Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | woooooo's comments login

The early industrialization 5 year plans actually worked better for the Soviets than the Chinese, and I think it comes down to execution? Stalin being the more numerate psychopath?

The last 30-40 years it's different, the Chinese have navigated market liberalization and transitioned from copying to leading in a number of areas, while still having a central planning aspect. It could be that some amount of central planning is preferable to pure ideological communism or capitalism.


China to a large extent is following the Japanese and South Korean playbooks, to the point where the Chinese financial system runs under the concept of window guidance invented by the Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_guidance

The question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face when they stop accurately picking winners. We are already seeing the property bubble collapse in a manner similar to Japan’s.


> the question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face

Japan didn't "blow up" due to picking wrong. The US and allies negotiated the value of the yen up (the plaza accords) when the trade imbalance started to rack up against the US. This popped japan's bubble, which ultimately caused their lost decade.

China, on the other hand, would be unlikely to sign any sort of similar treaty with the US. Their property bubble collapsed, but i dont think to the same extend as the japanese one. Not to mention that it was triggered by gov't, so it popped earlier than japan's one in the lifecycle - therefore, it must be the case that it's less bad.

https://old.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/rvid0x/why_did_japan... has some details in the comments.


I think there are different ways of defining bad. In Tokyo in 1990, the ratio of median house price to median income was 15. In Shanghai when the bubble popped, that figure was above 40, and even today it is at 36.

To put this in perspective, San Fransisco, a city considered to have a housing crisis, has a ratio of 9.


Yeah, but the mortgage rate in China is around 3%. Individual income taxes are under 10% [0]. And there's your multiplier for affordability comparisons.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/us-china-tax-policy/


IIRC the Soviets got that done with a lot of help from the US.

If you're in a toxic environment where people will hear that and start looking for culprits.. then yes, accidentally.


I used to work with a founder who would deliver product ideas and our roadmap by saying things like "If we were smart, we would [do X, Y, and Z]." Implying that we (the company in general, or engineering in particular) were not smart now, but need to change our ways to smartness and do X, Y, and Z. I'm not sure how else to interpret these kinds of passive-aggressive jabs.


My immediate reaction is to wonder whether he/she is privy to some information I'm not which would make X, Y, and Z a priority, whether he/she is overlooking or ignorant of some other factor which would make them not worth doing, or some combination of the two. As such, I'd likely try to strike up a conversation to see if we could reach a mutual understanding. I'd certainly hate to be working on the wrong thing because I was the one missing something.

I suppose if it happened regularly enough, and it was clear the founder usually spoke from a position of ignorance, I'd eventually disengage and start to dismiss them out of hand, but I can't say I'd ever take it personally.

While the founder could just as easily have said "I think we should do X, Y, and Z" instead, I'm more than a little concerned at how easily someone would shut down over the original statement, which strikes me as mostly harmless.


I don't know your old founder and can't speak for them, but generally, that kind of phrasing is just idiomatic, and not meant to be parsed literally.

It's just a colloquial way of saying "I've earnestly thought about X, Y, and Z and think it's the most effective way path forward" or "my intuition is telling me X, Y, Z is the best way to go"

It's a way of expressing that they have a strong sense of how to proceed and the "passive-aggressive jab" that you hear is just an artifact of the idiom not being familiar or natural to you.


Or it’s a shitty boss who’s averse to direct conflict and leaves little hints for their employees to interpret like tea leaves.

Can’t really tell which situation it is without more information but both are common


Yea, it's hard to convey the non-verbal cues that came along with the phrase. The way he would say it was just dripping with superiority and sarcasm: "If we were -smaaaarrt- [pause to look at the rest of us peasants]... then we would make this so much better..." The unspoken message was really not hard to interpret: "If I was blessed with SMART engineers rather than a bunch of dummies (and I'm looking at you)..."


The republican core of exurban/rural ownership class benefits far more directly from immigrant labor than the liberal professional class.

Professionals might have a housekeeper or get their lawns done, but they're not employing a kitchen or construction site full of people.


What percent of republicans do you think employ illegal immigrants lol. This isn’t 1980.


I'm saying that the people who employ illegal immigrants tend to be republican small business owners. They're not a majority of republicans but they are the heart of the party in the way educated professionals are for the dems.


Counterpoint there would be Mao. Lots of fear and starvation, less impressive results until Deng started fixing things.


Not sure if you realize, but the federal budget is already public and anybody can FOIA additional details..


So why can’t they pass an audit?


FWIW, you're thinking about the DoD/the Pentagon, not the federal government as whole - and yeah, the Pentagon hasn't been able to pass an audit in ~6 years.

The defense budget is somewhat more opaque, though, for national security reasons. I don't know if they are good reasons or not, but that's the story at least.


I think you're specifically referring to the Pentagon. I'd like to see Elon attempt to force his way into that building next.


Are you kidding? Hegseth will roll out the red carpet.


Why would you trust the man who's been heavily subsidized by the government to do an audit? A significant chunk of Elon Musk's money came from government contracts his companies had with the US government.


Exactly — this isn’t good will. The only subsidies he cares about are his own. Though all involved don’t seem bright enough to realize that destabilizing the government, its finances and the perception of the dollar will have consequences for their own wealth.


They may be all in on various cryptocurrencies at this point.


“Pass” as in “conduct one”? Because that’s a huge massive expensive undertaking that has very little upside and a lot of downside.


It’s hard to pass an audit when unfettered access has been granted to a billionaire without access and cronies installing unauthorized software and strong arming everyone they encounter.


You know they had many years before to pass one…


How does this have anything to do with an erratic billionaire given free rein to illegally sabotage things?


[flagged]


[flagged]


[flagged]


January 6th was an attempted failed coup. No doubt. Failed coup.

The events of the past few weeks are not even in the same hemisphere as a coup, by definition of the word.

Who is trolling whom, exactly?


They're OK on civil liberties and foreign wars, typically, so at least they're consistent with an ideology over pure partisanship.


I mean, they got involved for United Fruit Company..


Not in the article, but I've read that the way C does pointers, a single address with length implicit, makes it hard for compilers to assert that 2 arrays don't overlap/alias and this is an obstacle for generating SIMD instructions.


That's what the restrict type qualifier[0] is for.

[0] https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/restrict


I thought you could simply add `restrict`[1] to indicate that only one pointer points to a specific object? Shouldn't this help?

[1]https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/restrict


You can add that qualifier, but nothing will enforce that objects don't overlap. So you replaced slow correct code with fast incorrect code.


If you believed the pointers didn't alias and they actually did then you replaced slow incorrect code with fast incorrect code


That doesn't follow? If you replaced every call of memcpy with memmove (to use an example from the standard library), then your program is no less correct than it was before (and possibly more). The converse is that adding "restrict" qualifiers to existing functions can only make your program less correct, not more.


In this context it follows. If you believe the pointers dont alias (and want to use simd) then there should be no data-dependencies inbetween indices. (If there are data-dependencies it is quite likely that you have designed your algorithm to accomodate that, i.e. make it suitable for vectorised access. parallel prefix-sum would be an example of this). And without data-dependencies vectorized code is exactly equal to unvectorized code in all circumstances. If however, you do have data-dependencies, then your algorithm is wrong. Vectorizing can surface this error, while keeping it unvectorized may hide it. In my previous example (parallel prefix-sum) if you had a direct data-dependency to the previous index your program would've been wrong - regardless of vectorization.

In short, while your statement is true in general, I believe that it is not applicable in the context of the discussion.


In C++ there is the align_alloc specificier. https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/memory/aligned_alloc

Not sure for C


aligned_alloc is a C function. It doesn't help the compiler prove that two pointers can't alias. restrict is the keyword that does.


The compiler is allowed to assume the results of malloc and certain other allocation functions do not alias.

Restrict does too.


When compiling a library, it is generally impossible for the compiler to know whether or not the pointers will be aliased, right? That decision is made after the library is already compiled.


The function declaration in the header file of the library can carry the required 'restrict'. It works for c++ invokers too, as most c++ compilers also support and check the __restrict__ for old plain pointer types.


Not really. Pointers from different allocations are guaranteed to never alias. If they do, it is UB.


Right, but the compiler in general has no way to know that pointers are from different allocations - especially several function calls away from the allocations, with some pointer arithmetic in between.


In general, the information as to whether or not the pointers will alias might not even be known, right? Like we could be compiling a library that will take in some pointers from the user.


Yes, that is why restrict was introduced.


The constitution applies to American users and to non-Americans on American soil. It's not like the cops can execute you for being here on a tourist visa.


I do not think that the constitution necessarily applies to corporations. Corporations, for example, do not have a vote.

Forced corporate divestiture is a thing, for example Merck.


The constitution applies to the government. It establishes the government and defines -- and therefor limits -- what the government is allowed to do.

Corporations are considered "legal persons" for the purpose of applying the law to them in a convenient and organized way, but in real life, corporations are just organizational models employed by human beings for the purpose of coordinating their activities.

The restrictions applicable to what the government is allowed to do to "people" as defined in the constitution apply regardless of what organizational models those people are using to coordinate their activities. Ultimately, everything in society reduces to people, and the government is not entitled to use reified abstractions to escape the constraints on its authority.


Corporations have First Amendment rights as ruled by Citizens United v. FEC. Even though corporations don’t have a vote (which is its own can of worms because of their economic power, money = vote), they still enjoy some of the same constitutional protections as individuals do.


Thats only because those corporations are owned by Americans. Foreign corporations do not have first amendment rights.


No, there's no such reasoning in that decision, which confirmed that speech itself is protected by the first amendment, regardless of who originates it.

And this ruling had little to do with any of that -- the first amendment challenge was that the ban imposed content-based burdens on the speech of the users of TikTok, and the court ruled that it did not. So the ban therefore survived the challenge under intermediate scrutiny.

The domestic vs. foreign ownership element of the ruling only pertained to the evaluation of whether there was a compelling government interest in enacting the ban, not whether the government was exempt from first amendment scrutiny at all.


i mean that's old law. theres a new law in town and it was a 9-0 ruling too.


Something being a free speech violation does not imply it being illegal, free speech exist as a independent concept from the US constitution


The constitution applies to the people of the United States. It's in the first line: "We the people of the United States..."

That Constitution also includes numerous clauses granting Congress the authority to regulate international commerce (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3). TikTok is a foreign commercial enterprise. We have restricted foreign products and services since the Boston Tea Party.


I'm struck by the complete lack of confidence in statements like this.

We've got the whole world wearing blue jeans and listening to our music, mostly communicating on our tech platforms. English is the default language for international business. One Chinese social media company and its game over? Have some faith in your culture.


Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: