This is empty madness. It is, very literally, a celebration of total materialism.

What is ultimately important in life are people -- messy, filthy, bacteria-and-disease-laden, imperfect, emotional, sweating shitting cursing crying screaming laughing farting people and the connections we build to them.

This celebration of spending insane amounts of time choosing the perfect flatware or the perfect wallet is sick. Steve Jobs spent eight years discussing furniture with his family before buying a sofa etc (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_...). I will never do that, and I will never have flatware as nice as Dustin Curtis', and I will never have sound as good as an obsessive audiophile, or the perfect car.

I won't even write a particularly convincing Hacker News comment on this very topic. I've got to go. Life is too short for this shit.

Nice work.

The success, though, isn't his specific model. It's that Silver was able to market the idea that using statistical models is better than a table full of talking heads at predicting an outcome. And that a "dead heat" doesn't mean it's a coin flip. In hindsight, it seems almost ludicrous that it hasn't gained greater traction before.

He deserves a ton of credit for championing analytics into pop/political culture, but I'm sure we'll see many more models and a lot more statisticians during the next election, some of which will be better than Silver's models (if he's still doing them). I'm all for people asking to see the data instead of the media sound bites.

To keep this HN relevant: it was the marketing that drove his startup success. The product (the model) isn't quite perfect and an excellent substitute product was created by someone else in very short order (you). But he put together a great blog, grew out his brand, and eventually saw hockey stick growth.

That's one of the things I liked about the Android alarm app that I miss on my iPhone; when you set an alarm and tap "Done", it would say "Alarm set for 9 hours and 22 minutes from now" (or whatever), a quick sanity check to make sure you didn't confuse A.M. and P.M. or accidentally put in the wrong day.

As someone that doesn't smoke weed and never wants to. I'm happy that this got passed. I want Cartels to go out of business.

The most important part of this to me is that it generates a huge amount of precedent for the Latin American countries such as Uruguay and Guatemala that are considering legalization. The United States has used its global influence to push drug prohibition in other countries -- see for instance http://www.cannabis-med.org/english/bulletin/ww_en_db_cannab... -- and with these victories -- even if they prove to be merely nominal -- the people of Latin America can see that prohibition is crumbling.

There are some people who like to portray marijuana as a first-world-luxury or sideshow political issue, but for people in the countries most affected by the drug war, it is anything but. This electoral victory may just show some serious positive influence in Mexico, where the realities of drug prohibition have inflicted a lot of suffering on a lot of innocent people, and that's the real victory here.

It's clearly great work by Nate and the rest of the 538 team. However, as has been pointed out, it's not that hard to build a model that gets close to predicting everything correctly.

I built a model in a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon, which simply takes all the most recent polling data, takes an average, does a quick fudge to adjust for the number of polls, and then runs 10,000 simulations to get a probability for each state. The source is on Github:

    https://github.com/chris-taylor/USElection

and the predictions are in this gist:

    https://gist.github.com/4012793

The result? My model gets 50/51 correct if Florida eventually goes DEM (which looks likely) or 51/51 correct if Florida goes REP.

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Edit: full disclosure - with all data up to 6 Nov 20120 it predicts Colorado to be a toss-up, and I manually broke the tie in favour of Democrats, based on earlier models favouring them in that state.

That is so right. The "war on drugs" is not simply some stupid wasteful boondoggle; it is truly a heinous crime against humanity.

Some folks scoff when they hear a statement like that, but it really is true. Not because it makes it (slightly) harder for me to buy weed in San Francisco, but because of the very real and devastating effects that it has on people outside the US. People who are rarely, if ever, covered by the mainstream media.