"CyberSource's patented invention is simple: when validating online credit card purchases, use IP address information (such as IP addresses) as a check against fraud. Thus, the patented method might raise a red flag if someone attempts to make a large internet purchase through an IP address that had previously been used for a fraudulent transaction."
IANAL and this is not legal advice, but the guys (probably) that tried to patent this should go f* themselves.
I learned about this feature years and years ago and never used it. Maybe it wouldn't actually be all that helpful afterall. If only I could downvote myself.
"But, I'll just mention two things that are critical in Multiplan.
The first is the use of naming. You are not put into a mode where you have to use "A10," "B9," "C14," and things like that, which you have to do with VisiCalc. If you want to say that taxes are 6% of sales then you say "taxes are .06 times sales." If you want the sum of all the profits you say "SUM (Profit)" and so we deal with data on a name basis which is the way people are used to dealing with it."
Am I the only one that would love to see this impleneted in spreadsheet software today?
"Hoffman pointed to one of his recent investments, Airbnb, a short-term vacation rental website, as an example. The website pairs people looking for vacation rentals with people willing to rent out their homes. As Hoffman pointed out, both parties would want assurance that the other is trustworthy. Airbnb’s answer is an evaluation system based in part on the responsiveness of a host — the faster a host responds, the more reliable he or she is likely to be.
“And that’s a very good predictor of whether this will be a good experience,” Hoffman said. “This creates an improvement in the world.” "
You're so right. I had the same reaction to this and the New Yorker article covering the same.
I got interested in hedge funds in high school after reading a lot of articles like this. But after learning a lot about economics and finance I learned to pick up the sensationalism in these articles.
I think just about every article about a hedge fund has a line like, "consistently beats the market...which most economists say isn't possible." That's not even true. The free market hypothesis has not been given much stock outside of the University of Chicago (Eugene Fama) since the 90's. Most economists who even study such things focus on under what scenario can an investor outperform the market and what types of securities tend to be undervalued.
I'm even amazed that the article doesn't begin by mentioning Ray Dalio's childhood as a chess prodigy/math olympiad/other thing that only really really smart people can do.
These articles typically have a set format:
1. Intro into the mysterious culture of the hedge fund
2. Background on the precocious child prodigy turned market whiz
3. Description of firm's hiring practices of PhD's etc
4. Questioning value of Hedge Fund's to society
5. In conclusion, this hedge fund makes a lot of money...
I almost want to run some NLP scripts over a corpus of profiles of hedge fund managers and automatically generate a dozen of these, print them, and see if I can get a job at Bloomberg.
The one exception to this, which may really not even be an exception, is if you are your target customer. If you really need the product you're building that is a good starting point. I think for turning a website/app into a business the most important first customer is you.
I went to high school in one city, college in one 1,000 miles away. Have since worked in cities all over the world. I don't know how I would manage to keep even a tenuous grasp on all the connections I have with people in these different places without Facebook. Admittedly, these are not and never will be deep social bonds I am maintaing, but that is hardly the point. There is value in maintaining a large web of shallow social connections. Facebook helps me do this.
Moreover, whether or not Facebook has improved the life of me or anyone I care about is irrelevant to an objective evaluation of the site's value. I could make the same case for anti-malaria drugs.
As a stats person, I've seen lots of job postings for "data scientists" that are along the lines of "We need someone to turn our massive amount of data into profit!" I hesitate to name names, but if you search for data scientist jobs you will see what I'm talking about. My reaction is always, "Great, but what business question are you trying to answer?"