Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
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Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
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Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#2The last time this was posted on HN (October 2023), I posted this comment which I think makes it easy to understand the fundamentals of accounting:
Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#3Previously:
Accounting for computer scientists (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37940973 - Oct 2023 (50 comments)
Accounting for Computer Scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446202 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)
Accounting for Computer Scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298471 - March 2011 (75 comments)
Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#4This is so nicely presented it’s tempting me to have Claude whip up an implementation.
Just need aome form of graphic persistence then ways of summing across partitions of nodes to generate reports. And some convenience methods for adding transactions.
Final step would be to slap a CLI or UI on top of everything.
Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#5As someone who failed an accounting class I will definitely read this.
Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#6The last time this was posted on HN (October 2023), I posted this comment which I think makes it easy to understand the fundamentals of accounting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37951781
It's a good comment but I think to make something intuitive you really need to understand why something exists and I think for most people there just isn't in fact a good reason.
If you know it, it's easy to use, so why not? But if you don't, whatever method you come up with to track account balances and revenues vs. expenses is going to be useful enough. For individuals not accounting for receivables, debts, depreciation properly isn't likely to make a big difference.
Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#7The last time this was posted on HN (October 2023), I posted this comment which I think makes it easy to understand the fundamentals of accounting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37951781
It's a good comment but I think to make something intuitive you really need to understand why something exists and I think for most people there just isn't in fact a good reason. If you know it, it's easy to use, so why not? But if you don't, whatever method you come up with to track account balances and revenues vs. expenses is going to be useful enough. For individuals not accounting for receivables, debts, depreci…
This is a great point.
I take it for granted that people want to be able to read a balance sheet and an income statement.
But most people don't.
Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good comment but I think to make something intuitive you really need to understand why something exists and I think for most people there just isn't in fact a good reason. If you know it, it's easy to use, so why not? But if you don't, whatever method you come up with to track account balances and revenues vs. expenses is going to be useful enough. For individuals not accounting for receivables, debts, depreci…
This is a great point. I take it for granted that people want to be able to read a balance sheet and an income statement. But most people don't.
That was my thinking reading this. You need the basics but I would assume the main motivation is to look at a company's financial statement and at least recognize a lot of the language and the significance of the relationships. Of course there are going to be a lot of subtleties but the statement shouldn't be seen as being written in an ancient language.
Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#9I never understood double entry bookkeeping and that's where the author immediately loses me again:
Early on after 4th diagram, author includes sentence : "Because every transaction appears twice, once positive and once negative"
There is something so obvious about this to accounting folks that they always make the massive jump without any explanation. The previous diagram absolutely does not have positive and negative for each transaction! In fact, there is 5000 going into banking account and 500+5 coming out of it. Nothing in 4th diagram is obviously the negative of that 5k transaction, to me.
Similarly next sentence is "obviously" false: "If you partition the set of nodes into any two disjoint sets, and add up all of the balances in each set, then the sum for the one set is always the negative sum of the other set" -- the sum of the left two balances is minus five, and the sum of right three balances is 505.
And just like that, I'm completely lost and booted out of yet another accounting lesson without passing the introduction :-(
(fwiw, my experience of reading accounting is broadly the same as reading Plato: "it is obviously true that..." What, no, stop, that's not obvious at all, you gotta do better than that! :-)
Re: Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)
#10Double entry account is, in fact, what gave “transactional” databases their name: They were meant for financial transactions!
Nowadays TigerBeetle is a custom built financial database just for double entry accounting. The implementation is fascinating.