handle584

I wonder what will happen to Chinese employees of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google Gemini? Given the ubiquitous Chinese names in AI papers there must be quite a few.

They probably have gotten their PR or in the process, but naturalization requires five years after that, so there must be some still not citizen yet.

> huge emphasis on sharing knowledge

> developer forums in China

Care to share a few such forums or websites, genuinely curious as someone who reads basic Chinese.

A decade ago, I knew there were CSDN, jvjin (may not be the correct pinyin) where people talked about tech. Nowadays they have just become SEO farms like the rest of the internet.

Actually there are very few Chinese forums left, because it is a huge hustle to run one, and the same rule applies to the comment section of any personal blogs.

Right now pretty much the only one left with a bit discussion is v2ex, but it's blocked by gfw and kinda becoming a ranting corner for programmers. Some also recommend nodeseek and a couple other new sites, where you can find shady stuff but not tech stuff. Then you have tech blogs of big corps, or personal ones, but still not many quality tech posts. There are also some on WeChat but it's kinda cumbersome to use so I stopped.

More likely related to the slave labor in their Brazil factory [0].

I personally will not buy any Chinese EV until they fix stuff like this.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Brazil_working_conditions_...

I mean worst come to worst you can drive Uber full time until the market recovers? And this is certainly not an option for H1B.

Unless Americans does not want this type of job, which actually validates your cynical interpretation of OP's comment. Meanwhile a lot of illegal immigrants are happily driving for Uber and plenty more will be if they can do it legally.

All I am saying is foreigners' experience does not necessarily reflect that of citizens, just like in the US the current ICE raids and immigration visa tighten up does not affect most citizens, but changed many foreigners' life forever.

I pick the previous linked case because what he did is exactly what you did, and I am not arguing for general law enforcement.

I go to major expos in China multiple times a year, and the volunteers are there, every time. You can find advertisements for sim cards, vpn services not only at airports, but also hotels, etc.

The way Chinese and US treat foreigners are at two extremes. Simply from your example,

> didn't register our accommodation which is mandatory

>> Foreigner: just let us go on our trip anyway

>> Citizen: sent to detention and beaten to death [0]. Reverse ICE?

Police is friendly and laid back for foreigners, in China there are even foreigners advertising to call the police for you if you lost something, simply because police will be more responsible if a foreigner is involved. And they are also more flexible like your experience shows, which does not apply to citizens.

There are more examples, like gfw, for foreigner there are even volunteers at major airports helping you install VPN, while for citizens you can get fined or warned with an official record in your dossier.

Or like COVID you mentioned, during the lock-down period foreigners have prioritized access to foods and necessities. One extreme case I remember is a wealthy couple in Shanghai ran out of those things. And how did they get through? They happened to hire a Philippine nanny at the time, and that gives them priority, despite not officially registered like you. Imagine your gov prioritize your servant over you.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Zhigang_incident

Ah my bad, my brain was reading Snail House [0], a popular fiction that got adapted to an even popular tv series and its theme is on living in Chinese apartments.

While nail house is the Chinese version of holdout [1], and it exists everywhere. In China it is never regarded positively but always linked with forced eviction [2]. The eminent domain rule requires market rate compensation, which is not possible in many cases because of state ownership and the dual rural-urban land system. It is basically how China financed its growth for around three decades, get rural lands paying out penny, then sell it to some developer for a fortune.

For the land use right duration I believe it has always been 70 yrs [3]? Renewal or not is not a big problem right now, because real estate took off in the 90s, so we still have four decades to go and see.

For foreigner China can be a bit on the rosier side, because of their subtle reverse-racism? Like in universities the dorm for international students is better than the domestic ones, and where expats live is usually a nicer part of the town. Nevertheless, among my Chinese colleagues one the top reasons for immigrating to US is always better and cheaper housing. A couple years back I was surprised to learn that a modest ~700 sqft apartment in Shanghai or Peking easily went for $1M! Since then they had an almost 50% crash post covid but still, impressive.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwelling_Narrowness

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_requisition_in_China

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China#Obtainin...

> nail house term was invented in China after all

I do not see how this is related to property rights? In urban China you do not own your home, it is a 70yr right to use the land.

Some of their construction is good, but not private homes. Because you do not own the land, the quality of your home is up to the developer, who basically follows no code and cheapens out on everything. Also the Chinese code is very loosely implemented, for it lacks basic insulation and ventilation to start with, let alone modern airtightness.

Anyone grew up in sfh like those in the US will not like to live in Chinese nail houses.

Yep I would rank Japanese QoL higher than US or Canada. Skin color aside, they can even be xenophobic to second gen Japanese born overseas like Brazil.

Living space is quite good and affordable by Asian standards, you either live in mansion which is basically fancy apartments, or ikkodate which is single family home, albeit smaller than those in north america.

This has also been covered by Chris Brunet [0].

All I can say is academia hiring is a dumpster fire right now.

[0]: https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/exclusive-chinese-american-pro...

What you said is true, but it pertains to how to balance the game once it started, while I was giving a explanation why the game is started in the first place.

> consider what consistently giving away seats for free would do to the remaining paid seats

After all those years it is still fairly niche because few people knew about how it actually works, and it took quite a bit of learning, with dedicated forum [0] existing for decades. It shows even in this thread, and I would rank hn ppl very tech-savvy. Also the award seats are not given out free, since airlines got paid when they sold miles to banks.

> but definitely not the bulk

Even CNN thinks otherwise: Frequent flyer programs: The most profitable part of the airline industry [1]. If you think about it a bit, this is basically money printing under little oversight. What business can be more profitable than that?

I chose that video because it does explain why and is often quoted to newcomers in the community, hence its view count. I myself have been in this game for a couple years and my family almost travel solely on international award tickets now, so it is not just something heard over the Internet.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlyerTalk

[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/08/business/frequent-flyer-p...

Having been in academia for a bit, I find it somewhat hard to believe multiple professional mathematicians in different fields give meaningful reply to a random email solicitation from an internet stranger within three weeks, simply because those people's inboxes are absolutely bombarded every minute.

In reality people would be thrilled to have such response even with a finished preprint on arXiv. Anyway if you really hit the jackpot hope it will be smooth working out the details and get it published!

That's exactly how Chinese android market works, every phone/pad is No.1 upon release and within a few week's PR campaign. After a couple months a new one is released with another No.1 bla-bla, while the old one goes on life-support.

Also have to mention their ads, built into the system, when every app opens, when you switch back, f*king everywhere. The funny thing is if you switch language to English or use it overseas, some of the ads will go away, ironic.

The best part of this scandal is in a press conference a major producer, Mengniu, publicly announced that milk made for Hong Kong is not affected.

This one-sentence message demonstrates a lot of the problems of Chinese manufacturing if you think about it for a minute.

Also the enforcement of standardization is really poor, almost to the point nobody cares.

Chinese manufacturers can make quality stuff and can be rather honest to work with once you show certain knowledge of the field, they will even tell you which products are to avoid.

On average yes, but for savvy people they are worth much more for biz/first class travel. There is even a whole industry built around mileage booking.

Why subsidize? There is no subsidize at all, an empty seat on a flight is an empty seat unsold, any money they can make back is extra profit. Airlines do not make money by flying people nowadays, but by selling miles in bulk to banks [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4

So do credit card companies run transfer bonuses. There are only a handful of airlines who sell pts < 2 cent per point during promo, like Avianca. Others, including the big three US carriers, seldom do this.

Also the big part of this game is sign up bonuses, like spending $5,000 and get 100,000 points instead of the 2% daily rate.

>in the US we get to work our nice 60 to 80 hour weeks

That is hardly the norm, if you work in the hottest AI startup or some field of quant then sure, but average SWE do work the same 40 hour week. Lack of paid vacation is true tho.

Until you learn the hard way that they are not up to the standard advertised, if they happen to be rated in the first place. It is common knowledge that Chinese manufacturers maintains at least three configs of the same product, the best one sent off for rating, the middle for knowledgeable buyers, the worst being the 500-for-$7.99 shit for the mass market, who buys nothing but the cheapest.

Like the other commenter said, all you can say is less evil. Basically everything from China is made by factory workers working 12 hour shifts with 1 day off every 14 days, or programmers working 12 hour a day with 1 day off every 7 days. So forced labors from prison is not that bad comparing to daily life there, just another one of these first world problems.

Not really, Aliexpress is from Alibaba, who has been in the exporting business for many years. While Temu is from Pinduoduo, a competitor to Alibaba known for malicious business practices including exploiting an Android 0-day vulnerability [0].

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/andro...

Edit: I should add that Pinduoduo also ended up being fined over $200 million after a couple fist fight with auditing officials in China [1]. Stay safe, EU folks.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/fistfight...

Problem with insulation is that it kills off all sound, not only noise. For example people might actually enjoy the sound of wind blowing leaves, squirrels running around or an occasional car driving by. There are devices generating natural noise for Passivhaus because its insulation is so great that people starts to feel eerie.

Assuming English is the language, CEFR B2 is roughly 75 in TOEFL, such a low standard that community colleges would think twice before admitting such internationals students. In reality H1B tech workers easily blows 100+.

That note is grossly wrong though, ICE was/is putting them in jail while they appear for immigration hearing at courts.

Exactly as the other comment pointed out, in China you would not run such a business to begin with, let alone to be blocked later by payment processors.

By legal platforms or creators I suppose you mean the dispute between card processors and platforms like steam, pixiv, dslite, etc about nsfw contents like anime child porn? Those stuff are already banned in China long time ago.

To give a real example of how China bans stuff, take ByteDance as an example. It used to run a joke sharing app roughly translates into Subtle Jokes that is on par with TikTok in terms of popularity. Then one day CCP decided it did not like it, then poof it's gone overnight. The founder issued a public apology and promised to almost double their censorship department in the future. Comparing to the TikTok case in the US, we got what? The funny-yet-pathetic legal tic-tac-toeing of Singaporean-not-Chinese nonsense. There is just fundamental difference in the scale and efficiency of censorship.

Source about alipay/discover partnership? I could not find any and it is hard to imagine how a card-based network can support a qrcode-based system. The acceptance of Alipay at CVS/Walgreens is native, meaning you pay by qrcodes, exactly what you do in China.

Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS like square/clover it is getting better.

In what same way? Even registering a Wechat account is no trivial task, just look at all those ppl asking help scanning their signup codes. Suppose you did KYC and seasoned the acct enough to get it finally working, it is still limited to business codes (think of bigbox stores), not personal codes (think of farmers market, local mom-and-pop place, etc). The latter actually dominates the daily life in China.

IMO using V/M through wechat/alipay is like in the world you described and I was arguing UnionPay works in the US because ppl can buy gift cards at PO then use them at merchants, which is actually smoother comparing to this w/a business, but at the same time quite ridiculous.

Of course you do not talk about cheap labor when you are exploiting it, from which all the speed, all the availability-at-any-time come from. The closest quote I can find is

The story is told of when Apple did a last minute design change on the Iphone. As soon as the parts came in, 8000 Chinese workers were immediately called in at midnight to start a 12 hour shift. An Apple executive is quoted as saying that the “speed and flexibility are breathtaking.”

Currently the reality on Chinese assembly lines is those expert workers are working 12 hour shifts for 1 day off every 14 days, and earns about $800-$1,000 a month.

It's a huge problem in China actually, those 996-esque working schedule is everywhere now, normal 955 or even 965 schedule is almost non-existent among domestic private employers. The sad thing is that sometimes some Act (like EU supply chain law) forces factories to 955 schedule but those line workers are not happy, because that means they don't get overtime and are making minimum wages like $300 a month, not even enough to live a life. Chinese got five day work week because of WTO, yet now many have lost it.

In the opposite direction unionpay works at major US retailers directly or at least through a partnership with discover, even Alipay is available at CVS, while us processors presence in China is next to zero.

I don’t get the example, any payment in China is basically a duopoly between WeChat and Alipay, meanwhile in US there are visa, mastercard, American Express and discover counting credit card payment only.

Supposedly OP meant foreign nationals instead of overseas Chinese, while Haigui is even a broader term for anyone with a overseas degree. On the other hand, there is large exodus post 2022 due to domestic COVID-19 policies.