Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 216 posts

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#161

Post by cik »

coldtea wrote: post #107

This is what a commerce war looks like. It's not about China being an oppressive state, spying, etc. The former didn't matter all these decades, and the latter goes on forever from all sides and nobody bats an eye. It's about China catching up to (and surpassing in some cases) US tech, and not being content to be the mere "factory of the US" but sell its own stuff. Like Korea, Taiwan, and Japan each did in their own…

Are you sure? We've always been at war with Eastasia. Or maybe we've always been at war with Oceania.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#162

Post by coldtea »

str33t_punk wrote: post #125
coldtea wrote: post #107

This is what a commerce war looks like. It's not about China being an oppressive state, spying, etc. The former didn't matter all these decades, and the latter goes on forever from all sides and nobody bats an eye. It's about China catching up to (and surpassing in some cases) US tech, and not being content to be the mere "factory of the US" but sell its own stuff. Like Korea, Taiwan, and Japan each did in their own…

However Taiwan, Korea, and Japan all did this without pissing everyone off. China needs to learn to play by the rules

Not really. See my answer with links and info above. Exactly the same things you hear about China (accusations, threats, fears, tariffs, etc) also happened with Japan for example in the 70s to 90s.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#163

Post by coldtea »

eastendguy wrote: post #109
coldtea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example, these are the golden standard. Which would be the US equivalent? https://www.dji.com/gr/products/drones Here's another -- better than Google by a wide margin: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/1/18290215/huawei-p30-pro-ca...

DJI is impressive - but is DJI leading because of AI? To me, that is mostly manufacturing. And this is indeed an area where "the west" is severly lacking. (Disclaimer: I am no drone expert, so this is a real question) The verge says the camera is "...somehow even better than Google’s Night Sight". That is nice - but not a "wide margin".

>DJI is impressive - but is DJI leading because of AI?

No. But I was answering the parent comment "...in what area is China actually leading?" -- not specifically about AI. And those are just 2 examples I'm familiar with personally (as a consumer). There could be tons of others.

>The verge says the camera is "...somehow even better than Google’s Night Sight". That is nice - but not a "wide margin".

No, the Verge gushes over the camera throughout the review. You just read the subtitle ("somehow even better"), but missed their qualification of how much better it is in the review:

"I spent this past weekend comparing its camera against Google’s Pixel 3 and struggling to believe my eyes"

"The Pixel shot is, by any other standards, impressive. The P30 Pro is simply in another league, and the quality of its photo doesn’t require explanation."

"The less light there is in an image, the stronger Huawei’s P30 Pro advantage grows. In the following example, featuring an unlit bathroom where my eyes could detect shapes but no colors, the P30 Pro does the unbelievable by actually focusing and producing a very respectable image. With 30 seconds of editing in Google Photos, I can make it look like it was taken in the daytime. The Pixel attempt, by comparison, is out of focus. The Pixel, like the vast majority of mobile and even pro DSLR cameras, can’t obtain focus with so little."

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#164

Post by gamblor956 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #156
Balgair wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enlighten us?

The US felt extremely threatened by Japanese manufacturing in the 80s and in fact most of the world had this cultural idea of Japan becoming the dominant global technology force. As a consequence the US government imposed a 100% tariff on Japanese electronics, accused the country of "currency manipulation" (sound familiar?). And on the topic of IP Japanese faced the very same copycat accusations that China does now.…

The big difference is that while Japan was frequently accused of IP theft, the actual occurrences were few and far between as the result of individual corporate activity.

Chinese IP theft isn't just rampant--it's actively promoted and paid for by the Chinese government, which even goes so far as to identify targets for IP theft and provides governmental assistance in extracting stolen IP from the victim country.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#165

Post by [deleted] »

thrwawayw434 wrote: post #91
eastendguy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...in what area is China actually leading? Catching up and leading require two very different skill sets.

Do you follow ML ? A lot of big-impact papers in Computer vision has come directly from mainland China and Hong Kong. MSRA, CUHK, Sensetime, and Baidu have made quite a few advances in the field.DMLC a group of members composed mostly of Chinese students basically wrote things like MXNET and Xgboost. Granted most of these are collaborative ventures, but calling China 'catching up' at this stage is ignorant.

[deleted]

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#166

Post by partiallypro »

ryacko wrote: post #98
eob wrote: post #61

I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home. What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation “it was just a cultural misunderstanding” I want to be ca…

What grey area? It was bad enough they decided to send him home.

How was it bad that they sent him home? A spy is a spy. In China they would have just killed him or imprisoned him if a student were sending information "back home." If you don't believe me that China simply kills spies, look at the spy purges in the Obama years after a breach in the CIA's communications.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#167

Post by msie »

eob wrote: post #61

I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home. What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation “it was just a cultural misunderstanding” I want to be ca…

Uh, if there was explicit instruction at the beginning not to scrape internal data and code, then there would be no misunderstanding in the first place. Was there any NDA???

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#168

Post by varjag »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #95
varjag wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese tech is impotent, so there's a fair chance for America.

I can't agree with you. I am in the USA. I had dinner last night with several people talking about starting up an AI/medical company. When I got home, I found companies in China that were already shipping similar products to what we had just been talking about at dinner, just as possible ideas. My fields are NLP and deep learning, and from my perspective, research papers coming out of China have been innovative and h…

It's fine. We're not in China, we have room for disagreement.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#169

Post by smsm42 »

srndh wrote: post #159

First off, I am not pro or anti USA or China. Just curious and hoping to have a constructive dialogue. What moral high ground is USA on in the Snowden era? Why trust Cisco or Apple or Google or Facebook or Microsoft in USA's Prism? With the "Five Eyes", how to trust Nokia or Ericsson or Blackberry? What ethical high-ground are the tax evading tech giants on? Lets not forget how the pharma mobs are gaming the patent s…

> Why trust Cisco or Apple or Google or Facebook or Microsoft in USA's Prism?

You don't have to trust them. Definitely you better not to. But that doesn't make you to trust Huawei either. At least Google/Facebook are subject to US government, which is controlled by a (still) functioning democracy. Huawei is controlled by a violent authoritarian dictatorship. I'd say however I mistrust Google, I'd probably still mistrust Chinese Communist Party more. There are mechanisms in the US that prevent or impede governmental abuse. They are not faultless - they still get a lot of abuse through. But some is caught, and some becomes public (yes, Snowden - but the things were starting to seep through even before he blew up the dam). In China, I don't see even these partial and faulty impediments to government control.

> Its sad to see a place of learning is getting into politics & business.

Most major educational institutions are already billion-dollar businesses. And with this size, connection to politics is inevitable. And if Huawei does business in the US, it would be subject to the same rules other US businesses playing by - where being suspect of performing surveillance on the users on behalf of the government - let alone the government like Chinese one, - or enabling widespread human rights abuse - is a big black mark. The one which mere lower prices are not going to erase.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#170

Post by jdsully »

Barrin92 wrote: post #156
Balgair wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enlighten us?

The US felt extremely threatened by Japanese manufacturing in the 80s and in fact most of the world had this cultural idea of Japan becoming the dominant global technology force. As a consequence the US government imposed a 100% tariff on Japanese electronics, accused the country of "currency manipulation" (sound familiar?). And on the topic of IP Japanese faced the very same copycat accusations that China does now.…

Your own article contradicts you with respect to Japanese and IP theft. Its thesis is that they were just playing the game better:

''Are the Japanese picking our brains?'' a congressional staffer asks. ''Yes. They're doing it very well. They're doing it legally. The question is whether we have a two-way street.''

The Chinese accusations are that illegal methods are used. Which is a major difference.

Post reply on HN