I think Fabi is licking his chops thinking he can now finally be a world champion since Carlsen is out and Ding maybe won't be too hard to best. He predicted lots of lines in the match or saw better ones from his commentator chair (granted the eval bar helps a lot). But you are right he will have to take some risks probably.
I would want a way to view all the slides for a particular deck together, but here it seems I can only click a slide and see just that slide, no way to go back or forwards. I know in some cases the full deck may not be available but often there is more than one that we should be able to page through.
>Sidenote here: one thing I found but didn't mention (the reason I put in the pooling, both in Python and pgbouncer) is that otherwise, under load, the async implementions would flood postgres with open connections and everything would just break down.
Doesn't this prove that async is waiting for connections when you put a limit on it? The only way async wins is if it is free to hit the db whenever it needs to.
Who knows. The point is, if when not restricted you get a ton of db connections, then any restriction on that almost definitely means you are imposing a bottle neck. The only way this would not be the case is if it was trying to create db connections when it didn't need them, unlikely.
Not sure how MSFT usually handles it, but when I was acqui-hired (by a different large tech company, not quite on MSFT scale, but no trifle) I dealt almost exclusively with a person from Business Development. Maybe it is a bad sign that they had you discussing with people in their engineering group directly. Sounds like they were gathering data from you with no real plan to acquire. Then again every company may do it differently.
For me, there were some questions about my technology, but not a lot. Mostly we agreed on terms, and then they came up with a 40 page contract :) (the bus-dev guy said they don't really treat a small acquisition like mine that much differently than a larger acquisition in terms of contract verbiage). I had my lawyers (no I did not have any before this offer), review it.
But overall I felt that someone, who later I'm pretty sure turned out to be the CEO, had told their Business Development guy, just acquire this thing (and bring him along if you can), so they just went about doing that and it came out ok.
I had to go back and look it was a while back, it took longer than I remembered it. The initial reach out was in May 2011. I had some initial conversation with them in May and June, sent them some overview of the company, etc. Then didn't hear back for a while. In December 2011 conversations started back up. By then the company had actually launched a product where they could see my business being useful. I sent them some small amount of data as a sample. I had actually proposed a simpler lower cost proposal of them just purchasing the data they wanted and not the business or acquiring me to work there. Anyway sometime at beginning of Feb 2012, things started to move faster and then it was done by beginning of March 2012. So in my mind/memory it was really January 2012 to beginning of March but really started in May 2011.
Lots of times the process starts through some mid-level manager expressing interest in a possible m&a, and initiating what I'd call "casual" due diligence, along the lines of what the PP described. The issue here, from the target's pov, is that the person/team sponsoring the research/engagement isn't empowered to execute an acquisition -- ultimately, they're just performing research to build a business case that validates the viability of the purchase, and helps provides insights sufficient to guide the acquiring company's deal team on desirable base contract terms & structures. All this feels like it's an acquisition moving quickly to small companies that haven't been through it before, but it really isn't. Only after the corporate development analysts & attorneys get involved will it move quickly, but that's primarily for two reasons: 1) the due diligence is already largely completed, and 2) they hold the purse strings.
Note that it's pretty common for years to pass between the first and second stages of this process, and there are any number of reasons why acquisition negotiations can either suddenly accelerate (it becomes competitive, partnering isn't going to work as a fallback, the target is going out of business, the acquiring company needs to unload cash fast, ...) or slow down (partnering becomes more desirable than acquisition, 1st party development becomes competitive, various legal reasons intervene, business strategy shifts away from whatever made the acquisition interesting in the first place, org changes shift the focus away from the acquisition, ...).
It would be very useful to know the percentage of completed deals. Is it 1% or 10% or higher? I think the number tends towards 1% rather than 10%. We (mostly) hear about successful deals and not unsuccessful ones which why this article is very valuable.
That's what I was thinking. How would a company approach you if they were genuinely considering purchasing your product? And how if they want to brain rape you?
Maybe being contacted by a product manager or engineer should make you cautious.
I am no economist, but probably it's more widespread use pins it down, and addition central banks are supposed to try and keep inflation within a target. Exchange rates fluctuate of course and they can be wild, but within a country currency is usually stable but slowly losing value.
By the end of the stock market downturn of 2002, stocks had lost $5 trillion in market capitalization since the peak.[39] At its trough on October 9, 2002, the NASDAQ-100 had dropped to 1,114, down 78% from its peak.[40][41] Many online shopping companies, such as Pets.com, Webvan, and Boo.com, as well as communication companies, such as Worldcom, NorthPoint Communications and Global Crossing, failed and shut down.[42][43] Others, such as Cisco, whose stock declined by 86%,[43] and Qualcomm, lost a large portion of their market capitalization but survived, and some companies, such as eBay and Amazon.com, lost value but recovered quickly.
Silly to look at % down from ATH when we had a massive bubble that peaked and popped. If you look at return overall, crypto beats ALL stock market investmets.
From a brief google, Uber's seed round is up 5000X so that beats my example. But Ethereum did pretty well; their equivalent of a seed round was in 2014, when one Bitcoin was worth $600, and as of today they're up 700X since then. That's down 85% from their peak of 4600X.
And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor. If you just look at the public companies available to everyone, another quick google says the best in the last decade was Netflix at 40X gain.
> And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor.
If you ask the SEC the majority of ICOs aren't available to the average investor either, and never should have been. Because the vast majority are pure, hot, unadulterated garbage like Dentacoin and IOTA - which emulates a ternary computer for literally no reason anyone can identify.
Nevertheless it was available and the SEC is fine with Ethereum today. In any case, as far as the Crypto Fund goes my second paragraph was irrelevant anyway.
I mean, look, the point is that you can't compare when bitcoin first opened up to an asset, it was a toy that surprisingly people pay for today even though it's being propped up by Tether and Bitfinex. It's akin to comparing the par value (1/10th of a cent) per share that the Uber founders received at formation - a 5,000,000% return. That makes the returns quite comparable. Starting something can be lucrative.
It is by no means the best performing asset. Anyone with shares from the formation of a startup has outperformed.
Equity is passive investment once you own it whether you remain employed or not. It's capital gains once you own the shares, not ordinary income. You can also include anyone you want in the cap table at formation, not just employees -- if you wanted, you could easily issue your advisory shares at that time.
Not to mention, at formation, you're more than welcome to pay market salaries to your founders, that's your perogative as a founder.
Not a startup. They don't just go from seed round to IPO on idle. The founders had to invest thousands of hours and immense stress to get it to IPO. Meanwhile a holder of 1000 BTC from 2012 probably continued to work their day job until 2017 when they incidentally became multi-millionaires.
This is the reason bitcoin will never be more than a way to move funds illegally and for a few gamblers to trade it online.
Society is fine with startup founders and "employee number 5" making their fortune because they put in actual effort to build a company.
The bitcoin millionaires happened to mine a few coins in 2011 before most people knew about it and then just did nothing as you said. Zero contribution to society from making that paper (or bit) fortune.
Why on earth would everyone else not on the right internet forum in the early 2010s make the few that were fabulously rich?
Investing in stocks is a similar passive income, but at least in that case the investors money is going towards some business that pays a wage to workers or provides some net benefit to society (hopefully).
A start-up is just any company that's founded, usually with aspirations, and what I'm saying is that, technically, you can throw anyone you want on your cap table at formation [note]. I'm not saying it's typical or common, just that it's fundamentally possible. Same with founder compensation.
Bitcoin as a "passive investment" is such a lame comparison because it does, literally, nothing, just like hanging onto some beanie babies. Beanie babies, but much more wasteful.
[note] Anyone who's an employee or an accredited investor.
There were thousands of people who participated in Bitcoin's early days, tens of thousands by 2012. And back then they were giving away Bitcoin on faucets. You could also mine it with a basic graphics card.
It's not a lame comparison at all. If you bought Bitcoin in 2010, you've seen a 8,900,000% ROI. The asset may go up another 10-1000x from here. Bitcoin will outlast Uber. And if you're still comparing it to Beanie Babies 11 years later, it's likely you don't understand finance or blockchain, and you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the past few years.
Or it may go down to 0. Your assertion is as likely as mine, and you’re not basing it on anything it all. Past performance != future performance.
> Bitcoin will outlast Uber.
Ok, that doesn’t mean it’ll be worth anything. Or if it does that doesn’t mean anyone will have their keys haha. Every random walk down the timeline results in 100% of keys lost haha.
> And if you're still comparing it to Beanie Babies 11 years later, it's likely you don't understand finance or blockchain, and you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the past few years.
It’s because I’ve paid attention. Citing the divine scriptures of satoshi isn’t sufficient dismissal.
It may. I mean, oil just went negative a couple weeks ago so anything is possible.
When analyzing an asset class you have to look at probabilities. Probability of Bitcoin going to zero during a financial crisis, where people are losing faith in local currencies around the world:
...is near zero. It's much more likely that adoption continues and Bitcoin matures as a financial asset class, not just in the developing world, but here in the U.S.:
As for the random walk and 100% of keys being lost...maybe if you march out the timeline long enough, the whole human species isn't going to exist any longer...so there's that. But I would argue strongly that Bitcoin (and Ethereum) has better prospects than any other digital infrastructure.
In the mean time, the next few decades look very bright indeed.
> When analyzing an asset class you have to look at probabilities. Probability of Bitcoin going to zero during a financial crisis, where people are losing faith in local currencies around the world:
BTC has dropped 50% in value over the last three years, while the currency has inflated 5%. I know which I'd rather hold. Actually I'd rather hold neither, I'd rather be invested.
> It's much more likely that adoption continues and Bitcoin matures as a financial asset class, not just in the developing world, but here in the U.S.:
> As for the random walk and 100% of keys being lost...maybe if you march out the timeline long enough, the whole human species isn't going to exist any longer...so there's that. But I would argue strongly that Bitcoin (and Ethereum) has better prospects than any other digital infrastructure.
20% of BTC has already been lost.
Probably more if you count Satoshi's wallet, which likely belongs to Paul Calder Le Roux, currently working with the DEA as penance for his many, many crimes. [1]
The price is largely propped up through a massive fraud perpetrated by Tether and Bitfinex. All the folks with those heavy, heavy bags have no interest in surfacing it, as it has become too big to fail within the crypto community.
What we need is more data. What is the % of Covid-19 cases that require hospitalization (and are people actually going to hospitals when they don't need to?) ? Is it 20x that of flu or 2x? We need random testing throughout the population to know true mortality rate and herd immunity.
As shown, in Italy there were 55 times more deaths per week (two weeks already) than the peek during the flu season. And it continues to grow.
> are people actually going to hospitals when they don't need to?
Surely no. In Italy, it is known that even the people who should go to hospitals can't be all admitted because the number of cases grows exponentially and fast, when uncontrolled. No limited resources could handle that.
People already die because the hospitals are too full.
Additionally, all people who are checked but than estimated to be able to survive without the hospital are advised to stay at home. But some of those still get sicker and die at home. That happens, infrequently for now, even in other European countries.
The reason people are admitted to hospitals is that they have so big problems breathing that they either immediately or at least soon have to be connected to the breathing machines. Which nobody would ever do to a healthy enough person, it's to save the life.
That's what are ICU on the graph above "intensive care units" -- the number of beds in typically small parts of hospitals where typically small number of people has to be connected to the machines to help them survive. Now the demand for those is huge.
And even 30-year old doctors get to have to be treated so:
Consider this, if the news reported "Old people with pre-existing conditions should quarantine themselves because a deadly virus may kill them", that would be rational advice based on data.
Instead, the entire economy has been shut down, and the solution? Test everyone regardless of risk or value of testing. This is not rational, and many scientists and doctors are saying this.
Doctors and nurses should be tested regularly as they are more susceptible to contraction do to proximity, and the elderly or those in contact with areas of high infection or high risk of fatality.
Poorly reported sensationalism in the news needs a proper counter balance. And society needs something to overcome their power to induce irrational panic so easily.
> Instead, the entire economy has been shut down, and the solution?
The hospitals are being overrun.
Your whole comments just reads like you're upset that you can't go out with your friends anymore. "Why should I have to stay at home, its the old people that are in danger, they should have to stay home."
The hospitals are being overrun. That means that if left unchecked the virus overwhelms healthcare. Just yesterday we've hospitalized people in their 30s and 40s here. It's not just the old people who need intensive care. It seems to be its the old people who die even with intensive care.
At the moment, but the spread is exponential, and the U.S. in not an exception. It's just a matter of N days, where N is not a too big number. Everybody can do his own math, provided he understands the math enough.
But be aware of anybody who hasn't done the math. He simply doesn't know what he talks about.
Which hospitals in the US are being overrun by Covid cases? Close friend works at a large hospital just north of Sacramento (near the first Covid death in California)... not a single Covid patient in their hospital. Heard a guy from NYU Lagone on the radio earlier - said they're nowhere near capacity. I'm not saying this isn't serious, but a lot of the rhetoric is alarmism with no basis in fact at this point.
If it can be done cheaply and easily while preventing additional infections, no harm at all. In fact, testing as many people as possible to isolate carriers is, I believe, the single best way to handle this crisis. It's not doable at this point, although hopefully we'll get there.
> we don't know why the situation is so much worse in Italy than in Japan.
So... because we don't know why just Asian countries are better than Western in controlling the outbreak, the Western countries should just... do nothing to control the outbreak?
It's pretty ridiculous and has a ton of just bizarre stuff you have to read through (and do!) to even get to something remotely interesting.
One of the first projects I "assigned" to myself when learning to program was to create a 3d environment and be able to scale, rotate, translate objects in 3d. It was easy and fun because I got to choose the language, the rules, etc.
This assignment makes me cringe a bit because there are a lot of hoops to jump through. But yeah, I guess, no pain no gain or something like that :)
