Of course they do. To China, Russia is a cheap mafia-owned gas station. It can no longer provide any real business opportunities thanks to sanctions; see how the Russian part of Belt and Road got shut down and everything moved south to Kazakhstan.
Long term, Russia used to be a strategic problem to China, as its huge, aggressive direct neighbor. This problem has now been solved, but helping Russia develop would risk it becoming a threat again in a generation or two.
You're missing that the worst thing that could happen to China is a Russian collapse.
China wants Ukraine to end like Afghanistan: an embarrassing and gradual defeat of the US/West - leaving behind billions in cutting edge military hardware - after a decade of being financially and militarily drained, while having nothing to show for it. Russia is the Taliban that can make that possible, and while you don't necessarily want them to be too powerful, you definitely don't want them to just collapse.
Not to mention the US will get even more ideas if they "win" in Ukraine. From the Chinese perspective (and the perspective of much of the world), Russia is currently the anchor on US imperialist aspirations.
The real big loss for China, is Germany, who has chosen to obliterate its purchasing power as part of this war. That's the loss of a huge trading partner and quite unfortunate.
In reality Ukraine has become Afghanistan for Russia. Embarrassing military defeat? Check. Leaving behind billions in hardware? Check. Financially and militarily drained? Check. All things that have already happened to Russia.
Conversely other than expendable munitions hardly any of the Western capital equipment in Ukraine like M777, Caesar, MLRS, HIMARS and air defence vehicles seem to have been lost. Even if they were, the only reason those things existed is to fight Russia anyway, job done. None of them are particularly relevant to a conflict with China. That's why when the Marine Corps pivoted to focusing on the Pacific theatre they ditched all their tanks.
I don't think Russia has the same cultural attitude toward casualties and attrition that the US has, and it seems to me that their objective is more than a pure grab of territory.
> Embarrassing military defeat? Check.
The war is ongoing. I have a couple of friends who share your mentality toward it, but perhaps it's better to be doubtful of the outcome and cautious about Russia's next steps.
Petroleum-based economies operate better in high-price environments. Sanctions can be painful but with oil above $80, there's no easy way to financially drain a petrostate. They keep pumping and selling. Russia's strategic position gives it unique power to manipulate the petroleum markets by affecting supply to key markets in ways that induce price volatility. Separately, the nuclear threat is real and it's hard to imagine that a country with so substantial a destructive capability is militarily drained. It's true that some young people fled Russia due to the mobilization; I met one such man earlier this month and talking to him gave me a greater understanding of Russian public sentiment toward the war. Still, it seems unreasonable to evaluate Russia's manpower without putting it in the context of the size of the substantially smaller Ukrainian military.
> I don't think Russia has the same cultural attitude toward casualties and attrition that the US has, and it seems to me that their objective is more than a pure grab of territory.
And yet they eventually left Afghanistan. The casualties became too much, and arguably helped toward the collapse of the USSR.
Putin may be willing to accept unlimited casualties, but the Russian population isn't. Not for annexing eastern Ukraine.
> The war is ongoing. I have a couple of friends who share your mentality toward it, but perhaps it's better to be doubtful of the outcome and cautious about Russia's next steps.
And Russia lost it before it began. Nobody knows what exactly a "win" looks like for them today, but the perfect scenario for them, Ukraine folding and them installing a friendly refine is no longer possible. Even if Russia manages to win in the field with the poorly trained conscripts with museum pieces they're currently fielding, they don't have the manpower to keep the tens of millions of Ukrainian citizens that will survive under their control. And as we can all see, Ukrainians won't give up. So there is no scenario in which Russia wins. Nuking Ukraine gets them a nuclear wasteland, radiation probably impacting them, and obliterates any chance of relations and trade being restored to the status quo ante bellum with pretty much most of the world, so that's not a win.
Putin probably knows this (hopefully he hasn't become that dumb). Maybe he's stalling trying to think of a way to paint anything as a win.
One scenario that would be a clear win for Putin is forcing Ukraine to formally concede the captured territories. After that he will have some peaceful time to prepare for the next round and wage the economic war against the West, where having the largest energy producers and largest manufacturer on his side, he has decent chances to win some ground as well
On top of that, the value for R&D and marketing the real-world demonstrations of these systems provide is immense. Sales of HIMARS are gonna go through the roof, and the next generation will be based on lessons learned against Russia's own current-generation weaponry, not the shitty export versions they give to places like Syria.
The US yelled at Turkey for buying Russian air defense systems because they feared information getting back to Russia on how well they fare against F-35s. That conceptual risk is now very real, but for Russia; the West now knows how to target Russian air defenses with drones, how good Russian counter-battery fire is, etc.
I’d say the real problem is not the technical insecurity - that’s a result. The real problem is in the last paragraph: the fact that banks are incentivized to use insecure mechanisms by being able to shed any responsibility simply by denying customers claim.
Logging is a good example of how the opposite to what you say tends to be true. Have you ever wondered why Windows logs are so useless? It’s not windows-specific; when you look at journald you’ll see plenty of structured junk; the actually useful parts are plaintext.
“Every program as a function” would be a disaster for reliability and security. There’s a reason no mature operating system does that, apart from tiny embedded ones.
OP is right. Functional programming is more secure and reliable than imperative programming. There are no buffer overflows when code is formally specified and verified. It's next to impossible to do this for imperative code but very easy to do for functional code [0].
So what makes you assume it was “homeless and junkies” who mugged them, and not some Christian republican human trash?
(“Human trash” as a counterpoint to your “junkie” slur; also note I’m not really interested in _your_ response, I already know what you are; the point of this comment is to show dang’s skewed moderation criteria. Might not work this time, so I’ll continue doing it for a while, of course without annotating it.)
Ok, since you're obviously not interested in using HN as intended, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I really don't think that's the case. I've had enough exchanges with dang and observed enough of his moderation (visible to anyone by looking at his comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang>) that the notion that HN's moderators apply undue favouritism to HN companies seems ... unlikely. There are notable cases in which the bloom is well off the rose --- Reddit, Qurora, and Uber, notably --- that your argument has little support.
Instead I think that this really is a case of well-intentioned moderation rules, generally quite reasonably applied, having pernicious exceptions and edge cases. I suspect dang himself would tend to agree that tone and topics tend to have a status quo advantage, as I'd noted above. He and I have had this disagreement a few times, and the ultimate mission of supporting intellectual substance (as 93po noted above) is almost always the standard that he defends.
Though interestingly the top result by popularity searching "by:dang intellectual" shows a vehement defence of a progressive viewpoint against an oppressive one:
Again: I think this is an instance of disagreement, not a pronounced or intentional site moderation bias. Mostly I'm in awe of dang's patience, consistency, and level-headedness in moderation. It's a tough job.
And sometimes, or probably often, the role of fighting an inequitable or ineffective status quo involves a lot of repetitive messaging.
I don’t mean favoritism towards specific companies; I mean suppressing opinions that are inconvenient to companies. For example, blatant anti-Chinese xenophobia or hate speech towards economically disadvantaged seem to be welcome here, but just try to link something to Christian fundamentalism, or try to point out the kinds of hate speech that is still tolerated by American mainstream.
I've just banned you because you're not only ignoring our many warnings to stop breaking the site guidelines, you've crossed into outright trolling with it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33265508).
I want to add something here though. I've poured countless hours of effort over many years into telling people that they can't post that way about China—I even made a partial list at one point: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. So you could not have picked a worse example. I routinely get accused of being a secret communist agent or (as if it were a bad thing) Chinese myself, just for trying to apply HN's rules evenhandedly. (Everyone accuses the mods of being secretly on their enemies' side. You're doing the same thing here.)
Not that China is a special case; we're against all xenophobia and nationalistic flamewar, including the flavors you yourself have posted. Same goes for religious flamewar, which you've also posted a lot of. The idea that HN moderation favors Christian fundamentalism is just silly—it's an inversion of your own feelings*. The only thing we favor about religion is avoiding tedious internet mudslinging about it. That applies equally to any religion (or irreligion).
Plenty of bad posts do escape moderation, but that's because we only see a small portion of what gets posted. There's far too much for us to read it all, and we rely heavily on users to tell us about the worst bits so we can moderate them.
* People routinely imagine that the moderators are secretly in favor of whatever they themselves dislike. This is a cognitive bias, and there are always enough data points floating around to "prove" it.
p.s. as for "opinions that are inconvenient to companies"... that's pretty much what HN threads consist of.
I am a harsh critic of most moderation but I will say I think the more likely motivation here is to make sure HN doesn't turn into a cesspool or become overly unprofessional. Politics is inherently both of those things and it makes sense to suppress the worst of it.
I don't think your attitude is necessarily a wrong one, I think you are misunderstanding Amazon.
The place is a literal cult. In every meeting, no matter how short, you hear people argue not points but leadership principles. "We need to learn and be curious about this ! Lets dive deep!", "Sorry, no, we need to have a bias for action. We've learned enough, lets do this.", two way door / one way door.
You can think you are going to jump into the cats mouth and steal some cheese, but theres a chance that you get changed into a literal cult member by this organization.
One way to fix the problem would be to somehow feed Copilot a corpora of closed source code. This would either force Microsoft to add necessary copyright protections, or - which is imho more likely - would prove that those protections are already in place, but disabled for open source code.
A good start would be to take a leaked code of Windows, and then mechanically adjust all the names, constant values, and code formatting, and then publish it and observe.
Such as USA with $11B of goods manufactured by forced labour in prison camps?
(Note: this is not whataboutism, it’s pointing out hypocrisy.)