captaintacos

Cool! Thanks for that Already using it to track whenever a couple stores here in Japan put the Nintendo Switch back in inventory or lottery sale

Some weeks ago someone posted a very useful interactive demo of a bloom filter (implemented in js) that you might want to play with after reading this article: https://www.jasondavies.com/bloomfilter/

I guess this announcement from VW got fast-tracked now that China is about to announce a ban on gas-powered vehicles China, in turn probably wants to go forward with that not for environmental reasons, but because they have a near monopoly on the world's supply of rare earths (which the electric vehicle's batteries require)

Oh... yep I'm not American But I am afraid I knew the term.. and I completely missed it

And this gentlemen is how you start getting old...

The coordinates you posted point to the sea off the coast of Cote d'Ivoire...

The actual coordinates are these: 17.9447247, -90.1666302

And by the way, I also noticed that no news outlet seems to even bother to post the coordinates.

And there seems to be a town nearby. I think they are so busted on this one.

They probably even have souvenirs and guided tours in place.

ah yes! :) Sounds like it was you.

Oh by the way. I think I had 2 players and you had one because you could have hit your other one since the beginning. After you hit one of mine, it was disabled and I was just with one playable Player left.

Just played this and it is great. However the other player (in the chat) was saying that he could not fire sometimes.

And later on I was also unable to both post messages and to use the FIRE button. Never recovered. Server problem perhaps?

In any case I will be bookmarking this. This would work wonders to explain math :)

Software engineer here living in Japan for about the same time as the author, and with almost the same work experience.

This article totally nails it.

I have bookmarked this so that every time a non-Japanese comes to me looking for advice related to moving and working in Japan (which I should mention, does not happen as often as it used to) I can just send them straight to this article.

Yes, quite open for -skilled- workers and even more open to students. I emphasize the "skilled" part because trust me, you don't want to come all the way here to engage in low-skilled labor. Highly skilled work is already too life-consuming enough. However I don't know how the construction sector would be, it is the equivalent of the American military industry (i.e. that's where they will throw ridiculous amounts of money whenever they want to "stimulate the economy") and with the LDP winning the elections yesterday the pouring of concrete all over Japan will go back to usual.

If it is skilled work, I recall any undergraduate degree overseas plus a job offer are the main requirements you need to get a work visa. Yes, no need to wait for a space to open as is the case with the H1 visa in the US. And I think this year the process got even easier.

To get a contract, well, if you can speak Japanese then you are halfway there. If you can't, I can suggest:

1. The companies that seem to be hungry for IT/software engineers (judging from the amount of spam I get from recruiters), may take your from whenever you are, and where probably Japanese language skills are not important are: GREE, Rakuten, Amazon Japan. I think you can apply to those through their websites.

2. Message me so I give you a list of recruiting companies that seem to specialize in foreigners in Japan.

3. Some people recommend checking out www.gaijinpot.com from time to time.

Immigration "would be" the best solution but we are talking about Japan in here. Not an "immigrant friendly" country like Canada, Australia or the US. Simply put... Japan is "allergic" to foreigners.

Surprisingly the process to get a work/student visa in Japan is much more easier than in Australia or the US (I've applied to one or another in all these countries and it's such a breeze to do in Japan).

Despite that, immigration remains low. For the foreigners here, last time I checked it was basically composed of about 80% of foreigners from China, 15% from Korea and the remaining 5% from the rest of the world.

I suppose the difficulty of the language and geographic location has something to do. Racism as known in the West is rare, but the truth is, Japan has consistently failed to assimilate any foreign population and it is really difficult to explain how it is like. I guess it's definitely more like a Canadian "cultural mosaic" more than an American "melting pot". But the cultural mosaic has some sense of equilibrium. For the case of Japan it would look more like "patching the kimono with pieces of fabrics of different patterns".

The thing is, under the hood, legally speaking, Japan is very open and welcoming to foreigners, but it fails to keep them in or assimilate them.

I'd like to comment too, but the game doesn't show up in the Japanese AppStore. Please make it available worldwide (even if they are not localized).

Developers: You are all losing sales of expats and people who do speak English outside the US every single time you don't release apps worldwide.

So in the long term, how exactly will this be different from http://www.topcoder.com/ ?

Just wondering... I signed up already anyway.

It's all very well deserved Ron, your app in fact demystified to me how to actually play the piano. Not to mention that my toddler loves it.

Greetings from Kyoto ;)

Precisely. I see no point in teaching them in anything but English. They're children, if they don't know it, they will learn fast. In fact, teaching them in any other language would be a step backwards.

I am not a native English speaker myself. I am Mexican. Yes, native Spanish speaker which is supposedly one of the top 3 most widely spoken languages on Earth and I must confess that most of the time I don't see the point in reading any content in Spanish anymore (except for some literature - in other words, yes, you probably want to read Shakespeare in English and Cervantes in Spanish, etc)

Foreign news, science, technology in Spanish? all that content is nothing but translations (sometimes bad ones) from the original English source. I see how something could get posted on HN one day and only after many days (usually weeks) it would finally appear in the "Technology News" section of the most "cutting edge" newspapers and media in Latin America or Spain.

I live here in Japan and most scientific papers and research from major universities (like Kyoto or Tokyo University) is also published in English.

I think it's cute to try to keep one's traditions and culture alive but at the end of the day being able to communicate efficiently with each other and do stuff like hacking Android is what keeps the world spinning. Anything else in your way is just extra overhead.

Well I guess I might as well just order a new 512 with element14 (I wish I knew about those guys).

Mine didn't ship at all with RS Components (+4 months waiting) then I complain on twitter to @RSComponents, 3 hours later I get an email from RS saying that my order just shipped... This is last SATURDAY! - so no 512 version :(

A couple hours later I get a reply from RS to my tweet saying: "Our records show that yours shipped LAST FRIDAY".

And now I still have to wait 21 more days until it arrives. Maybe if I order right now from element14, it may arrive earlier?!

Great way to make the prices clear. 15% more for Japan, I think it's time to move my things back to US East (Virginia) and make some savings.

It had some pricing on S3 but I think it would be nice to also have the prices for RDS. A medium-sized one of those things costs as much as a medium EC2 instance (yes I learned that the hard way).

I second that. I would like to see what that TED talk has to say about keeping humans employed in something for as long as possible.

I want to think software engineering/programming would be one of the last jobs to be replaced by machines. It would last until the "singularity" is reached which is when computers would be able to program themselves (re-writing and improving their own code exponentially).

The email that did get me to start using Flightfox was another one sent to you a few days later after you had signed up, looked around, but didn't end-up launching any contest.

In that email Flightfox said they noticed that I didn't launch any contest and gave me a coupon that covered 50% of any contest just to try it out.

So that's how I started using their service.

On the other hand I also learned there are other things to take into consideration when launching a contest. The most important one, knowing you have to buy the ticket as soon as possible. My contest was a tricky one (involving a toddler, timing international connections in the US, etc) so after 3 days there was only one decent result, and it was gone by the time I wanted to purchase it :(

So I guess that was the reason why the longest duration of the contests is of just 3 days. Which reminds me, I still need to go back there and do it all again.

The spice must flow

Yep. We all did. Hence the "[sic]" used by some commenters in here when quoting the author -> "Competant [sic] developers, even those..."

On the other hand. What would be the difference between a script-kiddie and an "actual hacker"? The years of experience? Or the purpose for what the code will be used for?

Who would've thought. Ironically, flying economy might someday save your life (if Economy Class Syndrome doesn't kill your first that is).

whoa! why the 3 point down voting? I live here in Japan. Is it wrong to be depressed about this law too?

And so it begins...

Depends on what type of train I guess. Probably no bullet train (shinkansen) has even been more than 59 seconds late (under normal circumstances that is). Naturally any type of bad weather like blizzards, typhoons or earthquakes will cause delays but most likely due to a complete cancellation of service.

Local trains are more prone to delays, for example the Yamanote line in Tokyo being the most notorious due to ahem, being the preferred line used by Tokyoites to say bye-bye to this world.

For local city train lines a delay of more than 5 minutes will result in the driver profusely apologizing on and on, and the line to start issuing "certificates" that people can get to show their employers blaming the lateness on the train line.

Yep, also Github fan and user here, but truth be told, it felt like reading a corporate advertisement on an in-flight magazine. As they said, at least it was short.

Not if the anti-poaching agreement makes no specific mention about "CONTRACTING employees" of Google. If that is the case, then it's turkey shoot for Apple.

Sadly, it is almost unheard of here in Japan and I am 99.999% sure it is the same in most of Asia (the real market for diamonds and luxury brands nowadays).

Just a couple weeks ago I was at lunch with my Japanese coworkers and the conversation topic went to one of them thinking on whether to buy a diamond ring to his wife as an anniversary gift.

I told him to better stay away from diamonds, and mentioned the diamond situation (pretty much the contents of the article) and not only not any of them had ever heard about it (despite most of them having graduated from top public and private Japanese universities), but also I ended up getting from all of them the most incredulous and distrustful looks I had ever been given in all my years in Japan.

A fundamentalist vegan urging them to immediately abandon sushi and seek redemption in the purity of soy beans would had been more warmly welcomed to discussion than my comment.

I hate to be the devil's advocate but I swear by Facebook's messenger app. It does exactly the same things: international, FREE-as-in-beer, really cross platform (can whatsapp do web?), push notifications on iPhone thereby effectively replacing SMS, etc. As long as the other person is on facebook of course!

It has come to the point that my wife and I barely use SMS anymore and are actually saving some play money on SMS thanks to that thing.

And that is bad news for carriers worldwide yes, but not that anyone really feels pity for them anyway.

I'd say not just scientists at CERN. This applies to most (nah... ALL) scientists: researchers, PhDs, Professors, etc. They use very hideous design, or more accurately, nothing at all, on their research webpages. And I am talking about a geocities-esque type of "design" here. Sometimes I even wonder if there is an implicit rule around that goes on the lines of "real researchers must PRETEND they just learned html".