Wogef

>you could just send a beautiful woman to seduce someone important and have a ton less loose ends

and they're even advertising these days: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-qa-with-the-woman-who-des...

Unfortunately Nitrous.io does not work in China, neither does any other web based IDE that I know about. While it's true that it's a tough sell for Chinese companies, there are a lot of foreign companies here doing development.

I met Greg Fisher at a hardware meetup- very, very sharp guy. He is absolutely right about Process trumping Relationships BUT it can be very difficult to establish that process if you are only in China for a short while to get something manufactured.

I bought the Gear VR when they just said a Note 4 was needed. Once I got it I found out that of course, this was not the case with my HK bought Note 4. So useless region locked lenses and a piece of plastic. I'll never buy any VR hardware from Samsung again.

>Nope. Immigrating usually implies permanent residence in the new country, not necessarily getting citizenship.

I stand corrected- but expats in the countries they are referred to as such almost never have the option of permanent residence.

Nonsense. Expat indicates citizenship status. An expatriate is a person temporarily residing in a country other than that of their citizenship. An immigrants on the other hand is a person in the process of changing their citizenship to their new resident country.

I've never heard a European immigrant referred to as an Expat in New York.

Here in China we are certianly not immigrants because it is made absolutely clear we are expected to eventually leave.

If anything the question is why are some people called Expats and some called Migrant Worker?

Love it. Would be great if you included cutting speeds and lubricants for different materials. Great (and low-conflict) way to quickly qualify new people for machines at Makerspaces.

The article sort of misses the real issue- the demographic. The PRD is very young, well educated and highly ambitious. Tokyo has the education, but it otherwise increasingly stagnant.

New difficulties here in Shenzhen buying the required markers of Chinese status (cars and houses) mean young Chinese are increasingly interested in startups and entrepreneurship as an alternative signaling method.

This is already done, they have a huge bank fraud problem.

>This is not true. Wholly foreign owned enterprises have existed in China for many years, and their permissible activities have increased greatly over the last 5 years.

The letter of the law is never the actual implementation of the law here. Wholly foreign owned enterprises are tolerated up until there is a Chinese company in competition- then you get raided by the police in the early AM and find yourself on CCTV for “Tricking the Chinese People”. You’ll be allow an exit provided you sell your business for pennies on the dollar to your direct Chinese competitor. Yes, even if you speak, read and write Chinese, yes, even if your Chinese wife negotiated for you, yes even if you have a dozen Chinese lawyers and a contract. China as a system has zero interest in protecting the interest of foreigners- and you will always be such because they have no interest in immigration in any form.

The ONLY interest China has in foreign companies is for capital and as a vehicle to transfer IP. Once they have that- the company will be shown the door. Happens over and over again but Western companies persist in thinking they will be the exception.

I’ve lived in China for over a decade, I love it here, but without exception every foreigner I know here who has attempted to start a business was screwed in the end. Rich Chinese know this and most do everything they can to do business only with foreigners and earn their money overseas.

Baidu translate works great in China and will translate anything you copy to the clipboard automatically. Requires the usual insane Chinese app permissions so Xprivacy or something similar is a must.

Neck- I fully agree. In a dress shirt it's very noticeable. Bald with a pencil neck looks pretty bad- bald with a thick neck is jacked.

Gmail is now very heavily used in foreign trade in China, by completely blocking it they just necessitated Chinese companies buying VPNs that would never have felt the need before.

As a side note this does not really effect foreigners here since all of use pretty much use VPNs full time.

>What Chinese can't do very well in your opinion ?

Would be a very long post, it depends in which cities, and which age groups (there is a huge cultural gap with far more risk-adverse older Chinese who grew up during the Cultural Revolution) and generalizations are always a bad idea.

That being said I’ll take a stab at it- usually Mainland Chinese are not so great at problem solving, but they are fantastic at making the solution better and cheaper (idea Iteration over Genesis). There’s the expression "别在孔子面前卖文章” roughly "Don't sell your essay in front of Confucius” akin to our "Don't try to teach your Grandma to suck eggs”. Coming up with something new- or imagining you can carries a certain air of arrogance to it. This does not let itself to encouraging creativity. While this attitude has obviously led to accusations of China just cloning products, it’s also made many Chinese to be enthusiastic proponents of Open Source (although not contributors for the above reasons). So new solutions and creative problem solving will likely be something they rely on foreigners and overseas educated Chinese to do for some time.

Software, UI/UX, marketing and outsourcing are still comparatively weak. Nearly everything is C++, Java and PHP with only a tiny sprinkling of other languages. Programmers are held in fairly low esteem and not terribly well paid.

Service at one point was a weak point but in the past two years has started to pull ahead of the West significantly. Aliexpress is the tip of the spear as far as Chinese direct sales posing a threat to Western businesses and it’s service is not even close to what you can expect from Taobao.

>The West has a “broadcast” view of IP and ownership... China has a “network” view of IP and ownership

Probably the best way I’ve heard it described.

>You do have to read or speak Chinese to get it

This statement kind of bothers me. Mandarin is great- loads of fun to learn and speak. My problem is that I meet a lot of highly skilled professionals who don’t do more in China because knowledge of Chinese is often held up as an “obvious” prerequisite. I have met countless people who move here and waste a year with flashcards instead of making things because they are convinced that being bilingual will make them successful in China (hint: it won’t). Investing your time in doing things the Chinese can’t do very well will make you successful in China- and there is no shortage of bilingual Chinese.

You can get the Mediatek MT6260 (or just about anything else) without speaking Chinese, by using Google/Baidu/Bing Translate and relying on the spectacular patience of Chinese people for these things. Will it be a little embarrassing? Sure. Should you learn Chinese? Of course- but should you give up on doing things in the amazing development environment of China just because you don’t have a gift for languages? Certainly not.

That being said- Bunnie is the Man

Yeah, and if we use fonts.useso.com is slow outside of China.

We get a fair share of bullshit China speculation on HN- this article is absolutely spot on in every respect.

The author deserves a huge amount of credit, it's very, very rare for even long time expatriates to be able to explain things so well.

>Large parts of China are still a developing economy. If you’re illiterate, you can’t type, so enabling users to speak to us is critical for helping them find information.

Baidu needs voice search because so many Chinese are illiterate? WTF! This is an incredibly bizarre statement.

He's suggesting there are a significant number of Mainland Chinese users who speak Mandarin good enough for machine transcription- but are illiterate? Anyone who has lived in China for a significant amount of time can tell you that's just not plausible.

The people who have poor reading skills (in ten years I have never met any completely illiterate Chinese) generally only speak their provincial dialect. Last check only 53% of Chinese can communicate in Mandarin, while only 5% are illiterate. The overlap is nearly non-existent.

I think Ng picked up a bit of Singaporean bias during his time there- it certianly seems he has spent no time on the Mainland.

The vast majority of Chinese I meet here have zero interest in democracy, the few students I do meet who advocate it generally have very little idea of what it actually is.

They have no end of complaints about the government and are quite vocal about it- but huge divisions (to put it mildly) between provinces, as well as urban and rural people mean that the idea of letting "those people" have a say in how things are run is unthinkable.

>Or just take your same machine tool and make a metal gun?

Even in the infancy of the technology home 3D printers are already far more common than home mill/lathe setups and require far less skill to use. With the growing success of Dark-markets (even with the recent raids) there will be a growing move to design illicit goods specifically for mailing (even now this is done for drugs). It’s far easier to get a bullet with integrated barrel through UK customs than it is to get an entire gun.

All of this is being discussed with a heavy US bias. In some parts of the world homemade guns are a serious problem-

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/06/16/australian-pol...

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2013/11/21/revolving-shot...

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/08/25/homemade-semi-...

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/09/16/south-american...

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/crime/441342/northern-pen-gu...

3D printing has the potential to significantly lower the level of skill required to make them. I’m saying this as someone who knows the level of skill required- I learned metal work hand-scraping surface plates and using a shaper to cut cams, moved onto CNC and now use 3D printers. I give classes on 3D printing, am active in the community and a huge fan of the technology. No, we should not be hysterical about it but we also should not blindly say decreasing the level of skill required to build firearms is something we can safely ignore.

If you are going for the "shell as a barrel" solution you might as well maximize the utility and make it either silenced (captive piston) ammo: http://www.sadefensejournal.com/wp/?p=1812

Or make it electronically fired multishot using a superposed load like the Metalstorm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposed_load

That being said, while metal home use printers won't be feasible anytime soon, FDM plastics are getting much, much stronger (Ulthem etc) and being released to prosumer market at an impressive rate. Having a barrel stand up to a dozen shots or so will not be a problem for long.

>Where's "here"? I lived in Shanghai 3 years I would have put that number pretty close to 0%.

Shenzhen. You're right, 10% is being generous but a lot of long time expats pick up Mandarin not at work but through the "long haired dictionary" method.

I don't know any successful business people that have been here for more than five years that feel it's essential for business. Foreign companies fail here all the time due to not understanding culture, I've never heard of any failing due to the language barrier.

Value comes from scarcity- fully bilingual people simply are not scarce in China.

This is absolutely correct. Only about 10% of the successful long-term foreign businessmen I know here speak passable Chinese.

Chinese love when you speak the language- but that does not unfortunately translate into the sort of tangible business advantages that many students of Mandarin hope for. It's a wonderful language, and loads of fun to learn- but the ROI is not as high as other areas of study.

I wish someone would make one of these that works consistently and reliably in China.

I used to volunteer teaching English to Chinese kids from migrant families (displaced within China). One of the ways I illustrated the value of English was to print several objects of differing size. Those sizes each represented the average salary of a given profession in China. Then I had a piece which would nest on top of that object that showed the value of English- the additional salary an English speaking Chinese professional in that field could expect. The physical, tactile experience- objects of very different sizes with variables they could manipulate with their hands really got the point across in a way to those kids that graphs never did.

I'm in Shenzhen and we're getting a little news trickling in since there is a lot of back and forth daily traffic. They seem to be making some use of mesh-network (FireChat) for communication: http://www.pingwest.com/firechat-hongkong/?from=timeline&isa...

This would also be an ideal scenario for PirateBox. I roll the LibraryBox version on a regular basis for under $20.

Great to see someone going into detail on this- the Taobao experience is awesome. There are a few flakey carriers but over all- nothing even close in the US. It's become my favorite thing about living in China.

Just check my profile for an email, I think an HN in Shenzhen meetup would be cool. Anyone interested just let me know...

>Well, how would you be allowed to stay in China then?

Only work for a foreign company in China if they can get you a legitimate work visa, but for just working online from home an M visa is fine (at least this year, until they change the rules again).

There's still positions like that- but yup, brutal.