Hacker News Reader

Comment by buybackoff | Hacker News Reader

It's worse than that, the first thing that I scanned in the article is if he is alive. A title like that without a pre-defined context more often, in my native Russian perception, could mean much worse that just leaving a company. I'm glad he's doing well, I really enjoy NGINX as a casual user. It is a great gift to people. Удачи (good luck) or всего хорошего (best wishes) would not trigger such a reaction to scan the article for me.

I've just counted: only on the 13th paragraph I could get the answer.

View on HN

As another native Russian speaker, to me the headline explicitly did mean that Igor is alive, and the subsequent meeting would be in the physical plane of our existence. Had it been one of the closer synonyms of "Good bye", I myself would have surmised the worst.

I know zero Russian, or any other language other than English. I had a very similar reaction to you. It sounded almost like an obituary.

maybe they've updated, but the fourth paragraph is currently "we announce today Igor has chosen to step back..."

which would seem to imply "not dead". but given the tone of the first three paragraphs i think even that is a bit too late in the post to clarify.

I "scanned" the article twice, so could have missed. First time I did quit, because HN comments are often more clear and useful instead of "reading" every noise they publish out there. And I did not find what I was looking for. The second time I scanned again after I posted, just to find the paragraph if it was there at all. Even if it was in the 4th originally, it's still far too off. It should have been in the first sentence of the first paragraph.

Yeah, but that's like the fourth paragraph.

I know hardly any Russian, only about enough to recognise "da svidanja" as "goodbye", so I'm not sure "in what language" I digested the headline (=link here on HN) -- probably a bit of all of my eclectic blend of European ones... But to me it certainly felt fifty-fifty whether it was a "changed jobs" or a "dearly departed" post. Checking which it was probably constituted my main reason for clicking through.

It sounds the same to an american english speaker without knowing a word of Russian since we can infer context and use the same farewell structure for the deceased.

> the first thing that I scanned in the article is if he is alive

Same thing, my first reaction was "oh my god, no, please no" and I rushed to see if he's alive.

Maybe it was just some sort of click bait to keep the reader on the page...

I would rather think machine translation and learning foreign languages should be better in general. But that is probably a C2-level subtlety, so if a non-Russian was writing that I could understand.

I imagine a situation: EN copywriter asks a RU colleague how to say "Goodbye", gets "Do svidaniya" as a transliteration without a context, and just puts it there. Which sounds like farewell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com