You can buy a diamond-making machine for $200k on Alibaba | Hacker News Reader

You can buy a diamond-making machine for $200k on Alibaba

arstechnica.com

53 pointsksec35 comments

Looks like whoever writes for Ars likes to read HN — this was mentioned in a comment here yesterday, then published in Ars today. Nice one, Animats!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41492001

Quite surreal seeing the comment and just hours later seeing the article it sparked.

If the stylometry website [1] was still online, we could probably figure out which user the ars author is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

Assuming they have A) written somewhere with one user that they are a writer at Ars and B) have written more about other things with another account

Most likely they're just a lurker though, like most, and then stylometry wouldn't help :)

The article directly attributes it to him! Was that edited in after you wrote your comment?

I think it always attributed Animats correctly, I just wanted to point it out sounce it hadn't been remarked upon yet.

In the old days, most if not all media would avoid mentioning or linking directly to HN. I think it was post 2016 they stopped doing that.

Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode in which thieves steal $1 million of gold. Then to avoid capture, they enter suspended animation capsules and sleep for 100 years. Only to awake in a world where gold can be manufactured and has no value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip_Van_Winkle_Caper

Artificially made diamond is said to be more authentic/pure than real diamonds due to machines like this, time to stop digging the ground.

I don't think authentic is the best adjective here, but otherwise yes

Blood would probably be a better one.

It will be fun to watch the diamond monopoly go in reverse and argue that imperfect diamonds are the best.

It's already there. I've been trying, and failing, to convince my wife that we don't need a $7,000 "real" diamond for a ring she wants, and that a <$1000 lab-created diamond is better. Not only is it cheaper, but it's likely less flawed and doesn't support a company with unethical practices.

She is convinced that she nonetheless needs the $7,000 one or at least a used "real" diamond for reasons I cannot comprehend.

The value of real diamonds is in signalling how much money you're able and willing to burn. That's why their pricing makes no sense, and why the more expensive it is, the better.

This is exactly it unfortunately.

The price difference could be a large part of a romantic trip to Europe. The desire for such showcase possessions is tough for me to understand.

A ring rich in gold, platinum, rubies, or emeralds would at least hold its value well by comparison.

Think of it like this: what's the surest, simplest, and most reliable way of proving to people that you're wealthy? It's taking a good chunk of your cash - like, in the order of monthly living expenses of people around you - and setting it on fire. Or spending it on something just as useless - like a diamond ring, or that romantic trip across Europe.

That's why jewelry with obvious resale value doesn't work as well, nor does anything that can be seen as investment or an utility purchase: the signal only works if you're wasting money on a vanity purchase - one large enough to show that you either have more money than you know what to do with, or at least that you care so much about recipient that you're willing to sacrifice a meaningful chunk of your wealth on a gesture.

Of course few will say this out loud, or even think about this explicitly. Diamonds, engagement rings, and all the other staples of romance are in big part a status game that people learn to play from childhood, so to most, those things feel like something natural to do.

Part of it is because status means something because other people can’t achieve it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good#

Natural diamonds are not especially rare. The entire reason they are overvalued in society is due to an extremely successful and ongoing marketing campaign combined with a monopoly that allows for extreme market manipulation.

Your wife is concerned with that social value. The actual physical qualities of the stones aren't really that important. Social status is.

There really is no ethical or moral defense for natural diamond mining. When presented with the human and environmental impact, one’s response is pretty informative of their character and motivations.

A big part of diamonds is marketing. That if you are not putting one month’s salary away for that special stone then you are not strongly committed to marriage.

My wife was pragmatic. I said we could put $5k on a stone that has no intrinsic value or $5k on FNILX at time of marriage and take a blast of vacation one year later when it’s turned into ~$5500.

She chose vacation and we had a blast in Europe. Good vibes per dollar spent is where it’s at.

It's already happening, there was even a huge ad campaign

https://nationaljeweler.com/articles/12184-steven-singer-jew...

The article is a combination of this HN comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41492001 and the post it relates to.

[dupe]

Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488353

Vapour machines seem to start cheaper like this for $30k https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Diamond-Growing-MPCVD...

Not that I know anything about them.

DIY-ing one of these has been on my to-do list since I learned about CVD in, oh, 2009 or so.

For entirely predicable reasons, everyone I've lived with has said "NO!" to the idea of me leaving a hacked microwave oven running continuously for a month while filled with a mixture of methane and hydrogen.

This is curious. It took approximately 19 hours to turn a HN thread into an article. What does this tell about the speed of information?

That its a slow news day

How far off is additive manufacturing of diamond (forms)?

Here's 1st hit from my noob quick search.

Advance in additive manufacturing of 2D materials at the atomic and close-to-atomic scale [2024] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41699-024-00456-x.pdf

The "Not a Simple Operation" section really stands out for its GPT writing style ("While [pro], it's important to note [con]", "In short...").

The reason that ChatGPT and other LLMs use such language is because they often find it in the corpus of text they’ve ingested. It’s a frequent pattern in writing.

So, I don’t necessarily think that’s an immediate red flag. To be sure, I guess you’d need to go back and look at the author’s previous stories and compare writing styles.

Great, so now we're going to see a glut of diamonds on Etsy now.

you mean like this?

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1382479348/1-mm-to-5-mm-diamond...

Ha ha, I guess I'm slow.

How far is the Diamond Age?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com