squaresmile

These are not 1000 page books (but combined they can be):

- God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (more about the Taiping and their leader)

- Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (more about the west's actions)

I just saw this book on Amazon and haven't read so might be a good read to round out the history: Struggle for Empire: The Battles of General Zuo Zongtang (Qing statesman and army officer, General Tso's chicken was named after him!)

Overall, I would say good English material on this conflict is a bit thin. I would recommend reading more about the Qing dynasty, Opium wars, first Sino Japanese war, Boxer Rebellion, Xinhai Revolution. /r/askhistorians always have good books recommendation.

higher-passenger-capacity trains

Length is limited by platform length and width is limited by tunnel loading gauge and platform sizes. To increase the platform length, you have to do it at most if not all stations. Crowded stations are usually in desirable areas which make it harder to dig or acquire land.

run more trains

For lines at capacity, I believe it's usually limited by trains dwell time. Longer and bigger trains take longer for people to safely board. To improve this on the train side, you can have more doors and bigger doors. Station platforms also need to be bigger, have more stairs, bigger walkways, etc. Longer trains also make it tougher for train drivers and station staff to open and close the doors safely.

Tough but not impossible problems but many solutions contain trade offs. Only surefire way is to build another line but that costs tons of money.

There are problems with rail privatization but I don't think this is one.

Privatization results in requiring riders to sometimes exit a station of one company, go all the way up to ground level, walk a block or to two another different company station, and then ride another train.

I believe this is the result of different private companies operating physically separate lines, rather than some privatization activities? For example, Shinjuku has stations of JR East (result of JNR privatization), Keio (private), Odakyu (private), Toei (public), Tokyo Metro ("private" but owned by Japan gov and tokyo metro gov). Sure, JNR privatization is controversial but without that, Shinjuku is still a mess of different operators.

Are you suggesting the government turn back time and banned private companies owning rail or they should buy out and nationalize all rails companies?

A government managed system wouldn't have this issue

Well, if it's 2 different government levels and 2 entities, the issue still exists. For example, to transfer between Tokyo Metro and Toei Subway, you might need to tap or a transfer ticket https://www.tokyometro.jp/lang_en/ticket/types/connection/in...

It's also possible for public and private companies to cooperate. Keikyu main line (private) does through running on Toei Asakusa line that allows the subway to have connections to both airports through private rails.

Nowadays, with IC cards, transferring between systems is a breeze. For the walking distance, nothing much you can do besides moving the track itself (done sometimes) or station redesign with better walkways and tunnels (done often).

Same, ClaudeBot makes a stupid amount of requests on my git storage. I just blocked them all on Cloudflare.

I find Accuweather MinutecastTM quite good for the Northeast. I'm using Breezy Weather with them as the data source. Sometimes, I found their API data was not as updated as their website/app but most of the time, the API is good enough. Can't stand their app design and data collection.

I know I know they are not nice, just repackaging NWS data blah blah but after testing all other rain prediction services, Accuweather was the most accurate for where I am.

Dark Sky was the best though. RIP

Apple Weather on iOS looks pretty good but I haven't found a good app consuming AW API on Android.

Yep, it's a straight up safety issue with all the scam ads. I pay for YouTube premium but sometimes my parents and grandparents don't log in, accidentally sign out, watch it on the browsers, etc that it's safer to block them all. It only takes one to get through and gen AI is not helping.

The translation should be "Under the glorious flag of the Party, the people of Nghệ An Soviet are heros/will heroically do something..."

Soviet refers to this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_(council)

Yes you can

If self-host is your thing, there are blocky [0] or Adguard Home [1].

I self-host DOH using blocky so my Android devices can use it via "Private DNS" that is active on both wifi and cellular.

[0] https://0xerr0r.github.io/blocky/latest/

[1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

[2] https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html how to configure

thanks to that universal language, I can express my thoughts to most people in India, China, Japan, South America, etc due to having 1 common language.

My lazy ass wishes that English is enough to access those communities too. There are many cool and interesting developers, projects and communities only or mostly working in their native languages. One of the major motivation for me to learn Chinese now is to access those communities.

Yes, it's one of the reason. As a result, it's super rare to refer to someone by their family name in Vietnamese. Casually people use given names and formally people use full names.

Family names usually come up when referring to the whole family branch of 9-10+ generations like the Nguyễn family or the Bùi family. Because there are few family names, you often see family branches use family name+middle name of the first ancestor to be more specific.

Nevertheless, our close examination of his publications removes the ambiguity. The cover of his dissertation clearly delineates his family name from his compound given name, and in his final publication, he listed his last name as “Bui.” The preponderance of evidence suggests that he was Dr. Bùi, but the scientific literature misidentifies him as Dr. Phong.

This also suggests that “Phong shading” is a misnomer, but for reasons that will likely remain unknown, Bùi did not contest the naming. While he may not have coined the eponym himself, he referenced it in his dissertation and final publication.

I'm nowhere near as smart but if something's going to be named after me, as a Vietnamese, please please please use my given name. Either given name or given name + middle name or full name. Considering he also used it himself, he was probably more ok about it than the author thinks.

I understand it's the custom in English speaking academia to use family name and I only want to speak for myself, not for all Vietnamese and especially someone from 50 years ago. I also have the most common family name so the sentiments of someone with a less common one might be different.

Funnily enough, on his Wikipedia page, they also note about this:

In this Vietnamese name, the surname is Bui. In accordance with Vietnamese custom, this person should be referred to by the given name, Phong.

Probably a better stance. It was kind of a reach by the the Time's article's author.

I use a quick setting to quickly switch between ad blocking dns and normal dns for bad websites or captive portal.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.jpwolfso.privdnsqt/

Like others said, it's more of a hobby than a side hustle.

Citi DC is also a mastercard world elite which charges a higher fee for merchants. Afaik most (all?) 2% card are visa signature or mc word elite.

HN's a tech forum. It is what it is.

And Dream of the Red Chamber to round up the four great Chinese classical novels

Yeah, sometimes I have the realization that I don't need to open the game at all, I can just play the game in Excel.

Yep, I've also commented on how harmful ads seem to be more common on YouTube compared to Instagram and Facebook. Maybe Facebook use more human reviewers in smaller regions compared to Google? Maybe Facebook have better data due to their social network? Idk but the YouTube ads in my country are also shockingly bad compared to YouTube in the US.

The ads could be worse: drugs that treat cancer, diabetes in 1 month, supplements that cure Hepatitis and so on. If YouTube can show fast food and gambling ads instead, that would be a nice improvement.

I assume because the ads are in language and region Google don't care as much, there's less priority or resource to filter them out. Maybe they should ask Meta how to do it since FB and Insta ads are way more "reasonable".

Maybe manifest v2 will be removed for real soon.

Avoid non-tech discussion here and you are almost all the way there. There's a chrome extension to block a user's comments. Probably not too hard to make one or modify it to highlight users you like.

I think one thing that makes it IE-like is updates being tied to the OS. Asking the users to update an app is an easier sell than updating their OS.

From here [0], 94.1% of .jp websites use UTF-8 and 6.5% use Shift-JIS. You can find a list of popular sites still using Shift-JIS here [1].

If you change your PC or your phone locale to Japanese and access mostly Japanese website, the font display on most major OS works well. It's probably fair to assume that's a very common setup for Japanese users, and probably for Chinese and Korean users as well.

I think the CJK "problem" is more apparent for international users who don't have the locale setup or dealing with multiple languages plain text at the same time.

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-jp-/charac...

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/en-shiftjis

dotnet, vscode (Microsoft), golang (Google), Oracle JDK/JRE, Nextjs (Vercel), ...

I wonder if there's some trend where corporate backed, large "open source/source available" projects being more open to telemetry compared to more "open community" projects.

For non-corporate projects, the general thought process might be it's fine to leave efficiency gains and improvements on the table if it means violating some foundational principles. While in a business setting, those efficiency gains could be very tempting since it can translate to more money, market share or promotions and that way of thinking gets applied to the open source projects as well.

I mean, that's every non-IT topic in an IT forum. It's to be expected from all forums really. Everyone has blind spots about other professions.

I think the key is to treat off-topic threads like watercooler talk, friends shooting the shit with each other and enjoy the drama.

I'm sorry but I gotta laugh at "despite the majority being some form of an intellectual", as if that is worth something. If you don't have the experience and the domain knowledge, can you call yourself an intellectual in that domain?

gcmap can map path with etops consideration http://www.gcmap.com/mapui

pacific islands

Depending on the jet streams, the flight can take the great circle route [0] or taking advantage of the jet stream [1] and flying more southernly

[0] https://flightaware.com/live/flight/JAL6/history/20230108/02... [1] https://flightaware.com/live/flight/JAL6/history/20230105/02...

The translations are lacking or no existent

I wonder if the Windows/C#/VS ecosystem translations are actually decent leading to Japanese developers not being forced to learn English? From what I have seen, Windows and Visual Studio have usable Japanese translations and documentation. I have seen code from Japanese devs that if the original writer had had better grasp of English, they probably would not have made the mistake by understanding the English and argument names.

This also means that outside of the MS ecosystem, it's a huge language barrier to overcome. It's probably not the main factor but just some foods for thoughts.

China is building up

Yeah, you have to start building experience from somewhere. The Chinese Navy is both building many ships [0] (of which many would argue are among the most advanced in the world) and building operational experience [1] [2] [3]. While the Chinese Navy lacks actual combat experience, training if done properly can be very effective in its own right. It's only reasonable that the second largest economy in the world could sustain this level of development. China has the means and the will to build a very formidable navy.

Information coming from China can be suspect and I understand why some think their navy is a paper tiger. However, their ships are very real and their training exercises are also real, all sighted and confirmed by other navies. It's probably best to not underestimate their capability.

[0] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/RL33153.pdf go to page 12

[1] https://news.usni.org/2022/05/23/chinese-carrier-strike-grou...

[2] https://news.usni.org/2022/12/19/chinese-liaoning-carrier-st...

[3] https://news.usni.org/2022/12/23/russian-chinese-warships-ho...

Yep, b2 and cf is a great combo for hobby project. Note that you still need to pay for transactions so depending on your usage pattern, b2 might range from very cheap to a nice discount.

I recommend turning on tiered cache on cf [0]. Our b2 bill went from $7 to $4.

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/about/tiered-cache/