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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

What are the "foreign countries of concern", and why do they write it that way instead of just saying China?

There is a list. They'd rather the policy applies to that list, than the actual list items at the time of the writing, so that it can be updated.

> The most recent Countries of Particular Concern designations were made by the Secretary of State on November 30, 2022: Burma, People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

https://www.state.gov/countries-of-particular-concern-specia...

I don't see any chip factories in any of those except China and Russia.

I wish I understood why they pretend this is something other than a cold war.

The list has nothing to do with chip manufacturing.

The list is used as a list of reasonable-to-exclude countries from the CHIPS act.

The same list is used _all over the place_, including things like NASA mission collaboration, government funding for conference travel, background checks for visiting gov offices, etc.

What does cold war in this context? My mom went to China with a group a few years ago, and had a great experience.

That’s an odd list. Eritrea? Nicaragua? Pakistan and the other stans? Are they concerned that chips or tech sold to those countries could get re-sold to China or Russia?

Eritrea and Nicaragua are because of religious persecution most likely. These recommendations don't directly result in being added to the list but they're a pretty hard push in that direction I think.

https://www.uscirf.gov/news-room/releases-statements/uscirf-....

https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-r....

Data normalization!

What is 'MAX_WIDTH_CHARS', and why do they write that instead of just saying '80'?

Don't you just hate how devs makes things way more complicated than they need to be? Granted I'm not a dev myself, but how hard can it be? I'm very smart and I could rewrite this all to be way clearer.

(Maybe you were just asking a sincere question, in which case sorry for my sarcasm here. It's just, the sentiment reeks a bit of typical HN hubris to me.)

What?

They were making an analogy between developers using constants in code to avoid hard-coding values in all over the place, and government agencies using references to things defined in other places to avoid "hard-coding" lists of countries in random rules all over the place.

Future proofing.

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