Interesting. Any telltale signs? I'm assuming it's not the difference between native English speaker and ESL, but specific words or grammar patterns? Can you tell from my comment history whether I was educated in the US?
I spent <5 minutes on it. I'd guess that you're not US educated (or at least not a native US English speaker).
The "tell" that I'm primarily relying upon is that you often drop articles where a US-native speaker would use them. Just one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13197570 (that was as far back as I went) I think most native US speakers would use "the gun industry" and "the film industry". Several later comments drop an "an" or "a" article as well.
You also have a habit of using a comma splice rather than a semi-colon to join sentences, but that one is harder to place geographically, as it's a somewhat common trait within the US as well. In my experience, it is often a trait of European native speakers who learned English as a second language, but is less reliable than dropped articles.
Dropped articles is a good indicator of (most) Slavic language speakers, but not of most European languages. E.g., French would not have dropped those definite articles either.
Definite article rules do vary a little bit, though, so extra definite articles would be a good indicator of European native speakers...
Correct on both counts, although it's not quite clear how much of the difference is from place of education rather than native language. Math is the same no matter where you study it, at least in theory. Probably need a bigger sample.
That was an incredibly obvious example. My favorite telltale sign for native English speakers is the rampant misspelling of trivialities like it(')s, you(')r(e), etc. I've seen so many well educated peers fail at basic grammar, or misspelling common words (e.g. electrisity, from a CS undergrad) that I'm comfortable making this generalization.
The question was not whether I'm a native English speaker (obviously not), but whether I was educated in the US. I believe the latter is a much harder question.
