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zmh

149 karma · joined November 20, 2013

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zmh··on “Prestudy”: Learning Chinese Through Reading
>It also only supports texts with simplified characters. I’ll eventually add support for traditional characters. The silver lining is that when you add a flashcard for a simplified character, you’ll also get a flashcard for the traditional character. It’ll be suspended by default so you’ll have to unsuspend if you want to study it.

This goal is difficult the way you put it. In Chinese, besides reduction in strokes, a number of traditional characters (of different or similar meanings but mostly pronounced the same) are converted into one simplified character. In other words, traditional character set has a n-to-1 relationship with simplified character set. For most characters this n=1, but you would also see n=2,3... quite often.

For this reason, you would often see articles awkwardly converted from simplified characters into traditional characters when it's done automatically. The other direction--traditional character to simplified character conversion--has no such problem.

zmh··on Kim Jong-Nam Was Killed by VX Nerve Agent, Malaysians Say
one was reported vomiting.
zmh··on Twitter is now worth less than its Chinese clone
> so China knowing things about me affects me much less.

Not if you have a few experiences when a recipient or sender verified with you that his/her/your email had disappeared. When that happened, we keep wondering did who say what which angered the email provider or hit the censor black list. Such things never happened with email provider from other countries. The same emails finally got through when we switched to gmail or alike.

zmh··on China Flexes Tech Muscles Before a State Visit
Book author James Mulvenon: Firms tell me they have been threatened if they do not attend...

source: https://twitter.com/jmulvenon/status/641579936944365568

zmh··on A Y Combinator Company Copied Our Design and Data Viz: We've Arrived
It could go either direction. There was an startup Innopage in Hongkong news these two days claiming that the design of its iOS App "Worthy" was copied in merely 2 months by China's Alibaba after the latter sent a 10-member delegation team to visit Innopage in Hong Kong. Alibaba responded that "there is no factual and legal basis." What can a startup do?

(The following articles are all in chinese) Founder Keith Li's article: http://www.grandline.hk/2015/02/%E4%B8%80%E5%B0%81%E6%B2%92%...

News: http://startupbeat.hkej.com/?p=1197

Alibaba's response: https://thestandnews.com/finance/%E8%A2%AB%E6%8C%87%E6%8A%84...

zmh··on Alibaba’s I.P.O. Could Be a Bonanza for the Scions of Chinese Leaders
This comment by Pat Saison on that page was so funny: "Alibaba and the 40 Thieves. It is even in the name..."
zmh··on China bans use of Windows 8 on government computers
>And the thing that China has, that the NSA most certainly does NOT have, is support of the public.

Public Support? First of all, Chinese government is known to hire internet commentators to show the public is on the government side.

Secondly, if you have read some comments from Sina Weibo (China's twitter), you would know the public don't support, but can't do anything about the censorship. China comes from a era when simply saying the wrong thing against the leader could get you killed. The latest news this month was five prominent Chinese figures has been detained for attending a private meeting discussing the 25th anniversary of 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Also a journalist in her 70s has been detained with her son "on suspicion of leaking state secrets to a foreign entity." Both incidents were reported in this news story:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/07/world/asia/china-pu-zhiqia...

zmh··on OpenStreetMap is now navigation-ready
Wow, speed is great. I'll definitely check it out. However, the second statement still seems to be valid: OSM is still at the street name level rather than street number level.

I read some MapQuest's document saying that Mapquest actually took points on a street and interpolate all the numbers. Maybe OSM can do the same. Eagerly waiting...

zmh··on OpenStreetMap is now navigation-ready
Maybe I overlook? Are there turn-by-turn navigation api yet? Over the last year, every time I check it seems to be not available yet. I believe most or all streets in OSM only support up to street level rather than street NUMBER level. Well, please point me to some counter-examples if I am wrong.
zmh··on Kai-Fu Lee (2008) and Hugo Barra (2013) on China's Internet
Laws are weakly imposed for some companies because these companies recruited some prominent state leaders' relatives as their directors or cofounders. These relatives are greedy, but they are needed to negotiate cases of law enforcement.
zmh··on Zombies once destroyed Japan's economy, now they're infecting China's
I believe these 3 countries had a good and free education system (in the periods mentioned) which is still a burden for the majority of Chinese nowadays.
zmh··on Kai-Fu Lee (2008) and Hugo Barra (2013) on China's Internet
I understand Hugo's marketing effort. But most foreign companies cannot take a bite of their market because you need to accept the Chinese Communist Party's censorship first. Many foreign innovative apps are blocked and then cloned in-house with the censorship enforced. So their apps are not valued high outside of China and beyond Chinese as well.
zmh··on Why Facebook should worry about Tencent
2 supporting facts on its censorship: 1. WeChat will notify you it “contains restricted words” if you include “Falun Gong“ in your message: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/01/11/tencents-wechat-comes-...

2. WeChat just deleted 3 weeks ago at least 30 popular accounts that distributed political and legal news articles http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230373080...

zmh··on Halluxwater: NSA Exploit of the Day
The picture:

http://leaksource.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/nsa-ant-hallux...

zmh··on New China (Beijing) Region Coming Soon
"while remaining in compliance with China's legal and regulatory requirements." It could mean Chinese Government will start blocking main AWS services outside of China to avoid noncompliance's just like what it did with Google search.
zmh··on This one number explains how China is taking over the world
Horrible barcharts
zmh··on Lantern proxied sites lists – China
How do you know? I know they blocked YouTube and liveleak for political reasons.
zmh··on Lantern proxied sites lists – China
Originally "seeded by Google Ideas, it was built by developers at University of Washington and Brave New Software.". See: http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/24455/why-remarkably-sim...
zmh··on Lantern proxied sites lists – China
3 days after the launch, there have been 8500 users, mostly chinese users. Some reported that they joined twitter the first time. They are hoping more users join from overseas to help the speed.
zmh··on The Transparent Chinese
It's so ironic that Edward Snowden fleed to Hong Kong under China first.