Linux China, which supported the Chinese open source community, has ended | Hacker News Reader

Linux China, which supported the Chinese open source community, has ended

linux.cn

73 pointsnogajun35 comments

Basically he’s overloaded, can no longer supports the whole site on his own and there it goes the shutdown.

Interesting that this site posts user agent strings and rough geo-ip locations beside all the comments. I wonder how that would change the dynamic of discussion if it were done on other sites?

I believe this is the law in China - if you post on the Internet (especially socially media), your posts MUST be geo-tagged. With social media, past a certain number of followers, you must use your real name. Honestly, that last one is not such a bad rule to be "self-enforced" by social media companies.

How distopian the feeling

We could follow up with a talk about etiquette, manners or something instead of going straight for re-education camps

Astroturfers made me think, maybe its not so bad.

State actors and corporations pretend to be free thinking individuals.

i don't think so. i haven't seen this anywhere else. the user agent is more likely shown to see which OS the commenters use to give an idea how widespread linux is among the commenters, or maybe to see if someone is a true linux user. and the location to see where everyone is. that may help find local contacts.

https://techtechchina.com/chinas-geo-tagging-policy-for-soci...

thank you. this seems very recent, which would explain why i haven't seen it yet. but it targets big sites, not something small like linux.cn. also, linux.cn has not been under active maintenance for a while, so i doubt that its maintainer would have rushed to implement it for that reason.

my friends tell me that the maintainer was a member of the beijing gnu/linux user group, which, at least in recent years, was more privacy conscious, and although that doesn't mean that the linux.cn maintainer was as well, if you pay attention to his concerns in the post, he does seem to share some of those values.

As the other comment said, it's the law. And perhaps surprisingly or unsurprisingly it has not ended or significantly impacted the vitriol and antagonism passing for dialogue in the Chinese internet.

Strangely, there's lots of comments below the post that seem to be a bot posting negative comments. The real people commenting are all very supportive, though.

In this case thy are obvious. Now imagine all other cases where they aren't (when they are operated by the west).

The irony here for me is thick, reading the article through a machine translation, but this could be the first instance I've seen of LLMs triggering a forced major life decision. Although I'm a bit late to that party, since this is surely a huge ripple working its way through the world. The best of times, the worst of times.

This is not the first time LLMs have triggered a major life descision. Here's an article from March 2023

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-a...

> Now there is also the 1263 issue, which has never stopped.

I may have missed it but not sure what that is?

Google Translate shows me "Now there are 1263 issues, and it has never stopped." if I copy the whole paragraph, but it changes if I remove far away sentences at the opposite end of the paragraph, but I think the grammar in your quote interpretation might be wrong.

Basically, it seems like they're burnt out, overwhelmed, and giving up.

Thanks. I imagined the "1263 issue" to be the thing I hadn't heard about!

As not Chinese, I never heard about this website. But here is my tldr based on reading the page through Google translate:

linux.cn was a personal initiative, globally a one man shop that became too big. His goal was to advance the community but not do a commercial business.

Nowadays Linux and open source are well known and leaving by themselves. Not so many persons are motivated to contribute anymore and so the single activity was creating posts based on chatgpt translation of English articles (personal comment, I don't think that the content interest was that great based on that). So in the end, as often, the editor finished in burned out as being jobless at the same time and just decided to stop working on that and going on with his life.

To be noted the guy looks great as he preferred not sell his domain name/site to crappy buyers for moral reasons and not getting a very good cash payment

Another detail is that Chinese people generally retire at 50, and turning 50 prompted the author to reevaluate what they were doing and write this post.

Interesting. How does that work out financially? 50 seems quite early by western standards

Children old enough to look after parents by then. Traditionally not much of a concept of pension or retirement savings.

Source: Chinese. My dad and us lived with his parents, looking after them. We're not from some village, parents were professionals in Hong Kong.

I find this very fascinating, can you eleborate

How does this work? Your children move in with you, or your parents move in and then you provide not only for yourself but also for your parents?

What do the parents do in the household? 50 isn't an age where you are considered old age... in the west at least.

So I'm no historian, I believe traditionally the whole family lived together due to lack of money. This happened rurally or in towns. My dad grew up poor and all 8 of them (6 kids) lived in 1 room. Over time kids moved out and the parents transitioned to living with one of the kids, in this case my dad.

My dad did well as a professional and provided for all of us including some spending money for my grandparents. My grandma passed away in her 60s so it wasn't long but my grandad stayed with us until the end, no nursing home or anything. It was great because I got to live with him until the end, seeing him every day.

My grandad spent most of his time going to yumcha, day trading stocks at the stock brokers offices (very common past time for the elderly in HK), playing majong and cooking. It seemed like a pretty good retirement. He lived to his early 80s.

He did retire early by western standards. He was a logistics foreman then a small shopkeeper. The bargain is that he provided for the kids so they then took care of them. Oh also he would have worked longer than most of us, barely finished middle school, definitely no university.

I guess I'm the first generation that has broken this long tradition. My parents don't expect to live with me, but would like to live nearby.

The parents take care of their children's children.

They live in the house and help with the children. The woman then have more time and can have another job.

It's not a new concept, it was common in Europe too. The concept of children leaving at 20-ish and then just being away the rest of their life is what is new.

In other south Asian countries, it is expected that children take care of their parents when they retire. Sometimes children go work abroad and send money back home to support parents.

The main idea is that your parents supported you financially during your childhood, studies,.. now you owe them to support them. Sometimes other distant family members will also ask for money without shame as it is kind of a due if you can afford to.

It is very strange as it is a completely different mindset as the western one where elders are always supposed to support younger ones, even if they might be wealthier than you. For a parent to not be able to pay for their children is usually shameful.

by tradition the eldest son stays with his parents. when he gets married, the wife moves in with them and they take over the household, including taking care of the husbands parents. the parents in turn help the couple to raise their children, and pass on all their knowledge and experience. and this wasn't driven by lack of money. the parents often went out of their way to build out the house for their son. one friend i visited had a house with three floors and a beautiful courtyard.

on the face of it, a beautiful multi-generation lifestyle, if it weren't focused on boys.

because that is the reason why having a boy is favored. why one woman told me how her husband was in prison because he defended his wife against her father who attacked his own daughter for not having children. why another woman had a nervous breakdown because her first child was a girl, to the point that she rejected her own daughter and it took years for her to recover and accept the girl.

these are just anecdotes, but their severity suggests that this expectation is not uncommon.

the irony of the second story is that the husbands parents weren't bothered by the girl at all. they loved her. it was the womans own upbringing that caused her reaction.

> Children old enough to look after parents by then.

Isn't it rather one child looking after two parents these days?

This didn't affect everyone (rural families or outside of that policy's time period). We also never had one child policy in Hong Kong.

It’s 50 for women factory workers which makes sense. 30 years in a factory is going to be harsh on your body. For white collar workers google says 55 for females and 60 for males.

I suspect it depends on what generation is retiring, because my older white collar relatives are retiring upon hitting 50. I don’t know if that holds true for younger generations.

Dam retirement at 50 sign me up.

Keyboard keys getting too stiff to press? ;)

30 years of making rest endpoints and sql queries for a boss is more then enough for a life time. :P

They retire to raise their kids children quite often while the parents work work work. A different system than ours.

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