Zakiazigazi

> The guys lying in the street like that (even if not homeless) is actually culturally accepted.

It isn’t. It, however, is precisely what the blog talks about: newcomers explaining things away as “cute cultural quirks”.

Additionally, in normal Japanese companies that 6M _is_ the senior salary with starting salaries around the 3M~4M range. A 10M salary is basically a non-starter right off the bat at most places, they'd basically laugh you out the door with that, well, if you got a chance for an interview in the first place, but you wouldn't.

That said, 10M is of course not impossible, but in my experience it is mostly reserved for larger foreign companies, the banking sector or if you somehow manage to get to an executive level. And maybe a handful of very specialized very well funded companies.

They don't account for revenue from outside the stores. Apple technically doesn't allow purchases to happen outside its stores, in practice that has always been a bit of a grey area, but in any case that revenue is not disclosed to Apple and therefore cannot affect the rankings in any way.

As for the calculations, Apple updates roughly every six hours and I think (the algorithms not being public for a good reason, I have no real proof), they take into account the total sum revenue during the last period, but also use the relative delta revenue as a factor, so even with slightly lower revenue a suddenly popular app can appear higher in the rankings.

They also seem to change the algorithms every once in a while, we've seen pretty drastic changes overnight a few times, eventually though the top apps always normalize around the usual suspects, so it's possible that they just do some sort of reset of historical data that also affect rankings.

> Do you visualize the shape of the word "bee"

Not sure about Chinese, it is supposedly much more phonetic, but the Japanese unquestionably do visualize words to the point where they on occasion are absolutely dumbfounded by words that are just slightly out of context and unless you tell them what kanji you meant they won't be able to easily associate pronounced words to meanings. In my opinion this is so deeply ingrained that society and language subtly changed in a way to alleviate the embarassment from misunderstandings paradoxically by making the already highly context sensitive language vague while also placing the responsibility of interpretation (but at the same time also allowing for some generous amount of flexibility) on the listener. The result - in my opinion - is a spoken language that is in a way tangibly insufficient for _practical_ dissemination of information exactly because of this constant need for visualization.

You can find the same thing in written language where writing words just in the phonetic alphabet renders it completely unreadable without the symbology. In return having the words rendered in the logography frees the mind from having to visualize and is performing much better as a coduit for information dissemination (with the small caveat that the spoken language already changed to include the various ambiguities)

In the end, while you don't necessarily visualize the image of a bee or the shape of the _phonetic_ spelling of the be, you do visualize the placeholder character for bee. (BTW interestingly, I don't think there is a separate word for bee and wasp in japanese, so naturally there is no difference perceived)

A lot of people think that and personally as someone fluent in Japanese (as a second, well rather something like fourth, language) I also sort of feel the same way. However if you look at it without the learned biases, there is a great example where a country with fairly similar language in terms of grammar and sounds that had used to use chinese characters switched to a phonetic alphabet and are not noticeably worse off for it: Korea.

Generally they are kept very clean and the photo is not at all unrealistic. The cultural norm is to never litter, instead if necessary trash is taken home with you to dispose of for example.

That said, what might contribute to the cleanliness in the photo though is that it was possibly taken after the last train (all trains stop after around midnight), so it's not unlikely the stairs are exceptionally clean because they had just been cleaned before.

On a slightly unrelated note regarding having to be vacuumed constantly, the stairs being clean and the extremely low rate of unemployment in japan might not be unrelated, and on topic it might also not be unrelated to the prevalence of sleeping in situations that would be utterly unacceptable in other countries, such as meetings :)

Cookpad used to have a lot of foreigners and was considered to be one of the best places to work. From what I heard that has changed about two years ago, now most of the foreigners are gone and what's left is a fairly normal Japanese company with all the cultural aspects that that entails.

To me the average level of developers at most companies I know is just heart-breaking, many times they don't seem to be thinking on the right abstraction levels and instead treat development as something you just persevere through by pure exercise of will (which is of course exactly what you are rewarded for: put in long hours, results don't actually matter as long as you try your best, onboarding/training is limited to manners, how to clean the whiteboard and how to water the plants (not joking), your university education/diploma is considered worthless, hence why lots of people suddenly become "software engineers" with a law degree or a biology degree or an english major degree because tech jobs generally pay better). In the end in my opinion the prevalent culture/values are just not very conducive to becoming better at software (although it kind of works in hardware and on the outside definitely appears to work in services).

Considering how long English has been mandatory and what the average level of English proficiency actually is, it might be a little too early to be overly optimistic. The potential is there, but it will depend mostly on the execution and based on current experience I wouldn't expect too much.

In my experience Japanese site are way more cluttered than Chinese sites. Even with the large number of links and pictures Chinese sites look more organized and designed where Japanese sites are just a plain mess. My theory is that Japanese writing relies on the comparatively simple hiragana for "grammar" (not to go too deep into the topic) in addition to the complex chinese characters. As such it gives the text a kind of weird rhythm without which it is pretty difficult for them to read text (only presenting hiragana loses the meaning while only presenting kanji would be very hard to skim) As a result even when somewhat deliberately designed, the end result seems like a jumbled mess of characters with varying contrast randomly flowing together. Additionally words that would for example appear in a menu are of either writing system and as a result of varying length, thus difficult to align.

Combine this with the sofware industry here being absolutely driven by incompetence ("as long as you shut up and work hard [= long hours] you are a good employee") in most places you get no willingness to risk changing the status quo that is stuck in the late 90's.

Compared to that Chinese sites look pretty refined to me, with the same sort of characters of usually very similar length and while there is no whitespace the contrast between characters is much less varied and looks much more pleasant in my opinion. I can see contemporary patterns are also used a lot more too which suggest China in general is more aware of and willing to incorporate the latest trends. Taobao vs Rakuten might be a good example. Yahoo US vs CN vs JP (the latter run completely by Yahoo Japan and has nothing to do with actual Yahoo anymore) is another.

Code search is available - if somewhat hidden. Add /search to the end of the repository url on github (eg. https://github.com/rails/rails/search ).

This is pretty neat (even if not realtime :))

I'd really love to know where the data is coming from.

I played[1] with a similar idea a few months ago creating a simple visualization just for fun that is more like a timelapse of the "veins of tokyo" and was curious about the distribution of trains during the day. In my case, I just scraped the tokyo metro site's timetables, but it's quite a bit of work to fit the data (identify the trains with rapid/semi-rapid trains that skip stations, etc) - it's still not easy to know when a train would be waiting at a station, the best I could have done is guess from the average time between stations, which also does vary throughout the day. Eventually only a few lines made it in.

[1] http://zaki.asia/metro

Hi, I added shift counting to Mahdi's code a while ago: (https://github.com/zaki/Keyboard-Heatmap-1), so it should be easy to generate more correct heatmaps (in multiple keyboard layouts too) if you are interested.