I personally don't care and the rules don't forbid it. I wondered what you wrote, translated it online and thought I'd post it here to save others a few clicks :)
Avec la technologie actuelle, nous devrions pouvoir parler dans la langue de notre choix sans problème.
I don't think it's against the rules at all; we had a thread a couple weeks ago which ended up being mostly in German. We native speakers enjoy the privilege of reading English nearly every where we go online, it should be no skin off our back to pop open Google Translate every once in a while.
An occasional comment in another language is fine but HN is an English-language site, so people shouldn't be having entire conversations in other languages.
As a speaker of multiple languages, I disagree. There's no possibility of HN turning into a non-English language site just because a few threads are not in English; HN will always be first and foremost an English language site (and it's too long set in English for it to be anything but), and it's actually quite nice to be reminded of the existence of other conversations by other language speakers rather than only English. I and many others may not be able to participate so directly in them, but there's always Google Translate.
Hi, Norwegian here, so English is my second language. Sorry no. If there are other-language comments, I just skip them. The reason is UX and time. If you're too lazy to run your other-language comment through Google Trans or similar, then you'll just end up having fewer readers. Meanwhile you just end up annoying those who want to fluently read the discussions without having to stop and run things through a translator every other post. This makes other-language posts bad for HN's business. I mean consider if I just switched to my own language for no reason at all. Haha, da må du kjøre greia gjennom Google Trans eller lignende, og fordi jeg skriver dialekt så er det likevel ikke sikkert at alt blir oversatt riktig lol. Actually the translation for that last sentence came out surprisingly well, but it's not like you'd know anyway.
I'm not a native speaker, but I understand English better than German or Russian. Sometimes it makes sense to write something in other languages, sometimes it doesn't. It should be a matter of common sense and politeness more than about the rules.
I remember going to a computer club talk by Woz where a significant portion (certainly the important parts) of the conversation were all in 6502 assembler. I was so lost, and at the same time inspired.
