yutopia

This is super interesting:

http://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/news/detail/?id=278

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0034...

Apparently he showed his "rotating snake" image to a neural network trained to predict upcoming video frames, it also "saw" the illusory motions.

Not quite sure what you’re getting at, I never said there were no differences between cultures.

However the differences are often overstated, and with regards to Japanese culture some people seem to harbor strange preconceptions that make them blind to rather obvious falsehoods, leading to debacles like the New Yorker article described in OP. It goes both ways of course; a lot of Japanese people seem to have bizarre ideas about the US for example, perhaps I would too if I hadn’t lived there for a decade. It’s easy to form a skewed image of Americans if your knowledge only came from Hollywood films.

I’d say that in general, the more years you spend immersed in cultures outside of your own, the more you’ll be able to see beneath the surface and appreciate how similar we all are — for better or worse. Just look at the number of comments in this thread from (presumably) Western expats pointing out how "ordinary" Japan is in reality. That realization comes from actually living here and being directly exposed to the culture. Not from watching anime.

If we set aside superficial differences such as language and mannerisms, I never thought we're all that different from Americans, Germans, etc. — we're just humans living in the same modern, capitalistic world. Maybe we were different in the feudal era, but not anymore.

But very few people have the ability to overcome those superficial differences.

Yes! Just checked, and the most popular model on kakaku.com (Japanese price comparison site) right now is around $300. Ours was around $400, maybe not the best but we're pretty satisfied with it.

"Fuzzy" rice cookers have been around for decades, I (and my parents, and pretty much everyone I know) have always regarded it as a marketing slogan.

That's not to say high-end rice cookers aren't worth it, there's a world of difference between a $100 and $500 rice cooker. Not sure how best to explain this, but rice from a cheap cooker looks and feels like a dense, gooey chunk, whereas rice from a high-end cooker forms a complex, airy 3D structure with a distinctive sheen; individual grains still retain their shape, and there's ample space between them resulting in a well-defined but light texture.

A rather vague post.

> meritocracies work so well … because they produce peak performance

Does the author have any evidence for this? Supposing that this is true, does meritocracy continue to produce optimal performance in the long run? Is the author talking about meritocracy in theory, or meritocracy as practiced? What exactly does the author think should be decided through meritocracy? (College acceptance? Hiring decisions?) Does the author have any concrete recommendations, for any domain?

Huh the author claims low density living is more sustainable, but I don’t see how that’s supported by the underlying paper (Lenzen et al. 2004). It presents some interesting (albeit unsurprising) findings, e.g., energy use positively correlates with income, larger households generally require less energy per capita, etc., but it doesn’t make any statements as to whether dense or non-dense living is more preferable from an environmental standpoint.

Also, haven’t been to Australia in 15+ years but can you really make an argument either for or against dense cities by comparing different parts of Sydney? Central Tokyo is dense, NYC is dense, Singapore is dense. Sydney seemed medium density at most in comparison.

Fugu is good! Eating them as a show of bravado is a tourist thing I think (probably inspired by articles like these), here we eat them because we think they’re good. They’re in season now if you happen to be in Japan.

It’s no different from eating oyster. Sure they might kill you, but you don’t expect to be called brave for stuffing yourself at an oyster bar. You eat oysters because you like eating oysters, nothing more, nothing less. The same with fugu.

Wow this looks promising, wonder if the technique can be used to cheaply prototype optics. Stratasys has VeroClear but material properties aren’t ideal (e.g., lack of heat resistance), and injection molding is rather expensive for making a bunch of one-off prototypes.

Thanks, so Finnegans Wake is considered a modernist novel? Interesting. Totally out of my depth here but it seems so much at odds with modernist ideas in other artistic disciplines, e.g., architecture.

So Wells = modernist and Joyce = (early) postmodernist? This all looks familiar and relevant to our times, the struggle between one who believes in a shared reality and possibility of progress, and the other whose MO is to persistently challenge and deconstruct. I’ve only read Dubliners so not an expert on Joyce by any means though.

> But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong.

Perhaps not so in the 21st century, the postmodernists have won. External reality is a mirage now and we can choose from any of the countless, mutually incompatible narratives as we see fit.

So you say it wasn’t a joke, you wrote the original comment in Japanese because it was your sincere opinion and you wanted the researchers to understand.

Not sure I follow.

If that were the case you should have written in English, obviously. The paper is written in English, some of the authors have Japanese names but we don’t know if they’re native Japanese speakers, the last author (team leader) has a Chinese name, and everyone who does CS research at this level will understand English just fine.

There was an opinion piece on PNAS a few years ago that argued just that, no hard evidence though:

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/34/9384

I think the general trend of researchers becoming more media-savvy is great. But I also get the sense that researchers are increasingly choosing to work on Twitter-friendly topics (e.g., sensational, visually striking, reducible to sound bites) — whether that’s also positive I’m not so sure.

My guess is that it’s an inside joke of some kind, targeted at English speakers with some knowledge of Japanese.

When I was a kid my classmates would often ask me to teach them dirty English slangs, which they’ll say out loud in front of teachers. They got a kick out of the fact that they can say naughty things without the adults noticing.

So yeah I think it’s grade school humor, fairly innocuous stuff but kind of weird to see on HN.

Terrible grammar, but probably means something like the following:

"These guys were desperate to find hot white girlfriends, but nobody would date them so they resorted to writing this lewd software. I'd advise them to work on something useful instead."

I've found that the general rule is, if you see a Japanese-language comment on an English-language website it's most likely 1) not written by a Japanese and 2) offensive to varying degrees.

Not really, I’m not cooking anything remotely fancy and we have all sorts of technology to help us nowadays.

For example, cooking rice is simply a matter of putting rice and water into the cooker and pressing a button [1]. In the past we needed to first rinse the rice by hand.

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/04/16/reference/no-wa...

That's a good point, I cook my rice with all kinds of millet, barley, and seeds mixed in. My grandparents would probably think that's backwards, why would I eat barley when I could afford white rice.

But it's supposedly healthier (there's a famous story about how eating too much white rice crippled the Japanese navy [1]), and personally I think it tastes better too.

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...

After years of experimentation, lately I’ve decided that eating like my grandparents (i.e., eating like a traditional Japanese) is the easiest way to keep myself lean and healthy.

Traditional Japanese meals follow a standard format [1]: a bowl of rice, several small sides (which can change by the day), and an optional cup of miso soup. Sticking to this format every day can be boring, but it keeps my diet reasonably balanced without the need for conscious efforts like counting calories (which I'm too lazy to continue long-term).

[1] https://elemental.medium.com/ichiju-sansai-how-to-construct-...

I think in modern cities we have too much freedom with regard to what we eat, which is great of course but the downside is that we’ve lost a great deal of local culinary tradition, and along with it intuitive understandings of what is and what isn’t healthy eating.

Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates under the assumption that everyone acts honorably.

Perhaps that’s no longer sustainable, but what is the solution? Many of the problems with modern-day academic research can be traced back to increased scale and competition, neither of which is going away.

Huh I admit my impressions may not reflect the current state of things.

Knowing the state of English education here I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the story was true, especially seeing how the original blog post was written by a tutor in (rather rural) Fukui. I’ve never experienced anything like this myself, but some teachers truly are clueless.

However it’s quite a bit of a stretch to call these “Japanese rules for writing your ABCs”. The tweet wouldn’t have gotten 15k likes and retweets if this was a widespread occurrence or the standard way people are taught English here. It’s shocking and outrageous, that’s what made it viral.

I agree with the overall point that design is about more than looks, but my impression is that design as practiced by the IDEO / Stanford d.school / design thinking crowd is a quite different beast from what’s being taught inside most architecture schools.

The former tries to distill design into a largely linear, repeatable process (that can be peddled by consultants, if I’m being a bit cynical), the latter would characterize such approaches as reductionist and limiting.

A Japanese tweet/blog aiming to stir up outrage among the “concerned” Japanese public, being taken up by an English-language website for their latest “weird Japan” article.

Being Japanese myself I can share countless horror stories about how English is taught here, but crap article is crap.

Completely agree, it's quite shocking that powerpoint still remains the de facto standard of business communication after all these years. I'd been hoping for better presentation tools to emerge, but it seems instead we've dumbed down our communication to suit the tool.