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But I guess it's only works for functions that just call themselves? That's nice, but a very limited subset of TCO.

No, it is used for loops within functions as well. But it’s not fully generalized like in Scheme. You can’t have mutually recursive functions using tail recursion via “recur,” for instance. There is another Clojure technique for that (“trampoline”). Clojure runs on the JVM and is limited by the JVM’s original omission of TCO. When I started using Clojure, I was concerned about these limitations, but in practice I haven’t found them to be a problem. Most of the time, I just need a loop and “recur” works fine. I rarely use “trampoline” (just for state machines).

I don't understand this. Did they increase the overall amount of gold they held?

Sold it at the peak, and then bought it locally a few months later.

First sell the gold, then buy same amount at a slightly lower price a bit later (on average)

> the price of gold continued to rise as they did this

This would mean they sold low and bought high, right?


price of gold dropped from $5500 to $4600 in the last few weeks then came back. all is possible

Then they didn't make money as a result of the price rising, which is what the original commenter and article claimed.

It’s because they’re using European mathematics. You wouldn’t understand if you’re American.

In reality the article is attempting to account for a capital gain pnl accounting for taxes.


Usually that's how you want your selling and buying combos to be...

But the gold price has been rising (on average) a lot over the period July 2025 to January 2026

From the annual report, it looks like the headline number (XXB gain) is just because it's realized capital gain (which due to their reporting requirement appears in their annual report, unlike unrealized gains).

They have ~same amount of gold between both years and it doesn't look like they took extra market risk.


Impossible to make anywhere close to that amount since they only sold 129 tonnes

My local ice cream shop has never invested anything in AI. Do you think they'll come out of this ahead?

I've seen the "success" a non-software company has been having, trying to integrate AI into their processes. A hypothetical competitor who chose not to do so would absolutely be coming out ahead right now.

I can't say whether this trend would continue, but the answer to your question today is "yes".


Genuinely curious, what could an LLM even do for an ice cream shop? Checkout already takes less time than scooping a cone, and it's even quicker with cash. Maybe it could surveil the customers and employees? But I think that will lose you more customers than it gains.

Generally I would expect the ROI to be negative, like we've seen with most corporate AI projects, so yeah any ice cream shop that didn't invest in "AI" is going to come out ahead of one that poured money into the pit.


My local ice cream shop doesn't even have a computer in the building. Well, unless you count the credit card terminal.

Ice cream tends not to sell well in winter.

New York City seems to be a counterexample - gelato and ice cream stores everywhere that seem to do decent trade year-round...

Alas, no winter in my locality ever.

[flagged]


https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.


Remember the Long Island Ice Tea Company that renamed to Long Blockchain Company? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp

Free markets don't automatically do anything. There's nothing automatic. It's about giving individual people the opportunity to take action.

Free markets tend toward monopoly which restricts individual people’s opportunities for action. In this example, there was a cable monopoly mentioned. The only way to coerce it (not even to defeat it in some way) was through baseless deception, not free market competitive action. The monopoly remained.

> Free markets tend toward monopoly

Not true and oversimplification. Some markets tend toward monopolies, but you rarely will get one unless enforced/protected by a state. If you navigate through history, you will find almost exclusively monopolies on salt extraction, coal mining oligopolies (with the help of worker unions), silk... Curiously, the Standard Oil was accused of being a monopoly, and the proof was they were offering lower prices than anyone thanks to their scale, destroying the competence. The reward for offering low prices was disolving the company (notice that they never reached the hypothetical price hike stage).

It is also common practice for the state to declare something "public utility" or "natural monopoly", on things like snail mail distribution, telephone or TV, that were clearly not a natural monopoly and could be offered by free market. Here fall a lot of ISPs, that get a "public utility" status and only then can abuse that monopolistic position with the help of the state.

A lot of free market sectors tend to atomization: think hair or nail saloons, masonry, plumbers, carpenters... if you know someone in the sector, it seems that as soon as they get a size over 5 or 6 people, two of them always decide to split and go by themselves.


You're right on most of these, but wrong on telephony. That actually was a natural monopoly.

It's exactly how OP describes it. It's unproductive for multiple companies to maintain disconnected, parallel telephone infrastructures. The most productive use of resources is to lay more wires to more houses, not to lay more wires to places which have already been wired up for telephone service by somebody else. That creates a monopoly, and the government should step in.

With modern tech, you can mandate local-loop unbundling and fix some of this, but that wasn't possible with 1970s (and earlier) phone infrastructure.


We use "natural monopoly" too freely and too quickly, almost as a free card to actually implement monopolies that last for decades. Anecdo-time: in my small city there is a small "natural" monopoly in public bus service: the municipality offers a monopoly on which buses can operate in the city, that lasts for 25 years or so. I lived through a renewal that was a bit rocky, the bus company went on a strike, and as a result there was a vacuum of monopoly for six months. That resulted in a flood of other companies, big and tiny (as in 1 bus only, serving 1 very demanded route), doing the routes. They were as cheap as it gets, offering month cards outrageously cheaper than previous public-natural-monopoly. It was so cheap, and the offer was so high that cars seemed to vanish from the city center, that was so full of buses that you didn't even check the timetable: you just waited for the next for 5 minutes.

Eventually the municipality renewed the previous contract with the same previous company, a contract that forbids other companies from entering the city center, and we went back to the worse service we were used to. Of course they were a lot of narratives: they were trying to capture the market, drive competence away and then hike the prices; they were bounded to bankrupcy at such prices; that many buses were damaging the roads, and others. But the reality was that for a brief time we had the best bus service in the modern world.

As for telephone wires, we went through some years, between copper-IDSN and fiber (the DSL bridge) that a lot of companies found a way to make it profitable to put new copper cable parallel to what it already existed. The only thing the municipality did was to make it mandatory that the first to install it must use a wider-than-needed conduct (a solution much less disruptive than giving a natural monopoly, latest shown by new small companies born everywhere), so if a company wanted to add more cable later could use the same tubing. Predictions about company A blocking their tubing showed false, as other companies could retaliate in other places. No second tubing was allowed until the first tube was full, this was the only state intervention in the issue. The same tubes have now the optic fiber.

I am not fully anti-state, but there are undeniable overreaching everywhere, and a lot of zealots of intervention that are itching to issue mandates and interfere with everything, and then fix what fails with more interventions.


Sounds like a pretty good deal for those people who keep starting these 'profitable' companies.

If IBM runs them into the ground, there's a niche for a copy-cat of the original company that you can just found again. Rinse and repeat.


Power was used in customer applications a long time ago? I think Apple used them for a while and so did some game consoles?

Yes. Apple used PowerPC, and PowerPC was also in the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and Wii U. It was also widespread in embedded sectors like networking, automotive, and aerospace.

IBM eventually stepped away from the embedded market and eventually lost their foothold in consoles as well. While Raptor did offer Power9 systems at a somewhat accessible price point, the IBM-produced CPUs were still fundamentally enterprise-grade hardware, meaning they retained the high costs and "big iron" features of server tech.


What I wouldn't give for raptor money... they've gotten more and more expensive as time went on

Sort of, in the form of PowerPC, which was an Apple-IBM-Motorola (“AIM”) collaboration. It’s closely related to IBM’s Power line, but more like a predecessor than a sibling.

Wasn’t PowerPC cut down from POWER?

Anyone who can't get any better AI accelerators elsewhere? Last I heard, these things were sold out for years on end. And anyone who can make one, can sell them.

UK voters get what they vote for.

Literally untrue as we don't have proportional representation.

Sounds like a non-sequitur?

Proportional representation is nice, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary.


It's harder to block ads on mobile.

That's why I pay.


On iPhone maybe, revanced works great on Android.

If you don't watch on mobile, is there anything that YouTube Premiums gives you that an ad-blocker doesn't?

YouTube music, higher quality video, and the ‘jump ahead’ feature to skip portions of a video that others usually skip.

Also, though not a benefit to you in particular, apparently any creator you watch with Premium gets a way bigger payout for your view. Only heard about this anecdotally but it seems to track.

You can do this manually on the free plan. Mouse over the playhead and you'll see a graph. You can click the highest point in the graph which is where most people clicked through to.

Sure, but it's more annoying.

its crazy lengths ppl will go to avoid paying few dollars a month. i dont belive ppl commenting on this website are that squeezed for money. kind of bizzare.

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