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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

How are people notified to get the hell out of there??

Are you familiar with the term "air raid siren"? The coast is wall-to-wall peppered with squack boxes. About a minute prior to the earthquake there would have been a "Earthquake is imminent -- brace yourself." broadcast and within a minute there would have been a "A tsunami warning is in effect for (here). Go to shelter immediately. Repeat..."

There are a couple levels of alerts they can pull, from "Be careful" to "MOVE NOW." Miyagi just got "MOVE NOW."

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Thanks Patrick, that's refreshing to hear.

Problems Japan does not have #1: insufficient spending on public works projects In Case Shit Happens, because shit happens so often that when people in several dozen countries say shit they're speaking Japanese.

Can I tell you my favorite outsourcing story? Apologies for those who've heard it (and yes, this actually happened):

India: We can't log into the test server.

Patrick: Then you didn't set it up right.

India: No, we did, but we get an error message.

Patrick: What error message?

India: We can't read it.

Patrick: sigh Please take a screenshot then.

India: Here you go.

Patrick: Oh, that is just a weather report which correctly reflects the state of the test database. The system is operating normally. Please proceed with your testing of the function you were assigned.

India: Are you sure it isn't an error? It is written in red. And why would you put a weather report on the login screen anyway?

Patrick: Q1) That is because if you ignore it you'll die. Q2) See Q1.

Holy cow, I've been on Hacker News far too long:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422043

A bit off topic but how did you dig that up? Given how active you, you would have clicked next on your comments several hundred times.

SearchYC + a few words I remembered of it. (I have an anomalously good memory for things I've written, which is one reason I write so much. It's like Delicious except Yahoo can't lose my bookmarks.)

You and me both.

Reminds me of QA at Yahoo! Japan. They make sure that every page that is going to be released is capable of showing the EMG1, EMG2, and EMG3 tags.

Here is a screenshot of EMG1 and EMG2 both being shown at the same time, it was the first time for me to see more than one shown at the same time in production.

http://i.imgur.com/mZxyA.png

I forget what EMG3 is used for.

what is the point?, and cant that be just another name instead of India?

I thought it would be an amusing story to relate regarding our disaster preparedness: don't worry about us, we're so on top of this we have disaster warning systems built into the class schedule portals college kids access from their cell phones. It's amusing because out outsourcing operations in India were... less successful than they could have been because of frequent... inefficiencies in communication and pervasive... opportunities for improvement in engineering skill levels.

No, company policy and common sense would not let me tell you the names of the engineers I had that conversation with. You can read it as "An Employee Of A Japanese Megacorp's Indian Subsidiary" if that makes you feel better. I'm assuming most people understand I do not actually mean everybody in the country.

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