dvt's top-level comment was "Things we take for granted are hard."

Your response took things for granted.

dvt originally wrote "We stand on the shoulders of giants."

You commented "I feel it's a problem which I solve, by standing on the shoulders of smarter people and using the code they wrote."

It came across as totally missing dvt's point.

I picked Russian because I was thinking of an essay by Douglas Hofstadter. Quoting myself at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16289783 :

> I think it was in Godel, Escher, Bach where he talks about the problem of translating a line from Russian, along the line of "He lived on B____ street." It's possible from the story, which takes place in a real city, to figure out which street that was. Let's say it was "Main Street". Does the English translation keep the original Russian word and initial? Does it translate to "Main Street" and replace the "B" with an "M"?

You can use a Russian-English translator to get a translation into English. But that doesn't help understand the hard problems involved, which was the point of Hofstadter's essay. (See, for example, his "The Shallowness of Google Translate" in The Atlantic; HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267363 and in dupes.)