Hacker News: jpatokal

Querying the Stars with BigQuery GIS

jpatokal — Wed, 15 May 2019 04:56:28 +0000

Article URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/querying-the-stars-with-bigquery-gis

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19916544

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jpatokal in "Free Public Transport in Estonia"

jpatokal — Tue, 14 May 2019 09:35:37 +0000

Can you name a European city that has anything approaching the homeless problem of SF, Seattle or NYC?

New comment by jpatokal in "South Korean students flock to Japan"

jpatokal — Tue, 14 May 2019 09:32:48 +0000

The agreement is about "property and claims" between the two states. Of course, individuals can and have sued various Japanese entities, some successfully.

New comment by jpatokal in "South Korean students flock to Japan"

jpatokal — Tue, 14 May 2019 06:23:27 +0000

> Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens

That's a bit of a tautology: if they nationalize, which they can if they wish to, they become citizens and stop being counted as Zainichi. They're also granted a number of privileges (welfare, state pensions etc) as "Special Permanent Residents" not afforded to any other non-citizen residents, although they're still not to vote.

New comment by jpatokal in "South Korean students flock to Japan"

jpatokal — Tue, 14 May 2019 05:21:00 +0000

Japan and South Korea signed an agreement in 1965 that was supposed to settle all financial claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Basic_Relations_betw...

New comment by jpatokal in "South Korean students flock to Japan"

jpatokal — Tue, 14 May 2019 04:56:46 +0000

Actually, Japan has apologized repeatedly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements...

However, Japan has more than its fair share of far-right fruitcakes who deny everything, and in both Korea and China politicians have found Japan to be a convenient whipping boy whenever they need a distraction from domestic problems.

New comment by jpatokal in "South Korean students flock to Japan"

jpatokal — Tue, 14 May 2019 04:54:27 +0000

Historically, Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan. More recently, Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, during which the Japanese ruled with an iron fist and did their best to destroy Korean identity by forcing people to take Japanese names etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...

New comment by jpatokal in "South Korean students flock to Japan"

jpatokal — Tue, 14 May 2019 04:49:29 +0000

Both countries have low birthrates, but Japan is far enough along the labor shortage curve that unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan. From the friendly article:

According to Statistics Korea, the national statistics office, the unemployment rate last year for people aged between 15 and 29 was 9.5 percent, compared with 3.8 percent overall and 3.6 percent for Japanese 15 to 24.

Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular. There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...

New comment by jpatokal in "Free Public Transport in Estonia"

jpatokal — Tue, 14 May 2019 03:24:42 +0000

https://outline.com/WLYEMW

New comment by jpatokal in "China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia"

jpatokal — Mon, 13 May 2019 10:24:26 +0000

Variable, but generally worse. It's much more tightly censored than Wikipedia: for example, edits are manually reviewed by admins before going live. Also, most community features (talk pages etc) have been removed, so it's constantly gamed to push spam, copy pastes etc and the mods don't really care unless it touches a red line topic like politics.

New comment by jpatokal in "One Day With the Squad That Removes Needles and Feces From Downtown Portland"

jpatokal — Mon, 13 May 2019 06:41:21 +0000

They generally cannot, which is why so many users resort to high-risk, high-reward ways to make money like prostitution, theft, etc.

New comment by jpatokal in "Show HN: Koonchi – Convert Photo to Hand-Painted Painting by Artists from India"

jpatokal — Sun, 12 May 2019 22:21:59 +0000

Because their site is relevant to the question asked?

New comment by jpatokal in "What I gained, lost and learned while working for Microsoft"

jpatokal — Sun, 12 May 2019 11:56:42 +0000

Melbourne is a mecca of coffee snobbery, and most locals wouldn't be caught dead in a Starbucks. (Although you need to try pretty hard even to find one.)

New comment by jpatokal in "What I gained, lost and learned while working for Microsoft"

jpatokal — Sun, 12 May 2019 08:19:41 +0000

Lavish and impressive is also relative. Your original statement about "these things are all rather unimpressive to those that actually have them within reach" is tautological: having a yacht with a helipad is not going to be particularly impressive to anyone else docked next to me in St Tropez, even if it puts all of us in the global 0.01%.

New comment by jpatokal in "In Australia, Coal Remains King"

jpatokal — Thu, 09 May 2019 10:24:47 +0000

Australia is a stupidly uncompetitive place to manufacture anything. A friend of mine is managing a (rare!) factory expansion in Sydney right now, and costs of all inputs (rent, labor, etc) are 3-8x what the company is paying in Malaysia.

New comment by jpatokal in "Steve Singh stepping down as Docker CEO"

jpatokal — Thu, 09 May 2019 10:19:44 +0000

The cloud market is pretty darn huge, why are you dismissing it? Aside from the public cloud vendors, containers are very much a thing in the private cloud space too (OpenShift, Pivotal, etc).

New comment by jpatokal in "A 72-year-old French man has crossed the Atlantic in a giant orange barrel"

jpatokal — Thu, 09 May 2019 05:18:08 +0000

Look at the photo, it's hard to describe that as anything but a barrel: https://dynaimage.cdn.cnn.com/cnn/q_auto,w_634,c_fill,g_auto...

In particular, it lacks any conventional boat elements like a method of propulsion or steering.

He is clearly milking the label for all it's worth though, the GPS tracker ID was "diogene" (French for Diogenes of Greek philosopher living in a barrel fame) and his sponsors included several manufacturers of wine barrels (https://www.boutes.com/), who apparently also helped build the thing.

New comment by jpatokal in "Denver decriminalizes psychedelic mushrooms"

jpatokal — Thu, 09 May 2019 00:38:38 +0000

Laws in Australia are already pretty loose: medical marijuana is permitted on a federal level (although in many places the legal hoops required to get a prescription are absurd) and in most states recreational use is more or less decriminalized. I agree that actual legalisation is a long way off, and as usual it looks like our Kiwi brothers will beat us to the punch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_New_Zealand_cannabis_refe...

New comment by jpatokal in "South Korea's booming 'webtoons'"

jpatokal — Tue, 07 May 2019 08:47:16 +0000

The Rising Sun flag remains the flag of the Japanese Navy to this day, and is appropriate to fly on any occasion where you'd fly a Navy flag.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_Flag

New comment by jpatokal in "A technology writer visits the Bay Area for the first time"

jpatokal — Tue, 07 May 2019 04:34:25 +0000

https://outline.com/P5yRJC