MsMowz

I guess I assumed reverse engineering was understood to mean explaining how a phenomenon actually occurred. They've recreated a similar outcome, but haven't given any evidence that it's related to what happened in Cuba.

If I look at a hole in the wall and recreate it by pounding my fist through the wall to create another hole, did I reverse engineer the first hole? Or did I just reproduce the effect?

What's the difference between "reverse engineering" and speculation in this case? It's widely debated whether any device intentionally caused these symptoms. The article doesn't shed any light on this.

I’m not saying it’s minor apropos of nothing, I’m talking about it in relative terms to the consequences of the Gang of Four’s downfall.

I think we must have different understandings of what causes power struggles within leadership. The comparison to the 1953-1956 period in the USSR also feels a bit misplaced to me, as although there was a minor power struggle during that period, it didn’t have broad implications the way the death of Mao did. (I also don’t agree that the structure of the CPC is all that similar to the structure of the CPSU during Stalin’s leadership, but that’s not of much relevance in my mind.)

RE: the PLA and the party membership, I was referring to changes that mostly took place during the 1990s, which had much broader implications on the locations of structural power within the PRC than anything that’s been done in the last decade.

This overlooks many changes that have occurred in the recent decades, such as the restructuring of the PLA (including their decoupling from state business), the development of the socialist market economy, and the further development of the rank and file organization of the party. All of these give structure and order where they didn't exist before. The leadership roles in the party have never been less significant within Chinese internal politics, as the collective leadership has been strengthening for the last three decades.

The centralized, unitary structure of the Chinese government and the CPC make it unlikely that there will be a power struggle — there aren't many levers that would-be power players have to pull to achieve their goals (unlike after the Death of Mao, by contrast). Xi holds three positions of authority in China, and it's unlikely that anyone would immediately replace him in all three, as it's only happened in his case because of the confidence that the membership of the CPC has in his faction.

The next General Secretary of the party and Chairman of the CMC would both be elected by the party's Central Committee. Whoever is selected as General Secretary will most likely also be chosen as President, since this is mostly a ceremonial role. The majority of the Central Committee are in the same faction as Xi is currently, so it seems more likely than not that they'll find people from within their ranks to fill these positions and attempt to strengthen the collective leadership.

I really like Vivaldi, but at this point it’s not performant enough for me to use it on all devices. On a new MacBook Air, the UI visibly lags at times, and when doing video calls it’s unusably slow. I’m looking forward to future versions where this is hopefully improved, although on a stronger machine it’s probably fine.

What makes you think the setting is unrealistic? And why is it an issue that the housing looks pleasant? I’m sure it won’t look exactly like, but for the types of customers that are in the market for consistent 1.5 MWe at $0.06/KWh (their target), a decent-looking exterior and an ability to be placed in remote settings seem like desirable product features.

Perhaps more notable than the headline is the more rapid decline in support for capitalism. Presumably, this is related to the 60-80% of people who have expressed disapproval of Congress in recent years and the widely written-about erosion of faith in public institutions. One can only speculate what this will lead to in the long-run, but if it translates into meaningful political action, it could get much better or worse soon.

Corporate means acting as a single body in this context, it’s not about business corporations.

Isn't that really a pattern that the runtime adopts (i.e. not the language itself)? For ES, the libraries are dependent on the runtime environment; for browsers, there are the web APIs, and for Node, there's npm. I'm not sure how you could have anything more standard given the nature of things.

> Using it as a reason to say "oh, but this other super power totally wouldn't do that" is at best naive and at worst shilling.

That’s not what they said though. They made an argument that it’s against the interests of Huawei to engage in spying because they would be caught and it would harm their international reputation, in juxtaposition to the confirmed fact that the NSA is engaging in international spying via non-Huawei devices.

The idea that those who aren’t dogmatically opposed to anything and everything Chinese might be plants is insulting. Am I a paid American astroturfer because I work for a US software company? After all, it’s public record that the DOD has thousands of paid social media astroturfers. How is this productive discourse unless your goal is to foment antagonism between our countries?

They're making a comment on the HN/general paranoia around Huawei in the face of the actual privacy concerns regarding the US government. Does someone need to be a Chinese agent to find this paranoid behavior objectionable?

This is just playing a game with semantics; the form, canvas, dialog, and keygen elements are also first class. Nobody is saying that the web isn't primarily documents.

I don't think that's really true; in the original WWW proposal[1], Tim Berners-Lee specifically talks about using the web to build applications and he considered hypermedia applications to be only a matter of time and resources (about which he was correct).

[1]: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

When Drew Houston first posted Dropbox on HN, BrandonM had the top comment that doubted its viability/usefulness as a product. It's been the topic of a lot of discussion since then, including between the two themselves.

>I have a few qualms with this app:

>1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account...

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

In my experience (startup product development), product requirements and constraints are constantly shifting in order to support new use cases. In my practice, that has translated into only formalizing specifications after the fundamental needs of a system are set in stone, which is usually after release. When I’ve worked on contract-based projects, it’s been much easier to formalize beforehand, but I suspect most developers on HN are involved in active product development.

>For an experienced programmer eschewing conventions with this "resume", I am surprised by this comment.

They only have about a year of full-time engineering experience, so they might not recognize this yet. (Not trying to talk him down; plenty of people without much experience still do valuable work, but it's only natural to have blind spots.)

I think you may be (or I may be) confusing "i.e." for "viz."; I intended to use "i.e.", as I was specifically referring to the ATCs as industrial workers.

It is industrial work, and industrial work is not purely physical; even working in a modern factory often requires cognitive work. Tire production is a great example, and if you visit a Goodyear factory you will notice a profound lack of Taylorism in the actual work of the employees (of course, not in the processes themselves).

>It also wasn’t exactly for wages in the classic sense given that the federal government had holidays, vacation, and so on.

Wages are typically understood as whatever price is paid to employees for their ability to work[1]; we may be operating under different definitions, though (I studied economics rather than business).

[1]: https://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z/w#node-21529310

"Middle class" in this context refers to the level of their income and standard of living, where "working class" refers to their relationship to production (i.e. industrial wage workers).

> I don't understand how we continually believe the governments know how to spend money better, HN is littered with examples of government projects that have been woefully inefficient with the money they've taken.

This is of course true, but the opposite it true as well. Regardless, this misses the point. The reason people want public interest spending to be conducted by the government is that, with government spending, there is at least some opportunity for democratic (i.e. public) oversight. With private spending, there is only oversight from invested parties.

Many countries, including the US and UK, have indirect elections for high offices. Are they also non-democratic?

Personally, my answer to that question is yes, but I’m willing to apply principles equally. Again, this is beside the point of what I was asking, as I’m not trying to get into an ideological debate.

I understand your point, but what I was asking for is a non-ideological distinction. Every point you have made is from the ideological position that supports liberal democracy, but those who support people’s democracy would levy the same accusations in reverse. I’m not interested in hearing either of those points of view, because there simply cannot be a productive discussion on those terms.

I would like to understand the empirical situation. You suggest that I’m equating the two, but I’m actually just ignorant on the _substantive_ arguments. If you would be kind enough to enlighten me on that front, I would truly appreciate it.

I'll try to strictly source my remarks and refrain from commenting on the political content of the HK demonstrations to keep this purely factual, as I think this could be a rather controversial thread; however, it's interesting how different the reception to these demonstrations is to the reception to the US Capitol riots and the BLM demonstrations of last year. Hong Kong demonstrators have stormed government buildings[1], thrown gasoline bombs at police[2], attacked plainclothes police[3], and the like. In total, one pro-liberalization demonstrator died after falling from a parking garage[4], and one anti-liberalization demonstrator died after being bludgeoned with a brick by pro-liberalization demonstrators[5]. To keep this in context, the current Hong Kong SAR government is democratically elected[6] according to the provisions of an international treaty signed by the PRC and the UK which took effect in 1997[7].

If these events occurred in the United States, whose government surveils almost all telecommunications[8], what would its government do? One part of that answer is to have the military occupy a city with limited congressional representation (DC)[9]. This is clearly a much more restrictive measure than the measures taken by the HKSAR government, but its presentation by non-Chinese media has been the exact opposite. For what it's worth (zero), my opinion is that both government responses are consistent with what can be expected given their respective situations. Why are they portrayed differently? Is it ideology, or am I missing something that differentiates the two?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storming_of_the_Legislative_Co... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50115629 [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hong-kong-... [4]: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3036833... [5]: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/14/asia/hong-kong-protest-el... [6]: http://www.legco.gov.hk/general/english/intro/about_lc.htm [7]: http://www.cmab.gov.hk/en/issues/jd2.htm [8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) [9]: https://nypost.com/2021/03/09/pentagon-extends-national-guar...

Any major city in the United States has all of these features

I'm not sure if this is sarcastic, but there quite literally is not a "free market based mechanism" to do this. If there were, there would not be the market failure that we can observe today.

There are plenty of market-based methods for accounting for these externalities though, such as Pigovian taxes.

This isn't true unless your substitute is to eat nothing.

>Basically all uses of const in JavaScript are pointless. I have asked many times for someone to show me an example of a bug that shipped that would have been prevented by const as it exists in JS. I'm still waiting.

You have it backward; there's almost never a need to use let in JavaScript, as most variables should never be reassigned.

I've seen bugs pop up many times in client-side development where, for whatever reason, a variable is reassigned in a way that's difficult to predict. By defaulting to const unless reassignment is necessary, you're essentially putting documentation into the actual code and you can prevent logic errors by forcing runtime errors during development.

The answer is the same as it always was: you'll have "normal" libraries when somebody writes them (it could even be you). Most new application development relies on web servers, where JavaScript is very relevant and normal.