None of those qualify as significant. I'm asking for examples like: Linux, Java, OpenSSL, PHP, Apache, MySQL.. widely used codecs or implementations of them, compilers or scripting languages, network stacks.. frameworks.. like Ruby on Rails, Laravel, React.. graphics libraries or tools like Photoshop, GIMP, autocad, unity, unreal engine..
Can you think of an example that is widely popular and not trivial? Is there some software related thing that originated from China that is just so fundamentally important that the rest of the world could not resist copying it or building on it?
I'm willing to bet you have never heard of Aamir Khan -- but considering how much of the world is a fan of him (largely in China and India) he is considered by Forbes & Newsweek to be the biggest movie star in the world (attribution: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2017/10/05/heres-why-aa... )
I think the same can go with software. Just because it's not popular in the West (and it's not discussed widely on Hacker News or trade mags/sites) doesn't mean it's not very popular worldwide.
My only point (originally) was that Nationalism and confirmation bias can cloud objective judgement about something. Is your point that that Chinese software is at best 'trivial'? (If not, please clarify)
The naming part is probably about brand recognition and they are doing really well with Huawei(which recently surpassed Apple on the number of unites sold metric).
Also, Vue.js seems to have a lot of Chinese contribution.
Their Google, FB and Twitter knock-offs seem to be doing good too.
Let's take Vue as 1. Anything else? Programming languages, algorithms?
Their Google, FB, and Twitter knockoffs don't count, they are all crap compared to Western versions. The only reason the Chinese versions are alive is because the competition is blocked.
I'm not suggesting Chinese people aren't good, there's plenty of them working on top tier stuff outside of China. What I am suggesting is that China's policy of crippling the internet has consequences. As long as their internet is crippled China will lag the rest of the world in software.
These are the best answers I've heard so far. What are your favorite projects or products that depend on these? Any more examples you feel worthy of mention?
> Their Google, FB, and Twitter knockoffs don't count, they are all crap compared to Western versions.
Tencent has $35b in revenue and Baidu has $12b revenue (USD). Meanwhile Twitter has $0.7b in revenue (for reference, FB is $40b).
Yes Twitter appeals more to me but just because I'm not the target market of those Chinese platforms doesn't mean they are crap. They make real money and work for their users.
I'm not saying Tencent, Baidu, and Weibo are unsuccessful. I'm saying that they are successful because Facebook(+WhatsApp), Google, and Twitter are blocked by all 3 of China's ISPs. If that were not the case I strongly believe those Chinese companies would be niche players if they even survived at all.
To address the sibling comment by kuwze, the reason why Tencent is successful in payments is because the Chinese government blocked everyone competing with it, and also because the Chinese market lacked credit cards. Same thing for Alibaba. It's similar to how African countries went straight to mobile before more developed places did, and nobody holds those carriers up as examples of innovation. If we didn't already have complete acceptance of credit cards we would probably be using wallets from Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.
I have to respect Alibaba on the e-commerce though. In my opinion they're better than Amazon. Their software is dismal compared to Amazon, but when you measure them by the range of products you can get delivered, how fast and inexpensively, it's clearly superior, and they enjoy no protection from competition by Amazon. Alibaba is really great, the best perk of living in China hands down. Didi is cool too, though like all the copy cats it's just crap as a software company compared to Uber or Lyft.
So anyway, no disrespect to the business savvy of China's big tech. And I also see that there's some awesome units in them. For example, Tencent has some absolutely fantastic security groups. All I'm saying is that China's tech giants didn't get here by technical innovation, whereas America's did. And not only that, China's internet policy has the side effect of crushing innovation so we're not likely to see anything interesting spring from there.
OMG, you are so disconnected... Chinese big tech (BAT) is much younger with tons of senior engineers coming back from FAANG. Their tech stack is very cutting edge and arguably better, e.g:
This breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to call names in arguments. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. Your comment would be fine without that first sentence.
I'm vouching this comment. Obviously you created this throwaway for this.
I know what singles day is about. I'm unconvinced by your arguments, but will concede that it's not a good idea to for the US to drive good talent away with shitty immigration policy.
Have you used Alibaba's cloud service? Why is it as clunky as a second rate shared hosting service from 15 years ago? Can you explain that to me?
Also, given the fact that I have to go through insane bureaucracy just to get an account on it, what do the tech kids of China have the option to do except publish miniprograms on WeChat? Is China really going to be a leader based on returning engineers from the US?
Apollo's code looks pretty interesting. Will keep an eye on that. Funny though, I'm having trouble browsing the site. Requests fail half the time. Oh look, it's hosted by Baidu.. no wonder.
https://github.com/iikira/BaiduPCS-Go
https://github.com/Jannchie/Historical-ranking-data-visualiz...
Just to name 3. You can see them on https://github.com/trending when filtering by langauge