I experienced "crashes after 16 hours if you didn't copy the mostly empty demo Android project from the manufacturer and paste the entire existing project into it"
Turned out there was an undocumented MDM feature that would reboot the device if a package with a specific name wasn't running.
Upon decompilation it wasn't supposed to be active (they had screwed up and shipped a debug build of the MDM) and it was supposed to be 60 seconds according to the variable name, but they had mixed up milliseconds and seconds
Update: there is now a Hacker News Tokyo Slack community set up. There are currently over 140 people in there discussing business, technology, AI, machine learning, cryptocurrency, and various Japan related topics.
It's been really fun to watch this community come together in just the last few days!
If anyone is interested to check it out, you're very welcome. Please visit:
These meetups always attract of a wide range of people - from people hacking on unique and interesting projects, to founders/CEOs, to investors, to programmers and marketers.
If you're in Tokyo and interested in meeting more people in the technology space, it's a very friendly and welcoming group of people.
I went to this event a year or two ago, I happened to be passing through japan. It's a very friendly event, real mix of different tech / startup presentations. Would highly recommend it if you're in the area :)
I've lived in Japan for 14 years, and I'm doing a startup here.
In my experience, if you stay in Japan for more than a year, you go through several phases.
The first phase is confusion. Why am I being treated differently, even though I'm doing and saying the same things as another Japanese person.
The second phase that quickly follows is anger. This is bullshit! I know my accent and pronunciation is correct! Why are they saying they don't understand me! WTF!
The third is dull acceptance. You're not going to change Japan. They're not like this because they're bad people. They're just inexperienced with foreigners and foreign things, and they're overcompensating and trying to be nice in the way they think is nice.
The final stage is fun. This is the best stage. You understand all the social patterns and why everything is happening, so you just relax and start enjoying it.
When you go into a restaurant and order in Japanese and the waiters response is "I can't speak English! Sorry!" you respond in Japanese "Oh, I'm terribly sorry. Is there anyone here who speaks Japanese?"
This often (not always) has the interesting effect of changing the "foreigners cannot speak or understand Japanese" mindset, if only for a moment.
Sounds like you're in between stages two and three. It gets better.
To quickly respond to your list:
1) It's your face. It's nothing personal. They're just trying to be accommodating.
2) My typical response is "I've been using chopsticks since I've been four, since we used to order Chinese takeout. So complimenting me on my chopstick skills feels the same as me complimenting you on your deft fork techniques." This may result in enlightening your Japanese friends as to why it's challenging to be overly grateful for their well-intended compliment.
3) Kanji is hard. They're just impressed that you can read it, since they spent years as kids studying and repeating kanji over and over again. Having said that, my typical response here is "Actually, I think English is much, much harder than Japanese. Sure Japanese is difficult, but it's logical. English is full of exceptions, weird spellings, inconsistent grammar, because it's a mix of languages. If I wasn't born a native speaker, I can't imagine how I'd learn English from scratch."
4) Yep - you're definitely not alone. It can be hard to avoid feeling a bit slighted here. If you haven't seen this already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80 I gently correct people here. "Excuse me - since I'm ordering, could you please look at me?"
By the way, thinking of these things as "micro-aggressions" is a terrible way to think. They're not being aggressive. They're often just not very familiar with foreign people, and they're doing their best to be accommodating. Once you get to stage four, this becomes a lot easier.
Good luck, and don't forget to swing by the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups if you're in Tokyo - https://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/ - we're just about to announce another one.
Thank you a lot for the nice response and the kind explanation. You are definitely right that there are never any bad intentions behind the various experiences that can be had as a foreigner.
Perhaps my problem is not really the experience itself, but that I don't know how to deal with certain situations in a smooth and sociable way. I also have not lived in Japan long enough to really master all social interactions. It's quite easy to forget when you're from another culture how much routine your own culture already has and how different it can be.
Product/Market fit is good, but you need Founder/Product/Market fit. A problem that resonates with you so deeply and personally, that you will climb mountains over years to solve it.
Short term problems, doubts and anxiety quietly fade away if you're 200% focused on a long term goal, where the outcome is of intense personal importance to you.
For me, I went through years of Excel hell in Japan trying to manage our invoicing because there was no good software available. I feel VERY, VERY strongly about fixing that for Japan.
Two further pieces of advice: I highly recommend finding some advisors who have done what you're trying to do. Getting a "Yep, that's the right thing to focus on" from one or two smart people tends to make concerns fade away as well.
I also recommend getting laser focused on why people are saying yes, and why people are saying no to your solution. Once you have great answers to both of these questions, your next steps become much clearer.
For what it is worth, I have a hard time accepting that Invoicing and Appointment Reminding aren't each about as exciting as the other, despite the many affirmations to the contrary.
It was really just the basic set of investor questions compressed down into a very short and high bandwidth discussion. I think the general idea was to see how familiar I was with all the aspects of the business and the market.
It was at a dinner, so I was two beers in, but from memory some of the questions and answers were things like:
Q: How do you get new customers?
A: The great thing about MakeLeaps (For context: MakeLeaps is an online invoice creation and management tool for Japan) is that it's inherently viral, since every customer sends tens, hundreds or thousands of invoices to other customers, and each one is an opportunity to introduce MakeLeaps, since we have a tiny "Powered by MakeLeaps" stamp at the bottom of the email.
In addition, we do paid marketing campaigns such as Adwords and retargeted Facebook newsfeed ads which we've found to be effective in Japan, and a lot of content marketing. We're working on partnerships with BigCo1, and BigCo2, and integration X and Y that could also be a great new way to get in front of more viable customers.
Kind of thing. Some other questions were just general fact finding such as:
Q: How big is your team?
Q: What's your biggest challenge right now?
Q: Why are you doing this?
Q: Why don't Japanese companies already use a tool like yours?
Q: What's your business model?
Are the ones that I remember of the top of my head. Happy to field any more questions, and thanks again for listening.
It's the better end of the deal, to be honest. He used to live here in Gifu, and while this is a great place to live, there are many things you have easier access to in Tokyo.
None that I can quickly share right now, but suffice it to say that if a company gets one invoice that says "Powered By MakeLeaps", it's a coincidence.
But if they get two or three, they start looking into this new service that everyone seems to be using now.
As quickly as possible? This is the same Xen issue that made Amazon reboot their EC2 instances. They announced it significantly before Rackspace. Both RS and Amazon have the info from the same source -- the Xen vulnerability pre-disclosure list which keeps this issue (XSA-108) under wraps until Oct 1st while major cloud providers can apply the patch.
Rackspace may have thought that they could mitigate the issue without taking this drastic step. They certainly didn't want to do global reboots.
The engineering team probably spent some time running tests and scribbling on whiteboards, trying to prove that the boat wasn't going to sink. In hindsight, they should have just sounded the klaxon and started handing out life jackets, but you know what they say about hindsight. And there are lots of reasons why the typical engineering organization struggles to accept the inevitable and call for an evacuation. Nobody likes Cassandra. Everybody wants to be a hero. Didn't you say this boat was unsinkable? It's hard to get all the decision-makers into one room. The show must go on. It isn't obvious that this complicated problem leads to our certain doom. Et cetera.
The key to making these things go smoothly is the Chaos Monkey, a.k.a. "conduct constant drills of your emergency responses". If you don't rehearse the response, you shy away from trying it. AWS halts or reboots EC2 instances all the time, and lo and behold, when it comes time to reboot all EC2 instances they don't flinch. Or they flinch less visibly, anyway.
Hi there - we're a startup based in Tokyo and we're looking for a developer with Python/Django experience to join us as a full-time remote staff member, with the possibility of coming to live in Tokyo to work near/in the office.
We have a strong team consisting of 6 developers, a designer, and a bunch of great customer support staff. We're getting some exciting growth, traction, and users love our service.
We have a huge whiteboard full of exciting features we can't wait to get started on, and we need your help to turn them into a reality, and to help continue to delight our existing and future users.
We're mainly looking for Python/Django experience to start, but if you've got a wide variety of skills, it always helps to be a generalist in a startup.
To apply, can you please send me some information about some business apps you've worked on in the past. Ideally anything relating to business processes/quotes/invoices/accounting is great, but is not necessary, since we believe that a cultural fit is just as important as technical skill.
We'd offer a trial to start with, and then if we're both happy with how we work together, we'd offer you a full-time position.
Please send me an email directly at jay@makeleaps.com - I'm one of the founders. Looking forward to chatting with you!
(We also organise the Hacker News community meetups in Tokyo, so if you're planning on traveling to Japan and want to get a feel for the startup community here, see if there's a meetup going on at hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp)
https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles