Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#81

Post by andygrovetheman » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

hangonhn wrote: post #65

RamshackleJ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your opinions and your characterization of my argument. I didn't say people will not think about technological problems. Despite the incredible amount of good the party has done for the people of china they are still an authoritarian regime. I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation.

A market based system and an authoritarian regime are not mutually exclusive. Singapore is very capitalistic but its political structure is basically a dictatorship. The same family has ruled it from the beginning. The Singapore model is very attractive to other countries who want to emulate the same. In fact, when Deng Xiaoping opened up China, Singapore was one of those places he visited and studied.

It’s good if you find the right family. But this is exactly what Tolkien was saying in Lord of the Rkngs with the ring metaphor (Tolkien’s work was a big allegory on European World Wars and politics).

Tolkien said Gandalf couldn’t take the ring because he would be corrupted by power and become an evil autocrat.

There are few rulers who can assume dictatoral power and not use it for ill. And once a family has autocratic power, it is difficult and bloody for the people to take power back.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#82

Post by worldengineer » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:04 PM UTC

nimish wrote: post #67

History rhymes. American industrialists famously begged, borrowed and stole machine designs from Europe -- Slater the traitor kickstarted the American cotton industry. Of course, the lack of foresight of Wall St is legendary! Many companies have traded long term loss for short term gain.

[flagged]

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#83

Post by frockington » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #62

RamshackleJ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR; But the soviets lost. I'm not an expert in soviet history but I feel like their efforts around science and technology were economically unsustainable and almost all of them were directly or tangentially related to the military. I don't remember the soviets exporting consumer goods to the west. Academic freedom isn't the only freedom that scientists and engineers care about. I don't doubt that china can spend a…

Please explain downvotes?

My experience with hacker news is that comments with China mentioned in a not so positive way will result in a flood of initial downvotes. As to the the why, I haven't a clue

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#84

Post by andygrovetheman » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

tzahola wrote: post #55

RamshackleJ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your opinions and your characterization of my argument. I didn't say people will not think about technological problems. Despite the incredible amount of good the party has done for the people of china they are still an authoritarian regime. I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation.

>I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation. Werner Von Braun would disagree.

On a mostly-unrelated note:

Apparently big difference between the US and Germany in the nuclear race was not science but instead engineering.

Fermi and Oppenheimer were useful to the US effort but Heisenberg probably had the intellectual firepower to do that for Germany.

The REAL advances the US made were in chemical and metallurgical engineering at an industrial scale. Dealing with gaseous and liquid uranium and plutonium compounds took a lot of innovation. And the plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge were ENORMOUS. So if Germany was going to build a bomb they would have needed a massive industrial complex. Not just physicists.

Apparently Leslie Groves commissioned a public report in 1945. He deliberately put a lot of physics in it, but left out the chemical engineering. Because he regarded the latter as the key difficult steps in bomb building. And the physics was mostly known.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#85

Post by crb002 » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:13 PM UTC

wishart_washy wrote: post #44

Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…

The $$ is in ASICs. Most code is sorting, hashing, encoding/decoding, matrix-matrix multiply. Bitmain is hitting it out of the park.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#86

Post by addicted » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:13 PM UTC

wishart_washy wrote: post #44

Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…

Well the vast majority of these kids would prefer to stay in the US.

Clearly the solution to prevent them from taking their knowledge back to their home countries is to denigrate them politically and make it harder and more inconvenient for them to live and work here.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#87

Post by worldengineer » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #47

wishart_washy wrote: post #44

Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…

Throughout the 20th century, the United States benefited greatly from this sort of knowledge drain, from war-torn Europe, and from the Soviet sphere of influence. The trend is just reverting to the mean.

> The trend is just reverting to the mean.

That's a lie. United States get 1M immigrants a year since 2000. There's over 37,000,000 legal immigrants in US. United States gets the creme of the crop from countries around the world. On the other hand, there were approximately 594,000 immigrants living in China in 2010, most from Asia.

If you can live in US and make 300k-400k, you would do that in a heartbeat, vs living in China where the pollution could shorten you and your family's life, a brush with someone in CCP could destroy your life, no way to get the money you make in China out, no ownership of properties, censorship prevents you from doing research in the real internet, etc.

Oh yeah, what do you think will happen to China after additional $400 billion tariffs, when XiJingPing dies, when the massive shadow debt ($12Trillion and counting) causes widespread defaults and 30% devaluation of yuan?

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#88

Post by chrchang523 » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #64

chrchang523 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly with everything but the second half of your first sentence here, but unfortunately that embeds such a huge misconception that the net value of your comment could very well be negative unless you acknowledge and clarify/correct this. The boundaries of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are "arbitrary [and] invisible" to some extent, and obviously drawn by the powerful. But "the current set of lines are…

> This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. India has only become a natural US ally fairly recently... And largely due to the 'frenemy' status that the US has with China. (Which in itself is a consequence of the 'frenemy' status that the USSR had with China... It's turtles all the way down.) Through much of the Cold War, US-India relationships were very, very cool. Instead, they had good relat…

I agree that "India and the US are natural allies" is not the kind of statement that has a multi-century shelf life, for the reasons you describe.

However, I claim that it can be expected to be sufficiently true for the next several decades, to the point that continued rapid development of India should not only be something the US doesn't have a problem with, it should be an explicit strategic goal of 21st century US foreign policy. It's not every day that self-interest and humanitarianism align so well on a matter of such importance; it would be a pity if the opportunity was not taken.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#89

Post by imglorp » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

andygrovetheman wrote: post #78

nimish wrote: post #67

History rhymes. American industrialists famously begged, borrowed and stole machine designs from Europe -- Slater the traitor kickstarted the American cotton industry. Of course, the lack of foresight of Wall St is legendary! Many companies have traded long term loss for short term gain.

IP and knowledge was much less valuable in the 19th C industrial economy than it is today. Back then execution and raw materials and access to semiskilled labor was most important. The Chinese (NK, Iranian, Russian) corporate hacks we have seen recently could have a MUCH larger economic effect.

The problem was recognized at the time, though. The first US patent was in 1790 (a process to make potash), the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Of course, now we buy portfolios of patents as an investment backing extortion as a business model, or as bludgeon to slow competition.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#90

Post by worldengineer » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:23 PM UTC

RamshackleJ wrote: post #43

jacquesm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to be 'good' at anything, they just will move slower than an equivalent market based system but eventually they will get there. As long as the rest of the world out-innovates them they may not catch up but do not underestimate the power of over 1 billion people, especially not when a large number of them are very smart. Have a look at China 30 years ago and China today and tell me that that authoritar…

They are catching up, which is a net good for humanity. The highbred command/market economy and the focused bureaucracy of the Party have has been amazingly effective at industrializing and modernizing China. They have lifted many people out of poverty in a very short time. Catching up and innovating are different though. There is so much structure and even culture in China that will make getting ahead in tech and sc…

You're wrong if you think the party actually cares about the people in poverty. for example

"Beijing’s migrants no longer welcome as city caps population"

https://www.ft.com/content/822e982c-1b40-11e7-bcac-6d03d067f...

"How the eviction of Beijing’s migrant workers is tearing at the fabric of the city’s economy"

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/212...

few hundred million of these migrants only make $500/month in the cities.

http://www.clb.org.hk/content/migrant-workers-and-their-chil...