pwim

Here in Japan, I've never been to a place where you don't flush your toilet paper. In fact, they sometimes run into the opposite problem, with tourists not knowing you're supposed to flush the paper (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/08/26/national/kyoto-...). Part of this might be because you're not supposed to flush sanitary napkins or anything but toilet paper, so there's often a bin next to the toilets for disposing of those, which I could see as confusing to someone who comes from a culture where you don't flush toilet paper.

It sucks to hear you've been getting one year renewals. Unfortunately when it comes to bureaucracy here in Japan, things are on a case by case basis, so its hard to make any sweeping judgements. As a counterpoint, I came here on a working holiday visa (6 months) and found a job at a Japanese startup. When I renewed my visa, I switched to an Engineer visa and got a three year one.

Mid-way through that three year visa, I quit, and created a consulting company. After consulting with an immigration lawyer, I was told it was "probably ok" to be the director of a company on an Engineering visa, so long as the primary thing I was doing was Engineering related. When my three year visa expired, I successfully had my own company sponsor it, and got another three year one, followed by a five year one. Last year, I successfully got PR here.

Its hard to say why you're continually getting one year visa renewals. If you're not already doing it, it could be worth having an immigration lawyer submit the application on your behalf. Because it was a cheap business expense (~80,000 JPY) compared to the cost of screwing something minor up, that's what I did for every renewal I did under my own company (for PR, I did it myself though).

I'd argue that Japan has a relatively friendly policy for skilled immigrants. To get a job as a developer here, all you need is a company that's willing to sponsor your visa and a university degree in a related field. As far as I'm aware, there's no onus on the company to prove they couldn't get a Japanese to fill the position, or quotas on the number of visas like there are in other countries (US for instance).

Furthermore, a great thing about Japanese working visas are that they aren't tied to a specific company, only the field of work (which they've made broader by combining several statuses into the Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services visa category). This means once you have a visa here, you can easily switch jobs, and even if your company was to lay you off or you were to quit, you don't immediately need to return to your country.

What's more, Japan's introduced a points based system to give preferential treatment to highly skilled professionals. While the points they give create a bias towards someone coming from academia or working at a large well paying job, it makes it theoretically possible to get PR here without being married to a Japanese citizen after one year.

There are a lot of problems with Japan. I agree with you that the trainee visa is one big one. The lack of being able to get a clear answer about immigration status issues also makes it challenging, and encourages you to take a certain amount of risk in stepping into a grey area legally, which I understand will hold some people back. But for me personally, and other foreign entrepreneurs around me, it has made it possible to transition from being an employee to entrepreneur with relatively little investment compared to what is required in other countries.

If anyone is interested in more detail about transitioning from an engineer to entrepreneur here, I've written more about my experience here: http://www.tokyodev.com/2014/04/17/creating-company-japan/.

Having lived here a decade, I consider it my home. While I’ll never be considered Japanese, I do find acceptance in society here.

Japanese society classifies people as insiders or outsiders. The key I’ve found is to become active in some community where you can become an insider. For instance, I’ve been active in the Japanese Ruby community where I’ve found acceptance.

In Tokyo it is possible to get a job as a software developer without speaking Japanese. After living here a couple years someone decides they like life here, but want to run their own business. Maybe they want to run a SaaS or something that targets a global audience. For visa purposes, they need a Japanese company.

By this time they’ve maybe picked up up some basic Japanese but aren’t fluent. Becoming fluent in a language is quite challenging, especially if you’re working full time in an English language environment. Even without fluency, it’s possible to enjoy life here.

Almost all participants are English speakers. Typically 70 or so of the participants are non-Japanese.

The linked article looks like SEO spam to me. There's no sources and the article looks like it's a rehash of Linus's wikipedia page. Given that his employer is the Linux Foundation, I'd be surprised if they were paying him $10 million per year, especially as it looks like only in 2015 did their salary expenses even exceed $10 million (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...).

The author of the post agrees with you that library code is different:

> I should mention that almost all of my open source projects have 100% code coverage. This is because most of my open source projects are smaller libraries and tools that are reusable in many different situations (a breakage could lead to a serious problem in a lot of consuming projects) and they’re relatively easy to get 100% code coverage on anyway.

Your pricing is way too cheap, and makes it hard to take seriously. As a business, there is no difference between $5 and $15 per month (and if someone tells you differently, you don’t want their business).

According to the article, more than half the states have no firm minimum age for marriage. For many states, it is below the age of consent. In some states, statutory rape is not considered such if the partners are married. It seems that the laws need an overhaul like you say, to bring in line with age of consent at least.

One of the first guidelines, "Assume no malice", is one I take to heart, and wish it was applied by people here to this announcement.

Maybe you've never experienced any problems with the open source community. Personally, I know I never had. Even if most of us have positive experiences, there are some people who don't. These guidelines are trying to make it so less people have a bad experience in the future.

Having community guidelines doesn't kill a community. Hacker News itself has guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and I don't think we've suffered because of it. While the language of GitHub's guidelines is different, the goals seem very much the same.

Let's assume that GitHub is acting in good faith here, and trying to make things better for the community.

1) Subdomains. If you're app utilises subdomains, you need to use a TLD.

2) Integration with development tools like http://pow.cx/ or https://github.com/puma/puma-dev allow you to automatically startup and shutdown apps. This is useful when you're juggling multiple apps.

3) Security. Using a standard domain/port for local development opens you up to exploits like http://benmmurphy.github.io/blog/2016/07/11/rails-webconsole...

Previously I thought hiring diversity for diversity's sake didn't make sense, and hiring should be based solely on "merit". After all, as a company, you want to hire the best people.

However, since then, I have found there is research that indicates diverse groups can be more advantageous than homogenous groups of highly talented people [1], [2]. So from this perspective, striving for diversity makes economic sense.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full

[2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-make...

If you require a visa to visit a country where you need a visa, I would suggest contacting the organiser for an invitation letter. Organisers of international conferences are used to getting this kind of inquiry, and know how to deal with it. I have the feeling if the author had been able to produce an invitation letter in the beginning, he would have been much more likely to be able to attend the conference.

While there are many companies in Japan where people do work a ton of overtime, there are also companies where people work little to no overtime. For instance, I'm currently doing consulting for a Japanese start up where most people leave around the official clock out time, and I've been one of the last to leave an hour after it.

Software developers in Japan have traditionally been undervalued, as it has been seen as a job as anyone can do with a little training. This has meant while there have been some really great Japanese software developers, there have been many more totally incompetent ones, bringing down the average level of software developers here.

In recent years though, there's been a mini-boom of startups here. These startups realise the value of talented developers, and are trying to attract them through hirer salary and better working conditions. While the pay isn't as good as the US (the weak yen makes them look even lower) and the working conditions aren't as good as Europe, things are defiantly heading in the right direction.

If you are someone who's been wanting to work as a developer in Japan, I've put together some resources here: http://www.tokyodev.com/jobs/

For some interesting insight into why trade agreements are negotiated in secret, listen to this planet money episode: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/26/417851577/episo....

Part of the problem of any trade deal is that you'll end up pissing off one group at home to make another one more happy. Trade negotiators argue they need to have the deals be negotiated in secret or special interest groups will cause too much noise and trade deals will never get done.

Are your top customers really only paying you $97/month? Seems like you could charge them substantially more money.

As someone who has a startup with a multilingual web service (English / Japanese), I normally tell people considering translating their service to hold off as long as possible.

Going from have a unilingual website to a multilingual one slows everything down. Now whenever you make a change to one of the strings in your app, you need to wait to have it translated before you can deploy a new version.

Furthermore, merely translating your service isn't enough, you need to localise it. To do this, you (or someone else) needs to understand your target market. This isn't something you can outsource (cheaply at least).

Finally, adding another language to your application means you need to do customer support in that language. This means the founders can no longer do support themselves, and you'll need to rely on a third party instead.

Think carefully before going down the multilingual path.

If they are sharing an account, they aren't really cheating - your application just isn't providing them any benefits to have multiple users.

If you find a large percentage of accounts are shared, then maybe you should take a look at revising your pricing and segmenting on something else. Alternatively, you could look at adding functionality that makes having multiple user accounts more useful than just sharing one.

If it is just a few accounts, it's probably not worth your time worrying about it.

In my experience, bots don't execute JavaScript (yet).

I add a hidden "spam" field to the form. When the form is submitted, I use Javascript to remove it. If the field is still present when sending to the server, flag the entry as spam. This has blocked all spam bots for us.

It's hard to come up with concrete numbers, but here's a unscientific survey I did: http://www.tokyodev.com/2014/02/13/japanese-developer-salary...

If you are doing web development in Tokyo, your salary is probably between ¥400,000 and ¥800,000 per month.

If you are interested in working as a developer in Japan, it's a topic I've written about a bunch: http://www.tokyodev.com/jobs/

One thing you might be clear is whether the positions are for English speakers living in Japan, or if they are open to developers worldwide.

In my experience, most companies where Japanese isn't necessary still prefer people to already be in Japan, as bringing someone from abroad is seeing as more risky, as even if the candidate ends up liking the company, they still might not like life in Japan.

My criteria for a cofounder would be someone who has complimentary skills, and that I think has a good chance of being a successful entrepreneur.

Sharing interests might be a nice secondary thing, but I would start with the kind of person you're looking for first.

For website content (landing pages, articles, etc), you want it to work without Javascript so that crawlers index it properly.

For web applications where you don't care about content being indexed, I wouldn't worry about it being a javascript only application (and this is the direction lots of apps are heading with frameworks like Ember.js, Angular.js, and Meteor).

Wow, that's amazingly low. Especially because I'm guessing most of these transactions are just mixing services. I wonder how much represent actual transfers of wealth between individuals? I would guess less than 1K per day, which would make it incredibly low compared to all the hype bitcoin has got.

Heroku only has two regions, Europe and US. Many applications not targetting the American market are still hosted on the US region. For instance, I live in Japan, and all the heroku applications I know of are hosted in the US region. Additionally, as I understand it, most of Heroku's resources are used by a small number of large, international services, who's usage times don't necessarily correspond to USA hours.

If I search Vancouver and Python, this is the first result: http://www.meetup.com/vanpyz/ The next event is this Wednesday.

The organizers of that event probably know of companies in Vancouver who are looking for Python developers. You could also comb the attendee list and try to figure out what companies they are working for, as they'll probably be using Python.

GitHub has an enterprise plan where you can run it behind your firewall.

With a payment gateway, processing billions of dollars per year is still peanuts. For instance, PayPal processed $52 billion in Q4 2013.

Someone bought the domain for SEO purposes. The article about "how to get [his] wife a bit more excited about ‘adult’ activities" mentions he "found this other site about attracting women called The Attraction Institute", which just happens to be selling an ebook about how to attract women.