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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

> All the money and talent in the world can't replicate real users generating real data that you can use to improve

Basically, China excellence in EVs and Solar was driven by the market being new. It's hard (almost impossible?) to outrank an incumbent very entrenched in a big market. You need a paradigm shift (ie: iphone vs nokia) to make the change.

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> You need a paradigm shift (ie: iphone vs nokia) to make the change.

I imagine the manufacturing breakthrough for high temperature jet turbine blades could be additive manufacturing where you grow the crystalline structure layer by layer instead of casting and carefully nurturing it. Mature markets with few incumbents focus on local maxima and have difficulty to move from one maxima to another, while a new manufacturer can start from a different position and search for other maxima.

Directional solidification is a kind of additive manufacturing? You're carefully adding to macroscopic crystalline structure at a propagating melt/solid interface.

It kind of is, but it happens within the molten part, so it's harder to control (and, considering how hard, I'd say the science behind it is still poorly understood).

They get perfect enough single crystal superalloy blades every time ... after throwing out the half that fail. The science is well understood, even if it's fiendishly hard [0]

0 - https://www.asme.org/wwwasmeorg/media/resourcefiles/aboutasm...

Or good spies who steal the secrets + few years of subsidies to give runway for the new companies

You can steal ‘know’ but you can’t so easily steal ‘knowhow’. I could easily find all the information that I theoretically need to make a wooden chair. But to actually make it successfully would require years of practice at carpentry. At first, I can expect results comparable to Homer Simpson’s spice rack.

When I was at uni in the 90s I remember hearing one of our lecturers tell stories about visitors to British Aerospace being caught wearing shoes with sticky soles to try and capture small amounts of swarf for industrial espionage.

So yes, that does happen.

> swarf

New word for me: filing debris!

Filing or cutting debris from a lathe or mill.

Something important to remember if you come across it, never pick it up with a bare hand because it can be razor sharp and never wear gloves when using a machine tool like a lathe unless you want to loose a hand... or worse.

You mean like when the NSA is spying on Airbus for Boeing? :)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32542140

(it's particularly hilarious (in the bad way), that German secret services were participating in spying as well)

Thankfully some countries (here: Brazil) have some spine to react to it: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/saab-wins-brazil-je...

There may be a fraction of this, but the great thing about science is that it is verifiable.

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