pwim

There’s plenty of things that are valuable for society while still not having significant financial value.

Saying that the Japanese people deserved it comes off as hateful. Not every Japanese person was complicit. Like I think it was pretty clear Japanese children were innocent casualties.

In Japan, you pay by the person when it comes to hotels. Some will give you a slight discount for the second person. Others won’t.

Unfortunately transit operators are looking to discontinue the use of these IC cards in favour of QR codes as part of a cost saving strategy: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241015/p2a/00m/0bu/01...

I'm confused about it to. I suggested some possibilities in the "How did it get locked in the first place?" of the article.

Yes, I was kicking myself for not putting a sticker on it. I didn't mention it in the article, but I was going through security with my young child, so it was a bit of a hectic situation to begin with.

Unfortunately, this wasn't covered by the travel insurance that goes along with my credit card.

I didn't purchase additional travel insurance, and I'm in the fortunate position that I can eat the cost of a replacement, so it probably isn't worth it.

I'm in Japan. From what I've heard, chargebacks are nearly impossible to initiate here. Besides, I bought it with a corporate debit card, so it wasn't an option either.

With small claims court, I doubt my Japanese fluency is sufficient, and researching how to go about it would take more time than it is worth.

The article was worth my time because it makes others aware of the situation.

I didn't set up "Find My". The connection with the Activation Lock wasn't obvious to me.

The main thing Apple emphasizes is that you can recover a missing device. But it wasn't obvious to me how that would work without an internet connection (unlike with an iPhone where I have a data plan).

Protecting unwanted disclosure of data is different than preventing the erasing of a device, which is where I'm stuck.

The serial number matches mine. I suppose they could have scratched it off and repainted it, but that seems doubtful.

I started blogging about developer events I was attending in Japan back in 2010. As I was the only one writing about it in English, the content naturally ranked well.

That led a fellow Canadian to my blog, who asked how I found a job here. My email back to him started to get pretty long, and so I turned it into an article for the blog.

That article attracted more people looking for developer jobs in Japan, so I started collecting their email addresses as I occasionally came across developer job opportunities that didn’t require Japanese.

After about a year of this, I heard a company had made a successful hire through the list, and so I started charging companies.

From there, the business organically expanded, until I was working with many of the major tech companies in Japan.

It’s now a business generating a life-changing amount of income. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t of started blogging with no real intent other than to share what I was learning.

As someone living in Japan, this doesn’t strike me as something locals would complain about. Heck, my Japanese in-laws did a week long van camping trip last year, and I think they’d be impressed with this person’s setup.

I’ve been on the opposite side of this, being a native English speaker working in Japan.

I’d talk to your manager about it, but focus on your feelings of exclusion rather than proposing any specific solutions. It’s certainly natural to feel what you’re feeling.

But I’d also recognize that an “English only” policy is also going to have downsides for your team. At the very least the member who’s struggling in English will be put into a similar position to you, but it might also lead to the other Mandarin members just talking less altogether.

There are also things you can do to help foster communication. Even if you’re a fluent speaker of a language, group discussions can be challenging - often by the time you’ve formulated your thoughts it’s already moved on. One on one communication is much easier, so you could go out of your way to make opportunities for it. Pair programming, for instance, can work even when your pair isn’t a fluent speaker.

Google has been encouraging job boards to add structured data to job postings: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure.... LinkedIn is presumably using this data to pull the postings in.

The thing I’m most interested in isn’t in this article nor the source it cites: how was the tweet itself reported or discovered by the authorities in the first place?

That’s not the case in my experience. I’ve been living in Japan since 2006 and can’t recall seeing an iPod in forever.

Radiolab did an interesting piece on gender and sports a couple years back. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dutee

Gender is a nuanced thing, and there's no way to definitively divide people into the male and female categories.

The episode explores the story of Dutee Chand, a professional sprinter who for a time was not allowed to compete as a women due to her hyperandrogenism, a condition that leads to unusually high levels of testosterone.

While the broken windows theory was popular in the past, the research doesn’t support it: https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...

The History of Japanese Economic Development: Origins of Private Dynamism and Policy Competence (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075FX5X5J/) is the best source I found. As the author wrote it to help government officials from developing countries apply lessons from Japan's historical economic development, it's quite an approachable textbook compared to other more academic works.

The textbook is a refined version of his previous work, "The Economic Development of Japan", which is available for free: https://www.grips.ac.jp/forum/pdf06/EDJ.pdf.

Well, potentially it can if you aren't following the regulations, and it is classified as recruiting. For instance, if your job board recommends sends recommendations to individuals to apply to a certain job based on their profile, even if this is automated, it is potentially going to be considered as recruiting, thus requiring a license. For this reason, some of the major Japanese recruiting platforms, such as Wantedly, which offers a LinkedIn like social network around job hunting, has obtained a recruitment license, though they aren't doing what we would traditionally think of as recruitment.

In the UK, recruiters actually used to be licensed, but this requirement was largely removed in the 1970s. In researching my other article on recruiting in Japan (https://www.tokyodev.com/2020/10/01/recruiting-in-japan/), I discovered that there was a movement globally to move to ban, or at least license, private recruiting world wide as part of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. The concern then was more that recruiters could be quite shady, to the point that it was sometimes hard to distinguish them from human traffickers.

Licensing in Japan at least is isn't about ensuring the recruiter has knowledge of the field. Rather, it is to ensure that they meet privacy requirements and are not a fly-by-night business. They include having a minimum amount of assets, have a physical office with a separate room to interview candidates, and appointing a "privacy representative" who has completed a training seminar.

Personally, I think trying to ensure that a recruiter has knowledge of a field would be quite challenging to do via licensing, especially in an area like tech where the field evolves so rapidly.

Match Group owns and operates several online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, and PlentyOfFish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group

From the article, the question asked was "Would you rather the police spend more time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently spend in your area?", and was "administered by web in English and conducted as part of the newly launched Gallup Center on Black Voices". There's more information on how Gallup conducts polls more generally here: https://www.gallup.com/174158/gallup-panel-methodology.aspx.

To be pedantic, Mt. Fuji's is called Fujisan in Japanese (the character 山 can be read as yama or san).

According to this article (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/12/national/scienc...), Japan doesn’t currently have the capacity to test everyone.

Any hiring process will by definition favour certain kinds of candidates at the expense of others. Having a week long paid trial is a great way for the company to be less conservative about who they try out, but will also mean they’ll miss out on candidates who are already employed and unwilling to take time off or quit their job to participate in it. In the end though, if they can tap into an undervalued candidate pool though, they should come put ahead.

With Japan's incarceration rate of 41 per 100,000 people, one of the lowest in the world, your chance of being falsely convicted is exceedingly low (as only a very small percentage of the population is convicted of crimes, wrongly or otherwise).

Stripe has built a type checker for Ruby that they're using internally. I don't think it has been released yet, but you can get a preview of it at https://sorbet.run/.

Technically there is no law requiring there to be a shutter sound, but rather a standard practice that all Japanese mobile phones implement.

Interestingly, sometimes the system is used for future dates. For instance, my drivers license expires in September of H.31, which I guess will never happen now.