Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fight coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/miscalculation-at-every-level-left-u-s-unequipped-to-fight-coronavirus-11588170921 <comment><USER2> I still remember how when the pandemic was breaking out, I and my colleagues in the lab were not taking this seriously because we were so confident we'd be able to get it under control. All we had to do was test rigorously, and, like c'mon. It's just qPCR. I remember overconfidently asserting that, like, the USA _invented_ PCR - we know how to do it. laugh out loud. Hell, I had a plate in the machine as I was speaking! Colleagues agreed. After all, it only got so bad in china because they were covering it up, right? We just gotta run more tests, trace, and isolate. The stuff we were working on the lab was hard fundamental questions - the science needed to stop the pandemic was some PCR and quarantining people. And, the CDC was developing our own diagnostic instead of using the WHO's, but that makes sense, they're the CDC. What were the odds that they'd screw up so badly that the FDA would describe conditions as so bad they'd be reason enough to shut down the lab if they weren't the CDC? What were the odds that our friends in testing labs would find themselves describing the CDC as having "simply failed at molecular biology" [0]?

Of course, I use the past tense when describing our feelings about our research since we're certainly not working on it now. It's all nonessential. We're not allowed to go to the lab now unless you really need to water the plants or feed the mice. Just to keep a sustaining gene pool of our model organisms alive, so we can breed back what we need when we get back.

We really learned a lesson in humility. Part of miscalculating is having the wrong set of assumptions to derive calculations from. I don't think we were the only people who should have known better that were arrogant and overconfident.

We're hearing from some local labs that they have enough reagents to run tests, they have the right primers, they have what they need. But they can't get the cotton swabs they shove all the way up your nose and the little plastic collection things they need to administer the test. Cotton swabs. And little plastic vials.

We're talking about developing a vaccine, a cure, privacy-respecting contact tracing, fighting a once in a generation pandemic, keeping the hospital system from being overwhelmed. And we don't have the cheap disposable plastic and cotton things we need to run a test.

Truly a lesson in humility.

[0][https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01068-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01068-3)

<comment><USER3> Adding to the list of CDC failures was their utter failure to procure masks. You know, those things that would be absolutely vital for just about any epidemic or pandemic (never mind the respiratory variety that we knew would be the most likely). It's not like preparing for an epidemic is the raisin d'etre for the CDC or anything. I'm normally not this snarky, but I too thought the CDC was the one functioning agency but it turns out that it's closer to the opposite. And not only that, but their utter incompetence killed tens of thousands.

<comment><USER4> The CDC, US Surgeon General, and WHO have all claimed with a straight face that masks don't protect you from getting the virus. I guess that's why they didn't see any value in stockpiling them. /s

<comment><USER5> I too assume that surgeons wear those masks for funsies.

Of course the "masks don't work" was pure, transparent, bullshit from the very beginning. It didn't even pass the smell test. Now if the argument was "please save masks for healthcare workers first, they're higher risk" that would be _fine_. But "they don't work"? Fuck off.

Edit: I'm referring to the CDC here, not you personally, dear HN commenter.

<comment><USER6> If you tell people to save masks for healthcare workers... then the hoarding would have been worse.

At least by telling people masks don't work... peer pressure would keep them from buying them?

<comment><USER5> It doesn't look like anyone bought it, masks still sold out quickly and health care providers are still reusing N95 masks. And in exchange the CDC spent a large amount of their credibility; a real lose lose.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious, was the official word always that even N95 masks didn't protect the wearer? Or just that "masks" in general (i.e., lesser masks) would not protect wearers?

<comment><USER8> N95 masks are used as part of a package of PPE. That includes eye shields, gloves, and gowns. There's a complex protocol to put them on, and to take them off.

Without the rest of the kit, and without careful adherence to correct donning and doffing, there are at best marginal benefits to mask wearing.

There's some concern that those marginal benefits are eliminated if people wearing masks go on to engage in risky behaviours. These behaviours include increased touching of their face (often without immediate handwashing afterwards), reductions in distance between people, increase in frequency of leaving the home, etc etc.

<comment><USER5> Nonsense.

PPE is designed to mitigate a completely different level and type of risk. PPE is designed for medical professionals who by the very nature of their job must spend hours in physical contact with known sick patients. The protocols must be strict because failure means guaranteed infection.

I on the other hand have no obligation to physically touch random strangers, thank god, and don't have to go interact with known sick people. Instead I'm trying to provide some protection for myself, and trying to work in aggregate to reduce the risk that asymptomatic carriers spread the disease while doing essential activities. "Marginal benefits" in this context is also known as "reducing R0", which is absolutely a public health goal.

Now all of that is a good argument for saving N95 masks for medical workers and relying on surgical or cloth masks for the general public, especially in the light of PPE shortages. But that is an entirely different argument from "masks don't work".

<comment><USER8> > I on the other hand have no obligation to physically touch random strangers, > thank god, and don't have to go interact with known sick people.

What's the point of wearing the mask then?

<comment><USER5> Gotta go get groceries at some point, and that means breathing in the air someone else exhaled.

<comment><USER8> Where's your evidence that the virus is present in the air that people exhale?

<comment><USER5> We know it's a highly infectious respiratory disease with asymptomatic transmission, this isn't rocket science.

<comment><USER8> You've just destroyed your own argument.

If you're wearing a mask to protect against droplets then maybe you'd get marginal benefits. But if your concern is virus carried in the water vapour that people exhale, then an N95 isn't nearly enough to protect you.

<comment><USER9> Even if the mask is 10% effective that's still better than nothing.

<comment><USER8> Not if it's causing people to decrease social distancing or to touch their face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I live in Canada and our response between January - mid March was in line with the U.S. where the government said things like "the risk to Canadians was low" and "asymptomatic people are not main drivers of epidemics." That laissez- faire attitude perpetuated the belief that we didn't need to screen people at airports, or force people coming in from hot zones to self-isolate for 14 days.

Meanwhile, a country like Vietnam which doesn't have the same technological or financial resources as North America managed to quell the spread through mass quarantines and aggressive contact tracing done as early as February. They literally fenced off a village that had one known infection.

Taiwan acted quickly and decisively throughout the key time periods of the crisis. Things like stockpiling and producing more PPE in January, making quarantine taxi's ferry potential infected to their homes instead of allowing them to take public transit, using technology to aid with contact tracing, mandatory use of masks in public spaces, thermal screenings at airports and stations...

Looking back, I think we both woefully under-estimated the potential for asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic individuals to spread the virus. As a society we looked at the low numbers and scoffed at the idea of doing proactive preventative measures... until it all hit the fan and we had to hard stop.

<comment><USER11> i think there is a lot of superiority feeling in Western countries over Asia and then in Western countries against each other. For example when things started happening in Italy the Germans thought that it's an Italian problem.

As far as the US goes it was pretty clear that the administration didn't want to deal with this at all at home. So they were constantly behind the curve and did things only when basically forced.

<comment><USER12> > For example when things started happening in Italy

As someone who lived in Italy and now lives in the US, this was driving me absolutely crazy. They have a great health care system, and are a transparent democracy. When things started to happen rapidly there, it was very, very clear that the same situation would play out in the US, and yet there were still a lot of "just a flu" people.

<comment><USER13> > When things started to happen rapidly there, it was very, very clear that > the same situation would play out in the US...

When it was still restricted to China, I was able to reassure myself into complacency with memories of the original SARS. China contained that, so maybe they will contain this one, too?

As soon as it hit Italy hard, that story didn't work anymore, and it was clear it was only a matter of time before it spread _everywhere_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am not great at markets, startups, business ventures, etc. But I feel like these things are broken:

* Governments and only governments can and should prepare for national emergencies, because saying Hospitals don't have enough PPE for pandemics is like saying your local farm doesn't have enough stockpile of rice to server the public during a famine/war. Private institutions have no incentives to serve the greater good of the country.

* Manufacturing is an industry every nation should invest in. If labor is expensive, the government should subsidize it so that the essential skills to manufacture and the infrastructure to do so remains functional even though market forces tells consumers otherwise. "Made in Switzerland" marketing can only do so much when the T-shirt costs CHF 120 vs. CHF 11.99 on Amazon which is probably made in Bangladesh. I am not saying govt should subsidize T-shirt manf, just trying to make a point.

* Dismantle short-term capitalism that exists in the stock market. Public companies should disclose their financials on a yearly basis or even every other year. Capitalism needs to be refactored to orient itself for long-term gains. Also making it illegal to not act in the interest of share holders is an insane law - CEOs should have the ability to put moral, environmental and other concerns in front of their priority list and not just creating value for the shareholders. This whole system is messed up.

* Executives sold off their country's soul to China, made a bank, cut corners, fucked consumers and went to the bank laughing. They paid off senators and govt officials, created a greater divide in the income distribution around the world. Limit executive pay for public and private firms.

* Reliance on China needs to change, diversify manufacturing supply chain. Just making sanitizer in US doesn't help if 90% of the ingredients are shipped from China.

<comment><USER15> > Private institutions have no incentives to serve the greater good of the > country.

What are the incentives for government to serve the greater good of the country, specifically, why should government be uniquely qualified to decide what is good for everyone. As the old joke goes, "democracy is the belief that the people know what they want, and they deserve to get it, good and hard". But nobody in the world really lives in a democracy, it's even worse! There's indirection. To believe that governments are qualified to serve the "greater good" is to believe that people are qualified to select people who are good at judging the greater good. And that's not even counting the next layer of indirection. You're really hoping people are qualified to select people (politicians) that select people (unelected bureaucrats) that know what the greater good is.

There are many, many cases, when private enterprise (often, but not exclusively, for-profits operating in a nonprofit/goodwill capacity) has been the most effective responder in national emergencies, for example Walmart immediately providing tons of supplies in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

There is a wide window of human activity between a selfish money grubbing capitalist firm, and the government.

<comment><USER16> > What are the incentives for government to serve the greater good of the > country

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, ___> promote the general Welfare<_ __, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. "

> why should government be uniquely qualified to decide what is good for > everyone

The government is uniquely qualified to be the actor of last or only resort in a number of situations.

> There are many, many cases, when private enterprise (often, but not > exclusively, for-profits operating in a nonprofit/goodwill capacity) has > been the most effective responder in national emergencies, for example > Walmart immediately providing tons of supplies in the wake of Hurricane > Katrina.

Indeed we all remember when Walmart's convoy of soldiers arrived at the Superdome to finally open a supply line to the thousands that sheltered there. Or when Walmart's sailors airlifted or floated out 33,000 citizens stranded in floodwaters.

<comment><USER15> "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Man! If every organization held true to its founding ideals. _do no evil_ , or heck, March of Dimes. You know, that document you cite also has a list of ten amendments, of which I know zero have been held to over 200 years. That's right, even the US has violated the 3rd amendment by quartering soldiers in warzones, for example Afghanistan, and even WWII (the amendment does not specify homes of citizens).

Do you think the US follows this clause of the constitution? Did you even know it was there? "In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law."

Forgive me if your assertion that the least binding part of a legal document that has brooked all sorts of breaches to its principles holds very little confidence.

> why should government be uniquely qualified to decide what is good for > everyone. > The government is uniquely qualified to be the actor of last or > only resort in a number of situations.

You're begging the question.

<comment><USER16> You asked "What are the incentives for government to serve the greater good of the country" and I gave you an answer: it's the reason why governments were created. Are they perfect? No. Can they be entirely replaced by the private sector? No.

<comment><USER15> If you really believe that governments were created "for the greater good of their people", I strongly suggest you review the entirety of human history.

I'm not religious, but the hebrew bible has a really fascinating parable (1 samuel 16) about the israelites wanting "a king" (and importantly, describing there motivations for such) and god begrudgingly granting their wish with a warning for what was to come.

Governments serving their people is a very modern and very imperfect concept. I would argue we're not there yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think calling it a miscalculation is beyond extremely generous.

<comment><USER18> It's the wall street journal. They want to blame government...not a lack of leadership by the party they best align with.

The pervasive use of passive voice is a dead giveaway.

<comment><USER19> This is unfair. The WSJ editorial page is bananas but the reporters are top notch.

<comment><USER18> the reporters have great access and great information. The tone and perspective though are what they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://archive.md/qrkt3](https://archive.md/qrkt3)

</comment><comment><USER21> Everyone should read: The 'Red Dawn' Emails: 8 Key Exchanges on the Faltering Response to the Coronavirus

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-r...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus- red-dawn-emails-trump.html)

Full emails here: [https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6879-2020-covid-19-r...](https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6879-2020-covid-19-red- dawn-rising/66f590d5cd41e11bea0f/optimized/full.pdf)

It seems like experts at least at an exceedingly clear grasp of the situation, with fair accurate predictions based on available data on the time. It doesn't seem like there was much "miscalculation" by subject matter experts, but bureaucratic incompetence on many levels that still persist.

<comment><USER22> Why is this downvoted? I'm about a quarter through and have found this totally intriguing. Their concerns in late January seem spot on. I'm glad it got shared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What are the disaster vectors that the government should plan and equip for? What scale should be prepared for each?

<comment><USER24> [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new- wa...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-warning- covid-19-nothing-compared-to-emp-295-million-dead)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It amazes me that the entire strategy of the U.S. government is "Everybody stay inside and wait until this goes away". Two months into this, that still seems to be all there is.

"And what if it doesn't go away by itself?" "Then we stay inside for another month!"

<comment><USER2> We're not waiting for it to go away by itself. We're keeping the rate of spread below the threshold where we overwhelm our hospital capacity. This buys us time to scale testing and develop things like contact tracing, drugs, and vaccines that will be our weapons in the next stage of this fight.

<comment><USER26> How is this getting downvoted?

This is the strategy. We're not gonna wait out the vaccine but we certainly won't have overwhelmed hospitals like Italy.

<comment><USER27> It seems to be the strategy in the sense smashing a window with a hammer is a strategy to kill a fly. Hospitals are so empty that workers are being furloughed, say nothing about the unused field hospitals and naval ships. The Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table.

Edit: I should add that I didn't downvote.

<comment><USER28> Many positions at a hospital aren't related to treating someone with coronavirus. For example, elective and non-time-sensitive surgical departments should have nothing to do right now.

<comment><USER27> The ICUs aren't even close to full, and indefinite delays of non-emergency care also has real consequences.

<comment><USER28> There are only about 7,300 ICU beds in California [1]. If we're at 20%, that's only about two doublings before people start being rejected for care. In March, we were seeing a doubling every few days, with ICU requirements following [2].

I'm not disagreeing that we need to let people be infected if we want to achieve herd immunity, but I think it's a tough choice in deciding which portion of the population you put out to partially die, since letting everyone out at once will result in some high R0 value again, and a vaccine may be on the way. These politicians are in a lose-lose situation here. Anything they do will result in someone being harmed.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical- guida...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance- management-patients.html)

[2] [https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-gov- newso...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-gov-newsom-says- number-of-patients-in-icus-doubled-overnight/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Of the sources I read for coronavirus news is a daily chart posted on RealClearPolitics.

Per today's chart, the US has the most confirmed cases, the most tests taken, and one of the lowest deaths per million.

It's tough to judge which countries are doing well and which aren't, even given stark contrasts in policy. I don't think it's possible to harshly condemn (or praise) anyone at this point.

</comment><comment><USER24> The US beat every single expert pre-peak total deaths prediction; by a lot. There are supply chain issues to fix, and the few spots that could not deal with the case load need to be fixed, but by any scientific measure against the predictions, we did excellent.

[https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/s...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI- modelling-16-03-2020.pdf)

p16: "In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US."

EDIT to rrss's comment:

First, note that ~60k is how many people died and tested positive AND were coded as COVID-19. It's not necessairly how many people died because of a COVID-19 infection. We will not know the real #'s until all-cause death is examined. There appears to be a significant drop in "normal" pneumonia deaths for example. It also ignores the error bars on the testing false/positive/negative rates.

Second, I'll restate: The US beat every single explicitly enumerated via a integer expert pre-peak total deaths prediction; by a lot.

If the authors had given a table for the US, we could see what their model predicted, but they did not, and _you_ assuming that the US is a linear relation to GB may or may not be accurate.

<comment><USER30> You are misrepresenting the conclusions of that report. The report clearing distinguishes between "mitigation" and "suppression" in the second paragraph.

> However, the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in > hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive > care units) being overwhelmed many times over. For countries able to achieve > it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option.

The aggressive social distancing implemented in the U.S. falls under "suppression," and therefore is not considered in the predictions you quoted:

> suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the > entire population

Two paragraphs after the bit you quoted:

> We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy > at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which > are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound. Many countries have > adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier stage > of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently.

The report predicted 5,600-48,000 deaths in Great Britain if all four interventions discussed were put in place. The UK has had ~26,000 deaths.

This prediction for GB (suppression) is 80-98% lower than the prediction you quoted (mitigation). A naive application of these ratios to the US suggests that the predicted number of deaths with all interventions would be something like 24,000 - 220,200. The U.S. is currently at ~60,000 deaths.

So, erm, no - the United States has not "beat every single expert pre-peak total deaths prediction; by a lot."

<comment><USER31> No, GB's excess mortality compared to last year is already greater than 35 thousand death, and that's not taking into account the 4-day lag between the actual death and the report (unlike "covid19" hospital death. GB is not testing home sudden death (that are often caused by cardiac arythmia that might be induced even in very mild covid19 cases), so only excess mortality data is reliable:

[https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by- country](https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country)

[edit] That said, your argument still stand and in fact is even better with this data</comment></comment></comment>


IPad 3 who will buy one, and why? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/02/26/ipad-3-who-will-buy/

<comment><USER2> As someone with no iPad I can say we are planning on finally jumping on the bandwagon and getting one when they are released.</comment>


Why did I leave IBM? (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20070212062901/http://www.paramecium.org/~leendert/musings.html <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or has IBM been resting on their laurels for quite some time now?

I fear they have given in to bean counters. They only recently made a lot of experienced staff redundant, their outsourced operations are quite awful (especially in the SAP space), they seem to no longer be able to do infrastructure well, their consultancy division has lost a lot of lustre and it's been quite a while since I've seen anything terribly innovative come out of IBM that made me sit up and take notice of what they doing.

Does IBM have anything going for it any more?

<comment><USER3> Many people said they succumbed to the low hanging services fruits. It surely isn't the flagship it was. But IBM is old, and still large, they saw many eras, I wouldn't be surprised if they turn it around once again.

<comment><USER4> A large number of enterprises still deeply rely on them. I definitely don't see them going out of business any time soon.

<comment><USER3> Just yesterday I was thinking, IBM went too much into 'shallow' software tech. Building a lot of stuff around Java, Eclipse etc that wasn't valuable neither for them or for customers. Instead of focusing on brand and tech, they should bring back talents that solves problems on anything. I'm sure that would sell like hot pancakes.

<comment> UK-AL That's where the money is in software. Expensive middleware.

<comment><USER3> Short term maybe but it is detrimental IMO.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shaw Internet, Cable and Home Phone Outage Across Canada - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/04/27/shaw-internet-cable-down_n_16298742.html <comment><AUTHOR> What a disaster! It's back up now, but to lose internet for a good chunk of the day for an entire country is ridiculous. And the non-apology on their Twitter feed only made things worse: [https://twitter.com/Shawhelp/status/857682776190984192](https://twitter.com/Shawhelp/status/857682776190984192)

<comment><USER2> Well, it clearly wasn't the entire country . . . I'm on Shaw, and I saw no interruption. Still, it is pretty bad.</comment></comment>


Why Your Airport Needs a Museum - <AUTHOR> https://museumhack.com/airport-museums/ <comment><USER2> Some airports already have museums. AMS has an annex of the Rijksmuseum. SFO has the SFO museum - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Ai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport#SFO_Museum) .

The AMS isn't big - a medium-sized room, as I recall, plus a bigger gift shop underneath.

Given the existing experience, is there enough experience to judge how well this proposal might turn out in practice?

</comment><comment><USER3> That's an excellent idea. You could also add a cinema to an airport; quite often you have transfer times longer than a movie ...</comment>


Large Scale CSS Refactoring at Trivago - <AUTHOR> http://tech.trivago.com/2016/02/02/large-scale-css-refactoring-at-trivago/ <comment><USER2> Hey there, i am Christoph the author. If you have any questions i would be more than happy to answer them.</comment>


People on the internet can be so mean - <AUTHOR> https://justinjackson.ca/mean <comment><USER2> Interestingly, the linked page doesn't allow comments :-)

But, even if you were wrong or did a mistake, many mean comments are just that... mean.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, not sure how I missed that. Good eye though.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What interesting non-intuitive things do you know? - <AUTHOR>

You know what's interesting?
Stuff that's not intuitive. Stuff that would seem so wrong on a quick glance that it never gets explored.
These are goldmines for exploring. I bet you know some stuff like that. Care to share it with us? <comment><USER2> You might have read the comment by knowledgesale stating at one point that scientists are incentivized into producing positive results. Now take a look at this quote from John Holt on 'How Children Fail':

"[I told the fourth-graders] I was thinking of a number between 1 and 10,000. … They still cling stubbornly to the idea that the only good answer is a yes answer. This, of course, is the result of miseducation in which "right answers" are the only ones that pay off. They have not learned how to learn from a mistake, or even that learning from mistakes is possible. If they say, "Is the number between 5,000 and 10,000?" and I say yes, they cheer; if I say no, they groan, even though they get exactly the same amount of information in either case. The more anxious ones will, over and over again, ask questions that have already been answered, just for the satisfaction of hearing a yes."

Notice the similarity? The lesson for me was that: action is information. (Positive or negative it's still useful.) If you keep this in mind it also helps realise that there are two sources of action, yourself and others -- both should be used to feed your mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> The p-value [1] criterion is often used to test a proposed hypothesis in medical and social science research papers. When you stumble upon something along the lines of "studies that shown that eating broccoli makes people happy" in your everyday life, it comes down to the p-value calculation being small enough <0.05 for the before and after gathered datasets.

The p-value method is practically a standard for scientific reporting in some fields. It also has some drastic shortcomings, including, e,g., dramatic instability for tests with only little data [2].

Naturally, people realize that and try to use additional tools and criteria when available. However, scientists are pretty brutally incentivized to publish positive results and, as a result, more often than it should be, too much weight is put on the single p-value criterion.

With issues like this in mind, in my opinion, it makes sense to be somewhat skeptical when seeing reports in the news that "A effects B" and definitely not to rush with the conclusions. Trivial, I know.

The [3] video pretty much sums it up and by all means is worth a watch.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value#Problems>

[3] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ez4DgdurRPg)

<comment><USER4> This is an important issue. The article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, has good follow-up on what we CANNOT assume just because a study has a finding that has met the p-value criterion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if you'd find this interesting or not, but your server performance can actually depend on your memory configuration.

For example, you should definitely populate the dual channel, tri channel, or quad channel recommended. However, if you populate the second set of DIMMs on an Intel platform you'll get slower memory performance. So your 1333 MHz memory will end up being 1066, or your 1066 will be 800. You'll notice this resultant speed of course, but you won't realize it's bad until you have a second server with a slightly different memory configuration.

Additionally, there are situations where a hex core will have reduced throughput over a similarly clocked quad core, particularly if it's IO constrained for either memory (see #1) or disk.

If your check this on your servers and swap out the memory, and application speeds up because of this tidbit, please let me know :) I think this qualifies as non-intuitive because unless you're a sysadmin you wouldn't think to optimize this part of your hardware in your stack.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law>

> Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of > numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit > is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the > first digit is 1 about 30% of the time, and larger digits occur as the > leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a > first digit occurs less than 5% of the time. This distribution of first > digits is the same as the widths of gridlines on the logarithmic scale.

> This counter-intuitive result has been found to apply to a wide variety of > data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, > population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and > mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are > very common in nature). It tends to be most accurate when values are > distributed across multiple orders of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've found that Parkinson's Law is quite useful for being extremely productive. The law states that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." In other words, if you give yourself 30 minutes to complete a task (despite if it actually will) you will work harder because you've created a sense of urgency for yourself.

Read more here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_law>

</comment><comment><USER8> This may sound weird, but after using the bathroom some people wipe while standing up and some wipe while sitting down. And each group (in general) is shocked to find out that there is another way to do it.

Not computer related but i find it fascinating that so many people do something one way, and are totally shocked, mind-blown to find out that it can be done another way too.

</comment><comment><USER9> The music from my father. I never thought I'd end up listening to the same music as him, which seemed kinda old-fashioned when I was just a teenager. Unfortunately he passed away six years ago. It makes me smile we can still share common thoughts and feelings through his music today.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sometimes, the solution to really deadly (or deadly serious) situations is to reduce the force with which you meet it rather than trying to overcome it with a higher level of force. In essence: Gentleness is an antidote to violence better than bigger, more powerful violence. This seems to be the opposite of what most people believe.

<comment><USER2> Any specific examples? Without a frame I'm having difficulty in validating this.

<comment><USER11> Ever Tried Lock picking? This perfectly applies there ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bayesian logic and reasoning.</comment>


The Far Right Has a New Digital Safe Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/arts/the-far-right-has-a-new-digital-safe-space.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> That's not what "Safe Space" means? There's nothing stopping anybody from going on Gab and virulently disagreeing with everyone there or intentionally offending certain users.

Still, impressed with the NYT's ability to push a narrative.

<comment><USER3> > Still, impressed with the NYT's ability to push a narrative.

Isn't news narrative? Seems like I am missing what is bad about this article.

Or did you want just the facts? New app call ____ which does ___. Move along you now have all the facts?

I want a news story to give me context and some way to sort out the narrative and do something with the raw data.

<comment><USER2> Because the narrative employs obvious bias only partially grounded in reality. The title implies that these people needed a safe space to protect themselves from dissenting opinion -- when the simple reality is Twitter kicked them out so they started using a different website. Yes, all news is biased but increasingly I'm finding the NYT to be completely out of touch. It's very obvious there's a story they want to push and so they find news that they can make fit the story.

<comment><USER4> from elsewhere in this thread:

>On the Friday after the US presidential election, Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab.ai, a social network favored by conservatives, was kicked out of Y Combinator "I am actually surprised it took them this long to excommunicate me," Torba told BuzzFeed News. "Y Combinator doesn't accept conservatives and they don't accept Trump supporters."

this is relevant here because of what this dude was actually doing, being a prick.

> In the Facebook thread, before he was booted from Y Combinator, Torba wrote: > "All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling > bullshit and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a > President into office, cucks."

it took me a long time to learn that you _don 't have the right to be a prick on the internet._

if you insist on being a prick, don't cry persecution when you get shown the door. don't cry censorship. it's neither. it's you being shown the door because you wanted to be a prick. full stop.

if the guy in the above example wasn't a prick, he'd still be in the program. he could have called people cucks with donations like the big boys do, and not on facebook like a child.

<comment><USER5> How does this in any way negate the comment you are responding to? His point is that people go to Gab because they are thrown out of other venues.

You're just going on about how they deserve to be thrown out.

<comment><USER4> >His point is that people go to Gab because they are thrown out of other venues

my point is that they aren't being thrown out because of their political views.

the guy in the above example wasn't purged because he was a conservative. it's a shock, I know, but consider the fact that he was shown the door because he was an asshole.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. But people did experiments like

[http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/twitter-user-replaces- white-...](http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/twitter-user-replaces-white-black- gets-banned)

that show how same speech applied from opposite angles produces different results vis-a-vis being banned.

<comment><USER3> NO! Get out! That context and subject actually matter? NO WAY. /sarcasm

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Relevant backstory: [https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/trump-supporting- startu...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/trump-supporting-startup-ceo- kicked-out-of-y-combinator)

The NYTimes article is surprisingly charitable, although perhaps ironically.

<comment><USER7> FTA: > On the Friday after the US presidential election, Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab.ai, a social network favored by conservatives, was kicked out of Y Combinator "I am actually surprised it took them this long to excommunicate me," Torba told BuzzFeed News. "Y Combinator doesn't accept conservatives and they don't accept Trump supporters."

> In the Facebook thread, before he was booted from Y Combinator, Torba wrote: > "All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling > bullshit and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a > President into office, cucks."

I'm bewildered. I want to think that they are just trolls looking for attention. My pessimistic side says that they actually do have a persecution complex and somehow feel that the groups they regularly malign have more rights and privilege than they do.

One thing I've noticed regarding the above excerpt is a unique interpretation of free speech where they believe they are free to say anything they want without consequence. Any negative response is met with claims of censorship. If you acted that way in a coffeeshop, bar, or some community gathering you would be asked to leave as well. If you continue hurling verbal assaults after being asked to leave, that's harassment. You have the right to be a dick, but they're claiming they are exercising their right to free speech and are surprised people are being dicks back to them. I hope society never succumbs to their desires and normalizes denigrating speech and just being a complete asshole. I really hope they are trolls

EDIT: > "if you feel 'unsafe' from from [sic] me saying 'fuck off' or 'build a wall,' you probably shouldn't be on the internet."

Sigh, I had such high hopes for the Internet being the ultimate tool to elevate mankind to a more enlightened tomorrow and the promise that technology would make the world a better place. Seems it has enabled a safe space for people to unleash their inner asshole. I'm afraid of what's going to happen if they ever summon up enough courage to do these things in person and are inevitably met with violence.

I'm not a tough guy at all, but in my hometown, dem is called fightin words

<comment><USER8> Funny that the same people who want to be able to say anything under free speech regardless of who it hurts, or how hateful, are the same ones who would take away citizenship from protesters who would burn the flag as a form of speech.

<comment><USER9> Need to look at a specific example but rights always, without exception, come with obligations. They are not a net bonus.

<comment><USER8> You can't say 'let us have free speech' \- by using hate speech --then say 'take away their free speech' i.e. flag burning or w/e it's a double standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gab appears to be employing unlimited bidirectional voting. This inevitably creates a shout-down chamber, so the network will likely not attract a diverse group of opinions and is nearly guaranteed to become the echo chamber everybody is expecting it to become.

I don't find this to be the new competitor the market is really looking for.

<comment><USER11> _I don 't find this to be the new competitor the market is really looking for._

All the better then. A black hole that sucks up their energies (and lets them feel "validated" even though no one outside their tiny community is listening) might be just the thing for them.

<comment><USER10> I would interpret your statement to indicate you are an opponent of free exchange of ideas.

<comment><USER11> Which you can, if you want. But that's not what my statement implies.

<comment><USER10> This is not correct. The people going to Gab are not going because of market preference, they are going because they are being forced out of current market leaders who do not desire to have free exchange of ideas on their networks.

By extension, supporting of this movement means you do not support a free exchange of ideas.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, but I don't buy your contention that the restrictions adopted by market leaders are about blocking the "free of exchange of ideas", per se.

And apart of that, your "extension" would be a faulty generalization based on that contention.

<comment><USER10> It is not what those leaders perceive their actions to be, it is what their actions actually are. They are acting to reduce the capacity of people with some viewpoint from being able to communicate that viewpoint.

It is not faulty. It is you who is applying a generalization in your claim.

<comment><USER11> I would say they "choose not to foster" rather than "reduce" of the capacity certain people to propagate their views.

(Yes, there's a distinction, and a quite crucial one in fact).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't one usually associated a 'safe space' with the _introduction_ of policies surrounding what can and cannot be said? This article seems to suggest that a 'safe space' is also a place associated with looser constraints allowing people say whatever they like.

<comment><USER13> I guess it's a "Safe Space" for alt-righters because they are surrounded by like-minded people that will shout down any dissenting opinions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In a way, this might be a good thing -- it substantially weakens their ability to cry "censorship". And provides a space where their drivel can be monitored and tracked: inevitably, we'll see many people connected with the new administration turning up here -- and it will be interesting to see how they expose themselves.

<comment><USER14> I know that the fake news narrative is popular right now, and maybe it's just me, but do you think maybe you might be a little biased here?

How is it not censorship when somebody actively monitors what is posted on Twitter and makes a judgement on whether or not that post is appropriate? What is appropriate and how does free speech equate to that in your mind?

<comment><USER15> Technology does weird things to conversations about the First Amendment. Twitter benefits from freedom of speech/the press/assembly in the sense that it can operate a platform that broadcasts individuals' writings. By the same principle, it has the right to only broadcast what it wants. Twitter isn't the government or a public entity. It's the publisher printing a paper. So, no, that's not really censorship, whereas requiring Twitter to broadcast speech against its will seems like it would be.

NB: I am not a constitutional lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A quarantine on this stuff is a nice thing for the rest of us in the short term. In the long term it could either be a bad thing because it helps the movement grow, or a good thing because without any opposition to troll within the platform it flames out.

<comment><USER17> This is the thing I keep saying. If we kick them off every other platform around rather than letting the community critique them, they'll move to echo chambers and new people won't be able to be introduced to their ideas through criticism, only through those echo chambers. Not only that, but these echo chambers tend to let conspiracy theories and misinformation brew and go wild.

I do hope they're successful in getting more users onboard. In many ways I like their libertarian-style free speech loving moderation stance personally, but I read invite only somewhere, which is concerning me even more. If they want to take a free speech stance, they need to respect that free speech needs to be for all, so we can critique and discuss these sorts of ideas.

Seems all too ripe to be an echo chamber as is. Guess we'll see how long the invite only thing lasts.

<comment><USER18> The free TV time gifted to Trump for saying outrageous things gave him a decided signal boost over his rivals. On the other hand, the media did not give sufficient time to a sane counterargument whereas a well-regulated forum might offer that opportunity.

Unfortunately, that's not what we see from the balance of Trump supporters online, who are not at all hesitant to flag or brigade opposing viewpoints regardless of merit.

<comment><USER17> I'm not so sure, I think the media gave plenty of time to sane counterargument. Even CNN, which I constantly see blamed as an evil by both the left and right, they'd air his stuff, then go and critique it and debate it for quite a while afterwards.

I think ultimately not as many people are interested in the critique and debate portion and perhaps more importantly, and I think many supporters just didn't care about a lot of the outrageous stuff he said because their alternative seemed even worse. They were basically left no choice but to dismiss it.

If the options were better, even just one of them I think this whole thing would have worked out a lot nicer. But instead a lot of people were caught in the middle debating the better of two evils.

I'm sure many will argue it was clearly one way or the other, but I'm pretty sympathetic to both arguments here. Education, debate and rationality can't solve that in a really significant way, only better options can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can we stop normalizing scum like Richard B. Spencer and the alt right? Many would consider me "far right", I have nothing in common with that filth...

Also, nice to see the market filling the need for a censor-less social platform. Let them be hateful idiots over in the corner, it's their right.

<comment><USER20> +1 to the normalizing piece. These folks are a few short hops away from ISIS. They've nailed hate-filled ideology, lone-wolf attacks and it's only a matter of time before they organize into something worse. Trump has opened the flood- gates for individuals like this to have a voice.

<comment><USER19> Couldn't vote for him, never liked him, he scares me for a lot of reasons; but you think Trump has opened that flood gate? I don't think I buy that. I think the media has opened the flood gate/given it a soapbox in order to link it to Trump. For all his obvious faults, I don't think he is actually a racist. Nothing in the man's history, until he ran for president, shows that... if anything his history shows the opposite.

idk, but yea, we agree these guys suck.

(down votes incoming...)

<comment><USER21> Please don't preemptively complain about downvotes. It poisons the well.

To your point, Trump was sued in 1973 for racial discrimination in his housing business[1]. Most recently, he has advocated for banning Muslim people from entering the country based on their religion. The list goes on. The guy is racist to his bones in a way that has been normal but unspoken in America since the 1970s. He did not create the racism, but now the racists who want to be active have his tacit support.

[1] [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2016/sep/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2016/sep/27/hillary-clinton/true-hillary-clinton-says- federal-government-sued-/)

<comment><USER19> eh, I think I will if I want to. Telling people what do to also poisons the well.

Just spent the last 30 minutes reading about that case... doesn't look good, that's for sure. Was also 40+ years ago. We can go back that far in just about any politicians life (Hillary, Bernie, etc...) and find extremely questionable to outright disgusting things. Not sure it's relevant today, maybe it is.

As for the immigration moratorium from certain regions of the word, or similarly, deportation of undocumented immigrants; these are both things we have done VERY commonly in the past. Hell, Obama has done both. I wouldn't consider either to be racist, would you?

Don't fall into the trap of thinking Trump won because of some white uprising. The numbers just aren't there. Trump won because the country is revolting against the establishment. (I think people are kind of silly for thinking Trump is going to "fix" that, but that's a separate conversation I suppose.)

Should Trump come out in staunch opposition to every nutcase that get's in front of a microphone? Idk, maybe. Would take a lot of his time.

Anyway, here is to the country healing.

<comment><USER13> When you say something like:

> Nothing in the man's history

then I don't know why you then retort with "well, that was a long time ago." You made a statement that someone was proving false. Heck, you made that statement so broad in an attempt to bolster / underscore your point, so I think it's fair game.

> As for the immigration moratorium from certain regions of the word, or > similarly, deportation of undocumented immigrants; these are both things we > have done VERY commonly in the past. Hell, Obama has done both. I wouldn't > consider either to be racist, would you?

I'm unclear how "Muslim" classifies one as being from a certain region of the world rather than describing their religious affiliation. Could you explain this?

<comment><USER19> > then I don't know why you then retort with "well, that was a long time ago." > You made a statement that someone was proving false. Heck, you made that > statement so broad in an attempt to bolster / underscore your point, so I > think it's fair game.

He did prove me wrong, that is something in his history. But my comment regarding time and other politicians still stands.

> I'm unclear how "Muslim" classifies one as being from a certain region of > the world rather than describing their religious affiliation. Could you > explain this?

The man is a professional wind-bag, but he has multiple times expanded on that and specified he means "terror-prone regions", which is something we do all the time and is totally legal.

[https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-1994-title8/pdf/USCODE-...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-1994-title8/pdf/USCODE-1994-title8-chap11-subchapII_2-partII- sec1182.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a absolutely dishonest headline.

Andrew Torba and his team created Gab as a response to Twitter when Jack and his team started harassing and outright censoring people who didn't agree with far left ideology (and no, not just those who identify themselves as "right"). The most important design principle of Gab is "freedom of speech", and it is completely neutral of who are making use of this principle; Andrew has stated _several times_ that EVERYBODY IS WELCOME no matter where you are in the political spectrum.

Yes, a large part of the population on Gab can be described politically as either "alt right" or "conservative" because these people are outright scared that their online voices will be shut simply because of disagreement. But that doesn't mean that the Gab population is 100% right wing, it also consists out of classical liberals and moderates who are sick and tired of the behavior and bullshit narrative of the far left, and do not agree with the way Twitter is handling freedom of expression, which by the way is a universal human right, on its platform.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this the same as the former YC company?

<comment><USER24> Yep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have an account an Gab, with the same handle as my account here. It seems to be growing very quickly and offers keyword-based timeline filters that are far better than what Twitter offers.

I've said it before on HN, but I really think it's a mistake to write off approximately half the country because you disagree with their political positions.</comment>


The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2008/04/the_eligiblebachelor_paradox.html

<comment><USER2> Are we drowning in appealing, available women?

<comment><USER3> It always seems the opposite way on OkCupid...</comment></comment>


Cal State professor reprimanded for refusing to use expensive textbook - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2015/10/california_state_university_professor_refuses_to_use_180_textbook.html <comment><USER2> See this HN discussion a week ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10433025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10433025)

</comment><comment><USER3> HN Guidlines: _Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._

It's right there in the very first line. As a general rule, very little that comes from Slate, Salon, or the Huffington Post is original content.

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/26/dispute- requi...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/26/dispute-required- math-textbook-escalates-broader-debate-about-costs-and- academic?utm_source=slate&utm_medium=referral&utm_term=partner)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I didn't notice the citation. My bad.</comment></comment>


My PR was denied by Iranian Law - <AUTHOR> https://blog.yiddishe-kop.com/posts/my-pr-was-denied-by-iranian-law <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364793)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360801)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Hi, I'm from the IRGC secret intelligence  , we just wanted to test your > loyalty to the regime, therefore we create fake accounts. You can merge the > PR without any problem

It's generally an evil thing to do something that could get someone else imprisoned or worse, just for fun.</comment>


Donate to Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Letter/en?utm_source=2008_jimmy_letter&utm_medium=sitenotice&utm_campaign=fundraiser2008#appeal <comment><USER2> There is something disconcerting about that face. I can't quite put my finger on it, but when I look at that picture, something tells me "run."</comment>


Ask HN: How to Peacock my Resume - <AUTHOR> Hi, I'm applying for a bunch of entry-level programmer positions. I'm good at math so I'm curious what sort of projects would look interesting on a resume. <comment><USER2> Whatever you've done.</comment>


Vim Anti-Patterns (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-anti-patterns/ <comment><USER2> Here is a trick that I used to use when I started learning VIM:

\- Write down 2-3 tricks/shortcuts in a piece of paper. Put that piece of paper in front of you (ie: tag it to your screen).

\- Code with Vim. You'll eventually look at the piece of paper and find some of these shortcuts helpful. So you'll use them.

\- After a while, these shortcuts will get into your muscle memory and you'll no longer need the piece of paper.

\- When you are coding with VIM, detect annoying patterns: For example, I need to jump code, I need to replace often, I need to be able to select some text this way, I need GIT integration. You get the point.

\- Put these observations on a list. Pull 2-3 items (shortcuts) from this list and tag another paper to your screen. Pull 2-3 items (plugins/functionality) and enhance your VIM.

\- After a few years, your VIM will become extremely customized. You'll actually have trouble writing code on any other IDE.

\- Here is mine: [https://github.com/omarabid/vimrc](https://github.com/omarabid/vimrc)

Other bonus tips:

\- Use GIT to keep track of your VIM configuration.

\- Write a README file for your configuration. Other things that I should do: Update the README often, and add screenshots.

ps: in case you haven't noticed, I'm a die-hard VIM fan.

<comment><USER3> It's important to note the context these articles are usually presented in, and also most the responses, which is Vim for developers (or at its most general, Vim for sustained local use). The reason I bring this up is that there's a whole other set us use that is often overlooked, which is Vim as a standard tool for sysadmins.

Any system you connect to will have Vi, and probably Vim. This makes it an ideal tool for sysadmins that might need to connect to tens or hundreds of systems to know how to use, _and to have a fairly standardized behavior_. In those cases, having a customized config can actually be more of a hindrance, because switching from a highly customized local Vim instance to a stock remote Vi/Vim instance can be jarring.

For anyone who is primarily a sysadmin, I would recommend sticking with the default behavior (which is rich, and lends itself to being more and more useful and they become familiar with more an more commands), and making a minimum of local config changes and plugins to suit their needs (it's a trade odd. Just choose wisely). This makes life easier when you spend a significant portion of time on random stock Vim instances (and even if it only saved a modicum of time, it saves a lot of aggravation as you don't feel like you're working with missing limbs).

Then again, I've always been one to do develop scripts remotely to help with tasks (all the easier to test int he correct environment), so other people's experiences may differ. I'm primarily doing software engineering now, so I load main vim instance with a fair amount of specialization (but probably less than most).

<comment><USER4> > I load main vim instance with a fair amount of specialization (but probably > less than most)

Perhaps it's just that the people who diligently curate their .vimrcs are more prone to talk about it than people who use stock or minimally configured vim. I can tell you my .vimrc right now without looking at it.

        se sm
        se hls
        se number
        se ts=4
        se sw=4
        se expandtab

It's not very exciting. Nobody ever writes a blogpost on the virtues of a vimrc that looks like this one.

<comment><USER3> Ha, I see that your .vimrc is almost identical to mine in functionality, even if mine is riddled with mostly superfluous additions and lots of comments. What you've got there though is probably what I would consider the core things I would need to set in vim to get my desired experience on a new workstation if I didn't have my own .vimrc to download, all the way down to the number of spaces for expanded tabs.

The rest of the stuff I have boils down to history size, a fixup for backspace in insert, default paste mode and quick key to toggle it, how far from margins to start scrolling, and turning off swap files so editing very large files is easier. Oh, and the Pathogen init stuff, for which I have usually have no modules installed (but I test out stuff occasionally), but there it sits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any tool you need to use more than a few times is worth learning properly. And any superior tool is worth switching to and learning if you would use it frequently.

I suppose it depends on how one's mind works. If the mind moves slowly and holds onto ideas and abstractions easily, then the slower motor movements of moving the hand back and forth from arrow keys to home keys, and to mouse and back, are not really a problem. But if you're like me, and your mind is constantly racing, you need to be fast to get your ideas out before they're gone/replaced.

It's not just the time cost of moving the hand from home row down to find the correct cursor key, do the presses, and then move back to typing position - it's also the likely visual/mental cost of looking away from your screen to aid in positioning the hand, then looking back at the screen and finding what you were looking at before. All those movements and recalibrations take time and involve mental context switches.

If you're spending a lot of time using a certain set of tools, there is no reason to avoid learning those tools well. Refusing to do so is choosing to be ignorant and subperformant.

Now, if you'll only use the tool once in a while, perhaps it's not worth the effort. But chances are, there's some other tool you use often that you could master for your long term benefit.

If you program, Vim (behavior) is very difficult to beat for getting whats in your head out and into your computer VERY quickly. As a bonus, using a full featured IDE like one of the JetBrains products, but with the Vim plugin, is win win. You get the code editing speed of vim, plus the project navigation and other benefits of the IDE. Totally worth the time investment.

<comment><USER6> > As a bonus, using a full featured IDE like one of the JetBrains products, > but with the Vim plugin, is win win.

I refused to use Visual Studio for code editing until ViEmu came along. These days I use VsVim. vi is fantastic for editing/writing and using the other niceties of Visual Studio is a win-win, as you said.

<comment><USER7> This cannot be overstated. 90% of the advantages of VIM is the modal editing interface, which can be used beautifully in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and other nice IDEs.

The VIM way is a very good way of editing text. IDEs offer a lot more than editing text. Faking an IDE within a text editor with random plugins is terrible. Emulating VIM text editing within a real IDE is amazing. Just use VIM keybindings in your industry standard IDE, you will be able to use all the tips in the linked article and still not miss out on anything offered by the IDE.

The only problem is that the VIM keybindings are integrated into direct text editing, but not the IDE UI. For example, in Visual Studio, IntelliSense offers you a choice of possible completions for a variable name you are typing. You can only navigate these choices with your cursor keys, rather than with the VIM-style jkl; keys. But it's a small price to pay for really good text-editing qualities!

<comment><USER8> > You can only navigate these choices with your cursor keys, rather than with > the VIM-style jkl; keys. But it's a small price to pay for really good text- > editing qualities!

I have ctrl-j and ctrl-k mapped to down and up on my keyboard for just this reason. If you have a keyboard that supports macros it's easy to do and it works for all those annoying places in Visual Studio and the rest of the OS you need to use arrow keys for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are excellent. I didn't know about gi, and that's very useful.

Today I accidentally learned that ctrl-a and ctrl-x increment or decrement the number under the cursor. That's not terribly useful unless you're dealing with a lot of numbers, but if you are, it will save a lot of keystrokes.

One set of movement keys the article didn't mention but which I use all the time are H M and L (shift-h, etc.) They jump to top (high), middle, and bottom (low) of the editor window, respectively.

<comment><USER9> Even better you don't have to be with the cursor on the number you want to increment or decrement with Ctrl-A and Ctrl-X. It will work with the next number to the right of the cursor.

The same goes for ci' or ci".

a = 'foo' // imagine the cursor on the letter a

Executing ci'bar will change foo to bar.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Even better you don't have to be with the cursor on the number you want to > increment or decrement with Ctrl-A and Ctrl-X. It will work with the next > number to the right of the cursor.

To the point that I have used c-x c-a as a stupid shortcut to jump to the next number on a line. I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but it's fast so...

<comment><USER10> Surprisingly, there actually isn't an out-of-the-box way to jump to numbers that I know of!

I personally added a "number" text object, so that I can treat numbers just like "words", and also created a "jump to number" shortcut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ctrl-[ is a good replacement for escape but I've found it's not always supported in every vim implementation. If I remember correctly it doesn't work in the visual studio vim plugin.

Binding something like JJ to escape is also a good solution, but if you ever have to edit on another machine without your vimrc, your speed will seriously suffer. I try to not change/add any core hotkeys for this exact reason. I can ssh into a brand new Linux install and edit with stock vi at the same speed as on my development machine's vim install.

I discovered that Ctrl-C is another default escape alternative. It's worked on everything I've tried so far: vi, vim, nvim, gvim, vim over ssh, vim for visual studio, vim for IntelliJ, etc. This is what I've gotten used to using. Another benefit is if you're using a non-vi editor and try to exit insert mode out of habit, Ctrl-C won't actually do anything, whereas Ctrl-[ could be a hotkey in that program and JJ will obviously insert two unwanted characters in your document.

<comment><USER12> Ctrl-C will keep certain events from firing in vim (can't remember their names off the top of the head, something like OnInsertLeave).

Remap caps lock to escape on your computer and it'll work in every editor and every machine you ssh into.

<comment><USER13> But I'm using Caps Lock to type Ctrl-C!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Who cares? As long as you can edit text and it doesn't get in your way it's all fine. I can switch between using vim and vscode without any problems.

I don't use vim to its full potential and I never will, I don't know many vscode shortcuts either. I'm not a typist, most programmers should spend more time thinking than typing anyway.

<comment><USER15> I've noticed the people who work to master the tools of their trade are also the people who master the trade itself. I've yet to meet someone who mastered the trade without also mastering the tools they use.

<comment><USER16> I must say I disagree. Having some control over the tools is certainly of benefit. Yet my experience certainly was, that the greatest people I met were sometimes surprisingly slow with the tools they used.

This is because what really seems to matter is their prespective at things and what decisions they take then. Sure knowing their tools inside out will make them faster, but it is not the KEY thing of why you would take them over every other person. Unless of course your job very focused on these tools (e.g. hand crafting etc) and even there knowledge often trumps tools.

Tools are just tools. If you look at a Cameraperson at a movie set, you will see it even more so. A young guy who knows that 50k€ Arri Alexa inside out might be ending up making worse images than that old fart who just knows where to put it and how to press record. That young guy would be a perfect camera assistant tho. Making pictures is not the camera, just like writing code is not the editor.

If I manage to get to the same thing as you, it doesn't matter if I use notepad.exe, a typewriter or pen and paper, unless it takes me ten times as long. But nearly none of the time consuming problems I had with code were ever due to the fact that my editor slowed me down, but rather that I wasn't aware of parts of my code.

I aknowledge however that people are different, and maybe it could be distracting if your editor is to slow depending on the type of person you are. I also like smooth workflows where things don't get in my way also in vim, but there is a threshold above which it bascially won't matter anymore.

<comment><USER17> From my experience, people who are good at their trade tend to know their tools very well. They may not use the best tools, but they use the ones they have to their fullest. The people who aren't very good at their trade but want to appear like they're good use the flashiest tools, but they don't know those tools to their fullest. They may know of a lot of the features, but they don't use them consistently.

It doesn't really matter what tools you choose, provided you know them well and they're well suited for your work.

<comment><USER16> Now that I gave the whole thing another thought, it might be very different for different professions.

Maybe we also got it upside down? What if experts tend to be good with their tools, because they had a ton of experience with them and not the other way round. So they are not experts because they use their tools well, but they use tools well because they had a lot of time spent with these.

That is, if you are in a profession were the tools stay the same. The sound mixers I mentioned certainly know SOME workflows inside out, but mixing desks change and differ between manufacturers, get more modern etc. That means judging a sound mixer purely by his ability to handle a certain mixing desk on one point in time might not be completely representative of the man/woman's abilities.

For programming it is much the same. A perfectly guru programmer could have switched to vim just months ago, while anoob could have invedted a year into learning vim instead of gaining experience with code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12643887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12643887)

2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563292)

</comment><comment><USER19> > @@

Something somebody once showed me was

        noremap <Space> @q

With this, you can quickly record a macro to the q register by typing qq (and q a final time to end the macro.) Subsequently with that binding, pressing the space bar will execute the macro once.

With this binding I find myself making sometimes dozens of throw-away macros an hour.

</comment><comment><USER20> _> Ctrl+F — Move forward one screenful._

 _> Ctrl+B — Move backward one screenful._

Why use such obscure combinations instead of standard PgUp / PgDn? I find this bend on "make vim usage super fast by using completely obscure keyboard shortcuts for common actions that already have designated keys" not to be helpful at all. Such kind of micro-optimizations are not really what increases productivity.

<comment><USER5> The same reason we use all the other Vim keyboard shortcuts - to keep the hands on the home row!

I can ctrl-f way the f faster than someone who has to move their right hand down or over to the pgdn key.

I once read a great explanation about programming language wars. The author described a ladder of awareness, such that some languages were lower on the ladder than others. The idea was that programmers who knew languages at or below their level on the ladder could easily see the people below them and recognize that their languages were inferior, but they were unable to see the superiority of the languages above them. Of course the superiority of a language is somewhat subjective and largely dependent upon situation, but the concept is quite valid.

Do you use the mouse to click menus, or do you occasionally "cheat" and use a ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-s, whatever? If you use those keyboard shortcuts, why not other useful ones?

<comment><USER20> I use many keyboard shortcuts, but I prefer natural usage, such as arrow keys for one symbol / line navigation and PgUp / PgDn for page navigation. The home row issue doesn't really bother me. Heavy focus on home row that forces such kind of shortcuts seems a bit extreme for me personally.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't aware people were being forced to be mechanically efficient. It's an option. You're free to drive your mouse all day if you like; in fact, you could mouse select, right click copy, mouse click the cursor to a new spot, right click paste, and be totally free of the burden of the home row.

<comment><USER20> "The right vim way" proponents can be very opinionated about it, and view those who don't follow same approach with a bit of conceit. I'm not saying that always happens, but I've encountered such views. Not sure why this affects specifically vim and not other editors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Moving one line at a time

I either go down with arrows (I know it's controversial), beginning of file with :1, end of file with G, line number with :[line number] or search with /. I usually don't have large files so this works very well (and I almost exclusively go by line number on large files).

> Moving one character at a time

I use ^ for beginning of line, $ for end of line, e to move quickly in a line

> Searching for the word under the cursor

Nice, didn't know about */#, I just type what I'm searching, gonna use that.

> Deleting, then inserting

Insert mode is fine.

> Using the arrow keys

I use the arrow keys, and I don't care about all the arrow-key shamers out there.

> Moving in insert mode

I use insert mode only while editing (makes sense). I don't get the point of this paragraph.

> Moving to Escape

I'm fine with escape key.

> Moving to the start or end of the line, then inserting

I much prefer just going into insert mode.

> Entering insert mode, then opening a new line

I also use o quite often (as it just goes into insert mode).

> Entering insert mode to delete text

Yes, I delete with dd, de, etc. (. is also useful for that), deleting in insert mode is painful for more than one character.

> Repeating commands or searches

Didn't know about q: and q/, pretty useful, nice.

> Repeating substitutions

I use %s/for/far/g or %s/for/far/, or for a few lines, I select them (shift-v) (visual mode) then : (which auto-sets it to :'<,'>) then :'<,'>s/for/far/ for instance.

Anyway, been using vim for ~5 years with a pretty light .vimrc and one thing I would recommend is bogado/file-line plugin which lets you open a file at a line, e.g. vim app/models/user.rb:48

My vimrc if anyone is curious: [https://gist.github.com/localhostdotdev/aa25d1c81f3f3b67ac35...](https://gist.github.com/localhostdotdev/aa25d1c81f3f3b67ac35eccf1692f251)

<comment><USER22> >I either go down with arrows (I know it's controversial)

Probably not that controversial any more. It used to be (although I would use the word inadvisable instead), because dumb terminals like VT-100 and some emulators of them, would emit escape sequences when arrow keys were pressed. Since an escape sequence starts with the Escape key and then has some other keys following it, it would result in your going from input mode (if you happened to be in it) back into command mode (due to the Esc key) and then the remaining keys in the sequence would be likely interpreted as vim commands (since many letters of the alphabet are vim commands), so any unwanted modification could happen to the file you were editing, maybe without your noticing. Then if you saved the file without knowing that there was some such inadvertent change, you could have lost or mangled some of your content.

Nowadays common emulators that I have come across, don't have that issue, so arrow key usage should be fine.

The other reason why people may comment if you use arrow keys for movement in vim, is because if you instead use the default and recommended hjkl keys (for left, down, up, right respectively), your fingers stay on the home row (on a QWERTY keyboard), which may make for less finger / hand movement, so less strain.

>beginning of file with :1, end of file with G, line number with :[line number]

You can use 1G for beginning of file, G for end of file, and nG for going to line n, without having to hit Enter after some of those commands as you have to with the :[line number] method, thereby potentially saving one keystroke many times per edit session.

>I use ^ for beginning of line, $ for end of line, e to move quickly in a line

0 goes to the real start of the line, ^ goes to the first non-blank character on the line.

>I use the arrow keys, and I don't care about all the arrow-key shamers out there.

Good on you.

>I also use o quite often (as it just goes into insert mode).

O (a capital O) _O_ pens a line above the cursor, o (small o) _o_ pens a line below it.

> Repeating substitutions

>one thing I would recommend is bogado/file-line plugin which lets you open a file at a line, e.g. vim app/models/user.rb:48

      vi(m) +n filename

will open filename at line n, for both vi and vim, so I'm not sure why that plugin is needed, unless it does other stuff too.

And:

vi(m) +/pattern filename will open filename at the first occurrence of pattern in filename.

<comment><USER21> Not sure if you are directing this comment at me, but I know most of these already. Didn't know about the older terminal emulator issues with arrow keys though.

<comment><USER22> It was partly for you and partly for other readers. It seemed to me that, based on your comment, you may not have known about some of the points I mentioned, like use of G with number modifiers instead of the "colon then <number> then Enter" method. Maybe I should have been more specific, and put the more general points in a separate comment. Also, I guess you may prefer to use the colon method even though the G method is one key less. I know I do at times, too :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What I cannot wrap my head around is word-wise moving in code. I just never really know where w or b takes me, let alone how many w's it takes to get me to the desired word. My moving is mostly based on estimating counts; nth space (nf ) or just before third comma backwards (3T,); plus manual adjustments.

<comment><USER24> There are 2 types of characters ignoring whitespace:

* Upper and lower case letters, numbers, and underscore. This is what one commonly refers to as word characters as they're the least common denominator of what identifiers in programming language are usually allowed to consist of.

* Everything else (punctuation and other symbols, etc.). We'll call these non-word characters.

w, b, e, etc. will work in units of consecutive characters of the same type. So, if a consecutive set of word characters is a word, a consecutive set of non-word characters is a non-word, and everything else is whitespace. w will take you from the current word or non-word to the beginning of the next word or non-word. e will take you to the end of the current word or non-word, unless you're already there (one character word or non-words, for example), then it will take you to the end of the next word or non-word. b will do the same as e but to the beginning and work towards the previous.

The upper case versions of these commands, W, B, and E, treat the aforementioned word and non-word characters as of the same type, so you move in units of consecutive non-whitespace characters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't suggest disabling arrow keys and mouse. But I don't suggest using them either. (This goes for tmux as well).

The reason being is that you will frequently have to work with others. If someone comes over to your computer (or you bring it to them), they need to be able to look at the code. It just saves a lot of hassles. Besides, disabling these isn't going to help you develop those patterns, what helps you develop keeping on the keyboard is actively staying on the keyboard.

Side note: you'll notice vim users are more likely to use keyboard shortcuts in substantially more programs than in the terminal.

<comment><USER26> I don't see the point of disabling them. If you're a grown ass adult and you want to learn the homerow movement, just use the homerow until you naturally don't feel like using the arrows. It's not really that hard and you can always fall back on the arrow keys if you really can't afford to guess where your cursor will end up next.

<comment><USER27> I disabled mine earlier this week. After a bajillion years of using the arrow keys (even in Vim), I needed something explicit to force me to use the homerow.

<comment><USER28> I think this is actually the point he was trying to make in the article, if your instinct is to use the arrows and you want to break that, then Vim can help you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Another tip: Don't remap your comma (,) key to leader.

Many people suggest this — and I don't know why — but it shadows the command(verb? motion?) to move to the previous match in a line-wise find.

Some people in this thread say they skip through a line by word with w/W/e/E, but sometimes it's faster to see the character you want to jump to, say it's the number 4, and do f4. If the cursor lands on an earlier occurrence of the character that you didn't know was there, hit ; to jump to the next one. If you skip too far, hit , to go back again.

<comment><USER12> I like <Space> as my leader key. Easy to hit and it doesn't do anything useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've used vim for seven years now. My vimrc is a gargantuan 122 lines of vimL. It went from 0 lines to 300 to 750 and it's been 122 for a year now. Whenever someone asks me for tips and tricks to learn vim I reference this tweet:

[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/473247789728952321](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/473247789728952321)

Just use VSCode / SublimeText / Notepad++

</comment><comment><USER31> See also the excellent "Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi" by Jim "Linux Answer Guy" Dennis:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your- most...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most- productive-shortcut-with-vim/1220118#1220118)

</comment><comment><USER32> vim-adventures.com is a great way to learn vim by playing a game.

It's worth the money if you enjoy solving puzzles and learning by doing.

<comment><USER33> vimtutor is also a good way to get started with the basics of vim. If you have vim installed, it probably came with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Some vim keys I use a lot that seem not to be mentioned too often:

{ and } to go back and forwards a "para"

^U and ^D to up and down a half a page

{ and } are particularly useful with verb keys such as y, d, < and > (outdent and indent). And ! (bang) to reformat text with `fmt`

I cry a little inside when I see people go through pages with the j,k or up and down keys.

<comment><USER35> One I noticed missing (based on another comment here) is ctrl+o to run a movement command while in insert mode. To me this is pretty valuable glue between command/insert mode.

E.g. "ctrl+o 2e" to skip forward 2 words.

<comment><USER34> Cool. There's always stuff I didn't know about.

I think that on most terminals/vim combos the arrow keys will also move in insert mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The opening of this rings true for me. Once I get a pattern ingrained, it can be difficult to reverse it even if there is a more efficient way. To combat this I usually pick one thing per coding session to work on. I find lists like these helpful to check-in and see if I can add anything to my future to-work- on lists.

When I started learning vim I read an interview where someone (Ben Orenstein maybe?) talked about keeping notecards or a cheatsheet on their desk so they could do the same thing and I thought they were insane (and vim was insane). With time though, this method got me proficient at vim, then better, then better still. Each time I learn something new or unlearn sometime inefficient for something better I get a little bit of joy out of my daily work.

</comment><comment><USER31> Disclaimer: My vim knowledge has many gaps.

Understanding vim's model, what Chris Toomey of Thoughtbot calls "the Vim Language", helps incredibly:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0](https://youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0)

I've picked up numerous tips watching this and other of Thoughtbot's excellent video series. More importantly, though, is that I've learned _why_ specific vim idioms and motifs exist. They've lead me to rethink my own usage patterns, sometimes changing them, sometimes holding them just a bit more tightly. (Say, my practice of doing global regex pattern-replacement edits rather than repeated vim edits or macros, generally.)

But for a tool I use for coding, data cleaning, systems administration, email, writing, document preparation, and more, it pays to be on the lookout for more effective, faster, reliable, and/or repeatable methods.

And no, vim's not the only editor I have, or do, use. It's not even the first Unix editor I'd used. There's been DOS EDIT, EDLIN, MacWrite, WP51, WordStar (me and GRR!), EDT, EVE, the ISPF editor, emacs, pico, ae, MS Word, ... you get the idea.

But back in the 1980s, I first encountered (and balked noisily at, for a few weeks), BSD vi. And the basic muscle memory acquired, after a brief period of pain, has almost certainly been my best technical investment after learning to touch-type itself. Most importantly becaue both have been remarkably _durable_ skills. No, vim is not vi, _but it builds on its core_. And over 30 years later, I find it useful both to see what new capabilities have been added, and where my old knowledge has holes or flaws.

And I plan to be using, and able to use, that knowledge in another 30 years. Which I cannot say for most of the other editrs I've listed, or those listed by others here. It's been _both_ vi/vim's utility _and_ consistent access to it which have made it a valuable and durable tool.

Vim is a massively efficient tool for sculpting text. And that's why I use it and continue to hone my own skill with it.

<comment><USER37> No Brief? Or qedit? Or E? (-:

^K^D

<comment><USER31> I omitted a few. Qedit makes the list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> For the advice towards ESC key, anyone uses ctrl+c for quitting insert mode? I didn't know about the ctrl+[ combo works too.

</comment><comment><USER39> Of all the good practices listed here, the only one I can't seem to be bothered with is */# for searching the word under the cursor. I am curious is this happens to others, or it's just thst my workflow is idiosyncratic in this respect.

<comment><USER40> I use * often. It's even more convenient nice I have * mapped to pressing a modifier+n, so after I type * I can just hit the same key and type n, or switch to shift+n to go backwards. The map is on my keyboard, not on vim.

(You have an interesting username!)

<comment><USER39> It's an interesting airport :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I will never understand why iPad keyboards do not have a proper esc key. I know you can remap but it's not the same. It's almost as if apple knew this one key would forever preserve the MacBook as a developer platform.

<comment><USER42> The current Macbook Pro with Touchbar does not have a physical Esc key either.

<comment><USER43> I find this highly annoying as it's my issued computer at work, but it took me like one day to get used to standard ctrl + [ as an alternative

<comment><USER41> Perhaps but shouldn't there be a rule that if it takes more keystrokes we shouldn't do it? It's like deprecating df.ix for df.iloc... why do I need to type two more letters for essentially the same functionality?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> One thing I noticed myself doing is moving my fingers from the home row alot. For example when type "0p, I think I am supposed to only the pinky the type the entire command, but I am using the ring finger.

</comment><comment><USER45> Glad to notice I knew all of these, apart from q: and q/

</comment><comment><USER5> More tips:

If you inoremap jk to ^[ (esc), and kj to ^[ as well, you can just roll jk or kj keys to escape back to command mode. No more reaching for the esc key.

<comment><USER46> Or swap caps lock and escape. How many times did you reach for caps lock during the last year?

<comment><USER5> I prefer CTRL to be where caps lock was. I use CTRL very often, especially since (on macOS and Linux) many text fields use readline, which means you get Emacs ctrl- movement keys.

Almost the only time I use ESC is in Vim, and ctrl-[ or ideally the jk/kj->ESC mapping is really nice for me.

Now that I go the jk/kj esc mapped for .ideavimrc, I'm super psyched.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Using Vim without knowing WAY more than this article is an anti-pattern. Vim is inefficient for editing so you have to learn a lot more than these tricks and hacks to be proficient. If you aren't learning more about Vim's nasty design every day then it's an anti-pattern to use Vim, because you'll be much more efficient with less learning in any other editor. If, for example, you don't know how to edit searches and command-line mode commands in full Vim mode, then keep learning (press control-f in search mode). If you aren't proficient in Vim's garbage VimL then keep learning. Obviously an IDE with intellisense and multiple cursors is more efficient than most of Vim's efficiency hacks. Vim's efficiency gains more apply to editing text, not structured code.

<comment><USER44> I started using vim about 10 years ago. I am not an expert user, but I am using enough of it's features that I feel crippled when I am using another editor. I just have to think move this function to another file and my fingers will execute the vim commands.

I don't know any Vim Script. You don't have to know it to use vim, unless you want to write your own plugins.

I tried using an IDE recently (Clion), but it was not really worth it. Vim has plugins for most IDE features, including autocomplete and syntax checking. The only feature that I really miss in Vim automatic refactoring such as inlining functions.

<comment><USER48> You don't mention interactive debugging in vim ... and I'm not sure there's a good story there that's better than your CLion (Jetbrain's C/C++ IDE) -- I'd like to hear about vim interactive debugging. Perhaps there are other good debugging solutions for C/C++ but I like to edit and debug in the same environment.

Any Python code I write or review in Python I try to give a run-through in PyCharm (JetBrain's Python IDE) interactively -- having a chance to step through code lets me consider more options and corner cases and get a more expansive view on what I'm developing or reviewing.

"vim" is my preferred editor when I'm not in an IDE, and often when writing bash scripts, but over the last ten years especially I've rarely written higher-level language code outside an IDE environment ... and I stick to JetBrain's suite mostly these days.

<comment><USER49> 20 year vim user here... There is a really decent VIM plugin that works with all of the jetbrains IDEs I have used that I would recommend. It will even read your vimrc file! I wouldn't write Java or C# without an IDE (IntelliJ IDEA and Rider respectively) and the vim plugin makes adjusting to them much less painful.

<comment><USER46> Can you provide the link for that plugin?

<comment><USER49> I'm not in front of my workstation right now, but I believe this is the one: [https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim)

<comment><USER49> It's not perfect, but it does visual mode and visual block mode and will use as much of your vimrc as it can. Beats the heck out of vanilla IntelliJ that's for sure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Skype alternatives for Linux? - <AUTHOR> Recently there was a HN article regarding no support for Skype Linux Clients [0]. What are the viable Skype alternatives for Linux now? The main use cases are one-to-one video chat and voip calls. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11165568 <comment><AUTHOR> I am not exactly looking for Skype alternatives. Looking for video chat solutions in general. Are there any popular video chat solutions based on WebRTC? Have tried Firefox Hello, but it was a barebones solution without features like echo-cancellation etc.

Edited for clarity.

</comment><comment><USER2> Because of network effects, anything called "A Skype Alternative" is a "Skype Alternative." By which I mean that it's probably no more a an alternative to Skype than Facetime because some people are not on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm currently trying out Jitsi and XMPP. It seems to work well on new clients, on some older systems there are crashes when they go to sleep, which I couldn't fix yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Chrome or Firefox using Google talk or an equivalent web based service works pretty well for me.</comment>