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Conbini Wars – Map of Japanese convenience store ratios
These Japanese YouTubers decided to play a game, they got off a station earlier than their home and to walk home from there, but whenever they pass a Conbini they'd have to pick 6 items and roll a dice and buy that item from the 6. There's a lot of stores...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yT32QAyv6s

I'm sorry but that video is literally unwatchable! What in the world is happening with the audio/subtitles?
Youtube ruins videos with godawful AI-generated autodubbing if it detects a video in a language that differs from your locale. You can access the original audio from the settings cog.
It doesn't even respect the locale of the user interface, but uses IP geolocation and sends you HTML containing the video titles in the language it "knows" you want... And there is no setting to change this.
Big tech has changed over the last bit to trying to tell us exactly what and how we should think - or maybe more precisely to see thought as “friction” and want to remove it all together. This is a very minor example in the scheme of things, but I see it everywhere now.
Not really, reliably detecting a user's preferred languages has been a persistent Hard Problem in tech since the start of the internet. Every proposed alternative solution ends up having vastly more false positives due to browsers/people incorrectly setting of default preferences so companies begrudgingly default to geographic heuristics knowing it is a terrible experience for an outlier group of people.
  • deaux
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  • 2 hours ago
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Yet this implementation that Youtube uses is in the bottom 1% of worst ones. Strange how roughly every other website/app does a better job at it.
Why wouldn’t you just ask them, and particularly for media like this that has a native language, default to that? I don’t want software to think for me about what I want to see, if I want something different I’ll change it.
You're going down the first question of a deep rabbithole that eventually lands you to where every major tech company has landed.
  • deaux
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  • 2 hours ago
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Got it, "maximizing ad revenue " it is.
YouTube is literally unusable without browser extensions or a third-party app
I learned English when I was a child because all the media I wanted to consume were not translated into Dutch.

Makes you wonder if universal translators ever become the norm people will still bother to learn foreign language.

Often, several stores belonging to the same chain are located in close proximity to each other so that goods can be distributed more cheaply and frequently. This strategy is known as dominant policy (ドミナント政策, dominanto seisaku).[1]

[1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%89%E3%83%9F%E3%83%8A%E3...

I can't help but giggle slightly at the effort put into presenting not just the term, but also both the japanese and japanese-romanized forms, considering that it's just an entirely literal translation of a basic business strategy. Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIlo.
Seizon Senryaku!
This is great, but it doesn't differentiate between "Natural Lawson" and "Lawson", which my partner and I have dubbed "Unnatural Lawson".
Man-made Lawsons beyond my comprehension!

I don’t think it would be fair to differentiate it though. The point of the map is to show popularity / reach of each of the bigger brands.

Pretty cool stuff! Side note, it’s always fun to see Japan-related content getting to the front page around this time, as the people in NA are asleep. Would be curious to see HN userbase %s by continents.
This gets asked from time to time. It's somewhere in the realm of 45% NA, 35% Europe, and the remaining 20% relatively evenly split between Australia/Oceania, India, Asia (excluding India) and SA. Japan makes up around 1-2%
I would really like to know some stats about the Voronoi cells, like average size, largest and smallest...
  • froh
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  • 3 hours ago
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yes! and population numbers!
In the US, 7-11 has started selling Japanese style egg salad sandwiches. I haven’t been brave enough to try one yet.

https://www.7-eleven.com/products/fresh-chilled/egg-salad

  • n4r9
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  • 4 hours ago
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What makes this "Japanese style"? Is it the mayo and the sweetened bread?
I just meant that they are supposed to be very close to the sandwiches they are well known for in Japan.
I'd love to see this for Taiwan. I'm here now (on my Nth trip where N >= 11), and my impression is that 7-11 is the clear winner in all the cities I've been to, followed by Family Mart and then some stragglers like Hilife and OK Mart (it's ok).

My personal favorite is probably Family Mart, because they have multiple very delicious vegan rice balls to choose from.

What’s the source for combini locations?

I’ve actually been interested in that data for a back burner project for some years now.

I assume that querying OpenStreetMap for shop=convenience will return reasonably complete data. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop=convenience
Here's a similar analysis for Hong Kong: https://khwongk12.medium.com/7-eleven-vs-circle-k-5964b8f008....
I live in Japan. This is great! Though with all the overlay it’s hard to pinpoint my neighborhood. A gps loc button or the ability to temporarily turn off the colors would help! Thank you for making such a fun thing :)
Yes - hard to see e.g. city labels on the map under all the pie charts.
  • kuon
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  • 6 hours ago
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This is fun, but I would separate specialized outlets. For example Lawson and Lawson 100 are not the same.
I wonder if this information would be a useful addition to a geoguessr player’s toolbox.
  • k__
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  • 6 hours ago
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A few years ago, I was in Wroclaw and it was full of convenience stores.

Where I stayed, you could go to a store and from there see the next one already.

  • tjpnz
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  • 7 hours ago
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Nice concept but struggled to find my area. Short of search or using my location it would be nice to have a line overlay (lines which go underground are obscured currently).
  • iqihs
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  • 7 hours ago
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very cool, would be interested to see this approach applied to other markets
It took quite a while for the overlay to appear. Be patient if you want to see the data.
this is very cool! I love how responsive the interface is.
There's a lot more than these 6 brands. You have New Days, Daily Yamazaki, and the competition of mini markets as well such as My basket...
Went to japan for a few weeks last year, never saw anyone in the states who went talk about Daily, saw a few and popped in and was surprised by all the breads! pretty dang tasty
There was no war until a map was presented lol
It's just a name, but those franschises would likely consider it a real fight for prime real estate and customer base, each aiming to overtake the others.
Sorry but this seems like vibe coded slop

You cant search or change language

Idk what is the goal here, but maybe some analysis with graph would be better, like who has the most territory or something like that? You also might need to disclosure how you got this data

I thought you were being unfair, but I don’t think you’re wrong anymore.

https://github.com/kikkia/ConbiniWars/commit/b8ea5e5a9351c23...