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Comment by zibzab | Hacker News Reader

Looks interesting, although I am not sure if it is worth the trouble for hobbyist who can buy similar SOCs in much more friendly packages.

A commenter compalined about his "negative and accusatory language". Where does he see that?

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I think it's phrases like "some shady Chinese-language Windows-program". There are hints of a certain kind of English language chauvinism throughout the article. It's not surprising that a Chinese product aimed at the Chinese market is documented in Chinese. This doesn't make it obscure or shady.

As an imaginative exercise, try replacing 'Chinese' with English/American and see how the article reads.

I personally read it as less of an English-supremacist stance, more of a general distrust of Chinese institutions.

Still seems unfair - surely you shouldn't consider every Chinese company and person an extention of CCP?

If one called this program glitchy, sloppily, poorly written, or incomprehensible, we could discuss it in it's merit, and perhaps compare it against it's equivalents.

Shady implies criminality, it installs spyware and steals your bitcoins - and thats quite unlikely given how limited the audience of such a tool would be.

Every Chinese company is an extention of the CCP, read about China's "National Intelligence Law" it goes a lot further than the patriot act.

In reality it doesn't. In US the agencies can "convince" any company to do absolutely anything, starting from installing backdoors.

I took it as being representative of the experience I have had many times getting software from obscure Chinese manufacturers: a “dev environment” that includes pirated software, up to and including the occasional pirated windows XP installer lol.

I knew exactly what he was talking about- not xenophobia, but legitimately shady software that is common to get from Chinese manufacturers, often from some equally dodgy ftp server or torrent seed.

> I knew exactly what he was talking about- not xenophobia, but legitimately shady software that is common to get from Chinese manufacturers, often from some equally dodgy ftp server or torrent seed.

This so much. Part of the reason we decided against using one microcontroller that was China-only was that their "support" included a pirated and cracked version of Keil.

Uh, no.

As someone who doesn't speak Chinese, I can actually deal with Chinese datasheets, surprisingly (diagrams and hexadecimal generally don't need translation). Chinese support forums are a bit tougher if I can even get to them from outside China.

However, once you start exhibiting some level of casual illegality, that's a full stop.

Hopefully, RISC-V will side step a lot of this in the future by standardizing the toolset on something open-source.

English is a world language, at least when it comes to engineering. I don't understand why chinese people prefer to write chinese documentation. Surely they can read and write English. I'm from Kazakhstan and when it comes to comments or other technical docs, I prefer to use English, it's just lingua franca of IT.

Remember that China is the electronics manufacturing hub of the world. A lot of Chinese component manufacturers don't care that much if people outside China can use their products, because by far their biggest market is within China. Chinese companies aren't going to take the time to translate their datasheets just so a few hobbyists can play around with their chips. And if a company in the US really wants to use that chip, they'll probably just hire someone who speaks Chinese to read the datasheet. There are plenty of Chinese speakers around.

Not for hardware. Lots of chips are made in China and only sold in China. It's true that Chinese is harder to learn to read than English, especially if you're from Kazakhstan or other Indo-European-language-speaking countries, but lots of hardware manufacturers just aren't concerned about non-Chinese customers.

Chinese is the command line of the 21st century. (I think it was Naomi Wu who said that.)

If you go to Japan you will find something similar.

Well, Jeroen works (or has worked) for Espressif (manufacturer of ESP32/ESP8266), so apparently he knows that stuff well enough to make comments like this.

Personally I'm not going to believe the vague accusation that some unspecified piece of software is 'shady' just because someone works for Espressif. If he has evidence that the software in question is doing something it shouldn't doing, then he should present that evidence. (As another poster has pointed out, it seems massively unlikely on the face of it that an obscure tool for programming an ARM microcontroller would make a good vector for viruses or spyware.) If he doesn't have evidence then he's just casting aspersions on the software because it's Chinese, which comes across as somewhat prejudiced.

None of this is a big deal. It's just not hard to see why the tone of the article could rub people up the wrong way.

By and large, every piece of software that comes from China like this is the same. Barely functional when it comes from a random FTP server in a rarball you got from a link in an email, works best on a pirated copy of Windows XP, and half the time bundles a pirated copy of other people's software itself. You would be extremely foolish to simply look past this and declare that the origin of the software is irrelevant for the sake of dispelling imaginary xenophobia.

I don't want to get into an argument over the truth of that generalisation. However, you can presumably see that it is a generalisation of the sort that might offend people. That's really the only point that's being made here. The post could be edited to make specific criticisms of that one piece of software without unnecessarily antagonising people.

I don't think it is positive to shy away from calling something unsafe because somebody might be offended by it.

The point of my comment really wasn’t “don’t say things that might offend people even if they’re true”. My point was that the article, before it was edited, made vague insinuations that were both uninformative and likely to get people riled up to no purpose. Making specific criticisms rather than sweeping attacks is pretty much the sine qua non of a productive technical discussion. The revised article is both more informative and less potentially offensive. Offending people is sometimes necessary, but usually it’s a sign that you’re not zoning in on exactly what it is that you actually want to say.

The truth is very often offensive and being upset by it is the first step in solving the underlying problem. All of us know exactly what the article means by that phrase and everyone (especially the Chinese) would probably be happier if the Chinese (and US) hardware industry was more professional with its software.

You can say the exact same thing about US-made Windows software.

I have never seen a company based in the US distribute such absolutely terrible software unabashedly, no. I recently looked at the software which came with a laser cutter, which included a cracked copy of a CNC controller software, some random utilities with no confidence inspiring features whatsoever, burned to a CD-R and shoved in the box. That's the sort of level of quality and polish which didn't even strike me as abnormal.

Ever heard about Oracle? Or RSA, which I remember only worked correctly on one particular language version of Windows?

FWIW, I'm more concerned with the fact that it's a Windows program (the closed-source-ness and seeming unavailability of the programming protocol makes it shady, imo) rather than it being Chinese. I'll modify the text a bit to reflect that.

Seeing as he appears to favor FLOSS software (GCC, Make, OpenOCD), the shadiness comment may as well be directed at the Windows-program part.

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