SimpleMinds

Thanks, didn't know about that. Sounds like it's very specific version of account and most default accounts with IBAN doesn't have this possibility.

Could you tell how knowing IBAN enables someone to take money from your account? As far as I understand, the only think that can happen with IBAN is to receive money.

Maybe you're thinking of credit card number? The CC's I had had different CC number and IBAN account.

According to other sources, they did drive it in Beijing - and in bad conditions [1]

"We’ve tested the car at night and day, as well as in medium rain, and – since this is Beijing – in smog of course."

[1] https://www.techinasia.com/baidu-autonomous-car-hits-roads-c...

I've done something like this. After quitting office work I followed up with working remotely. I'm not sure if I could pull this without spending some time (1+ year) in office where I was able to build connections that allowed me to find remote projects without too much hassle.

As another comment was suggesting, key is to find work for client who is based in "rich" country (for me right now that's US, some of the Europe) and is ok with you working remotely.

If I wanted to work in current location, I'd have to take significant salary cut + start pulling those mentioned 40h/week

"if whatsapp usage is so pervasive at other countries as it is at Brazil, it will soon, by (physical) social network effect, dominate USA."

By using this logic, WeChat should also dominate USA - which is not happening. It's still interesting to me that WeChat is not more popular, considering its superior (for me) experience over WhatsApp.

Didn't know about Cainiao, thanks!

Ad.2 Accodring to [0], thought, Cainiao is only a middleman that connects sellers with delivery companies and/or warehouses. It's a stretch to say that sellers are managed by Cainiao, I believe

[0] http://www.alizila.com/inside-cainiaos-modern-fulfillment-ce...

I would like to add some extra information, to prove that above post is rubbish (I was shopping inside China):

- number of packages

Courier costs ~ 1.5USD, and on top of that, for 11-11 you need small amount to get it for free. As a result, I have around ~30 packages coming to me, from which 5-6 six are from Xiaomi. That's thanks to free delivery, instead of preparing what I want and bundling shopping together I just got multiple packages - and orders.

Number of delivery people:

- for singles days there are horror stories of what's happening in centers. Even thought it's against the law (I think), guys are paid for number of delivered packages, so for workers it's a gold time to work. Last year some of them were working 22 hours a day just to have a huge influx of cash

- Alibaba had tents inside office where people were sleeping. That one just for fun, not related to above :)

Overall, if his work related research is equal in quality to the one he had for this post, that's a very nice sign of not to follow him.

I have old information, hopefully you still find it relevant.

Around April in Beijing, for 10rmb paid by us Uber driver was paid 40rmb - at least that's what he told us.

We asked only one though.

I can do all three and you can find a lot of people who can. The problem is how many things you can do at once.

Mostly true, with caveat: it's hard to find big projects as single freelancer. Simply put, you won't be able to score a client that needs (let's say) both server side, front end, android/ios app finished in the same time. When working in (good) outsourcing shop, you work as a team.

I worked for two good outsourcing shops and both experiences were great.

I would like to add here a bit if I can.

I'm from Western country and I was/am living in Eastern culture (China)

I'm still learning about Chinese concepts of family and "filial piety". Thanks to long (and sometimes hot) discussions with gf, I feel now that my behaviour towards family and close friends have changed in better way - I understand/feel without thinking that there are situations where my concept of being adult and self sustainable person with own opinions should give way to another person even if I'm right (and they are wrong) because they are elders in the conversation. I understand in better way that there are social constructs that even if not best, they keep people close to you (that's important part) in greater mood than if you constantly try to set your opinions on them.

Sometimes you don't want to tell people close to you that your tooth hurst so they are not worried.

Even though there's a lot of wrong with social behaviours in China on a greater scale (look up problems with "good Samaritans" for simplest examples), the family scale I feel is much better and greater than what I learned/grow up with in West. I feel that if we could learn from Chinese concepts of family, we would be much better in West.

While saying above, I have to think that it still can be coming from my raising and history and I'm still learning about historical/philosophical entires in our social life, so I hope I didn't offend anyone with above.

Thank you for the link, I haven't read it before. Interesting part for me was

"That is, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you’re filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you’re seeing, in real time — thousands of people at once."

That's wow for me as this is almost exactly what Periscope is doing, which is popular around me right now. I had to check the date of article, 2011. Wow. 4 years earlier is a lot :)

Do you mean originally written in my language? As coming from post soviet block, most of our fantasy is a bit different in a sense that from the beginning it doesn't involve epicness of Tolkien, Malazan, Black Company scale. From the beginning books focus on different things.

I would like to read some of them in English to see how's the difference in perception.

A little bit related to article, as I'm not bilingual but just speaking English as another language and this come up after conversation with friend (another not native English speaker). I learned my English mostly thanks to computers and playing games, including classical RPGs.

I started to read Malazan Book of the Fallen[0], a very dark and heavy fantasy series. I started in English, then switched to my native language, now to have maximum fun from it (as I like it a lot), I read one book in native and then reread in English.

What I've noticed is that reading in my native language makes me feel much more connected to characters, I see the whole relations between persons more vividly and intensively. Then rereading in English, the same characters (which I already know and like!) feels much more distant and abstract.

But :)

All the fantasy scenes plays much better in my head in English than in my language. For some reasons sentences like "blood dripping from sword", "screams of souls", "massive", "darkness", "spread his wings" etc instantly trigger the feeling of magnificent and out-of-this-world scale of experiences. Even though translation is top-notch, for those parts I prefer the English version.

Very interesting experience.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen

I agree with other commenters, this is genius idea but all depends on the available content. Looking at the story, it's not interesting to me, so it'll not keep me occupied and willing to learn.

I'm searching for something like this but frankly there's nothing as far as I know. The best so far is Chinese Breeze series - example book

http://www.amazon.com/Whom-Chinese-Breeze-300-word-Level/dp/...

with stories a little, little better than usual. They, though, require that you know at least ~100 basic hanzis to be able to comfortably read. I have 3 or 4 books, I don't remember, and they are fine (just please, a little better story!) Each is around 20-40 pages so not much but kindle versions are also really cheap.

The way I worked with it, was to convert mobi to html and put on local server. That way I could use Zhongwen (mentioned by alexgolive) plugin to help me with words I didn't know.

If anyone knows something similar, please share! I love to read Hanzi, it's super fun when all the spiders :) suddenly start making sense

I was not implying that game programmers are stupid, sorry. I meant that they way it was told in the company how AAA do it sounded similar to what I learned about how big companies done it 10 or something years ago. Coming from agile workplace, I think there were things that could have been kept in place to improve quality of life for developers and art teams. I'm not sure if I can express what I mean correctly. For example, why the dreaded "crunch time" in gaming is treated as norm, while in modern web/mobile shops its believed that something like this is going to result in worse quality over time?

I could see arguing here with myself that AAA games are usually "ship and forget", with some bugfixes only. Maybe because company I was working in was not AAA, but small (by industry standards) f2p mobile shop, where applying AAA ideas is not that great (in my opinion). I mean that's where your product is more along lines of web apps - you are going to constantly add content, update code base, refine features, so focusing on quality in long term is better. This, thought, I was not able to articulate clearly and properly to AAA veterans.

I feel like not all ideas from current practises can be applied to big gaming studios, but saying that I believe it can be improved. This may need time and risk that companies that are big enough to be called AAA are not willing to take.

Why two companies you mentioned failed? I think we can assume there might be more reasons to that than only being Agile, maybe their games were just not that good, or IP was boring? Still you sound like you have more experience than me here, I'm trying to wrap my head around whole AAA industry thing. I'm ranting about it so much because making games was way more entertaining than web/mobile, but the industry is so poisonous for pure developers that I had to quit to regain my sanity :)

I agree with what you said with my limited experience. I hope it's anecdotal nature is good enough.

I worked in a company that went from doing software gigs in general to be full mobile gaming company. Before it was quite standard Agile style company: Scrum, code reviews, TDD, cross-functional teams (front end devs knew how servers works in general), focus on quality over quantity (one dev, rotated weekly or biweekly, focusing on fixing bugs), separate concerns.

After going full game-oriented, company hired couple of people from gaming industry into higher positions - tech leads, project managers etc. Over couple of months, people with many years of experience in those big companies dismantled what was standard for me, using combination of two arguments:

- big names don't do it, so it must be wrong - it's a waste of time

Before I quit, there were no longer code reviews (waste of time), all testing was to be handled by QA team (waste of valuable dev time), ship with issues (waste of time to fix minor bugs when can add features), single system responsibility (one dev to write code for client server protocols, one dev for UI, one dev for assets etc, that's gow big names do it).

At one of the last talks with "industry veteran", when I mentioned those things - and how negative, in my opinion, those changes are, his response was "so you are saying that whole gaming industry dev practice is wrong". At that point I thought he's right and I sound full of crap, now I believe that yes, AAA companies are simply bad development practises shops.

My guess as to why is because AAA is very strongly driven by deadlines and marketing, where you cannot simply delay release (Christmas shopping spree is coming). This idea I saw articulated on HN first and I agree with it.

I've been to 3w coffee in June, and I thought coworkers space moved out of there. Guys who were running [1] now rent small space for themselves in Shekou. My feelings there were similar to [2], that is it's a coffee shop feeling with a lot of power plugs.

(difference between coworkers space and working from coffee shops is that I pay a month/day fee and don't need to worry about buying coffee/eating to not feel guilty of taking their space :) )

There's one more place trying to open but their location is really far even for Shenzhen standards :) (Bao'an)

[1] http://szteam.com/ [2] http://www.coworkplanet.com/coworking-in-shenzhen-3w-coffee/

I'm a new here (only reading for long time), how can we contact in HN? I'd love to meet some people in Shenzhen that follow hacker news.

Hi,

I'm living in Shenzhen for almost 10 months now, after moving from Beijing after three years. I can only correlate living in Shenzhen with living in Beijing for an expat. My Chinese is only basic too. Ok here were go with plus sides first:

- being smaller city, Shenzhen still have the "wow" factor for foreigners. It's easier to find better paid (compared to Chinese counterparts) job, easier to handle things, easier to survive by being "lost expat"

- if you get tired of China (and many of us do), HK is just 1h away and you instantly have different experience. It might sound silly but it's very valuable

- cheaper than bigger counterparts

- Shenzhen is ~35 years old, build with grow in mind. That means that subway is great, traffic is great. Notion of traffic jam here is very very small compared to other big cities. If you drive, or, very probably, if you use taxi, almost no traffic jams is amazing (there still are, but its way less than what I experienced in other big cities)

- Shenzhen is one of the cleanest cities in China in terms of pollution. Some people say wearing a pollution mask in Beijing every day is like living in future, but not for me :)

- if you like warm, you will like weather here

- taobao - no, really, you can find almost anything there and it's a great asset to consider when thinking about China :)

Now, for the bad things:

- for IT software, I found it very lacking compared to Beijing. There's not that much talent (yet), not many startups. There's even no coworkers space available. Similar with Hong Kong, where I'm guessing cost of living is prohibitive for having a startup -> IT just goes towards big banks etc. On the other hand, if you treat work as a paycheck thing, check the positive point above, you could find boring, not demanding work in Chinese company just to be "white face". Overtimes are happening, but afaik here expats are more often excluded

- unless you are willing to travel to HK, foreigner things are harder to get by. If you like to cook especially. Taobao gets you covered in most cases but some specifics are harder to find

- food and available cousines are terrible. I like Chinese food, but what you can find here is disappointing. I do miss Beijing range of tasty restaurants

- good english speaking Chinese are much rarer, thus (until you learn good Chinese) learning about their culture, way of life etc from natives (compared to reading some post on internet, cough ;) ) is harder

Now, to answer your specific question: yes, I think it's very easy to make a living in Shenzhen for software engineer. I would recommend two things:

- making sure that company that you start with gives you a proper visa as now gov is cracking down on illegal or wrong type of visas

- if you would like to learn more Chinese, do not surround yourself only with expats.

I hope this helped you a little bit, I don't have experience with sharing this kind of information with people

Thank you very much for posting to vendor. Could you also post links and/or names to other parts? That way it will be complete information