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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Are you a native English speaker?

"does NOT constrain user's rate limit" should be "does NOT rate limit incoming requests" or similar.

"We will try out best" should be "our best".

"when our servers are under high traffic pressure" is at least grammatical, but it's awkward. Normally you'd say "when our servers are dealing with high load" or something similar.

"your requests may take some time to receive a response from the server" is again grammatical but also awkward. "Our response times may be slower" would be more natural.

The last sentence is also awkward but the whole thing would need to be restructured, which is too much for an HN comment.

Basically: everything about this screams English as a second language. Which does mean that it's unlikely to have been LLM generated, because from what I've seen DeepSeek itself does a pretty good job with English!

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I'm a native English speaker, and I partially disagree with your claims of awkwardness.

"when our servers are under high traffic pressure" - this is a bit awkward I agree, but only the last three words.

If we rearrange it to "when our servers are under pressure from high traffic", I think it sounds good. It's using a metaphor, and I think that should be encouraged. It's interesting. And the phrase "high traffic" conveys some drama.

"your requests may take some time to receive a response from the server" - I think that's fine, to be honest. I like it.

I think you are conflating "awkwardness" with linguistic flair. Technical documentation English has become standardised to a large degree, which of course is useful, and efficient. But it is also a narrow usage of English, and breaking out of its straitjacket does not make language awkward.

That’s a very generous interpretation. I don’t know mandarin but these are likely a transfer of grammar constructs from the primary language to english, in the same way the Dutch will say “make a picture” or “the house of my parents”, which can be justly classified as awkward rather than as linguistic flair.

If someone was editing my writing, it would feel a bit patronizing if they said grammar mistakes (many of which come from my mother tongue Portuguese) are “adding flair”, as they are not a stylistic choice.

I'm not claiming it was intentional on their part. My point was solely one of language, so how the sentence came to be written that way is out of scope. And given the word swap I suggested, I don't think it is awkward at all (unlike your examples from Dutch, which definitely are).

As for it being patronising, why is telling a non-native speaker their sentence is interesting unacceptable, but telling them it's awkward is ok? (Assuming both are genuinely held opinions).

I'll reiterate my point that common English usage (non-awkward?) has narrowed enormously in the last 50 years. I think that this is a bad thing.

Your point of how the social norms for English have changed over the last 50 years could be interesting but what does it have to do with the parents point of "these docs seem human written and not spell checked which is very different from the other ai companies AND which is weird anyway for a megacompany with ai tools that write English well".

Which part is it that has linguistic flair? Is it "The prices listed below are in unites of per 1M tokens", or "The expense = number of tokens × price"? Or maybe "you may continuously receive contents in the following formats"?

> "Our response times may be slower" would be more natural.

How can the time be slower? Response times may be longer, but not slower

In colloquial English my construction is just fine, but sure, you'd be welcome to pick longer too.

Some examples of my usage in the wild ("response times may be slower" is present verbatim on each page):

https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/discussions/8133

https://www.ameristarstaffingny.com/the-negative-effects-of-...

https://oci.wi.gov/Pages/Regulation/Bulletin20200320Regulato...

https://playrix.helpshift.com/hc/en/27-questbound/faq/13930-...

This sentence is a good example where the native speaker's version is worse (in this case because it's just non-sense, as the parent commenter already pointed out).

Sounds like you're the kind of person who will insist to Spanish speakers that a double negative is logically incoherent. Good luck with that approach to language!

This is normal and accepted English, at least in the USA.

And in English, the word “worse” requires a comparative compliment . Worse than what? Maybe you meant worse than a non-native speaker, but because you didn’t say it, your sentence sounds off.

In English time can have lots of lengths. Any number of English novels have the phrase “a long minute”. People talk about time passing slowly or quickly. We say things like “The last 15 minutes took hours!” Or “Today went by so fast.”

Just because the word “sunrise” is nonsense scientifically doesn’t mean it’s not understood and correct to use in English.

> In colloquial English my construction is just fine,

Maybe. However, in my opinion, it’s better to write in such a way that leaves zero chance for misunderstanding.

No real human being would misunderstand because, as you note, time can't go slower. This is just an excuse for pedantry.

When you remark on improvements, up is generally better and down is generally worse. So saying "response times will be higher" gives an immediate sentiment of improvement. But, obviously, a moments thinking helps you re-orient and realize it's better. This is why plots often have "lower is better" in the legend, to help readers understand.

I often use 'slower' and 'faster' as a native speaker to help reinforce the meaning of the direction.

> "response times will be higher" gives an immediate sentiment of improvement.

Higher as opposed to lower? It makes no sense to me.

Exactly.

"Response times will be higher" sounds very confusing as a way of saying we'll take less time to respond, right? So why should "response times will be lower" mean we'll take more time if the opposite construct is confusing?

Far better to just use the comparative forms that we already have for time specifically to make it perfectly clear.

It makes more sense if the direction is split from the unit in the sentence.

Consider: "after investigating response times and doing and doing a bunch of work, my PR causes a 30% reduction" - if you're busy doing lots of things and already have a lot of cognitive load, this could sound bad because the important phrase "30% reduction" is in there. You are a detail oriented person who is immune to this effect, but there are people who need help reducing their cognitive load in this type of thing.

You can help people reduce cognitive load by replacing "reduction" with "improvement" so they immediately understand that it moved in the right direction.

Yes, this is a good explanation for the phenomenon! Thanks.

It’s not time that is slower. It’s a thing called “our response time” which is slower. There is a slower response. This is perfectly grammatically correct and normally used, at least in American English.

If your problem is that the texts you quoted were not written by someone with English as the first language, I tell you: English is not the framework of human civilization, it sometimes uses English for data quantization and message passing.

A lot of English native speakers has such assumptions that:

- any academic topics are universally discussed in English/Latin and so every highly educated person shall speak good English, - language is like a thin wrapper over a to-be-converted-to-YAML common intermediate language(Universal Grammar theory), - anything should translate into fluid English with intent completely intact, - but WWW is >90% English anyway, - etc.

None of these are true, and it's just not realistic for a well educated East Asian - common theme of East Asian languages is it's all custom implementations with minimal sharing with neighbors let alone English - to "just" pick up natural English. I suppose you're looking for something like following:

"At DeepSeek, we strive to serve every request to our customers with best of our effort, and we do not impose a rate limit for our APIs. However, do note that due to finite nature of our computing resources, API responses might become delayed in cases when our backend is experiencing high load. Under such circumstances, the HTTP sessions will be kept alive, and response will be served in following formats..."

... Isn't this a $1m/yr skill on its own? Have you seen a great Far East engineer write like this - I mean, how often do you come across a Far Eastern translator that can casually do this?

I don't really get the point of your post.

The goal is to pretend that DeepSeek doesn't have access to good English translators? Or good English translation capabilities?

Why don't we just not pretend this instead?

Why do we not pretend like foreign language technical ghostwriting is a solved problem! You guys are asking for complete rewrites by someone explicitly NOT Chinese natives for all documentations. There's some point it'll be just an unreasonable ask.

A lot of HNers puts blind trust on Universal Grammar Theory and downplay languages as all but obsolete human output packing format that are each no more than header differences and those are just wrong. Languages are at least CODEC. And if you go back to the original topic from there, I don't think it will sound so unreasonable that translating between different CODECs will induce losses and artifacts.

I think this would have been a great argument to make 5 years ago. Now, it's absurd. DeepSeek itself can clean this up and output perfect English.

Nope, I've tried it in one of other comments, it didn't go so well. It's minimum 5 years away from being one prompt away. GPT-2 was 6 years ago and we still don't have self driving cars(except Waymo which always worked), so it could even be longer.

Here's a refined version of your text:

---

*DeepSeek API Rate Limit & Service Notice* DeepSeek imposes no rate limits on users, and we strive to fulfill all requests.

During periods of high server traffic, responses may be delayed. While waiting, your HTTP connection will remain active, and you may continue to receive content in the following formats:

[Insert specific formats here]

---

*Key improvements:* 1. Corrected "try out best" → "strive" for conciseness and professionalism. 2. Simplified "under high traffic pressure" → "high server traffic." 3. Streamlined phrasing (e.g., "remain connected" → "remain active"). 4. Structured the message for clarity and readability.

Let me know if you'd like further adjustments!

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