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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Incredibly impressive. This may sound horrible and racist but when I think of China and tech I think cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done. That's obviously unfair but based on my experiences with outsourcing and the countless stories of friends it's what comes to mind. Given the advanced manufacturing that goes on in China I should know better. I can't fathom the amount of work necessary to make things function at "China scale".

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Two words of praise followed by a stream of acknowledged personal biases and admitted stereotypes, which are forwarded anyway. For what reason? To prove the author's own point that he/she doesn't understand the scale of a company which serves one billion people?

My humble suggestion is this: next time, if you don't have a good reason to recite publicly a litany of unfounded assumptions about an entire country and people, don't -- write something like this instead:

> Incredibly impressive. I know nothing about China.

Why? Because those are common misconceptions that I am far from alone in holding. Bringing them up in the face of a monumental achievement is helpful for both myself and others who have had similar thoughts.

In other words, you're trying to justify your own racism?

(If you have to preface your statements with "This may sound horrible and racist", they probably are.)

His statement was never racist, which is probably why he qualified racist with "may sound." China isn't a race.

He was being honest about his own perceptions, and willing to admit they may not be correct. By all means let's have less honesty and less self awareness.

While I agree with what you have to say, it's hard to support you're point of view when you're saying like that.

Be civil.

It seems (to me, at least) that you're saying it so aggressively and childishly, your comments are likely to be discarded and ignored rather than considered.

Unfortunately, you're right. I think it's a bit ridiculous that people are more offended by incivility than racism, though.

To be fair, that's a reasonable position for a person who's "not really racist, but holds opinions that they concede certainly sound racist when said out loud".

Interesting, I thought I was being restrained. While certainly angry, I didn't mean to shut off conversation.

Re: reasonable position

If you have an epiphany that you've been operating on stereotypes (which in this case are racist, IMO), and you want to share the wonder of having your eyes opened to something you couldn't see before, the first thing to do is not to stream those now-understood-to-seem-racist misconceptions -- especially with no discussion of them. You could, instead, talk about what you learned, or why you believed those bad ideas.

And I don't mean why, as in, "because some friends had a bad outsourcing experience." I mean, why are you operating on stereotypes and unfair reductions, especially when you already admit they are wrong.

What would you think if someone said,

"Amazing job. I know it's racist, but I always thought blacks were too busy sitting on their porches drinking 40s that they bought with welfare money. I know too many friends who've had bad experiences with black people. It must be really hard to run for President."

Would you think such a person is having a genuine epiphany and sharing true insight into their own misguided worldview? I would think that the author of the comment is doing a bad job of it, at best. At worst, I would think that person learned nothing, but would like to say something anyway.

I agree with you entirely and unreservedly. The scare quotes in my comment were to poke fun at the idea that a person who holds a set of racist opinions is somehow not a racist.

I do maintain that it is, in some sense, a "reasonable" position for a racist to be more offended by incivility than by racism. Not ideal, or even good, but certainly understandable.

but you're glossing over (conveniently) that the vast majority of crap is made in china. Not to mention the fact that China has no regard to intellectual property, is always the first to produce cheap knock-off products that blatantly ignore the inventor's IP.

And, this doesn't even mention human rights.

If you take off your politically correct hat for a moment you'll see that the comment "cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done" is warranted and quite generous in its phrasing.

It's not racist (since China isn't a race), and it's perfectly ok to make statements about a countries exports. Just as its ok to say that Swiss trains run on time, Swedish cars are built like tanks and french wine is good stuff. Not every french wine is great, and not every export from china is crap, but most french wines are good, and most chinese cheap plastic goods are crap too.

actually, most of the people at the top of the bootlegging chain in China are not mainland Chinese, they are of Hong Kong, and Taiwan origin. They just use the mainland as their base of bootlegging, and exploitation of labor. bootlegging gucci hand bags and hollywood films did not start in the mainland. it started in hong kong, and taiwan. not much has changed. it's still the same guys doing it. theyve just relocated. no, you will never hear about this in the mainstream media because hong kong and taiwan are used as a staging area by western governments to destabilise China as a whole. and you cant make your lackeys look bad, because subversion must be rewarded. as far as quality goes, China has sent a few space ships up into space without one ever blowing up. on the other hand, the united states has had 2 of them blow up already. keep in mind that the u.s. hires the top scientists in the world to work on their space ships. while, China relies strictly on Chinese scientists because they are under sanctions from the rest of the world. Despite these odds, China still built their own space ship using their own technology. you should also know that if the u.s. did not bring foreign scientists in, would they be able to go as far as they do. google, and microsoft both hire foreign engineers heavily. take a walk around the silicon valley, and see how many Asians you see. i find it very hard to accept what the shills are pushing. and that includes you hnriot.

Last year I joined a big Chinese startup and, after eight years in China, I discovered something: the best hackers in China are not those you would find in places haunted by foreigners, they would not be working for foreign companies, they don't necessarily like to speak English, even if they follow closely what happens outside. Under these circumstances, many people naturally mistake the cheap and shallow folks they shake hands with in bars for the normal Chinese geek, and conclude it's not that impressive. It's an observation bias. There are many top level Chinese nerds, they are very busy making sites like taobao work.

I agree entirely. I worked in Shanghai for 4 years and hired a lot of Chinese developers. There is some very good talent out there. You need to work at finding it, but that's true everywhere. I think the main difference is that community groups and networking events are really not done out there. And if you're going out to bars looking for developers, well, you're doing it wrong.

One thing I learned from China while being in there: You can get goods of any quality there. The cheap stuff is what most westeners buy, and it is mostly not so good quality. But if you are willing to pay proper prices, you can get quality products.

And there are exceptions on the cheap stuff too, for example I just bought an Aoson M11 Android tablet for 125€ from there and the overall quality seems very good.

theres a reason why you think this. it's because western corporations are threatened by the good Chinese products, so they block the imports. it's called protectionism. instead, what western regimes usually do is, they only allow the import of the cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done products. this is why people have that impression. also, western governments and corporation employ millions of shills online to promote this exact idea, so people will continue to buy expensive stuff from western corporations, thinking that they have no other choice. if people knew "the truth", the western corporations would go broke overnight.

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