"This is a testament to memory, family and the unexpected ways the past finds its way back to us." """ Men going extreme in sentimental when they just sold a $9M collectible :).
This is a testament to outsourcing, laziness and the unexpected ways technology finds ways to change every press release.”
Most (all?) keyboards I've used only have a combined hyphen‐minus key (-) which is distinct from a dash (—) and isn't quite a hyphen (‐), so I get why most people don't care. All font dependent as well to add to the fun, and my examples here render differently in the textbox and the comment!
In social media comments they came across as pompous even before LLMs and werent particularly appropriate for casual comments.
Though to be fair some people enjoy coming across as pompous and embrace the 'better than the peasants and their lowly minus sign use' attitude. Makes them feel special or as if their writing is markedly better than those without fancy punctuation. (It isnt).
Also yes, im describing two writers i know that are adamant about the em dash being 'a sign of an intellectual wtiter'...they are insufferable pricks.
Person A: “We’re going to be so rich.”
Person B: “How many times do I have to tell you? It’s not about the money.”
Person A: “It’s about all the things we’ll be able to buy with it.”
Person B: “Exactly.”
https://www.ha.com/heritage-auctions-press-releases-and-news...
Even the same time and same day of the week there will never be exactly the same set of users online, and that’s even more true with regard to the users who are choosing to look at HN’s /newest page. So pure luck can determine whether a bunch of comic book lovers see it soon after submission and give it enough votes to get on HN’s front page, or just a bunch of people who think it’s a boring story worth ignoring.
(Personally I thought it sounded like it might have interesting comments worth reading, hence my being here, but I wouldn’t have found it interesting enough to upvote if I were one of the people who saw it on the new submissions page.)
That’s how we roll.
The results are likely to be that all HN front page stories will eventually be LLM-sourced.
I’m not entirely against that, if the scripts do a good job of selecting stories.
Not the actual goal, of course the actual goal of Hacker News for many people is gaming SEO and startup juice.
That said, I don't doubt for a second you're right. Trust a forum of tech bros and nerds to minmax away what little joy there is left to posting here.
I find most of the value, here, in the community commentary, though.
It’s fairly remarkable.
I do think people are trying to LLM that, as well, but not as successfully.
I think that a goal is to "cultivate" a startup community. Get nerds and tech bros together, and some synergy is bound to happen.
I'm not trying to start anything up, but I do enjoy the community. I'm not really what YC is looking for, but I suspect they like me, more than an LLM.
For the same item.
Crazy.
Heritage has great value. It is one of the few things that cannot be manufactured at will.
Also, since its uniqueness holds its value, its value becomes a "strange attractor". You can put a lot of money into one of these artifacts, fairly sure to get most or more back. Since future buyers will have a similar assurance. So it isn't money thrown away, but money stored in a medium the provides satisfaction and pride.
Not so different from buying real estate in some exclusive area for some crazy price. It really isn't that crazy if you are likely to get your money back later if you want. Likely at a higher amount due to a growing economy pushing prices up.
Crazy would be spending millions on something unique then grinding it up.
"I have a da Vinci at home."
Vs
(pointing at a picture on the phone) "I have this painting at home"
Which one impresses the other rich asshats more? Maybe even millions of dollars worth more.
The attribution to Leonardo is extremely dubious, but the whole thing seems to have been motivated as yet another attempt to wash the reputation of oil theocracies and their monarchs.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/world/europe/napoleon-dia...
If that was a true feeling, then they wouldn't sell it away as soon as they find it, as if it is something they must dispose off immediately.
Sales culture is turning all men into drama queens.
Men sounding too sentimental, emotional, girly, too much talking, making lots of facial expressions, trying to please or convince someone,... even though it is not hard it see it's fake. The talk was all about millions, not family silver.
The cost of the reading copy would end up being less than the negative impact to the condition (and therefore value) of your mint copy from reading it a single time.
With a little effort and research someone could come up with a reasonable estimate that read something like, “a typical 15-year-old reading through this comic once in a typical way would have cost the family X dollars”, and X might literally be $100k. Certainly well over $10k.
https://youtu.be/zw220bx88WA?si=vArVS22Oac02uNK5
I’d forgotten about prank monkey Homer.
https://www.zipcomic.com/superman-1939-issue-1
And I dare say, someone spending 9 million clams on this comic book is more than likely going to have it sitting in a very UV-protected vault somewhere ..
EDIT: Sorry - I didn’t realize that zipcomic.com is infringing the copyright - adding this note to point that out, but I will maintain my original link as intended. Better to read it on DC Universe Infinite, if you have access, or maybe it’s available through Libby or Hoopla library apps.
I have a feeling this was scanned a while back, where resolution was a balance between even being able to store it digitally due to size.
If I was lucky enough to have to defend say a billion dollars from diluting over decades, a priceless comic sounds like a decent acquisition
Until they pass away and somebody finds it then puts it for sale, and so on...
While you could store your collectable in a vault, many people enjoy displaying their collectables.
[0] It’s still copyrighted, although it seems that will expire in a decade or so, though. I guess I’ll read it then.
>"I care (though not for something whose creators are long since dead and whom you can't support any more)."
>"I think it's immoral"
King Herod makes the Kill Babies Act and now you consider it immoral not to kill babies?
You justified copyright by suggesting it was about supporting creators. So you at least consider the moral justification to end at the creators death?
It just really interests me how copyright terms which were grown purely to support corporations so they wouldn't have to be creative (read that as would but need to employ people, or pay people for creativity) can have people figuratively clutching pearls.
It’s a bit hyperbolic. It’s a webpage of a comic book.
> their mum had always told them she had an expensive comic collection
And perhaps they would have too, had they not known! (Or the mother not known either.)
Les Poseuses Ensemble by Georges Seurat was sold for $149m. Very few people have heard of it, care about it, or even like it considering it's pointillism which no one buys modern versions of. The world of art and collectables is entirely rich people speculating that the price (not value) will go up in the future.
The same way a regular person might buy an autographed photo of a celebrity they like or something like that.
I’m a billionaire earning $100M this year.
I owe $40M as taxes for that. (Too much!)
I find a dumb banana painting by a starving artist.
I buy it from him for $1000.
I wait 6 months.
I go to a museum to get it appraised by “professionals”.
I pay the professional appraiser’s wife $50K as a gift.
The appraiser says the painting is now worth $30M!
Wow that’s awesome, I have such a keen eye for art.
You know what, I’m gonna donate this painting to a museum instead because I’m such a patron of art and culture.
Oh, look at that, I get a tax rebate for the value of my donated painting ($30M)
Now I only have to pay $40M - $30M = $10M in taxes on my $100M income.
There’s more nuance to it in practice, but that’s the gist of it.
-----
Edit: For some reason I can't reply to the comments below so I'm gonna do it here.
> That wouldn't explain the price here, since in your scam the whole idea is to buy cheap and donate dear. not buy for 139M
Now we're getting in the details but it's very suspicious for an appraiser to appraise a work of art from an unknown artist at millions. But it's not that suspicious if they take Van Gogh's Starry Night which was previously appraised at $500M to now be valued at $1B. this way the deca-billionaire still gets to save his taxes while appraiser avoids suspicion.
> As far as I know, that's not how taxes work. You can't get a rebate for the amount of taxes you would have paid, you can get a deduction for the amount of money you made.
There are a lot of loopholes in the complicated tax system for the ultra-wealthy, not for us. This video (still a simple explanation in an animated way) covers a few more of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHy07B-UHkE
So:
You made $100M owe $40M in taxes.
Your painting is worth $30M! You have such a keen eye for art.
Now you made $130M and owe $50M in taxes.
You donate the painting, you're back at having made $100M and owing $40M.
Otherwise we'd all choose not to pay tax and donate our tax money to charitable institutions instead.
So if you buy painting for a dollar and wait a year then next year you make $3m and the painting is now worth $1m then if you donate it, your AGI is reduced to $3m-min($1m, 30% of income) = $3m-$900k.
You don’t count the appreciation of the painting as income. You don’t even count it as LTCG if you don’t sell it.
I think it also applies to stock option awards. When the startup I was at was acquired some people were talking about it.
The entire NFT thing would work if it were restricted to things people want, even if that only amounts to bragging rights.
Somewhere along the way people lost track of the fact that being able to trade something doesn't denote value in itself
Whilst that may be true for the most part, much of the art dealt nowadays is never displayed, just stored somewhere incredibly tax efficient until it's value has gone up enough to warrant selling.
https://theswisstimes.ch/unlocking-the-secrets-of-the-geneva...
It seems unlikely that in that time frame it would have been a 5 digit purchase. It still may have been a significant proportion of liquid cash or net worth though. I think it'd be an interesting detail to have too.
Needless to say, I kept all my old comics.
it’s valuable for the same reason the mona lisa is valuable. it’s iconic, it is a singular object, it is one of a kind, it is a stable investment vehicle. they ain’t making more of them.
I always wonder exactly how difficult it would be to get the paper, ink, staples, etc exactly right. I'm sure it would be difficult but 9m is a big payoff if you can.
Even if you could duplicate it down to the molecule I would assume it wouldn't hold the same value since it doesn't have the same history. Assuming you'd want to sell it in good faith as a replica.
[0] https://www.ha.com/heritage-auctions-press-releases-and-news...
> For decades, Allen says, nobody knew of a way to distinguish which copies came from that initial run. Then a grader noticed a key difference in a small in-house promotional spot advertising the upcoming Action Comics No. 14. In the first run, those ads included text reading “On sale June 2nd.” Subsequent print runs had updated it to “Now on sale.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Auctions#Controversie...
There has been a number of investigative shows arguing the valuation of collectibles in general (comics included) is largely driven by money laundering.
Is it some kind of conspiracy theory of is this legit ?
I imagine a pristine 1st edition Tintin or Asterix would be quite valuable.
It almost feels like it's gambling, because it's a sentiment that leaks into modern collectibles, like card games.
I'm not saying people don't value collectibles, or value nostalgia, or that some of these things should be limited to niches - the reality is that I can't quite put it into words, but a lot of it seems propped up... Or it's a false game everyone is knowingly playing, like a big Ponzi scheme.
These superman copies, or the first editions of mtg, or even some modern vintage games, were never intended to be collectibles - people used them and played with them, created memories, and the production runs were really limited in comparison to modern day production runs, that make those items actually rare... Like few hundreds or thousands have survived in good condition - which is an achievement for toys, games and comics that get used a lot.
Nowadays people buy stuff with high production runs, they never even create memories with the stuff... They slab stuff into a "hermetic" container right away, and get it graded...
It just feels fake.
Again I don't doubt people see value in this stuff, I just feel like they're valuing for the wrong reasons, and I can't wrap my head around how is that even sustainable.
Who is going to value the memory of "remember when I bought 5 booster boxes and pulled card X from the pack, with gloves on, put it in a sleeve and sent it to be graded straight away? Now those were the days!"
It's like people want to compress the randomness of time and social behavior into a predictable cicle of months, with minimal effort and to extract the maximum value out of it.
Am I overthinking this?