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Not sure why I thought I couldn't respond to you directly, but I deleted the other comment and moved it here where it belongs: Re the "just one language" thing

by dkarl 15y ago

Not sure why I thought I couldn't respond to you directly, but I deleted the other comment and moved it here where it belongs: Re the "just one language" thing, I can imagine I'm not making sense, because I'm not really communicating the context of how irrationally enraged I am over this. The truth is that I only enabled a couple of languages because I was just too angry and frustrated to enable the rest. I know it doesn't make any rational sense, but my reptile brain is telling me that goddammit, Google is not going to make me click on fifty little boxes just to fix them erasing my preferences. Not today. Not this user. There is a part of the brain that is trained to recognize when someone is jerking you around or abusing you, and when it gets triggered inappropriately, it is impossible to turn off. (I'm sure anyone who has worked in customer service will recognize what I'm talking about. Right now I am the bug-eyed paranoid who is convinced they are intentionally screwing with me for their own amusement.) So long story short, yes, it seems immensely important to me that I have to check fifty boxes instead of one, and I still don't have my unfiltered search results, not until I calm down enough to go click on all those boxes. As for the problem of change, I can sympathize with the problem they face. I'm sure that globally minimizing user confusion and frustration is one of their goals. As for me personally, they'll have to count me in the "used the product incorrectly for years without realizing it and is now very angry about it" category. UPDATE: EVEN ANGRIER: So I swallowed my pride and went to work clicking. "The page at https://www.google.com https://www.google.com says: The number of language restrictions is limited to 8, so only 8 of the languages selected will be saved." That doesn't bode well. But then: "The page at https://www.google.com https://www.google.com says: Your preferences have been saved" Ah, but guess which time it was lying :-/ So unless there's another way to turn off language filtering, Google will filter out every language besides your primary language and seven others. (Yeah, your interface language counts as one of the eight.) That's terrible. Even without Google Translate, I swear I got useful information from a page in Polish once. Plus there are pictures, video, miscategorized pages, mixed-language pages (what happens with those?) and the simple coolness of finding out that someone in Vietnam is using an open-source library you committed a patch to. And of course, Google freakin' Translate! Unless Google is translating every single page it crawls. Which it might be -- that's something to think about. But it does very poorly with some pairs of languages, and if it filters out every term it can't translate, then it will tend to filter out commands and symbols. And here I am speculating about how it works again, which goes back to my original point. With my track record today, I'm sure I'll find out I'm misinterpreting this somehow, but I'm starting to feel a little bit justified in my anger. Ah, I can't lie. I feel much less angry now that I feel like less of a fool :-)

6ren 15y ago
HN disables the reply button on long threads, for a period of time which increases with the length of the thread. This is to discourage back-and-forth arguments and to give people time to cool down. (You can circumvent it by clicking "link"; a reply box appears beneath.) I'm with you on the inappropriately triggered jerking-me-round neuron. I am definitely there from time to time :-). You put it well. When in that state, I don't really believe that someone in the real world is messing with me - but inside my world, I believe someone is. I think that I can't quite see the real world in that state (or don't want to). Funny thing is, if I find out someone is messing with me, I also feel less angry... Oh man, that's awful. And that "limited to 8" dialog pops up for each checkbox. Seems a really badly designed interface in general. I wonder why the limit? Maybe they keep languages separate, because effective pagerank criteria differ across languages/cultures; and they're limiting internal bandwidth needed to combine the results from distant databases. I was going to say you could just include the languages you can read (and where you often found useful info before); but I appreciate your point about seeing the whole web (I guess, the www), across languages. I've had a play with google translate, and I noted that untranslated words seem to pass through, unaltered (using the text-based one, eg: http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#auto|en|Je%20ne%20sais%20pas%20qwertyuiop http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#auto|en|Je%20n... ) You could probably see by trying example pages til you find a word it doesn't know. It seems much more useful to include an untranslated word than to omit it, so hopefully they do it that way. Given the 8 limit, this seems the best option for seeing the whole web - and if the translation is any good at all, it might be better. I might try this (though I recall reading something that I didn't notice was auto-translated, and after reading for a while, suddenly becoming aware that I had no idea what it meant...) I wonder if just plain more information about a situation reduces anger, because anger relies on one's internal view of the world? The more acquainted we get with the real world, the harder it is to sustain anger. (Aside: The Buddhists say all negative emotion is based on ignorance or misconception - of seeing something as 100% absolutely negative - and so negative emotion can be reduced by deeper understanding.)
landhar 15y ago
I faced the same problem. I am fluent in 4 languages and can work my way on a few others. But the problem is not that it's limited to an arbitrary number of languages. The problem is that it doesn't feel anymore like what I'm getting back from any query is the full web.

by dkarl 15y ago

6ren 15y ago

HN disables the reply button on long threads, for a period of time which increases with the length of the thread. This is to discourage back-and-forth arguments and to give people time to cool down. (You can circumvent it by clicking "link"; a reply box appears beneath.) I'm with you on the inappropriately triggered jerking-me-round neuron. I am definitely there from time to time :-). You put it well. When in that state, I don't really believe that someone in the real world is messing with me - but inside my world, I believe someone is. I think that I can't quite see the real world in that state (or don't want to). Funny thing is, if I find out someone is messing with me, I also feel less angry... Oh man, that's awful. And that "limited to 8" dialog pops up for each checkbox. Seems a really badly designed interface in general. I wonder why the limit? Maybe they keep languages separate, because effective pagerank criteria differ across languages/cultures; and they're limiting internal bandwidth needed to combine the results from distant databases. I was going to say you could just include the languages you can read (and where you often found useful info before); but I appreciate your point about seeing the whole web (I guess, the www), across languages. I've had a play with google translate, and I noted that untranslated words seem to pass through, unaltered (using the text-based one, eg: http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#auto|en|Je%20ne%20sais%20pas%20qwertyuiop http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#auto|en|Je%20n... ) You could probably see by trying example pages til you find a word it doesn't know. It seems much more useful to include an untranslated word than to omit it, so hopefully they do it that way. Given the 8 limit, this seems the best option for seeing the whole web - and if the translation is any good at all, it might be better. I might try this (though I recall reading something that I didn't notice was auto-translated, and after reading for a while, suddenly becoming aware that I had no idea what it meant...) I wonder if just plain more information about a situation reduces anger, because anger relies on one's internal view of the world? The more acquainted we get with the real world, the harder it is to sustain anger. (Aside: The Buddhists say all negative emotion is based on ignorance or misconception - of seeing something as 100% absolutely negative - and so negative emotion can be reduced by deeper understanding.)

landhar 15y ago

I faced the same problem. I am fluent in 4 languages and can work my way on a few others. But the problem is not that it's limited to an arbitrary number of languages. The problem is that it doesn't feel anymore like what I'm getting back from any query is the full web.