About this site

This site presents 高性价比人生指南 (HowToLiveBetter), a guide written in Chinese by eternity4719, in an English translation. It is an independent adaptation, not the author's own site, and is not endorsed by the author.

Source and snapshot

• Original project: https://github.com/eternity4719/HowToLiveBetter. The author's own online edition: https://eternity4719.github.io/HowToLiveBetter/.
• Snapshot: commit bb25081b423091f9e22059aab6b4ed7343a2266d, committed 2026-10-09 (20:00, UTC+8). The English is translated from that commit's README.md and book/ files. The build keeps a byte-for-byte copy of them, checked against the commit's file hashes, and compares every item of the English with it. Each section page links to its Chinese original at that commit.
• The snapshot is frozen. Later upstream changes do not appear here. Laws, subsidy amounts and deadlines in the guide change often; the upstream project is the current version.

Licences

• Guide text (upstream book/, docs/ and README text): Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), © eternity4719. Licence text from the snapshot.
• The English translation and this site's arrangement of the text are an adaptation of that work, also released under CC BY 4.0.
• Upstream code is MIT-licensed (licence). This site reuses no upstream code; it reimplements two rules from upstream's index.html: how the value-for-cost tier is derived from each item's tags, and the cost labels, translated into English.
• This site's own code: MIT (licence).
• Typefaces of the English edition: Literata, © 2017 The Literata Project Authors (licence), and Inter, © 2016 The Inter Project Authors (licence), both SIL Open Font License 1.1 and self-hosted.
• Images: each photo keeps its own licence, named under the image and in the image credits below. The illustrations were generated for this site with Z-Image-Turbo by Tongyi-MAI (model under the Apache License 2.0).

What this site changed

• Translated the guide into English. This site publishes the English only; the original Chinese is unchanged in the upstream project, and each section page links to its Chinese source. An earlier preview of this site also showed the Chinese text; its addresses now lead to the English pages.
• Reorganized the README and the 34 section files into pages: a home page, one page per section, a list of all items, an evidence page and a glossary. Items keep their numbers and order.
• Designed the site after Lovable's “Stone Paper” editorial magazine template (layout, type scale and colours; no template code, Lovable project or hosting is used), and added one lead image per section and one on the home page. The images are decoration chosen by this site, not part of the guide; see the image credits.
• Added navigation, an item index on each section page, links for the guide's cross-references (for example Section 8, Item 17), and summaries and bar charts. Every count in them is computed from the snapshot's own evidence grades and item tags; nothing is scored or ranked by this site.
• Shown per item: the outcome type, cost and benefit-size tags that upstream stores in each item, and the value-for-cost tier derived from them with upstream's own rule. Upstream explains that the tier is the author's judgment and comparable only within one outcome type; the site says the same wherever it appears. A "contested" flag marks items whose grade or notes upstream marks 争议.
• Left out parts of the upstream README that describe upstream's own tools and channels rather than the guide: badges, downloads (PDF, EPUB, offline HTML, Anki), the AI skill, instructions for the search page (two kept reading tips still mention it), self-hosting, the star chart, the tip jar, advertising, business contact, the chat group, and the lists of community translations and derived tools. They are in the upstream README.
• Linked, not reproduced: upstream's long-form pieces (docs/) and verification records (docs/核实记录/), which exist in Chinese only. Links in the text point to them at the snapshot commit.
• Source lists are reproduced exactly as in the Chinese, including Chinese titles of laws and quoted statutory text.

How the English was made

The English is a fresh translation of the snapshot, made with Claude (an AI model by Anthropic) under a written translation specification. It has not been reviewed by the upstream author. Where the two differ, the Chinese text prevails.

• The specification fixes the item layout, the rendering of evidence grades and flags, terminology, and the form of cross-references. It forbids adding, dropping or softening content and forbids localizing the advice: amounts stay in yuan, and laws, institutions and hotlines stay those of mainland China.
• Every build checks each item mechanically against the Chinese: item count and order, grades, cost tags, every number written in digits, every cross-reference and link target, and byte-identical source lists. The build fails on any mismatch.
• Each section was then reread item by item against the Chinese by the translator and by an independent reviewer.
• Two community English translations already exist. Both were assessed and neither was reused, because a sample showed dropped numbers, a changed evidence grade and omitted sentences in one, and a different, unrecorded upstream version with 649 of 676 items in the other. The assessment is in the site repository.
• Points where the Chinese text itself looked inconsistent were translated as written and collected for the author in a list of possible upstream issues.

The author's notes on the original

This book was written with the help of Claude Code: finding original literature, checking item by item that the numbers match the original texts, and maintaining cross-references and build scripts. The choice of topics, what to keep and what to cut, and the final review are the author's responsibility, and every number can be found in the original text cited in the Sources field.

The text is published under CC BY 4.0, covering the text of book/, docs/ and this README. You may republish, adapt and use it commercially without asking the author, but you must do three things:

• Credit the source: “高性价比人生指南” (The Value-for-Cost Life Guide), with a link to the repository https://github.com/eternity4719/HowToLiveBetter
• Include the license link https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• If you changed the content, say that you changed it. The statutes, subsidy standards and deadlines in the book are updated often, so it is suggested that you also state which day's version you synced.

The code is under MIT, covering tools/, skills/, index.html and .github/.

Image credits

Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under public-domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA terms. Each licence was checked on the file's Commons page on the date shown. The site shows the photos resized, cropped and with muted colour; the files themselves are otherwise unchanged. A photo illustrates the subject of its section. It does not show the people, data or findings of any study the guide cites, unless its note says so.

The illustrations were generated for this site with Z-Image-Turbo and are marked as illustrations wherever they appear. They are illustrative only and do not depict any study, participant, finding or real person. Their prompts are listed here; each prompt ended with the same style description: “Muted editorial illustration, hand-printed linocut and risograph look: a restrained palette of warm stone grey, charcoal brown ink and faded ochre only, low saturation, visible carving marks and paper grain, calm, generous negative space, no text, no letters, no logos, no faces.”

Using this guide

The guide's medical, legal and financial statements are the upstream author's, with the sources each item cites. They describe mainland China as of the snapshot date and are general information, not advice for an individual case. Emergency numbers in the guide (120, 110, 119, 12356 and others) are Chinese numbers.

Problems with this site or its translation: site repository issues. Questions about the guide's content belong to the upstream project.