skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One of the surprising things to me is how much China seems to have played their hand too early (and too strongly)

China is a dictatorship, Xi a leader for life. That dramatically changed Beijing's political profile.

Pre-Xi, one could argue China had long-term planning capacities. The rotation of leaders and intraparty competition limited corruption and promoted political fitness. Dictatorships have neither. They're cronyist, corrupt and focussed on short-term political survival.

A strategic China would have waited until 2050 to deal with Hong Kong. Instead, Xi got insecure about Winnie the Pooh or whatever. A strategic China would have slowly accumulated technology, capital and soft power. Instead, they're pivoting into a wall.

> On the one hand I think the CCP bought a dud with Chairman Xi. But maybe that’s good for the rest of us.

In the short term, sure. In the medium term, it's a security nightmare. In the long term, we're going to watch billions of peoples' humanity and productivity get squandered. That's a loss to everyone.
In this light of recent heat up of issues with China, I want to share a positive story to contrast: I had a daily driver in Chengdu for over 1 month who spoke no English, zero, none at all - not even "yes" or "no". We communicated via Google translate (on VPN). He would play Chinese music and then some days I would play some American rock and roll. We bonded in inexplicable ways. I had always commented on how I love the carved wooden letter that hangs on the taxi's rear-view mirror. The ride was almost 1 hour in the morning and 2 hours in the evening back to the Hotel. We became friends. On the last day, he took the wooden ornament off, cupped it in his palm, held it against his chest, gave it to me with a glimmer in his eyes. Fuck, that was the most amazing human connection I've ever made.

I've worked in China in the semiconductor business, stayed there and absorbed some of the things the west does not even know. I recommend reading "Poorly Made in China (2011)" by Paul Midler. It is surprisingly good - factual, objective look of deep issues with China's way of doing things. I resonate with the book with my personal experience.

Diplomacy is about being able to negotiate well, build trust and foster long term relationships, acknowledge mutual interests, differences and work towards solutions to problems. China has lost the brand image, probably forever. Despite a few positive experiences on the individual level, I hate working with Chinese businesses and would never want to go there. Fuck the Chinese government and its tentacles (Chinese corporations). The Chinese leadership does not understand that leadership is about inspiring others, taking care of the weak, keeping your promises and being able to independently think, innovate and set an example for other nations to follow. The way it is going, I can guarantee with certainty that they can have all the financial leverage, moral leverage is what you need in the long term; they can never become a superpower.

Edit: grammar
Kind of reminds me of how countries like Israel and Russia use democracy against us. Capitalism and democracy are our two weaknesses now but only because our institutions have been weakened from within.
I think HK is a huge part of this. They probably thought it would go away quietly but to see this level of support slowly growing and refusing to go away must be alarming. Notice how it was specifically the HK stuff where they are going scorched earth (NBA, Blizzard, co-opting celebrity messages, etc).

I think especially when it comes to entertainment they know how much it goes into shaping their own public discourse and they cannot lose that.
A post like mine? But it's your post that has the idea...? The only thing I said about how to make it possible is "separate backup", which anyone can think of in two seconds and is only a hint of a tenth of an explanation. I don't understand.
Why does anyone in tech still pretend there’s any real value left in blockchain tech?

The crypto industry is stymied, time to move on and let “real” fintech take the reins...
Time will tell whether they care or not, but I believe the CCP has moved past mere stability and support.
Hong Kong forced their hand early on this, but I suppose the whole series of events that precipitated the protests in the first place could have been delayed a year or two. I feel like things were pretty close to a breaking point already, though, following Xi's lifetime appointment and opposition purge.
Realized seems dicey indeed, I can't figure out how 'realized' applies to any fork unless the coins are moved.

Complete dominion, OTOH is easy to address. E.g. instead of mailing them the keys, I pull the public keys out of their website's SSL cert. They now have complete dominion.
To the extent China succeeds in influencing the world economy, whatever they do will be portrayed as "playing their hand too strongly" by those who perceive China's success as coming at the cost of their own.

So while I think you're basically right, I'm not sure under what conditions we'd be hearing comments such as, "China has grown into a legitimate economic power by playing fair and square. They really caught the rest of us napping."
> They probably thought [Hong Kong] would go away quietly

Hong Kong is a problem manufactured by Xi. Most Hong Kongers identified as Chinese not more than a few years ago [1]. Come 2050, almost every Hong Konger would have lived under Beijing's rule their whole life. The sensible thing was to wait.

But Xi got impatient. So we got this mess. Hong Kong accelerated the outcome for a die cast when Xi installed himself as leader for life.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-anniversary-idUS...
Because it started in the eighties and we didn't have Reddit to make shitposts about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dfmgst/oc_...

I remember it being mentioned in the "Work rules" book by that Google guy. They had a desert in their canteen called "Free Tibet Goji-Chocolate Creme Pie..." in the canteen. They said "well, the food is free, and the berries come from Tibet, so ..." Trying to be cheeky. But several people threatened to quit over this, and they had a huge discussion on the internal mailing list with over 1300 replies. The chef who created it got suspended, and then people got worried because of the chilling effect that this would have on free speech. Eventually the suspension was reversed. Very dramatic.
Any reason one couldn’t remove the lightning port entirely? And charge only wirelessly (Qi), using Bluetooth for audio?
Yes, just set the organization to 'Apple, Inc.'
It's a reasonably valid point. During his administration, right-wing autocrats the world over have been emboldened, and he hasn't spoken against them. See, for instance, Khashoggi, the Kurds, or the Skripal poisoning incidents in recent memory, or, more to the point, the promise that Trump would say nothing of the protests in Hong Kong if he got his trade deal [0].

You're being downvoted, but while it's not a direct cause and effect, he has supported and encouraged authoritarianism the world over.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-china-promise-hong-kon...
iTerm is made by one person? Wow. Your software has enabled me and many other people to create a ton of value. I'm not sure I would even still be using macOS if iTerm2 wasn't available. Huge thank you for your work. I donated a little bit before but now I really just want to donate more.
it is much simpler operationally to have a second phone if you frequently leave and enter the US and care about US agents potentially demanding you unlock your phone upon entry (as i do)

almost everyone i know, even the staunchest pro-privacy types, are not willing to go toe to toe with a US customs and border agent over phone unlocking. they just aren't principled enough. i don't blame them.

worse, there's no telling what malware goes /in/ to your phone if it gets imaged. yeah yeah, call me a conspiracy nutter, i don't care after what snowden showed us. if one of their machines touches my unlocked phone, i'd consider it compromised.

so, naturally, i have a second phone. this offers many benefits:

- no potential mission critical disasters if i lose it via robbery, water, or power tripping US border patrol agents e.g. forgot to backup some particular important message or whatever

- keybase paper key lets me keep in touch with people i need to, provision new devices if need be, and means i can burn the keybase app upon re-entry into US as it's not something like SMS that they are cognizant of

- using whatsapp on foreign SIM gives me some cred as far as not having a purely empty phone, some human interaction, etc. yeah they'd get dragnetted but it's a smaller set of people than my main phone

- if it gets imaged by border agents, i can trade it in for a new one at some point in the future or just recycle via apple recycle program. no big deal.
I wonder why LCC isn’t mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCC_(compiler)
Hayao Miyazaki's Airships [video]
The concept of self-mastery suggests that the outcome of the ancient dictum 'Temet nosce' (know thyself) is part of a (once well-known?) psychological process, of a liberation from ignorance.

I see an echo of that in Jung's 'individuation'. I see other echoes in Gurdjieff & Ouspensky's writings, in the efforts of the (non-materialist) alchemists, in Maslow's 'self-actualization', in Bucke's 'cosmic consciousness', etc ... and that's just in the West.

Huxley displays a somewhat more universal (but abstracted) outline of this constellation of efforts in his 1946 The Perennial Philosophy.

Long ago I waded (not very deeply) into N., but as I recall, he explored a lot more than this one idea. Maybe he's become most identified with it because its other numerous threads are too esoteric ... or concealed.

NB: One Jung take on Nietzsche (1936): https://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/essay-on-wotan-w-...
I was reading the top of page 5 as "the user doesn't have any crypto N after the hardfork". I understand your reading now.
Unrelated, 1Password has a great travel mode

https://support.1password.com/travel-mode/

It will only allow vaults marked "safe for travel", everything else is removed from device. Once you get past the security theater you can re-enable the non-travel vaults from your computer.
Inscription on Coffin Discovered to Be Oldest Egyptian Soul Map
https://github.com/rswier/c4/blob/master/c4.c

Holy what
What was last decade's big vqporware?
It only took 3 paragraphs for capitalism to end up under the bus. Which - sure. There’s much to dislike in the inhumanity of extreme consumerism. But that same consumerism has transformed that nation. Even the NYT has extolled the virtues of China’s rise.

“The world thought it would change China, but China’s success has been so spectacular that it has changed the world.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch...

Yes. We should stop giving them a pass. Who is going to be first to give up their iPhone?
Semi-off topic but you should knowledge-able in the area, but would there be any potential in leveraging the permanent temperature differences which occur 10meters below the ocean? Light does not penetrate below 10meters and old water is denser. Thus the ocean, away from land, has a permanent and substantial potential energy difference between these two layers. Is it viable to harvest this difference?
That's a mandatory system they need to be on the street [0]

> But those cars won’t be operating completely unmanned — at least for now. Under these regulations, driverless cars being tested on public roads must have a remote operator monitoring the car, ready to take over as needed. That remote operator — who will be overseeing the car from a location outside of the car — must also be able to communicate with law enforcement as well as the passengers in the event of an accident.

That being said, the way Waymo does it is different from other companies. As HN can understand, adding the ability to remote access a car is very very risky. Waymo on the other hand has the ability to suggest a path to the car, and the car will itself locally evaluate to see if the suggested path is safe before executing it. So it's not quite a "remote control" access.

[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/2/26/17053898/driverless-cars-self-...
Maybe I'm a cynic but I don't believe that's the real issue. We're friendly with plenty of countries that do far worse. I think it's about economics and strategic interests.
These Dice Know If You’re Cheating
You don't have to guess, in that if there are below a threshold number of errors there is a unique decode which will always be right.

And a decoder that uses Berlekamp-Massey can find that unique decode with a lot less work than trying every possibility. :)
In the UK (Scotland specifically) we had the ridiculous prosecution of Markus "Count Dankula" Meechan. We've certainly not found the right balance over here.
Web Architecture 101 – Storyblocks Product and Engineering
Don't you think the Military would step in with all these guys look like they're toys shooting 8 inch thick steel armor?

In my personal view, violence is the last resort for protesting and even then, sometimes I disagree with HK approach (beating officers with pies) despite of the fact that I support the HK's cause.
Who audits Google? Serious question.
Good points made above. Out of curiosity, is there a route to a return of rotating leaders without a voluntary abdication by Xi?
Dedicated servers are often so much cheaper these days, but it is not the new cloud, so a lot of startups look the other way.
Juries are not about accuracy. They are there as another line of defense against tyranny: it's harder to make up charges or convict people of ridiculous things when a jury can nullify it.

Nullification is rare and unfortunately that line of defense largely failed during the drug war. But I think that's largely because the government was able to successfully make it a racial issue. It's not always easy to take advantage of deep social divisions for all kinds of policies, and that's why dictators don't like juries.

Kind of like guns. How useful are they against tyranny really? Useful enough that tyrants try to take them away, and that's all I need to know.
My password says "FUCK [a woman whom I no longer have an intimate relationship with]". This doesn't concern you? Does it concern 'jedberg?
I know without reading this about the Kurds. My heart goes out. If the US ever missed an opportunity to pull a sliver lining from the pile of poo that was the Iraq war, it was the failure to establish Kurdistan.
(throwaway account to protect friends at Waymo)
data points of 2:
1. took a ride, at one point a sudden violent sewering and breaking for no apparent reason - explanation from the backup driver - the truck in the next lane was too close. Then it couldn't take a left turn into the parking lot in front of Waymo HQ and was just stuck even though the maneuver was simplest to anyone. remote driver couldn't do it anything and backup driver had to do the 'normal driving'.
2: spoke to someone (again a waymo employee and her friend) just after the ride and the friend was visibly shaken and verbatim expression "worst ride of my life".
This is all around the MV campus and in the last couple of months. So Waymo's claim seems way off unless they are talking about absolutely fixed paths, much like a public transit and maybe, just even then, a big maybe.
Like I said, a lot of different misleading statements are being confused people in this thread.

1. Waymo has been having rides with no one in the car for 2 years now.

2. Waymo has been having rides with real customers inside for 1 year now.

3. Waymo has told said customers in #2 that they may soon see rides with no employee inside

I agree that the soon in #3 doesn't mean much, but at the same time, this wasn't a press call, it was a private email sent to users, so it's not like they're showing off.

But 1 and 2 have already been happening for a long time.
Reading the news the past year or so has been like watching a slow motion bar fight break out. One person says something nasty, the other gets right in their face, the first gives a slight shove, and both can't back down or they'll look weak...
It would be considered a 1031 Like-Kind exchange though.
On Data and Science
If you want to keep your phone secure, enable a long passcode, turn on full device encryption, and turn it off. If you are a US citizen, you can't be turned away at the border or forced to unlock the device. If you're not a US citizen or don't want to be harrassed by customs, bring a burner phone.

Tools like Cellebrite can and do take advantage of security vulnerabilities. Turning off pair locking lulls users into a false sense of security and is therefore harmful. Further, only restricting CBP searches to "manual" searches isn't enough and does plenty of damage to your privacy.
Surfacing one of the comments from the article here since HN commenters (being primarily US/European) seems to exhibit similar views --

The thesis here bespeaks of the very arrogance we have regarding "dealing" with China. China is a major world power. Its existence and growing economic prowess are not dependent upon our acceptance, investment or "good will".

We continue to deal with China in an extremely condescending manner. To "deal" with China means we have to accept China for what it is; including that its political system is different from ours. It is not going to bend to our system of liberty and individual civil rights because we think that's the natural order of things. And in all frankness, our current political morass is hardly a paragon of virtue to which other should strive.

We can choose to ignore China and attempt to isolate it. But that didn't work out so well when we tried it after 1949 did it?

All these tariffs are accomplishing is incentivizing Chinese corporations to rapidly expand their production capabilities in facilities located in other nations. So in fact, we are financing China's increasing power and influence over both its neighbors and within the global economy.

We're now at a point where China doesn't "need" us. So we simply have to decide whether we want to interrelate with another major world power as it is or move towards confrontation and chaos.
Not nearly on the same level economically though. The problem is that China both denies basic human rights and is big enough to push these viewpoints in the west. The same can't be said of minor trading partners.
I don't think anyone can guarantee that at this stage.
it's worrisome when combative tactics (arbitrarily large fees) are employed to reduce communication network availability, with little reason other than 'it's no longer useful for the state.' .

One hates to extrapolate what could be meant by the statement.

Does anyone know of any practical (legitimate/good) reason why anyone would want to dissolve this network?
The lane markings looked pretty clear in this instance.

That being said, Tesla's cruise control capabilities are best in class, but it's misleading marketing-speak to call it true self-driving.
What episode? Sorry, I have not kept up with it for a while now.
Yes, it would be far different. If everyone had a gun here, things would be much worse.

I'm quite glad I don't have to worry overly about stray bullets flying through my window and literal open warfare in the streets.
Perhaps you should confirm what it's actually doing in the video? Tesla itself says that stop sign and traffic light handling is in shadow mode only [1].

[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-autopilot-fsd-traffic-light-...
> is there a route to a return of rotating leaders without a voluntary abdication by Xi?

History has limited examples of such peaceful (i.e. no civil war) transitions of power. (Most are from the modern era.)

My guess is the CCP’s senior guard would need to orchestrate his “illness.” But Xi has done a good job of purging the Politburo of able competition.

If I were giving this question serious study, I’d look at the PLA.
n=1

From all the android users who I have some level of intimacy, the only one sideloading an android app is my brother who uses a gps spoofer to teleport his Pokemon Go character around the world without leaving the confort of his chair. He's a dev and poweruser who knows what he's doing.

All the other dozens of users only have apps from Google's app store.
The people who buy games on steam that he then buys exclusivity rights to. The games people help kickstart with the promise of it being on a platform which is then purchased as exclusive. He’s screwing a lot of people.
Yeah we're on a bit of a purge right now to remove a lot of MS Office automation. We're just reading data from files - nothing fancy - but it's all over the place and apparently technically outside of licensed usage so compliance is cracking down on us.

COM is an interesting concept. If it were never invented I have a feeling native apps would be spinning up a simple REST API server instead, since that's what we all do now apparently.
Was rotating with CSS transforms an option?

That way you'd only need to read the EXIF data, but wouldn't need to go all the way to rotating the pixels yourself.
The line editing is good, as well as reverse search. I don't find myself using anything else sadly.
How many parks in the USA have speed zones around them that aren’t restricted to 15-25mph? It is stupid easy to slow down for a kid chase ball scenario when you are already going slow anyways, the only reason it is such a problem at all is because human drivers prefer speeding so much.
I think the point is to change behavior of firms by punishing them financially until they change. If they don’t ever change then I think they deserve to go bankrupt.

I don’t think boycotting Blizzard will have much of a direct effect on China’s policy. But if enough companies and governments act responsibly then China may change their policy.
This seems like a capricious and ill thought out decision. Does anyone have more context that might shed more light?
Conversely, just because a few people do a bad thing does not characterize the moral stature of a large decentralized organization. Sometimes, bad decisions are made. That doesn’t mean the day to day is one that makes the world worse, both in fact and in personal perspective.

The Purdue thing was really bad. That’s acknowledged. Nobody is happy about it. Plenty of work has been done pro bono to combat the opioid crisis even prior to the realization of what had happened. I have worked at other places and I legit feel comfortable saying that relative to most American businesses, the firm is not an evil purely profit maximizing machine. Most people’s day to day is benign and well intended and you can just straight up talk to people about it because people are interested in such things.

tldr: while I fully recognize bad things have happened I would say that on average McKinsey is more morally self conscious than your average us company. Take it as you will
None, because every other manufacturer is more concerned about not killing people than they are about releasing beta features for cars. The most surprising thing to me about autopilot is that Tesla hasn't been sued into oblivion for it.
It doesn't help when both sides were escalating constantly like two drunk blokes starting a bar fight. This is supposedly the current president's negotiation style.
Way above average. Those USB ports are nigh-impossible to solder, I'm not even sure how you'd "swap the data pins".
I don't agree. The Saudis have been extremely effective at pushing Wahhabism across the world. In many places traditional (usually more tolerant) forms of Islam have basically disappeared.
Would you say that Trump's trade war has also forced Xi's hand? China could afford to ignore these issues when its economy was still growing. But a shrinking economy has forced China to consolidate power and clamp down any dissent