Here's an example of something more obvious. We have a new finance grad. He comes up with the methodology of "let's take all the corporate profit for the quarte

Here's an example of something more obvious. We have a new finance grad. He comes up with the methodology of "let's take all the corporate profit for the quarter, divide it by the outstanding shares, and distribute it". It's a bit simple, but it's fine. However, if you know that comes out to $7.22/share and announce that ahead of the announcement, you would breach your NDA. It's just a stupid number, but it means something. Similarly, the fact that Twitter used 100, instead of 1000 or 2700 gives you error bars. It means something. Semi-unrelated: a new stat grad would almost certainly not choose 100. They would feel compelled to run some math and come up with a different sample size that matched the results of some equations for power analysis, etc.