penny since it's not me who earns this money?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Twitch has rapidly become the site I stay on the longest, mostly for Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering streams. It's the first time I enjoy watching a "sport" live. Just a few hours ago I decided to pay for a Twitch account in order to not see ads, something I wish YouTube would allow me to do (I don't want to use AdBlock, because I think it's unethical).

I hope that if this is true, it's a feature that YouTube will copy and not one that will be disabled in the future.

<comment><USER48> I didn't find pricing on the Twitch site. But for 9$/month (looked it up), i'd probably pay for YouTube to, if that means more copyrighted content is available to me with no ads

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Since this is unconfirmed, we added a question mark to the title.

<comment><USER50> Surely, YC knows whether this is true or not :)

But in all seriousness, shouldn't it just say the original title - "YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for $1 Billion: Sources". The Sources implying it's not publically confirmed, right?

<comment><USER49> That headline still seems overstated given that other stories are contradicting it.

I suppose I should mention that I have zero information about this, other than what's appeared on HN.

<comment><USER50> Fair enough - I've just seen the contradicting stories as well. Would this fall under sensationalist or link-bait then?

<comment><USER49> I'm not sure. A lot of this is guesswork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Why on Earth would Twitch let themselves be bought by a company that was in the news just a few months ago for systematically destroying the Let's Play community?

<comment><USER52> Let's not pretend, many of us would do the same. Many people would quickly forget their opinion for $1M. And we are talking a billion. Can't judge those guys.

<comment><USER53> It kind of makes me sad to think of all the bad things I would do/let happen for $1 billion, or even $1 million.

<comment><USER54> I'd do a lot of bad things for a few millions. I do believe I'd spend a large part of the _rest_ of those billions making things right. I hope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> A lot of people are saying this is a bad move because _insert reason that contradicts YouTube 's existence_. But consider Tumblr's sale to Yahoo! and nothing changed. Google bought YouTube when Google has 1% of the internet traffic. YouTube already had 6% [2006] (and is the worlds most popular site per unique visitors).

To be honest, I'm surprised MSFT didn't try to buy them first.

</comment><comment><USER56> Does anyone roughly know what Twitch's revenue/profitability is? I know that they're pretty profitable, but I'm not sure to what extent.

1 billion USD seems somewhat low considering Snapchat was valued at 3.5 billion, and I'm pretty sure their revenues are non existent in comparison to Twitch's revenues.

</comment><comment><USER57> Wow, congrats to the Twitch team!

</comment><comment><USER58> Here's an idea: Google buys Twitch and shuts it down. Thus making people go directly to YouTube to stream.

But something more realistic is they buy Twitch and then integrate it into YouTube so everyone has to use YouTube to stream everything. Smart.

</comment><comment><USER59> > Reps for YouTube and Twitch declined to comment.

Yeah. I call this just a rumor.

<comment><USER60> ...a publicly traded company like Google is not going to comment on acquisition rumors, for many, many reasons. Variety normally has good sources - if they're reporting it, a deal is almost certainly being discussed. Maybe it won't complete, but this isn't some random posting on Secret here.

<comment><USER61> Your comment made me wonder. Is there any site where people (users or editors) track and check up on predictions like this made by various media outlets?

I'd find it really helpful if I could point to a database showing that Variety or WSJ had a 90%+ accuracy in predictions like this, whereas another site might have a 50% accuracy.

<comment><USER62> Actually, a study on this _just_ came out: [http://www.bus.umich.edu/ConferenceFiles/2014-Mitsui- Finance...](http://www.bus.umich.edu/ConferenceFiles/2014-Mitsui-Finance- Symposium/files/W_Sosyura_RumorHasIt.pdf)

From a 3rd party summary: "...Kenneth Ahern at the University of Southern California and Denis Sosyura at the University of Michigan, reviewed 2,142 articles written about 501 rumors between 2000 and 2011. Of those rumors, only 167 were followed by a public bid for the company. The Wall Street Journal was the most prolific publisher of such articles, with 158 during the time period. It was followed by Dow Jones Newswires with 67 and the New York Times with 38.

"The rumors published in the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News Service are also more accurate than the average rumor, with accuracy rates of about 39%, compared to 33% for the average rumor," wrote the researchers. "In contrast, the Los Angeles Times and NYT Blogs have accuracy rates less than 20%."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Time for for Twitch V.2. in my opinion.

There is so much copyrighted material on Twitch streamed by users, whether it games, music etc that it would throw youtube TM-auto filter into overdrive.

<comment><USER64> Ironically, most copyrighted music on twitch is basically a background process of a youtube video playing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Justin Kan = 2 acquisitions in 2014. Not a bad result.

Has anyone else done that?

</comment><comment><USER66> I know of some Twitch streamers who migrated to Twitch entirely and stopped using YouTube because of what it had turned into. Where will they go to now?

<comment><USER67> If Youtube screws this up and drives away the users, there will likely be an alternative that rises. That's how Twitch got so big, so it might be able to happen again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> After reading this headline my first reaction was a verbal "aww man!" I don't really know why. Is it that I don't trust google? Maybe, but I think it's more that I like supporting the little guy and not the BnL's of the world. When I hear of an acquisition like this, thinking of Valve, I fear the brands I love will never be the same.

</comment><comment><USER69> Newbie question here. How can youtube acquire things? Wasn't youtube acquired by google? So isn't it google acquiring?

</comment><comment><USER70> Was Twitch a YC company?

<comment><USER71> Justin.tv was part of the summer 2007 y-combinator batch (with dropbox and disqus among others). Twitch branched off of justin.tv a few years ago (I think technically part of the same legal entity at the moment but I'm not sure- they were trying to separate the infrastructures etc. when I left). Emmett, the CEO of Twitch, is also a partner at Y-combinator if that hasn't changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> You now need a Google+ account to spam Kappa

And in before every popular channel gets shut down for copyright infringement...

<comment><USER73> You already need to link with a Facebook account to post on the biggest channels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This tweet from a friend I assumed hated YouTube and loved Twitch sums up why this might actually be a home run [https://twitter.com/macpheed/status/468237136882597888](https://twitter.com/macpheed/status/468237136882597888)

</comment><comment><USER74> Why is this labeled a "YouTube acquisition" instead of Google?

</comment><comment><USER58> Justin Kan is now going to be pretty rich. Good for him. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER75> My guess is that people who fled from Youtube to Twitch will just move on to other streaming sites, which in turn just helps to splitter up various communities even more.

</comment><comment><USER76> Twitch.tv + Google Glass will be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER77> This will be interesting given the recent Google Plus integration into YouTube. Will the same happen to Twitch?

</comment><comment><USER78> I wonder how many more months I have until I'm required to use a Google+ login to chat on twitch.

</comment><comment><USER79> Does anyone have any other confirmation of this? Seems like a crazy rumor, but... maybe?

<comment><USER48> It seems logical, i noticed more articles concerning Twitch. So probably Google picked that up in their big data analytics.

An acquisition would seem logical then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> curious is Twitch is seeing the writing on the way wrt net neutrality? They see big fees incoming from the ISP's to stream their content and decide to get under Googles wing now...

</comment><comment><USER81> Congrats to Justin and co... including ycombinator. Big exit.

</comment><comment><USER82> Surely this is a massive competition concern and should be blocked on such grounds?!

<comment><USER83> There aren't many barriers to entry in this field though. It's not a situation like a utility/ISP where you can only feasibly have one last-mile connection due to permits or limited radio spectrum. It's not even something like a nuclear reactor which costs $10B and a decade before you can flip the switch.

I'm not saying I could build a streaming site in my closet this weekend, but it's not impossible for competitors to enter the space (or existing competitors to grow in the space) so long as Google/YT doesn't too anything too anti-competitive.

<comment><USER82> I have to disagree with this strongly. There are significant economies to scale in any streaming service. For example, in terms of costs (streaming services require a lot of hardware). But also in terms of branding and reaching a critical mass in terms of content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Why is this worth $1bil?

<comment><USER85> It's the largest streaming site in the world and could possibly be making 10 figures / year. YouTube isn't dishing out money just because they are really nice people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I don't know what this means to my startup Shou.TV</comment>


Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/01/17/amazon-wants-to-ship-your-package-before-you-buy-it

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7078181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7078181)</comment>


Robinhood Making Millions Selling Out Their Millennial Customers to HFTs - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/article/4205379-robinhood-making-millions-selling-millennial-customers-high-frequency-traders <comment><USER2> Better explanation for the layman: [https://startupsventurecapital.com/robinhoods- exceptionally-...](https://startupsventurecapital.com/robinhoods- exceptionally-clever-business-model-arbitraging-privacy-776663d4d855)

Some detailed links on payment for order flow:

[https://www.sec.gov/fast- answers/answerspayordfhtm.html](https://www.sec.gov/fast- answers/answerspayordfhtm.html)

[https://www.sec.gov/fast- answers/answersmktmakerhtm.html](https://www.sec.gov/fast- answers/answersmktmakerhtm.html)

[https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor- publications/invest...](https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor- publications/investorpubstradexechtm.html)

[https://hub.ipe.com/find-research/white-papers/payment- for-o...](https://hub.ipe.com/find-research/white-papers/payment-for-order- flow-in-the-united-kingdom/hub.ipe.com/find-research/white-papers/payment-for- order-flow-in-the-united-kingdom/10017800.fullarticle)

</comment><comment><USER3> So there are two alternatives:

1) Trade for free at Robinhood and get front-run by HFTs

2) Pay $10 to trade at E*Trade or some other garbage company and still get front-run by HFTs

<comment><USER4> IEX?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Robinhood is doing the opposite of IEX that Brad Katsuyama proposed and started some years back, in case anyone was unaware and looking for an alternative.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/brad-katsuyama-says-his- aim...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/brad-katsuyama-says-his-aim-is-to- make-trading-fair-1.2597414)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this really specific to Robinhood? If I go to [https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/online- trading/order...](https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/online- trading/orders) and follow the "View the quarterly reports" link, it shows that Vanguard routes orders to these companies: Citadel Securities, VIRTU Americas LLC, G1 Execution Services, UBS Securities LLC, Susquehanna Capital Group, Citigroup Global Markets

Wikipedia says Virtu Financial is an HFT firm: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtu_Financial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtu_Financial)

Edit: yet, the same report (as well as a document that the article links to) says "Vanguard Brokerage does not receive compensation for directing order flow in equity securities". So Vanguard routes to similar companies, but doesn't get compensation from them?

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not really sure they need to be more transparent. In this day and age you have to realize if you aren't paying for the product you are the product. Basically the same with Facebook and Google. They are making money off of your use of the service. If this isn't obvious you shouldn't be buying and selling stocks!

<comment><USER8> That's a very negative and dangerous view to hold. You're blaming someone for being exploited because of their lack of knowledge. Not everyone can know everything and they shouldn't be expected to in order to participate in the global economy.

Robinhood markets themselves that they are taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Their behaviour is the exact opposite of that! They're actually more like loan sharks or payday loans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So for a regular investor (not day trader or "scalper"), this means they potentially losing some change due to potentially poorer fill prices. TD Ameritrade charges $6.95 per stock trade. If you trade very few stocks at once, it actually might be more beneficial to use RH even with knowledge of worse fills.

On the other hand, if someone trades 1000+ of shares at once, they might have a better deal from "traditional" brokerages.

I personally just playing with the stock market in RH app with a very small amount at stake. And as a result, my orders are of 1-10 shares at most. At this level, I actually don't mind my orders being routed to HFTs if this is what takes to make RH free to trade.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand. What does it mean that they sell order flow to high freq traders?

How are they fucking me?

<comment><USER11> HFT is front running.

<comment><USER12> How do you front run a limit order ?

<comment><USER13> Imagine you place a limit order at $101. The HFT sees the stock dropping to $100. The HFT then _has the option_ to buy the stock at 100 and sell to you for 101, making $1/stock profit.

On the other hand, imagine the stock is currently trading at 105. The limit order will hang there, waiting for the price to drop below the limit you specified (and either never gets executed, or then becomes the flow above). Rinse and repeat.

Note they don't need to make money in every transaction, but the bigger the order flow, the more opportunities they have to make profit on top of traders.

<comment><USER14> Hopefully someone who knows more than me will come along, but can you front run a limit order?

Say the price of the stock is $101. You place a limit order for $100. HFT sees that but can't do anything since the stock price is above the limit.

Stock price drops to $99.5. Your order is the executed by the exchange before the HFT can buy at $99.5 and sell to you at $100.

<comment><USER15> The exchange is where the orders are executed, but the exchange doesn't execute the orders. The market makers do that job.

Look at the companies listed in the disclosures. Citadel appears to have the largest share in all of the examples listed. Their website [1] claims that:

> We act as a specialist or market maker in more than 3,000 U.S. listed- > options names, representing 99% of traded volume, and rank as a top > liquidity provider on the major U.S. options exchanges, executing > approximately 39% of all U.S.-listed retail volume, making us the industry's > top wholesale market maker.

Citadel is paying Robinhood to put your limit order into their system at the NYSE or NASDAQ or whatever other exchange and then they handle the execution of it. Also, I don't believe that this article is claiming that Citadel et al are the high frequency traders, but that the high frequency traders are connected to their platforms and profiting (in some unspecified manner) from the orders that come in.

[1] [https://www.citadelsecurities.com/products/equities-and- opti...](https://www.citadelsecurities.com/products/equities-and-options/)

<comment><USER16> It's been over a decade (2007) since I dealt with order books, but when I was looking at this (writing a product to detect trade-throughs), it was a Reg NMS violation to execute an order for a price worse than the best listed on an exchange at the time.

...OTOH, what that product revealed was that Reg NMS violations were pretty rampant and the SEC wasn't interested in doing anything about it. You may have difficulty enforcing this.

<comment><USER11> > it was a Reg NMS violation to execute an order for a price worse than the > best listed on an exchange at the time.

Orders take time to process. HFT guys are fast enough to react and make money from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> More info on HFTs.

Charlie Munger: HFT is Legalized Front-Running [https://www.barrons.com/articles/BL- SWB-27750](https://www.barrons.com/articles/BL-SWB-27750)

</comment><comment><USER18> This has been happening since the beginning and is hardly anything new. However, I'm very pleased to see this getting more public attention even though not much will change especially given the lack of alternatives.

But at least those interested can educate themselves on how this all works.

[http://blog.themistrading.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/Wha...](http://blog.themistrading.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/What-Every-Retail-Investor-Needs-to-Know.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> Still better than paying for trades and being front run I guess.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand how this works? The stock price is the same for the buyer on RobinHood or does RobinHood raise the price in anticipation? I don't get it.

<comment><USER15> > The stock price is the same for the buyer on RobinHood or does RobinHood > raise the price in anticipation?

What this article is suggesting is that if you are going to place an order for some stocks and, _all else being equal_ , if you place that order with Robinhood there is a chance that the price for you the buyer is slightly higher (you probably care about this) and/or the price that the otherwise- would-have-been seller receives is slightly lower (you might not care about this).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Trade fast, die young."

Source: [2016] [https://twitter.com/robinhoodapp/status/756262680537759744](https://twitter.com/robinhoodapp/status/756262680537759744)

</comment><comment><USER17> What's so bad about this? Other trading firms are also using HFTs. I assume Robinhood is making more because they have more trading than other companies. It sounds like a good strategy. I don't see a red flag in this.

<comment><USER22> I think the implicit assumption is that HFT firms place a negative externality on the overall stock market in a manner which CAN distort the value of holding the set of equities being traded. As a hypothetical example, if 90% of Robinhood customers bought into a pump and dump scheme, and HFT wrote the algorithm to perfectly go long at the perfect time, and accordingly sell at the perfect time, then the less educated investors would essentially be subsidizing the HFT firms ability to turn a hefty profit. This kinda isn't so much a problem by itself. It's when the dump in the pump and dump is exacerbated by the HFT firms, which wipes out all of the Robinhood investors positions: Robinhood facilitated trading -> millennials bought into a false hype -> HFT knew this could happen and wrote an algorithm to capitalize on the inevitable correction, and slurped up the mismatched price difference contributed by these investors.

If this is the implicit assumption, the article still falls victim of a slippery slope fallacy by letting readers believe "if Robinhood does this, what other companies can sprout up to encourage HFT exploitation?" Regardless, the article points to a good discussion in the direction of "at what point do we expect HFT to be the only way to benefit from the stock market?"</comment></comment>


Tesla Is Slowly Pushing Germany into Recession - <AUTHOR> https://www.ccn.com/tesla-is-slowly-pushing-germany-into-recession/ <comment><USER2> > Problem is, electric cars don't require the same workforce to build. As > Reuters writes, 'electric cars provide less assembly work than combustion > engine vehicles.'

This may be the most interesting factor of all, but the article doesn't cite much in the way of support.

AFAICT, the electrical system on a Tesla is an entirely new level of complexity, but the rest of the hardware is vastly simplified. No engine. No fuel system. No emissions system or multi-state/country-specific modifications. The battery placement gives the car a low center of gravity, which simplifies safety engineering.

If so, then it's far from clear how German car makers survive this. They'll need to not only retool factories built a great cost (often, for diesel, which is now almost certainly dead), but will need workers with some very different skillsets.

This seems more like a problem for any country with an established auto industry. It's a great opportunity for countries without one.

<comment><USER3> electric wont kill diesel as towing still kills the battery fast. once electrics can tow long distances then I will worry for the tech. (in consumer of course disel is dead and in some states yes, electric is better . ie southern cali and if your rich enough to have solar panels )

<comment><USER4> Ok, you _might_ have a five year window max for that to remain a valid point; batteries continue to improve year by year.

<comment><USER5> Even if it is 15, that's still not long enough for many regulatory environments to respond effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The Tesla Model 3 is outselling every major German rival in US sales and in Europe. Source: CleanTechnica"

The article is written by a tesla shill, who also pulls out facts out of his ass. In the US this is true as per the graph, but in europe while model 3 is selling well it is not the best selling, at least yet.

<comment><USER7> Non-CleanTechnica posts.

[https://insideevs.com/news/395418/december-tesla- model-3-sal...](https://insideevs.com/news/395418/december-tesla- model-3-sales-europe/) (Tesla Model 3 Was #3 Best Selling Car In Europe In December)

[https://insideevs.com/news/400134/tesla-model-3-demand- europ...](https://insideevs.com/news/400134/tesla-model-3-demand-europe-high/) (Tesla Model 3 In Europe Is Mostly 'Sold Out For The Quarter')

Tesla is supply constrained, every Model 3 built is being sold.

<comment><USER8> I.e. If they could build them faster they would likely be the best selling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Germany is not just about cars. They make lot of machinery for various industries. While it is reasonable to assume that German auto industry is under pressure, it is a stretch to say Tesla caused it. While the YoY revenues for MB/BMW may be down, they are not too bad, they are at 2013-2014 level. Not to say about all the commercial vehicles BMW and VW sell, like vans, suvs and buses. This article is concentrating on small sliver of economy, and applying to all of it.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps. Simply having watched "Who killed the electric car" it was clear that it was already heading in that direction, even if it was snubbed at that time. Tesla was the agent in making electric cars cool though. It's true from a wider perspective that Tesla is a replaceable part of that timeline and perhaps inevitable, but the fact remains that it was Tesla who got the mindshare that has moved this forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a very sweeping statement about the German economy that I find hard to comprehend. The global car market in 2019 was 80 million vehicles sold. 1 million of which were electric cars. 300k of which were Teslas.

The automotive industry in Germany constitutes about 5% of the German GDP. Now losing a tiny fraction of that market to Tesla is not going to push the country into a recession, and it's not even going to bother the carmakers much in the short term.

the EV question for Germany is going to be an issue 10-15 years down the line, not now, and the reason for sluggish economic growth are more broadly related to the contraction in international trade due to the trade tensions between Europe, the US and China which has not just hit the German car market, but the entire industrial sector.

<comment><USER11> > the EV question for Germany is going to be an issue 10-15 years down the > line, not now,

The EV question is going to occur the moment consumer sentiment turns into considering ICE vehicles a risky purchase. Like for fear of resale value or high fossil fuel taxes.

Or simply because equivalent EV purchase price becomes lower than ICE vehicle.

Societal tipping point can occur _long_ before EVs become dominant. If I had to guess, I'd say it'll occur before 2025. Eventually, people will be worried about availability of gas stations.

<comment><USER10> Current prediction is that by 2040 EV will be about 20% of the global market share while total number of cars will go from about 1 billion now to 2 billion then. So there's plenty of room to grow for conventional engines.

Mind you the large car manufacturers don't make the lion share of their income in Norway or Sweden where environmentally conscious wealthy people buy Teslas. The lions share of the future car market is the developing world.

<comment><USER12> One word for the people making these conservative predictions: Test drive.

OK, two words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think a more likely reason is the absurdly high energy prices in Germany (for example double the price of France) which affects all industries and having been rising sharply the last 15 years.

</comment><comment><USER14> A better headline:

German car manufacturers failed to adapt to changing market demands and Tesla is eating their lunch.</comment>


Show HN: Predicting the winner of the US Presidential Election - <AUTHOR>

In 2008, I did some calculations to estimate the probability of Obama or McCain winning the election, using state poll results, and plotted the probabilities vs time, right up to the election. The results were quite interesting.
So, this year, I'm doing the same for the 2012 elections, and have put it all up on:
http://prespredict.com
I include both 2012 and 2008 results, and make an attempt to see how they correlate with campaign events and national news stories. There is also a section where I describe the methodology.
Let me know what you think
[P.S. I used bootstrap to get the site up and running quickly, but I'm not too pleased with how it looks. Any suggestions or templates I can use to improve the look?] <comment><USER2> If you're unhappy with the default Bootstrap look, <http://bootswatch.com/> has nice free themes. It made a world of a difference when I ditched the default and used one of their themes on a current project.

</comment><comment><USER3> 99.7% for Obama in March, and 82.6% now?

According to you, the odds of Obama losing are now higher by a factor of 58. That is _huge_. What has happened in the last four months that justifies such an overwhelming shift?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _According to you, the odds of Obama losing are now higher by a factor of > 58_

Just to be clear, this is not strictly speaking "according to me", that is I don't use my personal opinion to come up with these numbers. I just take daily state poll results from electoral-vote.com and pass them through some equations. No human intervention.

Having said that, I think what was happening in the March timeframe and before was that the field of Republican potential nominees was very uninspiring to Republicans, which can be seen by how often we saw a new front-runner, only to lose their front-runner status and usually bow out shortly thereafter.

So, perhaps, against this amorphous group of uninspiring candidates, Obama attracted a lot of voters. Then, as the Republicans started settling on one candidate, and started to slowly accept him as the nominee, he now has a much better chance against Obama.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your predictions are so good, why not keep the data to yourself, get on Intrade, and make a ridiculous amount of money?

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if we assume my predictions are very accurate, I'm not familiar enough with Intrade to know whether it's mostly guided by fundamentals vs technical analysis.

That is, Obama's value may go up because many people think it will go up, due to some technical indicators, and not necessarily because Obama's probability of winning went up.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't make sense to me.

Indeed, the more irrational you believe Intrade's users to be, the more incentive you have to use it. Same for the stock market, or any other market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does this always work? If you think that company X should be valued at $10 billion, but is currently valued at $5 billion because the market is being irrational, are you claiming that it's _always_ a safe bet to invest in this company? Are you claiming that in the long term the market becomes rational and will surely value the company at the value you think it is worth?

<comment><USER5> You're missing your parent commenter's point. He/she means to say if more people are wrong then the odds are stacked higher against the candidate you expect to win therefore the payout in favor of your candidate would be higher. Sorry I think my comment is even more confusing but I hope you arrive at this conclusion anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://prespredict.com>

</comment><comment><USER6> What are the main differences between you and your methods and FiveThirtyEight?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not too sure, since I can't find the exact model used by FiveThirtyEight. If any of you can point me to a post of theirs where they describe their model in detail, that would be great.

From the few things I have found out, some differences are that (1) they take into account correlations between states, which I don't as of now, but plan on adding and (2) they use Monte Carlo simulations whereas I have a closed-form expression for calculating the probability.

Beyond the above two differences, I'm not sure what model they use to convert the poll results into final probability estimates.

FYI, in case you haven't seen it yet, my methodology is described at <http://prespredict.com/methodology.html></comment></comment>