craftinator

> there is no way you'll end up with "haze figuring" or "arbitrary timberland" translating one way from any source language into English.

Good to know; I've always wondered at the peculiarities of different translation engines, but never really dug into them, as most modern ones seem like neural network black boxes to me. I was pointing out that there are some realistic use cases for doing round trip translations. I've used this technique at a few conferences to help straighten out my hazy understanding of a complex idea in a language I spoke quite poorly. And I do agree it is bad form to use this directly in an academic paper.

> Also, they speak Spanish in Bolivia ;)

To be fair they speak Bolivian Spanish, along with many other native languages! I chose Bolivia as a random target without doing any research, so thanks for the pedantic push to go learn something new; things like this are why I do love HN!

That is the insidious nature of being uneducated or ignorant in a heavy science subject. I'm fairly well educated, and had a meteorological related job for many years, and I still have a hard time parsing many of these papers. So my options are:

A. Spend huge amounts of time learning the heavy math involved

B. Find someone else who seems educated enough, and trust their ELI5

C. Make my own conclusions based on an imperfect understanding of the science

D. Make my own conclusions based on experience and whatever knowledge I have at the moment

Now I do understand enough about atmospheric dynamics to know, at a high level, that human induced climate change is occuring, why it's happening, and some fuzzy understanding of some of the effects we will see. But I don't think a generic USA highschool level education will be able to inform people enough to have the same understanding, which is why we are in this boat. It seems mostly the people who really understand the what/when/why/how of the situation are STEM field graduates.

> Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone?

I generally assign the problem of "change for the sake of change" to the UX developers, at least at any significantly large company. Once a company gets large enough, you're employment is no longer justified by the quality of your work. You justify it by shipping product features, enhancements, and fixes. So UX developers can't sit back and do nothing, the incentive is to endlessly tweak the state of the UI, by moving things, converting panels to ribbons and vice versa, redesigning icons every 6 months or so, etc. Is it the UX developers fault for doing this? No. But are they the ones doing it? Yes.

The parent post to mine was theorizing that the reason the English was so mangled was because it had been translated from English, then back to English. I was replying that, if the researchers didn't use English as a first language, it's ridiculously more likely that they were translating from their native tongue into English. You're misunderstanding where the notion of translating it twice came from.

And sure, there are reasons to translate a phrase from English, to another language, and back to English. This will be familiar to most people who've studied abroad, or done technical conferences on foreign soil, things of that nature. Let's say you're from Bolivia, attending a lecture at an English university, and are planning on referencing some of the content in a paper you're writing, in English. You speak passable English. The lecturer gets into the meat of the topic, and you realize you don't quite understand the context of what they're saying. Some of the conjugations are unfamiliar, so you just write it down as best you can and move on. Later, when writing the paper, you need a way to untangle the phrasing. A simple way is to put it into a translation application, translate to Bolivian, then try to parse it in native tongue. However, you know you have to explain and discuss this section in English; by translating it back, you'll get the English words, but some of the context and grammar structure will be from familiar Bolivian.

So yeah, never say never.

I don't use it, as I don't like having a monkey on my back. I had the unfortunate experience of having to install it today after losing a long battle to get Fusion 360 running smoothly on Linux. I can say first hand that Windows has become so much more mediocre than I remember; everything about it screams "we cater to the average and mundane".

Fair point. Guess I've been an outlier since the first time I sat down at a keyboard, never been happy with defaults.

Ah, the classic "unwanted feature that you have to waste your time trolling the internet in hopes of finding an way to turn it off that wasn't changed in the last forced unwanted update"! I bill at $60 an hour, to whom do I send the invoice?

And because it's from Microsoft, you're going to keep paying for it, over and over again!

Windows update? That's gonna cost you an hour. Update got botched? 2 hours, and all of your browser settings. Registry corrupted?!? 3 hours for backup and reinstall! Can't figure out how to change a setting, because the option used to be there, then disappeared in the last update? 1 hour searching SO, 1 hour crying.

People use Edge? I assumed that a majority of users do what I do on a fresh install, and download literally any browser that's not made by Microsoft, and set it as default.

> it's a common technique/first layer of plagiarizing a text to translate it from english to eg. spanish and then from spanish to english

It's also a common technique for people who don't speak English to translate it... In fact, quite a bit more common.

Perhaps you've learned to be emotionally hypersensitive to things you sense, while the parent commenter only interprets emotions from emotional contexts, like when people or animals express emotion?

Then again, perhaps anytime two people experience a subjective matter differently, they try to grade each other's ability to experience that matter on an objective scale, with their ability to experience it set at the origin. From the parent commenter's perspective, the article and your response are both emotionally hypersensitive, and from your perspective the parent commenter is "emotionally underdeveloped".

What this all comes down to is that applying an objective scale to a subjective matter doesn't yield anything useful; it only highlights the relative differences of the participants. I've always wondered if it's human nature, or cultural imbuement, to inject competitiveness into something that cannot be competed over. It's obvious that you each see this subjective matter differently. How can either of you possibly think that your subjective viewpoint is correct, without also acknowledging that the other's viewpoint must also be correct to them?

It would be incredibly stupid, at many levels, to lie about something that is so public and scientifically scrutable. There's almost no benefit, at a national level, to lying about this, and when the world eventually learns of the lie, which it would quite quickly, China would be the laughing stock of the scientific world, which is the opposite of what the CCP wants.

So no, this is not a lie, because it would be both obviously stupid, and obviously not in the best interest of China to do that; not even an amazingly shitty and disorganized government would be that stupid, and the Chinese government is quite coherent, and very good at acting I it's own interests.

> After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on.

> so I pay them less, regardless of whatever objective measure of impact may exist.

Ah, the classic "blame the person you hired for being bored with a low paid, dead end, high churn rate job", most excellent.

Ah, I think a lot of the people questioning your choice to hand over the data are US based, where a warrant signed by a judge is legally binding, but a letter from a prosecutor has no such power.

The police always intimidate. It's how they try to gain control of every situation they are in. If there's no mention, it should be assumed, and should be assumed unless there's specific evidence to the contrary.

Yes, the uncertainty is by far the worst part. I personally won't seek medical help unless I am completely sure I have a problem I can't handle myself (which will likely get me killed eventually, but at least my family will be able to pay for the funeral). A large part of that is not having any way to pre-budget the cost. If I don't know for sure I have a problem I can't deal with, I could go through thousands of dollars worth of testing only to find that it's acid reflux. And at that point the reflux would become worse because I'll develop ulcers just thinking of the debt.

If you don't opt in to the crowdfunding, it's called "mass theft".

> I am someone else who apparently never understood what technical debt was supposed to mean.

I've always assumed engineers (myself included) write code to the best of their abilities to solve a given problem at the time.

Another way of looking at technical debt, that I unfortunately must use regularly, is debt accrued by not updating systems. I work with hardware and software that is, in some cases, from the 80's. As these machines age, they become more and more likely to break. The longer we wait to replace them, the more value their initial investment is worth, but also the greater the chance that production will be halted for months while we try to design and implement a new system. So this is technical debt accrual as a function of time, not as a function of development speed.

But in the case of the US, we pay for healthcare in our taxes, pay again as companies, and again pay co-pays as individuals.

Why don't they just filter out the useless Y's, but keep the good ones?

Yeah, just like the American Pie movies, kids like em, so they're kid movies!

I think people may be missing the connection between punishments being with severe, and kept at a low level. A platoon will do a lot more to punish someone than a battalion.

Justice under the UCMJ is similar to how a grand jury operates, where the highest ranking officers will hear a case with evidence, and make decisions about guilt and punishment. Platoon level punishment is much more freeform, and tends to ignore those rules about type and duration of punishment; much more corporal in nature.

> So, not severely, then?

Probably could have phrased it better. The military culture is very different than civilian culture, jokes and turns of phrase that would be completely unacceptable in the civilian world are common, and the tolerance for them is higher. It's very much like the difference between working an office job, and going out to a seedy bar; different culture, different expectations and rules.

But as for what I said, there was a lot of borderline sexual harassment (and much of it that I witnessed not involving females at all) that went unreported. But when something was reported, it stayed at lower levels most times, and involved squad and platoon level justice, which is very, very severe. Like more severe than is allowed under the UCMJ.

> It's also worth noting that the military is a toxic cesspit for sexual abuse. Comparing any sane workplace to the military is a joke. Nobody should want to be like the military, including the military.

Can confirm true from experience. To be fair, the military (USMC experience only) is structured to intentionally harass all members below certain ranks continuously, with the idea being that it keeps them sharp and willing to follow orders that put them or others directly in harm's way. Sexual harassment was punished severely, but at the lowest levels possible, and wasn't often reported.

Much like the Colonel's 11 Secret Herbs and Spices, they are both Forbidden to know, and Impossible to understand.

Yeah, I can't stand freezing nor boiling either! Let's go ahead and embrace a better unit of measurement now!

> I don't think Diem is necessarily in search of a problem.

I think the problem with Diem is not that it doesn't fill a market role, it's that the target market, in general, knows how evil Facebook is, and would prefer a "cleaner" alternative. The problem with doing dodgey stuff with user data for years and years is that you gain a reputation, and then even if a small subset of your massive super organization makes a really good pure product, that product still inherits the stench from the parent. We don't trust the Zuck, and until fairly recently the target market for Diem were almost entirely people tech savvy enough to understand the depths to which Facebook operates in.

Imagine if Google came out with a new crypto-coin, and with all the soul and creativity a bloated bureaucracy can muster, called it "GCoin", a "New way to shop and get tracked!". Now, many normal people would stay away from GCoin purely because they know it would be in the GGraveyard in two years, but the rest of the target market would think," Ya know, Google has been absolutely evil this last decade or so, building their business model around surveiling us and toying with our emotions to get us to buy useless shit, while slowly trading away any uniqueness they ever had for fun primary marketing colors in a thousand different patterns. I think I'll pass on this GCoin bullshit...". That's how we feel about Diem. Except possibly not quite as angry, because at least Facebook has given us a figurehead to hate, instead of the faceless, souless, primary colored evil that is Google.

> What's wrong the coins I got issued from the federal reserve?

They are owned by someone who doesn't understand how one thing can be "good" without another thing in the same category being "bad".

You must be halfway intelligent!

Okay, so looking at your other posts, seems like you really love conspiracy theories and tying together any random coincidence you can without evidence. Not going to engage you in conversation again.