Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert • Hacker News Board

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#221

Post by Vincent_Yan404 » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #109

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #2

Hi HN, OP here. I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there. It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code. This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any ques…

> 404 is a classified code for a nuclear industrial base. Can you expand? A code under what system? What were some other code numbers and what (unclassified) things did they refer to? Did each code refer to a specific city or specific factory? Or were all cities/factories dedicated to a certain type of industry or military objective classified under the same code? Why did they teach you this code number growing up? I…

I don't know the code system, for me they are random 3 numbers(like Plant 504 : A uranium enrichment facility.)Thank you liking it, I will post the second part on Monday.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#222

Post by embedding-shape » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

panic wrote: post #197

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this profound comment. It is incredibly humbling to hear this from someone who has spent a decade researching the topic. You are right—the generation that built '404' is aging, and many of their stories are fading into silence. One of my primary motivations for writing this was the realization that if I didn't document these memories now, they might be lost forever. I hope my first-hand account can prov…

[flagged]

While reading through the post, I too felt it being similar to LLM generated text, but the stories and the perspective is uniquely human, or is there something specific that sticks out as inhuman from the text? Specific parts that sounds implausible?

It obvious that something was used to do the translation, but it doesn't feel worse than any other machine-translated texts, as long as I get the gist and the overall idea of what the author is trying to communicate, I feel like it's good enough.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#223

Post by lantastic » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #70

On my trip back from china this week I watched a Chinese movie about their nuclear bomb project. Basically the equivalent of Oppenheimer. Quite interesting movie and now I am reading this

Sounds interesting. What's the title?

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#224

Post by Vincent_Yan404 » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

jama211 wrote: post #189

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #2

Hi HN, OP here. I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there. It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code. This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any ques…

Amazing story, thank you for sharing it

Thank you! I will post the second part on Monday.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#225

Post by roncesvalles » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

tolerance wrote: post #121

I’m curious how HN’s general warmth toward self promotion is going to be affected by the steady proliferation of AI-assisted content.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong about using AI to help convey your ideas, as long as the ideas being conveyed are 100% genuinely yours. Because then it just becomes a choice of style, and a non-native speaker may not have a better choice of style than "LLMese".

It's like writing something with a commodity Bic ballpoint vs a fancy fountain pen with expensive ink. The style of the prose itself is not the valuable artifact, at least not here (it may be in certain places e.g. poems and novels), unless you think well-written/well-spoken people are automatically more veritable or intelligent, which is just as shallow as lookism.

The witch-hunt style comments where people accuse an author of using LLMs as if it's some big gotcha that discredits everything they said need to stop. It only derails the discussion.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#226

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #165

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please use actual machine translation systems, not generative AI.

That’s some grade A nonsense. The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation, the task which arguably these chatbots are the most suited! It’s the task that they’re far the best at, both relative to older translation algorithms (which were also AI), and relative to their capabilities other tasks that they’re being put to. These LLMs are “just” text-to-text transformers! That…

> The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation

Indeed! And yet, generative AI systems wire it up as a lossy compression / predictive text model, which discreetly confabulates what it doesn't understand. Why not use a transformer-based model architecture actually designed for translation? I'd much rather the model take a best-guess (which might be useful, or might be nonsense, but will at least be conspicuous nonsense) than substitute a different (less-obviously nonsense) meaning entirely.

Bonus: purpose-built translation models are much smaller, can tractably be run on a CPU, and (since they require less data) can be built from corpora whose authors consented to this use. There's no compelling reason to throw an LLM at the problem, introducing multiple ethical issues and generally pissing off your audience, for a worse result.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#227

Post by panic » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:26 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #222

panic wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

While reading through the post, I too felt it being similar to LLM generated text, but the stories and the perspective is uniquely human, or is there something specific that sticks out as inhuman from the text? Specific parts that sounds implausible? It obvious that something was used to do the translation, but it doesn't feel worse than any other machine-translated texts, as long as I get the gist and the overall id…

The fact that OP was a new account communicating completely via LLM made me suspicious. He does seem legit though based on his more recent comments.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#228

Post by Obscurity4340 » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:28 PM UTC

nephihaha wrote: post #190

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #186

> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment (ending with someones couch being neutralized) makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me. Thats a bit much, isnt it? This was in the early days of their nuclear progress, of course at the time it wasnt going to be a linear, completely efficient and sanitized. Kind of a weird comment, nothing develops perfectly w…

The development programme was haphazard. They got bits and pieces off the Soviets and had to figure the rest out.

Right, but the statement extends to the present state of mind of the writer. They're saying that they currently find the notion that nuclear energy can be clean or the cleanest as absurd based on their childhood in the infancy of the program.

Isnt it currently the consensus that nuclear energy can be one of the more clean energy sources? Because they seem to hold their childhood view that thats crazy

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#229

Post by Vincent_Yan404 » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:29 PM UTC

SilverElfin wrote: post #162

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #2

Hi HN, OP here. I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there. It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code. This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any ques…

> During the “Three Years of Hardship” (1959–1961), when more than 30 million people across China starved to death, our factory area faced a desperate crisis. At one point, there were only a few days’ worth of rations left in the warehouses, and workers began to suffer from severe edema due to malnutrition. I was curious about this part and lingering perspectives among Chinese citizens. How do they regard the past ma…

I think it's well known, cause that generation are still alive.In the Northern China, the situation was often more dire because the land is unforgiving. In the South, people at least had the chance to supplement their rations by fishing in the rivers.While the official term often points to 'natural disasters,'it is widely recognized as a man-made catastrophe.

I remember when I was 4 or 5 years old, my mother told me stories about those years. As a child, I didn't understand the historical context; I thought mass starvation was something that happened cyclically, like the seasons. I vividly remember asking her: 'Does this happen every few years? Should we start stockpiling food now just in case?'

Even today, you will see older Chinese people who cannot bear to see a single grain of rice left on a plate. It’s not just frugality; it’s a ghost from 1959.

A common criticism of Chinese people is that they 'eat everything,' but a major reason for this is that China has endured more famines than almost any other nation in human history.

Re: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

#230

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 7:29 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #217

jiggawatts wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s some grade A nonsense. The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation, the task which arguably these chatbots are the most suited! It’s the task that they’re far the best at, both relative to older translation algorithms (which were also AI), and relative to their capabilities other tasks that they’re being put to. These LLMs are “just” text-to-text transformers! That…

Heh, it's amazing how people have already forgotten exactly how terrible older ML translation was.

The "terribleness" is a feature. It means I can be confident that the meaning of fluent output corresponds to the meaning of the input: I'm capable of hand-translating any passages the computer can't, but I'm not capable of proof-reading all the translations to spot fluent confabulations.