osdiab

Oh, I didn't answer the how - I had been to Japan a lot, so I already had friends here. When I made the move permanent, I had cofounded a company with a few friends, piloted doing remote work from here a couple times before actually moving to convince the team that it can work. Once we were all onboard with it, I crashed at my friend's apartment while going apartment hunting with my Japanese then-girlfriend (now-wife). When I first arrived permanently I was on a tourist visa waiver, but then switched to a student visa studying Japanese (since I was planning to anyway). It was 6 months of full time school + full time job which was exhausting, but after we got married then I switched to a spouse visa and life calmed down since.

I don't know what your profession or situation is, but if you can line up a job you can pretty easily get a work visa (it's much less binding than US work visas). Japanese corporations are known to have pretty brutal work culture so that's something you ought to be aware of when searching, if you seriously pursue it. Hope it's interesting food for thought :)

I do believe city governments play an enormous role in these issues; the most obvious is the ridiculous and convoluted process for housing approvals in SF that has made it impossible for the city to come even close to providing adequate housing supply for the people that wish to live there, driving housing costs through the roof; coupled with the incessant stonewalling of any housing and transportation construction by municipalities across the Bay. Plus the fact that people dedicated to perpetuating this atrocious system keep getting elected to the the SF Board of Supervisors, no thanks to young people who would benefit from competition failing to show up to the elections.

But I also place a lot of blame on state policies too - CA Prop 13 is a cancer on the whole state, incentivizing land owners to fight tooth and nail to prevent progress. I'm glad that Scott Wiener got elected, though, as he's been making solid progress at the state level to rectify these issues.

The roots of these problems are not broadly federal in my opinion and, while they certainly can help, there's a lot of work to do at the city and state level that are achievable with a small number of dedicated people - if only they cared.

Neither would I just blame the sorry state of US cities on inadequate mental health care - while healthcare broadly certainly should be better, I'm in Japan where mental health awareness is relatively speaking in the stone age compared to SF, and that hasn't resulted in the level of human tragedy you experience viscerally by existing for 5 minutes in any of the US's major metropolises. Part of the reason for that is I can get my own apartment without roommates 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo, largely because the local government here actually does things to make it livable (and it's not just here, it's practically everywhere besides US cities).

I hope US cities wake up, become humble, and actually try to fix the deep hole of social issues they’ve dug themselves into. Best I can say is be active and vocal in your local government, since that’s where these messed up policies come from and you have a lot more power to impact your city than you do the federal government.

Then great news, SF has built almost nothing since 1979, so you’re more likely than not to be covered!

Maybe I was being a cheapskate for keeping my rent under $2k per month when I lived there, but I never lived in an apartment that wasn’t rent controlled.

While the Chinese government has forced the majority of young people to learn Mandarin in schools, even just taking a 1 hour train ride from Shanghai to Hangzhou, both cities have local languages that are mutually unintelligible. Elderly people, especially in the countryside but also in the cities occasionally, often don't know how to speak Mandarin at all. But if you mostly hang out with urban youth you should be fine entirely with Mandarin.

Unfortunately I haven’t found any good cycling mapping apps for Tokyo. Most apps try to take you down tiny streets but here those can be pretty dangerous and slow - lots of blind corners and super complicated routes. Best I’ve found is NAVITIME’s 自転車 app but honestly it’s pretty crappy. I end up just eyeballing medium-sized streets on Google Maps and navigate myself; really wish there was something better for here!

Yeah, there are so many alternate syntaxes, shortcuts, and ambiguous statements in Ruby; just reading through Matz’s reference book on Ruby was a trip for me.

I’ve found that doing it has helped me sleep when I’m restless at night - I think it’s more about giving you something concrete to focus on in order to make you more conscious of your body’s sensations, not necessarily something special about breathing through specific nostrils.

It's mostly been word of mouth for me - Japanese friends telling me DeepL is way better for Japanese, people on HN complaining about Google Chrome performance vs Firefox.

And competitors are coming pretty close to other Google stuff, Apple Maps is actually getting pretty good for me right now but mainly lacks the metadata about things like restaurant menus + the flexibility of routing like cheapest train fares or searching by last train and what not that Google has - honestly seems like low hanging fruit. Nobody gets close on search yet though, I've tried and failed to stick with DDG many times now.

The US is so loud! I don’t know if it’s true but one of my theories is that a lot of US cities consist of uninterrupted grids, and noise from a much larger area than in cities with messily organized roads like those in Tokyo where I live now, ends up being audible at any given place. In Manhattan you can hear sirens from like 30 streets away - but here, walk 5 minutes from the biggest stations and intersections and it’s dead silent.

Also, I noticed when I was living in Shanghai that it has gotten pretty silent there too with the dominance of electric vehicles, which has made places like the French Concession a pleasure to stroll in.

They definitely store location for the majority of users who use Google Maps, their location history is both very accurate and opt-out buried in settings menus. I don’t have numbers on percentages given that Google likely doesn’t share this data, but I feel safe in assuming that less than 5% of Google Maps users have turned off the location history feature.

I live in Tokyo now and I can confirm a solid number of these are! Though also the thread notes several that have been demolished too.

I grew up in a wealthy American suburb, the nearest grocery store was a 40 minute walk from my home, and I would have looked like a madman for simply walking on any street in the entire city because literally only beggars don’t ride cars. I’m glad to be living in Tokyo now!

FWIW I moved to Tokyo in part because it’s not a hellscape, but a great place to live if you like cities (and have income). I guess if you only consider American cities then maybe you might conflate cities with hellscapes.

Tokyo already passed and is enforcing an ordinance that banks smoking in all restaurants, cafes and bars. It’s great! There are some straggler restaurants not complying with it though, having just been in place since April.

My friends actually are making a startup, Cupper [1], for ordering high quality decaf beans on the web, you should check it out :)

[1] https://www.gocupper.com/

I do think you get a specific "tourist curated" version of Japan traveling this way - not that that's necessarily a bad thing, nor is it unique to Japan, but having spent my fair share of time both as a non-Japanese-speaking one-month-at-a-time tourist and as someone who can now speak the language continuously and lives here permanently, the people I knew, activities I'm aware of and understanding of the place then and now are pretty different.

The impact of having a site work without JS depends on who your site targets - if your site is mostly focused on young US professionals in cities using Macbooks and iPhones, bandwidth and browser support is going to be good enough with or without JS; you might lose out on some market share from accessibility if your site is poorly accessible, but it’s unlikely to be make or break for your site.

If your site is supporting elderly people in developing nations on low-specced computers/phones, probably a website isn’t even the best vehicle for your product, but supporting no-JS might be more significant for accessibility and bandwidth reasons.

I suspect the vast majority of products people work on here would not gain much by working without JS, although some passionate and outspoken people make it seem otherwise.

The Unpaywall iOS workflow worked fine for me! https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/bypass-paywalls-safari-re...

Or at least that government has the incorrect values which may or may not align with those of society at large (I would argue, not)

I think that you’re fast at what you practice - if you usually write clean code, you get better at writing clean code faster. And if you complain that writing clean code takes a long time and don’t usually do it, then yes - it will take time because you never practice doing it.

A major difference is that JS developers have little control over the runtime of their users, while all these other languages and especially compiled languages do. JS is a special case because it's the sole supported language of browsers, which all implement it differently—that comes with a unique layer of complexity.

If web programmers had the choice to install an arbitrary language's runtime in users' browsers, they would. But users have disparate browsers with disparate JS implementations, so if you want to code in a sane language with consistent behavior, you'll need to transpile and polyfill it.

You can't just distribute arbitrary binaries to users on the web, so web developers have to deal with a layer of complexity that other programs don't have to. That said, maybe WebAssembly will change this story.

Eh, I also think a lot of people overengineer things that are made simple with recent technology and that in fact most companies don't need the best engineers to get their job done.

I think it's totally true that one can leverage new tools to get more work done with less people, especially when it's for a service that doesn't reach scale and what not. Most companies don't need that to be lucrative. But I think the space of problems expands, whether that is more fields valuing tech, feasible complexity increasing in others, or competition just ratcheting up by lowering technical barriers to entry.

I think while it's true that new tools allow fewer people to do more work, that also expands the pool of tasks engineers can work on - more fields come to value software, work gets deeper in the fields that already did, competition gets fiercer, and the market as whole expands. This probably can't go forever but I don't see that trend ending any time soon.

I love city life but US cities are so poorly managed that I've lost hope that they'll be affordable nor pleasant to live in before I die, so now I've moving abroad to Tokyo and am living the lifestyle I'd hoped to in US cities - it's sad, cities don't have to be so prohibitively expensive and filthy if local governments were able to better manage themselves, actually reacting to the problems society faces, but even changing tiny things about the legislative process in US cities feels like a lifetime endeavor.

I usually do this kind of thing by making a new branch and interactive rebasing. Generally works well for me too!

The boring work has to get paid better because companies can't exploit the fact that people have no other choice. I think the businesses based only on that exploitation and not on real innovation will probably suffer as a consequence.

The GiveDirectly trial in progress now (been a few years) is the closest to what you're talking about - 20k people in 197 villages in Kenya getting a basic income covered fully for 12 years.

https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/

Posted above but I'll copy here:

I think that the work that needs to be done, will still get done but it'll be better rewarded (ie it'll be more expensive) - jobs that people don't want to do need to get paid more because employers can't just rely on economic coercion of the poor to force them to do dangerous or boring jobs, they need to remunerate them accordingly - which IMO is how the system should work. Result would probably be that businesses whose only value prop is predicated on cheap labor, will suffer, and businesses whose value prop is predicated on quality, will be rewarded.

EDIT: I do think there is risk that the coercion will become more intensely focused on illegal immigrants and foreign labor to fill in that niche, however, so better safeguards for illegal exploitation probably need to come along with UBI.