kaptain

This is helpful. I agree about transparency in impact. I also understand that it is often difficult to measure that impact quantitatively when you are a charity. Business is easier because $ is easily quantifiable. I'm not so interested in getting my money back. I just want some reasonable assurance that it's going to something "effective".

Can you describe how Sunrise Movement is effective in helping to mitigate climate change? (I looked at their website but I'm interested in quantitative data.)

I saw this as well as https://www.charitywatch.org/. Their analysis is somewhat opaque. It doesn't tell me how effective they are, just how efficient they are.

Can you talk about why NRDC is a good choice?

A friend of mine who is a teacher pointed out to me that “highly gifted” children were actually special needs children. She used this term because she worked in a highly competitive district where parents were constantly harassing her to consider their children “highly gifted”. Once she used this term, it became easier for parents to accept that their children were doing fine in “normal” class, which was quite good anyways because of the average aptitude of the students.

Hrm. This is very interesting. Your post made me think about using a couple of different software packages together. I could use IMAP Grab to pull all the email to disk on the server and then use https://www.duplicati.com/ to push to the cloud storage of my choice. Sigh. Sounds like another project for me. Thanks! Your post was super helpful to get me thinking about how things might work.

You're not wrong, but it's this kind of thinking that the author is referring to. When it comes to children, if the motivation to develop and cultivate comes from seeing them as a long-term retirement plan that can be dangerous if they fail to meet that expectation.

Wrong because others have monetized their own children. I am thinking specifically of parents who have children in the entertainment or sports industries.

I actually agree with you. My kids are awesome and I enjoy the time playing with them and watching them develop. But not everyone receives that same kind of joy from child development nor do people have the same goals.

I was going to suggest that raising children was something enjoyable that resisted monetization. But upon further reflection, I would be wrong.

Planet Money had a great podcast on this topic. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

I'm surprised ASCII/Unicode or some sort of encoding isn't on the list.

This assumes that your talent pool is only local. If Chinese (i.e. 大陆) parents would be willing to send their kids all over the world for a university education, do you think it would be a big deal that a Shanghai team moved to Taiwan?

I agree with you. But I'm not suggesting that people develop business based on the location of YCombinator. YCombinator accepts applicants from all over the world who want to focus on specific issues that their home markets exhibit. Just the other day someone was promoting FinTech for South America.

In my OP I said it would be work. It would be more of a challenge for Mainland Chinese applicants to launch their businesses while not being in the Mainland, but if that was their biggest problem then they're prepped for success!

The PRC says that Formosa (i.e Taiwan) is part of China. That's why I added the caveat (for some definition of China). There are political definitions, cultural definitions, linguistic/anthropological definitions. So, my statement still stands that Taiwan is a kind of China, depending on how you understand that word.

It's clear that you're speaking from a political perspective, but even that gets a bit grey.

Since you don't live in China, you should know that there are hundreds of different versions of China within China itself. You could live in Shanghai and never know the reality of the China that the people of Xinjiang experience. So I would say to your points that:

1) The markets all over China are very different. 2) The talent pools all over China are very different.

If YC wants to call it YC Shangjing, (because they're primarily targeting those two markets), that would be fair. But considering China just to be Shanghai and Beijing is a bit myopic, which is why I suggested Taiwan in the first place.

Disclosure: I am a Chinese-American currently living in Northwest China, which is VERY different than Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Linxia, Shenyang, etc. all of which I've visited.

The political concerns are real. It's too cynical to say that YC just cares about money, though. There would be better ways to create an incubator than to do it like this, if that were the case. One obvious question that hasn't been raised is: "Why not base it in Taiwan?" It's still "China" (for some definition of China), you can still get access to the talent that you want (you just have to try a little harder), and you could still get access to the market you're targeting.

It's not going to be easy, but it would better address the political and humanitarian issues raised.

Thanks for posting this. I live in China and thought Fastmail was finally being blocked by the GFW. Over the past year I've had intermittent issues with connectivity and I've wondered if FM's time in China was up. Are there any HN readers in China that have experienced similar issues with FM?

Always on VPN hinders my productivity. I live in China and sometimes the VPN connection stalls so while the my operating system indicates it is active, packets aren't being sent/received (I'm on macOS/iOS). Resetting my VPN connection does the trick, but my point is that VPNs aren't stable in China. I need them but I'm annoyed when data isn't pushed/pulled when I expect it to be.

Reminds me of bike sharing in China. Now THAT is out of control. In China, the companies pay committed employees or contractors to gather bikes, as opposed to crowd-sourcing it. There's pros//cons to that (as per the article itself).

At least in China, people don't respect the bikes. They trash them. They leave them everywhere. It sounds like a similar attitude exists with these Bird scooters. As societies/cities grow larger, people take less responsibility for things they use and spaces they exist in. I suspect it's partly a cultural thing (see Japan) but I'm pretty sure Japan has litter too. Bird has to incentivize the right behavior and disincentivize (i.e. even enforcement of charging policy) poor behavior.

I've never purchased a "new from the Apple Store" iPhone in China. But I've purchased a second-hand/refurbished US model iPhone in country off of Taobao. And you can make/receive FaceTime Audio-only calls with it, in-country.

I spoke to a friend (recent college grad) about expectations about work. He said that pre-marriage, he expected to work every day, as many hours a day as possible to build up his skill set. As he acquired more skills and responsibilities, he expected that he was going to do less coding and more managing others to code. A lot of the challenge of software development is not in the actual coding itself but rather in architecting the infrastructure and processes that make a product successful. He expected that by the time he hit 30, he would be working a more reasonable 9-5 because he would be in a administrative/managerial position.

Culturally, China is about fitting in. It's a difficult place to live if you're older and single, if you're married with no children, etc. This grates against Western values. Starting a tech job (i.e. programming/coding) over 30 is not the norm so it is avoided.

Saerx.me because it uses other search engines add a proxy, giving me the privacy I desire. Also, I live in China where, arguably, the best engine is blocked. Searx.me also gives me access to it without firing up a VPN.

From the article:

> We would be married but for my condition, which has placed a question mark at the end of nearly everything. Will experimental treatments eventually fix me? Can I contribute to a family? Is it fair to ask that Dunia sustain a lifetime of my poor health?

China. Two strong influences: an idolization of western parenting plus the one child policy. Take your caricature of a dependent US kid and add the pressure and coddling of six parents.

I've met foreigners who have had TERRIBLE tones but still manage to get their point across in Mandarin because of context. Your explanation for why English works despite mispronunciation is the same reason why Chinese works: context. For example, let's assume we were talking about our families. You want to say: 我爱我妈 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my mother". But if you said 我爱我马 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my horse", I would assume you meant you love your mother because of the context.

Speaking from a Chinese context this is very common. The irony to me is that spoken Mandarin is very fast and very colloquial. This coupled with the limited number of phonemes makes it very easy to transcribe speech incorrectly (i.e. not inline with the speaker's intention). The irony is that I've observed that most Mandarin speakers will slow down their speech and speak more clearly to try and ensure proper transcription.

This is amazing to me because most people I encounter don't do that for me, even though I am not a native speaker and by doing that they could ensure that our communication is smoother and more accurate.

If we're looking at the rest of these anecdotal comments as a reflection of the larger English-speaking (and perhaps American) public, the conclusion is that speech-to-text isn't very helpful but in a completely different linguistic and cultural environment (i.e. Chinese) we see that it is indeed quite successful.

One interesting thing to me is that, with sucessful enough voice-to-text transcription, the need for typing (and writing) becomes moot (in that context). I wonder if we'll see that typing as only a skill necessary for specific trades/occupations.

The article noted that one workaround for people in the middle of an install just to change the date. Is this a general workaround: change the date pre-February 2016, run installer, change date back?

Let's not insult junior high D&D clubs.

A lot of the posts here focus on content. I would focus on process. Since you're new to the job your head WILL be spinning, so it's important for you to setup a way to work through the "newness".

Bring a notebook and a timer. Understand what your immediate report's expectations of you are and then set up a schedule for yourself to help yourself meet those expectations. I'm assuming that since it sounds like you're new/junior hire, the expectations, at least initially, will be low. Use this time to create a rhythm for yourself on a hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week basis so that you yourself can see your progress and understand what you're doing.

Nothing is more discouraging than being pumped for a job, putting in a lot of hours, but not really realizing where the time has gone (which was my experience initially) with very little positive results to show for.

This introduction is both dated and timeless at the same time. Sigh. Part of me wishes I was back in school.

The tragedy here is that the political climate of China will hamstring the usefulness of this achievement. Baidu's search results are inferior to those of Google's; it doesn't matter so much that Google's computing power is inferior. Google can actually use the results.

Whatever technical achievements that Baidu can accomplish will be wasted because they won't be able to overcome the political issues that come with being able to make use of those achievements. :(