_solr

You just summarised the whole argument : you can go very far with a well structured relational database.

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 ?

This has never been a secret or am I missing something ? https://protonmail.com/law-enforcement

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.

Hi

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 :

The monkey eats the banana.

The monkeys eat the banana

The monkey will eat the bananas.

The monkeys are going to eat the bananas.