Hacker News: aphysically

New comment by aphysically in "sshole"

aphysically — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 02:26:57 +0000

fwiw pangram believes the text is AI as well

New comment by aphysically in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

aphysically — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 22:24:06 +0000

They’re talking about accounting at big tech and not hyperscalers

New comment by aphysically in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

aphysically — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:21:51 +0000

Purchase commitments aren’t even future debt, they’re a future asset

New comment by aphysically in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

aphysically — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:18:52 +0000

The lease agreement does become a financial liability and corresponding asset when it commences. In this case the article is adding leases that haven’t started yet, so GAAP accounting rules prohibit it from being listed as a liability. As a result it’s disclosed in the notes. nb the typical US investor way to analyze it is to still not treat operating leases as debt, since the rent is already reducing the EBITDA (a proxy for cash flow before debt items are paid). The other way to do it is you add back the rent to your cash flow proxy and count the leases as debt. You end up in a similar place.

New comment by aphysically in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

aphysically — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:02:22 +0000

If you open the annual report and look at the numbers they’re citing, they’re adding lease payments from uncommenced leases and future purchase commitments. Accounting rules prohibit either of these as being listed as debt. It’s also not possible to agree to a future lease without reporting it like this.

Generally speaking after commencement the former will become both liabilities (for a smaller amount than the number they listed due to discounting) and an asset (representing the asset of the right to occupy the lease)

The latter will generally become some sort of asset

I have no idea what the people going on about subsidiaries could even possibly be referring to as it relates to this article, this is just lease accounting