chrislipa

I just to try and gett TV rtf TTa we t feed define the t TTreally I just wh from G they rrdand I

No. Are you?

I live in Songdo (the city featured in the article), and I think I have to concur with their dystopian tone. This place felt “fake” or “manufactured” to me in some sense that I couldn’t put my finger on even before I knew that it’s a planned city. Like too much infrastructure built and the people never came to inhabit it. Not quite a ghost town, but in that direction.

I have to say that getting around without a car is rather nice in daily life, but the public transportation around town was disappointing. And it’s odd that it takes 45 minutes longer to get to the Incheon airport from my Songdo apartment than from downtown Seoul, despite being much closer.

He used to sit on the floor of his office with the lights off under a giant moving box and brainstorm math.

Reference: personal communication

Glad you liked it.

Travel the world. Read Hacker News.

Dead customers can't be returning customers?

Had it been a small non-profit, or some bootstrapped startup, they may have been able to get cheap representation via the EFF or some other group that defends the public interest.

And they very likely would have lost.

I think that cft is insinuating that the law is not the same for the wealthy and well-connected and the poor.

the owners are incredibly greedy not to accept a $3 billion cash offer

You can look at this another way -- Maybe greedy would be taking the life-changing amount of money here, and they're not because they actually like their jobs.

Do you have a reference for this hypothesis?

3,000 people out of ~300MM in the US is not one tenth of a percent.

Yea, I get it. I'm just saying it's suggestive, not conclusive.

But that's a counterfactual. Once the pop occurs, the company could not have gone with a higher price and pocketed more cash. A rational actor should make the best decision they can make given the information they have at the time, place their bets, and take their chances. The article clearly made it seem like having a pop (as differentiated from having a higher stock price) was a favor that Twitter was doing investors, and that somehow this favor would be repaid by market at large via some mechanism that's totally mysterious to me. I'm honestly really baffled that this meme gets repeated so much, and I'm open to explanations.

Dutch auctions do sound good in theory, and I'm aware of what happened with Google's: a 17% pop, which left some money on the table, but much less than Twitter did. Google's stock did abnormally well in the months following, but it's hard for me to divine how much of this had to do with the IPO mechanism. In any case, I think a sample size of one is probably not enough to draw much of a conclusion one way or the other.

But it sort of does imply that. Here's the reasoning -- There's a liquid market of a lot of shares trading hands at $40+. Anybody who bought a share at $26 knows he or she can sell today for $40+. To a first approximation, choosing not to sell at $40 has roughly the same effect as choosing to buy at $40. If the price is supported at $40+, that's at least very suggestive evidence that enough buyers could have been found at that price in the first place.

Maybe I'm fundamentally missing something, but I have a very hard time seeing why Twitter should care all that much about how much their stock 'pops' at open. Sure, they should care deeply about the price it settles at, because that's how they'll attract talent in the future and bases how they'll price future offerings, but the actual amount of pop itself? I don't see it.

This gem from the article:

Should a stock offering maximize value for the companies selling shares, for the investors looking to gobble those shares up or for early employees and funders? And why are investors buying the shares — because they love the company’s fundamentals or because they sense a good deal?

This is a ridiculously false dichotomy. In any efficient market, sellers are trying to raise the price as far as the demand will bear, and buyers should be willing to purchase up to their estimated value of the company, taking into account their risk tolerance. Price should be a tug-of-war between these actors.

The way I see it, there's only two possibilities:

1) Pre-IPO Twitter thought there was a realistic risk of not fully selling the shares they put up if they raised the price.

2) Twitter purposefully got less money in a fair market trade than they could have.

And (2) seems totally insane to me for a rational actor. (1) seems plausible; apparently these things are hard to price.

Suspension is not nearly enough. They broke the law and should be prosecuted.

XKCD did it first:

http://xkcd.com/882/

Ha. Gone are the days where you pay for a game. You're paying for a service. Didn't you read your ToS?

You'd think so, but unfortunately, our government disagrees.

https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fact-sheet-us-co...

I hate to be that guy, too, but if you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't be using OS X or iOS, either.

low taxes on dividends

My understanding is that the low nominal tax on dividends is on top of the high corporate tax, which is 35%, so that dividends are taxed at a higher rate than earned income.

In that case, the feds already have it ...

http://www.chessgames.com/~AylerKupp?kpage=35

Crackers are using phrases from literature and the bible. Trawling the rest of the internet is not far behind.

Why would you need to? The data is encrypted by the password.

Not ignoring that at all. History is replete with true believers willing to kill and die for their causes.

I don't know ... but I'm not convinced. I looks perfectly congruent with the facts that he's just incredibly passionate about his mission. I don't think it's so unreasonable for DPR to think and hope that he was changing the world for the better.

You make a good point, but that's also a shortcoming of all of the purely computational techniques. I think the most you can hope for is 'democratizing' the computational methods, i.e. making them non-parallelizable.

Taking gwern's idea, what if the homomorphic computation is just incrementing your input repeatedly inside of a loop? It seems like that might be hard to parallelize. Or at least, I don't know enough to assume otherwise.

Maybe there's still a way to use homomorphic encryption. gwern rightly suggests that it causes a big problem if the recipient must decrypt the result of an encrypted computation. However, what if the decrypted result of the computation is never known to the recipient and instead the recipient must use the still-encrypted result of the encrypted homomorphic computation?

It would work like this:

The secret sharer creates some random string called 'a' and some computable function 'f'. The secret sharer also creates an encryption function 'e', and a homomorphic equivalent to 'f', called 'F' so that the following commutes: e(f(x)) = F(e(x)). F acts on encrypted data and gives encrypted results, but is much slower than f.

The secret sharer can comparatively quickly compute e(f(x)), which he or she uses as a key to encrypt a message. However the recipient is only given the values e(x) and F and must use exponentially more computational time to go the more laborious route, computing F(e(x)).

It's a really beautiful and easy to understand and genius algorithm, and it perfectly meets its design goals. It works very analogously to the following:

Pretend your secret is an integer. You want to distribute clues as to your secret integer to N of your friends such that any K of them can collude to figure it out, but K-1 of them can't figure out anything about it at all.

So you construct a (K-1)-degree polynomial of one variable, f(x). All of the coefficients of the terms of f(x) are random, except choose the y-intercept (i.e. the constant co-efficient) to be your secret. Then calculate and distribute the numbers f(1), f(2), ..., f(N) to your N friends.

K points on the 2D co-ordinate plane uniquely identify your single (K-1)-degree polynomial, which will have your specific secret y-intercept. However (K-1) points will pick out an entire family of potential (K-1)-degree polynomials. And, in fact, for every single possible secret you could have chosen, there's a (K-1)-degree polynomial that goes through (K-1) points and the possible secret value. So, (K-1) of your friends colluding really don't have any additional information at all about your secret.

Shamir's secret sharing works just like that, but done with integers modulo a prime. (And the prime has to be larger than your secret.)

I feel like a developer could hack this pretty easily by enabling upgrade features through In-App Purchases.