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sphtoday at 4:43 AM1 replyview on HN

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.


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dangtoday at 4:45 AM

What 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&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, which was the #1 thread on HN a couple days ago (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.

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