This comment breaks HN's civility rule twice. First, you insinuated astroturfing (or commenting in bad faith). That's not allowed without evidence. Merely happening to disagree with someone is not evidence. Second, you invoked (allegedly) poor English to cast aspersion on someone. That's pretty low, given how many non-native speakers HN has and how poorly the rest of us would do in most other contexts.

Please treat others more respectfully on this site.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11761460 and marked it off-topic.

Um, not a native English speaker here. Though as long as I can articulate my thoughts to have a meaningful discussion, I don't think that's being an issue. I would rather you focus on the topic and contribute your thoughts or counter-arguments, than focusing on trivia or throw off 5 cents party stuff to close this fruitful conversation.

You can definitely articulate your thoughts enough to have a meaningful discussion, your written English is indistinguishable from college graduate level native written English. I am seriously curious what small hint convinced jonstokes your English was not native, because it was too small for me to catch I guess.

Thanks for the nice words. That's why hackernews is the forum I frequent most, since we can have discussions over almost every imaginable topics in an intelligent and decent manner. Even it is as political and ideological as this one.

I'm an editor, so I have an inordinately fine sense of who makes what kinds of tiny errors.

OH. That actually makes sense.

...I actually thought you were a native speaker at first. Your English is pretty good and it's easy to understand your thoughts.

Thanks for the nice words. Speaking with an accent and writing not as fluent as native English speakers used to make myself frustrated a lot. I got used to it a while ago. Though debating political or historical topics like this one is still a challenge to me. I think I need to participate more often, :)

Wow, what is your definition of broken? I'm a native English speaker and did not notice anything off anywhere in the OP's remarks. Like, I would have failed a test that required me to classify paragraphs as "likely written by native or non-native English speaker" on this one. Genuinely wondering, which part was the tipoff, as I can't find it? Maybe I'm just not so literate myself? :-)