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yuy910616on 2021 Letter

Calling it a genocide reminds me when some people compare the modern day American football to slavery: such inaccurate and click-baity name calling makes anyone who is sympathetic towards China an accomplice on the order of Nazis, and gives the Chinese government an easy target to refuse. I get that it raises eye-brows and generates attention, but ultimately it detracts from any effort to stop such brutality. It seems lazy.

yuy910616on The Coverage of Theranos Is Utter Bullshit (2015)

It's almost taboo to feel bad for her! I think she committed a crime - but compare to the coverage to, for example, Madoff, it certainly seems rather different.

I guess it cuts both ways - she certainly garnered more attention than your average unicorn startup CEO. Now those same forces are working against her.

yuy910616on The age of machine learning as code has arrived

Progress != destruction of jobs.

Farming, auto, journalism, and marketing fits your model. But medicine, finance, and tech would suggest otherwise. I've been getting advice about how there is no money in software and I should study hardware since 90s.

Yes, maybe this is a freefall and we haven't made impact yet. But drawing parallel without further evidence seems to be too simple of a analysis.

What cause the jobs in Detroit to be outsourced? What skills was replaced? How easy was it to train those skills? What was the potential pool of workers? What was the demand of workers?

All I'm saying is that this question is a lot more nuanced. I'm a software engineer, so I'm biased. But I'm guessing that you might be biased in some ways too. The real answer, perhaps boring, is that we really don't know. Even if you're right - you could easily be off by 200 years.

yuy910616on Southwest new CEO denies walk-off rumors, defends pilots amid schedule meltdown

This might be some sort of fallacy, but when FoxNews quickly and swiftly points out that this is a vaccine mandate related case, that's a good barometer for me that it isn't.

yuy910616on Understanding Python through its builtins

python actually has a build-in `breakpoint()` function. I think it brings up a repl at the line.

I've been using that instead of print debug, it's been great.

yuy910616on Tech Jobs Are Everywhere Now

It seems to me, from reading the charts, that it still follows power law distribution, just with different cities. In other words, the labor dynamic that creates super star cities are still very much in place, just with new cities. Is that a fair reading?

Also, tangentially, what statistics should I calculate if I want to measure how "concentrated" the distribution is? The first thing that comes to mind is Gini coef, does that apply here or is there something else? The question I'm trying to answer is if the jobs are more dispersed among different cities or concentrated - assuming the cities themselves don't matter.

yuy910616on A new biography of John von Neumann

I think any argument that tries to boil down success into either nature or nurture is a bit of a futile exercise - the boring and non-controversial answer is always that it is a combination of both.

No need to get all riled up about fairness.

yuy910616on A new biography of John von Neumann

I think this is a question of what your definition of "a lot" is. If you use percentage - for example, 1% of parents, of maybe even less - 0.01%, 0.01%*7.7 billion = about a million people.

Does percentage make more sense here or absolute number? It depends on your context. I would say in this argument, it seems more certain that Von Neumann's success, which is always a function of both nature and nurture, can probably be attributed more to nature. Or, perhaps most likely, it's a rare event of talent meets incredible luck.

yuy910616on Dude, where’s my stuff

Man...I don't know how good the argument is because it's not a field I'm familiar with. But the charts and arguments are so well done. Each chart is simple yet very illustrative.

Moments like this where I'm reminded that BI is really more about telling a good story. Kudos!

yuy910616on Ask HN: Good Independent Blogs for News about China

I have a few - Bill Bishop's Sinocism is probably the first that comes to mind - https://sinocism.com/about More cynical towards China - Sinocism is a word-play. (But I think he is mostly fair in his critique)

https://supchina.com/ is a good website on this topic. I discovered them through a podcast call Sinica https://supchina.com/series/sinica/ (the podcast is extremely good)

Dan Wang https://danwang.co/ - some of his writing is scattered across different publications - it's best to follow him on Twitter - He is perhaps one of the deepest thinkers on the topic. More sympathetic towards China. If you really want to dive down the rabbit hole - look up his employer. It is a think-tank on China, and has some excellent publications.

Economist's coverage of China is also good.

Also I would like to recommend a book - Trade Wars are Class Wars - it's a popular book lately, and bring up some excellent concepts. From what I've heard this book is playing a role in framing how Washington is thinking about China now.

yuy910616on Ask HN: Frameworks for thinking through your thoughts and feelings?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1285077091/

You might find this book helpful - it is a textbook, but approachable, albeit a bit expensive.

I pick up this book off recommendation from Hackernews, and it has really help me work through my thoughts in a rather clear framework. Suddenly, it seems, thoughts and emotions became traceable.

I was also lucky that some of my good friends are PhD clinical psy folks (i think focusing on early childhood, mostly). According to them, this is the latest and greatest from that academic field that is riddle with charlatans and crazy methods, so please take everything with a grain of salt. The author of this book, I was told, is the father of the ABC model (Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence), which came from Skinner, the rats guy - I think...

For me - Controlling my thoughts, even when I understand them to some degree, is still very hard, everyday I'm tempted to just go the other route - medication.

yuy910616on That time I told my wife I wanted to quit my job

That's why I said "superpower" - it's pretty rare to find someone reliably supportive.

yuy910616on That time I told my wife I wanted to quit my job

Having a supportive spouse is basically a superpower.

yuy910616on Amazon says it’s permanently banned 600 Chinese brands for review fraud

haha, by his attitude, I'm assuming that people have abuse this policy before. I'm thinking if you return the empty bottle, they'll still take it, albeit a bit gruntled.

Mine was about 2/3 gone. Definitely beyond of the point of "hm..this wine taste funny"

Over the years I've had so many little moments like this with Costco, whether it is a friendly exchange with a gas station attendee, a door person stopping me and pointing out that I was over-charged, a service rep who couldn't find an off-brand pedialyte I purchased so they gave me a pedialyte and told me "eh yeah just don't tell anyone", it really started to make sense to me why when you mention Costco - some people would light up and say "man I LOVE Costco", when it's just a store.

yuy910616on How Marvel took over cinema and TV

One thing that really stood out to me was how "okay" infinity war and end game was.

Big franchise like this rarely ends well, especially if you're juggling so many different characters.

It is shocking how well they delivered.

yuy910616on Amazon says it’s permanently banned 600 Chinese brands for review fraud

And their employee actually gets treated pretty well - when I go to Sam's club, I always feel bad; maybe I'm projecting.

yuy910616on Amazon says it’s permanently banned 600 Chinese brands for review fraud

I had a funny one - I was returning a bunch of unopened wine and I told the guy, there is one that was opened, indicating that when you see the open one please give it back to me.

He was kinda rude and I was like wtf. And then he proceeds to return all of the wine, I asked him "dude wheres the open bottle?" And he said "I thought you were returning that one too?"

Turns out in some states - they allow you to return opened bottle of wine. We laughed it off

yuy910616on Amazon says it’s permanently banned 600 Chinese brands for review fraud

If you're worried about quality, you should really look into Costco. Their business model incentivize them to have top notch quality.

I've also worked with some of their buyers / purchasers - best in the business for sure. Very QA focus company

yuy910616on Chery QQ Ice Cream goes on sale in China – a modern electric car for $4,600

QQ is actually just pronounced like QQ in English. If I remember correctly, it was first popularized by a type of candy - call QQ candy, which I think is where the soft and squishy meaning the OP referred to came from.

Next was QQ the software, I think inspired by the name ICQ, developed by WeChat's developer, Tencent. Prior to smart phones and wechat - QQ was the dominating platform

yuy910616on Online coding school Treehouse lays off most of its staff

There are scalable bits of Education - courses, books, practice questions (look at leetcode), and lectures. I think that is why a lot of ed-tech fails. Information really does want to be free, and anything that can be broadcast is usually better free. Youtube has seen an influx of high quality content IMO.

There are also non-scalable parts - access to expert, prestige, and all the bits you've mentioned. I think that's probably where the future of ed-tech is going.

yuy910616on A new book looks behind Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign

Funny - I read it for a history class. The book Banana was also quite interesting.

yuy910616on A new book looks behind Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign

Yep, this is exactly it. It's not that networking is unique, is that such connection is often used to replace things like law, justice, or a simple queue.

In my own experience, where I went to kindergarten was an outcome of who my grandma knew. Similarly, when I was sick and needed to see a doctor, I had to know someone who knew someone...

Yes - it's similar in the west. But to say they're the same would be like saying 100M dash and marathon is the same sport.

yuy910616on A new book looks behind Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign

Well, at least you wouldn't get shot for saying Snowden.

yuy910616on A new book looks behind Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign

I also want to add the book is currently has 20 ratings on Amazon and 4.9 stars - I'm curious if a large flood of of negative reviews quickly get posted haha, since it is now on both the Economist and Hackernews, which I think China closely monitors.

yuy910616on A new book looks behind Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign

It sounds like an incredible book. I will certainly check it out. It fits well with my experience of China well - a place where Guanxi (關係）trumps all else. People fear it, hate it, but also aspire it. It's also interesting that how unlikely this book is. I've been in the West for more than 20 years, but I don't plan on speaking ill of China at all. Kudos to the author.

Another book that I really enjoy that seem to be of the same ilk: confession of an economic hitman

yuy910616on Hong Kong: Police Raid Tiananmen Square Museum

Really reminds me of the Taiwan election commercial that compares Taiwan and Hong Kong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykcVIQMrc4A

yuy910616on Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

Can anyone comment on Cowen's economic/political view? Last I've heard he's kind of a dying breed of Hayek supporter, but looking at his wikipedia page - it seems like even he has adopted a much more sympathetic view towards bigger government.

Not to say anything about libertarian - I'm just curious.

yuy910616on The U.S. Army tried portable nuclear power at remote bases 60 years ago

I've heard there is a book about this why we don't have such a thing - the book largely blames it on the green movement I think...

Where is my flying car I believe is the title. Earlier this year I saw a book review from the star slater codex substack. Didn't read it tho

yuy910616on China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

These are minor details - US probably should pay for it. But directionally, if you're a developing country, you can't afford it.

The best way to progress has been GDP growth - modern medicine is not driven by good-will, kindness, or faith. It's driven by profit

yuy910616on China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

And if you look at the past 200 years that we've made large progress towards all the things you mentioned, with each of those accomplishments have been enabled by...GDP growth