forkLding

Afghanistan was a war of attrition that the locals felt the most of. Likely one of those wars that your dad and granddad fought (if you trace it back from the Soviet invasion) and somehow you also ended up fighting in. After a while everyone gets tired and they want to live in peace and not die in a war.

Can see why it ended the way it did.

I think competitive programming is useful as an interview style if you want to learn a language and gain that development intuition of stop, think, clarify, design, code and test. But do I think people are taking it too far? Definitely.

A typical comment or interview experience on Leetcode is that they take 3 months to prepare and do algorithms questions for FAANG interviews to pass the interview. In the process, some individuals skip class or other things. I don't think that is right personally.

ApplyBoard is quite big now, they raised $375 million recently and was the fastest growing tech company in Canada in 2019 as ranked by Deloitte. They have been quite successful in the specific field they are in.

I did some research, my girlfriend paid about $4k USD to a similar company in China for help with filling our her visa application and reviewing admissions essay to a university in Canada. Although now she regrets spending that much as she can do all that stuff on her own when she came here. Students can pay to that range or even more which is why Applyboard can raise $300+ million despite having only served 200k students.

International students as an "industry" really does exist.

Clothes, this is observed in the stats too: https://www.officialdata.org/Apparel/price-inflation/2000-to...

This is just general apparel, of course. Likely prices have dropped due to cheap factories that have higher production capabilities and sweatshops.

I've bought edibles and weed in Canada, mainly in Toronto. It used to be a lot stricter but now a lot less people check my ID or whatever. Overall the process feels more informal than before and less go through all these checks etc. Could be I look a bit older although I was able to buy weed at different places when I was much younger without showing my ID either back when it was stricter.

Also I've stopped calling them dispensaries because the places that sell weed have diversified, specialized or started marketing themselves with different products that it isn't just a buy weed location anymore so it's hard to put them in one category.

It is actually quite hard to raise the birth rate, Japan has been trying for years (see https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/Tokyo%E2%...). The real impediment is that it is now too costly to raise more than 1-2 children and also not enough time.

UN 2015 report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf... To summarize, they've started policies and measures since 1992-1994 but UN reports and I quote: "Despite these efforts, Japan’s family policy so far appears to have been largely ineffective."

There are other news opinion articles from Japan: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/06/04/editorials/u...

Don't think this program exists anymore, searching around found Business Immigration Program but its for people who want to start startups but they also have to have like a designated VC fund or designated angel investor group or designated incubator.

Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

This is still a similar viewpoint held by the young to adult generations of China although the idea of China as a democracy is definitely warming up but its more of at a certain date, China will transition to democracy instead of the current system being replaced now.

From what I can see, podcasts vs Clubhouse is a bit like Youtube (without streaming) vs Twitch. One is more spontaneous and interactive whereas the other is consuming content.

I'm guessing it's the sense that users get to participate as well (probably more than a normal stream or Twitch stream) which interests people, the value proposition is being able to contribute to a Joe Rogan podcast as a roundtable discussion instead of just listening to it.

Pretty sure this is not the rationale behind this move, because those are very small links, if parents don't have money for cram school, they won't pay for it. It's more because cram schools culture in China and East Asia is a toxic, vicious cycle preying on young kids in junior to senior school by overburdening them with work so they can have an edge over their peers in university application exams and then grabbing money from the parents.

The classes getting shut down are equivalent to SAT prep schools, they make billions of dollars of money by fearmongering parents into purchasing more classes because their peers are buying more classes and thus their kids will be left behind in the university application race because their kids don't get as much practice as other kids. Kids in China are then forced to these cram schools after school for 4-5 hours and it becomes a neverending vicious cycle. Most importantly the kids targeted are junior to middle schoolers so it becomes ridiculous after a while piling on the work.

I'm a lot more hesitant to say: Build something people really need because of examples like Instagram/Snapchat etc. Were those really needs? Were people really "needing" Instagram at the start?

I think businesses should target pain points/needs but I'm now of the opinion that its best to start with targeting a sizeable target segment and then work out pain points/products/needs/inspiration from there. As long as there are customers/users/market, there will be possibilities.

I know it might sound similar to others but a need can always be argued into existence or a need can be hidden so deep you can't even qualify it until the company/product is out (hence why some startups pivot or end up doing some exploration before they take off). But it is much easier to have a target group in mind and then target them and figure out a distribution channel to reach them than figuring out needs from the start. I think come up with your target customer group first, study them and then figure out the marketing and messaging needed target them and then things get easier from there.

Working now, much thanks!

happy to work on this too, played MUDs a lot in childhood and occasionally now. I believe the visually impaired will have to be accommodated as have met many friends on MUDs who are visually impaired.

Also the server might be down as I can not be able to enter a world with a new character

Still a bit confused after going through each step, what does this do?

Might not be a game but be from this: https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2008/05/article_0005.h... and then seeing the widespread usage of red cross symbolism in video games

This might be also a part of all this, where Johnson & Johnson fought in court with the American Red Cross over the Red Cross emblem on American Red Cross products: https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2008/05/article_0005.h...

https://www.jnj.com/our-company/youre-doing-what

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-johnsonandjohnson-redcros...

Seems like a good way to test and play around with APIs before coding it all out

Long or lóng is the pronunciation of dragon in chinese/mandarin chinese. You can google pinyin of dragon to check.

This looks amazing, cant wait to try it out

It depends, the PE firms that bought Toys R Us did what is considered a hostile move in an leveraged buyout (LBO) which is to saddle Toys R Us with lots of debt (aka they raised debt financing to buy the company) so it had to do everything it could to pay the debt and also generate profits for the PE firms and probably not enough to focus on anything else innovation or operation-wise. Its been noted that LBOs have lead to the demise of several famous companies as noted by Investopedia and LBOs has since gained notoriety.

See: https://www.barrons.com/articles/private-equity-firms-provid...

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-toys-r-us-leveraged-b...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/leveragedbuyout.asp#:~:....

Chanced upon MUDs as a millennial due to the Discworld novels and the Discworld universe, spent my childhood laughing and playing in Discworld MUD, RIP Terry Pratchett

http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/

This is Li Zhi's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zhi_(singer) for those who are curious, basically this is a repo linking to his music so Chinese programmers in China can still access his music, he is pretty much blocked all over Chinese social media, music streaming and cloud storage sites. He has also pretty much been "exiled" or "harmonized" from the public eye.

My mum was a restauranteur and I used to crunch the numbers for her on excel when I was a kid. Sit-down restaurants have more operating expenses because they have to pay more for labor for like waiters. People usually only buy certain products (a lot of profits came from some items like dumplings and also wine) which actually bring major profits to a restaurant. It is a lot harder to maintain selling many dishes at the same time because you need to hire more chef/cooks skilled in those dishes and also buy more ingredients and manage those ingredients' lifespan so its much easier to be profitable with a small menu of very profitable dishes or at least easier to cost manage.

I wonder if at a certain point the value of data falls simply because so much is leaked illegally online

Just saw this https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=104825... as part of: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1de0ZYDOcafNXXwMcg4EZ...

Hopefully its done and one of these days Safari takes the same approach

I've been a volunteer manga translator in the past, (also started getting paid for it after a while when our manga translation group started getting funded) and a large part of it is using google translate or translation tools to help out with definitions or look for inspiration in translating the words in the manga so this could likely help out in that regard by saving the need of tools like google translate

Usually communist party members in your company in China isn't a big secret, it's pretty much public info because the top 10% elite usually get invited and are allowed into the party. Also the desks of communist party members in the company will usually have communist party emblems and chinese flags indicating their status as a Communist Party member, it's not taboo to do so. Most top companies will gather top job candidates which will include communist party members who work as lawyers, developers, etc (aka normal jobs) and they will list their CCP membership on their resumes. So this is more doxxing I would say as the vast majority of communist party members working at a company are regular people.

Source on Communist Party entrance process: https://daily.jstor.org/communist-party-of-china/

this is a really cool idea, hope it gets traction

I feel like Twilio is making a move into becoming the go-to Enterprise/B2C API platform, being already the biggest company in SMS and Voice message APIs, acquiring Sendgrid to gain advantage in Email APIs and then Segment to be able to manage customer data. Think they might go acquire some kind of customer/user analytics API next.

Realized this when I use Twilio SMS + Video, Sendgrid and Segment together before their acquisitions and now I'm just sort of using Twilio, Twilio Sendgrid and now Twilio Segment.