How the U.S. Surrendered to China on Scientific Research | Hacker News Reader

How the U.S. Surrendered to China on Scientific Research

wsj.com

31 pointsdrkimball12 comments

"surrendered" -- can't we talk about anything without using a war metaphor?

The US has ceded leadership in a number of errors but humanity (which includes Americans) should be glad that they are not the only people doing research!

Seems to be a lot of china-related articles lately from heavy hitters like wsj, nytimes and bloomberg. And in a negative tone tinged with war metaphors as you noted. I'm guessing it has to do with the "trade war" ( another war metaphor ) between Trump and Xi. I wonder what the chinese media's take on it is? Would be great if there was a site with chinese articles translated into english. My guess is they are using the same war metaphors.

Actually not. I check Chinese news sites twice a month. Most of the international news is about the success of OBOR and multilateralism blah blah. News about trade war is relatively rare. War metaphors are often used for domestic issues though, such as poverty and corruption.

I personally rather see China find cures to illness than any companies in the Western world as the cost of those cures will be probably 10x less if discovered in China.

> I personally rather see China find cures to illness

Trusting the Chinese government is a folly. Lots of cures work until they kill you. The standards are so low (or nonexistent) that results are not always the results you want. Yes it's FUD. Well earned FUD.

Any chance we can just keep the FDA to monitor imports?

Maybe this is a chance for us to steal technology from China rather than the other way around.

The only advantage China has atm is lack of ethics and their enforcement, which will probably turn into advantage in biological sciences.

This article is behind a paywall

WSJ has been paywalled since 1996 - these "reminders" are growing extremely tiresome. Their articles are posted here because they are usually high quality and interesting - something they are able to do because they have adequate funding.

I eventually decided to subscribe. But luckily my work has a discounted subscription rate.

tldr: this worked for me to bypass the paywall on desktop: open the WSJ.com article in Chrome, open the dev tools (ctrl-shift-j), toggle device toolbar (ctrl-shift-m), select the "pixel 2" device, reload (ctrl-r), close dev tools (ctrl-shift-j).

Ah, a WSJ.com article behind a paywall... Usually it can be bypassed by browsing in Chrome's incognito mode. But this time it wasn't working for me.

A little research and I found that WSJ.com secretly scores users who browse their site, and present them with either a "hard" or "soft" paywall depending on the likelihood of them buying a subscription: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the...

So based on a hunch, I simply enabled mobile device view (selecting the "Pixel 2" device type), which modifies the user-agent string so that the web server thinks you are browsing from mobile, and it worked! It bypassed the paywall for this article. My hunch was that the scoring system probably assumes mobile users are less likely to buy a subscription because it's a PITA to enter credit card info on a mobile, and is more likely to give them a soft paywall, eg. free browsing of article for 24-hours.

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