kohsuke

Personally, I don't feel all that strongly that we are collectively getting it wrong, certainly not to the extent of getting a domain name just for that! I think most developers do indeed talk to their users, and they rather enjoy doing it, too. I've once worked in a place where developers are more detached from users, but that was an exception, not a norm.

There's also a difference between the opinion of one user vs the collective opinions of users as a whole. In most software these are conflicting goals. For example, iOS can't just add random features willy-nilly to satisfy an individual's feedback. So the product management needs to come in between developers and users to aggregate user demands. You'll have to make everyone a little bit unhappy to make users collectively happier. One of the reasons I like extensible software is that those two goals are no longer conflicting. Hopefully you know what I mean when you see Jenkins (http://jenkins-ci.org/)

I do share the joy of "caring about your users," there's something very special in knowing this one person/user, understanding his/her needs, solving it, and making him/her happy. We obviously do that through software, but this drive is universal.

Being from Japan, I have a few thoughts in this area:

* A significant percentage of music is still only available on CD, and not in digital media. Until recently, music from one company (say Sony) was only available from their digital music store, which had their own player app with their own DRM. These things create significant inconvenience to the consumers, hindering the adoption of digital music.

* The music industry in Japan came up with a brilliant business model that enabled them to sell the same CD multiple times to the same consumer, basically by bundling a ticket to each CD. Sometimes a single ticket grants you one vote, sometimes you get one piece of (say 12) tickets randomly and you need to complete all 12 pieces to get something. This forces loyal fans to buy 10s and sometimes 100s of the same CD.

It's not like people are carrying around portable CD players any more, so these factors obviously creates a rapidly diminishing music fan base. I still hope that eventually the decline in the CD business will force the industry to wholy embrace the digial music, but I'm not holding my breath.

I keep zooming in and there's some story that's happening in these images.

Nope. See their FAQ https://support.google.com/ime/japanese/answer/166771?hl=ja which states otherwise.

A Japanese here. I think this article fell into the same trap that many other similar articles fell into. Namely, in trying to make the article interesting, it attributes more to the culture and psyche, ignoring more mandane logical reasons.

One of the primary reasons houses depreciate in value so rapidly in Japan is simply because that is the accounting rules. If you look at http://www1.m-net.ne.jp/k-web/genkasyokyaku/genka-tatemono.h... (and I hope Google Translate translates it well), you see that the typical wooden houses (the kinds you see in California, where I live) depreciate competely in just 20 years in the eyes of tax agency. This has real effect on mortgage.

The rules around the market are different, too. For example, in California most houses are sold and bought as-is. In Japan, the seller is on the hook for up to an year for problems that weren't discovered at the point of sale.

These differences depress the existing house market, and that is made up by the new house market, which in turn translates into a lot more new houses.

I find this report from Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism highly educational. It comes with lots of numbers: http://www.mlit.go.jp/common/001002572.pdf more

By the way, it is "Jenkins", not "Jenkin".

Man, this is not how we wanted to be on Hacker News...

This demo is great, so I hate to be a party pooper, but this is not how it'll look if you are actually travelling near the speed of light at all!

For example, you'd see stars concentrate more near the direction you are heading with substantial blue shift, and not a whole lot on your side.

At the subjective speed in this demo, the blue shift would be so much and the light cone so narrow that you'll probably just see one dot in the center and pitch black everything else.

I think a physically accurate depiction of how it'll actually look if you are traveling near the speed of light would be very cool.

Thanks. These are interesting (and the difference between Georgia and California is far greater than I would have thought.)

If anyone is interested, http://www.hi-ho.ne.jp/taku77/papers/thes595.htm provides a reasonably comprehensive but short enough coverage of what the moral education subject looks like in Japan.

No, the article has nothing to do with the US. It's just that it got me thinking because I live in the US, that's all. Wherever you live, you take certain things for granted. Being an immigrant, I've been interested in finding things that I took for granted, and this article helped me find one, that is the moral education as a teaching subject in school.

And you are right, I take back the "political topics" part.

I also didn't know that "most schools in the US have something similar." This is from a parent of a 2nd grader in California --- I guess I better pay more attention on what my kid is learning, eh? What is this subject called in the US? I'd love to find out more about what that teaches and what that doesn't.

Wrt "not up to individual states", my understanding is that the states are responsible for the K-12 education curriculum, and so if there's moral education in K-12, I'd assume the state education board controls what goes in there. Am I wrong on this?

I was educated in Japan, and we did (and still do) have the moral education as one of the subjects in the elementary school. I never thought anything of it until now, but I can easily see that such a subject would be highly controversial in the US or in Hong Kong.

Just FYI, Wwat they teach you in that subject is more or less common sense stuff (apologize if you wronged someone, protect elders and smaller children, be nice to your friends, and so on), and the separation of state and church should still serve as a safe guard against introduction of any religious/politiacal topics. So it's not like you get indoctroinated, but then again, I'm not sure if I trust some states in the US to maintain that separation properly...