skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it's the US companies fault that they can't be innovative enough to figure out the Chinese market

Western business failures in China are more attributable to a lack of understanding of the business culture and excessive regulatory barriers and oversight applied on foreign companies than any innate superiority.

Negotiating business deals in China requires an extensive understanding of the culture to approach it properly, whereas Western negotiations are hinged mostly around profits and liabilities. Things like face/reputation, the unstated but expected mutual bribes/gifts (direct and to family/authority figures) and networking are new to them, and they stumble through it, giving the appearance of incompetence. China is pretty hostile to wholly-foreign companies, too, which means western companies are stuck wasting time hunting for local partners and making these deals instead of just selling products and services.

Not only that, but even after negotiations have been sealed, there's other cultural differences that get overlooked. This can be seen in the dozens of stories where a Chinese exec/partner resold business secrets, or stole clients and relaunched a competing service. It's obvious there's some sort of disconnect in the communications and expectations. Western companies are used to contracts having a lot more value.

Don't get me wrong, some amazing things happen in China. Shenzhen is beyond impressive. But given the large cultural differences and how hostile the government is to foreign-operated business, it's rather glib and disingenuous to claim that the US companies can't "figure out" the Chinese market.

The "market" is just buying and selling, but the part that's causing problems are the government's artificial limitations on the market. The foreign companies aren't allowed to ship their existing products as is, and through the process of certification, the idea is often stolen and reimplemented. The Chinese government isn't really interested in fixing this, as it's more advantageous for them to have local businesses than foreign businesses. It'd be one thing if a foreigner opened up a store and nobody ever bought anything, but half of the failures are taking place before product launch with staff and partnership meltdowns.

The Chinese "market" itself suffers deeply from government manipulation. Plenty of citizens mock their government's obnoxious nanny attitude with slang like "river crab" and high VPN use. Government corruption is a common complaint, and many of the richer populace got rich through excessive greed and collusion in the initial privatization of business. There's still the overly nationalistic people who believe the propaganda and descend on foreign news like locusts in their eagerness to devour the criticism, but there are plenty more who don't.

It's not like the west is inherently better or anything. We're all having problems with business regulation.
> Is there xenophobia? Are Americans looked down upon or treated differently?

xenophobia, no. treated differently, definitely. often they won't know where you fit into the social hierarchy, because, you don't. You don't have any family or social history so they may treat you like gods or may somewhat exclude you.

Language is a huge barrier. If you're in Shenzhen, there will be near-zero english. You'll have to learn mandarin, which will take many years.

> Culturally, what are some things to avoid, things to expect, etc?

If you've never been to China, you likely have never eaten Chinese food before. You may or may not like it a lot. You can find western food so it's not a huge problem in most places.

given the language barrier and the difficulty communicating with the outside world (you'll find ways to work around it, but it's still tough) it can be quite isolating. You'll want to connect with other expats and try to build up relationships with locals where/if possible.

China is less like the US than anywhere else I've been (including places like Nigeria, Bolivia, Fiji, Qatar, etc). You can't be prepared for it, so just be prepared to feel uncomfortable for a while.

I'd highly recommend visiting prior to considering a move.
"If they do it in front of you then they will do it to you"
Counterexample:

> In theoretical physics, Feynman diagrams are pictorial representations of the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles. [...] The interaction of sub-atomic particles can be complex and difficult to understand intuitively. Feynman diagrams give a simple visualization of what would otherwise be a rather arcane and abstract formula. As David Kaiser writes, "since the middle of the 20th century, theoretical physicists have increasingly turned to this tool to help them undertake critical calculations", and as such "Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram

----

This is the first example that came to mind, but there are certainly very many others. Because the idea that written flat text is inherently a global maximum for representing/communicating/working with all concepts is absolutely absurd.

This is immediately self-evident if you've ever tried to teach anything complex to anyone who wasn't already a domain expert in an immediately adjacent area.
Yes; and CPU is cheap as hell. Round trips to a cache are expensive.
Yes, referrals are an important sales channel for freelancing.

However, meeting and talking to people, in other words just plain old sales work is vital, too. That's where a decent website helps a lot: You can refer people interested in your services to your website for further information, testimonials, previous projects etc.

In other words, potential customers probably won't find you via a Google search (unless you're a high-profile specialist or open source contributor in your area of expertise) but a decent business website will complement the rest of your sales efforts.
Don't optimize prematurely, but avoid designing a system with performance bottlenecks that can't easily be cleared later.
(Disclaimer: I will vote for some candidate this election, but I would write in a name before voting for Trump.)

I see this conflation in almost all the election news I hear - people assume that Trump supporters are against any immigration. In fact, the white, blue collar workers making Trump's base are okay with most immigrants. They (quite understandably) dislike illegal South American immigrants, who compete with them for a shrinking pool of manufacturing and menial labor jobs. While immigration may benefit the country as a whole, illegal immigration from South America does not benefit them; instead, it contributes to ever-worsening employment prospects. To convince Trump supporters of the benefits of immigration, one must present a solution which simultaneously addresses the lack of jobs for workers at the low end. Until then, the tradeoff is clear - blue collar workers would rather ship illegal immigrants home than have increased local competition for employment, which I find understandable. Trump is also in favor of tariffs, etc. to keep American manufacturing jobs, and has spoken against NAFTA. For a blue collar worker, he may be the best candidate left in the race - and his protectionist position combined with a strong stance against illegal immigration may mean that he has been the best candidate in the race for a long time. (Again, seen from the perspective of a white, blue collar worker).

For Thiel, I can see a few reasons why a protectionist, anti-illegal immigration stance makes sense. He may believe we really do have an overpopulation problem, and wishes to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into America on those grounds. A protectionist stance makes more sense - America's prosperity in the 70's and 80's and South Korea and China's relative prosperity today make the case for keeping a manufacturing base at home, coupled with a reasonably strong creative and technical sector.

Again, this is just speculation on the beliefs of others; my own beliefs are different. But I think it's important to consider that Trump supporters may have reasonably nuanced views on immigration too, even if they don't align with our own stance.
I don't think this notation would get confused with deltas; how it's used is pretty different, and overloading symbols (especially once you're in higher levels) is common enough.
Just like the original kilo.c, I liked reading this. Thanks!
Does enslaving them in a pseudosocial mindcage constitute enfranchisement?
Sure it is! But they're not giving out Internet connectivity. They're giving out Facebook & Co connectivity.

And no, that isn't altruistic enough.

Besides the fact that Musk's plans are impressive and admirable regardless of altruism. No one is asking or expecting Musk to forego making boatloads of cash. He is and will continue to be wealthy, and that's the entire point: it's possible to do good without doing charity. Likewise, it's possible to do charity without doing good.
This is a silly question but I'd like to understand if it's possible for a human to sense those same signals. So many times I have had a sensation that my phone will ring and then moments later it does.

Probably confirmation bias or maybe I'm subconsciously hearing the interference in speakers and taking the hint from there. It doesn't happen every time and I don't receive a lot of calls.

HN seems a decent place to settle it once and for all.
This was precisely our motivation as well!
Well it's a bit more nuanced. He was for the war prior to when it started but then changed his tune fairly soon after it started, even before Saddam was caught.

I'm not sure where he truly stands. But I suppose I'll take his word that he'll want the U.S. to play an active role.

Democrats decided to nominate the candidate who voted for the war and has a very Hawkish foreign policy, not the one who was against it. So one way or another, Americans are voting for interventionism.
Most U.S. tech companies were strong proponents of the FCC's net neutrality regulations because they don't want telecom networks to intervene between them and their users by segmenting access based on pricing or speed. Although it seems once you are as successful as Facebook (and now, Netflix) you start thinking less of "what if the ISP wants to rip me off by differentiating access to my app?" and more like "how can I partner with the ISP to get an advantage by differentiating access to my app?"
Cryptographic signature verification can be expensive, but the previous commenter (and, to be fair, pretty much the whole software industry) is abusing the term "signature". Really, what we're talking about is cryptographically authenticated messages. Verifying an authenticator is extremely fast.
Thanks. I'm a huge fan of xfce but I'll spin up a Gnome 3 based VM later to test it out first hand.

I'm not convinced it'll replace virtual desktops, but hopefully I'm proven wrong!
I'd be interested in seeing what the arguments in the actual book are. I recall reading something about this before, that pointed to evidence that more diverse groups are less happy and have more conflict. And that people in general like being part of a group of similar people and having a group identity, humans being tribal creatures.

Anyway I'm not sure he's claiming western culture is homogenous. But it does seem like there is a cluster in culture space that is "western" and we don't have a better label for it.
Callbacks are successfully applied in lower-level languages. When a serial driver in Linux receives characters, generally at interrupt time, it invokes a callback in the TTY layer. You don't hear kernel developers whining about "callback hell". These C callbacks are just function pointers: any closure-like semantics is simulated by registering a pointer to data along with the function pointer, which is then passed in the callback call.
This confirms my overall feeling when considering Ruby and Rails.
Instead, I choose Python and Flask. The whole Zen of Python really spoke to me and my team members: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

No magic, just developer clarity. Neither of these items seemed like a primary concern for many different Ruby libraries and Rails itself.

I also suggest trying out data mapper pattern instead of active record. Flask and SQLalchemy are extremely powerful and easy to use. Virtual data fields and all kinds of neat things that really makes working with data easy and customize for complex business requirements.
It sure doesn't help that often it's forgotten to teach notation in the beginning. Not in high school but at university level this is my experience. And it's incredibly hard to google on your own.
Aaand that's popped the balloon and back to reality. Nevermind billion dollar ideas, let's just focus on a lifestyle business where you can't go wrong, headache and conscience-wise
Bird's eye view, what is Hanami's performance like compared to Rails?
> They want to replace the existing manager for vague, but apparently real, "communication" problems ...

"Communication" is a two-way process.

As they say: Communicate, it can't make things worse.
It looks like it won't do anything yet.
It's great to see Microsoft release these guidelines. It's good work, a broad document with a lot of interesting topics covered. You can always debate the details (the pagination discussion here is very interesting), but having seen first hand at Zalando how much dedication and effort goes into API guidelines to support a large number of service teams, plus releasing them into the public, it's no small feat and they deserve credit for doing this.

There's naturally been some discussion around REST/HTTP APIs and design styles. One of the things we've tried to do with the Zalando guidelines (https://zalando.github.io/restful-api-guidelines) is go into more detail on using HTTP and JSON, and how REST properties are used. Zalando, like everyone else, has had to think through versioning and compatibility, so it was interesting to read what Microsoft do here. The Zalando guidelines take a different approach, using media types for versioning, document just one set of compatibility rules, plus a deprecation model, and it's working very well in practice so far (http://zalando.github.io/restful-api-guidelines/compatibilit...).

Btw, in case anyone from Microsoft working on the guidelines is reading and ever wanted to swap guideline notes or ideas, that would be awesome. And once again, great job releasing the doc :)
he doesn't own Palantir. He owns a stake in Palantir.
Is this meant to be satire?
Yes, I do. There are plenty of non-Hispanic white congressmen who take the same stance as Luis Gutierrez.

The truth is that the people behind most of this anti-immigrant rhetoric can't see the humanity of someone who is not of their same skin color. When they call a human being "an illegal" -- it's dehumanizing, and it plainly reveals they don't see their common shared humanity. I've noticed it in the language they use, and they way they talk about other people -- and not just immigrants, but black Americans as well. They simply do not see other races as people like themselves.

I absolutely do not think that Luis Gutierrez is someone that is just looking out for "his own people", as you seem to be implying.
Uplift Health and Personal Care Products
Nobody is going to build your startup (stop harassing developers)
What would the baseband transmit in an emergency and how would it know that there was an emergency, if the phone itself had lost power?

When a phone is off or out of power, is the baseband periodically pinging cell towers?
Awesome Elixir – A curated list of amazingly awesome Elixir and Erlang libraries
Are you saying that if I come up with a good idea, I don't have a right to protect that idea?
The number and mood of comments in the thread is striking too. Zuck is almost a persona non grata in our future, like traditional banks, lobbyists and a supreme court who has never once read constitution correctly.
Inheritance: One More Reason to Love Postgresql
Why should CNN profit from captioning their video with Twitter users' commentary? It goes both ways.
That depends on experience, but expect around 60-80% of Seattle at a serious western company at the lower levels, reaching parity around the mid senior level, and exceeding that (perhaps with a coveted expat package) in the senior levels. This is my estimate for MS, but of course, it is very diverse.
I was just idling in the Documentation chat channel and based on what I was seeing there, it appears links to sources are discouraged on StackOverflow documentation. Presumably, they're aiming to eventually host new content that's better than what's already out there. I think it's a bit silly -- at least make a Sources section where folks can click to view links to existing docs!
This would have made self learning much easier for me. I remember when I was in high school I tried reading "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose and the gradient symbol seemed like some magical incantation only sorcerers could understand. If I had been told it was just a simple symbolic manipulation, I probably could have gotten through that section (now I would probably just Google it).

I bet if Professor Penrose rewrote his book in code-language it would be much easier to learn, at least for software engineers!
are you telling me 11 million ppl being here illegally coming and going as they please is not a problem?

sure, the numbers fluctuate up and down driven by many factors - economy, laws etc that doesn't change the fact that we have a porous border and a huge number of illegals.
Besides karma, I wonder if users will be motivated by career opportunities? Contributing to documentation could be a good signal to recruiters that are looking for experts in a particular technology.
You often need permission, then pay royalties, to copyright holders. That is the theft. In cases where you enjoy then distribute the copyrighted works of someone without their permission and avoid paying them the required royalties -- you have stolen money $$ from them. It's the same as eating at a restaurant then not paying. STEALING. You got a benefit you were supposed to pay for -- and you DID NOT PAY.

Stealing from others habitually is a very bad decision. You can justify it using any inner dialog you like.

The only caution is this: there are consequences to bad decisions you've made.

Here is the biggest consequence: if you purposely decide to hurt someone else (financially in this case), unless you are sociopathic/career criminal, you'll have an internal conflict about it. You will 'explain it away' so it doesn't feel as bad: "I do this because the law is unfair" or "everyone else is doing it".

YOU ARE LYING TO YOURSELF. You know darn well you shouldn't act that way. Once you start lying to yourself, you're going to green-light lying to yourself again.

For example: If asked in a job interview with the IRS "let's say we hire you and you have access to the IRS secure network, and after a week you discover that a lot of your IRS coworkers change personal data in our computer system and underpay their taxes. And you find your coworkers also download and seed torrent clouds with copyrighted material. Which activity would you find acceptable?"

YOU'D HAVE TO LIE TO THE IRS INTERVIEWER!! See? You'd have to say "I would never cheat on my taxes. And I download copyrighted material and seed with copyrighted material all the time."

YOU WOULDN'T SAY THAT!

Nope, you wouldn't get hired if you admitted to the IRS interviewer -- OR ANY OTHER COMPANY INTERVIEWING YOU FOR A JOB -- that you make illegal, unauthorized use of copyrighted works.

Why wouldn't you admit to the IRS job interviewer you seed torrents with copyrighted works without the owner's permission?

BECAUSE YOU KNOW IT'S WRONG. That's why.

RECAP: (1) you're stealing from an artist by not paying royalties on their film/music/etc. when using sites like KAT; (2) YOU'RE LYING TO YOUR FUTURE EMPLOYER in a job interview.

Slippery slope. In managing large groups of tech workers, what I discovered was this: if an employee is unethical or dishonest in one area of life, they seem to have a hard time restricting those bad decisions to only one area.
Maze Generation Algorithms (2014)
They would increase the ability of the controllers to deal with that density. Or more precisely, they would offload it to software.

As described, there is a lot of tedium, inaccuracy, and potential for human error in the ATC system. They're passing strips of paper back and forth, and making sure that no two strips put two planes in the same spot, and relaying the information over verbal radio commands.

It's begging to be automated.
thanks for that, interesting article! but your quotes are a little selective and tell only one side of the story of that more nuanced article, I think leaving a deep misimpression for readers here on HN.

another quote from the article says "a Home Office-commissioned independent review...found the US had not refused any extradition requests since the treaty came into force. A total of seven US requests were refused by the UK in that time."

that asymmetry in the treaty is not the result of a disparity of negotiating power nor clearly unfair-to-one-side. It's because the US has "untreatyable" constitutional rights that UK does not grant its own subjects, so for due process to grant an extradition request, the UK must submit that evidence. Since the US and UK are such close allies, that treaty may reflect the UK's desire not to slow down the process in either direction. Perhaps (this is pure speculation, we don't have the data) if the US complied in the other direction as the UK does, the UK courts would grant more of the extradition requests.

I'm not meaning to argue that the asymmetry works out fairly for every single defendant, clearly individuals will suffer more in one direction than the other, I'm saying that "the People" on both sides are not necessarily disadvantaged if we "presume evidence of guilt" and a symmetric desire to punish.

and this is for another topic, but the presumption of guilt is how the system is designed to work, otherwise, how could they even compel you to show up in court, or hold an axe murderer while awaiting trial? the commonly quoted "presumption of innocence" applies when you are in court in front of judge and jury; the entire rest of the system from arrest thru the trial is based on a necessary presumption of high probability of guilt.
That was never my experience. My Chinese peers at the same level made similar to what I made...I got a bit more because I didn't have to make contributions into the housing fund. I am/was working with international talent, many of them who would eventually just up and go to the states to work.
I would love to hear WHY he's skeptical. I'm sure he's heard all the traditional arguments like we have, which means he has additional information that I don't.

Don't you think it's more intellectually honest to question and hear what others have to say rather than just paint them as idiots because they don't believe what you believe.
> Zuckerberg wants more users and for us to sit in VR pods like zombies.

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/parmyolson/files/2016/02/1271...

He just looks so happy with his zombie army.
I can't help but wonder if the triangle of power is a Zelda triforce reference.
> This is not a black-white or other racist issue.

> The issue is unaffordable housing and it is a problem in many cities such as NYC where I live, not just SF.

Yet NYC is 23% black. If the issue is unaffordable housing, why did it almost eliminate black people from San Francisco but had had little effect on the number of black people in NYC? (The black percentage of NYC has gone down a little over the past 20 years, as has the white percentage, but this is because of a large growth in the NYC asian population over that time and a significant growth in the hispanic population).
I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court