Fermilab Experiment Finds No Evidence That We Live in a Hologram - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/fermilab-experiment-finds-no-evidence-that-we-live-in-a-1746130140 <comment><USER2> I don't know any physics, but I did enjoy this grumpy blogpost: [http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-fermilabs- holo...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-fermilabs-holometer- experiment.html)

<comment><USER3> It seems to be one of the "negative results are bad" category opinions, manifested through a grumpy blog post. I don't share that opinion. I think negative result is sometimes as valuable as positive, in that it allows us to remove some competing theories from the table and focus on the good ones.

<comment><USER4> It's actually more of a "this experiment isn't good enough to measure what you are trying to measure." If that's the case, then it is a waste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those of us who do not wish to give page views to Gawker: [https://archive.is/ybW22](https://archive.is/ybW22)

</comment><comment><USER6> Legal disclaimer: I know nothing at all about physics, prepare eye roll. Isn't the fact that certain quantum particles only "exist" when measured validation that they get "computed" when needed?

<comment><USER7> It's very difficult to explain the quantum mechanics without math, and most of the "explanations" without math are misleading or plain wrong.

This is a usual misconception that I saw a few times before. I'll repot an old comment that I made in a similar article (with some minor changes):

Quite the opposite, the quantum version of the word needs more process power instead of less process power.

When you use Classic Mechanics, you only need to "compute" one trajectory.

With Quantum Mechanics the system may have a many choices, and you must keep the details of all the possibilities. The easy case is a qbit that only has two choices. But if you have a few qbits nearby, they may interact and now you must "compute" the 2^n possibilities. This is why if we can ever build a quantum computer, it would be exponentially more powerful than a classic computer.

<comment><USER8> >This is why if we can ever build a quantum computer, it would be exponentially more powerful than a classic computer.

The truth is a little more complicated than that. If we could precisely inspect the quantum state of a system, then quantum computers trivially give us an exponential speed up. However, once we measure the result of the computation, we collapse the state down to a pure state[0], and all future measurements of the system will give us the same result. This means that we would need to repeat the computation an exponential number of times to get the full result with a bounded probability of error.

As it turns out, there are some tricks we can do with interference to improve efficiency, and for some problems achieve an exponential speed up.

[0] Or rather, according to the many worlds interpenetration, we become entangled with the system; however this is one of those cases where the Copenhagen interpretation is actually easier to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well it wouldn't be a very good hologram then, would it?

</comment><comment><USER10> Related - discussion of the cited article from symmetry from two days ago [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10674526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10674526)</comment>


After killing investigation, Bloomberg News sought to silence reporter's wife - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/04/14/828565428/bloomberg-news-killed-investigation-fired-reporter-then-sought-to-silence-his-wi <comment><USER2> The article that Bloomberg refused to publish, that was later published at NYT, is here (no prior discussion at HN):

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang- jianlin-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin- abillionaire-at-the-intersection-of-business-and-power-in-china.html)

<comment><USER3> Off-topic, but I decided to finally make that free account NYT insists on, and NYT returns the error "Please enter a valid email address." It's a @fastmail.com address with no weird characters. Anyone else had that trouble before? Even more interesting is that just changing the domain to a personal one that uses one of the new gTLDs makes it work. I would have maybe expected the opposite to happen. Are they blacklisting Fastmail?

<comment><USER4> It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service) bother blacklisting Fastmail – isn't Fastmail a paid service (i.e. less likely to be used by freeloaders, or by people making throwaway accounts)?

In any case, no matter how much they want to squeeze money out of new users, the NYT has more incentive to _not_ have a super strict blacklist, or overly onerous sign-up process. Signup numbers are still metrics that a company vice president/middle manager can brag about, and NYT's initiative of mandating free registration seems much too new (e.g. as a comparison, they had totally free access for more then a decade, then a leaky paywall for several additional years) for them to already have hard enforcement policies in place.

<comment><USER3> > It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service) > bother blacklisting Fastmail

If it's not a blacklist, I think it'd be even stranger for it to be a whitelist, precisely for the reasons you mentioned. mzkply's comment makes me think that it might have to do with Fastmail's email aliases, which is the closest thing they have that's like Mailinator (an email provider that _is_ frequently blacklisted for signups), but I don't think it's similar enough that this makes sense.

I agree with everything you said about NYT's incentives, but that leaves the question raised by this experience.

I opened up a chat with NYT to ask about it, but I was left waiting for an agent there for an hour before I decided to just close the chat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One could write this article about Bloomberg ... or one could write this article about China. I think the China part of the story is more relevant and newsworthy at this point, considering how things have unfolded in the years since. The news company probably didn't decide all on its own to pursue this remarkable effort to kill a story that had not much to do with itself.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. Making the headline here about Bloomberg smells of the exact kind of tiptoeing around the CCP that the article discusses. The real story here, and probably of this decade, is the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government.

<comment><USER7> >> The real story here, and probably of this decade, is the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government.

...with the full cooperation of western corporations.

<comment><USER8> ...and the full cooperation of the western elites and the government.

<comment><USER9> Probably because elites in china enjoy a huge advantage, and elites in the west would want that kind of advantage. If you got the power and money in China, with the right kind of connections you can literally get away with murder.

<comment><USER10> Or CCP is a shell for communist westerners to try out their social experiments on other nations. Communism is itself a western import to China, not an indigenous worldview.

<comment><USER11> I've got to congratulate you. I've been a conspiracy nut for decades but I've _never_ heard _anyone_ suggest that the Chinese Communists are a front for Western control.

* slow clap*

But no. Study the history of the Middle Kingdom. They invented totalitarian bureaucratic central government centuries ago.

<comment><USER10> Well, communism is not indigenous to China. It is a western idea imported by western educated Chinese intellectuals, who then indoctrinated Mao.

Whether the western control is direct or indirect, it is indisputable that the CCP is not an indigenous movement. It is a product of western ideological imperialism.

As a very visual example, go travel around China, visiting areas with greater and lesser CCP control. The less the control, the more elements of traditional China are around. The greater the control, the more it looks like a replica of yet another Western metropolis.

I saw this very clearly when visiting Xinjing province near Tibet and hiking through the villages. The normal part of the village has traditional, hand made housing, beautiful craftsmenship, great food. Then, on the outskirts of the villages, were towering, empty apartment blocks. The CCP planned to move the villagers out of their traditional homes into these huge apartment blocks they could more easily control.

So, yes, most clearly the CCP is a product of the west, not ethnic Chinese culture.

<comment><USER11> Your earlier comment sounded to me like you were saying that current Western communist elites are somehow controlling the CCP, and that's why they are going along with "the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government." But that doesn't make sense to me because there aren't any Western communist elites anymore, are there?

But if you're just pointing out the Western origin of the foundations of Chinese Communism them, yes, I agree the whole thing could be seen, from the POV of the West, as being confronted with a kind of social/political prodigal son. I'm so used to thinking of communism as an Eastern thing, but you're right (again).

<comment><USER10> There aren't any obvious communist elites, but there is a weird whitewashing of communism going on. And, a communist china fits the purposes of capitalist west quite well. So, I would say if there are western elite controlling China, they are doing it for personal gain, not ideological.

<comment><USER11> > There aren't any obvious communist elites, but there is a weird whitewashing > of communism going on.

Well the CCP is stumping hard on the propaganda front. They've shoved the Dalai Lama out of the spot light, etc., and they're working hard to influence Western media, and IMO too many are happy to go along with that to make money. Don't get me started on tech companies. I just don't think that there's a lot of secretly pro-communists in the West.

> And, a communist china fits the purposes of capitalist west quite well.

How?

> So, I would say if there are western elite controlling China, they are doing > it for personal gain, not ideological.

Ah but isn't that true of all elites globally? I'm not trying to "whataboutism" here, I just assume that most if not all elites are ideologically agnostic.

<comment><USER10> The Chinese government seems more than happy to exploit its people for western money, up to strip mining their citizens' organs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Aside from Bloomberg's scummy behavior, this story highlights the eternal dilemma of journalism. To write good stories, you need access to the subjects. But if the stories make the subjects look bad, you lose access.

Coupled with the fact that newspapers don't always make a lot of money these days, and often rely on wealthy benefactors that make their money in other ways, you can end up in an awkward spot where one wrong story can damage a newspaper's base of information but also it's financial foundations. I don't think there's any good answer to this question.

<comment><USER13> They likely don't make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link.

A second point (that actually justifies the practice of paywall bypass,) is that who is willing to pay for news when news outlets function frequently as PR organs for the constituencies they "cover?" The idea that you have to be nice to subjects in order to cover them is nonsense. What that actually means is that reporters lack courage or even basic training on how to get stories from confrontational subjects. So what if China gets pissed off. Publishing Xinhua-approved stories isn't journalism, it's PR. It's not different than publishing DNC or RNC talking points. If all the journalists in China get kicked out, that still doesn't preclude covering China — it just makes it harder — but it's already hard, so there isn't any difference. By letting China dictate coverage, that's worse than no coverage at all since only an approved version of the story is all that gets out and people then are inclined to accept that "truth" without challenge because $some_international_media_outlet reported it.

China's obfuscations and outright lies during the Coronavirus situation makes this topic even more noteworthy — outlets promoting and parroting the CCP official line have been deadly; one example was China officially reporting that the Wuhan Coronavirus wasn't human-to-human transmissible even after they knew that to be completely false and they themselves instituted mitigation for human-to-human transmission that, according to them, couldn't happen. Even more ridiculously, the UN appointed China to a human rights panel on free speech.

<comment><USER14> >They likely don't make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link.

As a paid subscriber of several digital-only newspapers, I only want them to publish their news as publicly as possible, so I _and others_ can know better. Walls don't help.

When we stop pretending that the news must be rarified to be of value, then we may start supporting actual journalism for what it does best: investigate and publish, instead of sell the news as a product. So as the readers, we should support them, not buy them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tren-hard Did Bloomberg change his opinions on China when they OK'd the "The Big Hack" in 2018?

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the- big-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack- amazon-apple-supermicro-and-beijing-respond)

The controversy that unfolded from that was massive.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik- wemple/wp/2018/10/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik- wemple/wp/2018/10/22/your-move-bloomberg/)

<comment><USER15> You would think they would have fired the reporters who faked that story.

<comment><USER16> Did they fake it? Or were they mistaken?

<comment><USER17> Are you asking if there is evidence that it was intentionally wrong reporting?

No, AFAIK there was no such evidence.

Are you asking how, in good faith, such a factually wrong story could have made it to publication?

We also don't know.

Are you asking why BB has not retracted it after being called out multiple times?

Maybe hubris, maybe profit motive.

At the end of the day, why would we trust anything BB publishes about China? They have Terminal licenses to sell and they don't want to jeopardize their market.

<comment><USER16> Yeah that's pretty much what I was asking.

It was a weird story with weird reactions from the companies involved ... but at least I never ran across anything that explained how the reporting played out / if there was anything 'faked" or anything like that.

The whole thing seems to not have many answers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It really brings home the importance of freedom ... elsewhere.

It seems like a very real likelihood that China would choose to track people's sentiments about China elsewhere ... and at will pressure outside companies to remove or simply not hire people who they wish to punish / discourage.

Post a winnie the pooh pic / are on the list? Good luck...

<comment><USER18> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, 1963

Pretty apt for our global society, too.

<comment><USER19> This argument is one that the left fails to make perennially. That improving the conditions of one necessarily improves the conditions of all and that policy that focuses on the most vulnerable helps everyone more still.

The left will win Wall Street (and thus elections) when they finally show that social programs provide mitigation allowing Wall Street to minimize losses and a multiplier to increase their earnings.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. The left should learn from the Trump campaign, who put a positive, constructive spin on a fundamentally anti-establishment platform. Trump's MAGA vs. Bernie's angry finger-pointing

<comment><USER21> So much to learn there. It's clear who the beneficiaries of that fraudulent platform are. Quite similar to China's tack, isn't it?

<comment><USER20> You can admire some aspects of the campaign/platform without agreeing with the people/policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was a long time Bloomberg Businessweek subscriber until last year. Starting around 2017 China started taking out multi page ads at the beginning of each issue. (Or at least that's when I noticed).

The editorial slant became predictably sympathetic to China as well. So much so that by the end when I canceled my subscription there were many outright pro-China propaganda pieces.

Interestingly the editorial slant also went much further left, politically. Not sure if the two are related.

<comment><USER23> Is that somewhat unprecedented to have a government post ads in a publication which are not related to spreading the word about hiring or something. What exactly did those full page ads have as content?

<comment><USER24> I dob't know if it is the same content but China Daily, a daily newspaper owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, has purchased full page ads in American news papers that look like news articles.

[https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flouts-fed- la...](https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flouts-fed-law-to- publish-propaganda-in-ny-times-wapo/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Plain text version:

[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=828565428](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=828565428)

</comment><comment><USER26> > "They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the > wife," author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher says. "I was just an > appendage of their employee. I was not a human being."

I understand she sees it that way, but I keep coming to the exact opposite conclusion. They knew she was a respected journalist with enough clout to be heard and a riveting story of fleeing Beijing for fear of their lives. They were clearly afraid of her as an individual.

I'm not defending Bloomberg, but I don't see any easy answers here. Publishing the second investigation would (in their estimation) have shut down all their reporting in China, put more reporters in personal risk / fleeing, and significantly hurt their core revenue.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe we should rethink this idea of billionaire presidents.

The proposition is that their immense wealth makes them immune to pressure and corruption.

To the contrary, they have much, much more to lose than any normal citizen.

What would President Bloomberg, or any other billionaire president, sell us out for to protect their pile and its increase?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not an alt-righter but the news media seems almost as corrupt as our politicians.

<comment><USER29> It's almost like they serve the same people

<comment><USER30> The far right and far right behave similarly -- except the language used differs.

<comment><USER31> It's not one dimensional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> China has been kicking out Western news reporters from highly respected organizations, including WSJ, NYT and WashPost. See article: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-bans-all-u-s-nationals- wo...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-bans-all-u-s-nationals-working-for- the-wall-street-journal-new-york-times-washington-post-whose-press- credentials-end-in-2020-11584464690)

<comment><USER33> > highly respected organizations, including WSJ, NYT and WashPost.

Highly respected by whom? And I believe it was in response to Trump's ban on chinese journalists.

[https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-journalist- associa...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-journalist-association- blasts-us-visa-limits-69427974)

It's not shocking that we'd ban chinese state propagandists and china would ban US state propagandists. It's silly to allow enemy propagandists in your country during a trade war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am very confused by the events and timeline detailed in the article.

Bloomberg (Edit: Bloomberg News) published a story on the Xi family wealth in 2012 and were banned for it. But this article says they were still investigating and writing that story in 2013. And that they buried it. And that they did so to avoid upsetting the CCP etc.

They even have quotes:

"late Oct 2013":

>"It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country," Winkler said. "So, I just don't see that as a story that is justified."

Except apparently Winkler, "founding editor in chief" didn't know that bloomberg news was already banned in China and had been for a year and for already publishing this story!?

Has someone just massively screwed up their dates?

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-censorship- bloomber...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-censorship- bloomberg/bloomberg-sites-blocked-in-china-days-after-xi-family-wealth-story- idUSBRE86306820120704)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_China)

There is a lot to discuss here:

* The extent that spouses' activities effect employee NDAs

* When and whether NDAs are appropriate both in Journalism and other industries

* The CCP and Chinese governments abuse of economic powers to silent dissent, in this case internationally and US and other governments compliance with that policy.

* Connections between wealth and political power, both in China and the world

* Whether being part of the larger Bloomberg entity strengthens BBG News or makes them more liable to external pressure

I also think Winklers position (assuming it was his position, since apparently all this happened after it had already happened?) was very sensible:

>Winkler alluded to that in his remarks. "There's a way to use the information you have in such a way that enables us to report, but not kill ourselves in the process and wipe out everything we've tried to build there," he told the reporting team. Bloomberg News and Winkler declined to comment for this story.

Aka: we can't publish this as we do too much business there, but we could leak it to someone else without the same exposure

Sadly the article seems to make a bad job of covering the basic facts and it's can't help but quote emotional projection instead of giving clear outlines of events. Good luck with this one (gender non-specific) guys!

<comment><USER35> > Bloomberg published a story on the Xi family wealth in 2012 and were banned > for it.

...

> Except apparently Winkler, "founding editor in chief" didn't know that > bloomberg news was already banned in China and had been for a year and for > already publishing this story!?

No, the Bloomberg News websites were blocked. Bloomberg News reporters were not thrown out, Bloomberg Terminal sales were not terminated. Blocking the websites is a far cry from "kick[ing] us out of the country".

<comment><USER34> >After the first investigative project ran in 2012, the Chinese authorities had searched Bloomberg's news bureaus, delayed visas for reporters and ordered state-owned companies not to sign new leases for Bloomberg's primary product: its terminals.

That would make some sense, though it seems like they were pretty damn close.

So why not mention the 2012 article and set all this in its context?

The story here is "Once bitten twice shy", so why mash it up so badly I can't tell if they've been bitten already or they're hesitating after the bite.

And why open it all with quotes like "I was not a human being"?

It's like the intro to a story about sexism has been pasted in instead of the intro to the story about CCP censorship then someone hit publish without proofing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I was kind of close to Forsythe's first investigation was published and his next one was silenced. The New York Times's similar, and subsequent, investigation into Wen Jiabao's corruption gained it a Pulitzer in 2013. Bloomberg journalists widely and correctly thought that the Pulitzer process showed a clear bias toward the NYT in favoring the paper's derivative work on an outgoing politician, rather than the trail-blazing work on the man who is now China's leader.

Here's some context: In 2013, after decades of reporting, Bloomberg News had never won a single Pulitzer. It ate at Winkler. One of the reasons Bloomberg employed Forsythe and funded the investigations of him and his team was in pursuit of that prize. The news organization and the company showed a lot of courage in publishing Forsythe's first investigation. And it suffered huge economic consequences. Its terminal sales to banks in China slowed considerably after that.

Bloomberg won its first Pulitzer two years later, in 2015, for a series of explainers on corporate tax inversions. That was after it had re-organized and some would say eviscerated the projects and investigations team that Forsythe worked on.

[https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/bloomberg- get...](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/bloomberg-gets-its- first-pulitzer/)

What Bloomberg realized, of course, as Bezos has realized with the Washington Post, is that owning a real news organization makes doing business complicated, because the best news stories contain information that someone wants to keep quiet. Bloomberg News has learned to toe the line on China, and that should scare people. It's a microcosm of how China intimidates individuals and businesses (and non-profits like the WHO) around the world.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Last month, a Bloomberg corporate spokeswoman told The New York Times that > Forsythe stole "Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property and gave it to his > wife." The spokeswoman, Natalie Harland, said that Bloomberg LP and > Bloomberg News never pressured anyone to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

The good ol' we never pressured we just warned we'd harass them to no end and ruin their lives.

It was rather entertaining to see an old billionaire who rarely hears "no" from those around him being put on the spot during the primary debates by Elizabeth Warren. All those millions spent on his advertising campaign didn't help, and there were no lawyers and PR spokespeople to draft responses for him.

Yeah, he eventually agree to release a few women who had NDAs signed if they requested. I think one might have gone through the process. But I can see being afraid to go through the process since a week later they could be sued for other things like "stole Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property" and then having to sell their homes to defend against it.

It's just so bizarre how he got any support at all. Look at the things he was saying: "...and that upon learning that a female employee was expecting a baby, he responded: Kill it!" from [https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/michael-bloomberg- no...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/michael-bloomberg- nondisclosure-release/index.html)

<comment><USER38> > _It 's just so bizarre how he got any support at all._

I mean... Donald Trump is our president, so if Bloomberg gaining any support is bizarre, we've already been in bizzaro world for the last 4 years.

It's not like the Democrat side of the house is squeaky-clean when it comes to its candidates not doing shitty things.

<comment><USER37> > Donald Trump is our president,

Good point. And I am thinking people who supported Bloomberg are the ones who protested for the last three years then a decent amount of them turn around and follow another old white billionaire from New York as a viable candidate. Not only that one with who was telling his employees to kill their babies. You'd think 3 years would be plenty to come up with well ... someone else.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, I find it incredibly bizarre that the DNC can't field a decent slate of relatable, electable candidates, even if you "only" consider the massive number of politicians with experience on the national stage. But I guess they are more incentivized to get their friends into positions of power than to do right by the country and party (though I assume they've convinced themselves that what they're doing does indeed fulfill that duty).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's interesting how this is the same Bloomberg who have published the completely fake "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies" story.

</comment><comment><USER40> From Alcibiades [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades) to Michael Bloomberg, it's always the elites who sell out their country. Of course it's only the elites who have have something of value enough on that scale to sell. Love of country is for the hoi polloi.

</comment><comment><USER41> I vehemently disagree with the blatant partisan lean of almost every news company, but this crony, spineless cowardice is a far greater sin in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER42> I do not understand why any body would think that Bloomberg could do political stories in China. I do not understand why Bloomberg would be embarrassed about spiking political stories in China.

I am not defending the press and political climate in China, but it is what it is. The Chinese make up their rules. Why should Bloomberg sacrifice billions of dollars in business for the sake of some political journalists work? I am glad they got their story published - good work. But Bloomberg would be _insane_ to publish it.

<comment><USER43> > Why should Bloomberg sacrifice billions of dollars in business

Maybe they shouldn't. But for that reason, maybe they shouldn't be in the Journo business?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How does it work for an NDA to gag people over criminal activity?

</comment><comment><USER45> >"It has to be done with a strategic framework and a tactical method that is ... smart enough to allow us to continue and not run afoul of the Nazis who are in front of us and behind us everywhere," Winkler said, according to the audio reviewed by NPR and verified by others. "And that's who they are. And we should have no illusions about it."

NPR's publication of this will surely lead to CCP pressure against Winkler, who will see him as a spy intent on leaking reportage out through other channels. And the world may lose still another channel of factual info out of China.

One wonders how NPR management rationalized inclusion of this particular quote as being in the public interest.

</comment><comment><USER46> You can't trust "the news" anymore. Everything is just clickbait doomsday nonsense every day. It's incredibly hard to separate fact from fiction, opinion from fact, and reality from fantasy.

<comment><USER47> This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think we generally expect too much from media outlets. Readers also have a responsibility to understand the context of what they're reading, and that's been true for as long as newspapers have existed.

Take everything you read with a grain of salt, know that a story might later be retracted or edited, and follow different outlets with different perspectives. I think the homogenization of media consumption is far more dangerous than the fake and false stories that get out.

<comment><USER48> Seems reasonable enough to expect the following:

Five Core Principles of Journalism

1\. Truth and Accuracy

Journalists cannot always guarantee 'truth', but getting the facts right is the cardinal principle of journalism. We should always strive for accuracy, give all the relevant facts we have and ensure that they have been checked. When we cannot corroborate information we should say so.

2\. Independence

Journalists must be independent voices; we should not act, formally or informally, on behalf of special interests whether political, corporate or cultural. We should declare to our editors – or the audience – any of our political affiliations, financial arrangements or other personal information that might constitute a conflict of interest.

3\. Fairness and Impartiality

Most stories have at least two sides. While there is no obligation to present every side in every piece, stories should be balanced and add context. Objectivity is not always possible, and may not always be desirable (in the face for example of brutality or inhumanity), but impartial reporting builds trust and confidence.

4\. Humanity

Journalists should do no harm. What we publish or broadcast may be hurtful, but we should be aware of the impact of our words and images on the lives of others.

5\. Accountability

A sure sign of professionalism and responsible journalism is the ability to hold ourselves accountable. When we commit errors we must correct them and our expressions of regret must be sincere not cynical. We listen to the concerns of our audience. We may not change what readers write or say but we will always provide remedies when we are unfair.

[https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/who-we- are/5-principles...](https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/who-we- are/5-principles-of-journalism)

<comment><USER49> This sounds ideal but in my opinion is far from reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Spent a few minutes trying to decipher why Bloomberg would go through such hoops to silence his own wife.

<comment><USER51> We've changed the title above to that of the HTML doc, which fits the 80 char limit.

(Submitted title was "Bloomberg Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter Then Tried to Silence His Wife", which I'm sure was cut to that to try to fit the limit.)

<comment><USER52> This issue comes up a lot. As a sibling comment says, if it is so common an occurrence for the character limit to lead to misleading headlines because they were overly condensed, you may want to consider slightly expanding the headline length limit (perhaps to 120-140). But I appreciate that it's a balancing act, because making it too long dilutes the punchiness of the HN front page itself. No easy answer here.

<comment><USER51> It comes up somewhat regularly but it's quite rare for there to be a case where there isn't a natural solution. For example in this case the HTML doc title not only fit the limit nicely, but was more neutral and thus better for HN. I think HN benefits from this limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've seen it here in small amounts before, but it's rather shocking to observe so much obviously biased downvoting and flagging in one story. A number of anti-CCP posts already dead, and others on their way...

I suppose it's rather predictable that people can't post something about the CCP on a meta-story about the CCP killing news stories, without their posts in turn being killed.

<comment><USER54> I came to this thread to observe the same behavior, without any plans to comment, expecting any comment that is even mildly anti-CCP to be heavily downvoted. But I just had to second your own observation at the peril to my own karma.

<comment><USER7> Fortunately we dont live in a country where you online karma is relevant. Yet...

<comment><USER55> What do you call your credit score?

<comment><USER20> False equivalence. Credit scores measure failure to honor financial contracts. They're not about honoring arbitrary social norms

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I've personally found that saying critical things about the Chinese Communist Party on this website results in people quickly conflating said attacks on a government with a non-existent ethnic group (ignoring the fact that China has multiple ethnic groups instead of just the dominant Han majority) and suddenly you are flagged for being a bigot. It's pretty obnoxious behavior that is very dominant in Silicon Valley. I view it as primarily driven at the bottom by people who see all bigotry through a purely Western lens (and are therefore blind to the fact that "white" privilege is actually "dominant ethnic group" privilege and changes depending on where you are), don't know anything about China other than it being an Asian country, and equate criticizing the country as being Western imperialism.

From the top, it's money money money, because hey, who cares about Uighurs anyway, I just got a billion from some dude whose dad fought for Mao and is now a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party. Now I'll go talk about how much I value diversity while my company is funded by a country which imprisons people because they are Muslim, or criticize the government, or, you know, tell the truth.

<comment><USER57> This is a disturbing trend I've seen on the left. Any criticism of a foreign country is construed as racism, or talk around immigration policies. That's obviously conflating issues, and it serves to shut down conversation rather than promote it. I hope people stop being so woke and wake up to the harm they're causing with that kind of extreme attitude.

<comment><USER58> > This is a disturbing trend I've seen on the left.

It's not just the left, it's both sides, and often there have been incidents of actual racism that can be accurately cited as prior examples of racism.

<comment><USER57> I haven't seen this on the right, I think the left is far more guilty of invoking racism falsely. The right tends to be guilty of actual racism sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Let's not forget that this company published the largest fake news about China that one could conceive:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the- big-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how- china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies)

I haven't seen any retractions of this piece of garbage that has been denied by any and all Western companies that were supposed "victims".

<comment><USER60> Sorry, where is the refutation to this?

<comment><USER61> Apple and Amazon produced detailed statements[1] explaining that they never found what the reporters say they found. And nobody has yet produced any concrete evidence of the spy chips existing; no example, no picture, no documents referring to them. It's impossible to definitively refute anonymous claims that some secret thing exists, but I think it's unreasonable to believe them.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17936968/apple-amazon- den...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17936968/apple-amazon-deny-servers- chinese-spy-chips)

<comment><USER62> > this company published the largest fake news about China that one could > conceive

Was this particular article based on evidence? We don't know.

Was it 100% plausible and done by governments all the time? Absolutely.

Are IPMI, BMC and managemnt engines complete garbage from a security standpoint? Absolutely.

So I find the strong language very over the top. If you know the history of weakening security equipment, then you wouldn't even bat an eye over this.

You know how bad Zoom security is? It's actually 10x better than any IPMI or BMC code. I'd get worked up about that, which is on every server motherboard already.

<comment><USER61> Sorry, yes, I didn't mean to give a misleading impression. It's very plausible that a government might intercept hardware in this way. I'm just skeptical of this specific way (there's got to be a subversion both easier and less obvious than planting a magic spy chip), and don't believe that Apple and Amazon would issue such strong denials if they had in fact found such a chip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> My eyes have been open to China's influence in _US media_ , especially with covid-19 outbreak, where they're rallied various institutions to change the narrative around the name and origin of the virus.

For example, Dreamworks carrying water for the CCP government by including the 9-dotted line prominently on a map in their movie[1].

Who thinks this inclusion was by accident? Their influence in US media and politics is out of control.

1\. [https://www.businessinsider.com/abominable-dreamworks- movie-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/abominable-dreamworks-movie- vietnam-ban-south-china-sea-map-2019-10)

<comment><USER23> It's somewhat amusing all the fuss over the legitimacy conveyed through maps, as if the map illustrator consulted some gold standard reference of truth. There was a time some centuries past when maps were approximations of reality. I think this comes down to the play on human nature of: when you say something frequently enough it's assumed to be true. Where is the relevant international law assuming there is one that expresses territorial waters.

<comment><USER64> It may not convey legitimacies, but it often reflects realities such as the one illustrated here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASh2_RzMuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASh2_RzMuE)

Maps often illustrate who owns whom, and how.

<comment><USER11> Wow.

> When asked about Taiwan, WHO Dr. Aylward first pretended not hearing then > awkwardly cut the line

They call him abck and ask about Taiwan again and he literally says, "well, we've already talked about China. ... when you look across all the different areas of China ..."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


List of Fictional Microsoft Companies - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_Microsoft_companies <comment><USER2> My favorite stupid Google April Fools joke was when they put out a "customer" blog post bragging that Contoso had switched to Google Apps.

[https://cloud.googleblog.com/2011/04/contoso-has-gone- google...](https://cloud.googleblog.com/2011/04/contoso-has-gone-google.html)

<comment><USER3> >Since moving to Gmail, HR violations and after-hours sharing of Rebecca Black videos have gone down by 76 percent

>2011

Wait, Rebecca Black was _that_ long ago? Feels like yesterday.

<comment><USER4> You should listen to some of the stuff she's done recently ... it's not bad (compared to other recent pop music).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twenty years ago I contributed a chapter to a book on SQL Server and slipped in a subtle fart joke. Instead of using the then Microsoft standard sample company called "Northwind", my example had "Southwind".

EDITED to add link to Google Books link.

[https://books.google.com/books/about/Microsoft_SQL_Server_7_...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Microsoft_SQL_Server_7_0_Programming_Unl.html?id=SZskAQAAIAAJ)

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of this clothing brand that got lawyered into the ground by The North Face: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_South_Butt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_South_Butt)

</comment></comment><comment> jagged-chisel I do find this mildly interesting and can see how it's interesting enough to make the HN front page.

But how is this 'culturally relevant' enough to make a Wikipedia page? That's an "I'm amused" question rather than an "I'm flabbergasted" question.

<comment><USER7> Seems like you answered your own question.

<comment> jagged-chisel Can you explain? Just because the HN crowd finds something interesting, that doesn't automatically qualify it for a wikipedia page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let's not forget Steve Ballmer as head of Virtucon Industries, with Bill Gates as an honorary Austin Powers.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI_xuFA18m4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI_xuFA18m4)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a fantastic resource of fictional companies for any modern day or near-future RPG campaign. I'm currently running Shadowrun, and can always use new corporations.

<comment><USER10> Shadowrun (videogames) is also trademarked by Microsoft. Does adding one of their fictional companies make it some twisted form of recursion? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I could have sworn there was a "Nile Bookstore" back in the early days of .NET (2002 - 2004).

<comment><USER3> What if I told you there was a major online bookstore circa 2002 that was also named after a humongous river[1]?

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River)

<comment><USER11> That was the joke -- that and they are in the same city and some of the engineers at MSFT have beers with the AMZN engineers.

<comment><USER3> Of course! I totally got the joke right away! Might I say, I'm totally _in_ the Nile!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know the origin of the name "Contoso"? I bet Raymond Chen does!

<comment><USER13> [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/jhoward/2005/01/27/conto...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/jhoward/2005/01/27/contoso- com-why-who-chose-it-is-it-an-anagram-is-there-a-hidden-meaning/#comment-1205)

 _" at the event we needed 2 companies, so someone in the product team came up with Contoso and Fabrikham, and in the BizApps events, all the integration scenarios where around these 2 companies doing business with each other. i have no idea where the names come from – i guess its like with setting up your own off-the-shelf Limited company, someone comes up with mixes of word & names. Fabrikham is a horrible name! Contoso is better, bu only just"_

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Duwamish Books

Also there was a pet-supplies store in there somewhere. Back when MSDN published as newsletter as a sort of newspaper-sized thing.

The Duwamish companies were used in extended examples of client-server business automation with Microsoft Office and their server products combination of SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, Message Queues; packaged as "Microsoft BackOffice" (egads).

<comment><USER15> Egads? It's a standard term, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_office](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_office)

<comment><USER14> I had a similar reaction when in a business meeting and one of the company reps said he was "Opening the Kimono".

A term of art in the business world today; I moved to scientific research computing in 2000 and had not gotten the memo about open kimonos.

Egads.

<comment><USER16> I had a former boss (a couple decades ago) that was also fond of the "open the kimono" saying. Ugh. WTF is wrong with saying "full openness" or "full disclosure" or something else that sounds appropriately business-like.

<comment><USER17> "Baring it all" would be a native idiom preserving even the emphatic nudity reference while not suggesting that you're taking off some other woman's clothes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the things I adore about Wikipedia is the fact that someone made this list, and then other people decided to contribute to it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Only two I've ever run into are contoso and fabrikam

</comment><comment><USER20> I hear Fabrikam sells some wonderful shirts.[0]

[0] [https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en- us/commerce/overview/](https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en- us/commerce/overview/)

</comment><comment><USER21> If you search for these example domains in the network traffic logs of any largr company you'll see at least a few hits. This is a security issue because people use example code, copy pasted into prod code which mostly does nothing due to the domains not resolving or not hosting the appropriate content but if an attacker took over these domains they will expose a ton of companies to an attack.

I believe example.com or example.org exist specifically for this purpose. I hope those of you who write documentation keep this in mind,especially when your example domain has never beeb registered.

</comment><comment><USER22> There is someone driving around Redmond with a CONTOSO license plate. I've seen it several times - too bad FABRIKAM is too long for Washington state plates.

<comment><USER23> [https://twitter.com/schumatt/status/1159634050602033152](https://twitter.com/schumatt/status/1159634050602033152)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Something similiar: Much of the late 90's and early 2000's Microsoft Official Curriculum training courses used the names of real Microsoft employees in examples (along with these fictional company names). I wish I could recall some of the names right now. I remember searching for some of the names and being shocked and amused to discover they were real Microsoft employees.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was surprised not to see Spencer Ceramics listed. They were featured prominently in MS Word for DOS manuals.

<comment><USER25> Add it! That's the beauty of Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "A Datum Corporation" reminded me of Traf-O-data [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O- Data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data)

<comment><USER3> "A Datum Corporation" may be a nod to ADAT[1].

Someone in Microsoft makes music.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In company collateral we used to say, "Send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com" I think that it's a real email address and is still active! LOL

</comment><comment><USER28> Probably worth noting that some of them are not fictional companies, and Microsoft indeed registered them as legal entities!

</comment><comment><USER29> Whenever I need to mock-up data about a list of people I use the family from Bob's Burgers

<comment><USER30> On a more serious note, you might want to consider using faker.js [1], alternatively bogus [2] if you are on the .NET stack.

[1] [https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/](https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/)

[2] [https://github.com/bchavez/Bogus](https://github.com/bchavez/Bogus)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "A s

</comment><comment><USER31> The best one is the kind, progressive, open Microsoft.</comment>


Ask HN: If electricity was $1 per barrel could we see an electric jet engine? - <AUTHOR> Really curious to know if the economic incentive was there if the engineering could fill the demand for all commercial flights? <comment><USER2> Not an expert, just the result of a Google search:Fuel has roughly 100x better energy density than lithium-ion batteries(both in weight and in volume), and batteries improve pretty slowly. Before take-off , the weight of fuel is 25-47% of the aircraft's weight.

And since the propulsive efficiency of a jet engine is relatively high(rough search gives 45%-80%) an electric engine doesn't buy much here.

So this isn't really a question of money, but basic limits.

<comment><USER3> You may also be interested in aluminum-air batteries, which have better than 10 times the specific energy density compared to lithium ion chemistries. The downside is that they aren't rechargable, but that may not matter for flights (they are recyclable though).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _" Given that practical lithium-ion batteries were capable of achieving > energy-densities of 113Wh/kg in 1994, 202Wh/kg in 2004, and are now capable > of approximately 300Wh/kg, it's reasonable to assume that they will hit > 400Wh/kg in the coming decade."_ -Elon Musk

[http://www.aviation.com/general-aviation/elon-musk-toying- de...](http://www.aviation.com/general-aviation/elon-musk-toying-designs- electric-jet/)

</comment><comment><USER5> How much electricity is in a barrel?

<comment><USER6> That's exactly what I thought.

<comment><USER7> 1.21 gigawatts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure If I understand your question, but my understanding is that we don't yet have the means to store energy in such a dense manner as to able to power a jet engine. Energy density of aircraft fuel is much higher than any battery available.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a starting point for you in your investigations into electrical propelled airplanes:

[https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/Features/leaptech.htm...](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/Features/leaptech.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> With a piston-prop or turbo-prop airplane, the engine rotates the propeller so it's easy enough to use an electric engine for that.

Jet engine thrust comes from the exhaust gas. How do you replace that with electricity? compressing air (pulse jets)? generate plasma?

<comment><USER10> Not entirely. Modern jet turbines have ~12:1 bypass ratios, meaning the exhaust is mostly just turning a fan, pushing 11 times the amount of air as goes into combustion.</comment></comment>


Pulse Joins the LinkedIn Family - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pulse.me/post/47721164686/pulse-joins-the-linkedin-family

<comment><USER2> I don't understand LinkedIn (anymore).

Their business model seems to be to source candidates to recruiters. This may be good for recruiters, but for candidates? I'm not so sure. It's certainly better to have an overall strong online presence (Twitter / Github (if relevant) / personal blog) than contacts on LinkedIn that don't mean anything.

Groups are full of spam.

The website is incredibly unresponsive.

They bought the excellent IndexTank technology and team a while ago, and promptly shut it down (the tech was open sourced though, which is more than can be said for a lot of acquisitions).

It seems they only keep on living because people are somewhat afraid to delete their profile; but everything inside LinkedIn feels dead.

And now Pulse. Who would go to LinkedIn for news??

Pulse says "The company shares (...) our belief in the power of knowledge and elevated discussion".

Elevated discussion? On LinkedIn? Come on!

<comment><USER3> The "LinkedIn is useless" meme that seems popular here really baffles me, to be honest. Yes, there are many LinkedIn features that I don't get value from (including the news feed and endorsements). But I've found it invaluable for the one core feature it was built on: keeping in touch with your professional contacts. I'm not going to add all my former co-workers, the interesting people I talk to at conferences and counterparts at other companies on Facebook. I don't care what their kids are doing, or where they went on vacation. But I _do_ want to know if they move to some other interesting job, find out if they're hiring or, most importantly, reach them in the future if I would like their advice or help. With my LinkedIn network, if I ever want to reach someone at Company X, whether it be to talk about a job opportunity or to tell them their API is broken, all I have to do is search that company name. Up comes a list of people at that company, and how connected I am to them. If I don't know anyone who currently works there, I probably know someone who does, and can get an introduction.

Before LinkedIn, I'd take business cards or exchange emails with contact information. I'd try to remember to enter it into my addressbook, or file it somewhere I can find it later. Good luck searching it, and if you do find someone and they've moved to a new job, the contact info you have might be totally out of date anyway.

It isn't just a hyped up resume. A great Github profile, blog or Twitter account does little to replace LinkedIn's functionality. If you're looking at it as just a way to be found by recruiters, you're doing it wrong. It's about keeping in touch with a broad network of professional contacts. Not people I talk to every day, but people I like, respect, and know I can reach out to if I need help (and vice versa). Despite all the annoying things they do, I find it extremely useful.

<comment><USER2> Upvoted. I really don't see myself using LinkedIn this way, but I understand that you do.

(All my LinkedIn contacts are people I know personaly. When I need to contact them I use my address book where I store their personal email address, and mobile phone # which aren't on LinkedIn. If I need to contact someone I don't know, I don't think about going through LinkedIn; maybe I should.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats to the pulse founders for entering the millionaire club.

Sucks that they have to pretend to be excited about joining LinkedIn and likely suffer there for a few years, but every rose has a thorn.

<comment><USER5> My friends startup was acquired by LinkedIn, 2 year vesting period that is heavily backloaded.

<comment><USER6> Please elaborate. Backloaded? In terms of what?

<comment><USER7> In terms of cash. So they might get 10% up front and larger portions as they near the end of the vesting period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently, LinkedIn paid them 90M - [http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/linkedin-acquires-pulse- for...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/linkedin-acquires-pulse-for-90m-in- stock-and-cash/)

Wow. There are so many RSS readers but congrats to Pulse team on executing well.

How it fits into LinkedIn's product roadmap?

</comment><comment><USER9> I love Pulse. They built a great app and I'm really happy for them, so this isn't a critique, but were they really worth 90M? I get that most of it was in stock, but damn.

I guess it was more of a team/userbase acquisition, similar to the Dropbox/Mailbox deal. Either way, congrats guys!

<comment><USER10> Isn't stock == cash when the acquiring company is public?

<comment><USER11> Assuming a vesting period, that implies much less liquidity from the deal, and very much relies on the longterm value of the stock. IMO, stock later is worth much less than cash now.

<comment><USER12> For a company like Linkedin which has been on the market for a while, you can buy a bunch of put options. It comes with a cost obviously, but it's a good hedge for an all stock transaction.

IIRC this is what Mark Cuban did when he sold his company to Yahoo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm optimistic because I love Pulse and Linkedin has definitely been pushing into the news feed space so it makes a lot of sense.

Slightly concerned though because of what happened to CardMunch.

Either way, grats to the pulse team!

</comment><comment><USER14> Way to go Akshay Kothari!

</comment><comment><USER15> I love Pulse, it's my favorite mobile news reader by far.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hope they do a better job with Pulse than they have with Rapportive

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats to the pulse team. Also, dammit.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great stuff from the pulse guys!

</comment><comment><USER19> congrats, guys!</comment>


Flight of the RoboBee: Tiny hovering robot creates buzz - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0502/Flight-of-the-RoboBee-Tiny-hovering-robot-creates-buzz

<comment><USER2> I'm afraid of this when they cap thw wire and use poisoned nano-needles and graphene as combined battery and wireless fractal-antenna by ionizing it with a gold layer. (Mad-Scientist every Friday)</comment>


Philadelphia perilously close to experiencing industrial accident - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1142551735191384064 <comment><USER2> ...if they were manufacturing phosgene?</comment>