kev6168

Interesting. What server side tech stacks are often used by young developers in the recent hackathon? Are there a few dominant ones or many choices?

I am surprised PyPy has such a huge lead over Python.

    $ time python pyrb.py 

    real    348m35.965s
    user    345m51.776s
    sys     0m22.880s

    $ time pypy pyrb.py

    real    14m2.406s
    user    13m55.292s
    sys     0m1.416s

I think you are correct that '0748' is not a very serious/forceful phrase. Probably only a lighthearted slang used by young netizens in China.

yeah, my default search engine is bing. But sometimes you have the feeling it probably has less stuff in its database than what baidu has crawled and collected. Out of habit I rarely use 360 or sogou so I don't know how they fair compared to baidu or bing.

Another reason I think is in China the search engines have been terrible since the beginning. For example even if your search query is as specific as "ACME inc. of AAA city in BBB province" , it would be your lucky day if the first two result pages have that company's web site. What you get mostly are paid ads and shitty seo stuff. It's been like this to this day.

So not being able to rely on search, people have to memorize companies' urls, to type them into address bar and pass along to others the actual url string. Internet companies are forced to display them predominantly in ads. So a domain name that is cute/easy(often costing ridiculus amount) is all that more important in China than elsewhere.

Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.

The second link is a referral shopping page without any information about the company. This url also appears on their crunchbase page. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kaishu-jianggushi#se...

What happened between Firefox 61 and Firefox 63 ? 61 (and the versions before that) occasionally freeze or crashed on my old laptop (win7, 32bit), but just yesterday I installed 63, it runs very fast, feels very stable, has had no problem at all so far.

Just want to say thank you to the developers of Firefox. Thank you for all the hard work to continue to improve a great product.

Thanks for the recommendations.

One liners are fun, and life-saving. I am curious about this aspect compared to Perl 5. With Perl 6's new syntax and language features, can we still easily [ab]use one liners for fun and profit?

It was tongue in cheek, haha... I was only frustrated by my own inability to get the hang of Perl 6. As an old casual fan of Perl, I still want to take another shot at learning it very much.

Perl 6 is for people who are very smart and have a great spirit in seeking and having fun in programming, I really admire that. That's my thought after two failed attempts (each lasted about two days) to learn it in 2012 and 2014. I felt the use of sigils, syntax oddities and the cleverness were beyond my ability to master the language. I should mention in 1998 I used (modified it a little bit) Selena Sol's shopping cart script. Since then I have only written a few small Perl 5 scripts, am not familiar with recent development. To learn Perl 6 today, what kind of practice projects/applications, or approaches, one can use?

I have often thought about this (why didn't they drop the bombs at a few villages not very far from Tokyo to make the point?). Today I found in this thread and the 2016 discusssion two good(I think) reasons, one was to race against Stalin's possible invasion of Japan, another was to clearly showcase the power of the US to the _world_, not merely to the Japanese, in preparation for the ensuring cold war.

I have tried previously to switch from vim to other editors (IDEA and sublime text). It felt painful. But this time (to VS Code) it has been smooth so far. I think it might be the result of me forcing myself to forget about the vim way completely. For example I have been deliberately using mouse more often, and supressing the thoughts and longing of registers and macros etc. I am not a vim power user to begin with so It's not that difficult. Losing vim power but gaining the benefits of VS code, so far so good.

It's VS Code + the vscodevim extension for me lately and it's been great. I am not a first-rate Vim user anyway, so the convenience and ecosystem of VS Code won me over easily.

haha true. I watched 10 days non-stop of cute cats on Douyin, then I tried to find other types, but found very lacking.

I agree, though Instagram is images based with plenty of sources for good contents (photos created by shopping web site, the makers of those products, etc.), but videos are not as plentyful.

My opinion on the long term potential of China's short video platforms has changed completely in the last three months. Used to be high on it, but now I think it's useful but not to this hyped up level, not even close.

The majority of videos on Douyin belong to one of these three categories, 1, girls putting on crazy amount of makeup staring at the camera or lip syncing. The platforms's software are often used to make the eyes larger and legs longer, to ridiculous degree. 2, cats, dogs and other pets, 3, tens of thousands of people imparting universal wisdom to you on how to get rich quickly, become a skillful pickup artist or life guru, etc.

Other than these three types, there are very little left. Of course you may find it differently. But IMO shortage of quality content will be a big problem going forwad for these platforms. In general most people in every country don't have the skill to produce videos of good quality, coupled with China's tight control on what can be shown, it's becoming suffocating for creativity. For example comedies or poignant news commentaries are very rare. A lack of respect for intellectual rights is still a problem in China, endless copying and pasting and boring and fake stuff. Anyway, content shortage is a problem everywhere, but it's just terribly bad in China.

Also, unlike say Facebook or Wechat, these video platforms lack the relationships between users that keep people around. Sure you can leave messages on Douyin but there are basically zero long term interactions going on. People on Douyin always tell others to meet at Wechat or Weibo or other places. Douyin is simply not made for social networking, and I don't see it can change that.

It does demystify it when you show the steps to create an virtual env by hand. Very helpful.

But these European museums for the past hundred years have been like this, "hey folks, look here, in the past we invaded other countries, burnt down their houses, plundered their stuff. It's wrong, OK! Now with that out of the way, here are our loot, everybody come in to take a look. Enjoy!" It's facinating.

I have been to many major memuems in China and I don't remember seeing large sections of precious artifacts from the populations you mentioned. Can you name some of them? Also technically they are all within one country, it's different from what we are talk about.

Agreed. During the 1950s/60s/70s the amount of precious art and historic artifacts lost is just staggering, it makes one sick everytime thinking about it.

It's interesting to see these European nations are publicly displaying these pilfered stuff, knowing many of them carry ugly history, in museums for the whole world to see.

Is this "matter of fact" mindset an unique trait of European cultures? No judgement is passing here, I am only curious about the thinking and mindset. I would venture to guess that nations of other cultures in modern days probably would feel very uncomfortable to openly display artifacts sourced in similar ways.

That indeed was what in my mind. For viewers it can be a huge time waste. I lost many nights' sleep watching kittens, puppies or comedy videos, often from 11pm until 5am, in my early Douyin days. The platform kept giving me stuff from the same category again and again. There was also the suspense that you wish to know what the next video would be like. But the next day I felt terrible. Nowadays I don't open Douyin/Tik Tok after getting on bed.

On the other hand, this form (of convenience and simple pleasure) matches our basic desire, imo. So maybe it will continue to develop and expand.

I should say Douyin/Tik Tok is also great for people to express themselves, to create artistic content, to provide valuable content. So potato chip or bubble gum are naturally not very accurate descriptions.

Like eating potato chips, watching the videos on Douyin (Tik Tok) can become a non-stop action because it's a super convenient low-effort pleasurable thing to do, it's faster than fast food while lying on the sofa.

The app opens in sub-second and then starts playing a video right away, the video is also selected to conform to your previous likings. Or I also like to say it's the mobile phone era's bubble gums, a source of endless simple pleasure. Of course there are also many videos providing valuable educational content.

From my own experience, I feel Douyin has enforced pretty strict policies regarding what video are acceptable. A while ago I submitted a video about early day internet success stories such as eBay/PlentyOfFish/etc., it was rejected repeatedly. No reasons were given and I didn't bother to ask. I suspect it's because I had words "rich"/"money"/"quick success" in the description. You often hear other people's complaints in their videos, such as "My last one was deleted by Douyin and I don't know why." Anyway, it's just my one anecdote.

I would think so, although I am not in that age group so it's just my observation.

Take Douyin as an example, it has a few hundred million users, 40% to 50% of them are under age 24 and live in smaller cities or rural areas, according to various reports. Growing up with mobile internet, for them shopping on the phone while hanging around in social networks is very natural, it's personal, it's fun. That's why most sellers have already set up account in Wechat/Weibo (and recently Douyin), not to publish product listing bluntly, but to post soft articles, funny videos, a lot of them even live stream their daily activities, to try to build up followers.

I think with the mature infrastruture already in place(delivery, payment, messaging such like video chatting with the sellers, etc.), young people in rural areas care less about how big the online store is, but more about quality and fun. Plus, browsing product and talking to many shop owners on the phone are super easy while lying on the couch, something hard to do in the PC era, so it's easy to search good deals all over the places, no need to buy all items from one big store.

Also thanks to mobile phone, young people in rural areas have pretty good access to product information compared to their peers in the big cities. What they lack mostly are good education and job opportunities.

The part about JD.com's business and ground level operations are very informative and interesting to read, props to the author.

But on the other hand, details of personal stories of various characters in the article made me grumbling "Really?! Is this from the New Yorker?".

Just one example, in the story about her parents sending her to stay with relatives in an extremely poor village before they left China for the US, the author wrote, "I wouldn’t see meat for three months;" and "that hunger could feel like a demon clawing at your stomach. ".

Come on, that was in 1992 when China had already got into economic reform for fourteen years(starting in 1978). Not matter how remote the village is, three months without meat for the daughter of your powerful relative? To make things even less believable, don't forget her mother was a doctor at an Army hospital in a big city, that's absolutely in the upper echelon in China financially in the 1980s. It's probably comparable to a $300K/year doctor in the US today relative to the rest of population, not to mention how few Chinese had the means and connections to immigrate (not merely visit) to US in that period of time, so how can you not be shocked to read that her parents would let their daughter go hungry and have no meat for three months?

These and some other passages made me enjoy a lot less of the article. I don't blame her because first the country and the people have gone through dramatic changes since she came to the states, and secondly even the New Yorker has to make things attractive to the mass in order to sell.

A tad too sensational and exaggerating, it's off-putting. I actually appreciate very much that the author went to China to get first-hand experience for the article. Too bad it's written as if the author was afraid that tech/business content would not have necessary sensation to sell the article.

JD has been doing great but I think it (and Taobao of Alibaba) has the great risk of losing the young generation (born after year 2000) who are less interested in these big box online sellers but more likely to buy from small invidual sellers, based on friends' recommendations or the sellers' promotions on social networks. For example, some of the new thriving places like Pinduoduo and Douyin (similar to Musical.ly, in fact Douyin bought Musical.ly recently) are very popular nowadays. The old giants might be gone within ten years because the ways to do ecommerce are changing so fast in China.

I agree with you taking care of people psycologically is probably the weak point of a robot task force. But in terms of pure technology advancement, I 'll just throw some random possibilities here for discussion.

Remember even as of today AI can compete on a high level of huge video games, face recognition, natural language processing, playing Go/Chess game, etc. Imagine in 30 years, all the robots, armed with AI and made of materials a few times stronger than whatever we have today, should be able to scan, learn, adapt and go. Another minor point, the robots can probably carry some heavy machines (or laser guns) and just pound hard on the cave's narrow sections to make the passage wider. Etc.

Man vs. nature, we are still bugs.

What are your thoughts on how technology advancement in the next 30 years would change the way of this kind of rescue mission? Say in 2040, can a group of robots finish the mission in one day with ease? That will be awesome, people can be rescued from bad situations much sooner.

Regarding news, I have had this self-imposed rule:

* Only check out the first screen of any news web site. No scrolling down, and no clicking links.*

Implementation details: I keep around 10 news sites in a bookmark folder. Through out a day, I right click on the folder and open all of the sites at once, then spend on average 5 to 10 seconds on each site. Do this three or four times each day.

Been pretty happy doing this for a few years now.

will mostly be business applications and web site backend stuff. Also I would like to learn native mobile app development to expand my skillset.