
Julie Rubicon - ISL
https://www.facebook.com/notes/robin-sloan/julie-rubicon/985697811525170
======
jimrandomh
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
I read 2-3 paragraphs into this and then thought, hmm, maybe I should check
the comments first.

Thank you.

~~~
avian
For once I'm glad I didn't read the comments before reading the story.
jimrandomh comment would have spoiled it.

~~~
jimrandomh
Edited to add a spoiler warning. My apologies to anyone I spoiled the ending
for.

~~~
reneherse
Not effective. Your spoiler is telling us that it's fiction. The delight would
have been in that surprise realization, not the nitty-gritty details of the
story.

------
stygiansonic
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...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one-fraud-
researchers-may-also-have-done-some-fraud)

~~~
carsonreinke
Can someone explain why this is illegal (besides any data/privacy breach
within Capital One)?

~~~
GreaterFool
Possibly something to do with privileged information. Keep in mind that even
things such as intent may get you on the wrong side of the line*

* example: you post a trade but you don't intend to execute it but instead hope to fool the market, then you cancel the trade and switch to other direction. forgot what that's called exactly

~~~
cholmon
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump)

------
chatmasta
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
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.

~~~
pookeh
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
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.

------
state
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_Books...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Bookstore)

~~~
lt
Yep! I'd recommend reading the short story, skipping the novel:

[https://www.robinsloan.com/books/penumbra/short-
story/](https://www.robinsloan.com/books/penumbra/short-story/)

I felt like the book was mostly filler added after the popularity of the short
story.

~~~
robinsloan
Ha -- the short story was, sorry to say, not _that_ popular ;)

~~~
lt
Hi!

Popular enough to turn it into a book? :)

Well, maybe it was because I'd read the story before (and really enjoyed it)
so I couldn't get the same enjoyment from the book.

Anyway, good work and keep writing.

------
maxaf
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
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

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

------
asadlionpk
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
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.

------
FlyingLawnmower
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.

------
kozikow
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.

------
ChuckMcM
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
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).

------
minimaxir
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
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.

------
wallflower
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_\(Eggers_novel\))

------
cavisne
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

------
djsumdog
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!

------
dynofuz
reminds me of the movie primer:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29)

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

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

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

~~~
minimaxir
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
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.

------
tfgg
Lovecraft does data science?

(the variance on the graphs intuitively felt a bit low, but then again it is
facebook)

------
mwcampbell
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)

------
avipars
I think April Fools has come early this year

~~~
orblivion
Oh thank God they didn't waste this story on that.

------
thomasahle
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...

------
Kevin_S
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.

------
chrome_x
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!

------
mat_jack1
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.

------
gizmodo59
By seeing the title along with the domain facebook.com I couldn't resist but
click. Perfect click bait. Though a good story.

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

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

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

------
raverbashing
Nice piece of fiction

------
dekhn
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)

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lucb1e
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.

------
personjerry
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
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.

------
steven2012
Identified as fiction because VW isn't traded on the US stock market.

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chejazi
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.

------
EGreg
Did John Titor write this?

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api
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.

------
jbscpa
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

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bpp
Very enjoyable, and almost plausible...

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Thane2600
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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KerryJones
This could easily be a Black Mirror episode

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lawnchair_larry
Not a very useful submission title.

------
jkkorn
The big short, Facebook edition.

Entertaining read.

------
wallzz
I really got scary reading this

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

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

------
dluan
Enchilada?

~~~
buremba
PrestoDB, I guess.

------
fsiefken
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?

