Many people in Latin America or Spain can write great code, but they are not that fluent in English. There was nothing similar before. And among 400 million people that speak Spanish, there are many, many good hackers.
I grant you your point, of course: It's fair enough to say that lack of English is a disadvantage - but I don't think the answer is to say there shouldn't be a more vibrant Spanish-language community than there has been.
I'm not against a spanish HN or any other website in a mother tongue, but wouldn't be better for everyone if Latin American Hackers would become fluent in English? Maybe then US companies could open up offices in Latin America, hire the best programmers, pay maybe less than what we pay now, etc.
Technically we're talking about the same amount of money (more than they are paid now, less than a programmer in Silicon Valley) but framing does matter.
[Note: I can't think of a less argumentative way to express that without being a lot less succinct. It's not meant as a flame, really.]
Addendum on rereading, because I think it matters: For a Pole to learn English to open up career opportunities has a whole lot less historical baggage connected with it than for a Latin American to do so, and this is over and above the fact that there are ten times as many speakers of Spanish as speakers of Polish.
I have been lucky to be born in a region with 2 official languages and more lucky to have a 3rd language in my family and being able to learn English and French in school. But... this is not normal in the rest of Europe.
In any case, I am not sure if I have understood correctly your last sentence. Did you mean "pay maybe more"? I am not sure of what you are implying...
"They took err jerb!!!"
It would also be better for everyone if humanity as a whole switched to renewable energy sources next year. Unfortunately there's the small matter of feasibility. Learning a language is not trivial for everyone.
I doubt that. The cost would be devastating. With current renewable energy technologies, we'd only generate a fraction of the power we use even after we pave the wilderness with windmills.