muddyrivers

I grew up in China. Line cutting has always been annoying, even infuriating, for me. The last few times I visited back, I noticed the young generations are much better in this aspect. There are rarely any improvements in this regard among my generation and older ones. So I guess we have to wait for nature taking its time.

Gawking is common in places that are not culturally diverse. I drove to many small towns in Midwest. I got stared at when I was walking around the town. Especially so when I entered local stores, diners, and pubs where everybody else was white. I could tell many store owners, waitresses, etc. were not comfortable when talking to me. I hope it is getting better.

I have similar experiences in both systems. Growing up in China, it is easy for me to navigate in US cities. Beijing is primarily of grid system.

The first time I went to Europe, I got quite lost in the city (Madrid). The second time was in Paris. I got some free time. So I walked around aimlessly in some neighborhoods, away from the popular tourist sites, appreciating the beauty, the history and the local people I ran across. It brought back the feeling I walked around the Hutongs in Beijing, which I enjoyed so much. Since then, I have been feeling very comfortable in navigating European cities with organic layout. In my case, it does seems there are two navigation systems, and I make subconscious switches based on the layouts.

The table corruption bugs were triggered when the load was very high, as far as I know. It happened twice to me. In both cases, the corruption couldn't be corrected.

The worse part was the corruption was propagated into replica, which brought up much more serious issue with Postgres's replication model. So the only solution was to install the latest good backup.

I think the media tend to use "depression" as a general term to describe mental illness. The persons who committed suicide may suffer other forms of mental illnesses. There are a great number of different types of mental illnesses, like there are a great number of different types of cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, etc. Instead of using accurate and specific diagnosis like lymphoma, we use a generic term "depression" in these cases. I think it shows both how little we understand the physiological basis of mental illnesses, and the lack of education in society in this regards.

Pollution is indeed a big problem. I think it is closely related to both economy and national psychology. The economy has to develop to a point that the government decides that it is preferable to slow down economy and allocate more resources to deal with pollution. One example is the recent ban of importing garbages. It will take years to clean the pollution.

Smoking/smokers problem has been improving. (Anecdotal evidence) Most men in my hometown were smokers when I grew up. So were my friends/classmates when they turned 20s. It was a norm in social meetings. The last few years when I visited them, most quit smoking. Based on my nephews, there are much less smokers in the young generation.

Diet might be another important factor. Asian tend to have balanced meals that include significant amounts of vegetables, fish, seafood, etc.

I think the condition is improving. More and more people realize the importance of balanced meals. It shows in grocery stores. They stock more variety of vegetables and fish than before.

As a molecular and cellular biologist in my previous life, I would say it is coincidence, although it is exceedingly rare, as you said. I don't see the possibility to acquire it, based on my understanding and training.

I want to provide some background, which is not typical, but pretty representative. In my 5~6 years as a biologists, I got my hands dirty extensively on 8~10 genes. It means I manipulated the genes in different ways via gene tools to try to figure out their properties. I knew every regions of these genes, even many single nucleotides, and what would happen if mutations occur at these nucleotides/regions. Other than that, I knew 50~60 genes very well. To this day, I can still remember most things about the genes. It is very sad that the random mutation happened to the lovely girl. If we only talk about statistics, the probability of the coincidence may be higher than we first thought.

You can have very messy code with an excellent language. You can also have beautiful code with a poorly designed language. Let's do a thought experiments. Have a pool of SWEs fresh out of school. Divide them into groups. Each group is given a language they are not familiar with. The pool of languages will include both commonly regarded good ones, OK ones, and bad ones. Ask the groups to do a middle-sized project for 3~6 months independently. Then we compile the projects, analyze their code quality. If the pool of SWEs are big enough, it will give us some insights.

This is true. However, it is more important to evaluate both the quantity and the "quality" of advantages and disadvantages.

For disadvantages, how serious are they, how easy are they to be abused, to creep into the codebase, to be prevented from happening again, etc.

It also depends on the team. If it is a small team of 5 people and they are all excellent engineers, I think whatever languages are fine. The 5 engineers will discuss and decide what features to NOT use, etc. and abide to them. If it is a team of 500 engineers, it will take much more efforts and eductions and much longer to achieve that.

You miss the point. I learned all these tricks in school as well. I loved them. I felt "smart". After working for so many years, I only remember the basic ones. If you ask me the "smart" tricks, I can't get them right out of my head. I can sit down with a piece of paper and may get them after trials and errors after a while. Guess what, the important thing is I know these "smart" tricks exist. If I need them in real work, I can google them out easily. Why need I remember them? In my real work, what I need to get right out of my mind are how our systems work, how MySQL/Postgres/Hadoop/HBase/Kafka/Spark/Linux/AWS/... work, etc.

I agree. On the other hand, we engineers need to look at ourselves in the mirror. After all, we engineers conduct the technical interview.

I was involved in hundreds of tech interviews in the past several years. So many times in discussing a candidate's performance, I found some of the interviewers' questions and comments were unrealistic, even preposterous. In one case, an interviewer gave a hard dynamic programming question. We were a tech company and had very good engineers. Our products and our technologies, however, rarely need dynamic programming skills of this difficult level. I couldn't bear it. So I asked, "who think he can solve this problem on the whiteboard in 40 minutes right now?" Dead silence.

I had a very similar experience many years ago. It was an start-up. The interviewer was the ex-CTO of a widely used open source project/product, and led the engineering team in the start-up. Although I regarded myself a good engineer, I was pretty nervous.

After several questions that he was sure I knew the regular stuffs and was qualified for the job, he said he was going to ask some really hard questions to see how much I really knew and what was my thought process. The questions had no simple answers. Each of them required knowledge and experiences from a few technical fields. I didn't know much then. He guided me how to solve the problems, discussed the pros and cons of each approach. Then he told me how they did it, how other products in the same category did it, etc.

The half-hour interview was prolonged to one and a half. At the end, he said, "You have a very intuition on what are the right directions to go when facing unknown complex issues", and gave me an offer. It is my best interview experience. (I didn't join the start-up due to other reasons.)

The technologies have been advanced in a blazing fast speed i the last 10 plus years. Technical interviews, on the contrary, regress in a similar speed.

No projects are budgeted to 45 minutes. The real world scenario for such limited time is debugging in production issues. It is a completely different scenario. The people who jump in are mostly those who are familiar with the services or application that are showing issues, those who have a clear understand of the architecture of the company, those who have skills on their tech stacks and know where to look at and how to analyze, etc.

As someone in a similar situation as the author, I actually agree with you.

It is perfectly normal that people who are not in similar situations don't know how to interact with such children and their parents, initiate, respond, or continue a topic. So I am fine with most remarks people made that the author may find uncomfortable or offensive, unless the remarks are bluntly inappropriate or offensive even to the ears of parents of normal children. For example, since I am not religious, it is really annoying to bring God into the topic, "there must be a purpose", etc.

I agree with the author that please invite our child to your party, to have a playdate, etc. We understand it means the hosts will put in extra efforts to accommodate our child. We greatly appreciate it. We will do our best to make it a less burden. For example, it is OK to invite our child for a swimming party, although he won't swim. He would be very happy to watch other kids play in the water.

See @schoen's good explanation to solve the issue with a computer.

It can be solved with a dictionary as well, by looking up the character from its pronunciation.

With neither computer nor dictionary at hand, it would mostly fall into three scenarios. First, you vaguely remember the character, but can't produce the correct one. Then you can make up a character that look closely to it, like an approximation ("entrepenor") in your example. People will get what you mean from the context.

Some people will substitute with another character of the same sound. Usually it is a character of much simpler form. This is actually an evolving process naturally occurred in history (I don't know what is the correct term in linguistics.) Many very complicated characters had been gradually replaced by simple ones of the same sound in Chinese's >2000 years' history. That is one of the reasons why one character may have multiple meanings.

Some other people will substitute with pinyin. It mostly happens in children's writing. Many children start writing diary at very early age (Chinese is indeed a difficult written language, so we have to start early :) Children like to try new words, especially the "big" words they hear from adults. But it is tiring and frustrating to keep looking up dictionary. Pinyin comes to the rescue. I find it cute, even aesthetic visually, that a child's writing has occasionally pinyin mixed with characters.

嚔 is indeed hard to produce, even for Chinese native speakers. It is an example of an exception, though, like entrepreneur in English (I know it is from French, so the spelling is "unusual").

First, people don't write 喷嚔 often, although they use it in spoken Chinese regularly. It seems people are reluctant to write down words that describe certain body functions.

For 嚔, the difficulty is that its "sound" component is extremely rare in Chinese characters. The majority of Chinese characters are 形声字. Each of such character has a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. Many characters can share the same "sound" component. The "sound" components are usually the "harder" component in writing, in that they have more strokes. (For 嚔, the rectangle at the left is the "meaning" component. The complicated looking part at the right is the "sound" component.) As a result, if one remembers how to write one character, one can simply remember many other characters with the same "sound" component. If one of these characters is commonly used, it is an easy task to remember all the others.

I only know two other characters who share the same "sound" component with 嚔, and I don't think people use them now. They only appear in ancient books.

So 嚔 is a character you don't often write down, and there are no other commonly used characters who shared the same "sound" component. Then you get a character who is hard for native Chinese speakers as well.

I don't understand that it was voted down. I think it is a fair argument.

I agree the reporting has been getting better.

Very helpful for people who study English as a second language. I really like the examples on Arabic, Spanish, and the woman from Nigeria.

Totally agree.

There is another barrier, the technical terms. Even if you know every character used to compose terms like linked list, stack, etc. when they are put together, you will have a hard time to figure them out, unless you have something like a Chinese-English Dictionary of Computer Science to look up.

Empirical observation: I find women who love spicy food usually have better, smoother skins.

So hilarious! Got to build up the tolerance so as to enjoy spicy food more and spend less in the bathroom :)

I have different interpretation of being a genius. Being a genius doesn't mean she or he can solve really hard problems easily. One is a genius if he or she does solve really hard problems, especially in the fields like math, physics, etc. where all low-hanging fruits were way gone. Both Zhang and Perelman are genius, in my eyes. It doesn't matter how long it takes one to solve the hard problems. It sounds a fairy tale to me that someone wakes up one day with a genius thought, and two weeks later, complete a solution for a really hard problem in math, physics, etc. in nowadays.

I understand the cruelty and inhuman treatment sides of child labor. But it is not black and white. Context is important, if not crucial.

Use my own case as example. My family suffered financial hardship due to some misfortune when I was 15. I really wanted to work to help my mother. There were rarely part-time jobs in my hometown in China, then. I could quit my study and try to find a full-time job, which I gave serious thoughts. I knew several people who joined workforce around that age, either due to family financial situation like mine, or they thought they had no future in school (it was already very competitive then) and it was better to work early and accumulate working experience. In this sense, they were "child" labors. But they chose to. They were not mistreated because they were under aged. In my view, they made rational decisions to join the workforce.

One of them, a classmate's brother, returned to school after working for 3 years, when their family financial turned around.

Fortunately, our family decided to open a small business. I tried to get as much time as I could to work there to help, while study hard so that I could go to the best colleges. For two years, I didn't have much time to hang out with friends. So I was a part-time "child" labor. But it was my decision. Nobody forced me. I don't regret it a bit.

Let's face the reality. There are many kids who are just not interested in school and are not good at it. There are two options. They can either hang around and be cool, which is a good situation, considering kids of that age tend to get into troubles if their minds are not occupied. Or they can get a job, learn something from the job, develop good work ethics, etc. What do you think is the better option?

It is a very cynical view that it seems more like propaganda.

In principle, the text of history is never the same as what really happened. What a historian can do is to do his best to write down what he verifies, the different accounts that have merits but none of them can be verified as the ultimate truth. As a reader of history, we should appreciate both the text and the effort, study it and learn our lessons.

Sima Qian's work covers not only the period of his life, but since the beginning of Chinese civilization. He read extensively, touched on all the texts he could get access to (his position in the government granted him such privilege, even after he was punished.) He often travelled out to verify the texts. Considering that was almost 2000 years ago and the size of China (although much smaller than now), one must respect his efforts.

I would say Sima Qian gave a comprehensive and objective depiction of Han Wudi, the emperor who punished him. Wudi was one of the greatest rulers in Chinese history. Sima Qian gave due credits to Wudi, while he didn't hesitate to write down his dubious policies and his mistakes, both before and after his punishment. Wudi knew his work, and didn't interfere. He punished Sima Qian for Sima's opinions on Li Ling (although Wudi was both wrong and brutal in this case), but not by his depiction on Wudi in his work.

I think it is fair to say Sima Qian is "one of two men who can claim to have invented history". His work is the standard and the gauge of all the historians that followed him. Not many have his talents and his balls.

Sima Qian's work is also a classic in literature. For anyone who studies ancient Chinese literature, he must study is work, the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji).

<i> The US, for the most part, doesn't have these problems (lots of roads, parking, and fairly well behaved drivers)...self driving cars are seen as more of a convenience than a necessity. </i>

The same problems exist in metropolitan areas in US as well, like Bay Area, NYC, Chicago, etc. although to a less degree than those in China. In Bay Area, people are so exhausted by long-commute driving. Check how jammed the traffic is in 101, 880, 580, 237, etc. Bart and CalTrain's coverages are pretty limited. With self driving cars, I bet plenty of people will quit driving by themselves for the commute. Imagine one can read, relax, read a book, or even work in the car, instead of sitting behind the wheel for 2 hours a day.

Considering Baidu's scale, it would be tens of thousands.

There are several other discrepancies in the doc between the Chinese version and the English one. Some technical proofreading is needed.

They say "my kid goes to college in Boston". :)

It happened to us a few times. We are asians. Interestingly, one time we got the disgusted look from an Asian waiter in an Italian restaurant.

Also we started to bring our children to good restaurants of different cuisines when they could sit through dinners. (Of course, no restaurants that explicitly say "no children".) We shared all the dishes. Well, it is more that we encourage our children to try our orders. They have developed very good tastes on foods and the appreciation on different cuisines. They both started ordering "adult" dishes at 9 years old. No more chicken tenders, mac and cheese, etc. It is really one of the best family time that we sit together and all enjoy trying local cuisines when travel aboard.

The mindset still stuck in the cold war era. As another comment in this thread, there has been "a huge spike of anti-China news sourced from USA" in the last several years. These news are quoted in China, and in many cases, without giving the full context, as also happen in USA news when reporting China. This has led to a huge spike of anti-America news from China.

Peace, please! National conflicts hurt the common people the most, especially so in such a globalized world.

I am East Asian and came to America in my 20's. I love pastries and deserts, always looking for local pastries to try whenever I travel, to the point to book hotels that are close to famous pastry shops.

Sorry for any misunderstanding my early comment causes.