6 ms·

I once heard about a meeting where someone did a presentation for the best part of an hour to a room full of Japanese people. They all nodded along, smiling as

I once heard about a meeting where someone did a presentation for the best part of an hour to a room full of Japanese people. They all nodded along, smiling as the presentation progressed. It wasn’t until the end that the presenter asked them what they thought. They all just kept smiling, but no answer. Someone at the front turned and talked to the room (in Japanese) then turned to the presented and said “they do not speak any English, but they are sure from this presentation that you are very, very intelligent”. I feel like the Japanese people. I don’t understand what you’re doing here but I am convinced it is very clever.

ghoshbishakh 7y ago
You made my day
tamiral 7y ago
i just felt like i was in the matrix for a little bit and that was ok for me :)
jmiserez 7y ago
Did you see the README.md? It explains each of the steps.
- rhacker 7y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out - I kinda missed it until seeing your post. I went through each step - it's still a bit convoluted, but definitely helps me appreciate hashing functions. It's probably very easy for a poorly coded hash function to accidentally wipe important data or accidentally and a bunch of data with zeroes, so it's pretty cool to see a lot of ROT and XOR usage which does more interesting things with the original data. Had no idea about the prime roots and multiplication, that's pretty clever too.
folli 7y ago
You need to watch his video, very cool, it really helps to understand how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9EbD6iY9zI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9EbD6iY9zI
- kebman 7y ago
  That video is really, really awesome! And it won't leave you feeling "Japanese" either. (Which is a great people, btw. I'd really like to go there someday, mostly for the food and language and history. And Anime also, I'm forced to admit.)
  - kebman 7y ago
    You guys really need to chill out. If you've got something to say, then say it.
    - Phenomenit 7y ago
      I think you're being down-voted because your comment doesn't really add anything to the discussion at hand.
      - kebman 6y ago
        Oh, to this site punishes people for adding a positive remark. Great... I'll keep that in mind then. Anyway, thanks for letting me know!
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        Just being positive and nothing else is what the upvote button is for. And turning your comment slightly gray is not really a punishment.
        tomhoward 6y ago
        Positive, supportive comments have always been welcome on HN.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        Being positive and supportive is a good quality, but it is not enough to make a comment good. Comments are supposed to have thought and substance too. Shallow praise is better than a shallow dismissal, but not by enough.
tzs 7y ago
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).
adrianmonk 7y ago
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?"
tripzilch 6y ago
> “they do not speak any English, but they are sure from this presentation that you are very, very intelligent” I kind of hope there's some nuance to this story and it didn't quite happened in the way you described. If they think it's "polite" to let a person talk for an hour without understanding a word of it (while nodding and smiling), and then have the nerve to call it "intelligent", that's an insult to both the presentor and the concept of intelligence. Cultural differences notwithstanding, the idea of "completely wasting someone's time while pretending to pay attention" shouldn't be too difficult to empathise with.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  It's probably mixed with avoiding confrontation and thinking that the other people understand it. I'd assume that calling it intelligent didn't have a belittling tone, but rather a 'still awesome, sad I didn't understand it' one

ghoshbishakh 7y ago

You made my day

tamiral 7y ago

i just felt like i was in the matrix for a little bit and that was ok for me :)

jmiserez 7y ago

Did you see the README.md? It explains each of the steps.

rhacker 7y ago
Thanks for pointing that out - I kinda missed it until seeing your post. I went through each step - it's still a bit convoluted, but definitely helps me appreciate hashing functions. It's probably very easy for a poorly coded hash function to accidentally wipe important data or accidentally and a bunch of data with zeroes, so it's pretty cool to see a lot of ROT and XOR usage which does more interesting things with the original data. Had no idea about the prime roots and multiplication, that's pretty clever too.

folli 7y ago

You need to watch his video, very cool, it really helps to understand how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9EbD6iY9zI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9EbD6iY9zI

kebman 7y ago
That video is really, really awesome! And it won't leave you feeling "Japanese" either. (Which is a great people, btw. I'd really like to go there someday, mostly for the food and language and history. And Anime also, I'm forced to admit.)
- kebman 7y ago
  You guys really need to chill out. If you've got something to say, then say it.
  - Phenomenit 7y ago
    I think you're being down-voted because your comment doesn't really add anything to the discussion at hand.
    - kebman 6y ago
      Oh, to this site punishes people for adding a positive remark. Great... I'll keep that in mind then. Anyway, thanks for letting me know!
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        Just being positive and nothing else is what the upvote button is for. And turning your comment slightly gray is not really a punishment.
        tomhoward 6y ago
        Positive, supportive comments have always been welcome on HN.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        Being positive and supportive is a good quality, but it is not enough to make a comment good. Comments are supposed to have thought and substance too. Shallow praise is better than a shallow dismissal, but not by enough.

tzs 7y ago

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).

adrianmonk 7y ago

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?"

tripzilch 6y ago

> “they do not speak any English, but they are sure from this presentation that you are very, very intelligent” I kind of hope there's some nuance to this story and it didn't quite happened in the way you described. If they think it's "polite" to let a person talk for an hour without understanding a word of it (while nodding and smiling), and then have the nerve to call it "intelligent", that's an insult to both the presentor and the concept of intelligence. Cultural differences notwithstanding, the idea of "completely wasting someone's time while pretending to pay attention" shouldn't be too difficult to empathise with.

Sebb767 6y ago
It's probably mixed with avoiding confrontation and thinking that the other people understand it. I'd assume that calling it intelligent didn't have a belittling tone, but rather a 'still awesome, sad I didn't understand it' one