If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
We have that rule for extremely good reasons. If you want more explanation, here is many years' worth: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... Either way, please don't post like that again.
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that throwawaylinux or chx is a paid government agent; I'm well aware that people frequently repeat chauvinistic propaganda like that simply because they believe them, because unthinking stereotypes come naturally to the humans. But I'd like to make that situation better rather than worse.
The one thing I'm aware of that you can do, to help dampen the nationalistic emotions and flames that spring up around this topic, is to scrupulously make your comments as factual and as neutral as possible. If you let your frustrations leak into your posts in any way, readers who disagree will take that as license to respond with 10x of their own.
This isn't easy to do, but it does help. It's not, unfortunately, a sufficient condition to avoid getting flamey responses on this topic. I wish it were, because it's a big problem and becoming worse. (I even made a specific list of moderation comments about this because the issue comes up so often: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. There's no other issue I've felt compelled to do that about so far.)
Bad as the situation is, though, I would not underestimate the persuasive power of a commenter who's able to keep their cool and stay flamebait free in everything they post on a divisive topic. It's a judo move in the end because the ones who respond with flames effectively single themselves out as not having good arguments. But the judo move only works if you preserve the asymmetry—i.e. if both parties are flaming, then they're discrediting themselves equally and it's a wash. If only one party is, then the other one wins by default. It doesn't feel that way in the moment (I feel the tug to respond-in-kind as much as anyone!) but when you go back and look at those threads later once the ashes are cold, it's quite clear.
Edit 2: There's one other thing you can do to dampen flaminess and increase the persuasive power of your own comments, although it's not always easy either. That is to find some point of relational contact with the person(s) you're arguing with. The most straightforward way to do this is to find something to agree with in what they're saying; or, failing that, to find some way of supporting the positive intention behind what they're saying.
The reason this works is that when people are arguing, they're inevitably arguing on two different channels simultaneously: (1) disagreement about the topic—that's the obvious one; but also (2) what each person thinks of the other. When the disagreement in channel #1 is so stark that neither party can find anything to agree with or respect in what the other person is saying, it inflames channel #2 and starts to feel like a struggle to defend one's self against attack. In other words, it starts to feel like a fight to the death (this is absurd on the internet, but this stuff all relates to hard-wiring from long ago). Survival instincts start to get engaged. When people feel like their survival is at stake, they'll resort to literally anything. In internet forum threads, that means lots of the worst kind of flamewar, including "are you being paid to do this" and much worse.
However. In a way similar to the 'judo move' I mentioned above, you can turn this to your advantage—and not only to your advantage, but everyone's advantage, by finding ways to reduce the pressure on channel #2. That's what I mean by "finding some point of relational contact". If you can do this, you're basically sending the message "I don't want to kill you" on the side channel, or—less melodramatically—"I'm not trying to vanquish you, I just want to find the truth together". When people negotiate that successfully on the side channel, the discussion on channel #1 (the actual topic) magically becomes more meaningful and interesting. But of course it has to be done with subtlety—not in the manipulative sense, but just in a way that genuinely respects the other person and allows them to feel heard and save face.
This is stuff we have a lot of ways to take care of automatically in person, without even realizing we're doing it, but because things like tone of voice and body language aren't available online, it's easy to fall into the worst interpersonal situations very quickly. Part of the challenge of developing a good forum culture (which is what we want to do here) is developing a new set of techniques that can map what we do instinctively in physical space into virtual space, in a way that leads to more complex and more interesting conversation. I don't think this is easy at all, so I don't think it's so terrible that it's taking us decades to get there. I do think it's a good idea though.
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Honestly I think the only thing it really made sense to do with that one was to remember and practice this site guideline: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ...which is our euphemism for "please don't feed the trolls", which strikes me as probably the wisest thing the internet ever said.
The reason I say that is that there literally wasn't any information in the comment to rebut—just a smear ("are you paid to do this") and a bunch of name-calling and innuendo. If you try to rebut it, you're forced to go to a non-factual, name-calling level just because there was nothing else there.
Of course it's frustrating, not least because it takes time for enough flags to build up and/or moderator attention to get attracted, but in the end the system takes care of these things fairly easily. You can always email hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases to speed that process up.
(Separately, in case anyone feels I've been too harsh here: I don't mean to pick on chx - it's easy to make these mistakes when emotions are high. But important to learn not to.)
I think that to a significant extent it's not actually absurd for such political debates "to feel like a fight to the death". Death is the currency of politics; the reason for the anti-China propaganda in the US and the anti-US propaganda in China is specifically in order to facilitate organized killing, because organized killing is how states stand or fall; it's what distinguishes the state from other forms of organization.
Even in arguably less consequential cases, like what happened to my friend Aaron or to Julian Assange, successful political factionalism can provide the factions who have control of the state with the opportunity to kill their individual enemies. (I can't count how many people I saw repeat the argument that Assange should give himself up to stand trial for rape, a trial everyone can now see was never in the cards.) At a scale in between, we have the drug war, which enabled Nixon, Biden, and their allies to imprison tens of millions of hippies and black people (who were inclined to vote against them) and strip them of voting rights. This directly killed many of them, forced others into violent prison gangs, and reduced their ability to organize politically to resist further damaging policies. And of course political debates over the death penalty and healthcare directly determine who gets to live and who has to die.
Even when there's no state, there's factional violence, so politics still determine who lives and dies.
So I don't think the humans are necessarily wrong when they feel that their lives are at stake in discussions about these divisive topics. No individual forum thread will, probably, determine their survival (though the HN thread where Aaron begged for help and mostly got told to suck it up might count as one) but the aggregate shifts in public opinion that emerge from the discourse will, ultimately, kill many of them.
In a broader sense, though, nobody's survival is at stake, because everybody who posting on this thread, every human alive today, is going to die. Their survival is a lost cause; their death is only a matter of time, and none of them has very much time left, a few decades at most. So the survival instinct, strong though it is, is the most futile of all human instincts.
And yes they make vaccines and nuclear reactors like many countries do or have done. And I'll just repeat that I didn't say they produce or invent zero new things.
For all their rhetoric, there is not matching output of new technologies in my opinion. Almost everywhere I look yes they often play catch up and are close behind in copying or are doing the manufacturing cheaply, but the idea or the innovation and research came from elsewhere. Smartphones, electric cars (or even conventional cars and internal combustion engines -- innovation and quality come from Japan, Germany, SK, etc), jet engines and airliners, CPUs and GPUs, reusable rockets, operating systems, software languages, pharmaceuticals, AI, crypto, for a few random things I can think of off hand. China obviously must do some innovation, it's just nowhere near the size of their economy or boasting, from my experience.
I don't know enough about smartphones, electric cars, conventional cars, reciprocating engines, jet engines, airliners, reusable rockets, or AI to comment on what the big innovations in the last few years are, where they came from, and which ones are being adopted in China. Can you go into more detail?
The most interesting innovations I've seen in CPUs in recent years are from Padauk (China) and RISC-V (everywhere, especially Berkeley, but also including China). NVIDIA seems to be leading in GPUs; like Lam Research, it's an American company with a Chinese-American founder. But now the critical innovation bottleneck seems to be not designing a working CPU design but successfully manufacturing it, and the supreme giant in the field is TSMC, a Chinese company, though Samsung is mostly keeping up. Of course the field is extremely international, which is why we're interested in ASML's fire in the first place.
In terms of crypto, it's an extremely international community, but two of the most significant achievements of the last 20 years were the collision attacks on MD5 and SHA1, which were found at Shandong University, which is in China. (Of course nobody knows where Satoshi is from, but China is near the bottom of the list of possibilities.)
I agree with you about operating systems and programming languages, though of course if you `git annotate` Linux you will find a rather large slice of it is written by people with Chinese names, a lot of whom work at Chinese companies.
As for drugs, well, I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792057 how far China is from "playing catch up" with respect to covid vaccines. But maybe in other drugs it's true. What are the big new innovations in drugs, and where do they originate?
And nor do I say China has done nothing. They just aren't the infinitely-resourced borg that will end up overtaking everyone in everything that people seem to take as a safe assumption.
It seems that we agree.
The solar cost reduction numbers come in the form of reduced cost to manufacture and improved panel performance. There is a lot of non-Chinese research into the latter, but even in the former case a lot of inventions and technology is developed then licensed. USA and Germany.
> I don't know enough about smartphones,
Smartphones, invented in the US.
> electric cars,
Obviously not recently invented, but the recent push to make these competitive and take market share has all come from US, Germany, Japan, and SK.
> conventional cars, reciprocating engines
> jet engines, airliners,
China has been trying to develop their own jet engines for 70 years and desperately needed a competitive jet engine since 40 years when they broke up with the Soviets. No dice. They also want civilian airliners rather than having to buy from the US or EU. There's always rumors this time they might have got something workable last year, but it's quite amazing how difficult it has been for them.
> reusable rockets,
Well the Chinese rocket program is basically repeating the rockets of the 60s. Meanwhile US companies are basically re-inventing commercial rocketry with innovations significantly reusable rockets. China has quickly tried to follow that naturally and they could well do a good job. My point is the innovation and the new ideas aren't coming from there. It's just the same story where ever I look.
> or AI
Just more same thing. The inventions around the recent AI boom ("deep learning" advances like neural networks on GPUs, GAN) has not come out of China.
> The most interesting innovations I've seen in CPUs in recent years are from Padauk (China)
What's interesting about Padauk?
> RISC-V (everywhere, especially Berkeley, but also including China).
RISC-V is another great example that's not come out of China. Despite the fact they desperately need an unencumbered ISA (which is part of the reason for their extraordinary hijacking of their ARM subsidiary), they had never taken the step to create their own (before that they were using MIPS). Using RISC-V is just more of the same thing: following not inventing or leading.
The ISA is not really where much innovation is going on in computing though. You just need something as an interface, and everyone is more or less the same (although RISC-V is not very good as ISAs go, sadly).
> NVIDIA seems to be leading in GPUs; like Lam Research, it's an American company with a Chinese-American founder.
Yes, and yet again not Chinese.
> But now the critical innovation bottleneck seems to be not designing a working CPU design but successfully manufacturing it, and the supreme giant in the field is TSMC, a Chinese company,
It's both, for high performance CPUs and GPUs. There are only a few companies on the planet who can do the logic and circuit design, Intel, AMD, Apple at the cutting edge, and say ARM and IBM after that.
Also we're talking about mainland China or the nation governed by the CCP here (the context was "China" catching up with "not China" in silicon manufacturing). So China does not have TSMC.
> In terms of crypto, it's an extremely international community, but two of the most significant achievements of the last 20 years were the collision attacks on MD5 and SHA1, which were found at Shandong University, which is in China. (Of course nobody knows where Satoshi is from, but China is near the bottom of the list of possibilities.)
Comparatively little crypto has come from China compared with, say, USA. Who developed the crypto math and algorithms that you're using right now?
> I agree with you about operating systems and programming languages, though of course if you `git annotate` Linux you will find a rather large slice of it is written by people with Chinese names, a lot of whom work at Chinese companies.
Not actually a lot compared with how much they rely on Linux (a non-Chinese invention). Recently it has picked up in number, but you actually find a lot of those are janitorial and automated linter type of patches. There are some good developments from China, but very few compared with many other countries.
> As for drugs, well, I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792057 how far China is from "playing catch up" with respect to covid vaccines. But maybe in other drugs it's true. What are the big new innovations in drugs, and where do they originate?
Well since we're on the topic of COVID their vaccines have been a great achievement. Chinese vaccines use inactivated virus, adenovirus vectors, subunit/protein, which were all techniques developed by the west for a long time. The new mRNA vaccine they are developing is based on this new mRNA vaccine technology which has largely been developed and invented outside China.
It's come entirely in the form of reduced cost to manufacture; mainstream solar panels have been about 21% efficient and low-cost ones about 16% efficient for decades. Thin-film panels have gotten a lot more efficient over the last 10 years, but they've also been completely eclipsed by traditional silicon panels.
Can you name one or two inventions that have been important in reducing silicon PV manufacturing costs in the last 10 years that originated in the US and Germany? I can't.
I'm confused about why you're bringing up the original invention of things like smartphones (arguably Finland and Japan in the 01990s, rather than Danger in the US, but there's been continuous development), and jet engines. I agree with you that 40 or 70 years ago the US was inventing a lot more things than China was; 40 years ago China was still largely Communist. 1000 years ago China was doing more; the Song had a paper-money-based fossil-fuel mass-production economy administered by a centralized bureaucracy. 2500 years ago the center of innovation was Greece and India.
But I thought we were talking about a much shorter timescale here: where are things being invented now, like, the last ten years. And the US definitely didn't invent jet engines or smartphones in the last ten years. What have been the crucial innovations in smartphones in the last ten years? I think you'll find that most of them came from China, though the M1 is designed in the US.
> Well the Chinese rocket program is basically repeating the rockets of the 60s.
Until a couple of years ago, the US couldn't even "repeat the rockets of the 60s"; it was relying on Soyuz to get its astronauts to the ISS. Reusable rockets themselves aren't a "new idea" on the timescales we're talking about here; the US tried that in the 70s and failed so badly it destroyed its entire manned spaceflight program. Presumably SpaceX has been able to succeed at this in part due to coming up with some genuinely new ideas; do you have any idea what they are or where they came from?
> Also we're talking about mainland China or the nation governed by the CCP here (the context was "China" catching up with "not China" in silicon manufacturing).
If you want to start talking about that, I guess you're free to, but I have no interest in starting to talk about that subject.
> What's interesting about Padauk?
Padauk's CPUs (another Taiwanese company, by the way, in case you're keeping track) have two particularly interesting innovations:
1. They use a second hardware thread on the same CPU (or, in theory, up to three of them) to do things like PWM, SPI, or quadrature decoding which are usually done in hardware (or, say, pioasm on the RP2040, or the tiny amount of programmable logic on some new Microchip AVRs). This means you aren't limited to the peripherals included on a particular chip; you can in theory do things like generate an NTSC signal while running application code, which is something I've sort of done on the ATMega328, but I had to settle for running application code during the HBI and VBI.
2. They cost less than many discrete signal transistors, so it's reasonable to use them where you would use a transistor. Harder to second-source tho.
They also invented their own programming language for the chips, an assembly language with C-like syntax, but I'm not that impressed with it.
There have been significant gains in commercial cells even over the past 10 years. https://www.nrel.gov/pv/module-efficiency.html
> Can you name one or two inventions that have been important in reducing silicon PV manufacturing costs in the last 10 years that originated in the US and Germany? I can't.
Yes, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021... LeTID problems in PERC panels were comprehensively examined and solutions found by these researchers. The parent company is South Korean (also not Chinese), but PERC was one of the biggest jumps in efficiency of cells in the past 10 years.
> I'm confused about why you're bringing up the original invention of things like smartphones (arguably Finland and Japan in the 01990s, rather than Danger in the US, but there's been continuous development), and jet engines.
Everything is built on other things, but still you can see significant advances. By smartphone I'm not referring to cellular radios or batteries or computer chips (all of which themselves build on other things), but the invention that revolutionizes a technology. The iPhone. I'm aware there are things people claim are smartphones before that, but that's not what I'm talking about.
> I agree with you that 40 or 70 years ago the US was inventing a lot more things than China was; 40 years ago China was still largely Communist. 1000 years ago China was doing more; the Song had a paper-money-based fossil-fuel mass-production economy administered by a centralized bureaucracy. 2500 years ago the center of innovation was Greece and India.
And today US is still inventing a lot more things than China was.
> But I thought we were talking about a much shorter timescale here: where are things being invented now, like, the last ten years. And the US definitely didn't invent jet engines or smartphones in the last ten years.
My point with jet engines is that China is incapable of developing them independently after 70 years of effort and with the luxury of having samples of good jet engines to copy for the entire time.
> What have been the crucial innovations in smartphones in the last ten years?
iPhone is near enough (I never mentioned 10 years, just general modern).
> I think you'll find that most of them came from China, though the M1 is designed in the US.
Which of them of them came from China? Not software, not silicon manufacturing, not digital logic design, not LTE modems, not screens, not new NAND technologies, not cameras. So what is the "most of them" that exceeds those things?
> Until a couple of years ago, the US couldn't even "repeat the rockets of the 60s";
Of course it could.
> it was relying on Soyuz to get its astronauts to the ISS.
A matter of funding, the rocket technology did not go away obviously they still maintain ICBMs and SLBMs.
> Reusable rockets themselves aren't a "new idea" on the timescales we're talking about here;
No, I'm talking about inventing an actual working reusable rocket and all the technologies and inventions required to achieve that.
> the US tried that in the 70s and failed so badly it destroyed its entire manned spaceflight program.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but a lot changes in 50 years. 70s was only a decade after the first manned space flight.
> Presumably SpaceX has been able to succeed at this in part due to coming up with some genuinely new ideas; do you have any idea what they are or where they came from?
Certainly not China, which (yet again) is following and copying.
It's an American company though, with very strong restrictions on who can work for them (non-citizens / permanent residents I thin are not allowed).
> If you want to start talking about that, I guess you're free to, but I have no interest in starting to talk about that subject.
This is what the conversation is about. Read the thread, it started from wondering about whether China will catch up in silicon manufacturing. That does not make any sense if you count China as including Taiwan does it?
All my comments apply to mainland China.
> Padauk's CPUs (another Taiwanese company, by the way, in case you're keeping track) have two particularly interesting innovations:
I'm not sure what is innovative about what you're describing as hardware multi threading or software DSP but I'll take your word for it there's probably more to it that I'm not understanding. Still, they're also not mainland China, not surprisingly.
Also, it is not very generous to describe something like this as innovation but at the same time say that iPhone was not innovative.
You also don't address any of the rebuttals I made to other things (e.g., RISC-V, crypto, AI, GPUs). Does that mean you concede on those points?