Took a look at the dev console, there are 2 tracking scripts, segment and CNN specific one. Those take up the majority of bandwidth. There's also a separate CSS style sheet. The main DOM and the stylesheet are <10% of the total bytes transferred. The favicon is the same byte size as the entire DOM.
Don't think there is necessarily a consideration of byte cost, given the size of the tracking scripts. A few lines to make this manageable on wide monitors aren't prohibitive for those users.
To anyone reading the comment above, it is extremely poor advice and should not be followed.
Stay at home and shelter in place orders are not solely for the purpose of protecting ones-self from contracting the virus. They also serve to limit the spread from unsuspecting carriers. You can carry and spread the virus unknowingly and this will result in susceptible people contracting it and dying.
The only way we know that shelter in place orders worked is if they feel like an overreaction after this is all over with.
We're all scared and desperately seeking answers and relief. We all want this to be over as soon as possible.
But we must put the public health above all else. This is not the time for egocentric defiance of the recommendations from our leaders.
> The only way we know that shelter in place orders worked is if they feel like an overreaction after this is all over with.
That's the only way to know? You think it's reasonable to take away the civil liberties of seven million people indefinitely without at least trying to come up with a better performance metric than that?
You have literally no interest in setting up any kind of plan to assess how the policy is working?
The only people losing civil liberties are the people that die after contracting the virus because we failed to social distance for the necessary amount of time.
The "performance metric" you're looking for is the number of tests we conduct. Unless we're testing hundreds of thousands every day, we have no choice but to continue to shelter in place or stay at home. We are not even close to the amount of testing we need to know who does and doesn't have the virus.
When you have enough tests, you know who has the virus and who doesn't. All those infected (and all the people they've contacted) can quarantine or seek the care they need, and those who aren't infected can all go get haircuts.
So the shelter in place order should be in effect until we have conducted approximately seven million tests, after which we will institute a voluntary program where people who test positive are asked to quarantine and seek care?
I think you're right, we do need a plan, but we need trained epidemiologists and other public health figures to define that plan. Many features of disease spread are counterintuitive and we need people with training to help us, the public, understand the problem and reasonable solutions. When people like Michael Osterholm tell me that it is possible one or two million people will die in the United States, I believe him and I'm willing to go along with the plan. That said, I would like to see more clear definition of where the risk lies, how we can take small chances that have a low chance of going catastrophically wrong, and how we can responsibly try to revert to some kind of normality.
I mean, it's not like this crisis started an hour ago. What's their plan? Like can someone write it down and post in on a government website?
We're all commenting on what appears to be an official government press release that is announcing an entire month of some of the most serious restrictions on the public ever put in place, that does not appear to even try to take any kind of quantitative approach to explaining why that policy was put in to place, and how its effectiveness is being assessed.
Broad, destructive public policy not tied to success metrics is fucking insane and I think the strong negative reactions to it are completely warranted.
Once you commit to some success metric, you're going to be stuck with it even it proves to be a bad metric. Let's say we all agree the "2 weeks with decreasing number of deaths" is a good target. Then we go back to work, and we discover that going back triggers a rapid spread and kills a bunch of people and starts to overwhelm hospitals. Now we need a new metric.
This is a novel scientific problem. Caution and study are warranted. People's lives are at stake.
People's lives are always at stake. That's how public policy works. Like 100% of the time. Try painting lines on the highway or administering a school lunch program without putting people's lives at stake.
The only thing novel here is completely abandoning the concept of public policy goals. There's nothing scientific about setting your public policy without any metrics at all. This is kind of the opposite of a scientific approach.
I'm not suggesting having no metrics, I'm talking about hard targets. Acknowledging that there are things we don't know about the problem and that we're not overcommitting to a course of action based on some specific target is reasonable.
At the same time, to your point, I would like to see clear explanations of "these are the aspects of the disease we are trying to understand (virality, mortality, etc)," these are the constraints on our healthcare system, these are the economic effects, here are the tradeoffs we're trying to make. All of that stuff is good, but it's a complex problem and assuming that we know enough at this point to set a clear numerical goal seems wrong to me. Describing general parameters for our data gathering and decision-making is good, though, and I agree that I'd like to see more of it.
I think that the government agency in charge of the shutdown should be able to answer each of three basic questions with clarity and some kind of numerical response:
1) What are you hoping this policy will accomplish?
2) What sequence of events, if any, would cause you to accelerate your timetable for easing restrictions?
3) What sequence of events, if any, would cause you to delay your timetable for easing restrictions?
I mean those should be the raw basic cost of even having this conversation. I am used to seeing magical thinking and emotional political arguments in many places but I am surprised to see such hostility to a basic quantitative approach on HN of all places.
Your questions are all reasonable. I'm not personally opposed to quantitative decision-making, but I'm also painfully aware of the limitations of quantitative methods, especially when applied under pressure. I would argue that a blind faith in mathematics is just as wrongheaded as the magical thinking you're describing.
To give a clear example of why I'm skeptical, look at the use of quantitative methods to conduct governance in the banking industry. It's not that we shouldn't have used numerical methods, it's just that they ended up being woefully insufficient because of how they were applied. There's no reason we couldn't make the same mistake here in a premature bid for some kind of certainty.
Yeah but this is like setting monetary policy without using interest rates or something. Or coming up with a government spending program and not even trying to do a quick analysis of how much it will cost. It's fucking insane.
Public policy requires metrics and stated goals, and requires that they not be secret. Without those it's not democracy.
We're half-aligned. The decision-making process and the data used to inform it should be public, but I don't think we should be saying at this point "when we see these targets hit we will remove these measures." I think our knowledge is still too incomplete to set that target intelligently.
Nearly uniform testing levels among the states sufficient to indicate that we're getting a real sample of the population, and not the biased sick sample we're getting with PCR testing, would be a start. If you want to be angry about something, be angry that we can't get our act together to get this data collected.
It's going to be a lot easier to win arguments about lockdown when we're confident in our testing data. Right now, nobody is.
You start doing it when you can gather enough information, fast enough to prevent new spikes from happening. The number of "known cases" becomes very low, and then ideally one can react fast enough when new clusters start forming.
When someone comes up with a sane, sensible and actionable plan.
Waiting it out for a vaccine. Even/odd days. Provisioning of masks for everybody. Enough toilet paper to ensure basic sanitation. Enough COVID tests to effectively gauge progress or regress. Rationing. Put all unemployed Americans on the military payroll and make them take turns delivering supplies.
We could look at what any other country who has made even nominal progress with this epidemic have done, pick any single step at random and it would be one made in the right direction.
Instead we've all been told to stay home just long enough to lose our jobs, file some papers and (maybe) receive a paltry stipend, we don't even have the testing infrastructure to know how bad this really is (confirmed cases aren't increasing if the supply of tests isn't keeping up with demand!), and that isn't stopping our syphilitic warlock from telling everybody to take anti-parasitics, drink Lysol and get back out there before it affects his re-election campaign.
There is no leadership. There is no plan. There's a reason this isn't getting better, but letting nature take its course is not the solution.
I understand you feel my characterization is unfair. But the focus on our own personal interaction with the virus without acknowledging how ignoring shelter at home orders can spread the virus to others, is selfish and egocentric.
I do not believe there is room for an alternative viewpoint to that.
> The only way we know that shelter in place orders worked is if they feel like an overreaction after this is all over with.
That makes no sense whatsoever. Millions of children are not vaccinated because of the lockdown. Will the mayor take responsibility for his share of deaths that will occur? Will there be a counter for that, that ticks up every day? And for all the pain and suffering of those that can't afford gratuitous shutdowns?
I work in the industry, can confirm, the tactics used to dissuade people for aggregating horse racing data so we can sell $2 PDFs are extremely counter-productive and reflect the age of the industry.
Several orgs, including Equibase (US-based, the gate keeper of a good portion of handicapping data) will regularly send cease and desist orders to people who attempt to automate aggregation of data even with free, publicly available content. That's at least half the reason PDFs are used when customers purchase data access, to make aggregation harder (you should see some of the white space, character encoding fuckery they use to throw off aggregators).
I suppose some of this often depends the quality of the data as well. Most data entry happens at the track during the race by a human, none of the data collection about races or the horse stats are collected by a computer, it's 95% hand entered. That also goes for pedigree information and other statistics including medications, weights, etc. And 100% of that is usually self-reported.
Much of the current handicapping in the industry is everyone trying to protect their personal mountains of data. Tech-minded people would love to provide open, controlled, API services so that people can do what they will with our mountains of data. But "giving it away for free" is a non-starter for the good ole boys at the top..
You've hit the nail on the head. It's all about vested interests.
I was involved for a number of years with a UK based horse racing ratings service (handicapping if in the US). This service used to license their base data from the Press Association[1] and then run algorithms on top to produce the ratings.
There's certain things I can't say due to NDAs which are probably still in effect, but the cost of licensing this basic data was in excess of £10k per annum. So, unless you were a serious bettor or were looking to operate a service of some kind, it's beyond the pocket of most individuals.
Timeform in the UK also license some of their own proprietory data, via an API[2]. They've published some pricing on their website and you're looking at between £6k - £12k per year. This is just to access data which is available via their website for a subscription fee of £75 per month, but via their API.
There's even a specific UK organisation which apparently has the permission from the British Horse Racing Authority to officially licence key racing data. This is who sells the data to bookmakers, form guides, racing newspapers etc. They have a rate card published on their website.[3] Private, pro-punter? £8.5k per year please.
It's a bit of a rort really. Most of the data is "freely" available online or in the racing press, but if you want to access it any useable format, either build a scraper (good luck with staying on top of the website changes) or pay a stack to access things programmatically.
As you stated, the vast majority of racing data is collected, measured and entered by hand, by people who are paid to perform this job. It costs enormous amounts of money to employ all these people to watch every race in meticulous detail and gather all the data required to publish the Daily Racing Form. Why would you expect them NOT to protect this proprietary, valuable information?
Almost all tracks publish result charts online for free along with race videos. If you want free, why not compile the data yourself? How long would DRF or Equibase exist if people could access their data for free?
The DRF relies on Equibase data for program and scratch data for all US and most International tracks. Even Churchill Downs relies on data agreements from Equibase to provide up-to-date information to feed to Totes. Result chart information is also almost exclusively Equibase data at least in the US. They make closed door deals with tracks, ADWs and Totes to provide data feeds.
Also, it's important to make the distinction between editorial content (analysis, predictions, subjective descriptions of a horse or jockey performance) and empirical information (horse weights, medication, surface conditions, weather, placements, jockey-horse combo win-rates, etc).
The DRF sells its speed ratings as well as analysis of pedigree and past performances. There's value in that and it definitely justifies the cost of their publication and the other publications that perform similar work.
The critical issue with your stance is that users have no options to aggregate their own data easily. The free PPs Equibase offers have been scrapped before and I know of several specific instances where the creators of those scrappers were sent cease and desist for collecting the information Equibase otherwise provides for free. Even to Github to remove the repository that contains the code.
I'm not advocating scrapping (please don't scrape sites like that) but there isn't any industry interest in providing modern consumable data. Wouldn't it be in Equibases best interest to put that information behind an API and sell access to the public? The industry actively discourages using publicly available data.
Charging a lot for the data is self defeating. In order for the sport to grow, more people need to be interested in the sport. One measure of interest is betting turnover. And a proportion of betting turnover is usually used to fund the industry. In order to increase betting turnover, one strategy could be to make the data free and easily accessible in an automated, machine readable form.
I really do not care about the likes of DRF or Equibase and how long they will or won't exist. I think it is upon the industry itself to ensure this data is available free and easily accessible. Look at Hong Kong as the alpha example. Loads of free data, huge betting turnover, well funded industry.
You may not care about DRF, but it is the sole source for a typical horseplayer to get reliable information about the horses, without which, these players would have zero guidance and likely abandon the sport.
DRF makes racing data easily accessible. If it was left to the tracks, which are independent entities (unlike NFL/NBA/MLB), an horseplayer would have to compile past performances from dozens of sources. The fields of a single day's race card may have run at 30 or more individual venues, in aggregate. Even if that data were free (well, the result charts and replay videos are already free, so technically this is already possible) if would take a ton of work to assemble it all in a digestible format -- which the DRF does for 6 bucks.
I don't believe HK offers free data that is not available from American tracks. There is no API, the result charts are less detailed than American tracks. If info was so freely available to everyone, how would someone like Bill Benter gain such a huge advantage? Why wouldn't he replicate his methods in the US? Probably because the US makes MORE data available.
Don't think there is necessarily a consideration of byte cost, given the size of the tracking scripts. A few lines to make this manageable on wide monitors aren't prohibitive for those users.