nknealk

The FDA can (and will) audit anything and everything you do for approved drugs/treatments. There are no trade secrets in medicine. This is why companies patent things. You literally can’t hide information about something that’s about to be FDA approved.

As a result, the medical industry is less competitive than other industries. Also, it’s seen as ethically dubious to compete on saving lives. Instead, there’s a lot if in-licensing deals (see above re patents) as opposed to trade secrets.

Ya. I'd really question how you can get 5%-10% yield in some of these deals. Risk and yield are generally very correlated. How much more counterparty risk are you really taking compared to treasuries which yield nearly 0%?

Lots of times in finance when things are too good to be true it's because they are.

In your citation [0], table 3. "No counterparty risk" on bitcoin is listed as "High" and "Moderate" for treasuries. It also lists real estate and gold as having more volatility than bitcoin.

I would question some of those assertions. Especially the ones about counterparty risk.

Probably the most important line:

To reinforce our long-term commitment to providing global access to affordable and flexible world-class learning, on February 1, 2021, we amended our certificate of incorporation to become a Delaware public benefit corporation. Public benefit corporations are a relatively new class of corporations that are intended to produce a public benefit and to operate in a responsible and sustainable manner. Under Delaware law, public benefit corporations are required to identify in their certificate of incorporation the public benefit or benefits they will promote, and their directors have a duty to manage the affairs of the corporation in a manner that balances the pecuniary interests of the stockholders, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the specific public benefit identified in the public benefit corporation’s certificate of incorporation. See “Risk Factors—Risks Relating to Our Existence as a Public Benefit Corporation” and “Description of Capital Stock—Public Benefit Corporation Status.” The public benefit stated in our certificate of incorporation is to provide global access to flexible and affordable high-quality education that supports personal development, career advancement, and economic opportunity.

The offer letters to key executives dated 2019 contain the following. Looks like they were doing flexible work long before COVID hit:

"We currently offer all salaried, SF-based employees to work from anywhere they want on Tuesday and Thursdays and do not need to be present in the office."

I just upgraded from a 2017 12" macbook to an M1 air. It's day and night in terms of performance across the board. I love the fanless design and the M1 air runs cooler than the 12". Also the keyboard is much better.

Their single biggest expense is “commission and other transaction related expenses” which clocks in at just over 3B. I don’t know how much control they really have over commissions.

M1 air used mostly for VSCode and web browsing. I regularly see swap in the 1-3 GB range. I think I have < 100 hours of usage.

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        31 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    0%
  Data Units Read:                    8,236,219 [4.21 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 6,393,656 [3.27 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 86,536,748
  Host Write Commands:                37,609,250

I played D2 regularly all through my teenage years. I think it might be one of the most exploited games ever which was half of what made it fun:

* There were a variety of ways to duplicate items online. One really popular and well known one involved spamming bone wall on a necromancer + meteor on a sorceress which would cause the server to lag to the point that your ping would exceed 1000. At that point, you could join a game with the same character, stop spamming the skill so your original character didn’t lag out, thus creating two ephemeral copies of your items. This eventually got patched

* One commonly duplicated item was called a stone ring of Jordan (SOJ). They were so commonly duplicated that blizzard added an event that if you sold ~100 to an in game merchant, everyone connected to a given server would spawn an Uber version of Diablo that dropped a unique small charm.

* Another way blizzard got rid of duplicated items was something called “rust storm” where they’d take the servers offline and go through every item in existence, deleting duplicates.

* Botting was extremely common. There are a bunch of weird quirks added to the game to try to prevent botting, though none of them worked. For example, if you spin the mouse wheel while hovering over a skill, it’ll cycle through your skills. That would immediately get you kicked from the game because the person who programmed the server thought only bots could switch skills that quickly.

* There was a feature in the game that if one person in your party got a quest, the whole party got the quest. Players regularly abuse this to “rush” level 1 characters into act 5 in the hardest difficulty so that they can expedite leveling up.

* There are ethereal items that get a 50% bonus to their core attribute (eg. Armor). If you used the cube recipe to socket the item, that 50% bonus would then get applied again. There were an entire class of items called “ebugged” that were overpowered.

* There was an event added much later for a unique large charm. Someone figured out that you could trap Mephisto in a building such that he would never path out of it, continuously trigger him to summon minions, and kill those minions to grant you massive experience with low risk of death. Thus uber leveling was born. You’d do this in a party with a fully equipped character handling the minions and could go 1-80 in like 5 minutes. This later got patched.

* There are still a small group of people who maintain items from previous patches that no longer spawn. A good google search term for this if you wanted to go down a rabbit hole is “1.08 valkyrie wing”. These are commonly duplicated and at risk of disappearing in a rust storm, so these players maintain a genealogy on forums of their items to prove they’re “legit” and not going to poof on you.

* Servers would drop you after like 30 minutes of inactivity. However, there were pathing bugs that could be exploited to make your character bounce back and forth between squares on the grid effectively preventing you from disconnecting. No mouse clicking scripts needed.

There’s probably more but this is getting long

> This ends in hyperinflation.

Except for the part where the fed said (and continues to say) it would raise rates if it saw sustained high inflation

> The difference between the PySpark & Scala APIs confuse the hell out of people

I personally had this experience when first wanting to learn spark, and it really turned me off to the whole spark ecosystem. Curious if you have any suggested resources that do a good job on this?

It’s worth noting that, while this is true, the reason the fed exists is because if they didn’t do that, we’d have bread lines.

I’d argue that recent fed actions are the reason supermarket shelves aren’t barren which is in the interest of all Americans.

> Insurance Companies play a similar game, based on the observation that a promise is a sellable good, and with enough statistics about various events occurring and their likelihoods, one can sell an unfair (worse than even) chance to retrieve the value of the promise.

Many insurance companies actually sell contracts below the fair price and earn money on the float.

Yes, because in the long run the equity will increase in value by the amount the currency has been debased holding all other things constant.

Put another way, if a currency is debased by 20%, businesses will raise prices or reduce costs to maintain the same margins over the long run.

If you look at the fourth table, the 15W config allows for 6 seconds of turbo at 42W. Which probably explains why the benchmark isn't very different between the 35W and 15W configurations. The processor probably just draws 42W for the duration of the benchmark in both cases. I don't know if comparisons to the Apple M1 are apples-to-apples (no pun intended) which tops out at like 20-25W.

That said, AMD's offering in this space is very impressive and really makes you question what Intel has been doing the last three years.

Ministry for the future.

It imagines a future where global warming goes unmitigated. I don’t want to spoil anything beyond that. Fantastic glimpse into what our future may hold.

The loan was collateralized by shares, not used to purchase shares. Also the founder got a sweetheart deal on the interest rate.

“ The loan [to our founder] accrues interest at a rate per annum equal to the long-term federal rate established pursuant to Section 1274 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code as in effect on November 8, 2019 (which was equal to 1.93% per annum), is secured by our Founder’s Class A units in Bumble Holdings and any net cash proceeds of such pledged units to the extent received by Beehive Holdings III, LP, and allows for repayment at any time”

Anyone else notice the Adam Newman style loans to the founder in the footnotes?

" (ii) cash proceeds to our Founder in an amount of $125 million, (iii) a loan to an entity controlled by our Founder in an amount of $119.0 million, as described further below under “—Loan to our Founder,” (iv) certain transaction expenses and (v) the contribution of $87.0 million to the balance sheet of the surviving company of the Merger."

I remember my first introduction to the hacking scene was installing custom firmware on the PSP. It allowed over clocking the processor to 333mhz which made god of war run smoothly

Like the Sunday crossword but SQL puzzles instead. Currently working on a back catalog of content and hope to launch later this year.

In the USA, we do the same thing, but with apples. Many grocery stores will carry like 10 different kinds of apples. I personally love honeycrisp and opal.

Possibly a dumb one but do you allow your browser to share your location? On mobile if you have location sharing enabled, most devices will allow the browser to get coarse GPS location

There are a variety of comments saying that discount rates are going to 0 because of fed actions which therefore justifies high asset prices. Another version of this story is “the fed printed cash and it has to go somewhere”. While it is true that discount rates are being suppressed by fed action, risk free rates are only one portion of what flows into the discount rate of a DCF. Market risk premium is another component that seems to be completely ignored this HN thread.

The google search term to get your feet wet is “CAPM”. I personally think that risk free rates being 0 is not sufficient to justify some of the valuations we’re seeing in the technology sector.

A more interesting question might be: what is the evolutionary pressure that caused convergence towards aging across essentially all multicellular living things on earth?

I want to see the dinosaurs

Just a thought — as far as I know, the degrees granted by online programs (like an MSc) are exactly the same degree as what’s granted by an in person program. You’re not required to disclose on your resume that the MSc was earned virtually. Also with most learning being virtual this year anyway, you’d be in the same boat as anyone else. All of this is to say someone reviewing your resume doesn’t necessarily have to know it was an online program unless they explicitly ask you.

I’d love to learn more about what you’re trying to get out of a masters and whether you could get the same thing by working professionally for 2 years.

We actually had a case study on the groupon accounting scandal as part of my MBA. In a nutshell, they claimed the retailer’s cut of the revenue in their financials improperly which arguably overstated their market power. Other interesting tidbits:

* Before going public, companies need to invest heavily in proper ERP systems. Groupon was allegedly running all its financial reporting off excel prior to IPO.

* At the time, Groupon also forced businesses into really steep discounts (think half off or more). Companies started realizing they either (1) were getting their same customers but giving them huge unnecessary discounts or (2) were acquiring a customer who would never return unless similar discounting was applied. Most businesses would only engage once before feeling burned and not engaging again. Which leads to

* They way groupon would source new deals (at least back in the day) was directly calling businesses to drum up demand. There wasn’t really a self-service portal or anything of that ilk. Groupon employed a bunch of people who literally dialed for dollars all day. It wasn’t really a scalable enterprise.

The shape of the first chart is really interesting to me. The M1 has a positive linear slope from 1 to 4 clients. Then from 4 to 8 clients the slope is essentially zero, maybe slightly positive. And then beyond 8 the slope goes negative.

This seems to imply the four efficiency cores really are “efficiency” cores and don’t have much computing horsepower at all.

I’ve had the same brother printer since college. Started in 2008. It still works great. Seconding brother as a cheap and reliable brand.

Write a solid term sheet if you’re going to go through with it. Examples of shenanigans that can be pulled that a term sheet would address:

* With an even split, in theory any two employees could declare a 200k dividend and walk away with 50k in pocket on day one.

* Similarly, the CEO and chairman could decide to oust you if things start going well since they own half the company.

* Where’s the stock pool for potential future employees? Does the equity stake you/other founding members get have a vesting period so they have incentive to stick it out?

There’s more but you get the idea.