echevil

I'd expect Chrome to provide some settings at least to not mark local IPs as not secure

Plenty of companies, universities and even small ISPs use 10.0.0.0

This is great. It was so hard to cancel Adobe subscription

It also invested more than US+Canada

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/in-q2-2018-global-vc-scales...

The reality is, three major players Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent are competing with each other in almost every front, and also competing with tons of new challenges like Meituan, Bytedance, etc. The abundance and variety of small startups and their competition is nothing unlike what's happening in silicon valley.

Vast majority of Chinese population is available to at least parts of the tech products now. WeChat/Alipay is available virtually anywhere.

It is true that the development in China is very unbalanced, and habits of different groups of people varies a lot. There are also abundant number of tech products targeting each group of people. For example, Taobao has been very popular in large cities for many years, you'd think they've saturated online shopping market. A new startup Pinduoduo launched in 2015, targeting online shopping market in smaller cities and countrysides, managed to acquire hundreds of millions of users there, and they just filed for IPO a few days ago.

I live in SF and go back to China about once a year, and every time I go back, I can always find tons of new stuff. For my hometown, the change from exclusively cash-only to cashless happened in less than 2 years.

Many of those Chinese immigrants still go back to China after they get green cards.

With Huawei being the second largest Android vendor after Samsung, there is nothing unnatural if Google wants to collaborate with Huawei to make better phones. They might also want to collaborate with the 3rd and 4th largest vendors, Xiaomi and Oppo

I wonder how did this random post with only 14 points and one comment got to front page

Not only old but also not enough. In areas that population have grown a lot in the past few decades, it makes a lot of sense to build new infrastructure to keep up with the demand

China is probably planting more trees than any other country in the world.

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/20305/20160321/china...

“Based on the images captured by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), it was revealed that 1.6 percent of the total land surface of China became heavily forested in a span of only ten years from 2000 to 2010.”

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1854/2016...

“China is investing immense resources for planting trees, totalling more than US$ 100 billion in the past decade alone”

Good then. Most of the restrictions mentioned in the article are automatically removed in 1 year.

The original announcement all included ways that these restrictions are lifted. Most of them are automatically lifted in 180 days or 1 year.

If the author of this article has read the original announcement from either Chinese government or various sources from China, they'll know the so called "people with bad social credit" that'll get these restrictions is defined very clearly, and yet it mentioned only a tiny bit of it in very misleading way. Many of the actions described in the definition would put you in jail in US. Whether they're intentionally misleading people is anybody's guess.

There are many paragraphs clarifying the definition either here: http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/gzdt/201803/t20180316_879653.html

Or here: http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/201803/16/t20180316_28505546...

There is also clearly defined way to lift the restrictions as defined in the NDRC announcement. Most of the restrictions are removed automatically in one year. Certainly not "once untrustworthy, always restricted"

Isn't the American credit score more like “once untrustworthy, always restricted”? Most the restrictions announced by China are removed automatically in just one year.

AI researchers are certainly fully aware of such issues, and there have been various models trying to encode long term dependency information, e.g. LSTM.

Indian and Chinese systems certainly have tons of problem themselves, but that's a separate issue. Chinese students need to spend tons of time cracking the college entrance exam (and all exams before that). When the exam focused on memorization, the students would optimize for that, and the "top talents" selected by that exam are those best at memorization. However, the exams also changed overtime, and it is much less focused on memorization now.

While these exams still receives tons of criticism nowadays, being able to perform well on these exams still correlates highly on being able to succeed in future.

As an immigrant in America, one of the most jaw-dropping fact I learned about American culture is that kids getting best grades in school are often tagged as "geeks" and often get bullied, and kids all want to be "cool". Well, though it might be common sense in America, in China and other east Asian countries, if you can't get good grades, you won't get much respect from anybody.

2015 Macbook pro. I switched to Mac as I was not happy with Windows Vista, and never looked back

English is the official language used in formal context in Singapore, not Chinese, Indian or Malay. All the documents you’d sign with a company are in English.

I don't know what to say. Believe in whatever you want to believe. I'm glad I can speak more languages than I thought.

Please search for "suppression of dialects was never a MAJOR part" in the original article for more details. I copied the exact sentence from there.

Yes, there are much less Singaporeans speaking their dialects at home. I've actually met several Singaporeans saying that want to speak their dialects as much as possible as they feel it's endangered. However, what are the alternatives? Singaporean Chinese doesn't speak the same dialect, and it's a small city. How do they communicate with each other in school, at work, and at home after marrying someone speaking a different dialect? They can speak English, in fact they do that as well, or they can speak Mandarin if they're communicating with another Chinese speaker. Either way, the chance they'll be able to speak their own dialects will diminish eventually.

In addition, most dialects are no where close to being endangered, as they're widely used in China. We speak in Mandarin with people that doesn't speak the same dialect, but at the same time, it'd also be weird if we are from the same place, speak the same dialect and yet decide to speak in Mandarin.

> Mandarin wasn't really written until about 120 years ago. Before people would write classical Chinese. It's a "written vernacular/白話文

This is true, but it's a separate issue from having various dialects. Language evolves as time goes by, and in the case of Chinese before "written vernacular", people would write in the same form of ancient Chinese (regardless of pronunciation) which diverged a lot from what people actually speak. With the promotion of "written vernacular", people started to write what they speak, irrelevant of dialects.

Even though each of the dialects have some special vocabulary, and even different grammar, that doesn't mean they're not still "MOSTLY" the same.

I speak a southern Chinese dialect myself (I don't know what to call it in English) which is also dramatically different from Mandarin. Yes it has a few words that we commonly used, that I thought to be unique, but it turns out all of the characters and words exist in standard Chinese dictionary. Those words actually existed for a long time, and they are just no longer commonly used by other people. That said, learning to speak Mandarin is no where close to be like learning a new language. Vast majority parts of the language are still the same. Hokkien might be slightly more different but still no where close to being a separate language.

On the other hand, Japanese is undoubtedly a separate language, even though it also use Chinese characters (plus about 100 characters of their own), and many of the Chinese characters and words in Japanese actually means the same as they do in Chinese. No one would claim Japanese as a dialect of Chinese, because the difference is both significant and clear.

I think you also agree that both Taiwanese and people from mainland China CAN read Hong Kong newspapers, just not as fluently. Part of the reason is what I said, different writing systems. The other reason is that people do use some different words, especially for new concepts. Since Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China has been fairly separated for a long time, divergence is inevitable. For example, new words like "program" is translated in different ways: "程序" in mainland China, and "程式“ in Taiwan. Again, this has nothing to do with dialects. Mandarin speakers form mainland China would not be able to read Taiwan newspapers as fluently even though it's also Mandarin. Cantonese speakers from Guangdong province couldn't read Hong Kong newspaper as fluently even though it's also Cantonese.

On the other hand, I grew up watching many Hong Kong movies that were spoken in Cantonese but with Chinese captions. The captions needed no translation at all - They were just what the actors were saying. After watching many of those, I could even understand some Cantonese though I still couldn't speak those. I admit there are occasionally some word that seems unfamiliar to me, but it didn't impacted much. I don't believe you can do that with a different language.

I totally believe that as it’s basically the same situation in China

> Only Mandarin and Cantonese even have a fully developed way of writing with characters. Up until relatively recently Mandarin itself was considered a spoken language

Native speaker here. I have absolutely no idea where you get that.

Cantonese is just one of many dialects, and in fact, it is not a single dialect: People from different parts of Guadong province actually speak Cantonese very differently. Should you consider those different languages?

Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin do sound like different languages, but not all dialects are. Most Chinese speaker can understand dialects spoken in central, and north parts of China, even though they usually can't speak those dialects.

Even though some of the dialects sounds very differently, the words, syntax, sentences being used are actually the same. That's how people can read what other people speaking other dialects write, with no problem.

To complicate the issue even more, there're not one, but two writing systems currently being used: Simplified Chinese is used in China mainland and Singapore, while Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. That's the reason people from mainland China (no matter what dialect they speak, even Cantonese) cannot read Hong Kong newspaper fluently

The two writing systems are different but they have one to one mapping for each character. So it's also not two unrelated system.

In fact, it's just called "Chinese" by Chinese speakers. I never heard of the word "Mandarin" before I came to US.

Yes, there was a promotion to speak Mandarin, but suppression of dialects was never a major part of the campaign and Hokkien is still spoken by many Singaporean.

If you can read Chinese, the Chinese versions of wikipedia page on Mandarin Chinese has a lot more detail on its origination: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/普通话

If you cannot, I found an English article for you: http://www.alittledynasty.com/history-of-mandarin-chinese.ht...

To summarize, Mandarin is not created out of nothing for sure, but the concept of "Mandarin Chinese" (or rather, Standard Chinese) started with an effort of newly established Republic of China in 1913, to develop a standard phonetic system and to use as the national language in China. They later published the standard around 1920s, which is essentially a modified version of phonetic system used in Beijing. The dialect now spoken in Beijing is very close to Mandarin, but not exactly the same.

I grew up in China and lived in Singapore for a long time. I can tell you for sure, that the different dialects spoken by Chinese should not be confused with completely different languages. First of all they share the same writing system, the words and syntax we use in various dialects are mostly the same. (Some dialects use a few words differently from others, but that's not surprising at all considering UK english and US english are not exactly the same)

I speak a southern dialect myself which sounds very different from Mandarin. But there is a somewhat systematic mapping from the dialect to Mandarin, so it was really not much an effort to learn Mandarin.

I can imagine there must have been some efforts there to promote the standard in the very beginning, maybe even "forcefully suppressing" other dialects are needed at some point, but considering the huge benefit, it undoubted is the best invention happened in the history of Chinese language.

I don't see any part of your comment being correct.

First of all, "Mandarin" is spoken not only in China mainland, but also the standard in Singapore and Taiwan. It was a creation by the Republic of China (which later became Taiwan government) back in 1923, long before the current Chinese government came into power.

Children use Mandarin in school because they have to learn it to be able to communicate with people coming from other parts of China, which would have become a huge disadvantage to themselves. (I can't imagine how I would communicate with other people in college otherwise) It doesn't mean people will forget how to speak their own dialect. In fact, people from the same region almost always speak their own dialects.

Regional / minority cultures are generally protected by the government. The minority are almost always over-represented in all kinds of national events. Being a minority in China means you can get tons of advantage (lower score required to enter good colleges, financial aid, etc.)