13 ms·

Ten days in Shenzhen

276 points by babkayaga 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
suitelife 9y ago
It's sad that techies who champion knowledge, freedom, righteousness, supports a country like China that openly rejects democracy, openly and brashly monitors its people and assign them scores, holds 're-education/concentration camps' for its minorities the Uighur, threatens democratic countries like Taiwan, house arrests many of its own citizens and nobel prize winners, spews its pollution into the ocean and to other countries airspace, supports a crazy dictator in North Korea who seeks to destroy US and Japan, etc etc etc
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  That's a very leftist, biased and effectively fascist way to look at things. China may have its problems yet for every point you make one could find a negative point in most other countries in the world. Especially if you choose the other country to be the US, which really can't claim moral superiority over many nations in the world (probably not even North Korea). Let specific points aside, technology is also a way to make things better for people. So instead of working on the next Tumblr or the third Uber it might make sense to go somewhere else and broaden ones horizon.
  - outworlder 9y ago
    > China may have its problems yet for every point you make one could find a negative point in most other countries in the world. Especially if you choose the other country to be the US, which really can't claim moral superiority over many nations in the world (probably not even North Korea). This is ridiculous. I agree with the general point when you say that all countries have problems. But some have way more problems than others – and I wouldn't call whatever happens in North Korea just "a problem". While the US foreign policy leaves much to be desired, you cannot compare the way US citizens are treated versus how Chinese or North Korean citizens are. So yes, the US CAN claim moral superiority in many areas.
    - dna_polymerase 9y ago
      > So yes, the US CAN claim moral superiority in many areas. Oh really? The biggest patriot of the US is forced to live in Russia because he pointed out, that the US has built an apparatus for mass surveillance. That man is Edward Snowden. If he would go back home he would be killed, legally, that is, because your highly moral superior nation allows to sentence people to death (just like China, which is such a worse place to be). In general people that speak against the US are threatened. The US actually goes out of their way to try and silence these voices. Even as far as bullying other countries into their crap. Look at Julian Assange, who is forced to live in a tiny room for years now, because the US made sure to catch and extradite him as soon as he leaves the embassy in London. Which by the ruling of the United Nations in against basic human rights, yet Assange is sentenced to death in the embassy (just like dissidents in China). North Korea is bullyied by the world (on behalf of the US) because they have not opened to capitalism and they have a nuclear bomb. Which by the way the US has, yet the US arsenal is not only one bomb but more like one hundred bombs per country of the world. To be honest, I am more afraid of the lunatic in the white house to launch one of those bombs than the fatty in North Korea. The US always points at the free press and free speech, yet they created such an environment of leftist propaganda, that Sam Altman feels more safe to say things in China than in the Valley. The free press is so damn broken that they spent the last year talking about Russians manipulating their elections that Donald Trump can slip everything he wants into congress without anyone actually noticing. And while NYT, WashPo, LATimes, etc. keep talking about the bad Russians your nation turns into shit. Oh and I did not even mention the broken capitalism and lobbyists yet... I could do this for hours. The point is, nope moral high ground is long gone for you guys, in fact I think after Hiroshima you never had it.
      - athrun 9y ago
        The US (along with the democratic free world) may have its own problems but it absolutely can claim some sort of moral superiority in many areas. You cite Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Well, you can freely support, advocate, demonstrate or petition for their cause, in the open. Let me know how it goes for you if you were to try defending political dissidents in Russia, China or North Korea. The fact that we can debate these things in a public forum is proof of our moral superiority. This does not mean there aren't plenty of things we need to learn from these non-democratic societies. We just don't need to reject our moral beliefs to do so.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Moral superiority is a huge myth, usually its use is coupled with what aboutism fallacies anyways. There is much that China can improve irrespective of the situation in other countries. Besides, when someone criticizes the USA, no one ever points out that China is worse, even when it obviously is. It isn't relevant.
  - tanilama 9y ago
    It is ridiculous a country that elects a openly racist president like Trump claims any morale high ground...
    - freeloop3 9y ago
      How is he openly racist? Because he wants to secure our borders?
      - tanilama 9y ago
        Oh, so many racist slurs he spilled among the way, speak his characters to me.
        freeloop3 9y ago
        What racist slurs?
        dang 9y ago
        Using HN for political flamewar will get you banned. Please don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - dang 9y ago
      Please keep political and nationalistic flamebait off HN. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- probably_whf 9y ago
  It's not as bad as the way many French intellectuals directly supported Maoism[0] - at least our "techies" don't (usually) claim to be experts on the political/philosophical side. (Ideally we would have a functioning intelligentsia in the US, but I really think this is more of a symptom of not having one than it is of having a morally decrepit one.) [0](see page 9) https://todhartman.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/michel-foucault-power-knowledge-interviews-and-other-writings-1972-1977-_gordon-colin-ed_.pdf https://todhartman.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/michel-foucau... - whatshisface, but posted on an alt so I don't have to feel bad about points. ;)
- um_ya 9y ago
  China has created "exclusive economic zones" like Hong Kong and Shenzhen that are more free than the United States. Mainland China may be a shithole, but at least they have places where capitalism can thrive, better that even the United States.
  - robjan 9y ago
    Shenzhen is a Special Economic Zone and Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous Special Administrative Region under "one country, two systems". There may be more economic freedom that the US but still less freedom of speech and press.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      HK had plenty of freedom of speech and press until very recently. With the bookseller abductions, that is obviously over, but it did exist at one point.
  - nichtich 9y ago
    There's no way Shenzhen is more free than US. I'm not sure you're more misguided towards US or China though.
  - zhte415 9y ago
    Hong Kong is not and never has been a Special Economic Zone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin...
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      HK is a Special Administrative Region (the HK SAR). To be honest, all these acronyms are confusing anyways (an SEZ, a SAR, the TAR)...
- outworlder 9y ago
  Being fascinated by some aspects of a foreign culture is not the same as supporting the political regime itself.
- jhales 9y ago
  There no support for the Communist Government, only a vibrant tech community.
- foxylad 9y ago
  To me, he didn't seem to be supporting China - he seemed to be shopping in Shenzhen. He didn't make a single positive comment about the regime, and in fact spent a lot of the article complaining about the hassles caused by the Great Firewall.
  - suitelife 9y ago
    pretty sure 'giving money to the China's economy' is the same as supporting China. doubt China cares about emotional support.
    - platinumrad 9y ago
      So nobody should ever vacation in or visit China? Even if you were to avoid explicitly giving money to Chinese businesses, it's probably impossible to buy any moderately complicated manufactured good without indirectly supporting China's economy. Why do new accounts pop up to shittalk China every single time someone writes a piece like this. Paid Taiwanese shills?
      - suitelife 9y ago
        we are techies, if we can program artificial intelligence, we can figure out ways to avoid giving money to an evil entity that produces concentration camps that today houses China's minorities, tomorrow maybe your children.
        IntronExon 9y ago
        You can’t program AI, just some mindless feedback models that have the name “AI” slapped on them. You also can’t sway a group of skeptics with corny lines such as, “tomorrow your children...” Get real. I don’t want to live in China right now, but evil? I live in a country that has destabilized country after country after country in the name of ideology, fear, and greed. This country kills civilians on a regular basis, and calls it acceptable. We’re all evil, if you want to be hyperbolic about it, or human I’d you want to be realistic. Pointing fingers at external “devils” is just a non-starter to anyone with a rational bone in them.
- drpancake 9y ago
  By visiting Silicon Valley am I supporting the US government's covert wars, extrajudicial drone strikes and interference in the affairs of other countries? Not in any meaningful way. This is an absurd argument.
  - abalone 9y ago
    It's a hypocritical argument, not an absurd one. One could argue that it's also wrong to uncritically celebrate the technological achievements of Silicon Valley. Well over a million people have been killed in U.S. wars of aggression (Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) and there are very direct ties between SV high tech funding and the Pentagon. Exhibit A: DARPA.[1] Even more direct than in China. A lot of what SV does is commercializing military technology developed at taxpayer expense. Autonomous vehicles and Siri are just a couple recent examples.[2][3] [1] https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/darpa-history-and-timeline https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/darpa-history-and-timeline [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO
    - jjtheblunt 9y ago
      Vietnam was not a US war of aggression: the US came at the request of the French presence as the communist north tried to take the French allies in the south. The result was a mess, sadly, predictably.
      - thebread 9y ago
        No. America supported colonialism (France), then later suspended the Geneva agreement of 1954. The agreement required elections across both north and south that they knew Ho Chi Minh would win. That beget what is known in Vietnam as the American War. Vietnam struggled for 30 years to be one country. Ho Chi Minh took assistance from the OSS in WW2 and styled the Vietnamese declaration of Independence on the American one. He turned to the Communists when America decided colonial rule was more important than freedom.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
- volgo 9y ago
  You seem to have a very distorted view of the world that's almost identical to what the media feeds you. Have you ever visited China and experienced it yourself, or do most of the things you say come from what organizations tell you? Not saying everything in your post was incorrect, but it's a very unrealistic view.
- dang 9y ago
  Taking HN into political and nationalistic flamewar is a bannable offense, and we've banned this account. All: please don't spoil this thread still further by taking this kind of bait. If you want a poster child for what happens, look below for a reductio ad absurdum in two steps: (1) bickering about wars of aggression (yes they were no they weren't); (2) relitigating Vietnam. If this is what you want to do on the internet, Hacker News is not the site you are looking for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
outworlder 9y ago
This excerpt is interesting: "One thing I found problematic with WeChat is that unlike Hangout, for example, it doesn't store any of the conversations on the backend. There's apparently a “we're not spying on you” angle to this with regards to Tencent providing this service to users." Yeah, but then just a couple of paragraphs before, they were mentioning how WeChat provides translation services inside the app. I highly doubt that this is being handled in the device itself.
- e_b 9y ago
  But you request the translation per message. It does not happen automatically.
- whisk 9y ago
  China's law requires all Apps to keep chat log for 6 months. Wechat just doesn't provide download so that they can reduce the cost of storage and bandwidth.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
baybal2 9y ago
Some may be amazed by the scale of the market at Huaqiang Bei intersection today, but it is just a pale afterimage of what it was 10 years ago, when the market was effectively filling 2 to 3 city blocks. It has been gentrified to death since then. And to people thinking of Shenzhen as a manufacturing city teeming with garage entrepreneurs, They fared no better. There are close to no factories remaining within the city centre today, except the special customs zone on the southern tip of Futian. All of this is thanks to the witless mayor Wang Rong that took over the city in 2009. Some oh his first orders were to bulldoze factories and build glossy shopping malls, "weekend rest" hotels, and coffee shops with $10 a pop cappuccinos, so "we can live like in civilised Western countries"
- gkgicccj 9y ago
  Don't leave us hanging, where is the real deal now, then?
  - baybal2 9y ago
    I'd say nowhere. Contract manufacturing has been a declining industry since its peak 10 years ago. The fewer small factories there are, the less refuse goes to street market. You best bet is to go to the few remaining factory districts in Shajing, north to the airport and look what garage factories are selling. Also try going to districts north to S3 if you are a try-hard. Stuff there is mostly generic light industry goods, and not electronics per se. It may worth going further north to Dongguan, but I myself rarely ventured there.
    - contingencies 9y ago
      People order on Taobao now, so physical presence in a market is of dubious utility for many factories. The factories are mostly in Dongguan where they have their own component markets. The Baoshan area east and north of the airport also has industrial components markets (more process-line stuff). Huaqiangbei (HQB) is mostly consumer electronics with some components. There's more in Longhua / Longgang, northeast of town. China Post is super cheap for bulk shipping if you choose surface (ie. sea freight) but it takes three months.
lovelearning 9y ago
Not directly related to this post's subject, but I highly recommend this author's YouTube talks and books on Android internals and embedded Linux to anybody looking to start doing things like customizing or porting Android, building their own secure or lightweight Android ROMs, or building their own distros for single board computers.
gkgicccj 9y ago
I notice that the author put a lot of emphasis on security and walking off his devices. I understand that he has a background in crypto/security and also the when I had learnt that stuff and it was fresh I was "paranoid" too. That having said, is that really an issue in China? Wherever you go you get hacked?
- yorwba 9y ago
  Maybe I'm just not good enough to notice that I've long been pwned, but unless you are a high-profile target I don't think you need to worry too much. When I went to China, I made sure to put all the "suspicious" stuff (like a complete Wikipedia dump) on a hidden and encrypted partition of my portable drive and worried that it might be discovered anyway. In the end nobody even looked at it, the English Wikipedia isn't blocked at all, and the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    > the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription. We tried this for a few months. We would subscribe to a VPN that worked, we paid our yearly fee, and it stopped working the next month. We did this a few times before finally giving up, it is far from trivial, the GFW is real.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      And, at least two years ago, could be trivially worked around if you bought appropriate SIM cards in Hong Kong, which - apparently completely legally, and with cooperation of one of China's telcos - gave you completely unfiltered access in the Shenzhen area. Sadly, I learned about this only a month into my stay in Shenzhen; before, I was playing the BPN cat&mouse game. China seems to have a weird dual stance about GFW. I even heard rumors that companies could pay someone to get a legal, unfiltered link.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
ggm 9y ago
I sat next to a guy who is "kenny" (the film about the portaloo entrepreneur) and he was flying into Shenzhen to have some new plastic portaloo parts made. By coincidence I met him coming back too. Dream run: they provided concierge, translation and hosting services and were really keen to prove quality and appropriate certification marks. They want to deliver top product. I had another friend doing brew-tanks. Same story. The real deal, if you can find it, will invest time and energy to get you to the product you want at world-class level. I don't doubt its a sick sad world out there, and scary at times but with some basic human decency and a realistic budget, manufacturing in China wants to talk to you. If you want to cut corners, or shave price to the bone, I am sure you will find people who are going to shave quality and compliance to match. If you can price ahead of the floor, you can find really good, entrepreneurial people to deal with. The brewtank guy wound up in delay because of new Chinese pollution compliance checks. Don't assume everything coming out of china is toxic lead, they are also trying to get on top of bad supply chain behaviour.
odysseus 9y ago
I was confused as the article keeps referring to “TEGES” with no clear explanation of what this acronym means. After digging around on the internet (in vain), I re-read the top portion of the article and figured out that it must mean “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”, which is apparently some sort of crowd-sourced/crowd-funded book ...
- blhack 9y ago
  It's not crowd sourced, it's a book by Bunnie Huang: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3189 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3189
- scriptsmith 9y ago
  It's explained under the preparation heading > One of the very first things I did was get my hands on Bunnie Huang's “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” (TEGES from here on forward) off of Adafruit's site
contingencies 9y ago
We're hiring mechanical and mechatronics engineers in Shenzhen! Email in profile.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dietrying 9y ago
Not much to comment on the other than the technology woes. I made a day trip to Shenzhen from Hong Kong last July. It was my second time in China last year, but first time to Shenzhen. So I was very aware of all of the "GFW" issues. I used my Pixel with VyprVPN installed prior to with no issues. Also I always downloading maps and languages with keyboards anytime I travel in case my connection is not 100%. Though I had a strong signal all around Shenzhen. I did run into some trouble finding an ATM that accepted my card. I did not want to trade a lot of currency since it was only a day trip, and not knowing if I would buy anything at all, or how much. There were many ATM's, though it is hard to find anywhere in China banks that are compatible with American cards. Not impossible, just far fewer than other countries. WeChat is a must all over China. They use it for everything! Though I haven't figured out how to get money onto it to use the pay feature, which they love to use. I think you have to have a China Bank account to tie it to your WeChat, or have someone with CNY who gives/transfer it to you from their account.
- ksrm 9y ago
  If you buy a Unicom "Cross-border SIM" in Hong Kong, it will work unfiltered in mainland China.
pasiaj 9y ago
I just came from 14 day trip to Shanghai-Beijing-Shenzhen. Here's a couple of more pointers: - DiDi is the Uber of China. Wonderful UX, English language UI with automatic two-way translation of messages and support for western credit cards. - AliPay & WeChat wallet are the primary methods of payment in China. You can enable a WeChat Wallet using a western credit card, but in most cases that card cannot be used for payments. You can have easily exchange cash for WeChat RMB, as other users can transfer RMB to your account free of charge. AliPay requires a local phone number & bank account (and no, the one you use for AliExpress does not work for mobile payments.) - The subway system in Shenzhen, Shanghai & Beijing is really well maintained. You can use cash or Alipay/Wechat to pay. - All foreign cell contracts pipe traffic through their local servers, so they automatically VPN through the Great Firewall. - ProjectFI recently lost 99% of LTE coverage in China. T-Mobile cancelled their contract with China Unicom, and Nexus phones do not support the LTE bandwith China Mobile uses. You're stuck on the EDGE network 99% of the time. - China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa. - One thing that was not mentioned in Karim's post: advanced manufacturing facilities. Try booking a tour: they can significantly alter what you think is possible.
- generalh0rse 9y ago
  What would you classify as "advanced manufacturing" today and localized to the area? I'm consistently impressed with the quality and cost of machined/prototype parts that come out of Shenzhen – even the "traditional" manufacturing can be mind-blowing.
- countryqt30 9y ago
  "without Visa" -- how did you get into China without Visa in the first place? It's illegal!
- goty 9y ago
  Yes, if there is any advice I could give it is to get familiar with the local tech ecosystem as soon as possible. After spending a few month in Shenzhen, seeing people coming and going, you realize that everyone has the same ideas about the same things. How to get around the firewall, catalog hqb, build their own pcba etc. Those things are of course harmless enough, but also missing the point. Shenzhen is all about doing things and talking to people. Which is something a lot of western hackers seem to have forgot how to do in favor of fantasizing about things in various ways. The sooner people can get past that and start doing things the more they will get out of the experience.
partoa 9y ago
Very interesting. Maybe stumbling onto such a piece before 2015 would have saved us quite a bit of trouble and time. We ended up doing most of our development from Shenzhen, with out primary electronic Engineer spending time in there, months at a time. Being a hardware startup in Kenya working on a custom Android device meant that a lot of what we needed to do had to be done outside the country. Our first foray in Shenzhen was made once we found a small company that had a Mediatek based 3G SOM and was willing to help us develop our hardware from there; they suggested that it was the best option. Two years, several stays and a final prototype later, we have learnt why it would have been almost impossible for us to successfully get to a functioning prototype from Nairobi; especially with our budget. For one, the we had direct help from manufacturers, who our hosts had to speak to in Mandarin. With drivers for out custom touch panel, we still needed a visit to the IC manufacturer for some configurations to be fixed. We also had such great help on mechanical design; here, I must admit, we had been completely clueless. The one thing I can say for sure, in China relationships help; greatly!! We were worried about changing our LCD because the one we're using has come to it's End Of Life. We were then introduced to a factory that was to make us a replacement. Turns out they can make the new LCD use the same exact connections as the one we had before. So no change in our circuit, and support for any change in our code. For us, it was less having a plan and more serendipity though.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
"I went to Google Translate to write my question and show him. Seeing what I was doing he said: “no, no, no, WeChat, WeChat”. I didn't get what he was saying at first. But he quickly showed me that he could type in Chinese on his phone, I would get the text in Chinese, long-press on it and get a menu that allowed me to translate it in English. And when I sent a message in English, he'd be able to translate it to Chinese." That quote is buried deep in the article, but should be emphasised for anyone travelling in a Chinese-speaking country: WeChat is easier to use than Google Translate! It also is worth emphasising for people developing iMessage, Skype, LINE, KakaoTalk, and other platforms, who seem to want to avoid "feature creep" by denying people this kind of functionality. Users like features. If you're interested in learning Chinese, I wrote a program to do that, but I recommend chat-based translation tools like WeChat for temporary visitors.
- sberder 9y ago
  It also does not require a VPN or foreign sim card
- jmnicolas 9y ago
  Speaking about Skype, Microsoft should be ashamed of the low quality of this app compared to WeChat. WeChat is snappy and feels very responsive. It works every time. With Skype it's always a hassle to connect (Android and Windows), the app feels very heavy (Android). I just started to use chat apps recently and frankly I was expecting better from MS, since I had good experiences with all their other products.
  - sharpercoder 9y ago
    Skype is frankly a disaster. Not only the personal app, also the Skype for Business app. Chatting works, but don't try to use any other functionality, since it breaks so easily. But first (with great distance) on the list of failed Microsoft products is their accounts. Ever tried to login into msdn? Even our sysadmin who's is daily job is to get this right fails many times. The UX is so confusing and ambiguous, it's not funny. Everytime I need to deal with it I am seriously considering moving away from the whole MS ecosystem.
kfihihc 9y ago
I come from Seeed, hope you enjoy the Shenzhen Maker Map :)
yesokayawesome 9y ago
I lived in Shenzhen for 2 years before moving back to Europe. Man, the pace is glacial here… Popped back there for another trip a few months back and suddenly there was no more cash, and the ratio of electric-to-gasoline cabs shifted from 20/80 to 80/20
- igravious 9y ago
  In our defence :) What are you comparing Shenzhen to? Europe is a continent, Shenzhen is a city. Type `size of europe'[0] into Google and you get: Europe Continent Population: 743.1 million (2015) Area: 10.18 million km² (By way of comparison, China is ~ 9.6 million km²) You have to compare a specific place in Europe to Shenzhen. Norway has the highest penetration on EVs in the world, for instance[1] so what if you compared Shenzhen with Oslo? The famous London black cab is going electric[2]. Here in Ireland we have been using contactless debit transactions for years in practically every place–when a retail spot doesn't support it you kind of look at them as if they're from the past[3]. By way of example, at a recent intimate book launch I went to by a boutique publisher they used a portable handheld card swiper because people don't necessarily carry cash and it would be too inconvenient to ask them to go to an ATM. Yes, I think the pace of innovation in Europe could be quicker but both the LHC[4] and ITER[5] are based in Europe (France) which is kind of amazing because there are 43 other countries in the world _bigger_ than France and France is only the second largest[6] country in Europe (taking into account European Russia[7] which dwarfs it). I sometimes think people forget both how small Europe is and how varied both culturally and developmentally–from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, from the Atlantic in the West to the Urals and Black Sea in the East. When people say Europe sometimes they mean the EU which is not the same thing at all! There are 47 states that make up the Council of Europe[8], there are 28 in the EU give or take a Brexit. When (if?) the UK leaves the EU it'll still be bound by the European Court for Human Rights[9]! Sometimes when people say Europe they might actually be referring to Western Europe which is historically inaccurate and a bit culturally myopic to put it kindly. TL;DR–comparing the whole of Europe to a city is bonkers. edit: added links to the LHC and ITER :) [0] https://www.google.ie/search?q=size+of+europe https://www.google.ie/search?q=size+of+europe [1] https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/03/ev-hybrid-car-sales-norway/ https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/03/ev-hybrid-car-sales-norw... “Pure electric cars and hybrids accounted for 52 percent of all new car sales in 2017 in Norway against 40 percent in 2016, the independent Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.” [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16704060/london-zero-emission-electric-taxi-lecv https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16704060/london-zero-emis... [3] http://www.moneyguideireland.com/contactless-payments-in-ireland.html http://www.moneyguideireland.com/contactless-payments-in-ire... [4] https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider [5] https://www.iter.org/factsfigures https://www.iter.org/factsfigures [6] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2147rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia “Russia is not proportionately populated between its larger Asian portion, which contains about 23% of the country's population, and its smaller European portion, which contains about 77%. The European portion contains about 110 million people out of Russia's total population of about 144 million in an area covering nearly 4,000,000 km2 (1,500,000 sq mi); (making it by far the largest European country) an average of 27.5 persons per km2 (70 per sq mi).” [8] https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/structure https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/structure [9] http://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/27/implications-of-brexit-for-the-european-convention-on-human-rights/ http://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/27/implications-of-brexit-for-t...
rfolstad 9y ago
I found https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/ quite useful to get a working ssh session thru the GFW. The GFW can introduce latency and packet loss to encrypted connections which mosh seems to handle nicely.
- nojvek 9y ago
  I use mosh on my bus commute. Under tunnels, changing cell towers, mosh is just amazing. That’s how I expect all my services to work.
joncrane 9y ago
> I was immediately reminded of the advice in TEGES that many drivers have bad eyesight. Eek!
csense 9y ago
Why does China get a Shenzen and the US doesn't? What would it take to build a US-based electronics hub to rival Shenzen in, say, one of the Rust Belt states?
- krapp 9y ago
  >What would it take to build a US-based electronics hub to rival Shenzen in, say, one of the Rust Belt states? The repeal of American labor, environmental and copyright laws, to start.
  - wan23 9y ago
    There was a really interesting segment on last week's Vergecast ( https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16935908/vergecast-podcast-290-dji-mavic-air-homepod-ios-11-3 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16935908/vergecast-podcas... ) about DJI and how business is different for them being a Chinese electronics company. Specifically, their products are state of the art because they are plugged into the components markets, but they also release new products very frequently because with the lack of intellectual property protections the competition is always right around the corner.
- goty 9y ago
  The US doesn't need a Shenzhen. It already has free enterprise, electronics suppliers and prototyping equipment. The problem is the barrier to entry, mostly living costs. There isn't really much you can do in Shenzhen that you can't do in the bay area. It will just cost you five times as much. But of course it depends on what you mean by "a Shenzhen".
  - csense 9y ago
    > The US doesn't need a Shenzhen When the US was a manufacturing superpower for most of the 20th century, it provided a way for ordinary people to earn a good living. Workers and suppliers pumped money into a wide variety of local businesses. Starting around the early '80s, the manufacturing started moving overseas, especially to China. The Rust Belt region (where I'm from) never really recovered economically, although there are a few bright spots if you know where to look. What did we do wrong and China do right, that the economic prosperity left us and went to them instead? How can we learn from their formula for success and adapt it for ourselves? It sure seems like having a piece of the growth industries of the 21st century located in your country is a big piece of the puzzle in terms of providing well-paying jobs to our citizens and promoting their quality of life. Which should help with some of the political problems we've been having recently. How do we make it happen?

276 points by babkayaga 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

It's sad that techies who champion knowledge, freedom, righteousness, supports a country like China that openly rejects democracy, openly and brashly monitors its people and assign them scores, holds 're-education/concentration camps' for its minorities the Uighur, threatens democratic countries like Taiwan, house arrests many of its own citizens and nobel prize winners, spews its pollution into the ocean and to other countries airspace, supports a crazy dictator in North Korea who seeks to destroy US and Japan, etc etc etc

dna_polymerase 9y ago
That's a very leftist, biased and effectively fascist way to look at things. China may have its problems yet for every point you make one could find a negative point in most other countries in the world. Especially if you choose the other country to be the US, which really can't claim moral superiority over many nations in the world (probably not even North Korea). Let specific points aside, technology is also a way to make things better for people. So instead of working on the next Tumblr or the third Uber it might make sense to go somewhere else and broaden ones horizon.
- outworlder 9y ago
  > China may have its problems yet for every point you make one could find a negative point in most other countries in the world. Especially if you choose the other country to be the US, which really can't claim moral superiority over many nations in the world (probably not even North Korea). This is ridiculous. I agree with the general point when you say that all countries have problems. But some have way more problems than others – and I wouldn't call whatever happens in North Korea just "a problem". While the US foreign policy leaves much to be desired, you cannot compare the way US citizens are treated versus how Chinese or North Korean citizens are. So yes, the US CAN claim moral superiority in many areas.
  - dna_polymerase 9y ago
    > So yes, the US CAN claim moral superiority in many areas. Oh really? The biggest patriot of the US is forced to live in Russia because he pointed out, that the US has built an apparatus for mass surveillance. That man is Edward Snowden. If he would go back home he would be killed, legally, that is, because your highly moral superior nation allows to sentence people to death (just like China, which is such a worse place to be). In general people that speak against the US are threatened. The US actually goes out of their way to try and silence these voices. Even as far as bullying other countries into their crap. Look at Julian Assange, who is forced to live in a tiny room for years now, because the US made sure to catch and extradite him as soon as he leaves the embassy in London. Which by the ruling of the United Nations in against basic human rights, yet Assange is sentenced to death in the embassy (just like dissidents in China). North Korea is bullyied by the world (on behalf of the US) because they have not opened to capitalism and they have a nuclear bomb. Which by the way the US has, yet the US arsenal is not only one bomb but more like one hundred bombs per country of the world. To be honest, I am more afraid of the lunatic in the white house to launch one of those bombs than the fatty in North Korea. The US always points at the free press and free speech, yet they created such an environment of leftist propaganda, that Sam Altman feels more safe to say things in China than in the Valley. The free press is so damn broken that they spent the last year talking about Russians manipulating their elections that Donald Trump can slip everything he wants into congress without anyone actually noticing. And while NYT, WashPo, LATimes, etc. keep talking about the bad Russians your nation turns into shit. Oh and I did not even mention the broken capitalism and lobbyists yet... I could do this for hours. The point is, nope moral high ground is long gone for you guys, in fact I think after Hiroshima you never had it.
    - athrun 9y ago
      The US (along with the democratic free world) may have its own problems but it absolutely can claim some sort of moral superiority in many areas. You cite Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Well, you can freely support, advocate, demonstrate or petition for their cause, in the open. Let me know how it goes for you if you were to try defending political dissidents in Russia, China or North Korea. The fact that we can debate these things in a public forum is proof of our moral superiority. This does not mean there aren't plenty of things we need to learn from these non-democratic societies. We just don't need to reject our moral beliefs to do so.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Moral superiority is a huge myth, usually its use is coupled with what aboutism fallacies anyways. There is much that China can improve irrespective of the situation in other countries. Besides, when someone criticizes the USA, no one ever points out that China is worse, even when it obviously is. It isn't relevant.
- tanilama 9y ago
  It is ridiculous a country that elects a openly racist president like Trump claims any morale high ground...
  - freeloop3 9y ago
    How is he openly racist? Because he wants to secure our borders?
    - tanilama 9y ago
      Oh, so many racist slurs he spilled among the way, speak his characters to me.
      - freeloop3 9y ago
        What racist slurs?
        dang 9y ago
        Using HN for political flamewar will get you banned. Please don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - dang 9y ago
    Please keep political and nationalistic flamebait off HN. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
probably_whf 9y ago
It's not as bad as the way many French intellectuals directly supported Maoism[0] - at least our "techies" don't (usually) claim to be experts on the political/philosophical side. (Ideally we would have a functioning intelligentsia in the US, but I really think this is more of a symptom of not having one than it is of having a morally decrepit one.) [0](see page 9) https://todhartman.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/michel-foucault-power-knowledge-interviews-and-other-writings-1972-1977-_gordon-colin-ed_.pdf https://todhartman.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/michel-foucau... - whatshisface, but posted on an alt so I don't have to feel bad about points. ;)
um_ya 9y ago
China has created "exclusive economic zones" like Hong Kong and Shenzhen that are more free than the United States. Mainland China may be a shithole, but at least they have places where capitalism can thrive, better that even the United States.
- robjan 9y ago
  Shenzhen is a Special Economic Zone and Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous Special Administrative Region under "one country, two systems". There may be more economic freedom that the US but still less freedom of speech and press.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    HK had plenty of freedom of speech and press until very recently. With the bookseller abductions, that is obviously over, but it did exist at one point.
- nichtich 9y ago
  There's no way Shenzhen is more free than US. I'm not sure you're more misguided towards US or China though.
- zhte415 9y ago
  Hong Kong is not and never has been a Special Economic Zone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin...
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    HK is a Special Administrative Region (the HK SAR). To be honest, all these acronyms are confusing anyways (an SEZ, a SAR, the TAR)...
outworlder 9y ago
Being fascinated by some aspects of a foreign culture is not the same as supporting the political regime itself.
jhales 9y ago
There no support for the Communist Government, only a vibrant tech community.
foxylad 9y ago
To me, he didn't seem to be supporting China - he seemed to be shopping in Shenzhen. He didn't make a single positive comment about the regime, and in fact spent a lot of the article complaining about the hassles caused by the Great Firewall.
- suitelife 9y ago
  pretty sure 'giving money to the China's economy' is the same as supporting China. doubt China cares about emotional support.
  - platinumrad 9y ago
    So nobody should ever vacation in or visit China? Even if you were to avoid explicitly giving money to Chinese businesses, it's probably impossible to buy any moderately complicated manufactured good without indirectly supporting China's economy. Why do new accounts pop up to shittalk China every single time someone writes a piece like this. Paid Taiwanese shills?
    - suitelife 9y ago
      we are techies, if we can program artificial intelligence, we can figure out ways to avoid giving money to an evil entity that produces concentration camps that today houses China's minorities, tomorrow maybe your children.
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        You can’t program AI, just some mindless feedback models that have the name “AI” slapped on them. You also can’t sway a group of skeptics with corny lines such as, “tomorrow your children...” Get real. I don’t want to live in China right now, but evil? I live in a country that has destabilized country after country after country in the name of ideology, fear, and greed. This country kills civilians on a regular basis, and calls it acceptable. We’re all evil, if you want to be hyperbolic about it, or human I’d you want to be realistic. Pointing fingers at external “devils” is just a non-starter to anyone with a rational bone in them.
drpancake 9y ago
By visiting Silicon Valley am I supporting the US government's covert wars, extrajudicial drone strikes and interference in the affairs of other countries? Not in any meaningful way. This is an absurd argument.
- abalone 9y ago
  It's a hypocritical argument, not an absurd one. One could argue that it's also wrong to uncritically celebrate the technological achievements of Silicon Valley. Well over a million people have been killed in U.S. wars of aggression (Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) and there are very direct ties between SV high tech funding and the Pentagon. Exhibit A: DARPA.[1] Even more direct than in China. A lot of what SV does is commercializing military technology developed at taxpayer expense. Autonomous vehicles and Siri are just a couple recent examples.[2][3] [1] https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/darpa-history-and-timeline https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/darpa-history-and-timeline [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO
  - jjtheblunt 9y ago
    Vietnam was not a US war of aggression: the US came at the request of the French presence as the communist north tried to take the French allies in the south. The result was a mess, sadly, predictably.
    - thebread 9y ago
      No. America supported colonialism (France), then later suspended the Geneva agreement of 1954. The agreement required elections across both north and south that they knew Ho Chi Minh would win. That beget what is known in Vietnam as the American War. Vietnam struggled for 30 years to be one country. Ho Chi Minh took assistance from the OSS in WW2 and styled the Vietnamese declaration of Independence on the American one. He turned to the Communists when America decided colonial rule was more important than freedom.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
volgo 9y ago
You seem to have a very distorted view of the world that's almost identical to what the media feeds you. Have you ever visited China and experienced it yourself, or do most of the things you say come from what organizations tell you? Not saying everything in your post was incorrect, but it's a very unrealistic view.
dang 9y ago
Taking HN into political and nationalistic flamewar is a bannable offense, and we've banned this account. All: please don't spoil this thread still further by taking this kind of bait. If you want a poster child for what happens, look below for a reductio ad absurdum in two steps: (1) bickering about wars of aggression (yes they were no they weren't); (2) relitigating Vietnam. If this is what you want to do on the internet, Hacker News is not the site you are looking for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

outworlder 9y ago

This excerpt is interesting: "One thing I found problematic with WeChat is that unlike Hangout, for example, it doesn't store any of the conversations on the backend. There's apparently a “we're not spying on you” angle to this with regards to Tencent providing this service to users." Yeah, but then just a couple of paragraphs before, they were mentioning how WeChat provides translation services inside the app. I highly doubt that this is being handled in the device itself.

e_b 9y ago
But you request the translation per message. It does not happen automatically.
whisk 9y ago
China's law requires all Apps to keep chat log for 6 months. Wechat just doesn't provide download so that they can reduce the cost of storage and bandwidth.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

baybal2 9y ago

Some may be amazed by the scale of the market at Huaqiang Bei intersection today, but it is just a pale afterimage of what it was 10 years ago, when the market was effectively filling 2 to 3 city blocks. It has been gentrified to death since then. And to people thinking of Shenzhen as a manufacturing city teeming with garage entrepreneurs, They fared no better. There are close to no factories remaining within the city centre today, except the special customs zone on the southern tip of Futian. All of this is thanks to the witless mayor Wang Rong that took over the city in 2009. Some oh his first orders were to bulldoze factories and build glossy shopping malls, "weekend rest" hotels, and coffee shops with $10 a pop cappuccinos, so "we can live like in civilised Western countries"

gkgicccj 9y ago
Don't leave us hanging, where is the real deal now, then?
- baybal2 9y ago
  I'd say nowhere. Contract manufacturing has been a declining industry since its peak 10 years ago. The fewer small factories there are, the less refuse goes to street market. You best bet is to go to the few remaining factory districts in Shajing, north to the airport and look what garage factories are selling. Also try going to districts north to S3 if you are a try-hard. Stuff there is mostly generic light industry goods, and not electronics per se. It may worth going further north to Dongguan, but I myself rarely ventured there.
  - contingencies 9y ago
    People order on Taobao now, so physical presence in a market is of dubious utility for many factories. The factories are mostly in Dongguan where they have their own component markets. The Baoshan area east and north of the airport also has industrial components markets (more process-line stuff). Huaqiangbei (HQB) is mostly consumer electronics with some components. There's more in Longhua / Longgang, northeast of town. China Post is super cheap for bulk shipping if you choose surface (ie. sea freight) but it takes three months.

lovelearning 9y ago

Not directly related to this post's subject, but I highly recommend this author's YouTube talks and books on Android internals and embedded Linux to anybody looking to start doing things like customizing or porting Android, building their own secure or lightweight Android ROMs, or building their own distros for single board computers.

gkgicccj 9y ago

I notice that the author put a lot of emphasis on security and walking off his devices. I understand that he has a background in crypto/security and also the when I had learnt that stuff and it was fresh I was "paranoid" too. That having said, is that really an issue in China? Wherever you go you get hacked?

yorwba 9y ago
Maybe I'm just not good enough to notice that I've long been pwned, but unless you are a high-profile target I don't think you need to worry too much. When I went to China, I made sure to put all the "suspicious" stuff (like a complete Wikipedia dump) on a hidden and encrypted partition of my portable drive and worried that it might be discovered anyway. In the end nobody even looked at it, the English Wikipedia isn't blocked at all, and the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  > the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription. We tried this for a few months. We would subscribe to a VPN that worked, we paid our yearly fee, and it stopped working the next month. We did this a few times before finally giving up, it is far from trivial, the GFW is real.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    And, at least two years ago, could be trivially worked around if you bought appropriate SIM cards in Hong Kong, which - apparently completely legally, and with cooperation of one of China's telcos - gave you completely unfiltered access in the Shenzhen area. Sadly, I learned about this only a month into my stay in Shenzhen; before, I was playing the BPN cat&mouse game. China seems to have a weird dual stance about GFW. I even heard rumors that companies could pay someone to get a legal, unfiltered link.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago

ggm 9y ago

I sat next to a guy who is "kenny" (the film about the portaloo entrepreneur) and he was flying into Shenzhen to have some new plastic portaloo parts made. By coincidence I met him coming back too. Dream run: they provided concierge, translation and hosting services and were really keen to prove quality and appropriate certification marks. They want to deliver top product. I had another friend doing brew-tanks. Same story. The real deal, if you can find it, will invest time and energy to get you to the product you want at world-class level. I don't doubt its a sick sad world out there, and scary at times but with some basic human decency and a realistic budget, manufacturing in China wants to talk to you. If you want to cut corners, or shave price to the bone, I am sure you will find people who are going to shave quality and compliance to match. If you can price ahead of the floor, you can find really good, entrepreneurial people to deal with. The brewtank guy wound up in delay because of new Chinese pollution compliance checks. Don't assume everything coming out of china is toxic lead, they are also trying to get on top of bad supply chain behaviour.

odysseus 9y ago

I was confused as the article keeps referring to “TEGES” with no clear explanation of what this acronym means. After digging around on the internet (in vain), I re-read the top portion of the article and figured out that it must mean “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”, which is apparently some sort of crowd-sourced/crowd-funded book ...

blhack 9y ago
It's not crowd sourced, it's a book by Bunnie Huang: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3189 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3189
scriptsmith 9y ago
It's explained under the preparation heading > One of the very first things I did was get my hands on Bunnie Huang's “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” (TEGES from here on forward) off of Adafruit's site

contingencies 9y ago

We're hiring mechanical and mechatronics engineers in Shenzhen! Email in profile.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dietrying 9y ago

Not much to comment on the other than the technology woes. I made a day trip to Shenzhen from Hong Kong last July. It was my second time in China last year, but first time to Shenzhen. So I was very aware of all of the "GFW" issues. I used my Pixel with VyprVPN installed prior to with no issues. Also I always downloading maps and languages with keyboards anytime I travel in case my connection is not 100%. Though I had a strong signal all around Shenzhen. I did run into some trouble finding an ATM that accepted my card. I did not want to trade a lot of currency since it was only a day trip, and not knowing if I would buy anything at all, or how much. There were many ATM's, though it is hard to find anywhere in China banks that are compatible with American cards. Not impossible, just far fewer than other countries. WeChat is a must all over China. They use it for everything! Though I haven't figured out how to get money onto it to use the pay feature, which they love to use. I think you have to have a China Bank account to tie it to your WeChat, or have someone with CNY who gives/transfer it to you from their account.

ksrm 9y ago
If you buy a Unicom "Cross-border SIM" in Hong Kong, it will work unfiltered in mainland China.

pasiaj 9y ago

I just came from 14 day trip to Shanghai-Beijing-Shenzhen. Here's a couple of more pointers: - DiDi is the Uber of China. Wonderful UX, English language UI with automatic two-way translation of messages and support for western credit cards. - AliPay & WeChat wallet are the primary methods of payment in China. You can enable a WeChat Wallet using a western credit card, but in most cases that card cannot be used for payments. You can have easily exchange cash for WeChat RMB, as other users can transfer RMB to your account free of charge. AliPay requires a local phone number & bank account (and no, the one you use for AliExpress does not work for mobile payments.) - The subway system in Shenzhen, Shanghai & Beijing is really well maintained. You can use cash or Alipay/Wechat to pay. - All foreign cell contracts pipe traffic through their local servers, so they automatically VPN through the Great Firewall. - ProjectFI recently lost 99% of LTE coverage in China. T-Mobile cancelled their contract with China Unicom, and Nexus phones do not support the LTE bandwith China Mobile uses. You're stuck on the EDGE network 99% of the time. - China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa. - One thing that was not mentioned in Karim's post: advanced manufacturing facilities. Try booking a tour: they can significantly alter what you think is possible.

generalh0rse 9y ago
What would you classify as "advanced manufacturing" today and localized to the area? I'm consistently impressed with the quality and cost of machined/prototype parts that come out of Shenzhen – even the "traditional" manufacturing can be mind-blowing.
countryqt30 9y ago
"without Visa" -- how did you get into China without Visa in the first place? It's illegal!
goty 9y ago
Yes, if there is any advice I could give it is to get familiar with the local tech ecosystem as soon as possible. After spending a few month in Shenzhen, seeing people coming and going, you realize that everyone has the same ideas about the same things. How to get around the firewall, catalog hqb, build their own pcba etc. Those things are of course harmless enough, but also missing the point. Shenzhen is all about doing things and talking to people. Which is something a lot of western hackers seem to have forgot how to do in favor of fantasizing about things in various ways. The sooner people can get past that and start doing things the more they will get out of the experience.

partoa 9y ago

Very interesting. Maybe stumbling onto such a piece before 2015 would have saved us quite a bit of trouble and time. We ended up doing most of our development from Shenzhen, with out primary electronic Engineer spending time in there, months at a time. Being a hardware startup in Kenya working on a custom Android device meant that a lot of what we needed to do had to be done outside the country. Our first foray in Shenzhen was made once we found a small company that had a Mediatek based 3G SOM and was willing to help us develop our hardware from there; they suggested that it was the best option. Two years, several stays and a final prototype later, we have learnt why it would have been almost impossible for us to successfully get to a functioning prototype from Nairobi; especially with our budget. For one, the we had direct help from manufacturers, who our hosts had to speak to in Mandarin. With drivers for out custom touch panel, we still needed a visit to the IC manufacturer for some configurations to be fixed. We also had such great help on mechanical design; here, I must admit, we had been completely clueless. The one thing I can say for sure, in China relationships help; greatly!! We were worried about changing our LCD because the one we're using has come to it's End Of Life. We were then introduced to a factory that was to make us a replacement. Turns out they can make the new LCD use the same exact connections as the one we had before. So no change in our circuit, and support for any change in our code. For us, it was less having a plan and more serendipity though.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

"I went to Google Translate to write my question and show him. Seeing what I was doing he said: “no, no, no, WeChat, WeChat”. I didn't get what he was saying at first. But he quickly showed me that he could type in Chinese on his phone, I would get the text in Chinese, long-press on it and get a menu that allowed me to translate it in English. And when I sent a message in English, he'd be able to translate it to Chinese." That quote is buried deep in the article, but should be emphasised for anyone travelling in a Chinese-speaking country: WeChat is easier to use than Google Translate! It also is worth emphasising for people developing iMessage, Skype, LINE, KakaoTalk, and other platforms, who seem to want to avoid "feature creep" by denying people this kind of functionality. Users like features. If you're interested in learning Chinese, I wrote a program to do that, but I recommend chat-based translation tools like WeChat for temporary visitors.

sberder 9y ago
It also does not require a VPN or foreign sim card
jmnicolas 9y ago
Speaking about Skype, Microsoft should be ashamed of the low quality of this app compared to WeChat. WeChat is snappy and feels very responsive. It works every time. With Skype it's always a hassle to connect (Android and Windows), the app feels very heavy (Android). I just started to use chat apps recently and frankly I was expecting better from MS, since I had good experiences with all their other products.
- sharpercoder 9y ago
  Skype is frankly a disaster. Not only the personal app, also the Skype for Business app. Chatting works, but don't try to use any other functionality, since it breaks so easily. But first (with great distance) on the list of failed Microsoft products is their accounts. Ever tried to login into msdn? Even our sysadmin who's is daily job is to get this right fails many times. The UX is so confusing and ambiguous, it's not funny. Everytime I need to deal with it I am seriously considering moving away from the whole MS ecosystem.

kfihihc 9y ago

I come from Seeed, hope you enjoy the Shenzhen Maker Map :)

yesokayawesome 9y ago

I lived in Shenzhen for 2 years before moving back to Europe. Man, the pace is glacial here… Popped back there for another trip a few months back and suddenly there was no more cash, and the ratio of electric-to-gasoline cabs shifted from 20/80 to 80/20

igravious 9y ago
In our defence :) What are you comparing Shenzhen to? Europe is a continent, Shenzhen is a city. Type `size of europe'[0] into Google and you get: Europe Continent Population: 743.1 million (2015) Area: 10.18 million km² (By way of comparison, China is ~ 9.6 million km²) You have to compare a specific place in Europe to Shenzhen. Norway has the highest penetration on EVs in the world, for instance[1] so what if you compared Shenzhen with Oslo? The famous London black cab is going electric[2]. Here in Ireland we have been using contactless debit transactions for years in practically every place–when a retail spot doesn't support it you kind of look at them as if they're from the past[3]. By way of example, at a recent intimate book launch I went to by a boutique publisher they used a portable handheld card swiper because people don't necessarily carry cash and it would be too inconvenient to ask them to go to an ATM. Yes, I think the pace of innovation in Europe could be quicker but both the LHC[4] and ITER[5] are based in Europe (France) which is kind of amazing because there are 43 other countries in the world _bigger_ than France and France is only the second largest[6] country in Europe (taking into account European Russia[7] which dwarfs it). I sometimes think people forget both how small Europe is and how varied both culturally and developmentally–from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, from the Atlantic in the West to the Urals and Black Sea in the East. When people say Europe sometimes they mean the EU which is not the same thing at all! There are 47 states that make up the Council of Europe[8], there are 28 in the EU give or take a Brexit. When (if?) the UK leaves the EU it'll still be bound by the European Court for Human Rights[9]! Sometimes when people say Europe they might actually be referring to Western Europe which is historically inaccurate and a bit culturally myopic to put it kindly. TL;DR–comparing the whole of Europe to a city is bonkers. edit: added links to the LHC and ITER :) [0] https://www.google.ie/search?q=size+of+europe https://www.google.ie/search?q=size+of+europe [1] https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/03/ev-hybrid-car-sales-norway/ https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/03/ev-hybrid-car-sales-norw... “Pure electric cars and hybrids accounted for 52 percent of all new car sales in 2017 in Norway against 40 percent in 2016, the independent Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.” [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16704060/london-zero-emission-electric-taxi-lecv https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16704060/london-zero-emis... [3] http://www.moneyguideireland.com/contactless-payments-in-ireland.html http://www.moneyguideireland.com/contactless-payments-in-ire... [4] https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider [5] https://www.iter.org/factsfigures https://www.iter.org/factsfigures [6] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2147rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia “Russia is not proportionately populated between its larger Asian portion, which contains about 23% of the country's population, and its smaller European portion, which contains about 77%. The European portion contains about 110 million people out of Russia's total population of about 144 million in an area covering nearly 4,000,000 km2 (1,500,000 sq mi); (making it by far the largest European country) an average of 27.5 persons per km2 (70 per sq mi).” [8] https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/structure https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/structure [9] http://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/27/implications-of-brexit-for-the-european-convention-on-human-rights/ http://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/27/implications-of-brexit-for-t...

rfolstad 9y ago

I found https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/ quite useful to get a working ssh session thru the GFW. The GFW can introduce latency and packet loss to encrypted connections which mosh seems to handle nicely.

nojvek 9y ago
I use mosh on my bus commute. Under tunnels, changing cell towers, mosh is just amazing. That’s how I expect all my services to work.

joncrane 9y ago

> I was immediately reminded of the advice in TEGES that many drivers have bad eyesight. Eek!

csense 9y ago

Why does China get a Shenzen and the US doesn't? What would it take to build a US-based electronics hub to rival Shenzen in, say, one of the Rust Belt states?

krapp 9y ago
>What would it take to build a US-based electronics hub to rival Shenzen in, say, one of the Rust Belt states? The repeal of American labor, environmental and copyright laws, to start.
- wan23 9y ago
  There was a really interesting segment on last week's Vergecast ( https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16935908/vergecast-podcast-290-dji-mavic-air-homepod-ios-11-3 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16935908/vergecast-podcas... ) about DJI and how business is different for them being a Chinese electronics company. Specifically, their products are state of the art because they are plugged into the components markets, but they also release new products very frequently because with the lack of intellectual property protections the competition is always right around the corner.
goty 9y ago
The US doesn't need a Shenzhen. It already has free enterprise, electronics suppliers and prototyping equipment. The problem is the barrier to entry, mostly living costs. There isn't really much you can do in Shenzhen that you can't do in the bay area. It will just cost you five times as much. But of course it depends on what you mean by "a Shenzhen".
- csense 9y ago
  > The US doesn't need a Shenzhen When the US was a manufacturing superpower for most of the 20th century, it provided a way for ordinary people to earn a good living. Workers and suppliers pumped money into a wide variety of local businesses. Starting around the early '80s, the manufacturing started moving overseas, especially to China. The Rust Belt region (where I'm from) never really recovered economically, although there are a few bright spots if you know where to look. What did we do wrong and China do right, that the economic prosperity left us and went to them instead? How can we learn from their formula for success and adapt it for ourselves? It sure seems like having a piece of the growth industries of the 21st century located in your country is a big piece of the puzzle in terms of providing well-paying jobs to our citizens and promoting their quality of life. Which should help with some of the political problems we've been having recently. How do we make it happen?