midhir

> Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups

I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.

Why does this happen? How is it economical?

I did Beijing to Xi'an last September in about 4.5 hours on the regular 320kph trains. To be honest, when you take into account security checks, boarding etc I just don't think it could've been done quicker by plane.

Not to mention the train station being central and the experience just being all round more fun!

I moved from the native app to just using the Web app in a pinned tab a while ago. Then you only have to block notifications in one place.

When someone @heres or tags me I only see the red dot on the favicon when I'm already in my browser.

On top of that you get tons of resources back on your machine!

That's interesting, I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?

我是中文学生 :)

Funnily the first thing you learn in Chinese is how to say who you are. But there's very little help with actually picking a Chinese name!

I wonder about this.

It might be a huge bias but I would imagine a significant amount of productivity gained in the economy, and thus new wealth created, over the last couple of decades has been software driven. So it _should_ pay well, right? It doesn't really matter that it's considered easy or hard, just scarce.

I've heard it, perhaps jokingly, stated that more than half of software that gets built fails; it never finds a market or never meets completion. In that case high-salaries are also a good thing as it increases the funding, and thus social proof, required to start a new software project.

So, perhaps we have a way to go yet!

Well, this is a British publication and an Irish product. Britain and Ireland are separate countries (apart from the small part of Ireland that isn't).

It'd be weird if a travel, culture and food publication couldn't do an article on Casu Marzu or Champagne so I don't see why this is any different.

Maybe they'd be better off looking at black metal, especially early Norwegian stuff when members of Mayhem were killing themselves/each other.

Or maybe My Dying Bride, Mourning Beloveth etc.

The rest of it is a blast.

One thing I've found impenetrable about Stellar is the use of the XDR data format. I've never encountered this before and it's been a painful step in starting to build on their platform.

Are their any simple, introductory texts on it? A lot of stuff is from Stellar themselves.

I'm sure there are good reasons for using it, the rest of the platform looks simple to understand and well designed.

If I could recommend one book from what I've read this year it'd be When China Rules the World by Martin Jaques.

For fiction; Solar Bones by Mike McCormack. One-sentence novel about a man on the West coast of Ireland shortly before the crash hit. Won the Dublin Literary Prize.