> The requirements are essentially that you're either upper-middle class

Not true - a youtuber from Germany who lives in Japan since about 10 years, was denied citizenship recently. And he'd make more than enough money.

https://www.youtube.com/@NihonGoo

The thing is really true: Japan is against more immigration. You'll always be a gaijin there if you come from the outside.

> there seems to always be a large number of clearly white people from America and Europe coming in to display their Japanese nationalism

Other countries are also very much against mass immigration. Japan just does it in a very strange way.

You're misunderstanding the immigration requirements: who is considered doesn't necessarily mean everyone that fits the requirements will be accepted. It's a requirements list for exclusion, doesn't say fitting the requirements implies inclusion.

This is not news anymore in that it has been going on for several months already. The first time I really noticed this was on Paolo from Tokyo, where he suddenly praised japanese cops on becoming tougher. Since then I noticed more and more complaints from non-japanese upon moving to Japan. Recently it was a guy from Germany who lives in Japan for like +10 years already and was denied being granted Japanese citizenship basically because ... he is gaijin.

Something really fundamental has been changing in Japan in the last few years, kind of an anti-globalisation movement tied to more nationalism - and I have a SLIGHT suspicion that this will become ultra-nationalism. In turn, a second prediction I make is that Japan will become militarily more aggressive and invest more in that. We can already see the writing on the wall here that more conflict will be brewing in the area.

It's a bit unfortunate in that if a country does not really want people to visit it, well - one does not have to go there. There are many other countries in the asian area that aren't as hostile to foreigners now. (Also interesting to see how an aging society suddenly changes to offset immigration. Hopefully we won't hear a single japanese complain about lack of people in Japan. Ironically Paolo is, or rather was, also kind of a gaijin, even though he speaks perfect Japanese of course.)

That is scary, how these strange ... cars try to sneak up on the hill-like streets in San Francisco.

Per “can’t” - The admins use a math example in the guidelines that’s kind of funny https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry for overstepping/violating HN guidelines. My only plausible defense is that these were my genuine thoughts, without malicious intentions.

You think your phrasing wasn’t “malicious”?

Page loads way too slowly IMO. Even the youtube page loads somewhat slowly, but it is about 10x faster than that webpage. There is no need for these fancypants animations really. I am not going to wait for slow animations to finish.

IMO it is not entirely dead, but not really "alive" either. TIOBE even has Object Pascal mentioned right now in TOP 20. Now, TIOBE has tons of issues, but it also means that there exists some tangible interest.

Still, I don't feel many people want to use Object Pascal these days. If you have the choice between Python and Object Pascal, most people will undoubtedly use Python. It's just how it is right now, and I also don't see how that can change in favour of Object Pascal. Programming languages nowadays have so much more competition, and people are less tolerant of flaws. Strangely enough, people barely seem to work on these flaws; this is one of my pet peeve with ruby, the documentation should be much better but it is not. I no longer find that acceptable in 2026, with AI spam slop lowering the quality and google search being terrible and almost totally useless nowadays. You'd assume that a counter-move to this slop-degradation would be to massively improve documentation, but you still find core projects in ruby or at the least important add-ons, to have low-quality documentation. And barely anybody wants to improve on that either.

Indeed the "why bother with performance when others write code in C for us" mindset.

I think I last used Pascal, TurboPascal if I remember correctly, in school - perhaps at age 17 or something like that. I recall that we used to define some things from geometry, e. g. a triangle, calculating sides, angles, surface area and so forth, and then of some more objects from geometry.

I have not used Pascal since then but it was not the most terrible programming language of all times either. These days I would not know why I'd want to use it, compared to IMO better languages. Nonetheless I found it ok for teaching in school back then.

The EU needs to stop acting as if all is fine. The EU commission is totally useless, from A to Z. There is zero strategy in play here. They need to take a much more pro-active stance - fining US companies that work against europeans is fine, but you also need to have viable alternatives. And that simply is not happening right now.

> [This is a guest post by Amit Sahai. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.]

No matter how good your case is - if you use AI slop to spam text, I will not read it. At the least they admitted to this sneaky slopness, which saves me time. I'd wish everyone would do so.

All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does the US government protect monopolies? This is against the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations only now.

Open ALL stores.

They protect them because they are them. The line between corporations and government is pretty thin these days IMO.