The flamewar comments you posted to this thread have been so hellish, and you have broken the site guidelines so egregiously, that I've banned this account.
I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted good comments–but we have to moderate based on the worst things an account does, and what you did in this thread is completely not ok.
Nationalistic flamewar is not welcome on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Same for ideological flamewar and the other flavors too—and yes, the rules apply regardless of who you're for or against. If anyone would like confirmation of this, there's a counterparty to this comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746593.
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.
Dong Jianbiao, the father of Dong Yaoqiong, who authorities disappeared for splashing ink on a poster of President Xi Jinping in 2018, died in a prison in Hunan province.
The new Measures on the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services came into effect in March, prohibiting individuals or groups from teaching or otherwise propagating religion online without official approval. A widely used Catholic app, CathAssist, shut down in August because it was unable to obtain a license.
Authorities in Jilin province forcibly disappeared human rights lawyer Tang Jitian.
A court in Shandong province held secret trials of prominent legal scholar Xu Zhiyong and human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi for “subversion.” Their verdicts were unknown at time of writing. The men were detained in 2020 and 2019 respectively after organizing a small gathering to discuss human rights and democracy issues.
The flamewar comments you posted to this thread have been so hellish, and you have broken the site guidelines so egregiously, that I've banned this account.
I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted good comments–but we have to moderate based on the worst things an account does, and what you did in this thread is completely not ok.
Nationalistic flamewar is not welcome on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Same for ideological flamewar and the other flavors too—and yes, the rules apply regardless of who you're for or against. If anyone would like confirmation of this, there's a counterparty to this comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746615.
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.
For all the faults of western democracies, the Chinese Communist Party is far worse. That’s not anti-China propaganda.
You comment on this issue a surprising amount, and clearly feel strongly about the US’ views on China. I’d be curious as to exactly how you feel China is being judged unfairly.
Julian Assange, currently being chemically lobotomized in one of the Wests' most heinously vile palaces of torture - without trial, without justice - would like you to very carefully reconsider your position with regards to political dissidents.
So would Australias Witnesses J, K, L, M, N and O .. who have been disappeared into a military Star Court, for the sake of political dissidence.
Be very careful with your castigation of China. We have far, far more political dissidents in our prisons than you know about. And that is by design.
What I mean to emphasize is that net net, one expects more of the semblance of a rule of law in western jurisdictions. It's why cases like Julian Assange are as controversial as they are, with public organizations in USA willing to make the case to support him and inquire on his well-being.
Our media is controlled but there is semblance of free press. You don't have even that in China. If you're a dissident in China you'd be hard pressed garnering support from any org.
I don't presume to have a complete picture. Maybe if I did it may suggest USA is in reality more like China. But from all that I've seen, authoritarian governments like China continue to have serious shortcomings in the kinds of freedoms we take for granted in the West.
Wikipedia is so funny. I like to read topics about contraversial stuff related to my region of Balkans, both hr. (Croatian) and sr. (Serbian) versions. For the same topic, one side says national heroes, the other war criminals. One side's terrorists are other side's freedom fighters. One side's nazi collaborators are other side's innocent communist victims. And so on.
So, what's the truth? I guess whatever one chooses to believe. I like to create my truths from many different, contraversial or sometimes completely opposing sources on same topic. Your links are all in english language, in en. section of Wikipedia.
> In May, a court in Hainan province sentenced former journalist Luo Changping to seven months in prison for a Weibo post that questioned China’s justification for its involvement in the Korean War.
> By all human rights measures, it is worse. Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of religion … you name it.
I don't think anyone is saying China has "more freedom". But that does not seem to automatically imply that's "worse", which seems to be your ground assumption!
If you believe more freedom is always better, do you agree that social media should have absolutely no moderation? If you don't, then it seems to me you concede that freedom is good, but up to a limit. Then the question become, does China have the right amount of freedom or the USA does? How about the EU, which is quite noticeably less free than the USA? I don't think the answer to these questions are nearly as obvious as you seem to believe by making such blank statements, which leads me to agree with the other person that this is something someone helplessly affected by good old propaganda would do without realizing it (good propaganda is like that, you have no idea you're affected, trying to recognize that is very important).
You have conspicuously avoided addressing the specific, systemic human rights abuses unique to China.
Instead, your post employs a series of rhetorical tactics aimed at stifling constructive dialogue:
First, you assert a false equivalency between China and the USA/EU by trivializing the qualitative difference in freedom levels, thereby attempting to normalize authoritarianism.
Second, you use a slippery slope argument about social media moderation to suggest that all limitations on freedom are essentially the same — equating limited, private content moderation with systemic human rights abuses by government.
Third, you engage in an ad hominem attack by accusing me of being influenced by propaganda without providing substantive counter-arguments.
Were I to adopt your approach, I could easily make similar sweeping ad hominem accusations based on your behavior here.
This response is comic. Are you sure I am the one stifling dialogue?
I did not assert any false equivalence, that's your mistaken interpretation. Given your poor reading skills, I agree there's no reason to continue a dialogue, actually.
Your first false equivalence arises out of trivializing the qualitative differences in freedom between China and the USA/EU, implicitly framing the limitations in China as comparable to those in democratic societies.
This is misleading given the severe restrictions on human rights, freedom of speech, and rule of law in an authoritarian regime like China.
Your second false equivalence is in your equating of limited, private content moderation by a social network with systemic human rights abuses by government.
Sure, but China has lifted nearly a billion out of poverty in the last half century. Would it be superior if that didn’t happen but there was no censorship?
Let's makes this clear: when we say China is bad, we mean the government. The CCP. We're not saying Chinese people are inherently bad.
To credit the "a billion being lifted out of poverty" to "China" (remember in this context we're talking about the government) is just like saying "the US" invented PC, network, lightbulb and the other thousands of good stuff we rely on today.
No, some smart people in the US did that. But it can't be simply credited to "the US".
Chinese people worked hard to lift themselves out of poverty. Did some policies help? Absolutely. But it's not "China lifted them out of poverty".
If it's true, we can even say the US lifted them out of poverty, since the China economy boom came in place when it became the major trade partner of the US. See? The US' foreign policy helped!
I think it’s fair to say that the CCP has hindered that lift more than helped. You could argue that it might not have happened without their involvement, but I think it unlikely that history would be much different. Other than China being a free market economy of course, and maybe everyone learning Chinese instead of English.
If there wasn't censorship and the regime that produced it, many of those people wouldn't need to be "lifted" at all. In a normal country, there's no special effort required from the government to "lift" people from anywhere. Surely, there are still poor people, but not mass poverty that requires heroic efforts to overcome. When did you last hear that Swiss government lifted people out of poverty, for example?
Human rights and human prosperity aren’t mutually exclusive.
On top of which, they did such a terrible job of lifting people out of poverty, they unnecessarily killed tens of millions in the deadliest famine in human history:
Sure. Im saying they did a good thing, you’re saying they did bad. I think lifting a billion out of abject poverty is overall net positive against freedom of speech. There’s no objective way to say one way or another overall.
If you look at removal of poverty China is unquestionably better. There’s simply no unbiased way you could say China is better or worse overall. Any weights you apply to certain things are inherently biased.
Yes, there is an objective way to say that you don't have to institute a fascist totalitarian regime to make people not starve. It is witnessed by the fact that many countries do not have a fascist totalitarian regime, and still do not starve. In fact, mountains of evidence - including in recent Chinese history - point to the fact that a fascist totalitarian government is more likely to cause a mass starvation than to prevent one. Yes, the current fascist dictatorship finally learned how not to make people starve. It doesn't prove it is the only solution to starvation, and the choice is either starvation or fascism - it only makes this particular totalitarian dictatorship a bit less horrible. But still plenty horrible.
I don’t believe you’re engaging in good faith; you are employing tactics meant to stifle discourse:
1. False Equivalence: Suggesting that economic progress and freedom of speech are interchangeable or mutually exclusive is intentionally misleading.
2. Relativism: By stating there's "no objective way" to compare, you are deflecting any form of critical evaluation.
3. Unfalsifiability: Your assertion that any evaluation is "inherently biased" is an unfalsifiable claim meant to immunize your argument from critique.
Existence of "point of view" does not make it subjective. You can think the moon is made of Swiss cheese, that doesn't make its composition subjective, it just makes you wrong.
Criteria like "not starving", "not being murdered", "not being raped", "not being put into concentration camp for following your own religion", "not being imprisoned for criticizing the government" is pretty objective, and I have yet to see a culture where being raped and murdered is praised and desired by people. I am sure whatever are the cultural differences in China, they like starvation, rape, murder and imprisonment as little as we do. So the country which does such things to its citizens, massively, is not "doing well", even if its citizens aren't allowed to say so aloud (and that's another sign it's not doing well - "I can't complain" can mean two things, and in China it means you'd be in prison if you do).
It’s very rare that bicycle is going to mechanically fail and send you flying.
Short of the time I was hit by a car, I’ve never had a bicycling emergency — road or mountain — that I wasn’t able to walk away from through some combination of hoping obstacles and/or putting the bike down in a controlled side-skid.
These are the ones that move super fast with a terrible braking system (one wheel) and zero protective gear right? Never seen one in person but I’ve read chatter and seen a video a while back. I mean anyone that jumps out of an airplane should also be prepared for the chute to not deploy.
I’m guessing the difference is that you dont have to sign a waiver for onewheel riding?
The design, maintenance, and alteration of parachute equipment is regulated by the FAA; equipment must be approved under the FAA’s technical standards, and anyone packing a parachute must be an FAA-licensed rigger.
AFAIK there are no such standards (mandatory or voluntary) applied to Onewheel’s devices.
They could have voluntarily applied hardware and software standards from other safety fields (e.g. automotive engineering), but they apparently chose not to.
As the peer commenter said: move fast and break bones.
There is an extremely vocal segment of cylists who argue that actually, a helmet never saved anyone and if there were no cars at all, no cyclist would ever die.
There’s a time and a place for discussing the merits of helmet usage. An article about a recall of 300,000+ devices should have the article be centered around the safety of the device, not about how a company’s negligence would have been fine if the people wore a helmet.
In my eyes, it’s the same as a journalist talking about how a sexual assault victim wouldn’t have been assaulted if they simply hadn’t gotten drunk that night.
Background updates are a built-in, supported, documented feature, widely employed by applications on the platform, and accessible to anyone that reads the two pages of documentation required to use them:
“Pushing background updates to your App — Deliver notifications that wake your app and update it in the background.”
They're using push notifications in a novel way to provide the app the necessary information to update itself without needing to be connected to the full internet. That's quite a bit beyond "They're using push notifications" and no other app does that AFAIK. Almost all will use the push notification as a notification and trigger an update on app open which would fail.
Give me one example, then. Of an app which uses a notification as an actual app data source and not just as a notification which opens the app. And which also updates the primary app view to reflect this new information.
No other app has updated its app state based on the content of notifications. Slack/Discord/Teams et al (the ones that aren't allowed on free messaging plans) will show you previously cached messages and then an infinite spinner when you open it. Fastmail/Gmail/Outlook et al will show you existing emails but not load the new ones.
Podcast players like Overcast use push notifications to learn about new episodes of podcasts that should be downloaded in the background. Presumably text-based RSS readers do the same.
Where are the push notifications originating from? Does Overcast have a cloud service that polls the RSS feeds and then sends the notification? I use AntennaPod on Android, and it definitely doesn't do anything like that -- the feed list is stored locally, and the feeds are polled locally.
Slack/Discord/Teams? Those are desktop web applications hosted via Electron. Failing to leverage basic platform functionality is practically their telos.
It’s a trivial, documented, supported, long-standing API for a common use-case. It is widely used, as documented, for its intended purpose.
I cannot share information about specific applications.
No one is asking for a survey of apps that do this. You’re making the claim that it’s far from rare, so you have enough knowledge to make this claim. Share with us the smallest piece of your knowledge by naming one single other app that does this. It’s the least you can do since you’re making the claim. Please, I’m very curious!
Do you genuinely believe it’s uncommon for applications to leverage this useful, trivial, long-standing platform API for its intended and explicitly documented purpose?
I can’t imagine why you’d believe that, but another commenter already provided the requested single example up-thread.
I really think you’ve missed the point. Opening any of those apps after receiving the notification requires a network connection to then update. It’s not done via the push notification itself. I have never seen that happen in my experience. Flighty does, hence why it’s deemed clever.
Background notifications can and do carry arbitrary application data, and are used to update the application state in the background.
This is their intended purpose, it’s what they’re documented to do, it’s how Apple intends them to be used, and it’s common application behavior.
This is literally a plainly documented feature of the platform. It’s not clever or unique or unusual — it’s a simple feature that Apple specifically documents.
I cannot even begin to fathom why people are confused about this, and it’s truly mind-boggling that this has required a thread at all.
Slack/Discord/Teams are non-native applications that do not leverage the platform’s support for updating application state via notifications. That does not mean the use of background notifications is unusual or rare. It is not.
I don’t know what you have against Flighty but you through considerable lengths in the thread below to spend time on letting everyone know how unimpressed you are about their efforts.
Your lack of amazement is duly noted, I suggest you don’t waste any more time on it.
That said, I, like others, are indeed impressed for a couple of reasons.
For starters because of the simple fact that they’ve found a novel way to use background notifications to provide users without unrestricted internet access with flight updates.
Contrary to what you imply, and subsequently fail to substantiate, there aren’t many, if any, other apps that use background notifications in such a novel way, certainly not in a way to circumvent restrictions and limitations on data connections.
Moreover, I have never seen background notifications being used to push concrete data to apps. This is because there are severe payload size constraints on notifications, including background notifications.
Typically when background notifications have been used, it simply contains an instruction to download data from a remote server, something that wouldn’t work on a limited connection.
Instead, Flighty uses the minimal payload size to push the actual concrete data used by the app.
Additionally there are some limitations in how often a background notification gets delivered to the tune of a few times per hour, worse yet, delivery of these notification is inconsistent because it’s beyond the app’s control of they get delivered at all.
To account for this, Flighty will use the background notifications to update the data where it can and make estimations in times it cannot not until the next time it can receive an update.
I’d go as far as call that amazing engineering.
You might not and I don’t know your qualms with Flighty, but you’re doing a poor job of convincing people to see it your way.
You’re right, I see that as embarrassingly trivial. This whole thread is inane — if using a simple API is “amazing engineering”, what do you call the actual amazing engineering you’re holding in your hand right now?
I have nothing against Flighty — this has nothing to do with Flighty. Background notifications are trivial and all apps can and should be using them to solve this type of problem. It’s detrimental to have folks mistakenly operating under the belief that this is complex, unusual, or difficult.
Sure, the payload size is limited, but it’s not impossibly small, and custom keys with arbitrary payload are explicitly and obviously documented as supported.
Overly-effusive praise doesn’t do anyone any favors.
I build AI/ML systems. I think delivering digital content through alternative pipes is amazing work. It has applicability far beyond simple aerospace wifi paywalls.
