It seems kind of predictable that "real news" sites would run stories on how "fake news" is an epidemic.

Maybe this is too much speculation but it seems like deflecting. Fake news sites weren't responsible for "real news'" complete failure to predict a Trump victory. I've seen little reporting on the attitudes of real Trump supporters. It's mostly reporting of noisy flawed polls and simplistic opinion pieces on why Trump is bad/hitler/stupid and dismissals of his supporters as racists.

IMO I don't think fake news is the problem either (though it is a problem, just not a proportionately large one). It has shades of demonizing independent news sources. Personally I can't stand any cable news source, I prefer to watch "Democracy Now!" I prefer The Intercept, Truthdig, and Jacobin to the NYT or WaPo. They don't peddle fake news whatsoever.

Edit: fake news was not responsible for this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxZVgktWQAAXu8g?format=jpg&name=...

In regards to the predictions, it's important to understand that their role in it was the same as it is with the weather forecast: they're just reporting what people come up with.

Those people, the pollsters and aggregators, were indeed wrong with regards to the winner. It's however important to note that the polls were less than 3% off. It just happened to make quite a difference in the winner-take-all system.

538 was arguably more right than others: their model sensed the uncertainty and gave Trump a 30% chance of winning.

Compared to the NYT/WaPo/WSJ, the self-styled outsiders like The Intercept are incredibly biased, or just bad. It's sometimes hard to see how information flows, but barely any actual news starts at The Incept/Breitbart/HuffPost/etc.

They could have said it was a 95% chance, or that it was a 10% chance of Trump winning and been just as 'right'. The only thing that could be 'wrong' in predicting a probability like that is if they say there is no chance of something, and it happens.

>It's however important to note that the polls were less than 3% off

Wisconsin last poll 41% for trump, Wisconsin result 49% (~8% off)

Michigan last poll 42% for trump, Michigan result 48% (~6% off)

North Carolina last poll 45% for trump, North carolina result 51% (~6% off)

Florida last poll 45% for trump, Florida result 49% (~4% off)

Source: http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2016/Pres/Maps/Nov09.html

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2016/Pres/Maps/Nov08.html

You can't excuse the pollsters. That's an epic fuck up.

Polls aren't predictions (some people draw predictions from polls, but those are different from polls.)

They, particularly, don't even in theory sample the universe of "people who are actually going to vote", the sample registered voters or some model of likely voters. Those are known (to anyone who has more than a casual understanding of political polling) sources of nonsampling error when treating polls as a measure of the actual vote, since the universe sampled is different than the universe of interest, and there was particularly a lot of publicly-aired certainty about the utility of backward-looking likely voters models in this election.

I don't think there is a particular problem with the polls so much as with people's (including, unfortunately, many of the people talking about polls in the media) understanding of what polls measure.

To the extent there was an epic fuck up, it was in poll-based predictions that the effects of these type of things are correlated across states, so they gave Trump a near-certainty of winning. (Better predictors, like 538, had Trump an underdog but with a sizable likelihood of winning -- you can't say a 70%/30% chance is wrong given that the result is the one given a 30% chance is the one that materializes.)

Don't you have to account for their margin of error though?

I don't see them on your link. But usually when a poll says 45% there's a spread in both directions indicating the level uncertainty in their data.

So for example a pollster could find that 45% of people prefer X over Y with a +/-5 point margin of error. Meaning it could be 50% prefer X over Y or 40% given our model

Frequently I've seen something like 2-3% margin of error either way. So with your numbers Florida for example could only be off 1% given the margin of error. I dunno what the margin of error was though.

Remember polls are best guess statistical models. There is a lot of jitter in human modeling. Not least of which is due to the simple fact that people lie. We lie a lot to fit in versus be honest. and we encourage this feeling in people. There's no realistic way I can see for pollsters to account for that

This bias was consistent across all polls (swing state polls, anyway, didn't look at the others).

I'm not sure if there was actually even a single poll where Trump's support was overestimated.

Well it's looking like they assumed more people were going to show up, based on their polling, and a good chunk didn't show up. That is, Trump voters showed up approximately as the poll models predicted, while Hillary voters apparently weren't as committed to actually showing up as they were when polled. So the polling fouled up only in terms of capturing a meaningful nuance whether the voter was likely to show up, which is a really hard thing to do.

And the polls didn't ask, and may have a lot of error capturing for, the Q&A along the lines of "if there's another controversy regarding candidate X are you a lot/a little more or less likely to vote?" It's plausible the polls don't capture last minute antipathy.

You're doing a bit of cherry-picking but I guess it's only fair, since reality conspired to do it similarly. Not sure how far off the polls were in aggregate.

But my point was mostly that the media doesn't have much to do with the polling. And secondly, I think it's important to distinguish between ideological bias and just simply mistakes. There are many pollsters from all over the political spectrum and I'm convinced that they made a best effort to be accurate, and that it has just become difficult to do accurate polling. Or that the polling may have even given a very accurate picture of reality, but that volatility has just increased dramatically.

My original point said nothing on the media's involvement with polling, outside of simply reporting it. As for the pollsters, whether it was ideological bias or simply mistake is also irrelevant to my original point.

My claim is that the "real news" committed the journalistic equivalent of manslaughter. Whether or not they intended to mislead the public doesn't negate the fact that the public was misled. Blaming "fake news" doesn't justify their own role in misleading the public. There is no court of journalism, but the consequences regardless will be that people will trust the traditional news sources less.

I just picked the states which actually decided the election. For all I know it was 8% off in Oregon too but that wouldn't have mattered.

It did appear that there was a systemic bias against Trump in the polls, whether intentional or not.

It's even worse than you state -- those are just percentage points off, not full percentage off.

To restate:

Wisconsin last poll 41% for trump, Wisconsin result 49% (~8 percentage points off, or 20% off)

Michigan last poll 42% for trump, Michigan result 48% (~6 percentage points off, or 14% off)

North Carolina last poll 45% for trump, North carolina result 51% (~6 percentage points off, or 13% off)

Florida last poll 45% for trump, Florida result 49% (~4 percentage points off, or 9% off)

Don't forget HuffPo's models giving HRC an 90% chance a few days before.

That could have been completely correct... and the card was drawn for one of those 10%. To test that probability empirically, we'd have to have the election at least a couple dozen times, right?

Simultaneously and independently, with exact copies of all registered voters.

What is The Intercept's bias?

They are harshly critical of unchallenged power, so of Obama, US foreign policy, and Clinton. People perceive that as a bias against Democrats but I'd expect we're about to see some good reporting against the Republicans now.

I don't see being critical of people in power as a bias, unless you're saying that they don't spend enough time being critical of people not in power.

It is deflecting, they were so wrong about the election, so rather than take responsibility they have to blame someone else.

Well I would say that the numbers strongly suggest that the Democrats lost the election rather than the Republican winning it. Votes for both parties were substantially down compared to 2012; it's just that the Democrats failed in their turnout and lost ground to the Republicans, especially in "battleground" states.[0]

[0] http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout...

[EDIT] fixed grammar typo

> I've seen little reporting on the attitudes of real Trump supporters. It's mostly reporting of noisy flawed polls and simplistic opinion pieces on why Trump is bad/hitler/stupid and dismissals of his supporters as racists.

I've heard quite a bit on NPR where they have gone to some of the swing states that went for Trump and interviewed assorted Trump voters.

if the "real news" spent half the time they spent explaining why not to vote for the other candidate, explaining the virtues of their candidate ....

edit: should have clicked your picture before commenting

Nah, correct solution is simply to use memcpy(), works on all compilers, all platforms, all versions, with SSE and with any flags specified:

  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include <stdint.h>

  uint64_t sum (char *p, size_t nwords)
  {
      uint64_t res = 0;
      size_t i;
      for (i = 0; i < nwords; i += 8) {
        uint64_t tmp;
        memcpy(&tmp, &p[i], sizeof(tmp));
        res += tmp;
      }
      return res;
  }

Nitpick: memcpy is string.h not stdlib.h, the type was uint32_t not uint64_t and you are making some unwarranted assumptions about sizeof(uint64_t), not to mention that the existence of this type is merely implementation defined ;)

Deal breaker: your memcpy invocation requires a sufficiently smart compiler to convert into normal unaligned load on x86 and seems to prevent GCC autovectorization. In this case OP actually didn't want vectorization, but in general it happens that such workarounds confuse compilers and produce worse code.

I'm not sure I understand your deal breaker. For the platform he was targeting it produces optimal code, for other platforms it's merely slower (but not specifically slower, since the compiler is likely not a great optimizer across the board).

Vectorization is in general not applicable here since it usually requires aligned memory... not all implementations do, but most. In any case, benchmarking is more appropriate than armchair optimizing.

You are writing convoluted code and hoping that your compiler will figure it out and convert it internally to the form I posted. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. In this case it generates reasonable code but doesn't vectorize it for some reason. WTF.

I prefer to just add alignment specification and move on, assuming I don't care about portability. If portability matters, reread my original post ;)

It's not convoluted. It's actually clear and well-defined making it easier to reason about.

I'd call compiler specific alignment attributes more arcane, convoluted, and susceptible to future bugs.

Vectorization isn't a panacea. You need to benchmark to be sure, lacking that I expect GCC to be better at optimizing code than you. If you disagree, please manually write a vectorized one that handles non-aligned addition and post your results :)

Undefined behavior is one of the most intelligent things the C designers did when designing the language.

It's a fact of life that not all syntactic forms will have meaning. What's sqrt(-1)? Trick question, There's no meaningful answer (in terms of real numbers alone)! Why should anyone specify if it crashes the program, returns 0, throws an exception, etc.? Who cares? garbage in, garbage out.

Another example, "the floor had a pretty day with his melted spaceship" that is a grammatically well formed sentence but what does it mean? Don't answer that!

> Undefined behavior is one of the most intelligent things the C designers did when designing the language.

I agree, actually. They just went too far. Too many things are undefined for no good reason. Even sqrt(-1) is debatable, by the way: if your platform provides an efficient way to trap, it should probably trap, and the compiler should not assume it will never happen.

And if you want crazy optimizations, consider introducing unsafe assertions into the language. That is, arbitrary boolean expressions the compiler is allowed to assume will always return true.

I don't necessarily disagree that they went too far though I assume they probably had good reason at the time in most cases.

I'd prefer it if the decision to trap or not were an option to the compiler.

It would be nice if there were a GUARANTEE() macro so that the programmer could specify conditions that would never happen even in a production build like: GUARANTEE(n >= 0). Also if trapping was enabled, it would trap at runtime. This is a nice post about that idea http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1096

Who wrote this?

By the editors of the New York Times, according to the 2013 book, "New York Times: Disunion".

What's preventing there being an AI with hardcoded desire to regulate values like hunger level, boredom level, etc.? I could imagine a problem solving AI dedicated to continuously solving those problems.

But how?

hunger = 100;

while (hunger > 0) { seekFood(); }

// Is this what hunger is to a machine, at its basest level? An int and a while loop? Is that really what it means to understand hunger? This and a text description?

I mean hunger is really just a gut reaction created to tell us we need to eat or we'll die eventually.

edit: s/created/developed over time/

while(sugar = 0) seekFood()

And thus the grey goo was created

Hm no, you used = instead of ==, so this will never seek food. ;)

You probably mean that it will always seek food since the assignment evaluates to 'true' when it's successful (which is usually the case).

In what language? In all that I know, assignment evaluates to the value that was assigned (that is, if it evaluates to anything at all). Also in most languages that look like C, 0 evaluates to false. Therefore it will never seek food.

Usually the case as in usually never the case.

Only if you release it.

GPZ finds a entirely new class of vulnerability, Apple takes 4 months to patch and resolve. And you claim this has been exploited for years. There is 0 evidence of this, and such a claim demands proof.

I would be happy to apologise if you could find one example of exploitation prior to a few days ago when it became public.

There is a middle ground between "all bugs are known on the black market" and "no bugs are known only on the black market."

I've been provably shadowbanned by Twitter before so it is something they practice. N/s what happened in his case.

Nothing is going to get out of hand. That whole idea just seems like media sensationalism. There may be a minority of people who won't accept the results, but the vast majority of people are going to feel bad or good for a week or two and then go back to worrying about their jobs.

I think it's very unlikely, but people act like we're immune to violent transfers of power because it's never happened to us. Historically peaceful transition of power is the exception.

Based on his current rhetoric, it's seems pretty likely that Trump will come out on November 9th and say the election was stolen.

Sure most people will ignore it, but I live in the South, in the middle of Trump country. The majority of people that I know, over 40, think that Obama and Hillary are evil. They don't disagree with them, they think they are evil.

They thought that the Federal government was going to invade Texas during Jade Helm. A fair amount of them think that Hillary is literally possessed by the devil. Breitbart is the most mainstream news source that they'll listen too, and they get most of their news from conspiracy sites spreading clickbait lies on Facebook (I know because many of them are family members and I see it). They don't believe the polls, and they really think that the only way Trump can lose is if the election is rigged. Oh and they're all heavily armed because they've been buying up ammunition since Obama was elected, in anticipation of a gun ban. (I have guns myself, but I don't have dozens of cases of ammunition in preparation for "the shit hitting the fan" like many people I know do.)

I've never seen anything this bad, even when Obama was elected. I think the major difference is the polarizing effect of most Trump supporters getting the majority of their news from Facebook. Combined with the realization by some that demographics are changing, so this may be the last election they can win.

Again, I think that actual civil war is extremely unlikely because luckily Trump won't be a losing incumbent. But I think that if Trump refuses to concede, a few acts of domestic terrorism are likely.

The FBI just stopped a group of white nationalists who were trying to kick off a religious war by detonating a truck bomb in a mostly Somali apartment complex.

Never said violent revolt couldn't happen. It just seems very improbable. I'd bet that the vast majority of those people who believe Obama/Clinton are evil wouldn't be willing to risk their current living situation on that belief when it actually came down to it.

I think it's very improbable as well. At least in the current situation where their candidate isn't actually in power. It's too hard for someone with no really power to get the ball rolling.

Happy to a see this trending on HN.