Show HN: SHA-256 Animation

I realize it's not what you're saying, but I don't like the idea that if you can't teach something to others, you don't understand it yourself. Teaching is a skill and it's something that I am aware that I struggle with. I can explain something in great detail to a captive audience and understand it myself personally, but teaching is about getting others to engage with the ideas you're presenting and identifying and elaborating on parts that they don't understand.

Given the content of knowledge sharing sessions that I sit through and the convoluted nature of some of them, I wish that people recognized that presenting information is not all that is required to teach. You can understand something perfectly, but teach it horribly.

Anecdotally, based on experience with shipping software with an annoying bug to Japanese consumers, the Japanese people are way more patient than Americans.

I worked at an American company that made utility software for DOS/Windows. A major Japanese distributor liked our stuff, and made a distribution deal with us. They also helped with localization, and suggested feature changes to better fit what Japanese consumers wanted. Later this expanded to where they would also suggest new products they wanted for Japan and we'd develop them.

One product under development was very rarely causing a system lockup during installation. By "lockup" I mean it appears completely dead. No mouse motion. No keys worked. Hitting "CAPS LOCK" would not even toggle the light on the keyboard. Hard reset seemed to be the only way out.

It was rare enough that we always saw the install attempt after that hard reset work.

We just could not figure out what was causing this. The Japanese distributor decided we should go ahead and release, and their tech support people would deal with any complaints.

So we released...and their tech support got a lot of calls. People were hitting it a lot more than we had seen in testing.

...except they were not calling to complain about their system locking up. No, they were calling to complain about a slow install.

Apparently, when it became completely unresponsive all you had to do was wait 20-25 hours and it would complete the install.

I cannot imagine any American consumer whose PC has become completely unresponsive going 20-25 hours without giving up and resetting the thing. Not only were there such people in Japan, there were a lot of them. We didn't get one complaint about a lockup--all of the many many people who called called about it taking around a day to finish.

(Oh, and the knowledge that it was not a complete lockup was enough of a clue to let us figure it out. It suggested it was some sort of timeout, not a lockup. Our product needed to know what optical drives were available, and it turned out that the way it scanned for them did not get alone well with one particular brand of optical drive controller card, which could trigger about an hour timeout per drive checked for. We switched to a much more cautious drive scan, and the problem went away).

Lore from an old company of mine says that we had the opposite of this happen. We had an opportunity to expand from the US into China. So a dedicated team spent months localizing our English-only software into Chinese.

Our sales people traveled to a key meeting with execs at the Asian division of a multinational corporation (the potential customer). They did a big demo to show the software working in Chinese, hoping to impress the execs with how the software was ready to go.

The execs awkwardly said essentially, "Hey, that is probably great, but even though we handle the Chinese market, we don't speak Chinese; it's only our customers that do. So we couldn't tell what your software does, and we wouldn't be able to use this. Do you have an English version?"

I subscribed to your YouTube channel.

https://youtu.be/f9EbD6iY9zI

Minor typo: "Rinjdael" -> Rijndael