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No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

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Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#21

Post by w1ntermute »

ibisum wrote: post #17

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 seep…

> 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.

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#22

Post by w1ntermute »

SunShiranui wrote: post #15
FreezerburnV wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cor…

Well, he's speaking English, not Japanese. Do you refer to multiple pizzas as pizze?

Actually, you're wrong. The plural of "kanji" in English is "kanji": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kanji

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#23

Post by nrinaudo »

FreezerburnV wrote: post #14
nrinaudo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 cor…

I apologise, I was not aware you could not pluralise these words. My only excuse is that english is not my first language.

I'd go back and edit my comment, but that'd just make yours seem weird...

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#24

Post by limaoscarjuliet »

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 ;-)

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#25

Post by saalweachter »

SunShiranui wrote: post #15
FreezerburnV wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cor…

Well, he's speaking English, not Japanese. Do you refer to multiple pizzas as pizze?

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.

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#26

Post by ibisum »

w1ntermute wrote: post #21
ibisum wrote: post #17

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 seep…

> 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 ..

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#27

Post by ibisum »

hvs wrote: post #20
ibisum wrote: post #17

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 seep…

it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home I highly recommend it. It's called having a life.

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.

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#28

Post by jgalt212 »

nrinaudo wrote: post #8
jgalt212 wrote: post #4

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 ch…

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…

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.

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#29

Post by nrinaudo »

jgalt212 wrote: post #28
nrinaudo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#30

Post by epaladin »

SunShiranui wrote: post #15
FreezerburnV wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cor…

Well, he's speaking English, not Japanese. Do you refer to multiple pizzas as pizze?

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'.
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