Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 398 posts

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#331

Post by orionometer »

deepspace wrote: post #103
Froztnova wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate. I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got aroun…

That's so weird. What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography? The fact that Indonesia was Muslim is something I learned very early on - certainly before high school.

[dead]

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#332

Post by [deleted] »

kopirgan wrote: post #219

Been going there since mid 90s, not that often recently. Seen it change and yet stay the same.. Not cheap anymore but ofc not comparing to Singapore. Issue is getting around.. For a city of that size + national capital, public transport options very limited. More like HCM or PP than Bangkok or KL. Comparisons to Thailand inappropriate cos almost no pub culture and "entertainment". Even top end hotel bar like Raffles…

[deleted]

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#333

Post by rothos »

> The U.N.'s report highlighted what areas are expected to be the next megacities and surpass the 10 million mark, including:

> [...]

> - Hajipur, India.

Estimated population of Hajipur in 2025 is 213k people. Not sure why it's on the list. Throws the rest of the article into question for me.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#334

Post by fnikacevic »

elgenie wrote: post #86
superconduct123 wrote: post #13

I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media

They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime. They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growi…

The island of Bali has outsized impact from all the tourism.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#335

Post by ipince »

duffyjp wrote: post #32
decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time. The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a…

> which I can't say about any other SEA language

maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#336

Post by socalgal2 »

seattle_spring wrote: post #81
phainopepla2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar

??? Burmese food is absolutely delicious. Burma Love in SF, Rangoon Bistro or Burma Joy in Portland. They're some of my favorite restaurants.

Those restaurants had none of the food I ate in Burma

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#337

Post by socalgal2 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #135
itake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed. Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car. Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either. Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at…

> Jakarta has a noise problem. I offer a practical template: has a noise problem. When you say "temples", do you mean masjid (mosque)? It is pretty normal anywhere in the Islamic-majority world to sing prayers over a loud speaker a few times a day.

Catholic churches ring bells twice a day. It's less then mosques that do their call 5 times a day both as non-religious person both are disappointing to me.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#338

Post by socalgal2 »

rester324 wrote: post #187
itake wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U.S. cities have noise laws. I don’t think Tokyo is considered loud. Yes, temples blasting prayers.

I can tell you that Tokyo is very loud. Constant road traffic noise everywhere, drunk people singing on the streets, pointless warnings from the local municipal office on the public alert system, noisy street advertisements, constant announcements in train stations, bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night, flight traffic noise, railroad noise of the trains passing, level cr…

Tokyo isn't loud at all. Go 2-3 blocks from any major street and they are practically silent.

> drunk people singing on the streets

never seen this

> bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night

seen this maybe twice in 25 years

> flight traffic noise

do you live next to the airport? this is not a thing relatively to any other major city I've lived in

> railroad noise of the trains passing, level crossing barriers constantly ding-donging

This is only a thing if you live next to a track which is like 1% of housing

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#339

Post by realusername »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #316
realusername wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.

There are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.

That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that.

The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#340

Post by saltcured »

roughly wrote: post #234
Greduan wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue. Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics…

Just remember, you can tune an instrument, but you can’t tuna fish.

Eh, in a discussion about homophones, homonyms, and ambiguity, I prefer the variant, "you can tune a bass, but you can tuna fish".

Right up there with "fruit flies like a banana, but time flies like an arrow".

Post reply on HN