15 lines of JavaScript that translates tweets from Russians, built in a newsroom setting to help cover a bombing in Moscow, is a cool hack. Hacks don't have to be technically complex, they should be smart solutions to problems.
I think of a hack as a non-obvious solution to a difficult technical problem. I'm not saying they didn't do a good job, this is just more what I would consider standard.
No argument from me, I think the focus was off a bit. This 'hack' was just a simple extension to a plugin I'd already written for parsing jsonp feeds to html. I consider the process more interesting than a specific piece of technology.
This kind of thing is why I loved working for the Guardian. If you ever get the chance to be a programmer in an international newsroom, I recommend taking it.
This is an interesting project, stringing together google translate and a twitter widget...but why is it being covered like it's mainstream news? There's a whole paragraph that covers a minor javascript issue that doesn't seem relevant at all.
It's a relevant explanation of the technical for the non-technical. I'd much rather a verbose explanation than a reference to "magic code" or some other nonsense.
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