tepidandroid

No need to imagine hypothetical scenarios.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver

Yup, I've given up ages ago. When confirmation bias has hit supercritical level like it has here, there's nothing anyone can say anymore that will change the minds of those holding the consensus opinion.

Just so we're clear, HN users find a story about China temporarily detaining a US pilot to be top-of-front-page relevant, but the story about the US bombing 30 innocent farmers in Afghanistan gets flagged to death.

This looks like an interesting off the shelf alternative to Envoy, which currently requires you to implement your own control plane. Moving forward, is this going to be open-core with a paid EE edition type of thing like Traefik?

thanks, I updated the title

seems to be working fine for me -do you have JS disabled or anything?

I’d say there are pros and cons. One consequence of lax IP laws is that competitors will rapidly converge on the same set of popular product features. When everyone has the same set of features, innovation and the ability to distinguish oneself from the competition becomes a matter of life and death. Resting on one's laurels behind a warchest of patents is not an option.

This is particularly true of a playing field as large and as cutthroat as China, where at any given time there are thousands of competitors jostling for dominance of even the most minuscule of niches.

Huawei responded to this study, and the author responded to Huawei's response [1]. Salient point:

Our bottom-line conclusion about what it all means is just our opinion. If readers disagree with our conception of what employee ownership means and prefer Huawei’s, that’s their opinion. As long as everyone understands what the structure is, what label one puts on it is not ultimately that important.

[1] https://thechinacollection.org/huaweis-ownership-huaweis-sta...

My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the people who are listening to not only reject, but to actively push back against ideals which are universally understood to be reprehensible.

The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged. Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate, espouse their basest thoughts and feelings and receive gratification for it -all without challenge. Moderate people are repulsed by such forums and the quantity of hate-speech they generate, which further compounds the negative feedback loop.

Unchecked extremism compounded by more unchecked extremism inevitably leads to scenarios like the ones we’re witnessing more and more often.

On the contrary, it objectively is the case, as the first video you yourself linked to shows: it opens with a pro-mainland student in black rushing into the pro-HK crowd and assaulting someone with a crowd screaming and advancing behind him.

Quick questions:

1. How do you know that guy is pro-mainland? I certainly don't have enough information to make a concrete determination such as that, i'd be curious to know how you did. It looks like he came from the pro-HK side of the mob as they are the ones holding the signs and the guy in the black sweater and glasses from that side is screaming "free hong kong", but I could be wrong.

2. Who hit who first? It looks like a mutual engagement to me.

Your confirmation bias is really shining through here.

It's outrage-porn peddled as world news by the BCC, plain and simple. The tell-tale sign is that they didn’t bother to get both sides of the story. There are videos of the incident readily available on Youtube [1] which show what exactly happened.

There’s one group of HK/Australian pro-Hong Kong protestors on one side. There’s another group of Mainland students exercising their right to free speech by playing and singing the Chinese national anthem on the other. Was this extremely annoying to the pro-HK protestors? Definitely. Was it offensive to the Australians? Yes. Were the pro-China crowd offended by the signs saying “free Hong Kong”? Yup.

You can see the ensuing minor scuffle ("violent clashes" according to the BBC) between between a tiny handful of students from both sides. I saw exactly one sign being torn down. The vast majority of the students were just standing there peacefully.

The BBC article makes it seem as though the Chinese students strong-armed their way into the crowd and started beating people, which is objectively not the case. This is the narrative of the two pro-HK students who they interviewed. If there is evidence of threats and intimidation, then that evidence should be brought forth and those students should be formally reprimanded at the very least, or expelled/criminally charged/deported at worst if the complaints are proven to be valid.

It’s easy to see why they’d write a story like this though when you see the emotional response elicited even from people here -one can only imagine the effect it'd have on the less educated masses.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CkH3zqoGWw

edit: Another longer video of the "violent clashes" or "Lennon wall violence in University of Queensland" as described by the Youtube uploader (warning: extremely long and boring video where nothing happens)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiRmRPsJ-sM

Which artificial islands did the US build in eg the Gulf of Mexico to steal all of Mexico's gulf territorial waters? It didn't. Instead, the US has maintained a fair split of the gulf with Mexico, despite being a superpower that could take it all anytime it wants to. The US could take most of the water territory in the Caribbean if it wanted to, any time it wanted to.

This is the case only because Mexico and the rest of Latin America are relatively poor and subservient nations of no threat to the U.S. The Monroe doctrine and its 1904 corollary [1], both precursors to U.S hegemonic domination of the Western Hemisphere, ensured that the cards would fall this way. These policies have have directly resulted in multiple humanitarian disasters the effects of which are still being felt in Latin America to this day [2].

As far as the question of building islands, neither the Russians nor the Chinese are conducting war-games 10,000km from home, inviting Mexico, Cuba and Canada to come sail their warships around the Gulf of Mexico in the name of freedom of navigation. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese are installing advanced radar and missile systems in Canada and Mexico. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese have declared a “pivot to the West”, selling billions of dollars in military hardware to Cuba, Canada, Mexico and the rest of Latin America, proselytizing their political ideologies while doing so. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese have any military bases in America’s backyard that have previously been used as launching grounds for conducting illegal wars. Neither the Russians nor Chinese have ever exerted a policy of containment - an act of political and economic strangulation. America doesn’t have to worry about any of these things, and thus the question of why it has not built artificial islands becomes largely non-applicable.

Where are the vast number of examples of the US getting its military tech directly - via hacking - from cloning it from the USSR, Russia, Britain, Germany and France. Is that where the US got the F22, by stealing it from Russia? Is that where the US got the B2, by stealing it from France? Is that where the US got its 20 year lead in drone tech (eg Global Hawk 25 years ago), by stealing it all from Germany? Or how about the innovations in carrier technology over decades, that was stolen from which country, Spain? Italy? Japan? None of that happened.

Is it common for a technologically superior nation to steal technology from technologically inferior nations? What could they hope to steal? Nonetheless, there are still a few examples of it happening, as mentioned in the other comments.

When did the US send a large army of labor into Africa to extract resources there? It didn't. What the US has done for Africa, is push hundreds of billions of dollars in aid into the continent and save millions of lives with programs like PEPFAR. And its cure (thanks Pharmasset) for Hepatitis C will save millions more over time (see: Egypt).

I’m not going to denigrate the contributions of programs such as PEPFAR, as they have undoubtedly improved the lives of millions. This is objectively a good thing in terms of reparations for the destruction the U.S government and corporations have wrought upon the continent for the past few decades [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. We have everything from facilitating coups and assassinations to the backing and arming of genocidal warlords (responsible for the death and suffering of countless millions during endless civil wars). We’ve seen American corporations doing everything from conducting illegal human experimentation [11] to bog-standard corruption [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] and other types of exploitation [19]. We don’t really need to talk about the long-term, multi-generational effects the slave trade had on Africa [20].

If your first line (flooding Africa with labor to extract resources) is referring to China, then you’re wrong: the overwhelming majority of labor employed in Africa by Chinese corporations is local [21][22].

The West has provided hand-me-downs to Africa for decades now, crushing local industries like textiles [23] and suffocating food producers [24]. It has pumped billions of dollars of aid into Africa which has objectively not achieved much more than feed corruption and erode government-taxpayer accountability [25]. No western nation has been willing to lend to “junk” rated African nations anywhere near the amount of capital or provide infrastructure development on the terms the Chinese have.

For the first time in history, a country is willing to come to Africa as an equal partner, signing deals that provide the people with real, tangible benefits like world class airports, highways and high-speed rail systems [26]. No hand-me-downs, no pitiful TV ads begging for a dollar a day on behalf of starving, fly-laden black kids. Just mutually respectful and beneficial business deals. Economic corridors are now opening up between African nations that have never been connected before and brand-new high-capacity ports are doing the same thing for international trade. And before you mention the tired old debt-trap diplomacy trope, it has so far been nothing more than a groundless accusation based on paranoia and sour grapes [27][28][29].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Corollary#Use

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/19/central-amer...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiss%C3%A8ne_Habr%C3%A9#Suppor...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_engagement

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Savimbi#United_States_su...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Council#Ac...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_the_Democrat...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_the_Democrat...

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Nkrumah#Overthrow

[10] https://www.npr.org/2016/05/16/478272695/retired-cia-agent-c...

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trovafloxacin#Nigerian_clinica...

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Jefferson_corruptio...

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InVision_Technologies

[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/business/worldbusiness/27...

[15] https://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/big_oils_sleazy_africa_secr...

[16] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ex-och-ziff-deal-maker-faces-ch...

[17] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kbr-bribery/ex-kbr-ceo-ge...

[18] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/business/goodyear-agrees-...

[19] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershe...

[20] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3710252/Nunn_Lon...

[21] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/middle-east-and-a...

[22] https://www.reporting-focac.com/myth-1-chinese-workers.html

[23] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/world/africa/east-africa-...

[24] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/world/americas/14iht-food...

[25] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/13/why-t...

[26] https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/industry/public-sec...

[27] https://rhg.com/research/new-data-on-the-debt-trap-question/

[28] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/...

[29] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opinion/china-belt-road-i...

The intro blog [1] mentioned in my other comment gives a detailed run-down of differences between the two. Not sure it can be summarized any more succinctly so I'll just paste an excerpt here:

"NATS Streaming provides a similar log-based messaging solution. However, it is an entirely separate protocol built on top of NATS. NATS is an implementation detail—the transport—for NATS Streaming. This means the two systems have separate messaging namespaces—messages published to NATS are not accessible from NATS Streaming and vice versa. Of course, it’s a bit more nuanced than this because, in reality, NATS Streaming is using NATS subjects underneath; technically messages can be accessed, but they are serialized protobufs. These nuances often get confounded by first–time users as it’s not always clear that NATS and NATS Streaming are completely separate systems. NATS Streaming also does not support wildcard subscriptions, which sometimes surprises users since it’s a major feature of NATS.

As a result, Liftbridge was built to augment NATS with durability rather than providing a completely separate system. To be clear, it’s still a separate server, but it merely acts as a write-ahead log for NATS subjects. NATS Streaming provides a broader set of features such as durable subscriptions, queue groups, pluggable storage backends, and multiple fault-tolerance modes. Liftbridge aims to have a relatively small API surface area.

The key features that differentiate Liftbridge are the shared message namespace, wildcards, log compaction, and horizontal scalability. NATS Streaming replicates channels to the entire cluster through a single Raft group, so adding servers does not help with scalability and actually creates a head-of-line bottleneck since everything is replicated through a single consensus group (n.b. NATS Streaming does have a partitioning mechanism, but it cannot be used in conjunction with clustering). Liftbridge allows replicating to a subset of the cluster, and each stream is replicated independently in parallel. This allows the cluster to scale horizontally and partition workloads more easily within a single, multi-tenant cluster."

[1] https://bravenewgeek.com/introducing-liftbridge-lightweight-...

It looks like Liftbridge occupies a nice little niche between full-blown, durable Kafka and lightweight, ephemeral NATS.

Additional reading: https://bravenewgeek.com/introducing-liftbridge-lightweight-...

That’s like me taking your wallet, but still offering to let you use your debit card once in a while. At the end of the day, it's a colonizer dictating the terms of governance over territory obtained through coercive means.

This is my take on mainland sentiment also. If it comes down to HK being torn apart by some group, the CCP would rather that group be the HKers themselves than the PLA. HK is sufficiently culturally, politically and geographically insulated that don't have to worry about the unrest spreading over to the mainland. They’ll let them burn their own city down if that’s what they want - and if they do, the problem largely solves itself because an act like that would alienate most reasonable HKers from their cause.

What they won’t tolerate is an external force stepping in on behalf of the protestors because that would be a direct challenge to their sovereignty over the region. That’s the one and only scenario where the PLA has a possibility of being deployed.

The CCP has time on their side when it comes to dealing with this issue. Are the businesses in HK attempting to conduct their day to day operations able to say the same thing [1][2]?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-29/hong-kong...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-28/hong-kong...

I'm glad you know the history there. It's definitely more convoluted than most people think.

nothing in history has shown that China is any better at colonizing lands than the west

I agree - I guess historically speaking, China just hasn't colonized enough countries to have a decent sample size.

If I understand the point you’re trying to make correctly, you’re likening China’s claim to Xinjiang to that of the historical colonial powers?

Because if we’re going to go down that road, I have to warn you that the Xinjiang story is not nearly as black and white as the British, Dutch or American stories.

Re-reading my comment, I should have actually written “I don’t disagree with you that the two can coexist, but only in certain contexts”.

I’m of the opinion that it’s impossible to achieve economic progress with social upheaval, threats of separatism and terrorist attacks. Economic progress is incompatible with the others.

It's the extreme poverty and lack of economic opportunities which drive destabilizing forces such as these.

Prosperity by means of terrorism then separatism is the path offered by the WUC and ETIM.

Prosperity by means of forced “re-education” in vocational skills and poverty alleviation plans [1] is the one offered by the CCP.

I think it’s the CCP’s gambit that when there is economic prosperity in the region, there will be room for expanding human rights. There won’t be a need or desire to separate from a system which you are actively benefiting from and when that threat goes away, so do the armoured patrols and surveillance mechanisms.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-poverty-xinjiang/china...

Along with what kenrose said, imagine the flexibility of being able to request the exact view that you need from the server for any client you have in mind. A perfect view fetched in a single trip -no overfetching or underfetching, no bespoke HTTP endpoints for every new use-case and a self documenting API + type-safety to boot.

Some trade-offs are things like more backend complexity, querying complex data (like deeply nested or recursive data structures) becomes harder, limiting exponential query complexity as the data branches out, etc. It also becomes more difficult to predict resource usage and to monitor performance, as the article mentions.

Chinese domestic media is for the most part trash and it's well understood that it conveys the views of the ruling political class. It has never even pretended to be an unbiased source of information.

As far as the Chinese domestic media threatening to nuke US just any godly day, I highly doubt it and I've never seen this. Their domestic media is much more focused on internal development and accomplishments. It serves the purpose of reminding the people how great the Central Government is, which is the CCP's primary objective. International affairs (even with the U.S) are an afterthought. You won't find nearly the amount of vitriol directed towards the U.S that the U.S media directs towards China.

I don’t disagree with you that the two can coexist. I’m saying the mainstream publications have skewed most people’s perception of Xinjiang so far out of the realm of reality that they would likely be absolutely shocked if they ever actually set foot there. World class airports, modern agricultural techniques, a high speed rail system that would put the ones in NY or London to shame [1]. Stray from the “dystopian Xinjiang” narrative and you’re automatically branded a 50c army propagandist.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a sensational exposé about alleviating poverty through technology-driven, sustainable farming in Xinjiang, in a mainstream publication. On the other hand, I don’t have enough hairs on my head to count the number of condemnations and denouncements.

This is likely the cause of frustration that you see seeping through in answers such as the one posted.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHCs582uUx8

Besides being a broad generalization, your point #2 applies to basically anybody on the internet who has their views challenged, to be honest. Doesn't need to be a paid troll or nationalist at all.

what does the Dalai Lama and Uighur oppression have to do with this

The snark likely comes from the fact that Xinjiang is consistently portrayed in Western media as a nightmarish, dystopian, Orwellian hellhole suffering under the iron fisted oppression of the Communist Party. They ignore the very real benefits that have been afforded to millions of poverty-stricken people in Xinjiang via progressive government policies, while tunnel visioning solely on human rights abuses.

Apologies if my assumptions were wrong. I should have said "the articles you are submitting are pushing a political agenda". Being emotional has nothing to do with it. When I see five identical articles pushing the same political agenda, submitted by the same user at the same time (and more within the past week), one can only assume that the user has a political agenda.

You could have easily just messaged the moderators to ask why your submissions were flagged instead of spamming the board and risking your account getting banned. As far as Bloomberg not having an agenda, please recall the as-of-yet unretracted and unproven Supermicro story.

The difference is that those articles you've mentioned are not pushing a political agenda. You are pushing a political agenda. Not only is this not HN's use-case, but there is nothing here to discuss that hasn't already been discussed to death. What kind of intellectually stimulating discussion do you think will arise from a submission like this?

If you really want mass exposure for your political crusade, there's Reddit for that. You'll receive 1000x the eyeballs, all the accolades, upvotes and Reddit Gold that you desire along with a nice echo-chamber of predictably inane comments.

I’ve merely said that there exists a conflict of interest due to funding sources, which is a legitimate concern in any context let alone geopolitics.

I’ve never advocated for automatically dismissing anything wherein a conflict of interest exists, only to regard it with a critical eye and a grain of salt.

And it's also not a stretch to suggest that a government that defines separatism and religion as two of it's three defined evils is committing cultural genocide on a large (millions+) section of it's country that doesn't conform to the rest of it's society.

I’ve already addressed the million+ figure and cultural genocide point above. As far as the Three Evils, religion is not one of them. Religious extremism is (for example, Wahhabism and Salafism). Many religions are practiced openly in China today. There are 39,000 mosques in China, many of them paid for by the state. Separatism is considered an evil for obvious reasons. Namely, it undermines the stability of society which can lead to large scale consequences in a country of 1.4 billion that is barely four decades removed from third world status, like China.

There is only so much time in the day, and today I'll spend most of mine scrutinizing the layout of virtual networking devices. In order to receive news and information about topics I am less knowledgeable about I unfortunately must entrust others with the credibility to perform this scrutiny on my behalf. The ones I entrust to do this may fail, but that doesn't mean that I'd necessarily do better than them.

This is all fine and understandable. But if that is the case, don’t you think it would be better not to perpetuate conjecture masquerading as facts which can’t withstand basic scrutiny?

Most research in America is funded by U.S. government grants at least partially if not mostly. What's your point?

My point, as I’ve stated earlier, is that there is a conflict of interest here. It's not that much of a stretch to think that the U.S government would like to delegitimize the CCP to further their own geopolitical and strategic interests.

I don't really know what you expect me or the average layperson to do.

I expect you as a HN reader (but perhaps not the average layperson) to not view news reported in the mass media as infallible, but to scrutinize everything that is said with a high degree of criticality. Whose interests do these stories represent? Who benefits from fomenting mass outrage against an external boogeyman? Who is paying for the experiences and stories which you are consuming and why?

Knowledge of history can be of help here. One example is Rebiya Kadeer’s testimony to the U.S Congress about the Uygher situation [1] which many people accept verbatim. We can see an exact, historical parallel in the form of the Nayirah testimony [2], which was a contributor to the U.S decision to engage in the Gulf War. We all know how that turned out.

The source of the article I linked to is one of many.

Look at the primary sources. There barely a handful of them which 99% of articles like these trace their journalism back to.

Also consider that you don't have to be sitting in a detainment camp to be a victim of a cultural genocide.

This is true. I’d like to add that asking Uyghers to speak Mandarin in these “education camps” does not constitute cultural genocide and neither is banning elements of Wahhabi Islam which is not native to their culture in the first place. It’s a simple fact of life that if you want to do business in China or have any kind of economic opportunity, you need to learn Mandarin. This does not preclude the practice of your own native customs or languages. People think China is all Han when in fact there are many, many ethnic groups there [3] practicing their own languages and customs, and getting along just fine.

I'll end by saying that Uyghers are definitely being detained and "re-educated", I've never contested that. I'm merely questioning the scale and characterization of these camps as well as the motivations of some of the mainstream publications.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFWBCPuzl5E

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_China

I was waiting for the parent commenter to respond first. I've elaborated below.