east2west

Thank you for detailed and easy-to-understand explanations. This is why I come to HN.

As someone who used to work in adjacent field, I have a question that I hope you can help me with. DL usually requires a large volume of data, but I don't know whether there is a huge pile of experimentally determined protein structures for training. Did DeepMind find a clever method to get around data-size issue or there is really a lot of known protein structures? I skimmed one of their earlier papers and it seems training data was in tens of thousands. I am surprised that is enough for training DL structure prediction.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I meant as the rate of final price.

It has been a while so it is a little fuzzy, but I recall the broadcaster said up to 50% of pre-tax price. The official VAT rate is like 17% now, I think (just googled it). So it is other fees imposed by local governments that are onerous.

Many people know the precise rates; it is just that common people do not, which is the whole point. VAT rate is public and I think uniform across the country. Local governments impose various fees and they are not widely known to the public. Relevant accountants and officials know all about the rates but they are not supposed to broadcast it.

I saw a clip of Chinese news broadcast giving shocking rates on Youtube, like a quarter to a third, but unfortunately I cannot find it now. There is little public information about effective sales tax rate. However, people do realize it. High taxes is one reason Chinese tourists buy a lot when overseas; they could see the price difference.

State secrets in China are not same as classified information in the West. State secrets mean: do not broadcast to average Chinese. It is a censorship tool, it is meant to protect the government from its citizens.

You gave an excellent example. Tax rates are NOT on receipts in China. That would put pressure on the government to lower tax.

It is a case of lost in translation. Chinese use "invoice" for "receipt" because they use the same official form for actual invoices, I think, as a way of cracking down on tax avoidance. China has one of the highest sales tax at the retail level, including VAT and various fees; so high in fact the actual rate is a state secret. You can imagine the pressure on retailers, particularly, small shop owners, to avoid paying it. The government therefore introduced a system of official invoices that everybody including all retailers must use, and from carbon copy of invoices tax collectors can calculate sales amount and thereby tax owed.

That is my understanding, anyway. I have been out of the country for so long, it must have changed a lot. Most of it must be electronic now, I imagine. I still remember a shop owner's audible complaints when I asked for an invoice around the time the system was initially introduced.

Chinese has large regional differences, too. Cantonese has different grammar, not just word usage. Modern Chinese grammar is somewhat similar to English while Cantonese follows ancient Chinese, which places verb to the end of sentence.

From WSJ: Amazon Says Email Ordering Employees to Delete TikTok Was Sent in Error.

I suspect Amazon realized late what a legal mess it is to ban an app on their employee's cell phone when they have no clear legal basis or governmental guidance. They banned employee using Huawei phones when I was working there, for some things -- don't remember exactly. But in that case, US government already banned it for its employees, so there is precedence Amazon can claim as legal basis.

On paper, yes, China takes official examination rather seriously. In realty, a saying in China goes: as long as there are exams, there are cheaters.

An ancient Chinese source estimates that 20% to 30% participants of imperial exams are imposters.

Endless examples of high ranking officials pave way for their descendants to succeed as top performers. A renown prime minister invited the chief examiner to his library, where he had removed all reading materials except a copy of an essay his son would write for the upcoming exam. The chief examiner was left waiting forever, so he was forced to read the only reading material within reach. When he later read it again as part of national exam, he recognized it immediately and made the the son of the prime minister NO. 1. This only came out because the emperor did not want PM's family become too powerful, but merely demoted the son from NO. 1 to NO. 3.

Not unlike elite institutions in the West, publicly the imperial exam system was lauded but a system of "donation" co-existed to fill official posts. This is a legal way to buy one's way into officialdom. "Legacy" entry was also available, not unlike today's system in China or elsewhere. Human nature prevails everywhere.

I don't know about BBC or NPR, but VOA and Radio Free Asia are much more borderline. A valid argument can be made that they are not really independent of US government.

Sorry if I come across a bit strong. I am a something of a history buff, and the liberty that some Chinese historical shows take is shocking to me. I am like you, curious about different interpretations of familiar events.

The story I am familiar with emphasizes different aspects but illustrate the same point.

Cao Cao volunteered for assassination mission but asked Wang Yun for a renowned sword/knife as the assassination weapon. As he entered Dong Zhou's chamber he encountered general Lu Bu, a fearsome warrior and Dong Zhou's personal body guard. Cao Cao told Lu Bu that he wanted to try out a famously fast horse of Dong Zhou and asked the general to fetch it. When Cao Cao failed to kill Dong Zhou, he pretended that he was gifting the famous (assassination weapon) sword as a token of respect. Then he went outside and jumped on the famously swift horse general Lu Bu just brought at Cao Cao's request and fled, while Dong Zhou and Lu Bu were puzzled by Cao Cao's action.

I cannot vouch for the story's authenticity, but what a fascinating story.

First of all, the popular empty-city story is made up by the author of "Romance of Three Kingdom." It actually was Zhao Yan, a general in the same faction as ZhuGe Liang, who pretended to have an empty fortress and repelled an attack. Needless to say, there is no truth whatsoever to alternative "truth" that drama speculated.

Second, by the time Sima Yi commanded a large field army, Cao Cao had died for a long time. Sima Yi represented powerful large land-owners who would gain monopoly on official positions during Cao Pi's reign, Cao Cao's son. It is a recipe for weakening imperial authority and endangering emperors. Historians argue that Cao Cao passed up the chance to become emperor because he would not countenance such policy.

Third, that TV show is like so much of Chinese TV that is a wasteland. It is melodramatic, ludicrous, and laughably bad acting. I am sorry, but it is unwatchable, not just the show, even the trailer. Compare the stylized combat and bloodletting to the realism of "Game of Throne" (yes, I am ware of the irony of calling historical drama fake and fantasy real); there is no comparison. Nothing there is believable, much like every word out of CCP's mouth. It is sad, really.

It is rather interesting that this is on the front page with "Authenticity promotes well-being in life and at work" [1]. I don't believe they are opposite, but it is difficult to achieve both. However, publicizing individual work is absolutely crucial for promotion or even keeping one's job. My personal take is to build something concrete, something other people find useful.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21666569

I don't recommend cppreference for novices. It is by no means an easy read. It is a reference, first of all. It enumerates all possible minutiae exhaustively. Unless you are already familiar, to a degree, with most of the topics, reading it is going to be frustrating. The second obstacle is the terminology. C++ defines a lot of terms that are not in common use in other languages. It takes time to be acclimated.

The reason that it is popular in the C++ community is that it cuts down legalese a lot when compared to the language standard.

Try books first. Meyers and Josuttis write excellent books. The template guide by Vandevoorde and Josuttis is my gateway drug to becoming a language lawyer. It is still hard, but at least manageable.

I feel that this debacle would not have happened if it had been subjected to the scrutiny of public market much earlier. One can make public financial market more efficient by spotting bubbles and bet on the other side, and thereby making a killing financially and arguably counterbalance prevailing insanity somewhat. How does one do it in private markets? Not only is there much less transparency, but also murky and less liquid markets. Therefore are private markets less efficient?

Wiki says China is the third largest, after Russia, Canada. US is the fourth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

I think they meant emergency plan. The article could be translated from Chinese. "紧急" could be translated as "urgent," but "紧急计划," with plan attached, is better interpreted as emergency plan.

BTW, Google translator gets this right.

Generic programming is not same as OOP. Both Rust and Julia have extensive generic programming capabilities, arguably more powerful although less complicated than template meta-programming.

C++ is multi-paradigm. While people can write OOP code in C++, they can also write header-only libraries, which is generic programming. In C++ generic programming, inheritance is merely a language feature to get what you want, not the main method of abstraction.

I recognize some missing pieces, which I believe you will find interesting.

1. The Soviet union did not order China to attack UN troops. The Soviets were never powerful enough to order something like this, right after the conclusion of a civil war and brutal Japanese invasion. If they were, there would not have been a break-up shortly afterward.

2. I don't think the Soviet being a control freak is the reason for Sino-Soviet rupture. Even after public denunciation, the Soviets still delivered prototypes and all the blueprints of Mig-21. Your impression of overbearing Soviets might come from Communist propaganda about "three-year natural disaster." That was purely to cover up Mao's catastrophic "Great leap forward," a complete man-made disaster that the Chinese Communist party refuses to allow a full investigation to this day.

6. The Sino-Vietnam border war was China's admission ticket to Western block. Normalization of relation with US followed immediately and arms sales were permitted again. As for the military winner, Vietnam, I would say. Chinese army suffered heavy causalities with little to show for. Chinese officers were shown to be incompetent, and the Air force, despite deploying hundred of fighters, did not carry out one sortie against enemy forces. Another infamous incident is when China imported two sets of military radar for counter-battery targeting and one set sent to the front (the other was sent to Beijing for cloning), it was effective enough that Vietnamese sent in special forces and destroyed it. Afterward, only a lowly company commander was court marshaled.

I have found that Communist propaganda is most effective in willful neglect and ignorance rather than outright lies. Lies can be pierced more or less readily, but ignorance hardened into opinions are much harder to change.

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Usually optimization takes forecasts as part of inputs. It is actually a lot like reinforcement learning, where the sales forecasts are part of the environment. This is standard process for supply-chain management, not just retail industry or at Amazon.

I guess this is making a virtue out of necessity. Amazon is clearly behind other tech companies in deep learning, so they are calling it "low-key." I used to work on the retail side, and their prediction process is pretty bland. They use an off-the-shelf neural networks, but they don't know how to do modeling, so forecasts are inconsistent. I am sure they will try to incrementally solve the problem, but proper modeling is foundational to predictions so I think it will be a long time before it is resolved. Like I said, it is about average in industry.

When I was a postdoc at UCSF there was subsided housing at the Mission Bay. The price was like $1000 below market rate. I think they still have it, but space is no doubt very limited.

I am currently working full time as a scientific developer with substantial background in statistics and control theory, and I want to attend, but I am not sure about the expected course load. Could you discuss average hours a student is expected to spend on this? And whether this is like a full-time student course load or a part-time course load?

If you really believe H1B holders are paid at least the prevailing rates and are hired only because of genuine shortages, then I got beach-front property in Arizona for sale.

Common sense says if someone cannot freely move between jobs, who faces immanent deportation if fired, who will have much better prospects of living well in US than their home country, then this person has much less leverage and would be paid less. It is easy to test this hypothesis: do H1B holders have a much higher rate of changing jobs after obtaining visa than their peers.

>>The target audience for the code I write is not the compiler but my coworkers and the gals and guys who will maintain the stuff after I leave a project.

If the compiler cannot understand the code you write, I doubt your "coworks and gals and guys" are going to be much happy with you. Isn't code for both the compiler and programmers? >>So I prefer to choose a language where I can nicely express the intent of what I code. Java is a good compromise, because it's easy to follow (even if it's quite verbose and mainly stuck in the world of nouns).

I don't call verbose code nice, just like average people don't call verbose prose nice. It is personal whether something is easy to follow. To someone who has put in the time and effort C++ code can be easy to follow; I see no reason to denigrate one for that. >>Yes I know, C++ is more "capable" than Java but it's not efficient in the hours-spend-per-solved-problem way of things.

If I am going to spend 30 years programming, I am going to become more "capable." And I will spend LESS hours-per-problem because I have put in efforts to really understand the problems and gained insights. >>Yes I know, there are you C++ whiz kids out there who are insanely fast using the language. But I experienced teams using it, and in a team C++ does not scale well. Adding more and more features to it makes it a cool language, but not one which I like to use in my day job.

Some teams are built to use Java, others use C++. I do HPC and numeric analysis; my C++ skills is quite an asset to my team. >>And I'm not sure what I'd use it for. I use Java for the day-to-day boring "enterprise" world, twiddle around with dynamic languages for the hobby (yay to the recurrence of lisp!) and for close to the hardware stuff I'd use plain C - which is a not so bad language at all. And it's hard to beat speed-wise, writing C++ that keeps up with C is possible but not trivial.

I know what I use C++ for, as do other people. C lacks abstraction mechanism and is fragile. And it is actually not very good for today's hardware. Eigen library offers ease of use and good performance using template-meta-programming; I don't see any C library doing both. >>And if I'd have to look forward I'd check out rust or go or even look at some really mindbending stuff like erlang. Parallelism can't be evaded in the modern world and using a language tailored to that is a great thing. (Yea, I'm sure there also is a C++ library implementing the actor model).

Erlang employs one kind of parallelism, and there are others. They are suitable for different use-cases.

Look, it doesn't surprise me a Java programmer doesn't think much of C++. I get it, it is competition. I don't recommend Java to my team lightly either. But, really, you got to find better trash talk.

Given academic salary and researcher publication rate, I am confident that it is far less than $1000 you pulled out of air. How much did your tax go up when NIH mandated free publication, after a 2-years period?

Journals do minimal typesetting, and practically no editorial work. Paper reviews are done by academics, free. Editors are mostly academics, not depending a paycheck from publishers. There is cost, like marketing cost, but none that justifies $35 per article to the general public.

You appear to have a view shaped by the Nationalist propaganda. The Flying Tigers were mercenaries recruited from US Naval aviation and Marine corps because the top commanders were more sympathetic to Chinese plight. They were in China before Pearl Harbor, hence so-called "volunteers." Russian pilots, also called "volunteers," helped defend Wuhan before Americans got there. The demise of Chinese Air Force was a direct result of incompetence on Madam Soon, who for political reason had a hand in procurement and wanted to save money until the war started. The Chinese pilots were exclusively recruited from the upper class and generally lacked skills and capabilities to mount effective campaigns or devise innovative tactics. The Kumingdon so mismanaged the war efforts that in 1945 Japanese force could still launch successful drive across China to improve their line of communication, and when American air power failed to stop Japanese advances, the American Commanding general, general Chennault wanted to fly in ammunitions to Chinese ground troops, like general Stilwell earlier advocated, generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (that is right, the husband of the first lady wasn't the president of China; in fact he lacked legality, but had legitimacy, for his rule during the entire war) refused because he couldn't be certain his troops wouldn't turn their guns on him and replace him with a competent leader. The performance of Chinese force during WWII was abysmal, which directly contributed to loss of the Outer Mongolia as the price for Soviets to open a second front against the Japanese. It is not just that Chinese troops were ill trained, ill equipped, and poorly led; they were ill clothed, ill fed, had no ammunition; the Chinese soldiers were worth more to his commander dead then alive because the commander could forge headcounts and pocket dead soldiers' pay. The entire government and the armed force were thoroughly corrupted.

I just cannot let you cast aspersion on general Stilwell without challenge. He did clash repeatedly with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek because he wanted to fight the Japanese and the generalissimo did not. He wanted to equip and train Chinese Army, but the generalissimo only wanted to maintain his control over elite Chinese units because that is how he controlled China. An American once asked the commander of the best artillery unit, after patiently inspecting German made 150mm guns, why he didn't move his unit to the front line and actually fight, he was astounded when the commander replied that he didn't want to suffer loss and no longer being the best artillery unit in Chinese Army. The Chinese Expeditionary force to Burma was remote-controlled by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who insisted that the entire force go through dangerous mountain range to retreat back into China rather than going to India. The units that obeyed and went back to Chine suffered such loss that they had to be reconstituted, while one brave commander took his troops to India saw his division forming the core of counter offensives later. The same commander, who was trained in US, would later train the main force defending Taiwan. Most of loss suffered by the Chinese Expeditionary force was non-combat causalities.

Madam Soon May-in, as you call her, was greedy, corrupt, clever in PR, and did more than her part in losing China to the Communists. Her meddling in politics made it impossible for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's son to do even minor reforms to cleanse the government. Corruption was so bad that when a top commander correctly outed a Communist spy because the spy was above reproach, the spy correctly fingered another spy (they worked for different branches of Communists) in the Defense department because he was also clean, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek chastised his top commander for effectively saying no Nationalists could be clean. I couldn't make this up.

I suggest you carefully read all sides before making your mind. I hate the Communist with all my heart but the Nationalist lost the mainland because they were corrupt, incompetent, and organized themselves on a classical Chinese patronage system, which ironically the Communists are doing their best to emulate. The corrupt but all powerful bureaucracy has reasserted itself, as it has done for two thousand years. The choice is suicide now, by attempting reform, or suicide later, by doing nothing. All the wounds are self-inflicted. The Chinese Communists are wisely choosing to wait, as the Empress Dowager did during the last era of Qin dynasty. It is truly a tragedy. The Chinese revolution, it turned out, wasn't necessary.