Hasknewbie

"Apple’s market valuation is roughly equal to the national net worth of Denmark (...). In all but name, this is a superpower"

Denmark is a really nice country. Also, it is not a superpower.

This reminds me of a 'news' organization that promoted the pseudo-scientific book "The gendered brain" (which could be described as Peak Blank Slate Fantasy), including a fawning soft-ball interview with its author where she said that research into her claims would be unethical, because nothing says good science like "just comply with what I said". That same media then went on to put that book on their 'recommended reading of the year'.

That 'news' organization was, of course, The Guardian.

When I was working in the mobile industry, I was told repeatedly that a 100% FOSS phone would be impossible. Not only is the existing tech proprietary and patent-encumbered, even if somehow you could get past that your GSM radio must be certified before going to market. And if your radio is FOSS-based that means an end-user can toy with the baseband, therefore you will never get your cert, period. The stuff at the lowest level must locked down before being allowed on a public mobile network.

"I can't read the article"

"Chinese censorship is good, actually"

"Also it's easy to get around"

...Is this a parody account?

All major Hollywood movie studios pro-actively doctor their scripts to make them China-compliant, and you think basketball is somehow going to do better?

On a related note, this thread went from #6 on the front page to #105 (as of right now) in mere minutes. Maybe the mods, who are quite willing to pop in and tell people off whenever someone mentions astroturfing or censorship, would like to explain how a very recent thread with high upvote and comment count can sink so fast all by itself? It's not like users can downvote threads on HN. Threads mentioning China in a bad light tend to de-rank at astronomical speed, for some mysterious reason...

Beware: TheGrayZone is an 'alternative news' Web site. The type who claims that Uighurs internment camps are anti-Chinese propaganda, Maduro criticism and opposition are US-funded anti-Venezuelian propaganda, etc. Just skim their site and you'll get the idea pretty quickly.

Moreover Taiwan's transition to democracy was 'indigenous', as it was never effectively colonized by the West (barring some isolated outposts), therefore defeating all the silly talk of "democracy is a cultural norm imposed by the West and is not compatible with Chinese culture" that pops up every now and then, including in this thread.

>> Most of the complaints about the US focus on comparatively small mistakes

Taking down democracy in Iran. Supporting dictators in Latin America and Africa and assisting them in hunting down democracy activists. Financing terrorism in Angola for two decades. Fabricating an incident in order to attack North Vietnam, killing 3 millions people. Supporting "Asian Hitler" Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Tacitly supporting Pakistan's genocidal attack against Bangladesh. Selling weapons to the terrorist regime of Iran, and then using the money to support terrorists in central America. Fabricating a threat in order to invade Iraq (hundreds of thousands of dead, millions displaced). Supporting terrorist groups in Syria. Waging undeclared wars in (at least) seven countries at the moment.

"Small mistakes."

>> The good the US has done is also radically beyond any good that China has done.

"Dear members of the jury, I know what you are thinking: well it looks like this guy did napalm little children in Vietnam, and did sell weapon to terrorists, and did support violent dictators. But I urge you to take a second look at my client; consider all the occasions where he DIDN'T murder women and children, that ought to count for something! And there are also instances where he DIDN'T support some dictators and terrorists. Also he gives to charity. I rest my case."

I had the same question while reading TFA. The Khoisan ethnic group split from the main population an estimated 150k years ago, and although their clicking language is peculiar I don't think they have any issue with recursive grammar.

I don't have a direct link to the study, but this is from the BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48950483):

"The researchers also found the presence in seven products of the solvent dichloromethane, which can cause wheezing and shortness of breath, at levels above food safety limits."

A recent study here in Europe as found that some low-quality CBD e-liquids contain traces of solvent (used to extract said CBD) that are above safety level and may trigger adverse reaction in vapers. I assume THC e-liquid goes through the same sort of process and may have the same issue.

FYI as hinted at the top of the page, this is a recycled (duh) version of a much longer article published 5 years ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/tales-trash

It feels weird to see a journalist republishing the same content just like that, but my guess is he has his book to promote and not that many angles to introduce the topic.

Yes, this article felt like reading the rant of a scientologist about 'suppressive persons'...

Yes, both during WW1 and WW2, but to a much lesser extent than Japanese-American: only a few thousands were held, most of thoses deemed German enough were only required to register at their local police station. So not really the same level of collective punishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans

Nice attempt at reframing there, but if this new paper is correct then it's not a 'failed replication', it's a refutation. Big difference.

It's interesting that Melville was seen as derivative during his latter years, when he was in fact creating his own aesthetics and rythm (a Sergio Leone of film noir, if you will).

For people fans of his style, I can only recommend the work of Johnnie To (and that of his film company, Milkyway Image), in particular The Mission, PTU, and Exiled. Few settings are more Melvillian than Hong Kong by night.

Reminder (motivated by taway69's post questioning Sully's credentials): prior to the Hudson river incident in 2009, Sully was already an aviation safety expert, having participated in multiple National Transportation Safety Board investigation, and having founded a safety related company in 2007 (so at that moment in 2009 he was kind of the perfect man for the situation). So yes he's very much qualified to testify in front of Congress.

It's interesting to note that he's being attacked in part because republicans are relying on him. Of course they don't do this because of any sort of scientific integrity on their part, but only because they happen to agree with him on some specific points. And of course the democrats do not point that hypocrisy out since they're doing the same thing.

He's also only addressing his area of expertise, extreme weather events and their cost, not the overall risks triggered by climate change (such as ecosystems collapse, or triggering additional release of greenhouse gas via thawing). That is, at no point is he denying other areas of this (large) topic.

And yet this is sufficient to get lies (including in this thread) about him being a climate change denier, which clearly he's not, or that he's "against the consensus scientific view". He's against the consensus political view. His work is based on the IPCC. The IPCC has its problems, but it is an international body that's pretty mainstream and recognized as such by many countries. The IPCC assess the validity and importance of papers published around the world, their reports are the opposite of fringe.

To me an important point is that this is just one more example of the supremacy of dogma over facts in US public discourse, and that it impacts both the left and the right. For us non-American it is (I assume) pretty easy to spot crazy republicans and their agenda: they're usually quite shameless about it and not very subtle. And so we are somewhat immune to their ideas. What I'm growing increasingly concerned with is that we tend to consider the democrats as the comparatively "reasonable party", the ones that accept facts and science, the ones that are more humanistic. I don't think they are, I think they're just a hell of a lot more insidious about it.

"Repo Man", Chinese Edition.

They kind of have to go that way (offer extra VPN/storage as a service for a monthly fee), their market share of users has tanked since their last deal with Google, they're not going to get that kind of money from them any more. Gotta diversify.

To me this part is particularly amusing, since one of the most successful and lauded CEO ever was that notoriously hyper-critical guy named Steve Jobs. Turns out people whose "job is to shoot holes in things" can do pretty well...

As ridiculous as it is, that's still more researched than that idiotic Newsweek article...

> For one thing, Chinese culture is quite alien to western culture, and I don't mean that in a judgemental way, just that their spoken, written and body language is so much different that it is automatically harder for them.

I call BS on that one specific point with a counter-example: Taiwan (regardless of if it is/isn't part of China, it's a majority-Chinese-culture country).

I would agree though that students allowed to study at foreign universities are somewhat selected, in that the CCP forbids travels for 'tendentious' individuals. No doubt they would enjoy having "highly selected" ones, but they're just using basics metrics covering way too many candidates for that to be effective.

I was curious why a law like that would not cause more scrutinity other than that one website. After looking it up, the law is from this past March and has only been discussed by a couple of French-language sites. This is not causing more alarm because the data was previously available only in printed form, which meant that typically only a lawyer would access it, and only on a case-per-case basis. So in practice the data is being made more easily available, but in a limited form. They're basically handling this like it's a whois request.

The law specifically state that what is illegal is publishing data identifying a judge ("Les données d'identité des magistrats et des membres du greffe ne peuvent faire l'objet..."), so publishing general or anonymized stats is legal. For stats regarding a judge I guess one would have to rely on the previously available printed format. Why that is I have no idea, the only argument I've seen is some vague reference to protecting againt "judge/lawyer AI", which I can't make sense of in this context (is judge AI even a thing?). This seems to me to be some kind of over-reaction to new tech.

I've come to call these type of laws 'Peak French': unforeseen issue on the horizon? No worries, just lock everything down and pretend the problem is solved.

Something that should be pointed out and that is specific to the US: the legal status of religion there invites that type of behaviour. As John Oliver noted in the segment mentioned, the law is extremely vague in its definition of what a religious activity is, and gives pretty clear advantages in terms of tax exemption. That high rewards to low obligation ratio naturally invites parasites. If, say, NGO had a similar status instead, said parasites would move there.

What a bizarre comment, these camps have been widely reported and nobody serious disputes their existence. But hey, here you go:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chinese+internment+camps

Ladies and gentlemen: products/firmware cloned so brazenly they have the same bugs, patents filed using documents from their rivals, operatives caught with thousands of confidential documents... "weak accusations".

Huawei's baggage regarding IP theft is notorious, this article is nothing new, you can easily find others all the way back to 2003 when the Cisco/Huawei feud started getting coverage.

What would be more productive is finding out if this is a case of chickens coming home to roust (now that Huawei has gone from B-grade/discount vendor to A-lister and a different level of accountability is expected), or if they're just yet another chip in the US-China trade war, as ZTE were last year.

If you look up that "professor" you will see him quoted saying for the same thing for UMTS (that's 3G...), and spouting non-sense on how he has developed some gizmo to detect "Electromagnetic Sensitive people". Yeah.

Also, spamming the thread with multiple unsubstantiated posts in the hope that one of them sticks is not at all the behaviour of a crank. The problem I have with this is that if at one point in the future there is indeed a health risk and skepticism is required, such position will be undermined by years of publishing/posting nonsense like these, where the same pseudo-scientific bullshit is repeated over and over for 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, etc.

As a side note, I used to work in the telecom industry for a decade, sometimes having dozens of mobile phones tested in a day, and at some point using a test antenna. You can bet your ass that I kept myself informed with health risks and would have found something else to do had there been any doubt. So would have my colleagues, and so would have consultants that could have walked out on a dime. Like many people in that space I worked for an independent mid-sized company: to think that tens of thousands of people in that industry, scattered among many independent entities, would let themselves be exposed to radiation risks and that they would not say anything is just dumb.

I don't know why you got downvoted, that thing did happen and "consenting adults" was the murderer/cannibal's defense. Another counter-example I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned yet is incest.

"Between consenting adults" is a necessary but unsufficient condition.