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Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#51

Post by NalNezumi »

ackbar03 wrote: post #46
NalNezumi wrote: post #45

I would mention hitta.se from Sweden. Probably a privacy nightmare to some, and very creepy to others. On the page you can search peoples home address, phone number, date of birth, other members living in the same house , real estate value, mortgage rate, all by searching their names. I successfully once identified a parent of a owner of a lost wallet, only containing a gym card with last name on it. Found her phone…

WOW. Is this a well known service/site in Sweden? In other countries this would have been blown up into a huge privacy issue. Assuming its not because its sort of underground, why do you think it hasn't in Sweden? Genuinely curious

It's a well known site in Sweden. I remember using it at least 10-13 years back. A quick Swedish googling found me a dozens of sites offering similar services. One even offered credit rating assessment at 1.5 dollar after the search.

I'm not well read on the issue but a lot of things are digitalized in Sweden. It's a cashless society, where everyone have a personal number that they can use for government service & signing up for phone contracts. The tax institute (like USA:s IRS) sends their deductions out digitally, and AFAIK they have a very open API a lot of digital services in Sweden use for online identification of a private person. So I assume those pages probably use the tax-institutes API for personal information, and then other APIs (such as real-estate portals) to tie information together.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#52

Post by geza »

samwestdev wrote: post #42
geza wrote: post #38

Sites and apps in Chinese: Baidu Wangpan (百度网盘): file-sync service like Dropbox, but gives you 2TB (terrabytes!) of free storage Tengxun Ketang (腾讯课堂): similar to edX/coursera, they have a lot of free courses on programming, machine learning, and technical topics Wanmen Daxue (万门大学): similar to edX/coursera, they have a lot of free foreign language classes and lectures on economics/social sciences HKGolden (香港高登): Ho…

how does the p2p payment app work? No middle man?

Ah I meant P2P in the "from user to user with no transaction fees charged, doesn't go through Visa/Mastercard/Unionpay" sense (similar to Venmo, except that in China businesses accept it everywhere), not in the "fully decentralized and doesn't need a server" sense. For Zhifubao the servers are run by Ant Financial (it's a spin-off company of Alibaba), for WeChat the servers are run by Tencent. You can deposit/withdraw money to your bank account.

I'm assuming you're probably more interested in the new digital RMB wallet technology which supposedly works even if your phone doesn't have internet access, but I'm not familiar with how that is implemented (I'm guessing it uses blockchain and broadcasts the transactions later when you connect to the internet). There's some info about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Digital_Renminbi

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#53

Post by exikyut »

OJFord wrote: post #9

Ha, I'm learning Hindi, I'd love a 'Hindi Stack Overflow', I imagine the technical bits would be English anyway so it'd be a great way to familiarise/practice. (Easier than news, say, I imagine, since I'd have more context and it wouldn't be as formal/pure Hindi.) I could try to contribute too: My cache is full of eels, how do I set the death timer for the evictings of my tenants?

+1 for the second line, but I'm very curious about "eels". The rest generally makes sense.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#54

Post by adventured »

ackbar03 wrote: post #46
NalNezumi wrote: post #45

I would mention hitta.se from Sweden. Probably a privacy nightmare to some, and very creepy to others. On the page you can search peoples home address, phone number, date of birth, other members living in the same house , real estate value, mortgage rate, all by searching their names. I successfully once identified a parent of a owner of a lost wallet, only containing a gym card with last name on it. Found her phone…

WOW. Is this a well known service/site in Sweden? In other countries this would have been blown up into a huge privacy issue. Assuming its not because its sort of underground, why do you think it hasn't in Sweden? Genuinely curious

As crime perpetually gets worse in Sweden in the coming decades, it's practically a guarantee their culture will change when it comes to tolerating such privacy violations. They'll begin to lock down formerly open aspects of their culture.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#55

Post by beefield »

adventured wrote: post #48
Black101 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yandex reverse image search is also much better then Google's version in my experience.

Google intentionally tamped down their reverse image search several years ago. They fundamentally changed how the product works, the results that it delivers, and did it on purpose. It's definitely inferior if you're actually looking to find copies of an image (Google is fully aware, they don't want you to be able to effectively search their image system that way).

> they don't want you to be able to effectively search their image system that way)

Why?

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#56

Post by Tijdreiziger »

https://tweakers.net

Dutch-language tech community. Has news, a well-moderated and active forum, product and price comparison (with many filtering options) and reviews (both by tech journalists and the community), second-hand sales, and a job board.

It was started by one guy 20 (if not more) years ago, but these days it's part of one of the big Dutch-language media conglomerates (DPG Media).

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#57

Post by universa1 »

RasmusLarsen wrote: post #35
kalleboo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden has prisjakt.nu, and Japan has kakaku.com that serve the same purpose, they're both great! It's so nice to be able to drill down into any product in any product category (for kakaku this is not just tech products but contact lenses, credit cards, movers, electricity providers, car insurance, phone plans, etc) using the specs you want, and then sort by intelligently selected columns like $/TB for a harddisk. Am…

I don't know the exact list, but pricespy (prisjakt) is in a lot of countries. I have used .no/.se/.co.uk previously and they all seem to be at about the same level for their respective countries.

Sounds a lot like geizhals.de - price comparison site with detailed info on products, best for tech products though

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#58

Post by Moru »

ackbar03 wrote: post #46
NalNezumi wrote: post #45

I would mention hitta.se from Sweden. Probably a privacy nightmare to some, and very creepy to others. On the page you can search peoples home address, phone number, date of birth, other members living in the same house , real estate value, mortgage rate, all by searching their names. I successfully once identified a parent of a owner of a lost wallet, only containing a gym card with last name on it. Found her phone…

WOW. Is this a well known service/site in Sweden? In other countries this would have been blown up into a huge privacy issue. Assuming its not because its sort of underground, why do you think it hasn't in Sweden? Genuinely curious

It's not even the only one, there is a bunch of them that gives different levels of information. Partly because the equivalent of social security numbers are public information in Sweden.

There are apps for Eniro and Hitta that could tell you if an incoming call is from a known callcenter for example. Not sure they still work after google tightened up security.

I'm always amazed I can't find someones phone number outside Sweden when I need one. Here it's just a few clicks away. Sure you can ask to be removed from their register but most wants to be there.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#59

Post by abdullahkhalids »

xxpor wrote: post #43
captn3m0 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, writing good technical content in Hindi is nigh-impossible.

I've noticed that Twitter will translate Hindi written in Roman characters, which is certainly common on the internet, but I'd think given (AFAIK) there's no formal standard for it it'd be hard to get good data to feed into an AI. Or is it enough of a 1-1 transliteration that all you need to do is encode the Roman->Devanagari rules and that'll work nearly 100% of the time?

There are several standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration#Tra...

Nobody bothers to use them.

Same for Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#60

Post by singularity2001 »

mehrzad wrote: post #18

Not a website, and this may be obvious, but if you are doing research on Wikipedia on a topic from a non-English speaking country, sometimes that nation's language features a longer and more in depth article. I am currently learning German and have noticed this with regard to articles regarding universities in Germany.

this is a great recommendation also for scientific topics:

Often when I am really interested in something I read the article and four different languages, because most often each language offers different aspects and images.

also it's a great way to learn languages.

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