Ben Welsh made an index of all FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive(fivethirtyeightindex.com)
78 pointsby ChocMontePy3 hours ago10 comments
  • defrost2 hours ago
    For any, like myself, wondering "Who is Ben Welsh" ?

      Hello. My name is Ben Welsh. I'm an Iowan living in New York City.

  I am a reporter, an editor and a computer programmer. My job is to use those skills, together, to find and tell stories.

  I work at Reuters, the world's largest multimedia news provider, where I founded the organization's News Applications Desk. In that role, I lead the development of dashboards, databases and automated systems that benefit clients, inform readers, empower reporters and serve the public interest.

  [...]
    ~ https://palewi.re/who-is-ben-welsh/
  • culi7 minutes ago
    Unfortunately most of the most important visualizations are broken in the archived version. Including the gun deaths visualization and I think the P-hacking interactive

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230205124354/https://fivethirt...

    It's kinda sad to know no one else will get to experience those interactive visualizations. Though its nice to see the approval comparison page still works

    https://web.archive.org/web/20241031232233/https://projects....

  • nomilk2 hours ago
    Couldn't figure out why archiving FTE aricles matters, but a quick search yields:

    > Thousands of FiveThirtyEight articles seemingly vanish from the internet

    https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/thousands-of-five...

    And discussions here on hn:

    ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553

    Disney erased FiveThirtyEight (article by Nate himself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197703

  • arlattimore36 minutes ago
    I'm not a soccer guy, but I still think the piece on Lionel Messi was awesome

    https://web.archive.org/web/20140701122958/http://fivethirty...

  • nl2 hours ago
    This is because whoever owns Fivethirtyeight now (ABC?) deleted the whole archive of articles on the site.
    • bombcaran hour ago
      Don't we need more than an index of Archive.org because whomever controls the domain could robots.txt these out of existence if they wanted to?
    • Avicebron2 hours ago
      Bourdieu. The field has structure, the structure has logics, the logics shape what counts as a publishable story, a promotable journalist, a credible source, a "balanced framing".
      • tantaloran hour ago
        Please, say that again in comprehensible English.
        • Avicebronan hour ago
          The ownership relationship was always load-bearing? The journalism in this case was a tenant, I highly recommend that people promote forms of independent journalism?

          EDIT: dude have you heard of the s in https, http://johntantalo.com gets flagged.

  • internet2000an hour ago
    I'm seeing a lot about this. What makes this situation different than any other website going offline?
    • patconan hour ago
      I think it's the fivethirtyeight of of historical significance, and Disney is one of the largest and wealthiest companies on the planet. So it's just kinda like "whoa, this is stratospheric negligence" or "whoa, what is the reason for this... assuming they are not idiots?"
  • ChrisArchitectan hour ago
    Love Ben but title can simply be: Index of FiveThirtyEight articles preserved by the Internet Archive
    • buildsjets12 minutes ago
      But that would be a false attribution. The Internet Archive did not create the index, Ben did. And the Internet Archive is not hosting the index, Ben is.
  • 3eb7988a1663an hour ago
    If I wanted to get the complete WARC archive of 538 - how do you do this in a friendly way? No interest in history tracking, just want the last available version from Internet Archive.
  • stinkbeetle28 minutes ago
    Those 2015-16 ones sure aged poorly, I'm reminded of this https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg

    This is why people don't really buy the "but he had Trump at 30%, you just don't understand statistics" apologist line. Sure he hedged in the dying days of the campaign (a cynic might think to try to protect his credibility), but the tone overall was of a person who comprehensively failed to understand the mood of the country from beginning to end.

    Which is a problem because these election predictions are not just pure "mathematical models" and "data driven" like 538 would have had you believe. What mathematical model should be used? What data should and should not be used? At some point those things are based on the modeller's understanding of reality.

    • f1ay10 minutes ago
      I think Nate did a phenomenal job calling out pollsters in that time. Since 538 was predominately a poll aggregator that did tricky stats to rank the reliability of each poll. I remember specifically an interview with him griping about some of the unusual data he was seeing from pollsters that made it look like, and I quote, 'Someone has their finger on the scales'