How Taiwan’s Digital Minister solved a mask supply problem | Hacker News Reader

How Taiwan’s Digital Minister solved a mask supply problem

wired.com

115 pointsbaylearn22 comments

Wow. I remember when Audrey Tang (formerly Autrijus Tang) -- now Digital Minister in Taiwan -- was an active figure in the Perl community. She started a bunch of Perl projects and even wrote one of the first Perl 6 interpreters (Pugs) in Haskell.

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

Without the donation of Maps credits from Google, findthemasks.com couldn't have happened exactly as it did. I can't imagine what our bill would have been otherwise. Donations from a number of companies were (and remain) essential to leveraging the skilled volunteer workforce into something awesome.

If really no companies were interested, maybe you would just have added new POIs on OpenStreetMaps and everybody could build on it

I'm not in Taiwan but Japan (not metropolis), here OSM is not enough detailed and not updated well. Is it different in other countries?

Certainly from my experience in the cities of New Zealand its as good as Google maps and in some respects superior. I just assumed it would be like that in Taiwan and so when I read about the Google bill I was thinking "shame they didn't use OSM". Certainly if I were to make a similar project for where I live I would use OSM for it.

They could have used OSM if Google charged standard rates for maps

The sibling replies mentioning Openstreetmap are correct. When displaying placemarkers, like this, you don't need Google Maps.

Also, for showing maps on a high-volume homepage like this, you can use caching, robots.txt and old-school HTML image maps.

So, they have a 'Digital Minister' who's competent, which puts them way ahead of a lot of places ...

https://archive.is/eb54h

I'd like to breathe that tech-democratic air for a while. Does anyone know of a graduate program, or a different way in which I could (go to Taiwan and) meet the right people?

Audrey Tang! I know it was her even before reading the article.

Great article.

A tangential benefit: I learned about Taoist breathing practices, and Pol.is.

I also see that the global media is very reluctant to discuss Vietnam's success in handling Covid. I wonder why.

I strongly recommend this translation of the I Ching https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/i-ching-book-of-changes/id4381...

Thanks, I will try this out.

> I also see that the global media is very reluctant to discuss Vietnam's success in handling Covid.

Do you have data to confirm that? I disagree with your assessment, and have seen Vietnam frequently mentioned

Good article, but why are the titles always clickbait? She doesn't seem that “unlikely” to me, and she didn't hack the pandemic – the hacking was to do with mitigation efforts, and not the actual virus or disease.

Agree, I would have preferred a better title too.

And knowing her reputation in the hacker community, it is anything but unlikely to me that something like this has happened.

Ok, we've made her not be unlikely and have replaced the baity general bit with the neutral specific bit (opening paragraphs ftw), above.

nit(to me, maybe not to them): Audrey requests the use of 3rd person pronouns. Out of curiosity - how does that work in Chinese?

Gendered pronouns don't exist in spoken Chinese. Some such as 她, 它, and 牠 do exist in written Chinese, but they are neologisms, arising only relatively recently (nineteenth century). They're all pronounced the same (tā in pinyin). Prior to then, the word 他 (also tā) would be used to represent he/him/she/her/it.

I have heard that in modern times, some actually use the pinyin tā in a sentence consisting otherwise only of Chinese characters to represent the truly gender-neutral pronoun. However, I've never seen that myself; I've seen only 他.

Incidentally, this is why you'll sometimes hear a native Chinese speaker mistakenly use "he" or "him" instead of "she" or "her." It's a distinction they don't make in their native spoken language, so it doesn't come naturally to them.

> Incidentally, this is why you'll sometimes hear a native Chinese speaker mistakenly use "he" or "him" instead of "she" or "her."

I know speakers of foreign languages with strong gendering (as in every person/object has a gender in their language) and they will still confuse she/he at times.

https://www.slate.com/human-interest/2013/12/mandarin-chines...

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