I've always found it confusing how run of the mill SaaS trades at multiples assuming decades of doing business. The amount of change in software businesses has been massive and being able to run a successful software business even for 15 years from 2010-2025 requires a great deal of strategy and foresight and more likely than not that's not enough. Considering how these dynamics have been accelerating as technology accelerates it just seemed so off that the market was landing on a 20-30x multiples for software businesses that don't have much moat (e.g. swathes of B2B CRUD apps).
Investor analyst looks at earnings growth and determines Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Acquisition Cost Payback Period (CACPP). They determine that ABC Software Corporation has no marginal manufacturing cost because it makes software that it sells online, so if it invested 90% of its profit margin into marketing it could grow its ARR by 140% a year. Then they extrapolate that for 30 years and say ok the NPV of 30 years of 140% ARR on current CAC, etc etc...
If everyone in the industry benchmarks on more or less the same multiples, it becomes a good idea to buy any b2b crud saas trading at 10x earnings because if the big boys see it they'll probably bid it up to 30x
the other classic move is to take a business which really isn't even a new technology, like revolut, and call it a tech business. now suddenly a bank can trade on a 50x earnings multiple instead of 15x like say a bank. many such cases~
This clearly has the goal of muddying the water of the DSA transparency requirements. It's an opaque way of trying to mislead users into believing that X is being transparent while not being so at all.
They pretend to be transparent about their algorithms while denying researchers access to their API through exorbitant pricing and severely limited quotas.
Access to read 1 million posts through the X API costs $5000/month. Enterprise access to their API costs $42 000 per month.
Multiple researchers are being told by X that they must pay this fee to get access[1][2][3].
X has recently been fined for not providing this access to researchers. Both for the organic engagement, and for paid advertising. [4]
The pricing of X's API is exorbitant and orders of magnitude higher than arguably higher quality datasets like Reddit. One million posts through the Reddit API costs $2.40.
The pricing scheme is obviously not value based and is clearly designed to limit data access to researchers. As users here note, studying recommender systems requires studying the inputs and outputs of the system. Platforms are rightly not mandated to present the inputs due to privacy concerns. But they are mandated to make the outputs available. And they aren't. "Open sourcing" their algorithm is not a replacement for this, it's an obvious a ploy to present themselves as transparent.
That is one of the worst clanker-brained replies I have ever read on this platform.
The OP you're replying to made a concrete point (X claim to be transparent but block researcher access through unreasonably price gating), and you didn't even attempt to refute it nor engage with the substance of the post at all.
If you think that this evidence is so compelling why don't you link to some sources and summarize it in your own words? If you cannot be bothered to do that much, why are you replying in the first place?
Telling someone that they're wrong and they should just chat with an LLM to educate themselves removes any room for discussion, leaving this platform and other comment readers worse off.
Nope. I didn't feel like spending the time to read the code, but I did want an LLM to pull out specific pieces for me and compare them to other published info. This is a good way to use LLMs: ask them to organize data for you to consider yourself and come to your own conclusion.
In this case, the info I looked at changed my opinion (downwards) on how cynical this release really was.
There's a clear winner of surveillance in the set of the US government, US companies, and the EU government and EU companies.
Not only is the EU miles behind the US, the US is accelerating faster towards more surveillance. Historically PRISM and the US Cloud act. More recently DOGE's recent actions in centralising data and a new crop of private enterprises working on surveillance tech like CCTV facial recognition.
I don't see the federal government applying any breaks on this development. However, I note some states are. But we do see clear attempts from the EU attempt to attempt to curb this. E.g. parts of the AI Act.
While I'm not enjoying the development certain factions are pushing through in the EU either, it is hyperbole to say that the EU is attempting to make a surveillance state, especially in this context.
People also sometimes forget in this debate that the NSA is allowed and has a mandate to spy on non-US citizens and companies as they deem fit. Anything is allowed, including mass surveillance and hacking into systems. There are only restrictions when US citizens and companies are involved. European agencies probably have similar permissions but I don't think they have comparable capabilities and they also have and will continue to have smaller budgets.
Do you really think if the NSA is not allowed to do something, that they'll be held accountable? In 2026? I doubt it very much so. The USA sits on a lot of data from EU, and that is a bad situation. We also need to stop selling important companies such as Nexperia (to CN) and Zivver (to USA).
> Do you really think if the NSA is not allowed to do something, that they'll be held accountable? In 2026?
I know more than a few career lawyers who worked or currently work at NSA. It would blow your mind how rigidly they follow the laws and rules when it comes to US citizens.
Of course I don't expect you to believe me because "I said so" or anything like that. I can tell you definitively that when it comes to US citizens NSA is pretty neutered.
The most fun proof this isn't the case is Keith Alexander lying in congress with 'not willingly' which is something completely different from 'not knowingly'. The NSA uses loopholes in laws and back around Snowden they played the card of using one European Union country versus another.
Really abhorrent how the current US government is spinning this into their tried and true "free speech" crusade despite it being mostly irrelevant. The DSA's core goal is transparency, shown clearly in the X ruling.
> The ‘blue checks’ charge is about consumer deception. X changed the rules about how it does verification in a way that allowed impersonation and scams to flourish. [...] As the Commission put it, the DSA “clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place.”
> The ‘ads transparency’ charge stems from the DSA’s requirement that platforms must maintain a public archive showing what ads the platform ran, who paid for them, and other information. X fell drastically short of meeting this requirement
> The third thing the EU penalized X for is not giving researchers better access to public data. This enforcement is not about the DSA’s more famous and controversial requirement for platforms to hand over internal data. It’s just about information that was already publicly available on X’s site and app.
It's clear why the tech monopolies want to keep their secrets in the dark. There is a democratic consensus that what they're pulling either is illegal - or should be illegal. E.g. Scam advertisements, overt editorial practices by selective (de)amplification and/or monetization and looking the other way about bots and third-parties leveraging their systems for spreading political propaganda.
Transparency is their enemy. Free speech is their irrelevant but emotion-laden argument. Europeans see straight through it - the questions is, do the Americans?
Please add more examples or a demo page or something. The gif and picture in the github repo is the single most descriptive part of your documentation, but a gif is terrible UX and a picture doesn't show off interactivity. This should be front and center on your landing page.
This may be useful for me, but I'm not going to bother setting up a test Django environment to test this just to find out that it isn't what I expected.
In the docs, if you click on the links "forms" or "tables", that will lead to the docs for those parts with a few example, and that in turn links to the cookbooks.
Thanks, looks interesting. I may play around with it.
I think what happened was that I landed on your page. Read the landing page, which only contained code. Scrolled to the top and clicked "install in minutes" and was unexpectedly redirected down the page. Then I clicked into github and didn't click on the forms/tables hyperlinks there.
I think what I'm saying is primarily that I'm lazy.
Secondly, your landing page is too code oriented and does not show off any UI and your anchor link (which typically links into documentation) short-circuited my search for a docs page.
I think you would have gotten considerably more upvotes on this post if you show the product off more on the landing page. Despite the obvious lack of effort I put into learning your product, most people who clicked on this link today did even less.
No shade or anything. Again, the product looks nice now that I've seen it in the docs.
I've had mixed success with Claude. It keeps adding too much display_names to everything for example which is annoying.
In theory we could put that up, but I don't particularly want to maintain such a live example app and pay for hosting and all that, only to have it instantly crash under the load of HN :P
I've thought about extracting it, but I think it's a lot of work unless you want to support only Django and rST which is what we're using. At least the iframe part is very specific to the web framework.
What a horrible take. I feel compelled to say that in my experience people in northern Europe can empathize with and separate the population from a dysfunctional two-party political system captured by capital.
Most of the world engages routinely in tribal thinking without any form of self-reflection. Northern Europe is a distinct exception due to post-enlightenment and post WW2 cultural norms.
The commenters in this thread engaging in transactional tribalism are angry at Trump supporters in the US (and therefore, all Americans because of their tribal "us vs them" lens) for engaging in the same transactional tribalism that they live in. From a game theory perspective, they want the US and northern Europeans to continue to be the good person in the Prisoner's Dilemma game while they reap the rewards.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the comments here actually support the beliefs of Trump's base, which is "the world hates us, only pretends to be nice to us when we help make them rich, and power is the only currency that matters."
There are people in this thread complaining about tariffs on imports in the US that are a fraction of what their own nations charge on imports. They don't seem to grasp that "fairness" is an emotional construct that matters for human voting.
Both sides are the same. Trump and his supporters are the same as people who are their targets .... because it is the same tribalism.
> As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the comments here actually support the beliefs of Trump's base, which is "the world hates us, only pretends to be nice to us when we help make them rich, and power is the only currency that matters."
When you are t like Trump does, yes you will loose the affection and respect.
And besides, Trump and his fans both see those who are friendly to them as suckers to take advantage of.
Your wish to be a bully and simultaneously treated like a friend is extremely unrealistic. And not just that, it is a loosing proposition.
Thanks to some frankly amazing American propaganda there's a surge of interest in free speech in Europe. Funnily the same regulations that aim to remove toxic products, make platforms more transparent, and hold platforms more accountable for breaking the law all are being attacked for encroaching on free speech.
I don't see it succeeding.
It's hard to explain just how much shit these digital platforms pull when serving a small market they don't care much about. People are rightfully pissed. It's seeped deeply into the public sphere the last ~8 years. Much more than I imagined possible even 2-3 years ago. Doubly so with the recent merging of the Republican party and technology leaders.
While Temu is in a class of its own - it's obvious that hyperscaling and postponing QC, moderation and compliance with a very American approach to safe harbour laws will not continue being the premier way to skirt laws for much longer.
One big factor that I observe in Germany is that the general public has stopped trusting what American companies say. For example, when you contact the Amazon support, they will try very hard to gaslight you into believing that your consumer protection only lasts for 30 days. But by now mainstream media is reporting about it that they’re just lying to your face. And, indeed, casually mentioning the correct law immediately extends your warranty to the full (legally required) two years.
I fully agree with you, by now no new company will grow that large using this American approach, because nowadays the German public will expect them to skirt the law and call them out on it immediately.
> Funnily the same regulations that aim to remove toxic products, make platforms more transparent, and hold platforms more accountable for breaking the law all are being attacked for encroaching on free speech.
That's what a clever law looks like, it bundles things together.
So now if someone complains about threats to free speech they can be told "Oh so you prefer toxic products, then? Think of the children!" in the same way you are doing.
That would make more sense if the law was limiting speech. But it has been clearly designed to not give governments the power to remove content/services/products that are not illegal.
Content which is not directly illegal is covered by the voluntary code of conduct on disinformation [1]. If you can point out to me a provision which allows the governments to force platforms to remove content which is not explicitly illegal I'll be very impressed. Because it ain't there.
It does say that algorithms should be tweaked to not spread "damaging disinformation" - e.g. reduce amplification of it. And it does say that these platforms shouldn't be allowing users who create disinformation to monetize their content like the good old Macedonian troll farms [2]
But in the end - there are no sanctions. These are guidelines. And if platforms consistently ignore these and it turns into a systemic harm then fines can start piling up. But never for a single piece of content - just a systemic malpractice.
Yes. It's a clever law because it doesn't give governments the power to remove content which is not illegal. But it does still force platforms to do something about their incentives they create for third-parties around content.
And no. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and letting foreign companies self-regulate illegal content is frankly ludicrous considering their stellar track record of not giving a shit because it's the cheapest option.
That's clearly not the case as the provisions against "disinformation" and "misleading information", which are very vague and subjective thing to judge, are aimed at constraining freedom of speech and to censor legal speech.
Someone's "misleading information" is someone else's political campaigning.
The EU commission is guilty of hypocrisy and doublespeak on this when it states that "the Code of Conduct aims to combat disinformation risks while fully upholding the freedom of speech" when those two things are obviously mutually exclusive.
I'm newish to Django. Been using it for about a year. I had some experience with React earlier. But I'm more of a data engineer.
Django Cotton [1] scratched my itch fully. Very composable. Being able to pass HTML to components (E.g. you create a modal which takes a content slot) removed so many of the warts I felt using the standard Django templating.
It's not JSX, but it plays well with Django and makes it feel like I can create a real design system of components without a ton of JINJA.
> I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.
Are you arguing that 27 different sets of laws was a better approach? That these countries would just gladly lie down and never regulate the societal-level harms, systemic lawbreaking, and massive infringement of privacy across the board? I don't think so.
For a moment the political system in the US seemed to get to the same conclusions as the EU under Bidens FTC and anti-trust cases. But the conclusions of that remain to be seen.
The problem is that those 27 sets of laws basically still exist. Regulation is certainly not the only reason. Fragmentation is another massive problem.
There's the EU-Inc initiative that the EU has basically made pointless (by wanting to introduce 27 new standards, not one, just making things more complex).
There are no 27 sets of laws to do business in Europe. It's not perfect, but it's a SINGLE MARKET, if you comply to the EU regulation you are allowed to sell everywhere.
It does however not absolve you from additional local market demands to be competitive, i.e. local language support, service infrastructure, etc.
For example: Miele is one of the largest washing machine manufacturers in Europe. They have their front panel translated to local languages for most of its markets. You can sell a washing machine with a English front panel, but you won't be able to compete in e.g. the German/Italian/French market
I heard they make quality products that last 20 years and don't use WiFi, too. Maybe they should try exporting to America.
If true, it's indicative of some American vs European ideology. American tech bro soyjaks keep screaming criticisms about things like GDPR preventing remote-brickable wifi washing machines, and European bases nordic mans are like "bro those things are crap, why would I want them"?
