nihonde

The idea that appetites are assigned at birth is a bold claim. Is there evidence to support it?

Well, you've reduced a rational position to absurdity here. The concern isn't that someone is going to require chemotherapy. The concern is that an asymptomatic condition will go undisclosed until it is symptomatic, at which point preventative treatments are futile.

Even if we accepted your example, there is a fundamental inconsistency, since doctors in America regularly prescribe very serious drug interventions for patients who essentially self-diagnose for being neurotic/adhd/etc.--actually a much worse problem than the one you're so eager to curtail.

Japan has seen millennia of huge cultural shifts. Its strength is its ability to adapt and survive with some measure of continuity, even while embracing the new reality. Go watch some Ozu films. They're all about the "hollowing out" of traditional small-town lifestyle and culture. It isn't so much a problem as a feature of the landscape that reminds people about how transient their reality can be.

"Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai"

Also Keihan. And most, if not all, of these companies have huge land and real estate development projects generating non-rail income all up and down their lines.

Something doesn't add up. The entire Japanese healthcare system is built around the idea that preventative testing for asymptomatic conditions is effective. You can read all about it, if you want.

Personally, I think you've swallowed some kind of health insurance industry black pill, whether you know it or not.

I don't think there's much difference? The technicians that perform the tests are not doctors. You usually see a doc for 5 mins at the end, to discuss any anomalies. Even then, they're just going to refer you to see your GP or a specialist. At the end of the day, the ningendoku is just information that your doctors can access. I'd much prefer a high-resolution full body scan.

Either way, the patient should make the choice about whether they want that info, not an insurance company or a know-it-all armed with a dubious study concluding that asymptomatic conditions are better left undiscovered.

This doesn't hold up for me in Japan. My apartment is in a building that's 10 years old now, and I've been here since it was new. Japan famously builds for a 20-ish-year depreciation schedule, although buildings like mine often stay in operation for 40 or more years. The build quality is honestly through the roof. Even the materials that are "builder quality" like unit kitchen and bath or veneer floors are still built to last, with minimal maintenance, and maximum convenience. As for the neighbors, they're mostly passing strangers. A few of them are busy bodies who love to force management to post "reminder" letters on the bulletin board. In other words, typical ultra-passive-aggressive-obsessive types. But most people that I encounter are delightful, and everyone just stays out of each other's way. Building maintenance is an old lady who tried to retire, and the building residents literally demanded that she un-retire and come back. This building is absolutely spotless and everything is ship-shape at all times. Most people own their units. I rent from the owner. In the time since I've lived here, I've bought multiple other properties, but I remain here because it's so damn easy and great.

Insurance companies dislike paying for procedures instead of passively collecting premiums. Not sure how you missed that.

Are you joking? 人間ドック is absolutely more than a "health checkup". Maybe do some reading: https://medical.kameda.com/general/en/ningendock/what/

The Ningen Dock is a comprehensive health checkup system that includes a battery of tests, including blood tests, chest X-rays, and ultrasound scans, among others as well as advanced diagnostic tests as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) or Endoscopy. These tests can help detect potential health problems early before they become more serious or difficult to treat.

Rather than dealing with the issue—hypochondriacs or whatever—you prefer to remove the option for the non-hypochondriacs?

The fact that doctors like your wife think that people who are concerned about their health and want more information is a problem tells me everything I need to know about your (and her) worldview. You've dressed it up as being pragmatic, but the reality is that you're arguing for censorship and against freedom of information.

In Japan, the government gives everyone a battery of full body tests at least once per year. I guess you know better than Japan, right?

The whole argument that "you'll worry yourself sick" is such patronizing trash. It's obviously programming that came from the insurance industry, and you lapped it right up.

How brainwashed by the healthcare machine do you have to be to think that catching asymptomatic medical issues is a bad thing? The argument against is literally:

- patients will worry too much, and - it will cost time and money to investigate.

Both spurious rationales cooked up by an industry that is at least as hostile to humanity as it is helpful.

"What possible use could there be for doing this?"

I've encountered this attitude before, and I always find it perplexing that there are people who are annoyed by, even hostile to, the idea of frequent health telemetry.

What possible use? How about giving people greater visibility inside their own bodies without having to navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare machine and without having to justify themselves to actuaries?

Have you visited literally any city outside Japan or Singapore lately? Law and order works, whether you like it or not. They're allowed to do it their way. Results speak for themselves.

Charges were dropped does not mean innocent. It means the investigation determined that the case wasn't worth pursuing. Japan has strict rules about importing drugs. The lack of drug abuse in Japan is one of the reasons it's not a shithole like nearly everywhere else. Obviously foreigners are in the crosshairs for that particular category of transgressions, since they come from places with different attitudes toward certain drugs, and since they get sent stuff in the mail. You can be pretty sure that she got the message that the Japanese authorities wanted to send her.

As if that was ever the goal. Japan is plenty popular.

We're not talking about the US. We're talking about Japan, where the authorities are extremely conservative and cautious. Most Japanese people know how to stay completely clear of trouble. Ask yourself why this person did not.

This is just bias confirmation theater for a certain worldview.

Oh, also, "Made in Japan" is a huge deal for a lot of people in Japan.

This is almost certainly a Japanese product for Japanese people/companies who will give it to other Japanese people as a GIFT. Japan has a never-ending gifting protocol. People buy perfectly normal beer in a fancy box, to give it as a gift. It's a nice thing about Japan that is particularly Japanese, which is probably why many of you don't understand the purpose of this product. I bet if someone gave it to you spontaneously, you'd appreciate it!

No one is going to get mad at you for violating these, but they will judge you. If you're trying to get along with a person from a proper Japanese family, you'll fail unless you know all of these and more. For example, placing bowls/plates on the table too hard, or not trying hard enough to pay the bill, not serving others, pouring your own drink...the list goes on and on. Most people think these things are silly, but some absolutely do not and will treat you accordingly if you're making these mistakes. Whether or not you care is up to you and the situation. This is all also true in almost every other culture, by the way.

No functional difference whatsoever. Literally the exact same solution, but somehow dressed up to be contrarian.

If you don't have a record of questions asked/answered and rationale for decisions taken, I've noticed it's easy for subsequent feature plans to clash. Maintaining a line of consistency across each feature plan is a good thing.

Feature plans generated by agents are often transient documents that fall away once the plan is executed. Ideally, that artifact would be preserved alongside the implementation.

My experience is that Cursor's reliance on VS Code's clunky panel-based UI and jack-of-all-trades harness is holding it back. Likewise, Claude Code shoe-horning a GUI into a TUI and perma-binding to a single model family is not the ideal end-state.

The VC play here? The git context CLI thing is a foundational step that lays the groundwork for a full IDE/workflow tool, I guess.

The paper focuses on math and finance—i.e., quantitative matters.

It seems obvious that language models are not suitable for determinative number-crunching unless they generate a program to compute the response as an interim step.

Different CoPilot product. Typical Microsoft naming confusion.

I remember pre-Musical.ly TikTok here in Japan, and it was MUCH better then. In fact, it noticeably degraded when Musical.ly was folded in.

American social media culture revolves around money and sex in a way that isn't as popular in Korea/Japan/S. Asia—roughly speaking, the original scope of TikTok's userbase, since Douyin has always kept Chinese users separate.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of garbage social media content in Asia, but it's more boomers and gen-z era that consume hentai/money flexing/politics/etc., so that nonsense was almost completely absent in the early days of TikTok, when the users were mostly Asian teenagers and young adults trading choreography, in-jokes, and showing off their video editing skills.

Most modern Japanese homes are not "western style" at all. They're usually built by large industrial concerns (e.g., Toyota, Sekisui, etc.) that prefabricate many components at scale. The process of building such a home in Japan begins with a company architect fitting their design system onto your lot. The price is fairly predictable, and relatively cheap—-under US$300K in most places. The home is designed with more or less the following priorities: 1. Safety 2. Ease of maintenance 3. Efficiency 4. Cost

And more recently, considerations for SDGs (sustainability goals) with respect to materials used.

Longevity is not a priority, as homes are expected to depreciate in value over roughly 20 years. There are many reasons for this, but my personal opinion is that industrialization has made it possible to upgrade the technology of the home at a pace and a price that favors rebuilding.

As for machiya and kominka, local governments like Kyoto have tried to intervene to preserve the traditional homes. The "no build" lots do not allow a property owner to build on anything other than the load-bearing structure for the old home. As a result, you have many empty lots and coin parking lots around Kyoto where the old home was unsalvageable or where the owner could not afford a renovation. To be honest, only tourists/foreigners would want to stay in a machiya for the novelty of it. Although they were marvelously engineered for their time, they tend to be rough living compared to the extremely easy and cheap prefab homes. There is also the problem of craftspeople who can maintain these old homes dying out, which adds to the cost of keeping them.

I don't think it's possible to attribute any of this to a general "Japanese" attitude, though. On the one hand, one of the most important and longest-lasting spiritual sites in Japan is Ise Jingu, which is rebuilt from scratch every 20 years as a Shinto ritual of renewal. On the other hand, you have some of the oldest and largest wooden structures in the world still standing in Nara.

As usual, it's complicated.

Tension joints for wood are seen in classic Japanese construction

Japan also has several wooden buildings that purport to be 1,000+ years old—although these situations inevitably lead to Ship of Theseus debates.

Thanks, anyways. Ironic that they effectively "censored" my comment rather than engage with it.

Prompts a few thoughts for me: (1) coming to HN is like time-traveling ~10 years back, (2) HN today reminds of the late stages of after slashdot, digg, etc. peaked, and (3) decentralized projects have real incentives with "points" that mean something, so losing some silly HN points to moderation seems more meaningless than ever before.