You can "trade the news" with penny stocks (this is basically just buying when people first start talking about it then selling when more people are talking about it), but like you say, the liquidity is soooooo low that you have to be really careful if you plan to sell more than a few hundred dollars.
Generally, you're going to lose money - so don't do it.
Like any kind of gambling you have to do it with money you can't afford to lose and if you want exposure to stocks it is hard to say that you shouldn't have a big chunk of your savings in something like $QQQ or $VOO.
Myself I was working on finance-adjacent stuff at the time and thought it had educational value. I did OK trading my favorite penny stock but I've had my share of financial misadventures, like I just had to buy $XIV because I wanted to see what happened and... I did.
Well, pressure builds when the coffee bed restricts the flow of water. So if you don't have much restriction (really coarse grind) you're not going to build pressure :) so you don't have to actually change any settings to get a reduced pressure at the puck.
But I also do enjoy ~6bar shots using a traditional lever style machine.
Yes of course, but by dropping opv pressure on most home machines that also drops flow due to opv bleed off. If you have your opv at 9-10 bar you get a full flow shot on a coarser grind - which is way too fast. You need to drop pressure until you can keep your wet time the same (I use the pretty standard 17g coffee 34 ml out, 34 seconds wet, upped to 40 seconds because I use preinfusion). If you have a fancier machine you can just adjust flow directly, but then you can set pressure directly so why wouldn't you do that too.
Good is totally up to the person's tastes, anyway. Turbo style shots are the end-all-be-all for a lot of people who enjoy espresso. For other people, they hate it, for a multitude of reasons.
A pet peeve of mine is when people mention "weak" coffee. What does this mean?
You're spot on, but this coarser, faster-style shot is called the "turbo shot" and you don't actually have to use less coffee, you can actually use more - just compensate your grind to brew quickly. You will get more consistent results here, but they're very different from traditional espresso.
But, I think for any recipe, "total brew time" is just a way to communicate contact time with water, and should NOT be a goal unless you're trying to copy what someone else did with that same coffee, and is IMO more important for pour over in that regard than espresso.
I roast coffee professionally, and there's just a few things that will make up 98% of your coffee quality, and none of them have to do with technique. And without these no level of technique will ever compensate.
1) Sourcing high quality coffee to the roast level you enjoy. Try a lot of different coffees - from "Ultra Light" to "American Light" to "Medium" to "Dark" - and find what you enjoy, then find a roaster that produces those coffees to a high quality standard. There will not be a ton of these roasters in your country. Maybe even just a couple, even if you live in the US.
2) A good grinder, of course. Fortunately in the last few years this is wayyyy more accessible. There are pretty good options starting around $300, and the workflow isn't terrible for these picks, either. Of course the sky is the limit here, but it's really vital to a good cup.
3) Good water. You'll want to either find a bottled water brand you like for brewing, or use an reverse osmosis (can be a gravity type) system and remineralize it. Cafes do this (if they are any good) and you should too. There's a chance your tap is great for coffee, but only if you're pretty lucky.
4) Decent brewing equipment. The cheapest is a v60 for pour over. You can make good coffee with pretty much any machine, but some will get in your way and cause you to have to fuss with them much more.
Then, after those, is technique - and the most important part of technique is really grind size and water temperature (I suggest you do not go above 88c in most cases).
The importance of technique was demonstrated to me over half a century ago. I grew up in Santa Cruz which has the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company. They have been doing the pour overs since the early 80's. They have two cafes. A sit down large cafe and about four blocks away an annex in the bus depot (no longer there). The annex was basically a small room with a coffee bar. Both the main cafe and the annex did the pour over with the same coffee, same bad city water (probably filtered), same kind of grinder and same coffee bar pour over setup. The only difference was the cafe was large and the employee pouring would walk off and do other job related tasks. In the annex the person pouring was trapped and therefore much more attentive to the pour. The annex had consistently vastly better coffee.
As to "Maybe even just a couple, even if you live in the US.". I now live in Portland with 48 independent roasters. They all suck? I wonder how they would rate your coffee roasting. Yes, slathered on a bit thick.
I love coffee because the good stuff is really good. The decent stuff is still pretty good and the bad stuff is passable when you really need it.
Sorry, didn't mean to come across like that. What I was trying to express is that no amount of technique can make up for the things I mentioned being bad - and they're easy low hanging fruit fixes that don't require much effort at all.
For all you know, both locations could have had totally different water compositions, anyway.
> I now live in Portland with 48 independent roasters. They all suck?
No. I didn't say that.
Who is your favorite roaster/what's a recent favorite single origin you have purchased?
> There's a chance your tap is great for coffee, but only if you're pretty lucky.
I've worked and RV'ed throughout the USA and Canada. Canadian urban areas tend to have good quality tap water for coffee making. Canadians know that in only a few seconds the water will run truly cold. The USA's tap water as one gets further south from the Canadian border has generally dreadful taste and temperature, meaning chilled, bottled water is a necessity.
I don't think it's technically RO but "Zero Water" is absolutely fine, pretty inexpensive, works well! Not as convenient as a $200 (ish) under the sink setup but way more accessible.
Zero Water deionizes water. It removes anything inside of water with an charge, which is a lot of things, but not everything. It gets depleted pretty quickly if there are a lot of minerals in the water and is generally used after RO because RO is cheap compared to DI resin.
well, at least for really odd ones - like the china example - the liquidity is (probably) going to be really low. you need people buying both sides to make money.
But for big events/talked about stuff/etc ofc this is not true.
If there's not much money to be made (because of illiquidity and adverse selection keeping market participants out), then there's not much incentive for people to do weird things.
It doesn’t actually require that second part. Every time I’ve used it in a production system, we had an approved list of query shapes that were accepted. If the client wanted to use a new kind of query, it was performance tested and sometimes needed to be optimized before approval for use.
If you open it up for any possible query, then give that to uncontrolled clients, it’s a recipe for disaster.
GQL is an HTTP endpoint. The question is, how are you schematizing, documenting, validating, code-generating, monitoring, etc. the request and response on your HTTP endpoints? (OpenAPI is another good choice.)
Really? Hmm... where in the HTTP spec does it allow for returning an arbitrary subset of any specific request, rather than the whole thing? And where does it ensure all the results are keyed by id so that you can actually build and update a sensible cache around all of it rather than the mess that totally free-form HTTP responses lead to? Oh weird HTTP doesn't have any of that stuff? Maybe we should make a new spec, something which does allow for these patterns and behaviors? And it might be confusing if we use the exact same name as HTTP, since the usage patterns are different and it enables new abilities. If only we could think of such a name...
An HTTP Range request asks the server to send parts of a resource back to a client. Range requests are useful for various clients, including media players that support random access, data tools that require only part of a large file, and download managers that let users pause and resume a download.
Because it solves all sorts of other problems, like having a well-defined way to specify the schema of queries and results, and lots of tools built around that.
I would be surprised to see many (or any) GQL endpoints in systems with significant complexity and scale that allow completely arbitrary requests.
Yep, OpenAPI is also a good choice nowadays. That’s typically used with the assumption you’ve chosen a supported subset of queries. With GQL you have to add that on top.
Probably for one of the reasons graphql was created in the first place - accomplish a set of fairly complex operations using one rather than a multitude of API calls. The set can be "everything" or it can be "this well-defined subset".
I think they mean something like (or what I think of as) “RPC calls, but with the flexibility to select a granular subset of the result based on one or more schemas”. This is how I’ve used graphql in the past at least.
> I am wondering why you're using graphql if you are kneecapping it and restricting it to set queries.
Because you never want to expose unbounded unlimited dynamic queries in production. You do want a very small subset that you can monitor, debug, and optimize.
It's not. The fragments you can execute are limited if you do it right. A client isn't allowed to just execute anything it wants, because the valid operations are pre-determined. The client sends a reference which executes a specific pre-planned fragment of code.
In development, you let clients roam free, so you have access to the API in a full manner. Deployments then lock-down the API. If you just let a client execute anything it wants in production, you get into performance-trouble very easily once a given client decides to be adventurous.
GraphQL is an execution semantics. It's very close to a lambda calculus, but I don't think that was by design. I think that came about by accident. A client is really sending a small fragment of code to the server, which the server then executes. The closest thing you have is probably SQL queries: the client sends a query to the server, which the server then executes.
It's fundamental to the idea of GraphQL as well. You want to put power into the hands of the client, because that's what allows a top-down approach to UX design. If you always have to manipulate the server-side whenever a client wants to change call structure, you've lost.
No one exposes SQL to clients though. I think where Gql differs from sql is it’s at a higher level. SQL bleeds performance and data layout (e.g. normalizing, limits), GraphQL does not.
It’s not clear if it’s high enough to abstract knowledge from storage. In the end it’s tension between enabling client to wander around productively vs being a bull in a china shop.
Generally, you're going to lose money - so don't do it.
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