> Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right?
I seem to recall that Wired was widely regarded poorly in the technical community as early as the turn of the millenium and that it has long been viewed as something read by non-technical folks who want to feel "plugged in" to technology.
So, I'd kind of be surprised if it was really the case that a "significant portion" of Wired's readers were engineers.
I feel like Wired goes back and forth a lot - some of their articles (on a number of topics, not just computer-related) are pleasingly technical and I've really enjoyed them, and some feel really watered down. Probably, it depends on the individual writer.
I remember reading a feature in Wired 10+ years ago about how processors were made that went into some quantum details and basically never stopped to take a breath. It was refreshing to see a publication simply assume you were smart enough to read, and thus smart enough to follow along (or look up the hard words yourself). I guess times have changed a bit.
I had the same thought when I saw that and the line "Much of this is thanks to a sweeping effort to rebuild the site using a software programming technology called Scala". I had to double check that I was reading something on wired.com. It seems even more excessively watered down than usual.
I like the word "boffin". It seems like it is used to denigrate others less frequently than similar words (including "engineer" itself, which in some circles and situations is implicitly understood to be an insult).
I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not enough to handle that ;-)
Twitter's engineering blog posted about this phenomenon last year.[1] It's not as in-depth as I'd like, but it does contain some technical/architectural details about how they scaled to deal with such high traffic.
Didn't read the article, but I did grep it for unicode and utf-8 and found no matches, so this might also be related.
Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx 2X.
Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 characters = 140 words = an article. In English, 140 characters = a short/medium sized sentence.
Sorry if this comes off negatively, but I'd like to correct some of the things you said in this comment. Chinese characters are closer to logograms than ideograms. Chinese characters are more than a representation of an idea.
The vast majority of words in Chinese and Japanese are not single characters. In fact, a very large portion of the characters cannot be used by themselves, at least in modern Japanese. Japanese is also heavily reliant on two other writing systems which are far less space-efficient. A single character of either hiragana or katakana represents only a single syllable of sound (such as か（ka),ぽ(po),し(shi),etc.). Unless your tweets were just very long noun phrases without any grammar pertaining only to things that can be written with Chinese characters (which means no modern foreign words), less efficient writing systems would be needed.
So, while Japanese may be slightly more compact due to the lack of spaces and the ability to assign a large number of sounds to a single Chinese character (such as 承る＝うけたまわる(uketamawaru)), it's still a synthetic language that can have very large conjugations (which have to be written in hiragana) and has a very unfavorable ratio of amount of meaning:syllables (partially mitigated by the use of Chinese characters).
Japanese is often encoded in Shift_JIS, which is much better than UTF-8 (for japanese text). Most browsers default to that encoding on japanese OSes, so there probably isn't a real bandwidth issue, depending on the ratio of browser to dedicated client usage.
As for ideograms, your statement is not correct. Kanjis allow for better content/character ratios, certainly, but one kanji is very often not one word - the word foreigner, for example, uses 3 ideograms.
On top of that, Japanese is not written solely with kanjis (as opposed to Chinese, for example). It also uses katakanas and hiraganas, which stand for phonems. This is more often the case on social networks where a lot of western words are used - western words are almost systematically written with katakanas.
Kanas are still more "efficient" than alphabets, but to reuse my previous example, foreigner is written using 5 kanas instead of 3 kanjis.
I know it's such a tiny point, and very much off topic, but please don't "pluralize" words such as Kanji, Katakana, etc. As someone who has spent a lot of time learning Japanese, and who knows that Japanese words don't change between singular/plural (with certain exceptions, such as attaching "-tachi" to a word), seeing you write "Kanjis" or "Katakanas" so many times in a row really bothers me.
I'll go back to my corner and leave you alone now.
It's more like the plural of 'deer' being 'deer'. I don't think I've ever heard anyone attach an 's' to 'kanji' for pluralization when speaking English. Like how it might be odd to say 'sushis' or 'wasabis'. Whenever I need to stress plurality i would say 'kanji characters' or something like that. Oxford English Dictionary lists 'sushi', 'kanji', 'shinkansen', 'katakana' all as being mass nouns or having the plural form the same as the singular. The exception in the words I looked up was 'tsunami' which may be pluralized as 'tsunami' or 'tsunamis'.
Most of those are the sorts of nouns that wouldn't normally be pluralized in English. "Sushi" is like "rice" — specifies what the roll is made of rather than the roll itself. We don't pluralize the name of a rail system like Shinkansen because there is only one of it (similarly, "the L" but not "the Ls"). But there are many Japanese loanwords that are commonly pluralized differently in English. For example, futons, tycoons, typhoons, tatamis, ninjas and kimonos.
It's ambiguous whether "kanji" is a mass noun referring to the character set as a whole or a singular noun referring to a character in the set. I think it's both. So it seems hard to blame someone for being unclear on the matter.
Eh, English has a long history of pedants insisting that the original pluralization of loanwords be used. If people are going to push for indices instead of indexes, octopodes instead of octopuses, and rooves instead of roofs, there's no reason not to use the Japanese pluralization of loanwords when appropriate.
That was not the basis of FreezerburnV's complaint, which was based on how it's done in Japanese, not English. So I don't believe SunShiranui's point is wrong. The fact that the plural of "kanji" is "kanji" in English does not establish a blanket rule that every word must be pluralized according to its language of origin. (And that is good, because pluralizing "cherry" would be a nightmare! It's an over-singularized form of the already-singular French "cherise.")
English has many anomalies and plural forms are often strange. That said, in the texts I've read, they did not add an 's' to kana, kanji, katakana or hiragana, but used them as their own plural forms.
I wouldn't have guessed that you were not a native speaker, though. You write well.
Just for information, be aware that you should not write 'softwares' or 'informations' either. Those aren't words.
So is twitter sending Shift_JIS encoded responses back? That seems unlikely given it seems easier to engineer accepting anything but always send utf-8 back, but definitely interesting if that's the case.
Also, why downvote? Even if was largely wrong, the discussion engendered was a net positive to HN.
I think twitter generates answers based on the client's Accept-Encoding header. Well, I assumed that. Come to think of it though, it does seem unlikely and you make a good point.
I did not downvote, or if I did I did not mean to, op's comment certainly did not deserve it.
No, the 140 characters don't mean 140 bytes [0]. A zigzag read seems to indicate that it's much more accepting than that: Every character is normalized to a preset format, such that combinations like é are represented in a single codepoint (and not "e plus diacritic" which would be two), and then you count the number of codepoints.
So, contrary to popular belief, the languages that could be discriminated seem to not be chinese or japanese, but languages with possible combinations on each character, such as european languages.
The 'no downtime' thing really rings true with me .. during my personal time working in Japan I found I'd become accustomed to the fact that it was just 'normal' to be going into the office after a few beers and working another shift .. to the point where, when I returned to California, it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home and - except for a few hardcore hackers - life just seeped out of the office space(s) we called a workplace. I guess the different physical characteristics of the two locations has a lot to do with it, not to mention culture - back home (at the time) in California it was not at all weird to be spending up to two hours on the commute, just sitting on the freeways in ones car, completely alone tuned into whatever bland offerings the radio waves proferred, while in Japan I don't think I had a car-ride longer than 30 minutes the whole time I was there (airport lift) .. and there is something to be said for the vital 'energy' that imbues a place like Tokyo at 9pm in the evening on a Tuesday, where most of the world is still at work. Albeit drunk, at least in a good mood, but nevertheless: still working. I got used to heading out at 10pm on any workday and feeling really alive out there in the walking streets, like there wasn't a "shutdown" period before 12am.
The takeaway of this article to me is that, to be truly successful in the International markets of the new electronic economies, one really does have to disavow oneself of cultural baggage. I think I get better at that as the years go by - but I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. Oh, how impersonal that life was ..
> I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway.
You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.
> You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.
I don't know about that .. they spent more time doing things that mattered to them - like, work, or associating with work colleagues/blowing off steam - and less time doing things that were highly destructive to their health on an immediate basis, like .. sitting in traffic for hours, being very un-social, breathing in smog.
EDIT: Is it a 'cultural downvote', or something else I said? Because my Japanese friends still don't 'get' why Americans think its so vital to have so much private time being spent 'on the road'. This is very definitely a cultural artifact, people ..
The truth is, majority of worker stay very long hours in the office, because leaving on-time gives you the notion that you are not getting enough work; hence you would be treated as you are slacking off.
Also, there's often unspoken rules, for example, someone leaving earlier than their boss being rude.
When they were in growth (back prior to 1980) where lifetime employment and salary increase by age were common, there was at least some incentive to put up with that, but they are now gone as the thing in the past, they are just getting the short end of the stick, as losing your current job might mean that there aren't any other jobs. (Getting hired in Japan outside of new hire -- that's something other than right after graduating, can be very tough.)
Now, having said that, of course, there are people out there who have more liberty in deciding how much they should work each day, and doing it as their choice, but considering this being nationwide issue, I wouldn't think that's a majority.
Note: If you are someone from outside of Japan, you will get some perk as a foreigner, that you are not expected to go along with the above. Merely appearing like the Japanese would lock me into same expectation as Japanese. (Which I envy "foreigners" every time I visit Japan, as my mindset is as foreign from Japanese.) Japanese people usually don't really discriminate foreigners, but they do have different social expectations. (Just you never can be "one of them.")
Maybe a daily walk in a park and/or 30 minutes of meditation could be better for their health than spending 12 hours in the office with a break of having a few beers each day. Seems like you're posing a false dilemma between spending the full day in the office and having a two hour commute each day - it's possible to choose neither of those. Are you sure your colleagues are so happy about their situation?
Oh, I missed that part out - certainly, my Japanese associates at the time got a lot more walk in the parks than you might think. For many of them it was a vital part of the way home.
I just don't think the city planners of America in the 20th Century were as sensitive to these issues as they should have been. We cannot deny that the automobile-economy made America very unhealthy, and it wasn't until the era of the gym that this became lesser of a health issue. Even still today, though, by direct personal (thus: anecdotal) evidence, I can say without a doubt that my American friends are far, far less healthy than the Japanese side. Alas, its just a fact - even if we factor in the binge-work and alcoholism. Not a popular perspective, but I think Americans need to get some humility about this factor and stop building such monstrous cities with such dependencies.. okay, this is now outside the scope of the original article, which was fundamentally about the differences between cultures and how it affects technical deployment decisions, but - after all - this is fundamentally an Architectural problem as much as it is a cultural one (and the two cannot be dissociated, really..) In the end, could the Twitter difference really boil down to just how well the space of the two countries is utilized? I think it does, ultimately, play a role in this discussion.
I absolutely agree that long commutes are bad, but I still don't think that excuses Japan's overwork (Karoshi) culture. According to surveys Japanese employee satisfaction ranks relatively low compared to other countries: http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/summary/200906/0...
I did the whole 12-16 hr work day for nearly half a decade out of school, including the weekend. I even skipped out on vacation for 3 years. I really enjoyed what I was doing.
Having lived that life style, it doesn't leave you with much free time. Dinner with kids and spouse? Exercise? Cooking? Errands? Creative hobbies? 7-8 hours sleep / night?
My commute last for 30 minutes on a bicycle, I would like everyone to have the option to leave at a reasonable hour to live their life. If they want to continue working, that's cool too. But the impression I get from the Japanese culture is that it isn't so free to do so. It is 'expected'. I heard that Japanese employees don't leave until their boss leaves, which could be an ungodly hour. Having lived the extreme, my personal opinion is that balance is best.
This is entirely subjective, but I've found that Americans are much more sociable, particularly with strangers, than the Japanese (or most Europeans) are.
How in the world do you interpret "see their families" as "private time on the road"? This isn't a commuting fetish. It's the idea that there is lots of life — most of it, in fact — to enjoy outside the office. If you really enjoy hanging out with your colleagues, you could do it outside of work. But if you have other friends or family members you'd like to see, you can't do that at work, and it wouldn't be very high-quality time anyway if you're working.
Saying that having a strong work ethos means 'not having a life' is about as derogatory as you can get without actually calling someone names .. whereas I found that the Japanese integration of work/home life really meant that there was more focus on really caring about what you were doing. Okay, there are exceptions, but I have to say that it was very clear to me that the two cultures have their own ways. It was considered just as 'degrading' not to be spending time with your co-workers in Japan .. which way is 'right'? This is clearly a cultural decision, and therefore: utterly arbitrary.
I'm not so sure about "strong work ethos" part. I believe Korean work culture is reasonably close to that of Japan, and one of the things most frequently mentioned by Koreans who emigrate to work in a western company is that people really concentrate on working (and nothing else) during work time.
I.e., there's no time for reading newspapers or surfing the web, and much less time for "spending time with your coworkers." Instead you do your work, and when your work is done (or if it's 5 pm), you go home. Which actually means you must work hard, because if you slack off and spend the evening in the workplace, your manager may start to wonder if you are fit for the job (unlike Korea, where your manager may question your competence if you leave on time).
Maybe Japanese work ethics is somewhat better (well, surely they have a much better economy...), but I'm skeptical. There's a limit on how much most people can work with concentration. Make them work longer, and they'll compensate by spending their time in distraction.
* On the other hand I'm working in a US company and writing comments in HN, so there's that...
As a Scala enthusiast, it's neat to see one of my pet languages get press, but...a "software engineering technology called Scala"? Did you mean "programming language"?
Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right?
Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...