shawnps

Come visit Tokyo. Most of the people I know do not own a car. The train is the most popular form of commute. I either walk to my destination, or walk to the nearest train station to get there. It certainly does not have the same garbage system as described in the article, though :)

Ah, I think I get it. When searching for the term "shin" for example, it would ignore any English definition matches such as shin guard, and only match Japanese terms containing it, like 心配.

I understand what you mean; I've been studying Japanese for five years now and learned hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks of class. I have always told new learners to do that first as you rarely see romaji used in Japan.

Do you mean that on jisho you always use the Japanese search box?

User hermanschaaf and I live in Japan and set out to build a fast Japanese dictionary: http://nihongo.io

Source is here: http://github.com/gojp

Take a look if you have time, feature requests are very welcome :)

Thanks for pointing this out. I've been working on a text extractor in Go at work and tried for a long time to get UnRTF working with RTF files containing Japanese characters to no avail. This lib lists catdoc as the extractor they use for RTF, so I'm going to give that a try.

Edit: Looks like catdoc doesn't work with RTF files containing Japanese characters either. Might end up having to use libreoffice or something like that.

Nuclear anything is controversial in Japan recently because of the earthquake. Japan is also under the "nuclear umbrella" of the US on the condition that Japan will not produce nuclear weapons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_umbrella

I once talked to someone from GitHub who said that the way he sells people on TDD is to show them the tests running automatically when they save a file. I thought this was a pretty neat idea, and have used it on a couple of projects. If you write Go for example, you can run fswatch . "clear && go test" in your project's folder and get this result.

Do you mean the author is reinventing the wheel because this already exists in other programming languages, or because there are many existing GUI libraries like this in Go already? It's likely there are many people who are most comfortable writing Go recently so I don't understand how this is a problem.

Looks like atomic will be the default in 1.3 for this reason: http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.3#gocmd

A code review tool specifically for Golang projects based on many of the contribution guidelines listed here http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html

A few months ago when I made some contributions to Go I realized I like their code review process and tools much more than the typical GitHub PR workflow.

I noticed that whenever people recommended a movie, book, or album to me, I would take out my iPhone and write it down in a note. This resulted in a lot of notes containing various recommendations people had made to me. I decided to make an app that would let me organize those recommendations.

Client libraries for the APIs are here:

https://github.com/shawnps/rt https://github.com/shawnps/gr https://github.com/shawnps/sp

Thanks. This has been requested before, but I didn't want to show romaji since it's generally considered a bad habit to learn Japanese with romaji (the "correct" way being to learn hiragana and katakana as soon as possible). But since people want it, we'll likely add it as an option.

My friend and I live in Japan and built a simple Japanese dictionary. It's not much but we recently hit 800 unique visitors in a month :) Feedback welcome, and the code is open source: https://github.com/gojp/nihongo

I used to use my credit card almost every day in America, but now that I'm in Japan I don't even have any credit cards. A lot of places don't accept them, so I just use cash everywhere. The one card I have is a bank card that I use to withdraw money from ATMs, mainly at 7-Eleven. I don't really like having to buy gift cards to use on Amazon, but it's just a minor annoyance.

Yup. When my mom came to visit me, she came back to my apartment one night and said, "you'll never believe what I just saw." I already knew what she was going to say, it was that she saw a homeless guy pull his pants down in broad daylight next to a trash can to relieve himself.

Ah, that's unfortunate. The other thing that drives me crazy is the fact that no one will give me a credit card here. I understand that I have no credit history in Japan, but can't they at least give me a crappy ~$500 limit card to start with or something? I've applied to probably 10-15 cards and have been rejected every time.

My theory on why a lot of these things happen is that the companies or establishments have been burned by foreigners too many times in the past. For example, SoftBank does a background check when you try to open a cell phone plan with them. They don't tell you what they're checking, but if you fail the check, you have to pay for the phone up front instead of paying monthly. I'm guessing a lot of people came here for half a year or a year, opened up the contract, then left the country without paying.

I've also heard that getting an apartment is quite tough as well, but I had no trouble going through an agent and I got my first choice. You have to pay an exorbitant amount of money to move in (guarantor fee, key money, first month's rent, agency fee) but that's not really a foreigner-only thing. If I had known someone in Japan who would have been willing to pay my last month's rent if I flew back home without mentioning anything, then I wouldn't have needed the guarantor service.

Hmm, I don't think so, I was only able to get 3 different pictures because I ended up moving. Here it is, for the record (warning: poo) http://sfdisgusting.tumblr.com/

I've had a very similar experience to what you mentioned with the hotel. Another student and I were totally lost in a train station, and we said "excuse me" to a guy before realizing he was on his cell phone. We felt bad for almost interrupting his phone call, so we were about to ask another person, but the guy immediately ended his call, went down the elevator with us to the platform, walked us onto the train, and pointed out the station we wanted to go to on the map.

Could you elaborate on the scammers? I can imagine maybe someone asking you where you're going, then saying "oh, it costs 300 yen to go there, let me buy your tickets for you," when it actually only costs 150 and he keeps the change. Was it something like that?

I don't mean to defend Tokyo to the death because every place has its good and bad points, but I have to say I've never once seen a "no foreigner" sign or higher prices for foreigners here. In fact, I've only seen lower prices for foreigners but those would be for things like English language exchange events.

The short story is I work at Gengo (http://gengo.com/), based in Shibuya.

The long story is I took a Japanese class a bit randomly in college (my favorite CS professor suggested that we broaden our interests by taking some liberal arts courses). I studied here in 2010, then came for a vacation in 2012, and by then I realized I'd like to live here so I applied to Gengo.

Japan didn't make it to the top 15, but it was listed in there as number 1 safest. I've been living in Japan for a few months now and I have to say, after living in SF for enough time to start a Tumblr of human feces I had found out in the open, I'm really happy with the safety and cleanliness of Tokyo.

I also hear stories all the time of people getting their belongings back after having forgotten them or misplacing them. For example, a coworker told me that he had accidentally left his Macbook Air on the train. He realized this after getting off of the train and the doors had already closed, so he stood on the platform in the exact same spot and waited for the same train to loop back around. The laptop was right where he had left it.

Aside from that, the service here is so good to the point that I want to tip everyone like 30% but there isn't even a tipping culture here. And the price that you see on the menu is the price you pay. And they often either have pictures of the food on the menu, or wax sculptures of the food out front.

Oh and convenience stores are actually convenient, and clean. I remember walking into 7/11 here and expecting it to be filthy, but it was so clean that it actually hurt my eyes.

Anyway, Japan is a really pleasant place to live and I hope Americans pick up on some of the conveniences that people here have (PS: heated toilet seats all over the place!)

> If you want others to see the benefit, I'd encourage you to pick a specific area of the code, test the hell out of it, and make sure that a) tests are easy and quick to run on dev boxes, and b) every checkin is automatically tested. I'd start small, and one good place is a chunk of important business logic. It's even better if you use the tests to support refactoring and general cleanup of an area people know is messy.

Ah, this is really good advice, thanks. I'll give it a shot.

Oh cool, I've used Travis pretty extensively and didn't know about this feature yet. Thanks!

That sounds really awesome!

I'm guessing I'll just have to sit down one day and write a whole bunch of tests, and then hope that everyone else will see the benefit.

So you mean everyone just pushed directly to the upstream master?

We used a very similar model to this at my last job, and I'm struggling to get my current team on board with this type of process. I think the main problem is that people don't trust continuously deploying master because there aren't enough tests. In my ideal world, every commit is tested (with Jenkins, Travis, Buildbot, etc), and then if the PR includes tests for the code and the build passes, the reviewer says LGTM and the committer presses the merge button on GitHub. Once the button is pushed, a build of master is triggered. If the build passes, the code is automatically deployed.

Interesting, I live in Japan too and use Line often, but have never received any requests of this sort. Sounds really annoying, but luckily it seems that no one I know actually plays those games.

Is this what you mean (under Historical estimates)? http://www.google.org/flutrends/about/how.html

I'm so glad Go removes these sort of nitpicky style problems with gofmt. At first I was bothered by how gofmt makes things line up like this, but now I prefer no style guide and a tool that formats stuff for you.

I'm using vim with the vim plugins that come in go/misc/vim. I use :Import and :Drop for adding and removing imports, and :Fmt to run gofmt in vim. I also have a git pre-commit hook that runs gofmt.

Gotcha! I'll have to check out Black Sands, too.