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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…