3 ms·
Non-native speakers have learned and improved their English for decades by trial-and-error, let’s stop using that as an excuse to use LLMs. I have been there, a
by sph 3mo ago
Non-native speakers have learned and improved their English for decades by trial-and-error, let’s stop using that as an excuse to use LLMs. I have been there, and making mistakes is how one learns to communicate effectively in another language.
If one doesn’t put effort in their writing, I am not going to put effort to read whatever slop they put out instead. Simple as that.
- dang 3mo agoWhat you say implies that people should "learn and improve their English" before posting their work to HN. I'm not with you on that, and here's why: we're trying to optimize for the most-intellectually-interesting site, not the most-English site: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor..., even though people do have to post in English here. That may sound like too fine a distinction, but it isn't. Here's an example: Show HN: Getting GLM 5.2 running on my slow computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842459, which was the #1 thread on HN a couple days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-07-09 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-07-09). That user is a non-native English speaker who helped get his posts into a format that HN could appreciate. His work is obviously excellent—the community response was unambiguous. But I don't think it would have made it through without our help. I'm sure you weren't saying that if someone can't describe their work in good English then it must be slop, but the space is larger than you make it sound. Which is unfortunate in a way—it would be easier to narrow it down, but then we'd miss posts like that one.
- cwillu 3mo agoPie-in-the-sky synthesis: translation is easy these days, so maybe non-english writers can and should just write in their own native language and let the readers provide their own translation. Perhaps English no longer needs to be the lingua anglais of western tech writing :p
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- otterley 3mo agoI don’t buy it, Dan, because non-native English speakers were somehow managing to produce, publicize, and communicate before LLMs did the heavy lifting for them. Perhaps they had human assistance before, but the slop that’s so endemic today reminds us of its value.
- dang 3mo agoNot on HN they weren't. Right?
- otterley 3mo agoNon native speakers have been on HN since its inception. Unless you mean something else?
- dang 3mo agoSorry, I was posting hastily and can see how that was unclear. Unfortunately I've forgotten my point. Perhaps it was this: there are many non-native English speakers who have valuable things to contribute to HN, who don't yet have sufficient English or don't feel they do, and therefore resort to LLMs to do their English for them. Should they automatically be excluded?
- girvo 3mo agoThey should be included! But there's a difference between machine translation and technical-writing-using-an-LLM, in my opinion. One has a lot more humanness to it, still.
- otterley 3mo agoYou said earlier that we don't allow LLM-generated content on HN itself (i.e., the comments). So, at least in principle, that's already taken care of through exclusion. If you mean the linked content: can come from anyone and anywhere--it's just whatever someone submits and is deemed good enough by The Algorithm to get attention. So that's not "HN content" - the content exists independently of HN. As for that, I'll repeat myself: the scientific community has managed somehow to intercommunicate for centuries despite language barriers before LLMs existed. (English was neither Einstein's nor Madame Curie's first language.) It's an existence proof that LLMs aren't needed to overcome those barriers.