Backstage - Metaculus Dashboard

This dashboard follows the Unix philosophy: small tools that do one thing well, composed via text streams. Each component is designed to be independently useful.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ METACULUS FORECAST DASHBOARD │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ │ │ ┌─────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ │ │ │Metaculus│───▶│ Parser │───▶│ Formatter │ │ │ │ API │ │(Clojure) │ │(text/html) │ │ │ └─────────┘ └──────────┘ └─────────────┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ ▼ ▼ │ │ ┌──────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ │ │ │ Confidence │ │ TTE Effects │ │ │ │ Intervals │ │ (terminal) │ │ │ └──────────────┘ └─────────────┘ │ │ │ │ Outputs: JSON API │ HTML Dashboard │ Terminal (TTE) │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Components

1. Data Layer

2. Analysis Layer

3. Presentation Layer

Terminal Text Effects

The dashboard uses TTE for animated terminal output. Effects are chosen based on prediction confidence:

Certain (>90%%) → decrypt (calm, resolved) Likely (75-90%%) → slide (smooth, confident) Leaning (60-75%%) → waves (some uncertainty) Uncertain (40-60%%)→ scattered (maximum entropy) Closing soon → burn (urgency) Hot topics → fireworks (attention)

GET / HTML dashboard (auto-refreshes) GET /backstage This documentation page GET /api/questions JSON: raw question data GET /api/summary JSON: aggregate statistics GET /text Plain text for terminal piping

CLI Usage

./metaculus # Default: show 8 questions with TTE ./metaculus list 20 # List more questions ./metaculus show <id> # Detail view for one question ./metaculus hot # Most forecasted questions ./metaculus closing # Questions closing soon ./metaculus ai # AI-related predictions ./metaculus serve 8080 # Start web server

Design Decisions

Babashka over Clojure: Fast startup (~50ms) for CLI responsiveness

Shell scripts for collectors: Composable, debuggable, POSIX-portable

JSON as interchange: Universal format, easy to pipe

No JavaScript framework: Static HTML with inline CSS

Effect-per-state mapping: Visual encoding of uncertainty

📚 Backstage: System Design

Philosophy