> Net Income and Operating Cash Flow are not the same thing

This is the second article that gained a lot of traction on HN in the last few months with similar fundamental errors. The previous one was similarly written by someone with a dev background where they didn't understand the difference between gross margins, operating profit, and net income–concepts which were the basis for their analysis.

I wonder with this author or the previous, if they're just a little too confident in their abilities. Accounting and Finance are very deep and highly technical fields. Particularly for publicly traded companies where the businesses tend to be very complex and sophisticated and the consequences for making mistakes or committing fraud are severe. I'm not suggesting that non-finance people shouldn't try to analyze this stuff, but some humility might be in order.

It reminds me of a data scientist I worked with who was doing some modeling on companies' revenues. He believed he'd uncovered some secret, conspiratorial truth about Samsung having trillions in revenues, thereby making it the largest and most powerful entity on Earth. We had to gently inform him that he was looking at the revenues denominated in Korean Won and they needed to be converted to USD.

A confident yet clueless swe? I don't believe you.