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I’m a developer from China. So, is this what Hacker News is all about? Whenever a model comes from China, the comments section stops discussing its technical ar

• mannycalavera42 3mo ago
  > instead starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish look, it's just a matter of priorities ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯
• retox 3mo ago
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• adithyassekhar 3mo ago
  Unfortunately this is a US centric site, for a US based investor, who themselves and probably most commenters as well who are highly paid silicon valley people who have stakes in ai companies on their side of the pond. Not to mention the political unrest and fear of losing the technological superiority which they once earned but now is trying so hard to hold on to through legally grey monopolistic practices. You dare not outcompete the US in any tech they can sanction. At some point people who made genuine innovation and wanted to make the world a better and equal place were replaced with capitalists. Wait for the downvotes.
  • cnhwl 3mo ago
    Rankings have never been something I’ve cared about. Just as with the smear campaigns against China, there is far too much noise in the world. We simply hope that the geeks who are genuinely committed to making the world a better place can unite and focus on getting things done, rather than being brainwashed by ideology and social media.
    • adverbly 3mo ago
      > committed to making the world a better place can unite and focus on getting things done The problem is that nobody can agree on what "better" is, so it is difficult to unite. And in the meantime, people who don't care about "uniting" or "better" just carry on with whatever their goal is(usually just to make as much money as possible), and that sometimes ends up on net making the world a worse place. This is a legitimate systematic problem that many of us are concerned about solving. It could easily be more important than the technical problems that geeks such as myself would love to be able to focus on.
  • villish 3mo ago
    Legally gray practices? Such as what? Old politicians who barely understand how to use e-mail had a panic attack due to Anthropics marketing about Mythos and being told that Chinese models were "attacking" (distillation) US frontier labs to train theirs. They pull the only lever they could in an attempt to stop it, but again, they don't understand how any of it works. The export ban lasted a few weeks yet everyone keeps crying about it like the US is shady. In reality the entire world is 100% dependent on the output of US and China for frontier AI. Anyone outside of those two countries will be loud about either closing off access. I personally think it is inevitable that China and the US stops producing frontier level open models when they become too valuable.
    • bigyabai 3mo ago
      > I personally think it is inevitable that China and the US stops producing frontier level open models when they become too valuable. This reads like a paradox, though. If the value of a FOSS model comes from pushing the local frontier, then FOSS releases will be even more attractive in a world with highly capable AI services. The underdog researchers will be motivated to train smaller LLMs that close the gap with the most newest architectures and improvements, democratizing those same benefits to local models. There's not really anything that stops them, besides finding an investor. The US already has top secret AI technology like the NRO's Sentient. The danger is less the architecture, and more the data that it has access to and the technology that it interfaces with. Most people aren't entirely convinced that AI will ever be "too valuable" in the first place.
      • villish 3mo ago
        > Most people aren't entirely convinced that AI will ever be "too valuable" in the first place. There will be a generational leap that makes current LLMs obsolete in every way. Let's say China gets there first, why would the CCP let it be released publicly? That is an insanely valuable advantage in everything from war fighting to economics and more. Humans for millennia have used technological advances to make better weapons. AI will be no different, unfortunately. Wars will be fought with drones and artificial intelligence from now on.
• throwa356262 3mo ago
  Yes, and its geting annoying If you know of another forum with less politics or VC talk and more technical depth please let us know :)
• sdoering 3mo ago
  > human rights and all that rubbish Denying human rights. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion.
  • epolanski 3mo ago
    I think he means rubbish as in completely off topic.
    • ykonstant 3mo ago
      Perhaps, but I am struggling to find a worse phrasing to get a point across.
      • allarm 3mo ago
        You just nitpicked his words and made a big deal out of nothing, ignoring the actual message. Classic.
      • kelipso 3mo ago
        The guy is using translation software to post it. So maybe don’t take the phrasing into consideration too much and focus on the intended meaning behind it.
  • swznd 3mo ago
    he never said anything about denying human rights
  • gabriel666smith 3mo ago
    I don't think you're taking the good-faith reading of the sentence's grammar here, which is: "[When China is mentioned] the comments section stops discussing [technical aspects], and instead starts going on about [non-technical aspects], and all that [stuff which I do not feel is relevant]." I'm struggling, though, to find a good-faith reading of what you meant by: "Denying human rights. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion." Specifically, "classic" - classic what? "Classic" meaning "a trait you personally believe is more prevalent in people who (might be) citizens of a specific country"? Hopefully the good-faith interpretation of GP's comment, which you might have unintentionally missed, will help you engage with their opinion with more respect. I think it's an easy opinion to empathise with personally. I would be enormously frustrated myself, on an individual level, if interesting technical achievements made by companies in my own country were overshadowed by political discussion about the actions of the country overall, when spoken about on technical forums. This would be especially true for me if I - as an individual - disagreed with politically with my country's leadership. Frustration at a topic of discourse is not mutually exclusive with being in favour of human rights. I don't think GP has done themselves any favours with the broad statements that close their comment, and is clearly frustrated themselves. That there's mutual frustration is probably a sign that empathy on both sides might lead to a really productive discussion - but focusing on the more substantive points they've made, rather than escalating by misinterpreting the less important aspects of what they commented - is what will lead to that.
• ksimukka 3mo ago
  What else would you expect from a "majority" of US educated geeks? Btw, are you using GPUs/TUs at all for local inference? I've been exploring what hardware options exist outside of Nvidia.
• alex7o 3mo ago
  People in the US have not lost soghts sight of their original aspirations. They are always on track much more than before really. Making as much money as possible in as little time as possible.
• rapidaneurism 3mo ago
  The response was similar when the new grock came out.
• ghosty141 3mo ago
  > humans right and all that rubbish Ummmm.... I see both technical and political topics being discussed and I think the balance is fine right now. The pricing is also very suspicious such that people raising suspicion about it being subsidized is not that surprising to me.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• meowla 3mo ago
  Dude, you're a Chinese developer! I'm also a Chinese developer, nice to meet you. So do you agree that we developed quite a profile of low-quality software under Chinese techs whose UI and logic are pure not-well-thought-through and even disgusting to use. Do you really think Alibaba would make their model open-sourced if the model gets to be the best of the world And how would you comment on the fact that CCP recently restricted high-profile model trainers' freedom of movement by requiring a license whenever they want to leave the country? They also did the same thing to Manus' Xiao Hong(who is not a model trainer in this case), who looks like a good person
• fragmede 3mo ago
  Welcome! What other sites like v2ex.com are out there on your side of the world?
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• benterix 3mo ago
  > human rights and all that rubbish While I understand your point, please think a bit how you formulated the sentence above.
  • simondotau 3mo ago
    I almost choked on my tea when I read that. I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed. A shocking turn of phrase, and one that IMHO catastrophically devalues the nominally valid argument underlying that post.
    • deleted 3mo ago
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    • bigyabai 3mo ago
      To be fair, both of America's frontier labs that fearmongered safety and human rights folded immediately during wartime. It's pretty glaringly obvious that "safety" research is a complete sham that is consistently ignored at every point in AI's development.
      • computerphage 3mo ago
        What do you mean by "folded during wartime"? When did wartime start, and who folded?
        • bigyabai 3mo ago
          Anthropic and OpenAI both immediately reneged their safety/wartime limits when the feds confronted and threatened them. Now their technologies are being used in a brushfire war half the world over.
        • platinumrad 3mo ago
          This little special military operation: https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-hormuz-strait-war-july-20-2026-8b37952906cbec6351fdcc47a0fa6297 https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-hormuz-strait-war-july-20...
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• eurekin 3mo ago
  I have a feeling this comment will make history
• gasstation 3mo ago
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• adornKey 3mo ago
  In case there is a decent forum about tech somewhere in the Alibaba cloud, I'll be interested. HN has built a certain unhealthy bias in a lot of subjects. But so far other places haven't gained enough traction, yet.
  • Anonyneko 3mo ago
    It's probably in Chinese, which would cut out most of us here.
    • adornKey 3mo ago
      Sounds like a decent challenge. Needs AI Translation built into the forum infrastructure... But I'd give it a try. Before there was AI, I chatted a few times successfully in Chinese only using some translation tools. Now with AI it should be even easier.
      • tesnorindian 3mo ago
        +1 for AI Translation within HN. This will help us to learn a lot across languages.
  • woctordho 3mo ago
    There is a forum named Zhihu. AI translation works mostly well to translate contents there into English.
• Springtime 3mo ago
  I looked at the comments here but it doesn't appear to be an accurate characterization of the discourse. If anyone has links to such comments shaping the discourse from before the parent posted I'd be interested. There's one top-level comment that's just an opinion of censorship of Qwen models (which might be argued to be politically adjacent if one assumes the censorship is referring to sensitive political subjects) but no specifics and there was a rebuttal reply anyway, while an unrelated top-level comment has a child reply believing China models are commoditizing AI to unseat US based models (could be argued a whiff of politics but also just competition) but it was still a positive impression. Then I went to archive.org to check the earliest crawl of this page (prior to parent's post), but nothing different. So I enabled showdead in my settings to check dead-marked posts and there's one post near the bottom talking about how Chinese models are rarely ground-up foundational models, while another dead comment had an angle about it's a geopolitical strategy (neither of which had replies). Ironically some of the dead comments are praising Qwen.
  • anon5868 3mo ago
    The comment timestamps already show how old the posts are[1] Putting politics aside, technical chatter is scarce in large‑model discussions here. Take the K3 release as a case study: out of more than 1,200 comments, how many actually delve into topics like LatentMoE, KDA, or attention residuals? And how many are offering guesses about per‑head Muon or SiTU? Users interested in this should look at imageboards [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966211
• raxxorraxor 3mo ago
  Perfectly in agreement, but in many places politics were forced into geek spaces. Formerly nobody cared which country you came from. I think anyone that used open models will have had contact with Qwen. China currently does the most work here, simple as that.
  • TomK32 3mo ago
    You might want to ignore politics all day long, but rather sooner than later it's politics that will creep into your life and take an interest in whatever things that politicians mis-understand about your little niche.
    • orangeboats 3mo ago
      Christ. This again. Sometimes people just want to geek out and talk about technical things, this isn't rocket science, is it? Yes, those people mostly do realize the importance of understanding and discussing politics. But that doesn't mean _every single_ thread must devolve into a political discourse, especially when those discourses have a general tendency to lead to nowhere. It gets real tiring real fast... I am willing to bet my 20 cents that you don't talk about saving the environment every single time you eat. And the reason is much the same -- it gets tiring. Anyway. If you want to make a political statement, why not do it in a more suitable thread rather than a thread simply about the release of a model? It's not like HN strictly bans political threads.
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• TomK32 3mo ago
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  • tomhow 3mo ago
    Please don't reply to anyone like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here, and none of us would like it if we were spoken to this way due mainly to our nationality. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• kwanbix 3mo ago
  > human rights and all that rubbish Crazy that you think human rights are rubbish. It clearly paints where china and its population is headed.
  • orangeboats 3mo ago
    I think interpreting the word too literally may not result in a productive discussion here. Especially taking into account that the original comment is translated from another language. All things considered, it seems plenty obvious to me that "rubbish" is used to express the commenter's frustration. More particularly, their frustration about how the discussion always devolves into non-technical discourse (the actual thing that they are referring to when they say "rubbish", and "human rights" is one example of such discourse) anytime China is mentioned. They are frustrated because they think this is in direct contrary to the Hacker part of Hacker News, because Hackers should be more interested in the technology.
• synergy20 3mo ago
  you probably are overly sensitive and biased, do not forget transformer is the only 'original' for AI so far, the 'original aspirations' nowadays are just incremental improvements. human rights are not rubbish by the way, you might earn high salary now, dare to criticize Mr.Xi at all? you could be in jail and lose everything overnight. without human rights, tech is fragile and mostly harmful in the end.
• egorfine 3mo ago
  I have asked local Qwen 3.6 What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and it refuses to answer no matter how I ask. This is why. On a more serious note, I am immensely grateful for Qwen and I'm rooting for chinese models as opposed to American models - due to the general direction where US models are going.
• stiltzkin 3mo ago
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• tracker1 3mo ago
  It's a western site in English where a bulk of users are in the US, which has an adversarial relationship to the US... where many working in IT aren't even allowed to consider Chinese services or products directly (even if what you're getting was half made in China or controlled spaces). I can't even consider Chinese AI tools for my own use on my own time on my own hardware without potentially risking firing or worse. Yeah, it's cool on a technical level.. but the "open" part of this and K3, etc. is of limited use depending on how/where you can actually use it yourself. Trust is another issue entirely.
  • fc417fc802 3mo ago
    > the "open" part of this and K3, etc. is of limited use depending on how/where you can actually use it yourself. ... from servers owned and operated in the US by US providers? Go check out the list of providers on ex openrouter for ex the latest deepseek model. Some of them even fall under the zero data retention agreement.
    • tracker1 3mo ago
      I'm not saying that nobody can use it or consider it... I'm only saying a lot of people literally cannot/should-not. For example, I'm currently working for a local government office on elections management software... It's a no-go from the get-go for me... AI, in general is not allowed, though a couple groups in the city do have copilot access. Even if it's running on US hardware, without Chinese comms, that doesn't mean it's completely safe... there are complex attack paths that have and do happen. StuxNet was a long time ago, and it's only gotten worse and escalated from there. Not every job/position/application needs this level of paranoia, but don't completely discount it because you don't have to worry about it.
      • fc417fc802 3mo ago
        Sure but at that point effectively you're taking about stuff related to national security which is essentially an edge case and inevitably tightly regulated with all sorts of hoops to jump through.
• andriy_koval 3mo ago
  > That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source competitions—it’s got nothing to do with politics there are plenty oss geeks in US, but they don't have access to similar compute, alegelly subsidized by Chinese government.
• nullc 3mo ago
  > That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source competitions the lag is because closed ai orgs are sucking up most of the talent and monopolizing resources. Not that your criticism of HN comments aren't deserved-- but the people commenting here are not usually people who would be doing something useful otherwise.
• sam345 3mo ago
  Oh please. Yes it's what it is about. China stealing western technology and flooding the market with underpriced stolen ip to bolster dependency.
• tesnorindian 3mo ago
  Chinese open weights models have liberated the world from Western exploitation. Great respect for Chinese students especially those who returned from foreign countries after their graduation and their research on AI.
• alexgoodhart 3mo ago
  The United States and China are both extremely powerful governments with dispositions towards their own citizens and the outside world that are unequivocally despicable. I don’t think that the discussion of Chinese tech devolves but you’re right that China’s geopolitics flow into the convo easily while America’s does not. This website isn’t exactly a forum for niche experts of every type. It seems more like a group organized around respect for the people who actually can speak at length and specificity about technology, while ultimately most of us are just well informed and tinker-level consumers.
• senordevnyc 3mo ago
  starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish? To be honest, we Chinese IT professionals possess a genuine geek spirit. An incredible amount of damage has been done in the world by "geeks" who lack a sense of care for ethics, human rights, "and all that rubbish".
• yanzhang0219 3mo ago
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