echevil

The Great Leap Forward is known by almost every Chinese, many of whom having family members actually experienced that. That said, having millions of people starved to death has been quite common throughout the history of China. They could be caused by war, by natural disaster, by human, or a combination of multiple factors. Even in 20th century, starving has been commonplace until the economy started to improve after the economic reform in 1978 (a huge accomplishment that is often ignored by western people) It's hard for younger generations of Chinese to even imagine the darker ages.

Won't be long. Mate 20 will be announced on Oct 16.

There's a nice uptrend it seems: https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2018/country/all

Making things easier for foreigners in China simply have very low priority for these companies.

Both WeChat and Alipay are expanding aggressively abroad but their primary motive is just to make things easier for Chinese tourists traveling abroad.

Zu Chongzhi derived pi should be between 3.1415926 to 3.1415927 back in 5th century. Well, that was pretty good precision at that time

People won’t usually believe random articles over statement from government or other authorities body. But most often, the articles never gets debunked since there are so many, and even if they are, it could be too late to repair the damage already done - business getting hurt etc., and the authorities statement may not reach everyone that believed the fake stories.

If there are no laws and there are no consequences making up such stories, nothing can really stop this.

Just replace that with "national heroes" and you're all good

> The traditional western concept is that an educated people will be able to discern who to trust and when ...

That won't solve the immediate problem of caused by fake articles circling around; and it will just bias towards hurting less educated people (who, btw, are exactly the target of those articles)

If there are laws against false information, of course this would need to go through proper law enforcement process, e.g. There must be proof that the articles are made up with intentional lies and the person should go through a trial.

The western societies never solve this problem and there's nothing to be proud about.

That sounds right. But for bigger companies, they can also come up with a much bigger pool of questions and choose from there

I also think this could be very effective first round of screening. The questions don't have to be all trivia though. Something that is simple for legit developers in that domain to answer should also work. Time they take to answer also correlates well with experience.

> The government has far too much vested interest to be trustworthy.

Yet they are the only entity that can make laws against it

There are borderline content that’s hard to judge, but also tons of content that’s undoubtedly fake. For years there have been tons of articles floating around WeChat (Chinese social network) that’s completely made up stories and yet causing bad influence. As an example, there was a very popular article claiming seaweeds sold on the market are often made of plastics. Eventually the author of was identified and basically said that was what he felt like, but the impact of this article was real.

The government is in the best position to stop this by establishing laws against creating and spreading such misinformation.

> Most engineering interviewees fail to advance because of cultural/personality/communication issues and not technical competence.

This must vary from company to company, but it's clear that tech companies spent tons of time and efforts in technical screening. Most questions asked in these interviews are also technical. It's hard to see why candidates would even have a chance to talk about their political views

Also, this looks like a feedback email after a take home project? I guess the rejection emails after the technical interview should be much more detailed.

Bing has always been operating normally in China

> "Why not base it in Taiwan?"

Because the startups are simply not there. Why doesn’t US YC base in Puerto Rico

Nope. There’re tons of Chinese startups already with or without YC. Would US startups be required to register as Chinese companies if they receive Chinese VC money?

Lol, what makes you think they can’t invent their own

It’s not hard to understand if you just take a look at stats in the past few years on where recent startups are founded, and where VC money goes.

Language barrier is not an issue for YC - they can just hire mandarin speakers like Lu Qi. I’m sure YC China would get mostly Chinese employees.

Really excited to see how YC model would work out in China!

It is the top 1 free app in China’s App Store for some time now

Well, you may be glad to learn that there has been lots of rumors on Chinese websites in the past few months that Xi’s position is being challenged and he might even be in danger

Also, they need to "predict" whether the loan would be profitable as they have not loaned the money yet. The decision largely depends on the precision of their prediction

Things don't work like that at all in China. Even the basic "financial credit score" is in a very immature state at the moment

First of all banks in China works very differently from those in US. It's very hard for individuals and small companies to get loans from banks.

Secondly, there are tons of companies working on peer-to-peer lending in US as well. Lending Club and Prosper has been around for a while. Newer ones like Upstart and Lendup are also in the same category. Their claims essentially that they have more data and better models to make better decisions than what traditional banks can do

The Chinese government prints much more money though. Inflation is much more serious in China. The official stats doesn’t reflect this, but it’s clear for anyone who’s familiar with price changes in China

On the other hand, if some company have all my data and knows what I would need when I need it, it'd help me save tons of time browsing irrelevant information. I hope they can get better doing that. e.g. Yelp has tons of information about what restaurants I like and what I dislike, they still gives me tons of useless recommendations.

Early adopters of agriculture most likely had the option to choose between farming and keeping their old way of hunter/gatherer life, and yet agriculture become dominant

That's the kind of argument I would simply discard, and it is only a matter of interpretation and can provide no benefit whatsoever..

I wonder why they don't require existing websites to apply for these licenses. Maybe it'll be a next step