I hadn't really considered the case of actually wanting to learn English :) I just assume its tolerated by the rest of the world.

Maybe you have it backwards?

Why do you need to communicate in English with us native English speakers? Why don't we need to learn your language to communicate with you?

The way I'm looking at it is that you're putting all this effort towards learning how to communicate with people who would never without an outside pressure do the same for you.

If language learning is intrinsically a positive thing what can we do to encourage it in native speakers of English, specifically Americans who are monolingual (as they dominate this website)?

Imagine a scenario where Dang announced that we're only allowed to post in English one day week -- every day is dedicated to another language, like Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and the system auto deleted posts that weren't in those languages. Would that be a good thing? Would we see American users start to learn Spanish to post on HN on Tuesdays?

I've seen this comment but can't square it with the LLM-induced outcry from translators over job loss.

We've all pasted news articles into 2022 Google Translate and a modern LLM, right, and there was no comparison? LLMs even crushed DeepL. Satya had this little story his PR folks helped him with (j/k) even, via Wired June '23:

---

STEVEN LEVY: "Was there a single eureka moment that led you to go all in?"

SATYA NADELLA: "It was that ability to code, which led to our creating Copilot. But the first time I saw what is now called GPT-4, in the summer of 2022, was a mind-blowing experience. There is one query I always sort of use as a reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and it's achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it doesn't have the subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry. Growing up in Hyderabad, India, I'd dreamt about being able to read Persian poetry—in particular the work of Rumi, which has been translated into Urdu and then into English. GPT-4 did it, in one shot. It was not just a machine translation, but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry across two language boundaries. And that's pretty cool."

---

edit: this comment has some comparisons incl. w/the old Google Translate I'm referring to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40243219

Today Google Translate is Gemini, though maybe that's not the "traditional translation tool" you were referencing... but hope there's enough here to discuss any aspect that might be interesting!

edit2: March 2025 comparison-

https://lokalise.com/blog/what-is-the-best-llm-for-translati...

"falling behind LLM-based solutions", "consistently outperformed by LLMs", "Not matching top LLMs"

The ones that are “pretty darn good” are the ones that use the same underlying AI/ML tech as the average LLM, and would be in violation of this newly-formalized guideline.

>Telling an LLM to "refine" your writing is just lazy and it doesn't help you learn to express yourself better. Asking it for various ways of conveying something, and picking one that suits you when writing a comment is OK in my book.

To me those are the same thing excepting the number of options given to the human...

> Anyone with a level of proficiency sufficient for reading the comments here can manage writing English at a passable level.

I'm an English speaker with some Spanish education and practice. My experience is that reading, writing, listening, and speaking can be quite uneven. Uneven enough to matter.

In the long-run, yes, learning a language is better, assuming your goal is to learn the language. I'm not trying to be snarky: sometimes people simply want to communicate an idea quickly in the short-run and/or don't prioritize deepening a language skill.

I would rephrase the comment above as a question: "Given the set of tools available (in person tutoring, online tutoring, AI-tooling, etc) and what we know about learning from cognitive science, for a given budget and time investment, what combination of techniques work better and worse for deepening various language skills?"

> Then you should have no issue with people using LLMs to communicate more clearly.

My raw thought: I wonder how many people are really objecting to the loss of exclusivity of their status derived from their relative eloquence in internet forums. When everyone can effectively communicate their ideas, those who had the exclusive skill lose their advantage. Now their core ideas have to improve.

Same idea, LLM-assisted: I wonder how many objections to LLM-assisted writing really stem from protecting the status that comes with relative eloquence. When everyone can express their ideas clearly, those who relied on polished prose as a differentiator lose that edge. The conversation shifts to the quality of the underlying ideas — and not everyone wants that scrutiny.

Same ideas. Same person. One reads better. Which version do you actually object to?