byoungd/up: nine years of Chinese learning notes

TL;DR: byoungd/up is a single author’s running collection of Chinese-language writing on AI learning, English study and personal development. It was started in May 2017, still received commits in September 2026, and carries 64,739 stars with 6,517 forks. GitHub reports no license it can recognize, which matters more than the star count.

What it is

The repository description is the most honest thing about it. Instead of a sentence, it is a stack of search phrases: 韩先凯的人生进阶指南, AI学习, 英语学习指南, repeated and strung together with slashes so the repo shows up when someone searches for any of them.

Read that way, the project is not a tool. It is a reading list that grew for nine years. The topic list confirms this. It has exactly three entries, chinese, english-learning and tutorial, and all three describe the reader rather than any technology. There is no topic here about a framework, a language runtime or a workflow.

What the numbers say

Field	Value
Stars	64,739
Forks	6,517
Open issues	32
Primary language	JavaScript
Topics	chinese, english-learning, tutorial
License	NOASSERTION (none recognized)
Created	2017-05-30
Last push	2026-09-20
Repository size	125 MB

Two of these are worth pausing on.

The first is the age. A repository that started in May 2017 and was pushed to nine days ago has outlived several waves of writing about how to learn AI. Most of the material in it is now going to describe a specific moment in how the field worked, and the durable parts will be the parts that are about learning itself rather than about tooling.

The second is the fork ratio. Roughly one fork for every ten stars is high for a repository people are not going to build on. For a code project, a fork usually means “I want my own copy to change.” For a body of notes, the same ratio reads more like “I want to work through this on my own.” The metadata does not say which it is, and I would not guess from the numbers alone.

The license is the catch

GitHub returns NOASSERTION for this repository, which is what the API says when it cannot match a license file to a recognized SPDX identifier. In practice that means the default copyright applies: the writing is published for you to read, not granted to you to reuse.

That is a meaningful gap at 64.7k stars, because a repository that size feels like shared property. It is not. If you want to quote a passage, translate a chapter, or fold a diagram into your own notes, the stars do not give you permission and the topic list does not either. The author’s site at biezou.com is the place to ask.

How to use it

You do not need the history. The repository is 125 MB, which is a lot to pull for a reading project:

# shallow clone, current state only
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/byoungd/up.git

If you read Chinese, the practical approach is to clone it and search it the way you would search a book, since the content is organized by topic over nine years rather than by lesson. If you do not read Chinese, the repo is still a useful signal about what self-learners are searching for, but it is not a reference you can work from directly.

When to skip it

• You need an English-language reference. The core writing is Chinese, and the English-learning material is about learning English rather than being written in it.
• You are looking for something to install. There is no package here to add to a project.
• You plan to republish any of it. Settle the license question before you build on it.

Source and Accuracy Notes

• Project page: https://github.com/byoungd/up
• Source repository: byoungd/up (verified via GitHub API html_url)
• License: NOASSERTION (GitHub API could not map a recognized SPDX license, so default copyright applies)
• Stars at time of writing: 64,739
• Forks at time of writing: 6,517
• Companion site: https://biezou.com