stuartcw

I want the ability to turn off romaji completely.

One way to do this, but before the mails arrive, is to use a service like IFTTT or Zapier that can both read your mails that match a search and write to Google Sheets. Then you can configure them to save any mails that match the criteria automatically. However, that would be for future mails only.

You can definitely make a Python script do this using the Gmail and Sheets API libraries to do this or use Google Apps Script to do it. ChatGTP and/or Claude can probably write the code for you to do it if you know enough programming to understand and debug it.

If you used the kanji names of the cities and towns it would be a lot more realistic.

I’ve lived in Japan since 1988 and this just seems like a list of jibberish to me. Japanese city names are, like English city names, made up of meaningful components i.e. Newbridge, 新橋,しんばし, Shinbashi. So there is nothing to get a hook on. It’s just syllables.

Try it with 2000 English city names and you will get the same quality of output.

I live on the Miura peninsular not too far from William Adams fiefdom. It’s possible to walk up the hill from Anjinzuka Station (The navigator’s hill) and see his and his wife’s grave.

By the way, the first link on Google for “Japan developer salary” is https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/software-developer-salarie... which is based on an annual survey of developer salaries.

That’s probably double what a developer in Japan would get for similar experience unless you are bringing some exceptional talent to the company.

It’s the last collision of the day but the previous collisions are pretty entertaining too.

Earthquakes are so common here in Japan that unless there is a death toll it doesn’t make sense to raise them as news.

Exactly this.

This is almost a daily occurrence.

The news this time is that government used the J-Alert system to mass broadcast to everyone in Hokkaido to announce that, instead of coming down in the sea of Japan, it might come down on the land. NHK is reporting that it might be a new type ICBM which I guess might be the reason for the general alert this time.

10 years ago. I’m in Japan and I go to the nearest convenience store, transfer the pdf document to the printer and get a clean print. I only use the printer for two pages a month to post the document, stamped with my company hanko, to a traditional Japanese big company.

The only time that I regret not having a printer is when it is pouring with rain on print day.

Why? Because dried up ink was a rip off.

I suspect that some readers of Hacker News were not born when this was popular.

I live in Japan and the one thing I miss about the UK are Marks & Spencer’s sandwiches. If I never had a convenience store sandwich again I wouldn’t be sorry.

Err.. no. It is generally considered unwise to consider boring sea tunnels along the boundaries of tectonic plates in the Ring of Fire especially considering the distance from Taipei to Naha is 641km, 30 times longer than the current record holding sea tunnel between the Hokkaido and the main land.

Also note Ireland-Britain has no tunnel.

The ScanSnap is a business quality scanner.You can put in a stack of documents into the sheet-feeder and you will get high quality scans out as fast as a printer.The smartphone scanner app are like an emergency workaround in comparison.

This is all in Japanese but if you watch it you can understand what they are doing. The walls were starting to get dangerous so they decided to take the whole castle wall down and sure it up and reconstruct it. It’s a rare chance to see how they use modern and ancient technology to build a self supporting stone castle wall.

Yes. I love it.

I have always wondered whether new ideas are seeded by cosmic rays disturbing neurons in the brain..

Serious inquiry: does anyone use the word "temblor" outside of journalism?

I used to manage address data in a insurance company in Tokyo. We had about 20% of all Japanese addresses in the database.

It was a challenging job.

Parsing the new addresses, normalising them and matching them to existing addresses was a major effort.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism publishes electronic data about historical addresses as huge address changes have been done over time with the creation of new cities and metropolitan areas. That all has to be factored in when trying to normalise a pre change address.

Rural addresses get weird. Sometimes we had to try and find anomalies on a map to check that they were possible addresses.

In the end, the biggest help to find mistakes in the data is to send a postcard to that address. If it gets returned then investigate the reason.

Genius name. I wish I had grabbed that domain.

I was once involved with a software project, actually the DOS version of Lotus 1-2-3 2.4J, which bundled some Japanese fonts that were licensed from a Taiwanese font maker. The QA manager told one of the staff to print out every character and check them. I thought it was crazy but the junior guy came back a few weeks later with a list of mistakes that he had found. They were reported to the maker and a new updated version was received. This was at the end of the era when software was distributed on physical media (CDs in this case) and providing updates was a costly business.

Before social media people religiously read the local obituaries column in the local newspaper and called their friends if someone they both knew had died.

Families would call all the close contacts and relatives to make sure that they knew.

For several years after my father died in 1985 people called our house to speak to him. Most were not close acquaintances but some were still pretty shocked to hear of his death.

Once you decide to leave and take a new job your allegiance is now to your future employer. My only regret in leaving jobs has been not taking all my holidays and staying too long after deciding to leave. If you do feel bad about leaving then c.f. Stockholm Syndrome.

At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience [...] [...] Ultimately, you need to convince companies that you can do the job. [...]At the same time, you need to convince yourself that you can do the job.

Err.. Ultimately you need to be able to DO the job...

That's cool. I supported an IBM/PC clone keyboard firmware developer in the 1990s. Having an open source USB based firmware has really changed the game as it was a nightmare to clone the IBM XT/AT keyboard controller with all it's quirks.

c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930894

No. I have had numerous interviews in Japan and never had a kind of test like this. Maybe be one company has used this, but it is far from the norm and as the z2 mentions, the intro is Chinese.

Perxactly!

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