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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I don't know exactly the reasons but Japanese software is basically embarrassing. I was talking to a good friend of mine last month who is a very good photographer about how you basically don't have GPS or a ton of other features in the main cameras from Japan--so both of us increasingly just use iPhones unless we really need to use big bodies and lenses.

Sure, some of it is that iPhones (Pixels) do a good enough job for a lot of us. But it's also that the gap has closed so much and a lot of it is about software.

Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes.

And even in the large systems space, when I was an IT industry analyst, there was just a lot of quirky Japanese tech stuff that was out of step with the world as a whole.

I don't have a coherent theory for it all but Japan just fell out of alignment with mainstream patterns especially in the 90s or so.

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I will say this though --

Japanese companies and organizations (and people) love diagrams to present to the public. Whether how to navigate a website, book a ticket, check-in to a hotel, etc. the number of process diagrams in daily life (as a perceived effective way of communicating information) is unseen outside Japan.

Also, the amount of highly detailed posters in public places. For example, the departures board of a train line -- far more information than probably the average US rider knows how to comprehend even. Or is interested in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stem-and-leaf_time_tabl...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/rqaoj3/the_crazy_t...

You have to wonder whether this generates a tolerance or expectation that detail is expected to be understood.

That train time table actually looks more readable than a typical bus stop time table from Europe https://formstark.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Otraf_buss_2...

How do American public transit agencies present the same information?

From Chicago: https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/1bxiy5s/i_highligh...

Only distributed as a PDF: https://www.transitchicago.com/redline/

Overall train map: https://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/6/ctamap_Lsystem.png

Overall train+bus maps: https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/system/ + https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/downtown/

Sooo yeah, I agree the Japanese one is much nicer. I don't recall ever even seeing a schedule at the stations, just "train arriving in X minutes". The train map and per-line map are at every station, and the train+bus map is pretty common too.

I notice the Chicago map has multiple stations with the same name -- is this not a problem when using Google Maps and other navigation apps? How would the app know which "Pulaski" I want to go to?

Those are the names of the street the station is at, if you follow the map north/south you'll see all the Pulaski stations are on the same street. In an app you'd use the address for where you want to go and it may or may not include the train. Though the apps can also understand "Blue line Pulaski" if it really is your destination rather than a stop on the way.

That first board is just a list of departure times by hour, with express trains highlighted. For weekdays and weekends. Not exactly a huge amount of information.

I'm more impressed by their maps of where each station exit leads to, or where on the platform to wait based on your seat number. Those can be tricky to figure out as there are multiple wait points based on the train route and number of carriages. Shinkansen even take into account what end of the carriage you're closest to.

Here's some more examples of exactly that complexity:

https://imgur.com/a/Qzy46WV

https://imgur.com/a/7UtQnMF

Both are standard-looking maps, honestly - stem and leaf is so obvious I have problems imagining what other form you'd expect, and I have never seen japanese public transport timetable sign before now. It's just standard over here (Poland, UK).

The format of metro map is actually based on London metro, the only major difference is the amount of lines.

I had a Fuji point-and-shoot with GPS built-in nearly 15 years ago. The problem with GPS built-in to hardware is that it takes like 30-60 seconds of standing still to get a lock on the satellites, it doesn't work indoors, and so on. Phones work around this by downloading ephemeris data and triangulating using the cell towers and nearly Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, things that a camera can't do without incorporating a whole phone with SIM card into the camera and burning battery.

That's a bit of a red herring. Why do cameras integrate so poorly with phones, which could provide this information, backup and upload images etc. Same is true of professional video cameras, which are used for much longer periods of time in a single place, turned on etc. It's a mindset thing with camera manufacturers, running enormously outdated software with terrible UX on underpowered processors.

Battery life. A good camera will have a standby time of months and will do heavy image processing for days on one charge. And that's a key feature. It's also one of the reasons most people quickly turn off features like GPS and WIFI in their cameras. They're relatively useless and a massive battery drain.

But yes, it could still be made better by waking up the radios fast and having e.g. reasonably smart tethering based on an open de facto standard spec that would be only woken up when the camera is switched "on" (which is mostly a key lock in many cameras, not a boot up).

This isn't true at all of cinema cameras - which run off v-mount, b-mount etc type batteries and are expected to burn through them, and still face the same processor and feature limitations. There isn't (to my knowledge) a single cinema camera that supports bluetooth headphones for example, bizarrely.

Phones handle that this way, but it's not necessarily a good thing if that's the only way they can get the ephemeris data. I used to navigate in Japanese cities using not my phone, but my tablet. Worked fine. Then I changed to another tablet. Didn't work at all, could not. The only time I could get a GPS lock was if I could connect to a local wi-fi, which is not something easily done. Its GPS software clearly didn't even try to get the ephemeris date via the GPS signal, it relied 100% on network download. Which made it utterly useless, in the place where I needed it most - another country, non-EU at that, and my tablet doesn't even have a SIM slot, and if it did, I would have had to buy/get a SIM card (as would I for a phone, something I normally wouldn't need).

In short - downloading ephemeris data from the internet is fine, but if it also cripples the whole thing by not using the embedded GPS ephemeris data.. horrible.

> you basically don't have GPS or a ton of other features in the main cameras from Japan

I'm just a happy amateur photographer, but this fact has been annoying the sanity out of me for over a decade now. Mobile phones are taking increasingly large bites out of the camera manufacturers' market share, but companies like Fuji/Canon/Nikon/Olympus, for some unknown reason, are unable to adapt at all. Sure, there is still and will always be a market for larger glass and more pixels, lower noise levels, ergonomics etc. - but why in 2024 GPS, Wi-Fi, uploading to Instagram and similar functions are not standard in ALL cameras is beyond my understanding.

It's like watching the car industry in the early 2000's where manufacturers would pride themselves over finally putting a USB jack in their car.

I increasingly don't travel with a dedicated camera. In fact, I suspect in the next year or two I'll purchase a new phone sooner than I otherwise would to have a backup camera when traveling especially given a backup phone has other uses.

I have a couple of good cameras and glass but they're getting old and I really can't imagine upgrading at this point.

Adobe (sorry, subscription haters) made up for a lot of defects in the manufacturers' PC software for downloading etc. But I totally get frustrated by the lack of GPS metadata at this point because I hate entering that sort of thing which geo data makes irrelevant in many cases.

> Sure, there is still and will always be a market for larger glass and more pixels, lower noise levels, ergonomics etc. - but why in 2024 GPS, Wi-Fi, uploading to Instagram and similar functions are not standard in ALL cameras is beyond my understanding.

Specifically on uploading to social media and having apps that depend on external APIs — maybe it's because putting Android on such devices and having to constantly keep the social media apps updated "dates" the camera and forces consumers into an upgrade cycle because of software bloat.

I've noticed that for some reason, cheap Android phones tend to objectively slow down over the years even without software or app upgrades — as if the cheap Mediatek chipsets and RAM are designed to eventually degrade. Something similar happened to some of the wi-fi connected printers I have owned, which slowly become sluggish and unusable even after factory resets.

On the other hand, I can still use my 16 year old full-frame Nikon D700 DSLR purchased in 2008 very, very well. Even back then, it supported a GPS attachment, though it's utter trash compared to in-phone AGPS these days.

> Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes.

As an European living in Japan, I can confirm. Japanese advertisement and presentations look like a competition in who can cram the most text in epilepsy-inducing colors in a single page/poster. Bonus points for cramming both horizontal and vertical text in the same page.

I don't know if they really like it, or if they just follow what everybody else does.

The research I have seen seems to show that Japanese brains simply prefer information density over style and simplicity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi8pyS076a8

"Japanese brains" as in there is neurological difference, or is it because that is the environment they have been raised in? (nature vs nurture)

Nurture. That's why the Asians are better in Math. Their language allows to shift from one operation into another at light speed.

Do you have a source that can back this up? Otherwise this looks like linguistic determinism and Orientalism

Ah yes, the myth that East Asian countries are better at math because their numbers are just one syllable, so they can calculate faster.

Leaving aside the fact that math is not only basic arithmetic, the reality is that they dedicate much more time in school to this kind of problems. But as usual, skills that are not used often atrophy over time, and in my experience the average Japanese adult is not much better than the average Western adult.

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