<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: AlanYx</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AlanYx</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:53:22 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=AlanYx" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "The Amazon tax"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.<p>This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:28:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347132</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347132</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347132</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Bioengineered chewing gum may offer a way to fight HPV and other microbes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Gardasil 9 seems to be the best available HPV vaccine.<p>Only in high income countries. The 4-valent version is still the dominant version available worldwide.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:23:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212815</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212815</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212815</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Bioengineered chewing gum may offer a way to fight HPV and other microbes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not just gut flora. High levels of circulating xylitol (and erythritol for that matter) have been shown in both mouse models and humans to be associated with increased platelet reactivity and elevated 3-year risk of major cardiovascular events.<p>But we're talking significant levels of xylitol/erythritol, such as from keto-friendly ice cream and drinks, not the modest levels from chewing gum, and the dental benefits are well established.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:09:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209849</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209849</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209849</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You could, but getting it from pigments in a chitinous matrix produced by genetically engineered brewer's yeast is just a little bit cooler.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:27:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201181</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201181</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201181</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The mushroom smell isn't from either the substrate or respiration. That distinct odor is 1-octen-3-ol. Biochemists call it "mushroom alcohol." It's caused by enzymatic breakdown of their cell walls, and it thought to be related to signalling.<p>I doubt it would be strongly present here. The article says the mycelium are close to dormant.<p>You can actually purchase mushroom alcohol commercially as a food additive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:23:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201125</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201125</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201125</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The claim in the article that saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) naturally produced the deep blue color in the butterfly example is not actually true, although it's a gorgeous effect.<p>These are genetically engineered variants of brewer's yeast designed to produce pigments.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:08:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200195</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200195</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200195</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.<p>Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:42:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49196568</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49196568</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49196568</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Literally "wine-faced" or "wine-eyed", yes. The problem with the literal wine-faced/wine-eyed is it doesn't convey luminosity/depth to readers, so it kind of misses the point. The missing context is that ancient wine was often unfiltered and cloudy, and diluted before being served.<p>"wine-looking" would be better for modern readers in terms of conveying the actual meaning, but again, it doesn't convey the actual idea Homer is getting at, and sounds awkward to repeat.<p>It's fun to think about alternatives far from the text like "garnet-hued sea", "sapphire-hued sea", "burgundy sea", but they all miss on either hue or clarity. "Lee-dark sea" is probably the closest, and hits the wine idea.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:47:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083843</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083843</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083843</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"wine dark sea" is the best example of this. It's a poetic/literary leap by Chapman and Pope that then became a functional convention in most subsequent translations.<p>The alternative translations aren't any better though, at least in English.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:40:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083723</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083723</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083723</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Civil breach of contract. Anthropic's TOS explicitly say you can't do what Kimi is alleged to have done.<p>This is true, but Kimi also has a variety of defenses. Kimi can't raise unclean hands if Anthropic systematically violated others' terms of use, but it can raise copyright misuse (which is similar in some respects to unclean hands) as well as lack of standing to enforce restrictions in the contract due to the third party beneficiary principle (i.e., Kimi would argue that Anthropic cannot sue Kimi for derived IP that rightfully belongs to third parties whose terms of use were violated by Anthropic, and the proper party to sue Kimi, if any, would be those third parties). That latter argument usually fails in small-scale cases (ProCD) but has been successful in larger ones where the alternative would be anticompetitive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:30:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49012188</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49012188</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49012188</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Cohere (HQd in Toronto)<p>Cohere keeps changing their story about where they're headquartered. From 2019-2020 they were HQed in Toronto. Then from early 2020 to 2026 they billed themselves as dual-headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco. Then in April 2026 they started to bill themselves as dual headquartered in Toronto and Berlin. Sometime in the last two months they've started to bill themselves as HQed in Toronto again.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:41:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48934438</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48934438</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48934438</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "AI builders outnumber AI governance hires 7:1 in Europe"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I disagree with this being flagged. I'd be interested in seeing more data of this type, despite how "preposterous" it is from a tech perspective. I've long speculated that in Canada we're at about a 3:1 ratio for builders to AI regulators if you include government and NGOs, and the numbers in this link from Ireland are not far off that (and this link excludes government and NGO regulatory hires).<p>It's clear that outside of the US, there is an atypically large regulatory complex building compared to actual implementors.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:04:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48846071</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48846071</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48846071</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Sagrada Família Lego set"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Did the parents grow up with Lego? The "each set stays in its own bag" thing was what my wife wanted to do for the longest time, not having grown up with the beautiful chaos of a giant tub of pieces, and the oddly reassuring sound of swishing your hand through all of it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:36:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402793</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402793</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402793</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "12,060 piece, $799.99, Sagrada Família is the largest Lego building set to date"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There were also two 20-in-1 sets recently, both very reasonably priced. Those were huge hits in my house.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:24:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402600</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402600</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402600</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's presumably why so many professors are banding together for this letter. 600 professors is a fairly significant chunk of the faculty.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 14:33:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309530</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309530</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309530</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Most of the soul ideas that eventually made their way into Judaism (and many years later becoming heavily influential in sects like the one founded by Baal Shem Tov) originally came from diaspora Hellenic Jews who were familiar with Platonism. There was about a half century+ lag before these ideas diffused. That is, they existed but were not yet mainstream.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 13:26:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207356</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207356</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207356</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Antigravity CLI was only announced yesterday, so pretty much no one realizes it's different from Antigravity IDE yet, but I agree with your overall point. This kind of branding is toxic for individual product awareness. I'm not sure what drives the thinking behind it; Microsoft does it too (Copilot, etc.).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 13:23:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207302</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207302</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207302</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time<p>That's a broadly accepted take among religious historians, although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora. Philo of Alexandria did begin to integrate Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy on the soul during his lifetime.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 13:52:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48193327</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48193327</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48193327</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>C3P is not staffed by parents who have lost their kids.<p>I've had some professional interactions with one person who works for the org, and she came across in a very negative way. I don't want to use pejoratives, and perhaps it's understandable that people who spend so much time on this issue become emotionally invested in it to an unhealthy level, but people so emotionally charged are not well-positioned to craft balanced, rights-respecting digital policy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 10:19:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120030</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120030</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120030</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlanYx in "Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm in the middle. I have some sympathy for the Canadian intelligence community's perspective here; in recent years, much intelligence potentially preventing major criminal public safety incidents has had to come through five eyes partners because the legal situation for domestic collection has become unworkable. CSIS refers to the situation as "going dark", which is an unfortunate US terminological import.<p>That being said, C-22 goes way beyond what would be halfway reasonable to solve the main issues in a fair and rights-respecting way, and I have absolutely no sympathy for the reasoning and goals imported from the UK's Online Safety Act.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 18:53:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112660</link><dc:creator>AlanYx</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112660</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112660</guid></item></channel></rss>