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It's not like it's hard to see either, there's routinely news of Chinese scientists and engineers caught with some kind of industrial secret stolen from their e

It's not like it's hard to see either, there's routinely news of Chinese scientists and engineers caught with some kind of industrial secret stolen from their employer trying to go back to China in a hurry. Every time it's mentioned people on HN react like some grand conspiracy theory was unveiled while it takes 15 seconds on google to find examples like: https://www.biospace.com/article/-jc1n-second-scientist-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-glaxosmithkline-trade-secrets/ https://www.biospace.com/article/-jc1n-second-scientist-plea... or https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/ex-coca-cola-engineer-charged-with-stealing-secrets-for-chinese-firm https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/ex-coca-col... it's pervasive and it's stupid to think it will stop on its own. China has been at war with us for quite a while, we just failed to recognize it because it is convenient for many not to do so, but we should behave accordingly. Edit: since my comment was called "inflammatory and nationalistic" I'm going to add a link to a book that explains the war ongoing between China and the US, from an author that's very much not either of those things: https://www.amazon.com/Cool-War-United-States-Competition/dp/081298255X https://www.amazon.com/Cool-War-United-States-Competition/dp...

lawrenceyan 7y ago
None of those links work. Do you mind reposting ones that do below? It seems that you copy pasted the links from a different comment, but since HN will automatically shorten long links when presenting them, the links you copied end up cut off.
- luckydata 7y ago
  fixed.
  - lawrenceyan 7y ago
    Thanks!
youeeeeeediot 7y ago
https://www.biospace.com/article/-jc1n-second-scientist-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-glaxosmithkline-trade-secrets/ https://www.biospace.com/article/-jc1n-second-scientist-plea... https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/ex-coca-cola-engineer-charged-with-stealing-secrets-for-chinese-firm https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/ex-coca-col...
dang 7y ago
This is inflammatory and snarky and exaggerated ("China has been at war with us") enough to count as nationalistic flamebait. As I said above, we don't want that here. Please make your substantive points without it.
- youeeeeeediot 7y ago
  You've pinned a comment at the top arguing against "nationalistic flamewar" type comments. Fair enough, however your own moderating choices seem to paint you as biased in this regard. Why is there an implied double standard for those who post vs. those who moderate/admin?
  - dang 7y ago
    Moderator bias is the perception the mind leaps to when running into moderation one dislikes. But people's views of moderator bias are as varied as their feelings on the underlying topic. Actually, they're identical to their feelings on the underlying topic—simple introspection will reveal that to anyone. If it helps at all, I can tell you that when we see flamebait going the other way we try to moderate it just as much. Moderation work has a weird side-effect that is elusive to describe but is relevant to this question. When you routinely have to moderate angry arguments, where neither side will concede so much as a grain of sand or a drop of water to the other, you often end up in an intense position where one or both sides turn their frustration onto you instead and decide that you are the problem. Sometimes it seems as if that's the one thing they agree on! The side-effect is that over time, this seems to gradually change how your brain functions. You start to think less in terms of agree/disagree and more in terms of the container as a whole. People often make claims about our personal biases and views, but from my perspective they're always curiously off, because they miss this weirdness of how moderation changes a person over time. I've compared it to having one's brain sandblasted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16361266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16361266). Dwelling in the crossfire has altered how I see many of these high-energy topics. My views have become more friable—smaller in scope and less welded to the infrastructure of the major positions. For example—speaking personally now, not as a moderator—it seems obvious to me that there's no factual dispute in the current thread. That is, there's no contradiction between state infiltration of corporate and academic environments being a thing, and misguided persecution of honest researchers also being a thing: not only could both of those be true, it's actually hard to see how they wouldn't go together. Yet people each pick one of those two and use them as spears to joust with. What's happening is that our loyalties keep us from widening the frame enough to incorporate all available information. Instead we try to exclude any information that 'helps' the other side and block it when they try to bring it up. Most heated arguments now appear to me to be of this nature. At root, we can't and won't hear each other's stories. In this way the gruntwork of moderation has turned out to be a protracted exercise in forcible frame-widening—something that is painful in its little steps but also has an expanding effect that may (or may not) be worth it.
notus 7y ago
I was going to post a similar response but I chose not to after a little research. I think there is a clear difference between engineers at private industries and academics at a public university. Not sure if this is the best comparison. It seems the Trump administration was targeting academics at public universities.... which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
- luckydata 7y ago
  They are all part of the same plan. You can't let your enemy infiltrate your academia, it's just bad strategy. If China in the future decides to behave like any normal country I don't see an issue with having cordial relationships again.
  - notus 7y ago
    I don't get why an academic researcher in the United States who has contributed to our body of medical research is the enemy.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    So every Chinese person in a US university is the enemy? That seems more than a little sweeping, not to mention inaccurate.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - luckydata 7y ago
      At the moment, it should be assumed that's the case. That's an unfortunate side effect of conflicts.
      - stevens32 7y ago
        Literally racism
stcredzero 7y ago
there's routinely news of Chinese scientists and engineers caught with some kind of industrial secret stolen from their employer trying to go back to China in a hurry. tl;dr - State actors make getting away with it much easier. State actors providing cover is one of the serious issues with corporate security today. I was discussing this with coworkers over a decade ago when I was consulting inside a petroleum multinational. We could all see how we could exfiltrate valuable trading data. That would have been trivial. What was anything but trivial was the notion of getting away with it afterwards. None of us would seriously consider touching that with a ten foot pole. Even back then, however, we were talking about someone with the cover of a foreign state. That lowers the bar for "getting away with it" by a large margin, primarily by reducing the time for evading detection and capture from the rest of your life to a few weeks or months. Disclosure: I'm Asian and my wife was born in China and has multiple degrees, including one PhD. She was once a foreign born Chinese academic.
avanti 7y ago
If your assumption is that China is at war with you, then you will only look for evidence to support that. And by the way, who do "us" represent in your "at war with us"?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kodz4 7y ago
And it's going to stop by doing what exactly? The West has had a head start in science and tech. But China and soon India will catch up. It's a simple numbers game. They both have a billion MORE people each than the entire American population. You can't fight that and remain king of the hill forever. Archimedes, Pythagoras and Euclid weren't born in the US. Maybe the Greeks should have thought like you declared Geometry a national security matter and hidden it away from the rest of the world. Most people understand why Greeks don't rule the world today and most people understand the more interconnected everything gets the less one country is going to dominate anything. The best strategy is to actively push for more and more multinational collab till it gets harder and harder for anyone country to dominate anything. But ofcourse that requires balls and imagination.

lawrenceyan 7y ago

None of those links work. Do you mind reposting ones that do below? It seems that you copy pasted the links from a different comment, but since HN will automatically shorten long links when presenting them, the links you copied end up cut off.

luckydata 7y ago
fixed.
- lawrenceyan 7y ago
  Thanks!

youeeeeeediot 7y ago

https://www.biospace.com/article/-jc1n-second-scientist-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-glaxosmithkline-trade-secrets/ https://www.biospace.com/article/-jc1n-second-scientist-plea... https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/ex-coca-cola-engineer-charged-with-stealing-secrets-for-chinese-firm https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/ex-coca-col...

dang 7y ago

This is inflammatory and snarky and exaggerated ("China has been at war with us") enough to count as nationalistic flamebait. As I said above, we don't want that here. Please make your substantive points without it.

youeeeeeediot 7y ago
You've pinned a comment at the top arguing against "nationalistic flamewar" type comments. Fair enough, however your own moderating choices seem to paint you as biased in this regard. Why is there an implied double standard for those who post vs. those who moderate/admin?
- dang 7y ago
  Moderator bias is the perception the mind leaps to when running into moderation one dislikes. But people's views of moderator bias are as varied as their feelings on the underlying topic. Actually, they're identical to their feelings on the underlying topic—simple introspection will reveal that to anyone. If it helps at all, I can tell you that when we see flamebait going the other way we try to moderate it just as much. Moderation work has a weird side-effect that is elusive to describe but is relevant to this question. When you routinely have to moderate angry arguments, where neither side will concede so much as a grain of sand or a drop of water to the other, you often end up in an intense position where one or both sides turn their frustration onto you instead and decide that you are the problem. Sometimes it seems as if that's the one thing they agree on! The side-effect is that over time, this seems to gradually change how your brain functions. You start to think less in terms of agree/disagree and more in terms of the container as a whole. People often make claims about our personal biases and views, but from my perspective they're always curiously off, because they miss this weirdness of how moderation changes a person over time. I've compared it to having one's brain sandblasted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16361266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16361266). Dwelling in the crossfire has altered how I see many of these high-energy topics. My views have become more friable—smaller in scope and less welded to the infrastructure of the major positions. For example—speaking personally now, not as a moderator—it seems obvious to me that there's no factual dispute in the current thread. That is, there's no contradiction between state infiltration of corporate and academic environments being a thing, and misguided persecution of honest researchers also being a thing: not only could both of those be true, it's actually hard to see how they wouldn't go together. Yet people each pick one of those two and use them as spears to joust with. What's happening is that our loyalties keep us from widening the frame enough to incorporate all available information. Instead we try to exclude any information that 'helps' the other side and block it when they try to bring it up. Most heated arguments now appear to me to be of this nature. At root, we can't and won't hear each other's stories. In this way the gruntwork of moderation has turned out to be a protracted exercise in forcible frame-widening—something that is painful in its little steps but also has an expanding effect that may (or may not) be worth it.

notus 7y ago

I was going to post a similar response but I chose not to after a little research. I think there is a clear difference between engineers at private industries and academics at a public university. Not sure if this is the best comparison. It seems the Trump administration was targeting academics at public universities.... which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

luckydata 7y ago
They are all part of the same plan. You can't let your enemy infiltrate your academia, it's just bad strategy. If China in the future decides to behave like any normal country I don't see an issue with having cordial relationships again.
- notus 7y ago
  I don't get why an academic researcher in the United States who has contributed to our body of medical research is the enemy.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  So every Chinese person in a US university is the enemy? That seems more than a little sweeping, not to mention inaccurate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - luckydata 7y ago
    At the moment, it should be assumed that's the case. That's an unfortunate side effect of conflicts.
    - stevens32 7y ago
      Literally racism

stcredzero 7y ago

there's routinely news of Chinese scientists and engineers caught with some kind of industrial secret stolen from their employer trying to go back to China in a hurry. tl;dr - State actors make getting away with it much easier. State actors providing cover is one of the serious issues with corporate security today. I was discussing this with coworkers over a decade ago when I was consulting inside a petroleum multinational. We could all see how we could exfiltrate valuable trading data. That would have been trivial. What was anything but trivial was the notion of getting away with it afterwards. None of us would seriously consider touching that with a ten foot pole. Even back then, however, we were talking about someone with the cover of a foreign state. That lowers the bar for "getting away with it" by a large margin, primarily by reducing the time for evading detection and capture from the rest of your life to a few weeks or months. Disclosure: I'm Asian and my wife was born in China and has multiple degrees, including one PhD. She was once a foreign born Chinese academic.

avanti 7y ago

If your assumption is that China is at war with you, then you will only look for evidence to support that. And by the way, who do "us" represent in your "at war with us"?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kodz4 7y ago

And it's going to stop by doing what exactly? The West has had a head start in science and tech. But China and soon India will catch up. It's a simple numbers game. They both have a billion MORE people each than the entire American population. You can't fight that and remain king of the hill forever. Archimedes, Pythagoras and Euclid weren't born in the US. Maybe the Greeks should have thought like you declared Geometry a national security matter and hidden it away from the rest of the world. Most people understand why Greeks don't rule the world today and most people understand the more interconnected everything gets the less one country is going to dominate anything. The best strategy is to actively push for more and more multinational collab till it gets harder and harder for anyone country to dominate anything. But ofcourse that requires balls and imagination.