texasbigdata

Just a guess: perhaps that it’s more applicable to large use cases and at clients that are much more likely to be profitable and therefore able to pay?

Essentially, yes. The GAAP income statement is a very poor proxy for cash flow generation ability. That captures 80% of it.

There’s also operating leverage. This business should trend to 50-80% gross margins and 30-50% profit / free cash flow conversion, similar to Facebook, Google, or other similar businesses.

Further, there’s a bunch of pre- and post- transaction adjustments that hit the financial statements (for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability), so you can’t just take last years profit and tack on the new debt structure.

Last, the amortization on high yield isn’t necessarily linear. In the most extreme example (where the debt costs >12%) you could have pay-in-kind (PIK) interest where the interest payments accrue to the balance of the loan (like a credit card) and for amortization, it could be anywhere from straight line (1/x periods) to a “bullet” with no amortization at all until a end period where it all comes due at once (you typically refinance in that case).

All-in, it may be risky, but the bankers that committed billions of capital to the deal aren’t exactly brain dead and all have internal credit approval processes which require them to do all the work outlined above and a bunch more.

Except for this one :)

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586108809772089345?s=46...

Edit: apparently this was “trauma / shock actors” (whatever that means) but it was still picked up by CNBC.

I would wait for the first product to launch before pronouncing a company dead, which should be fairly soon: https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/traffic/officials-aim-to...

This is incorrect accounting. Source: myself, CPA.

We could drill down further here but it’s not worth 3 paragraphs of nuance for this subtle point.

Facebook has 50% profit margins. Why can’t twitter do that? They both sell ads.

The covenants on a low leverage transaction are likely highly limited: a)make interest payments, b) make principal payments, c) don’t make illegal dividends, d) don’t cross certain covenants such as EV/EBITDA, fixed charge coverage ratio, or similar, and e) get an audit every year and submit financials to the banks every 90 days.

Not exactly onerous since they were a public company before.

The bankers aren’t naive, they modeled this out. Sure it could go bad and I wonder if Elon PG’ed (personal guarantee) the debt, but you don’t underwrite your a default out of the gate. It’s one of the worst faux pas of debt capital markets.

Another slant, considering the (is this true btw) the rumor he asked engineers to print the last 30 days of code they submitted: he’s signaling “hey if you’re lazy, I’m going to fire you, so go ahead and leave on your own”. Which might just work.

It’s pandemic popular as “non sleep deep rest” if you want to try it by following a YouTube guide. Great nap replacement for when you’re too wired to fully fall asleep.

The last line is logically ambiguous. In Europe, I believe in 2019, they found two effects: a significant _underdiagnosis_, offset by a tiny over diagnosis; now you could argue phones and screens artificially raise the genetic baseline, or that America is inherently different. But I will tell you ADHD meds calm me down, or when measured with a heart strap monitor over a full day fairly meaningfully lower my heart rate.

It’s perhaps a meme now that adhd is over diagnosed, but I’d guess the majority is pill seeking individuals looking to compete at school or at work and less false positive diagnoses such as yours.

Net net you seem to have solved it fairly quickly so at least that’s good: even when you get the diagnosis wrong if you can backtrack without significant cost then maybe it’s not absolutely horrible.

This seems like the most inhumane way to make the decision discussed, even if you're not necessarily wrong for taking this approach. I can't imagine what it'd be like being a small child in a household where your parents "had doubt" and turns out they didn't really want you after all. You can't fake it well enough for 18 years where they wouldn't notice. Just sad imho

You just invented the next great dating app. Because I can “game” saying I like or do something, but having to both physically be there and review it is a cool angle. The catch (outside the crazy permissions) would be it would greatly hurt smaller cities: “oh you really like the only Starbucks in town? Me too!”

Ehh, there was some really sketch things there. I think at least for apple they might have potentially already built it and this just moved their announcement date up. There’s a very weird simultaneously timed NSA bill in congress at the same time.

/tinfoilhat

There’s a play about this, the name escapes me, but it’s a “quantum” love story: two people meet and at each step options present; the catch is the possibility tree doesn’t converge (one character had a midlife disease, which only happened in some of the branches).

It was absolutely fantastic. Just tremendous. Think it played in New York, Dallas and New York at a minimum.

It's like the sticker that says "this amp goes to 11". Google just went further!

Somewhere a product manager is beaming with pride

tldr: hard stuff is hard and not fun to work on

Why did AWS, a group probably fairly technical savy and a direct competitor to its vendor, take so long [1] to migrate from Oracle?

Why does Google, as of today, have job openings for SAP in its Rev Rec division [2], and more widely in areas touching [3] “ SAP ERP domains (e.g. Finance, Revenue/Cost Management, Billing, Materials Management, Sourcing, Procurement and/or Inventory Management)”?

Granted you could say, and I believe in one of the many google “corporate biography” books Eric Schmidt allegedly worked through this same problem: hey is an ERP a product for us? A core competency? Should we build it? [Seems HN discussed this in 2021 already, 4]

Conversely, given the wide ranging scope of random things Google has built and how naively simple accounting and something like a fixed asset ledger looks at first glance…why did they never do it? Surely not because building 7 conflicting chat tools was a priority.

My guess (as a non developer) would be it’s crazy hard to build SAP. From personal experience even QB Online has a daunting level of “backwards compatible” complexity [5] in its data scheme even coming from an accounting background. The API keeps versioning up incrementally and you’ll find gems like “XYZ local French Tax” and other accumulated baggage. As an anecdote, using arguably a knowledgeable vendor, as of a year ago it wasn’t possible to populate a full simple profit and loss statement via Fivetrans ETL tool [6], even though they did a phenomenal job in mapping out the ERD compared to anything else that existed imho [7]. CDATA let you run SQL queries, but the complexity of scripting some of the reports was much more fragile. The community even built a DBT layer [8] and given how cumbersome it was to generate even just the “Revenue” line on the P&L out of a simple non-enterprise tool like QBO, SAP seems 1000x harder.

That’s probably why everything in-market, post-sales cycle is garbage. But hey, someone in a dorm room might be working on replacing SAP right now :)

Note: this excludes versioning, which I believe Workday does every six months, which is also a bunch of work twice a year.

1. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...

2. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/142858723165905606-r...

3. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/118792275728704198-s...

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26706991

5.(imprecise but good starting point) https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/api/acco...

6. https://fivetran.com/docs/applications/quickbooks

7. https://docs.google.com/presentation/u/0/d/1u0dnyq5L_rcEgR2_...

8. https://fivetran.com/docs/transformations/dbt/data-models/qu...

The max are basically useless. They sound okaish compared to headphones 4-6x their price, but they love to pair with anything around and the mic is non existent. It's the most enjoyable brutally frustrating experience ever.

Rookie question but don’t draws occur more than 20-25% of the time at this level? Or is that just a unique feature of chess versus say StarCraft.

Restated, are sports specific ELO scores real? Alternatively phrased, does an X ELO score in one competitive endeavor represent the same relative strength as the same ELO in another subject?

Hmmm I wonder what this thread is called

Shutting down all the nuclear?

Slight comedy.

Fair. Good point.

As a n00b bet, I'd guess if actual top 5 or top 10 powers fought you'd see some scary / impressive / novel drone warfare usage.

Perhaps a little pedantic but as a thought experiment, if ABC corp was awesome at drones and wanted to solely manufacture in China, but in order to do so was forced to form ABC_China_LLC and transfer al the IP and know-how, how would you feel about it then?

It's like a reverse "what if China invades Taiwan and takes TSMC".

Just tape a gameboy or switch to a dslr and there’s your kid version

My bad. Thx.

I'm not really familiar with this market but I'll just quote one article from last week suggesting it's a bit more lopsided than that; things can change quickly obviously.

"Tesla accounts for more than two-thirds of all-electric car registrations (almost 68%), which is a dominant position, but the non-Tesla electric vehicle sales are growing at a similar rate and potentially might outpace Tesla later this year."

If youre outselling everyone else _combined_ that suggests a clear current market winner.

https://insideevs.com/news/604580/us-bev-premium-car-sales-2...

I think the reticence is the old attitude that you basically had to drag the old car manufacturers to electric, then they insisted on doing design after design of the clearly inferior hydrogen alternative, it's hard to take them seriously now that they're just responding to stay relevant / alive. If they really "cared" about EV this would have come 20 years earlier given the sheer scale of endowed resources they had. Of course that's not a fair evaluation of them, but one perspective on how it'd be easy to be cynical.

And aero performance? And materials? And reliability? And availability of support (and charging, although that will go away), and resale market depth/liquidity? And branding? And interior layouts (the Lincoln grotesque most recent model car as an example)? With features (the giant tesla glass sunroof)? With new innovation (further soundproofing)? With more efficiency (greater energy recapture on breaking)?

I don't know, once there's 20 credible manufacturers in this space I bet they will compete in any way possible. Just like any other industry.