qsi

In my case it's been from sites that got hacked or were discontinued. I don't investigate every single item of spam to see where it's addressed to, but some of the major data breaches like LinkedIn and Dropbox feature prominently. There's also an address I used as admin for a long-defunct domain.

In practice it's hard to differentiate between the sale of an address and a data breach, especially for smaller sites where the breach may not be publicized at all.

This has happened to me too, though not at Sixt. "Do you work for our company?"

Without clever innovations in notation, a lot of math (and physics) would be utterly intractable. For instance, without Einstein's notation hack [1], using and manipulating tensors is extremely painful. Arguably, General Relativity would not have been possible without the clarity of the Einstein notation.

Also long-established notation like integrals and differentials were once new and innovative, and paved the way for new discoveries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation

(edit: capitalize GR, grammar)

> In short, Twitter is not keeping up with the broader economy at Musk's price. You're telling the investment banks, mutual funds, and most-senior vested employees that their company has the same worth as a low-risk government bond or a bar of metal.

Exactly! The stock has been a terrible investment since IPO, and Twitter management has done a terrible job of unlocking value. It's current management that has failed to keep up with the broader economy. Musk thinks he can do a lot better if he has full control. Musk's price is a reflection of how poorly current management has done; he is not trying to compensate you for future growth.

If you think current management can drive the share price much higher, then you should not sell to Musk. If you think current management is just going to be more of the same, Musk is giving you a big premium over where the stock had been trading, and you should take his offer.

If Musk thinks Twitter will be worth $400 in five years' time, then he can realize that value for himself. He'd be very foolish to offer you that price now.

Oh, I see. In that case the stock is likely to decline from current levels and you should short it. (Not Investment Advice!)

Perhaps "free speech absolutism" isn't quite the right framing here, but more "First Amendment absolutism," with all the known bounds and checks (defamation, libel, incitement to violence). It does give a US-centric bias, but may better convey the meaning and intent.

"Go lynch this man" is speech, but is not protected under the First Amendment. And the First Amendment gives much broader protection than most countries' legal systems do.

He owns about 70 million shares. Before he announced his stake, the stock had a daily trading volume of about 20 million. I agree it's not super slow, but also not super fast. Probably a reasonable speed given the volume.

Why is the IPO price the relevant metric? In fact, I would argue that exactly because it's been such a poor investment since the IPO, the fact that he's willing to offer a premium over recent market prices is a positive. Then again, I don't own any Twitter, so my views are irrelevant in that sense.

IIRC the regulations are such that if you make a takeover offer, you can't do that? Not sure though, my work is only M&A-adjacent, so I'm not an expert.

He'll have to do it the same way he bought his current stake: slowly, over weeks and months, a little bit every day. A totally standard thing to ask your investment bank to do.

Because he filed the takeover offer with the SEC (the regulator) today. This is the way it should be done.

That's not quite how it works if you make a formal takeover offer. It's basically telling existing shareholders that he'll buy their stock at $54. If enough of them don't want to sell (depending on how it's structured), the deal falls through. It's a one-off purchase at $54 if it does go through. He can't buy more stock in the interim (I think).

Once he's taken it private, supposing he succeeds, you can't short the stock anymore as there won't be shares to borrow (or buy, or sell).

And specifically without the board's consent, or in active opposition to the board.

For as long as I've been in finance (measured in decades now, scarily enough) somebody's been trying to displace Bloomberg. They haven't succeeded.

The helpdesk explicitly doesn't support API questions, only for the Excel functions. I phrase my API questions to match in Excel BDP terms, that usually works. Data questions can indeed be difficult to get answered.

I'll just pile on here. The functionality of the Terminal is seemingly infinite and goes way beyond market data. Although it is obviously very good at market data. You pull up a bond, or future, or stock, or index, type FLDS and see an amazing amount of data beyond just the price.

It has maps (ships, refineries, fires, earthquakes, etc), flight schedules, overviews, top/bottom lists, correlations, regressions... ad nauseam. And also a quant platform, where you can code in Python I think, but I've never used it. I've been using for longer than I can remember and it's still impressive.

Also, they have generally a good to excellent help desk. Hit F1 twice and you're chatting to a real person, who can either help you or direct you to someone else who can. They have let me down on occasion too, but compared to other help desks/support, BB is the best.

I am starting to see more latency in pulling up functions in the Terminal, so I hope they're not losing sight of the UX. Near-instance response used to be commonplace, now I find that even some very common screens like WEI take noticeable time to load.

It is expensive. Many competitors have come and gone, and the closest thing now is I think Eikon, which also have installed to access the old Datastream data, and it's a complex monstrosity. FactSet is another one but I haven't used it in a long time. Every time cost-cutting time comes, one of the first questions is, "Do you really need Bloomberg?" Well, yes, I do.

Also don't forget about how deeply integrated BB is at many companies. Not just spreadsheets, but entire applications using the API.

So good luck, but I don't see it happening.

Minor pedantic point: prices (or specifically, the consumer price index) rose 7.5%, not inflation. It IS 7.5% YoY and did not rise 7.5%.

(Sorry, switching off Man-Shouts-At-Cloud Mode).

Inflationary expectations are definitely getting reanchored at a higher level, so it's hard to see an easy/painless exit. Helps deflate the debt/GDP ratio though (it's nominal GDP in the denominator, which includes inflation), so some folks will be happy.

Neither did I using Brave.

I agree it reflects poorly on the organization, but the previous story on HN [1] mentioned that the malicious insider had scared the CEO into giving access by manufacturing some sort of security incident. Had this not happened, he would not have been able to pull it off IIRC.

That would also point to the CEO being too powerful when it comes to security, which is also a knock against the organization, but in a different way.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29411775

More details, but not much more news yet:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/dbs-posb-down-not-...

From that article: >DBS Singapore country head Shee Tse Koon said the bank identified a problem with its access control servers on Tuesday and has been working "round the clock" with third-party engineering providers to fix the issue.

A few months from now the headline will be that MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore) slaps DBS with a hefty fine.

As an addendum to my previous reply on the DBS's abysmal UX, I will echo the point made here that once you get to talk to someone, it's generally fine. I've had some great service when I could get through to a human, but they're making it increasingly difficult to do so as they're going all digital. Many branches have closed, and even the higher-end Treasures locations are now down to just two I think (a major mistake IMO especially as you target the wealthier). Navigating their phone support. takes. a. lot. of. patience.

I also agree that other banks can be a lot worse, and HSBC in particularly has been abysmal.

(edited for grammar)

For context: DBS is Singapore's biggest bank, and this outage affects most (all?) electronic banking services made through the app or website, including the popular PayNow transfers (usually small transactions made by scanning a QR code, or sending it to the recipient by phone number).

I am also not really surprised as my experience of DBS IT as a customer is mediocre at best. Trying to apply for a credit card online was a comedy of poor UX. Errors preventing the submission, but not marked, files to upload could have a max of 20 characters in the file name, trying to re-upload failed until you deleted the failed previous upload (not explained), and best of all, their "We value your feedback" webform does not accept "special characters" such as apostrophe. "Your website doesn't work" cannot be submitted because of "doesn't." Really. This was a few months ago.

Oh, did I mention the DBS app takes forever to load? There's other stuff I am trying to forget.

As they're the biggest bank here they can offer some attractive packages, which is why I have put up with it...

Alien 8 was great! I should try to dust off my MSX emulator...

Hah, same here! The SVX-728 was somewhat infuriating in that it was slightly non-standard MSX if I recall correctly; this would mostly show up in (copied) games, which I then had to disassemble and tweak. I think it had to do with the memory mapping of the expansion slot or something... it's been a long time!

It did teach to me code Z-80 assembly (I still have Rodnay Zaks around somewhere [0]), and managed to squeeze a basic text editor into less than one kilobyte of code.

Good times.

[0] https://freecomputerbooks.com/Programming-the-Z80-3rd-Editio...

Won't use it for the simple reason it's much harder to type (for me) than ls, and doesn't seem to offer anything I can't find in ls right now.

For further perspective, I also recommend reading Scott Alexander's retelling at

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

You could get close to inkjets and early laser printers with Signum! on the ST and 24-pin dot matrix printer. It used custom bitmapped fonts and very fine control of the pins to generate amazing output.

It was very slow in the highest quality setting, but most people couldn't tell it apart from much more expensive solutions. It also had an astounding equation editor which made it great for STEM work.

Sometimes I wonder too, but your list of exceptions already points to why it's not likely to be true. The datasets that "regular" Excel users mangle easily can consume many megabytes. Write a document, add some graphics... remember how slowly JPEGs used to render?

I fully share the nostalgia though, but as a practical matter I don't think your statement is true.

I wrote some amazing papers in Signum! at the time, pushed the LDW spreadsheet to its limits, wrote cool stuff in GFA Basic, fondly remember the Tempus editor, learned C with Turbo C... it was magical, but for getting stuff done I don't I'd want to go back.

I'd love to reclaim some of that magic for today's world.