This is a deliberate pedagogical choice, and one which will familiar to those who did one of Jeremy Howard's deep learning courses.
One of the challenges of learning Linear Algebra is where to start. Most textbooks start with vector arithmetic, which make senses if you are working with paper and pencil, but they take a long time to get to something useful.
With a computational approach, we have the option to proceed top-down -- that is, we can start with libraries that implement the core algorithms of linear algebra, and wait until later to see how they work. With this approach we can can get to the good stuff faster.
The sentence you quoted from Wikipedia is nonsensical.
Comparing one revenue line to total net profit is a category error: the numerator and denominator measure different things.
In FY2024, Costco did $249.6B in net sales and collected $4.8B in membership fees. Gross margin on product sales was about $25B. That $25B is 5x the membership fee revenue. So, even if you consider membership fees as being free money, membership fees are only 16% of gross margin.
Moreover, without those product sales, the membership would be worth zero and no one would buy it.
Agreed it's a weird comparison, but I'd argue SG&A needs to come out of gross margin too for a fair comparison. You need a warehouse/staff/utilities/etc to sell merchandise, you need nothing to sell a membership (whether it's worth anything is another question of course).
In their 2025 filing, gross margin on merchandise was $30B, but SG&A cost $25B (with membership fees at $5.3B).
Note that $2.6B of those membership fees will go back to members as membership rewards, which is interesting too.
I've noticed that my local Costco business centers actually tend to have a larger selection of things like soft drinks and single-serving packaged snacks, and not in obscenely large quantities (any more than normal Costcos).
This guy took inspiration from gog cli (steipete's cli for Google Workspace, which predates gws cli and is apparently more agent-friendly and token-efficient):
Whether the acquirer or target borrows the money, this would not allow to increase the market cap of the company. It would increase the enterprise value (because the debt allows you to make a bigger acquisition), but not the market cap.
"I think it made about a billion dollars in profit"
It raised over a billion dollars of capital (i.e. issued shares in return for cash). It did not make a billion dollars in profit (and has never had a year when it did).
Total revenue declined because they closed stores. But income went up because those stores were losing money.
They also made a lot off of interest on their cash, but that is going to get cut by about 30% if this goes through, as the combined cash position Gamestop has access to declines from 9 billion to 6 billion. Or so I've heard.
I am? Last reported quarter was their 10Y high. The Q4 before that is in the top 5. And it's been positive for almost 2 years, whereas before, it had been negative for several.
>No matter how you look at it this company is a dog.
Apparently we have different definitions of flying. They sold a bunch of stock, bought treasuries and shut down some money sink stores. Amazing stuff. Apparently if I just buy treasuries and stop wasting money on garbage my stock should sore too.
You can't normally describe it as profit because stocks by rule trade at a fair price, but it's surely reasonable to consider in this case GME making a profit from the squeeze given they were selling a good well above fair acquisition price.
no, they issued more stock. stock is a claim on corporate equity, ie the delta between assets and liabilities. existing stock holders' claim to equity gets diluted when this happens, but share prices will often not be effected proportionally, making it appear the company has "made a billion dollars" when in fact they've just split the same pie into smaller pieces and managed to sell it at the same price. ryan now seems to think he can issue shares to acquire ebay, which will be much harder than fleecing retail.
The TLDR for people who don't intuitively understand why: existing shareholders are diluting their stake in the company by issuing new shares and getting money for those new shares. It's simply selling part of the company. Not profit.
Yes, in 2021 GameStop did sell shares to raise cash in a dilutive way. [1]
No, that is not being treated as profit or revenue.
Gamestop had ~418 million in profit in 2025. [2] A fraction of that profit does come from interest income. Ignoring that (say to value the business separate from the cash) they still made ~110 million in profit.
In my personal opinion (not financial advice) Gamestop with the cash it has today is a much more attractive investment than without. If you have worries about an economic downturn, it's a hedge. If you worry about GameStop being able to maintain it's current revenue/profit or volatility, it's runway. There's a variety of ways it reduces the risk of an investment.
>A fraction of that profit does come from interest income.
More than half of it came from interest income.
Gamestop has been unable to grow revenue since Cohen took over, failed initiative after failed initiative. The only thing saving them is their meme stock nature and a legion of people willing to throw good money after bad allowing them to dilute shareholders to build a warchest.
They have increased profit by closing something like 50% of their stores but you can't grow a retail company by constantly closing stores at some point you have to find a way to make the stores more profitable and in 5 years with tons of different attempts they've not found that. Revenue is down almost 50% in the past 3 years.
Having a pile of cash doesn't matter if you have a leader who has no good ideas for how to invest it to improve returns for shareholders, all it does is allow you to die for longer.
Not growing revenue would be one thing, they're shedding revenue at pace - 50% decline since 2020.
> Shareholders seem to agree
First, it's a meme stock. The market can remain irrational for long periods. Another way to analyze it - almost all of the market cap of ~$10b is the $9b in cash. The shareholder pricing tells you they value the business at it's cash assets.
Gamestop's business of physically selling video games, consoles, etc is a dying/dead industry. Nothing can change the trajectory of the market that is almost completely disappeared.
It's a Blockbuster or Tower Records, a dead business running on fumes and memestock valuation.
A strong cash position business like that is effectively a finance sort of business, in other words, exactly the kind well positioned to go conduct an LBO.
> A strong cash position business like that is effectively a finance sort of business
You are conflating companies that make a lot of cash (and therefore can afford debt service) to a company that has limited cash flow, but has a large pile of cash.
The shareholders would be best served by a special dividend of the cash. Management has shown zero ability to grow a business.
In this case, the shareholders don't want a special dividend and prefer to own a company that has a strong cash position. There is nothing at all wrong with shareholders choosing that.
There are plenty of other stocks to invest in if one wants a highly-leveraged company that is trying to grow really fast.
Tightening your belt is a good thing. No disagreement there but it has a hard limit. You can't just keep tightening the belt and growing profit, at some point you have to start revenue expansion again and from what I've seen Gamestop has no way to do that.
At $2.50 they had massive amounts of debt they couldn't service and a very real chance of going out of business. Then through pure luck they became a meme and were able to extract $10b from investors so of course they are worth more today. There is no growth story though so as meme investors get bored and move on it will move back down to it's asset value unless they find a way to grow again.
The meme investors can stay irrational long before gamestop gets a growth story. If they haven't given up on their get rich quick scheme that's lasted over five years now, I really don't think they're going to jump ship now.
The sad part is that gamestop is offering 55 billion, yet only has 9 billion in cash. The only way they come up with that much capital to buy ebay is to dilute the existing shareholders to a point that "to the moon" will just be moondust.
Well hey, what do you think about them buying eBay? eBay seems to think a lot of the value is in verification - grading cards, authenticating watches, shoes, handbags. GameStop has a similar business in collectibles and could provide eBay with a physical footprint that would let a lot of that verification happen easier, in-store.
I honestly don't know anything about ebay these days to comment on them but many many people have tried to make a business of providing a storefront for ebay in the past and they've basically all failed so I don't think that bodes well for the main offering Gamestop has.
Also Gamestops verification business is not done in stores AFAIK. I'm pretty sure they've just partnered with PSA to allow you to drop off cards at stores but they are sent away to be authenticated. The stores don't really add any value for most people in this transaction and add a potential downside in that there are multiple reports of Gamestop store employees stealing cards handed over for grading.
Training retail employees to be proper verifiers seems like a huge risk and a huge cost since you need to train them up on how to handle everything where with centralised grading locations you can have specialists(think antiques roadshow).
The verification stuff is minimal. That's not where eBay makes it's bulk of money but it's a reasonable growth area. There's a huge opportunity though for eBay or someone to tie several loose ends and concepts together and have a serious competitor to Amazon.
Worth also pointing out though that if you can sell new shares above intrinsic value that is accretive to existing shareholders. Dilution isn’t always a bad word. (It’s bad for the people buying new shares.)
Well, partly it's an audience thing. Hacker News has a lot of folks who work at tech startups, and if you work at a tech startup, dilution is nearly always a very bad word for you.
The main purpose of a funding round is for the company to sell shares and receive cash (e.g. to spend on marketing), not for founders to sell shares and receive cash (e.g. to spend on Ferraris).
(Sometimes, at the same time as a funding round, founders may also sell some existing shares to the new investors.)
Yeah I'm also always confused whenever I heard that a company issues new stocks. Why would existing shareholders agree for that? If there's more comprehensive resources about this I'd love to read it.
Bubble? Yes. Ponzi? No. The latter requires some element of deception/fraud. Strategy Inc. (formerly MicroStrategy) was basically something similar. They had $x worth of bitcoin in a vault, but were selling themselves for $2x.
It works fine for this small set of emails, although the search isn't great, and there was more preprocessing that I would have liked. (I would prefer to be able to point a single binary at a pst or mbox file, and have it magically serve it like this, even if it means I need a VPS to serve it.)
Here's one: a client of mine has a bunch of SnapLogic pipelines that are configured to send errors via email, and there is no other persistent logging system. This results in tens of thousands of emails that are insanely hard to search and parse for any useful auditing.
I was waiting for a flight at SFO, trying to get some work done. Two airport employees were sitting at the next table. One of them started watching a video on her phone, on speaker, at loud volume. I politely asked her to use headphones or turn off the sound. Hey retort: "this is an airport!". I replied that it's a 'quiet airport' but her reaction suggested to me that she was not familiar with the concept.
Here are two quotations from that policy, directly relevant to the situation I described:
"The playing of music is prohibited in the following locations: at the podiums, ticket counters, and seating areas adjacent to gates"
"employees may not use mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets, in “speaker mode” in any public area of the Airport"
San Francisco Public Library [0] is the best resource for readers in California. Of all the libraries in the state, I've found they are the most likely to acquire new titles, and often they are the only holder if the subject is particularly niche and technical. Even most university libraries are switching to digital collections *which can't be loaned out*.
One reason I say SFPL is great for all^H^H^H many Californians+ is their book collection is available for free pickup at a your local library via the inter-library sharing program, Link+ [1].
((People, submit purchase requests at your local libraries. It's what it's for.))
The other is that they are subscribers to "O'Reilly for Public Libraries", which lets people access Everything from O'Reilly for Free [2].
My point was not whether $35/year per person on books is a lot or a little. I was responding to a comment where someone suggested libraries were a way to avoid high book prices. But they're not!
Libraries themselves (and by extension, taxpayers) suffer from high book prices.
Separately, would you mind explaining this part, as I'm not familiar with university libraries: "Even most university libraries are switching to digital collections which can't be loaned out."
Does this mean you can only read the digital collections when physically present in the library, or that they're only available to members and not via inter-library loan?
Just now, I went to suggest a book there and got a popup message saying they won't get that book because it's over 10 years old. It's a book about critical thinking. It doesn't need to be updated.
> I was responding to a comment where someone suggested libraries were a way to avoid high book prices. But they're not!
Most of the books I've bought got read by me, and then sit on a shelf forever. If a book is bought by a library, and used multiple times before it's weeded, that's a big win for $/read.
> Just now, I went to suggest a book there and got a popup message saying they won't get that book because it's over 10 years old. It's a book about critical thinking. It doesn't need to be updated.
I think the library is suggesting a 10 year old book might be better accessed through other means. Can you get it from interlibrary loan? Is it available on the used market? It may not be available through the library's usual sourcing, etc.
Why would the age of the book matter? If it were from a big publisher and they were to publish a new substantially-unchanged edition every three years, why would that make the library willing to consider the book?
The book in question is still in print and still available new.
If nobody wanted it in the first 10 years it was available, chances are it's only going to get one circulation if they buy it for you. That's not a great use of the libraries purchase budget or shelf space budget.
If they had a copy that wore out and it was circulated many times, they would have reordered it when they discarded it.
Some universities have it, but the only copy in CA public libraries seems to be at the Sharp Park branch in Pacifica (which I believe was acquired in the last couple of years - good on them!).
Berkeley public library has copies of the JS edition for what that's worth..
Also, I'd like to note that in my experience no public library can provision online-only books. I've been unable to get any to acquire Mastering Emacs for example.
Worldcat says it's at 1483 libraries: https://search.worldcat.org/title/Structure-and-interpretati... (although some of them may not participate in ILL, and some may only have eBooks that you probably can't borrow unless you have an appropriate account)
I'm sure SFPL does tracking on ILL requests and if something comes up more than once or twice in a reasonable period and it's available for purchase, a copy will be purchased to add to the collection.
Request physical copies of books you want to read, and that you think are beneficial to the community. And check them out from time to time.
I'm sure a librarian does their best to keep abreast with the latest best books.. but would they know the field better than someone in it?
I've been told they have experts that consult on title selection. But based on the 004-006 section at most libraries, I can only infer that is the IT guy at the senior center..
Yes. I've found criteria for new books at public libraries to be very limiting. They usually will only acquire newly published books (published within a year or so). But they do get a discount from the publisher, perhaps 30%.
Basically, they will buy books that nobody's had a chance to review yet or talk about, but won't buy books published a year ago that everyone cites and recommends. It's a broken policy.
I'd say it is a way to avoid the high cost of books tho, in that they are a shared resource. Dozens of people may check out a single copy within a year. E-books at public libraries are more accessible, but only a finite number of copies may be accessed by patrons at a time - less accessible than you might think. Additionally, e-books are not owned, but leased. And the cost is substantial and comparable to the cost of a physical copy, and re-paid every few years.
Another way libraries avoid the cost of new books is by relying on other libraries to expand their collection. When my local library joined LINK+, for instance, they substantially decreased the amount of new books they would acquire, and it's stripping influence from the individual patron. Good luck borrowing a copy of Laws of Software Engineering [0] anywhere. Or Crafting Interpreters [1].
As far as university collections go, most have large libraries with huge collections that are available to borrow - somehow. But most of the books are very old. The new acquisitions are primarily digital and may only be accessed through a locked terminal or web portal. Whether the general public has access varies and often costs quite a bit or is free for the immediate community.
(range of options: $1000/yr to $35/two-weeks, remote unclear)
I have had some luck accessing some e-books at some colleges, but for the most part you need to have a login. It really depends on their policies and licensing deals with digital publishers.
Libraries also do a lot more than just provide books. $35 per resident per year for everything that libraries do provide is forking cheap, and we would be greatly impoverished if they were to disappear.
But my point above wasn't about whether that number is high or low. It's that the price of books is paid by us, even it's funneled through taxes and librarians.
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