Do you mean Joe the Plumber from London, UK or Joe the Plumber from London, Ohio ?
We all know how this ends up. It ends up being like Google where the search engine uses word embeddings and the like and removes word from your search queries or replaces November by December because they are both months so you can substitute one for the other right ?
It's sad the article is paywalled because I have developed this theory as well.
(this is the copy paste of a recent HN commment)
> I call it the paradox of discussions on the internet. When it comes to some topic (eg language learning) everything has already been said somewhere by someone very clever. So in the grand scheme of life the value of my contribution to a conversation is 0. Now, if instead of wasting my (and everyone's) time in a pointless discussion I write an in depth blog post or make some creation of some sort that expresses my thought in a deep way and share it then I become a spammer. Whereas a one liner written by a newb or a comment that is posted everyday with a slightly different wording is a 'contribution'.
Protonmail's claim is that their emails are end to end encrypted and that they won't sell your data to advertisers nor answer random government requests. They have always told they are going to collaborate in cases of serious crimes.
Indeed. I work in Europe for a startup that has experienced 100% growth several years in a row and everyone (except for the founders) works 9-5, goes to the pub on Thursday afternoon and leaves early on Friday.
That's clever but there is one reason I think this would not work. Most pro-vaxx don't (and don't want to) spend their entire days thinking about why they are pro-vaxx. Being anti-vaxxer is a lifestyle.
I am the OP. I just discovered that my submission has made it to the front page.
A quick word on the rationale for not using translation.
All of the classic apps (Anki, Duolingo, Memrise, ...) are to some extent translation based. Translating has three scalability issues.
First, if you want to be inclusive and your product to be used by everyone you have to translate the whole product in a long list of languages. I imagine there is a ton of people who do not speak English and would love to learn Japanese !
I don't really know how to express the second limitation better than by saying 'translation is not additive' or it does not 'scale up'. What I mean by that is that if you translate at the word level (such as with Memrise), you learn words but somehow you do no learn the language (to be fair is the point of the app and that works fairly well). However a language expresses itself through sentences and translating a sentence is not the same as translating each one of its word. So you are sort of stuck at the word level and can't scale up to the sentence level by combining the low level components that words are.
Third, translating sentences does not scale well due to the complexity of natural languages. If like Duolingo you base your app on translating sentences you face all the poblem faced by Duolingo.
How do you translate 猿はバナナを食べる ? There are a lot of potential translations. Here are some I can think of right now :
It seems to be down as well. I knew it would happen with the whole Elon Musk stuff but that still makes me very unhappy.