SEEKING WORK | USA | Remote | Senior Product Manager / Head of Education
I believe strongly in helping people reach their potential through education. As such, I have worked as a tech learning product manager on MOOCs (massive online open courses), tech education programs, technical training, and other technical learning products for the past 10 years.
I've worked at edtech startups (like Udacity) building massive online open courses and micro credential programs to big corps (like Amazon Web Services) crafting company strategies for teaching AWS customers about how to better use AWS products and services.
I am the right person if you need:
1. someone to figure out the vision, strategy and curriculum for teaching your customers about how to better use your company's SaSS product (which will hopefully lead to increased product engagement and higher product spend)
2. someone to help you craft the strategy and curriculum for online tech education programs
2. someone who's experienced in edtech to manage a newly formed learning/education team and to provide guidance, structure, and best practices to the team
If I recall, Gumroad worked their employees to the bone then let them all go while the founder enjoyed great PR and profitability.
I think HN at the time wasn’t against the guy so much (the opposite), but that whole incident pissed me off. I hope Dropbox can take away Gumroad market share.
Dropbox Shop is cheaper than Gumroad-- they only pass on the 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction fee from their payment provider. The way Gumroad's tiered fee schedule works, you only get those rates from them if you've sold $1 million worth of product through them.
On the other hand, Dropbox doesn't have anything like Gumroad's Discovery page, so if that's something that you think might drive sales, it might be worth paying Gumroad's higher fees.
Politics has become increasingly hyper-partisan since the 90s [0]. It has become been more about your team vs my team + purity testes and less about politician's policies. As a result, conservative democrats and moderate/progressive republicans of the yesteryear are becoming increasingly rare nowadays.
For example, 13 house republicans voted for the infrastructure bill b'c their constituents will benefit from the bill. Shortly after, Trump and the ultra-right wing members of the house republicans publicly called them traitor, RINOs, and even democrats [1]. Additionally, they've received angry messages and death threats from their constituents b'c one of the house ultra-right wing republican shared their phone numbers on her twitter account.
Both-sides-are-the-same is lazy analsysis that avoids the difficult and essential question: Where is the problem?
Moderate Democrats dominate the party, as can be seen in the people in the White House, leading and controlling Congress, and even the next mayor of NY. In the GOP, arguably the most radical candidate ever was elected to the White House and dominates the party, with much of the party at the national and state level taking unprecendeted, radical steps to gain power, such as attempting to overthrow the will of the people: Most Republicans in Congress voted to overturn election results. You won't find both sides doing these things.
If it’s so different what changed? Many Obama voters voted for Trump, and then Biden.
Did blaming Russia for the entire time not count? Everything you blame a “party” for the other “party” did the same thing, it’s just a political class.
The chinese govt is indeed throwing their weight behind developing a local semiconductor industry capable of rivaling TSMC. They are making heavy investment in SMIC for example.
However, at the same time, unfortunately the Chinese government doesn't play fair, and they are ramping up state sponsored industry espionage and hacking of American and Taiwanese semi-conductor firms to speed up the process.
This best describes China's perspective towards "technology acquisition"
“They want technology by hook or by crook. They want it now. The spy game has always been a gentleman’s game, but China has taken the gloves off,” said John Bennett, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco office, which battles economic spies targeting Silicon Valley. “They don’t care if they get caught or if people go to jail. As long as it justifies their ends, they are not going to stop.”
+1 to this, China has never made anything real themselves. It is all stolen property from countries who actually play fair.
Until the general U.S population realizes that china's end goal is to eat them alive and unanimously supports putting china in its place, nothing will change and by then I fear it will be to late.
The assumption that any country, especially the successful ones, plays “fair” is ludicrous. IIRC the CIA (or was it NSA?) was giving state-gathered intel to American arms And aerospace manufacturers in the 1980s so that they could outbid European rivals.
The Chinese might be playing by different rules than those “established” over the last few decades by the west; but no one is playing “fair”.
"In 1994, Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia after the NSA, acting as a whistleblower, reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials.."
The 1 child policy is leaving China with a low birthrate and hence an increasing smaller population of young people. The problem is further compounded when Mao encouraged Chinese people to have as many children as possible, which lead to ~6 childbirths per women in the 1960's.
This means that, at some point, there will be too many old people to be supported by too little young people. Japan is facing similar population issue for example.
Now, with the population index slowly inverting, China is running out of time to grow rich before it grows old. Otherwise, its social infrastructure will at some point become overburdened by old people who require care/safety net and not enough young people to to provide that care/safety net (either directly as children taking their aging parents or indirectly by paying taxes).
Also, China needs to figure out how it can overcome the middle income trap. Otherwise, its growth potential is severely limited, and could be more fuel being added to the rapidly aging population problem.
In addition, some analysts believe that China's official GDP growth numbers are overinflated, and the actual GDP growth is 1-2% lower than the official government data.
for example, Li Keqiang, the current premier of China (the #2 guy behind Xi) measures a different set of numbers [1] to approximate China's GDP growth because he doesn't trust the official GDP figures due to inaccurate local government growth data.
Chinese GDP is "made up" according to Li himself in an leaked memo in the mid 2000s. The context behind this statement is that Chinese GDP figures are irrelevant to the actual operations of the Chinese economy and calculated off low-effort and unreliable provincial measures to appease foreign audiences - the government understands the limitations of statistic reporting in China. They know any number derived would be largely meaningless, so here's some back of the napkin estimates for international audiences who clamor for it so much. Then people take it out of context and accuse manipulation or falsification when no one should take it seriously since garbage in garbage out. In addition to LKI, the government uses other internal measures like TSF (total social financing) [1] while ignoring the GDP to gauge economic health.
As for foreign commentaries and studies on Chinese GDP, they're as unreliable as the Chinese figures themselves because the data simply isn't there. The most rigorous western analysis of Chinese GDP I'm aware of was conducted by CSIS who comprehensively reverse engineered Chinese GDP reporting from ground up, sector by sector using a variety of official sources, and concluded China is (1 trillion USD) larger than official numbers purported to be: Broken Abacus? A More Accurate Gauge of China's Economy [2].
That's not to say it's anymore an accurate reflection of ground truths, but at least it tries to reconstruct from the bottom up. Unless people believe the Chinese government expends vast resources manipulating every bit of data to comport to their GDP estimates which by all accounts they don't even care about.
A quick note --just because China is not a major player in the semiconductor industry today, doesn't the CCP is not placing its state resources (both state financial backing [1] and the industrial espionage kind [2][3][4][5]) to try and incubate a semiconductor industry
> just because China is not a major player in the semiconductor industry today, doesn't the CCP is not placing its state resources (both state financial backing [1] and the industrial espionage kind [2][3][4][5]) to try and incubate a semiconductor industry
Well, according to the US Department of Justice, China is behind 90% of espionage and industrial theft cases that it has handled over the past 7 years [1]
To use a less biased source [2], SCMP (which is a HK newspaper now owned by Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba) mentioned:
John Demers, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s national security division, said that by stealing trade secrets through computer intrusions and the co-opting of company insiders, China had “turned the tradecraft of its intelligence services against American companies”.
Between 2011 and 2018, Demers said, more than 90 per cent of his department’s cases alleging “economic espionage on behalf of a state” involved China. Among such cases are the recent prosecutions of Chinese national Xu Yanjun, suspected of trying to steal trade secrets from US and European aerospace companies, and 10 other Chinese intelligence agents suspected of similar offences.
“The playbook is simple,” Demers said. “Rob, replicate and replace.”
If you try to treat every Chinese scientist and engineer as a spy, and prioritize the handling of cases related to China, 70% is not surprising. 100% is possible.
If 70% of robbery cases handled are by black people, is it because the black robs more, or is it because the DoJ is racist?
If 70% of espionage case handled are related to China, it must be China's bad. Huh.
Wall Street Journal has recently published an article [1] detailing some of the most high profile technology thefts and espionage related to Huawei.
According to the article, here's a list of thefts and espionage attributed to Huawei, employees of Huawei, or people related to Huawei.
1. Stealing tech at tradeshows:
On a summer evening in 2004, as the Supercomm tech conference in Chicago wound down, a middle-aged Chinese visitor began wending his way through the nearly abandoned booths, popping open million-dollar networking equipment to photograph the circuit boards inside, according to people who were there.
A security guard stopped him and confiscated memory sticks with the photos, a notebook with diagrams and data belonging to AT&T Corp. , and a list of six companies including Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp.
2. Secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices :
Alarm bells included the discovery around 2012 of secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices, akin to facilities in intelligence stations around the world, American security officials say.
3. Former staff admits stealing :
“They spent all their resources stealing technology,” said Robert Read, a former contract engineer from 2002 to 2003 in Huawei’s Sweden office. “You’d steal a motherboard and bring it back and they’d reverse-engineer it.”
4. Stealing tech from Cisco :
Eighteen months before the Supercomm imbroglio erupted, Cisco accused Huawei in January 2003 of copying its software and manuals—the first time Huawei had to fight a major international allegation of its theft.
“They have made verbatim copies of whole portions of Cisco’s user manuals,” Cisco said in its lawsuit. Cisco manuals accompany its routers, and its software is visible during the router’s operation; both are easily copied, Cisco said.
The copying was so extensive that Huawei inadvertently copied bugs in Cisco’s software, according to the lawsuit.
5. Stealing tech from Motorola :
Email fragments recovered from Mr. Pan’s laptop and included in Motorola’s complaint show Mr. Pan wrote to Mr. Ren after the meeting, “Attached please find those document [sic] about SC300 specification you asked.” Huawei later made a similarly small device, weighing half the SC300, which it marketed to rural communities in developing markets.
5. 5G related tech theft:
Mr. Barker had never heard of “user specific tilt,” which could multiply the number of signals from an antenna and tilt them to provide greater accuracy in communicating with mobile phones.
Mr. Barker had, however, heard of a conceptually identical technology, ”per user tilt." He coined it seven years earlier, according to a Quintel lawsuit alleging misappropriation of trade secrets by Huawei. Quintel said it had shared the technology with Huawei in September 2009 after Huawei proposed a business partnership.
The partnership never came through. Huawei filed papers to secure a patent for the concept a month after their first meeting, using a document still emblazoned with Quintel’s name and the words “commercial in confidence.”
6. Camera theft :
Rui Oliveira, a 45-year-old Portuguese multimedia producer, told the Journal he flew to Huawei’s Plano offices in May 2014 to meet Huawei executives, who were interested in his patents for a camera attachment to smartphones.
In a conference room, surrounded by a dozen empty chairs, Mr. Oliveira recalls, two Huawei executives listened as he shared data on his product which he hoped to license manufacturing to Huawei. He recommended pricing it at $99.95.
“We’ll talk later,” he says Huawei told him.
Three years later, a friend in Portugal asked him why Huawei was selling “his camera.”
“Huawei? That’s impossible! What?” he remembers saying.
7. Stealing songs :
Paul Cheever, a bespectacled preschool teacher who records music as The Cheebacabra, said his life has become overrun with paperwork and costs since he sued Huawei in California last year for taking his song “A Casual Encounter” and pre-loading it on Huawei smartphones and tablets for free distribution to its customers.
Mr. Cheever said in his court filing that he discovered the alleged theft after noticing user comments on YouTube that associated Huawei devices with his song.
8. Stealing Tappy, the mobile phone testing robot, from T-Mobile :
In the U.S., Huawei engineer Xiong Xinfu had endured a nine-month fusillade of demands from Huawei’s China-based engineers for information on how to replicate a robot called Tappy developed by T-Mobile to mimic an ultra-fast human finger and test a smartphone’s responsiveness. In May 2013, Mr. Xiong eventually stole part of Tappy at Huawei’s behest, U.S. prosecutors say.
9. Stealing Solid State Drive technology from Silicon Valley :
In October last year, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a longtime Silicon Valley engineer and co-founder of San Jose’s CNEX Labs Inc., accused Huawei in a lawsuit of stealing his firm’s solid-state disk storage technology, used for managing data generated by artificial intelligence. CNEX said at a hearing in April that Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu issued a directive that led to a Huawei engineer in June 2016 posing as a customer to steal CNEX secrets; Huawei denied wrongdoing. The suit is ongoing.
10. finally, forcing employees to be dishonest :
Jesse Hong, a software architect at Huawei’s California unit, said in a lawsuit that his bosses ordered him in November 2017 to use fake company names to register himself for an industry conference organized by Facebook Inc. The social-media giant had invited other companies to a Telecom Infra Project meeting, a collaboration on network design, but excluded Huawei. The suit was confidentially settled in April.
Mr. Hong said he refused to carry out the directive, leading his supervisor to unleash a stream of abuse and a threat: “If you don’t agree on this, then you quit right now.”
After Mr. Hong declined, Huawei fired him. The company says it acted in good faith.
I googled the 2003 Cisco vs. Huawei case as your post wasn't clear about the outcome. The WSJ article claims that Huawei admitted copying some software. I found this blog post:
It's a Cisco reaction to the following statement by Huawei's chief US representative:
"Huawei provided our source code of our products to Cisco for review and the results were that there was not any infringement found and in the end Cisco withdrew the case ... the source code of the issues was actually from a 3rd party partner that was already available and open on the internet."
The blog post goes on to say that this is not a permissible statement and Huawei are misstating facts. Finally it provides some evidence for the copying, such as similar whitespace and comments in the source code. It also mentions the name of the "routine": STRCMP :-D. They should have run this post by an engineer before publishing...
Decide for yourself, but in my opinion there is quite limited value in a specific strcmp and likely they both copied it from the same free-software codebase.
Does it seem more believable that when Cisco and Huawei had a dispute about what code was duplicated they picked an absurdly unqualified engineer or Cisco, one the world's largest router providers, has a highly optimized and specialized strcmp built out for their routers? The second seems way more believable to me than the first.
Someone at one of Cisco’s competitors once told me that Huawei copied their routers down to the English silk screened assembly instructions on the PCBs.
Friend of mine also does contracting work for them. They never pay their bills on time apparently.
I know a guy who used to work for TI who talked about the Chinese knocking off chips, right down to purposely-introduced defects added specifically to detect such counterfeiting. Problem was, knowing that it happened didn't do much good. Ended up moving production of some stuff to the Philippines because there was literally no recourse.
I remember when I worked in a trade company, one of most unusual things to sell was a maskset from a company that went bust.
Apparently a very common practice in China, companies were selling masksets of their discontinued ICs to companies lower on the ladder for them to manufacture relabelled/repackaged chips.
Grain of salt on the latter concern, because lots of big American companies are also infamous for not paying contractors on time. One of our best (huge) clients at my last company got more than a year into arrears with us, and friends at other companies have much more lurid stories than that.
More provoking, perhaps Huawei is aware of this and using it as intimidation, "we can copy you exactly faster than you can innovate, so better work with us..".
Agree/disagree is not the only factor involved in voting - another one that I suspect is in play here is “interesting/uninteresting in the context of the present discussion”.
Without even getting into the "is personal piracy wrong" issue, it's pretty easy to draw a line between an individual downloading songs from pirate bay and a major corporation pirating IP wholesale and then making a business out of reselling the derivative products.
Without entering the entire debate, I was only intending to talk about the "Ask the plaintiff" style. Obviously the plaintiff is going to think something's wrong. That's what being the plaintiff is.
Does anyone have experiences using GraphQL in production? Trying to understand if GraphQL will be a good alternative to REST for new projects or is GraphQL being hyped up like mongoDB was 7-8 years ago.
There are articles from GitHub, Shopify, Artsy, Walmart, Coursera, New York Times, and more! And these are just companies that have bothered to write an entire article about their experience.
This side-steps the legal question, but GraphQL is ultimately an idea on API design, and less about the corresponding libraries, such as the ones by Apollo or Facebook.
Of course the libraries are important too, but even if Facebook specifically strangled GraphQL to death, the idea of simple declarative HTTP API is too valuable to let it die on the vine.
In parallel, even if Facebook decided to strangle their React user base with patent trolling, and everyone decided to ditch React, the idea of a declarative DOM library or unidirectional flow is too good to let it die with React. And so we see it in Vue, Angular, and Preact or Inferno.
Hype may be related to many factors, one of which is mere library or ecosystem polish, often propelled by a big company with labor to spare, but I think the benefits behind a declarative HTTP API are real.
I believe strongly in helping people reach their potential through education. As such, I have worked as a tech learning product manager on MOOCs (massive online open courses), tech education programs, technical training, and other technical learning products for the past 10 years.
I've worked at edtech startups (like Udacity) building massive online open courses and micro credential programs to big corps (like Amazon Web Services) crafting company strategies for teaching AWS customers about how to better use AWS products and services.
I am the right person if you need:
1. someone to figure out the vision, strategy and curriculum for teaching your customers about how to better use your company's SaSS product (which will hopefully lead to increased product engagement and higher product spend)
2. someone to help you craft the strategy and curriculum for online tech education programs
2. someone who's experienced in edtech to manage a newly formed learning/education team and to provide guidance, structure, and best practices to the team
Open to 1099s and part-time contract work
Email: lee.chenghan at gmail.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hichenghanlee/