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Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

The Reddit dedicated to this showed there was an article in the huffpo and a Twitter account (something like @fyrefraud) that have been screaming for months that this festival was an obvious scam. If you know what to look for, a lot of outcomes are not some giant mystery. In isolation, human behavior is actually quite predictable; only in the aggregate does it get difficult to predict.

Edit: I went through my browser history and the Twitter handle is correct.the article was actually on BuzzFeed but it's been scrubbed since last night. The author's name is Madeline Scott and the title started with "is fyre festival the next big music event or..." Maybe there's a cahe of the article somewhere?

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Archive of article: http://archive.is/ts6kN

Both Sky broadband and 02 mobile are blocking this domain saying it's dodgy

I've been using archive.is for years.

Of course if you actually want to be sure you're visiting the real site, you should prepend the url with https .

I really doubt they're blocking it saying it's dodgy, more likely that it's a way to get around other blocks - do you have the "content filter" (Government censorship) enabled?

The Google webarchive link might work better: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OLBvHo...

Dude, you really need to use a VPN. That's the create firewall of Great Britain at work.

They have to block archive.is because it's very so slightly socialist..

Or hop to an ISP that doesn't filter. They do exist.

Or, y'know, disable your filter. Sky's configuration panel is here - https://broadbandshield.sky.com/ - O2's, iirc, requires you to go to an O2 shop with your ID.

Heh, small world. I work for Sky, and my team very recently took over technical responsibility for that exact site. Nevertheless, it's worth knowing that outside the big 4, there are ISPs which on principle don't even require that step. People can fall into the trap of believing that all UK consumer internet access has a ThinkOfTheChildren filter in place by default, but that's just not true.

Sure, AAISP don't even provide a filter iirc, though are a lot more expensive than some of the more mainstream ISPs. I think Zen Internet don't either, but again, expensive.

Where are you located (approximately ofc.)?

It isn't.

Nice! Thanks. How did u find that?

Copied and pasted the quote into Google, with quotation marks. It was on the front page but not the top result. Wayback Machine has it too, but this archive.is (A site I've never used before) is a much higher quality archive.

From what I gather, the founders were plowing ahead despite clear signs of failure in store. Looking at it that way, this is not a scam, but instead a story of the less glamorous side of entrepreneurship. It's unfortunate that a proper learning lesson has been turned into a laughing stock, but I guess that is also part of the lesson.

Did you read the BuzzFeed article?

>> In isolation, human behavior is actually quite predictable; only in the aggregate does it get difficult to predict.

It's the opposite, isn't it? You can predict what a group of people will do on average, but you can't know whether a specific person picked out of that group will be average, or an outlier.

> It's the opposite, isn't it?

No, its neither. Or both. Whatever. That is, there are fairly narrow circumstances where, with sufficient information about an individual, individual behavior is well predictable and fairly narrow circumstances where group behavior is predictable, but neither is actually all that predictable reliably (there's lots of people trying to do both, and the notable successes -- which involve lots of luck -- can make it look like either is more reliably predictable than it is.)

That's what I was thinking. Might have Hari Seldon's psychohistory on the brain.

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