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Comment by throwawei | Hacker News Reader

Using a throwaway to share our $0.02 relating to this. AMA I guess.

We're a US-based startup that does about $100-200k in business annually with Futurewei (Huawei's R&D subsidiary). I've never dealt with Huawei proper. I can say they're genuinely investing in R&D, and trying to build a product unlike anything being offered right now. We're working with tech that's floating around the academic conferences, but no one else commercially will touch.

This in contrast to our experiences with established US companies which, a) don't want to deal with early-stage research, b) wouldn't work with us as a new, small company, and c) gave bad IP terms (ironically).

Not excusing other activities, but for us it's been above-board and beneficial. If they want to pump their profits into the US ecosystem, I see that as beneficial.

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But, don't you see the connection between their risk high investments and the IP they've stolen from US companies? If anything, Huawei made its name of stealing from Nortel, Cisco, etc. Not to mention, questionable ties to the CCP. If they have R&D money to burn, it's because they've saved billions on R&D because they stole it.

To see them as "good actor" because of a token $200k, while stealing literally tens of billions is missing the forest for the trees. Strategically, feels penny wise, pound foolish.

I think the stealing instead of R&D thing is somewhat misled. These guys are definitely spending billions on research as well.

I get the concern, and fines and punishment is all fine. But I think they might also have got caught in the geopolitical crossfire. It's a messy world; Samsung and Apple are stealing eachother's billions everyday, Google and Facebook are spying on us, DOD is killing people. I don't know who it's morally permissible to do business with anymore, but we're trying to get by.

> But I think they might also have got caught in the geopolitical crossfire

I think it's extremely naive to think that Huawei is just an innocent victim. Almost willfully so.

> I think the stealing instead of R&D thing is somewhat misled. These guys are definitely spending billions on research as well.

If you really think Huawei's R&D theft is blown out of proportion, there's a huge mountain of evidence that suggests the exact opposite. There's really not much wiggle room for ifs and buts. If anything, it's probably worse than reported.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Intellectu...

and you know, this indictment.

That being said, I don't expect you to say anything bad about the hand that feeds you. Given Huawei's reputation, they're probably monitoring you as we speak.

Could you also react on his arguments that:

- lots of companies, like apple, are stealing from non US companies.

- US companies like Google and Facebook have much more personal data than huawai.

The whole privacy concern regarding Huawai is not well argumented. And its mostly an excuse by trump to attack China that is becoming a big world economy with manufacturing and technology skills rivalling USA.

Huawai is good competition in their field making products across the board cheaper. Competition is in the core of capitalism. May the strongest survive.

5G will be more expensive to rollout without them.

Ok, if they "copy" certain tech youre free to go to court. But a complete ban... thats just bad politics.

He reacted by citing evidence for his claims. Now it's time for the Huawei defenders to cite evidence for this supposed equivalency, and prove it's not just propaganda.

> I think it's extremely naive

> Almost willfully so.

> I don't expect you to say anything bad about the hand that feeds you. Given Huawei's reputation, they're probably monitoring you as we speak.

I think your post would have been just fine making your point without these remarks. It's just someone sharing their experience, that's what I'm reading the comment threads for. We can all see it's a new throwaway account without you lashing out at them.

I think my points are highly relevant. Questioning their intent and motive is an important part of what I was getting at. Highly suspect in every sense of the word.

Yeah ... I'm not quite getting the same hostility in the air when it concerns US corporations accused of doing exactly the same. Or people defending something as despicable as US Adtech. It's like people sometimes forget they're people, whether it's being fed by the propaganda machine, or being from China, or both.

Literally the same situation happens, when FB employees post from an anonymous account and defend Facebook.

Reactions are quite a bit more reserved, if not always nice or believing. They will get pointy questions, but they are expected to be treated with respect. Sometimes HN mods even remind people of this.

I think it's actually pretty disgusting how forgiving a large part of the HN crowd is, when they do it for US companies. It's just the big X-word. Hostility against those who are even suspected of doing it for the US media enemy du jour.

Now of course FB is a finger of the hand that's feeding you the very idea that Huawei is doing it more than USFAANG. (who, coincidentally, also are monitoring you as you speak)

They stole IP from western companies so they could reach the bleeding edge and then spent billions on R&D research to get ahead. Without the decades of IP theft, the R&D achievements never happen. No western company should trust their 5G equipment.

US citizens don't trust their own companies equipments. Now you are trying to convince rest of the world that Huawei's equipment shouldn't be trusted.

I mean, both US companies and Huawei can be malicious actors, no?

I don’t see how your conclusion follows from the premise. I don’t think anyone really doubts that they’ve stolen IP, but it doesn’t follow from that that their 5G equipment is therefore untrustworthy. That conclusion requires its own evidence, and also presentation of the wider context about why we should trust equipment from other manufacturers instead.

It does follow. Question why they would steal it and realize the Chinese government can force them to do whatever they want. Given they’ve been stealing IP it’s clear this is already happening. Then start questioning why? It’s a very interesting position to be in to have built a majority of the worlds wireless networks, especially with that type of gov.

> They stole IP from western companies so they could reach the bleeding edge and then spent billions on R&D research to get ahead. Without the decades of IP theft, the R&D achievements never happen.

Is an excellent argument for more technological sharing (as is/was customary in china), and less IP ownership.

> Without the decades of IP theft, the R&D achievements never happen.

Because they're incapable?

You should realize that saving billions of dollars on R&D is not really a good thing. It may get you up to a point, but you stagnate afterwards, because you didn't cover your fundamentals and build the skills necessary to advance forward.

At a national level, the R&D spending is actually important to build up your society's fundamental expertise in an area. You learn from your failures and mistakes. And in the meanwhile, you build up the expertise in your population, and those people, may later leave, and form other companies, which further advances your society.

However, if you can get the research results of your competitors, and learn that certain paths don't work, then you can save time and money, and not go down that same path. But, I still feel that you learn most from your failures, because you build in safeguards to prevent them from happening again in the future. So you end up with a technique, a system of systems, to build out your final product.

It's like Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

How did the two of you get connected with each other?

Originally had a friend that knew one of the people there. I was going solo-preneur at the time, so it essentially started as a consulting gig.

I don't have a question but your throwaway username is fantastic.

Wish I could add more value to this comment.. but I also upvoted for the name.

Good username!

What company and why should anyone believe this?

It's $200k/year, which is basically nothing to a megacorp like Huawei. Not sure why you're so incredulous

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