HN - thankfully - sends text (mostly) unmolested to browsers which generally tend to handle arabic substrings correctly (assuming the page encoding supports it).
HN /could/ make it better by setting css auto directionality for all <p>s, but that would be antithetical to its goals as a English-written forum.
It won't fool the people who can speak the language, but I think the website is just designed to educate people so that it doesn't look like complete nonsense.
Facebook is surprisingly an offender here. It's common to mix both Arabic and Latin, say, begin with بسم الله and then write the text, sometimes in english, and it'll throw off the alignment of the text completely. You get the Latin words right aligned or the Arabic one left aligned.
Edit: I'm actually quite surprised how well HN handles this.