Hacker News: whatok

New comment by whatok in "Trump snubs Twitter after Musk announces reactivation of ex-president's account"

whatok — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 16:54:39 +0000

Elon took out loans with over 100% annual rates?

New comment by whatok in "Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down"

whatok — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 15:34:10 +0000

I'm not making an argument one way or the other beyond that the OP conflating deliveries with packages is inaccurate and misleading. People are acting like drivers are expected to make 400 individual deliveries a day which doesn't remotely pass any sort of sniff test.

New comment by whatok in "Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down"

whatok — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 14:20:25 +0000

I should clarify that comment with if you made a naïve assumption of 3-4 packages per delivery then it's a similar workload. I don't doubt that Amazon workers are treated worse than UPS workers but comparing packages to deliveries without normalizing somehow is not productive.

The 400 package number from the article is also specifically cited from this company and we have no idea whether that is a nationwide figure while the UPS comment implies that it is.

New comment by whatok in "Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down"

whatok — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 14:02:51 +0000

Comparing packages to deliveries is apples to oranges. I don't disagree that these jobs are rough but 120 deliveries with an average of 3-4 packages per delivery paints a similar picture.

New comment by whatok in "ARK Space Exploration and Innovation ETF launches tomorrow"

whatok — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 21:14:54 +0000

You have a small taste of that in this with the second largest holding PRNT.

https://ark-funds.com/3d-printing-etf

New comment by whatok in "Netflix to start testing warnings for people borrowing login info"

whatok — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 16:44:44 +0000

> I don't follow your point? Private companies can take a loan just as easily as public. If they were unable to attain the financing they wanted, they'd still have plenty of their own content, just not as much.

Private companies face a higher cost of capital than equivalent public companies and are unable to borrow as much money as public companies are able to. This is basic finance 101 stuff. Without debt financing, they would not have been able to begin their pivot when they needed to. Netflix is able to borrow at much lower rates than a company with the same financials solely because they are a large public company. Google "equity cushion" if you're unfamiliar with the term.

> I'd suggest you do the same. Their cash balance increased from $5 billion to $8 billion last year. They took out "debt" to finance their movies because money is cheap right now. Nothing they've done required them being a public company, and nothing you've shown makes me believe they couldn't be in exactly the same position they currently are as a private company.

Yes, Netflix is doing much better financially over the past few years and especially in the past year given the pandemic. I don't see how their cash balance is relevant in the face of content spend 2-3x that much. The initial contention was over content spend and a misleading gross profit number.

>They didn't even start borrowing money of significance until 2012, I still don't believe for a second they'd be "bankrupt" as a a private company.

They started borrowing when they needed to pivot to their own content, had to do so at pretty high rates, and luckily succeeded in their pivot.

Throughout this, I don't see any acknowledgement of where streaming was back then and how competitive the space has become since then. Netflix needs to spend on content or it will get left behind. A smaller Netflix offers no competitive edge right now and a smaller Netflix years ago would have been held hostage by content owners while being unable to have any real control over sub pricing; see poorly handled rate increases years ago.

New comment by whatok in "Netflix to start testing warnings for people borrowing login info"

whatok — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 15:16:05 +0000

Netflix would not remotely resemble its current form and likely would have been acquired years ago if they did not pivot to their own content. Switching to their own content required and still requires huge amounts of money; est. 17bn last year[0]. Additionally, the gross profit number is a flawed number for many reasons; try looking at operating or net income or anything farther down the income statement from basic revenue. Netflix has no option but to finance content spend with debt as they do not generate enough FCF to cover content spend and will quickly fall behind competitors if they don't.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/netflix-will-probably-spend-19-bi...

New comment by whatok in "America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%"

whatok — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 16:10:10 +0000

Amazon has been paying significantly above minimum wage for several years now:

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653597466/amazon-sets-15-mini...

New comment by whatok in "Clover Health: How Chamath Lured Retail Investors into a Broken Business"

whatok — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 15:21:11 +0000

> Initial Disclosure: This report represents our opinion, and we encourage every reader to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report. We have no position (short or long) in Clover Health because we think in this moment for public markets, it is more important for people to understand the role short sellers play in exposing fraud and corporate malfeasance. For more on that discussion, see our conclusion. For members of the media who wish to independently corroborate our work, please contact us for information on sources on condition that their anonymity is maintained unless they explicitly agree to go on-record.

New comment by whatok in "Oracle Moving HQ to Austin"

whatok — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 21:22:38 +0000

Relevant text: Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas. We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work. Depending on their role, this means that many of our employees can choose their office location as well as continue to work from home part time or all of the time. In addition, we will continue to support major hubs for Oracle around the world, including those in the United States such as Redwood City, Austin, Santa Monica, Seattle, Denver, Orlando and Burlington, among others, and we expect to add other locations over time. By implementing a more modern approach to work, we expect to further improve our employees’ quality of life and quality of output.

Oracle Moving HQ to Austin

whatok — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 21:22:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459020056896/orcl-10q_20201130.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25391186

Points: 361

# Comments: 437

New comment by whatok in "GitHub Sponsors expansion"

whatok — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 17:32:00 +0000

From Bloomberg (not on the web yet):

Amazon.com Inc., American Express Co., Daimler AG and Stripe Inc. are among those joining a new GitHub program that will let companies directly fund open-source projects and software developers that are key to their businesses.

Edit: would probably update with this link: https://siliconangle.com/2020/12/08/github-universe-2020-bri...

GitHub Sponsors expansion

whatok — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 17:26:37 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/github/status/1336360282587881475

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348411

Points: 14

# Comments: 3

New comment by whatok in "Warner Bros. Will Send Entire 2021 Slate to HBO Max and Theaters"

whatok — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 20:19:45 +0000

it doesn’t have anything to do with developing an app and everything to do with HBO insisting on how their content is distributed. they recently reached a deal with amazon and i believe part of the deal was pulling the legacy HBO Now app and only allowing HBO Max. they want Max to be the front facing brand

https://www.vox.com/recode/21686514/hbo-max-roku-amazon-peac...

New comment by whatok in "Masayoshi Son had help pulling SoftBank from the brink"

whatok — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 19:47:53 +0000

In a lot of cases, reporters do not have access to AUM or want to extrapolate from potentially misleading sources in order to construct a percentage return that does not exist publicly. You don't see reporters attempt to extrapolate dollar returns from percentage ones when percentage ones are all that are available; even if dollar returns might make a better headline like you claim. A headline with an extrapolated percentage return would have to be phrased in an awkward manner like "could be down as much as" and an editor is not going to greenlight that. This isn't even broaching the subject of gross vs net percentage returns which isn't possible to succinctly address in a mere headline.

New comment by whatok in "Masayoshi Son had help pulling SoftBank from the brink"

whatok — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 13:34:10 +0000

Liquidity doesn't begin to explain the valuation question. SoftBank's market cap was once 110bn vs their stake in Ali Baba at 150bn [0] . Even if you marked all the Vision Fund nonsense to 0, SoftBank is still a real company that does stuff outside of being a bad PE/VC/HF firm.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-group-alibaba/a-...

New comment by whatok in "Shanghai stock exchange suspends Ant Group's A-share IPO"

whatok — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 16:57:35 +0000

Your underwriting standards are going to be different depending on how much skin in the game you have.

New comment by whatok in "Shanghai stock exchange suspends Ant Group's A-share IPO"

whatok — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 16:19:42 +0000

The timing makes sense if it is in response to his recent remarks but the regulation is extremely punitive vs potential outcome if this IPO gets botched.

New comment by whatok in "Shanghai stock exchange suspends Ant Group's A-share IPO"

whatok — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 15:32:28 +0000

There's a regulatory draft that requires small business lenders like Ant to warehouse 30% of the loans they originate vs the 2% that they currently have on balance sheet. This draft was disclosed after regulators met with Jack Ma and other Ant executives. No clue why this was only done now but this significantly changes valuations.

New comment by whatok in "Selling Data to Hedge Funds (2017)"

whatok — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 21:59:10 +0000

I mean, I guess that's something that you can do but it's likely to get you laughed out of the room and greatly encourage them to reverse engineer whatever you were trying to sell.