Viewing profile — Xixi

I strongly recommend Merchants of Doubt [1], it's fairly clear what happened: learning from the "mistake" of the tobacco industry financing research, the oil industry understood th…

Static types are not _that_ useful to catch bugs, if only because type related bugs tend to surface very quickly, especially in strongly typed language like Python. So a good CI su…

There's been a pendulum swing of sort during my career: static languages like C++/Java, then dynamic ones like Python/Ruby/JavaScript, and now back toward typed languages like Type…

An expat is someone living outside (ex) of their homeland (patria, technically fatherland rather than homeland if we are pedantic). All immigrants and non-immigrants [1] are expats…

Jet engines are far more high-tech than most people imagine, but I'm not convinced this is evidence of some inherent Chinese weakness. The obvious explanation is that China started…

PACs and super PACs are the key difference. Lobbying in the US includes practices that would fall squarely into the definition of corruption in many other Western countries. There'…

That sounds more like FIRE / geographic arbitrage than expat in the traditional sense. What people often mean by a "true expat" is something completely different: someone sent abro…

I stand corrected, I was not aware of the full mechanism, and I was still stuck at the proposed multiplier and not the actual one.

Nasdaq "solved" that problem by including a 5x float multiplier for stocks with less than 20% of shares available to the public...

I understand the desire to end that murderous regime. If I were Iranian, I'd want to see it ended too. But do they really think bombs will achieve that? More importantly, would mor…

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I wonder to what extent in this instance it is driven by the EU regulating (mostly) foreign companies rather than (mostly) domestic ones. Said differently, it is much easier for th…

I'm not sure I'd put it down entirely to Osaka versus Kyoto. My impression is that these things often have at least as much to do with upbringing, formality, and social background …

But what if there's not enough diesel? That's what at stake here, with oil exports from the Middle East dwindling... Oil price might not even go up that much, or for that long, if …

I’m building something similar for Japan: https://altstack.jp . Still work in progress!

Steward-ownership is a philosophy more than an actual structure, my understanding is that each such company is in practice structured somewhat differently. This article explains ro…

There's a little known alternative: Steward-ownership [1]. It's the kind of structure used by Novo Nordisk, Bosch or Patagonia. LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a c…

NASA once offered the UK to launch its satellites almost for free. That offer was rescinded as soon as the UK abandoned its national space program. [1] From a European perspective,…

I agree with your sentiment, but let's not rewrite history too much. Snow Leopard didn't have any new feature, but under the hood it was a massive undertaking IIRC: it introduced a…

Sarkozy was not the only one sentenced to jail in that trial: Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux were also convicted, receiving sentences of six years and two years, respectively. A…

I've been building AltStack.jp, a curated directory of Japanese digital services (cloud hosting, registrars, email providers, and more) all operated in Japan, by Japanese companies…

I've been working on AltStack.jp [1], a curated directory of Japanese digital services (think cloud hosting, registrars, email providers, etc.), all made and operated in Japan. It’…

I think another factor is real estate: a population shrinking by more than half a million people per year eases some of the pressure on rent and land value... When I lived in New Y…

Hi HN! I'm building AltStack.jp to help people discover Japanese alternatives to popular international tech services (cloud hosting, VPS, email providers, etc.), with an eye on com…