Announcing TypeScript 2.2 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2017/02/22/announcing-typescript-2-2/ <comment><USER2> Woo :) whenever I have to work with an old javascript code base now I always add typings to it first. It makes it orders or magnitude easier to work with and refactor after that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Speaking of tooling -- has anyone had a good experience with Typescript in IntelliJ/Webstorm? It does a fantastic job figuring out ES6 code but seems to totally choke on Typescript. I'd like to avoid switching to Visual Studio.

<comment><USER4> For passersby who were confused like I was: IntelliJ _Community Edition_ has absolutely no support for Javascript or Typescript, which is not noted clearly in the help docs. You apparently need Ultimate Edition to get it.

I was real excited that I could finally use the same IDE for front-end and back-end too... :/

<comment><USER5> The price gets lower each year for the first few years you renew your license.

My company pays for my license but I think it's hella worth it and I'd pay it on my own if I had to.

I avoid VS like the plague and I've never really felt at home in an IDE until I started using IntelliJ.

It's the only thing that was able to get me off of Notepad++

<comment><USER6> I also avoid VS, but VSCode is nothing at all like its big brother. It's actually very quick and lean.

If you're interested in TypeScript at all, the two were made for each other. I'd suggest giving it a try.

Just note it's closer to a text editor with IDE functionality, rather than a full-blown IDE itself.

<comment><USER5> I can pretty much get that and more with Notepad++ or Sublime, though. I've moved back to vim for simple text editing, N++ for casual writing and organizing my thoughts. Is there any specific feature that makes it better than other editors in your book?

<comment><USER7> Apart from Intellisense completion, a full featured integrated debugger, version control integration wich supports line wise staging, a diff viewer, a fast integrated terminal that even gets link detection in the next release, proper variable renaming and a working "Go to Definition" that is even implemented in most of the third party language plugins?

No. Pretty much the same as Notepad++.

<comment><USER5> IntelliJ has all of those things. I'm not sure you understood my question. I use Webstorm daily, I'm using it this very moment. I was asking about VSCode and where it falls between IntelliJ and N++.

<comment><USER7> I understood the question – and that IntelliJ has all of those things is exactly the point I was trying to make.

You get most of the features from a heavyweight IDE, but they managed to get the architecture incredibly lightweight so you can use it as a "daily driver" editor as well.

It is snappy enough to quickly edit some configuration or Markdown files (with live preview and clickable links), it has text based configuration files, its easy to write plugins with a couple of lines of code – and all sorts of other things that previously could only be found on the "editor-side" of the spectrum (export VISUAL="code -w", anyone?).

Unique selling points are quite hard to find, most things where invented somewhere else. Its more the combination of things and walking the thin line between the text editor and IDE worlds.

<comment><USER5> Oh ok, I just didn't understand your answer. My apologies!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have to admit I am getting lost in all these new language constructs :(. I worry that soon I will not be able to read TS code of more experienced programmers.

That being said, the only way forward is to learn! But there seems to be total lack of solid learning resources with plentiful of examples and most importantly "best practices" that explain why the new construct is better and when to use it over the old way.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know this probably comes up each typescript thread, but I still cannot figure out why I should use TS instead of flow + es6, and maintaining the typing definitions always discourages me as it's one more thing that needs to be kept up to date. Am I working on old information here?

<comment><USER10> Why would flow + es6 be better?

<comment><USER11> Avoid vendor locking. Someday in near future if you don't like flow anymore, you can just strip all type annotations with Babel and move on. You are not risking ending up like coffeescript.

<comment><USER12> TypeScript compiles to JS in a straightforward manner as well. If you wanted to move away from TS, you could simply have the TS compiler compile to ES6 and you're done.

<comment><USER11> But that'd still be transpiled code, right? After getting rid of flow it will be exactly same minus the type annotations. Same cannot be said about typescript considering various language features and syntactic sugar TS offers. Will it run? Yes. Will it feel that it was written by me? That depends.

<comment><USER13> > Same cannot be said about typescript considering various language features > and syntactic sugar TS offers

I think you're vastly misinterpreting what TS is.

It's not anything like CoffeeScript. It's JS plus types and a few other features like Interfaces or advanced ECMAScript features when targetting older versions of the standard.

If you strip away types by exporting to your ECMAScript target of choice, you'll get real JavaScript with the same style as it was written in TypeScript.

It's exactly the same thing you'd get with Flow in that sense. The only additional code you'd get would be for polyfills, but a) those are minimal and b) those will only appear if you export to an older ECMAScript version than the one you wrote it in.

There is no vendor lock.

<comment><USER14> there are a few minor things like enums and decorators that will need to be compiled because they're not standard and are not just types either (well, const enums are i think?, but the rest are not?).

That's about it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Object type, better index access, and the quick fixes are all great additions. Awesome job TS team, keep it coming!

</comment><comment><USER16> My favorite: the new `object` type. Non-nullable and cannot refer to primitives.

<comment><USER17> _Non-nullable_

This is incorrect, as is the announcement. The following is valid.

      class Bar{}
      let foo:object = new Bar()
      foo = null
      foo = undefined

edit:

For the people mentioning, --strictNullChecks. That applies to all types not just object. For example, "let x:string = null" would also be an error. That option applies to any type that is not of type Any/null/undefined, and has been in place since 2.0. In that way, "object" is non-nullable under strictNullChecks just as every other type is.

<comment><USER13> No, object is not a nullable type.

For your code to work, you'd need to run it with strictNullChecks disabled. That's probably what you're doing, since it's the default.

<comment><USER17> _since it 's the default._

It's not the default for the command line compiler. Also, all types (except Any/null/undefined) are non-nullable under that option, so that's not what makes object special (it's the no primitive types that is important).

      >tsc test.ts
      >tsc test.ts --strictNullChecks
      >  test.ts(3,1): error TS2322: Type 'null' is not assignable to type 'object'.

<comment><USER13> > you'd need to run it with strictNullChecks disabled. That's probably what > you're doing, since it's the default

I think you misinterpreted my reply. I meant the default is off. That's what your code shows.

<comment><USER17> I did, sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love you Microsoft!

</comment><comment><USER19> Relaxing index-signature access is definitely great as it will make writing code easier. Dynamic properties can lead you to hairy code but it's hard to ignore the reality that it's used everywhere.

For example, no more awkward `e["code"]` where `e.code` is just as valid.

</comment><comment><USER20> Crumbles from the design-table. Oh look, a new object type. I'm not even sure this is an improvement to straight JS any more, it just fails in more exotic ways from pretending to be something it isn't. Once the choice is made to compile to JS, there are plenty of real languages to choose from.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you're familiar with what TypeScript is trying to achieve. It's not supposed to be another language entirely, but a standards-compatible type- safe version.</comment></comment>


India's workhorse rocket fails for the first time in decades - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/31/16234434/india-isro-pslv-rocket-failure-payload-fairing-irnss-1h <comment><USER2> There are a couple of dead comments that, essentially, made the same argument that I've heard here in Scotland when there was talk of a Space Port being set up: why are you wasting money on this when there are problems with poverty etc right here at home.

The response to those arguments, at least here, is simple enough. There are currently about 7000 jobs in the Scottish space industry and in the last two years Glasgow has built more satellites than any other city in Europe. Yet, we have to go to another country to get these satellites launched!

And I suppose the choice of phrase, "space industry", is what makes the difference. It can seem reasonable to say, "this country shouldn't have a space program" but it sounds far less defensible to argue, "this country shouldn't have a space _industry_ ".

And so with India. This particular launch was for the Indian government, but the article mentions the previous record-breaking launch of 104 satellites at once. Of those, 88 were for a company called Planet, "a US private imaging company". And the others were commercial launches for various other countries.

Since the space industry is rapidly growing with huge commercial potential, it seems ludicrous to argue that you _shouldn 't_ be developing it. It would be like someone 20 years ago arguing that you shouldn't be developing Internet connections when you had poverty issues to deal with. How exactly will avoiding hi-tech industry help that in any way?

<comment><USER3> Unless you're launching into high-inclination orbits you really don't want to be launching out of Scotland. Anything going to GEO (quite a large percentage of commercial satellites) needs to be launched from near the equator.

<comment><USER4> GEO launches are more efficient when launched from near the equator, but it's far from "needs."

The Russians launch into GEO from Baikonur, for example, which requires at least a 51.6 degree inclination. The latitude of a Scottish spaceport would be a bit higher, but not enormously so.

For a less extreme example, there are lots of launches into GEO from Kennedy Space Center, which is at a latitude of 28.5 degrees.

The same rocket will be able to put more payload into GEO if launched from a lower latitude, but that doesn't make high latitudes impractical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 41 launches with 2 failures seems pretty impressive to me. I think the current Soyuz (Soyuz-2) is at nearly 70 launches with 3 or 4 failures (some partial) and this is considered one of the most reliable systems made so far. (Obviously not making an exact comparison - PSLV can only lift around half or so as much to LEO as Soyuz).

Hopefully they will find the root cause and get it fixed before serious delays to the Indus lunar rover launch are caused.

<comment><USER6> Ariane V and current-Soyuz's predecessor would have better track records. But yeah, 2 failures in 41 launches puts it fairly high in the league tables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The faring failed to separate trapping the satellite which also may have caused a lower orbit due to extra weight from the faring.

With the headline "rocket fails" i was expecting an exploding rocket.

<comment><USER8> Payload shroud and other separation failures are actually one of the most common failure modes in orbital launch once past the early space age. It's easy to have problems with systems that you don't or cannot test before deployment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it unconscionable that a country with nuclear weapons and a space program still has a caste system, receives foreign aid in the 100s of millions (£) and is 93rd on the social progress index (2017). Get it together India!

<comment><USER10> What is the relevance of this comment to the article?.

<comment><USER11> There's a special version of Godwin's law. Any internet discussion involving India mustn't fail to mention the caste system

<comment><USER10> Yes. Next question would be - shouldn't India tackle poverty instead of space program first.

<comment><USER12> The standard response to that should be "shouldn't the US?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> India had a good run. The technical deficiencies and unsophisticated working environment would eventually result in failures such as these.

<comment><USER14> > India had a good run. The technical deficiencies and unsophisticated working > environment would eventually result in failures such as these.

Odd. When SpaceX loses a rocket, do you write that off as American technical deficiency as well?

<comment><USER15> When things go wrong for Western companies people absolutely do blame it on cultural factors, yes. Beancounters, pressure on quarterly earnings from Wall St, to name a couple of examples. SpaceX through the sheer force of Elon's will has kept some of this at bay, but he won't be able to forever, and the cold winds are already blowing at Tesla.

<comment><USER16> "Through sheer force of Elon's will..." you don't really believe a word of that, right?

<comment><USER15> Why not? A charismatic CEO can get away with a lot, in terms of investors giving them more leeway. Sometimes this is good, like Steve Jobs, sometimes it is bad, like Elizabeth Holmes.

Eventually tho' SpaceX will be as constrained by demands for quarterly earnings figures to start making bad, short-term decisions, just the same as most Western corporations.

<comment><USER8> Only if it's Musk demanding quarterly earnings figures. SpaceX is privately held, with overwhelming control by Elon himself, and much of the rest by his friends. While eventually he might be diluted out of control by (very large amounts of) additional investment, that's not going to happen any time soon, and is predicated on being significantly unprofitable for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Clearly someone didn't heed the reminder about ensuring the device is plugged in and powered on. /s

<comment><USER18> Did you look at the address bar while posting this? It says, "news.ycombinator.com", not "reddit.com"!</comment></comment>


Almost real time Earth images from NASA's EPIC - <AUTHOR> http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also check out this article for more background on these images and the EPIC project.</comment>


Dumping a PS4 Kernel in "Only" 6 Days - <AUTHOR> https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2017/ps4-crashdump-dump/ <comment><USER2> Fantastic. Reminds me of [https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/05/01/29/2017244/piezo-a...](https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/05/01/29/2017244/piezo- acoustic-ipod-hack)

<comment><USER3> Holy cow, I forgot how toxic slashdot comments were... first non-modded comment is like Xbox Live level racism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I understand this is impressive work, my understanding of the FreeBSD- kernel on the PS4 is not enough to warrant some kind of understand -- Python, however, is my forte, and oh my... I think he hacked Python too! :)

<comment><USER5> > Python, however, is my forte, and oh my... I think he hacked Python too!

I had to reread the article to see the decoder and decryptor and some other snippets is python.

But what do you feel is a hack, the way he used the langauge, not pythonetic enough, or something else?</comment></comment>


Sentiment analysis tool thanks to deep learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.deeptrade.ch <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I've just finished my MVP over three weeks of hard work. What do you think about the platform? Constructive feedback is more than welcome.</comment>


Check In Early, Check In Often - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001165.html

<comment><USER2> I find myself working this way almost all the time. In the middle of a refactoring or other change, I try as much as possible to get it commited by the end of the day, in a runnable state, even if accessing the affected unfinished area will crash. Better that than to have to walk in the next morning and try to remember what portion of the code change is actually finished.

In a way this is like looking at your changes as atomic operations: If a change is so big you can't get yourself back into a runnable state by the end of one day coding, it probably should be broken up into smaller stable steps.

<comment><USER3> For bigger changes I just work over a new branch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great advice, but it requires significant project discipline to make it work with large projects. Breaking builds or introducing bugs that make your coworker's jobs harder is a cost you need to look at. Tools like git, with per-developer "branches" might be a good choice.

But I fear that it a typical team is told to check their changes in every few hours, this is going to cause more harm than good.

<comment><USER5> _But I fear that it a typical team is told to check their changes in every few hours, this is going to cause more harm than good._

Let's examine the "typical team" scenario.

1\. Can't tell everyone to check in changes every few hours, because it'll hopelessly break everyone's builds all the time.

2\. Can't tell everyone to only check in concrete working chunks, because then people will only check in once every week. Unless people work on isolated components, this will have a tendency to make merging progressively harder.

3\. In CVS and Subversion, can't tell people to use private branches, because manual merge tracking means that revisions in non-trivial branches can get lost. (This happened to me on several occasions, and the main reason why I hate, loathe, and despise Subversion.)

4\. Can't tell people to use distributed source control, for a variety of reasons. Politics. Fear of change. Lack of IDE integration, for the majority of "typical teams" out there who do not understand command line tools. Lack of interest in learning better tools ("this already works for us," and never mind that you just spent a week before the release unravelling the mess everyone made of the Subversion repository). Stuff like "git rebase --interactive" and "git add --patch" is easy to use, but I personally have found it enormously difficult to explain to other people the value of clean, well-ordered, well- isolated revisions.

Basically, in a team where everyone proficiently, comfortably, and cleanly wields git or hg, source control shouldn't be a problem. In any other team, there will be problems. On my current project, I've been keeping my life sane by using git-svn, but the rest of the team can't and won't adopt better tools, and it struggles with the Subversion soup.

<comment><USER6> It scares me to think that many programmers are not comfortable with the command-line. Sure, GUI integration is nice, but I actually prefer using Git from the command line for most things, except for viewing history (Gitk/Giggle) or differences (Kompare.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way Jeff talks, one would say he doesn't know about git-svn: commit locally a zillion times, then just push once to the remote, shared svn server.

Which is to say: the fear of "breaking the build" should not stop you from doing anything you want locally.</comment>


Asocio – Decentralized and free messenger - <AUTHOR> https://asocio.github.io/ <comment><USER2> fyi in case anyone is trying to find the actual messenger. it doesn't appear to be released yet</comment>


Thank you for the laughts Leslie Nielsen. Rest in peace. - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11860014

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite actors. The best one in comedy! I was hoping for many more great movies from him... Thank you for the laughts. Rest in peace.</comment>


NASA paywalls first papers arising from Curiosity rover – I am setting them free - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1430 <comment><USER2> Actually, the real question is why the raw data isn't free.

Note: I worked briefly as a contractor at JPL in 2011 on a project related to Curiosity image-processing and distribution (among other things).

I argued at the time (fairly strenuously) that the raw data (the data that was used by the scientists in this paper) should be public.

The reason the data is not released immediately to the public is both understandable and frustrating: scientists around the world compete for control of Curiosity's precious mission time. The mission is refreshed every day, each move is voted on and the results uploaded to the rover. The data is not released to give the "winning" scientists first crack at interpreting the data. It's about _prestige_ \- if you released the data and get "scooped" by Joe Public it's embarrassing but it's also a lost opportunity for scientific prestige.

The same basic reasoning is why so many JPL-produced datasets (particularly astronomical but also terrestrial - JPL does a lot of weather research) are not public.

Personally, I'd like to see this change. I want all publicly-funded non- military research projects have an open data policy. Clearly this would not apply to research with straight-up defense applications. But Mars rover data? I suspect that scientists will be incentivized without being granted artificial monopolies on that data.

<comment><USER3> Prestige? _Prestige?_

Science is not about prestige. It's about science. If you want prestige, go become a jockey, or the world's best hooker. Too many "scientists" are in it for the holidays, money, and "prestige", rather than the, y'know, _SCIENCE_.

I'm afraid it's not "understandable", it's nasty, selfish, and contrary to scientific advancement.

By not releasing data, they're preventing the internet hivemind from doing its thing - and it has managed some pretty impressive things (NEAR target spotting, anyone?).

<comment><USER4> well we don't get paid jack. 99.9 % of the science undertook is boring, inconclusive or negative results.

The only carrot _is_ prestige, and the only perks are holidays ...

I dunno why you suggested money because there is none (in wages).

I expect a big reason for not releasing the data is ... who is gonna do the necessary steps to release the data? You want to take a scientist off his role to build a website and database?? We have little administrative support (probably JPL has better, but still, yet another distraction that eats time from our main job that pays too little). The people that make websites for a living get paid better the scientists, so its a bit harsh to expect scientists to constantly be building website to share data whilst paying them under the industry norms.

<comment><USER5> In his article, the OP mentions "$2.5 billion taxpayer dollars that made it possible". Sorry you don't get paid as much as you'd like -- that doesn't give you the moral high ground. Doing it for "prestige" still isn't a good reason.

At a cost of 2.5 billion, I don't think it's too harsh to expect a small budget for releasing the data publicly.

<comment> barry-cotter I sympathise with your goals but you're being a douche. Science is a crap career if you're chasing money. You're a smart college graduate with excellent grades who spends 4-7 years doing an apprenticeship for piss poor money, then a postdoc, for three years, maybe a second postdoc, and if you're lucky you then get a tenure track position. Now you have seven years of earning high school teacher money but working 60-80 hours a week and at the end of it there's an excellent chance you'll be fired.

People do science for love or glory, not money. (Except people from 2nd or 3rd world countries studying or postdocing in industrial nations. For them it's a sweet deal.)

<comment><USER6> _(Except people from 2nd or 3rd world countries studying or postdocing in industrial nations. For them it 's a sweet deal.)_

Reminded me of this article:[http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html](http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> His assumption that these works must be public domain is questionable. It is true that US government works are generally not subject to copyright in the US, but that is when they are works of government employees producing the works within the scope of their employment.

There are two big limitations on this. First, if the government work incorporates outside copyrighted work, only the parts authored by the government employee operating within the scope of his employment are public domain.

Second, this only applies to government employees. It does NOT apply to contractors. What happens with copyright of works produced by contractors under a government contract is determined by the terms of the contract.

The Curiosity project is largely run at JPL. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech. Almost all JPL employees are neither government employees nor government contractors. They are Caltech employees.

To figure out the copyright status of works authored by JPL employees, we'd need to look at their employment contract with Caltech, and with Caltech's contract with NASA.

<comment><USER8> Also, the journal publisher definitely owns the page layout, and can potentially claim copyright to the final text, since its editors contributed to it during the review process.

<comment><USER9> The publisher "owns" the layout only for the creative expression within the page layout. There's not likely to be much copyrightable expression within a page layout. And infringement of that expression by republishing the article is likely to meet the criteria for fair use.

Editorial contributions are also unlikely to rise to the measure of a separately copyrightable work. In the case of scientific articles, joint authorship between contributing scientists is common, but the editors of the journal are never (rarely?) cited as authors. Occasionally, a reviewer will make substantive contributions to the science and join as a co-author.

It seems pretty safe to say that if the editor is not listed as a co-author of the paper, neither the author(s) nor the editor(s) consider it a "joint work".

See also [http://lottfischer.com/general.php?category=Resources&subhea...](http://lottfischer.com/general.php?category=Resources&subhead=Articles&headline=+When+does+an+Editor%E2%80%99s+input+create+a+Joint+Work+of+Authorship) for a discussion of when the editing could arise (basically, if both the author and the editor intend for it to be a work of joint authorship.)

<comment><USER8> I don't know enough about the relevant case law to tell you for certain that the layout is copyrightable, but my gut feeling is that it is, since that bar is pretty low and copying the publisher's PDF seems kind of analogous to copying a website's HTML. Fair use may not be applicable here, since even though the layout is a small proportion of the total work, it has value independent of the text: People might spend money (or persuade their university to spend money) to buy the publisher's PDF even if the manuscript were available for free. Given your link I agree that the review process is unlikely to give the publisher any claim to the text itself.

I do know that most author agreements for non-open access journals allow authors to publish the manuscript on their personal website and in repositories (sometimes pre-review, sometimes post-review), but most do not allow authors to publish the publisher's PDF, which suggests that the publishers believe they have some kind of ownership over the latter. (In practice many people post the publisher's PDF articles on their websites and no one complains, although repositories like PubMed Central contain only manuscripts from these journals.)

The AAAS author agreement actually explicitly allows authors to legally publish the peer reviewed manuscript on their websites as soon as it is published, which raises the question of why the authors of these studies didn't just do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not everything remotely related to the MSL mission is performed by NASA or US government employees. Non-US scientists cannot be employed directly by NASA due to citizenship requirements. NASA avoids cutting itself off from the world scientific community as a result by granting contract work to, or simply cooperating with, non-US scientists.

Indeed, some of the work "freed" here was performed by European scientists, using NASA data -- which is available to the public in the US and out -- but without a penny of US government funding. These works are certainly not in the public domain.

Most scientists would be happy to share their research. Just ask.

<comment><USER11> Yes, a quick review of the papers shows what you say - the authors belong to a plethora of institutes and centers, American and otherwise.

NASA got the data and has made it available, yes? Further work using it is being done by third (fourth, fifth...) parties who feel their work would be most visible in a top-shelf journal like Science.

I'm all for liberation of data, and for scientific papers in particular having wide and free dissemination. We should really be working on alternative funding models for research and alternative business models for journals rather than calling out individual teams for putting their work where they think it will receive the most attention.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the data is free. One link for the calibrated data is:

[http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/subscription_service/SS-201306...](http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/subscription_service/SS-20130610.shtml)

If you really wanted to work with the data, you'd want to get in touch with the instrument team. At this relatively early stage, there will be quirks that will not be corrected for/documented. Poking around with the data is fine, but you might spend a lot of time on something that is a known instrumental artifact.

One caveat with this "free" data -- usually there is an embargo period (there was with MSL, something like 90 days). During that first 90 days, a few hundred people came to be resident at JPL where the mission is controlled. They all worked in a few large rooms there, largely on Mars time. So the first batch of papers (some of which are already published) are done by the instrument teams. And this is clearly not a level playing field. (The thing is, those teams worked hard on a lot of un-fun calibration and infrastructure- building.)

Other missions have much longer embargo periods (years in some cases), and some have effectively no embargo at all. It's partly about the culture of the discipline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with vigilante justice is, the vigilante usually gets the wrong person.

These scientists don't work for NASA, most of them work for private institutes and some are based in Europe, the work is entitled to be copyrighted, and basically you're stealing it and giving it away for free.

I love science, I love space, I think Nasa's budget should be tripled (at the expense of a few less fighter jets). But these scientists didn't do anything wrong by publishing THEIR works (not Public Domain works) behind a pay wall.

Let's get the facts straight at least.

<comment><USER14> > These scientists don't work for NASA, most of them work for private > institutes and some are based in Europe, ...

Yes. Also Canada.

> ... the work is entitled to be copyrighted, ...

You're heading in the right direction here, but copyright does not work quite that way in the modern world. No one _copyrights_ (verb) things anymore. Rather, copyright exists in most works upon their creation. So, yes, these are copyrighted works. (And so is your HN comment, by the way.)

> ... and basically you're stealing it and giving it away for free.

The scientists already gave it away to the journal for free. Journals, which provide nothing in the modern world except prestige, now hold the copyright and charge for access. No one is stealing anything, since everyone who had a copy before still has a copy. Yes, the papers are now being given away free to the public, probably against the wishes of the copyright holder (the journal).

> But these scientists didn't do anything wrong by publishing THEIR works (not > Public Domain works) behind a pay wall.

Close. The scientists assigned the copyright to the journal, for no payment (but for the prestige of it). The journal is the one publishing behind a paywall, and the journal is the one getting any money collected.

Now, to the real point: "wrong" is not the same as "illegal". Yes, the journal holds the copyright to the paper, and it is legally entitled to charge for access. But what about the moral issue? _I_ funded this work. Me. My taxes paid for it. If you are a U.S. taxpayer, then you paid for it, too. And yet now I'm supposed to pay to see it? There's a problem there.

This _would_ be illegal[1] if these guys were medical researchers funded by the NIH, which has a policy that publications coming out of projects they fund must be freely accessible.[2] It is not illegal here; I think it should be.

And one more thing that many people don't catch: the researchers would probably love to have their papers more accessible. They are not sending papers to pay-walled journals because they like limited access. They are doing it because these are the journals that give them prestigious publications. The journals can trade on their prestige to enforce conditions on the researchers, like limited access. _No_ _one_ likes this except the journals. If NASA made a policy that papers from their projects must be made freely available, then the journals would either have to allow it, or else stop publishing all NASA-based works. Experience strongly suggests that they would do the former.

[EDIT--One more quick note before the editing period closes: It appears the author of the post might not be clear on the distinction between researchers working on NASA projects and researchers doing projects using data that NASA has made available for anyone to use. I am primarily addressing the former situation here. However, what I said about the journals being the only ones with any interest in limited access, applies to academic researchers in general.]

[1] Or maybe not quite _illegal_ , but rather _against_ _regulations_. Almost but not quite the same thing.

[2] [http://publicaccess.nih.gov/](http://publicaccess.nih.gov/)

<comment><USER15> It's not just prestige though, it's also legitimacy. Scientific journals have formal peer review and it is this process that is supposed to ensure that papers that get published aren't totally spurious. One might argue that NASA could be exempt from this process given its own reputation and level of accountability, but submitting articles to journals for peer review and publication is standard scientific practice.

The paywall is arguably just for business though, a lot of papers get put up on sites like arxiv pre-publication anyway.

I don't see much in the argument from the view of the taxpayer though. In the UK a lot of public funding goes in to research and the papers are largely behind paywalls - Graphene research for example. Now, if we had government subsidized peer review journals - I could definitely get behind that.

<comment><USER16> "Scientific journals have formal peer review and it is this process that is supposed to ensure that papers that get published aren't totally spurious"

Considering the fact that peer review is done by _volunteers_ , I think this a pretty weak argument. At best you could argue that the publishers are organizing the review process, but even that is suspect -- scientists organize themselves pretty well.

Peer review is orthogonal to copyright issues. Journal publishers serve almost no purpose in the modern world, and the copyrights they hold on scientific articles are doing more to prevent the dissemination of knowledge than to promote scientific research.

<comment><USER17> This seems to prove too much. Either all scientists are irrational, or they get some real value out of the journals system.

<comment><USER16> The only value a scientist gets from publishing a journal article is another publication they can add to their CV. A long list of publications is important for any scientist who wants to get funding, and even grad students need to have that long list of publications on their CV if they hope to get a research job later in life. What the journal provides is its _name_ , and nothing else -- because as I said, everything else that goes into a journal is done by volunteers.

Now, once upon a time, journals served a secondary purpose, which was to distribute scientific results on a global scale. Back then, there was no Internet, and printing enough copies of a journal to satisfy the world's needs required industrial equipment. _Fortunately those days are done and over with_ , but unfortunately we are still dealing with the relics of that bygone age in the form of academic publishing companies. Worse, in fact, since today's publishers are far greedier and for more profiteering than many of the publishers of the past.

Really, were it not for copyright, we could cut publishers out of the equation without any ill effects and have a net gain for society by removing all paywalls from scientific articles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well, I hope this doesn't come back and bite me too badly :l

I've mirrored the files here in case the original author decides to take them down:

[http://lelandbatey.com/science/](http://lelandbatey.com/science/)

<comment><USER19> Good. It really is up to the publication to prove that they hold the copyright.

By providing mirrors, it spreads the work further for the authors, lowering the chance that they would add their support to take it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am pursuing a PhD in the field of planetary sciences at the moment, and I can definitely vouch for the fact that there is a lot of discussion amongst the "younger folks" about the elistism of science, particularly for missions like Curiosity. The last few conferences I've been to (Division on Planetary Sciences, European Planetary Science Congress, American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting) have highlighted how worried publishers like Elsevier are about the changing attitudes in the field. I've been to a number of dedicated PR seminars at these conferences, where it is clear that the pitch is that publishers that require payment for the publication of scientific papers are not preventing taxpayers from gaining access to results, but are rather simply seeking appropriate compensation for their efforts in coordinating peer-review processes and bringing the results to the attention of the wider community.

I very openly tell my colleagues that change is necessary to make it clear that investment in missions like MSL, MESSENGER, JUICE etc. is for the mutual benefit of everyone. I think as a scientist, I have an OBLIGATION to communicate my results to those that make my work possible.

Open access journals are making some headway, but unfortunately, until the bigwigs in the field really make a clear statement of intent to shift from the traditional publishing houses to these new publishers, the status quo will be maintained.

I applaud the OP's efforts to make these results accessible to to everyone, and sincerely hope that there are no legal repercussions.

</comment><comment><USER21> I work at a National Lab, and all my publications are available for free. However, that's not done through the website of the publishing journal, it's done through my Lab's portal.

The main requirement journals have is that we don't distribute the journal's marked-up final version. So we make them available as "Lab Reports" with our own typesetting, front cover, and so on.

<comment><USER22> Exactly, the first one via a simple google search on the first author's name:

[http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2013/pdf/1685.pdf](http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2013/pdf/1685.pdf)

So it is a conference paper, freely available now too. Looking that over, it seems it's that typical short dense sort. Conferences tend to limit the length of papers. Science being more general interest, I would expect that paper to have more prose, background info, and images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The American taxpayer paid for the freaking rover without which no one can generate any research whatsoever. Thus we should be able to read the results without a paywall in the way.

<comment><USER13> Same can be said for a lot of things. The American taxpayer paid for the road on which you use to drive to work. Should you get no salary as a result?

If you think that the rover funding and the _independent non-NASA, non- American scientists_ who spent months analyzing that data and coming up with their interpretations should be connected, you are entitled to think that. But they currently aren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Aaron Swartz would be proud of you.

</comment><comment><USER25> NASA is not a government agency as such, and its work is not required to be released as public domain. Instead, it falls under the Federal Acquisition Regulations: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Acquisition_Regulations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Acquisition_Regulations)

Which isn't to say that I disagree with making its findings available publicly. But the facts are worth noting.

</comment><comment><USER26> Also, Science is run by, um, the AAAS, which is "an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association"

Couldn't the membership just have a vote to make Science go open access already?

</comment><comment><USER27> To be fair, it is the norm in the scientific community to publish research in Journals... and while the Journals make money off it they do provide some level of editorial standards.

What would have been the alternative here, self-publishing? I suppose that would be possible for NASA, but it would be highly unprecedented. And besides, like the top comment says, some of these papers aren't actually done by NASA scientists, but others using NASA's data.

<comment><USER28> The correct thing to do would have been to publish the article as open access. That means nobody has to pay to read it. It costs a small extra fee from the authors to the journal to make it open access forever.

<comment><USER29> I don't know about other fields, but in physics, the "small extra fee" is $1700 - $2700.[1] Many researchers prefer to spend this money on actual research. Fortunately, most physics journals also allow the author to retain publishing rights (just not on the final typeset version). So, sites like arxiv.org provide a better alternative. Free-to-reasearcher publishing in a prestigious journal plus free-to-researcher-and-public publishing elsewhere.

[1] [http://publish.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press- release](http://publish.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release)

<comment><USER30> >Many researchers prefer to spend this money on actual research.

Compared to the cost to license journal access from Elsevier and the other parasites 3k per published item is cheap. The problem being that it comes from your grant funds instead of the Uni's general fund, or the Dep't funds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > The only ambiguity in the case of these Curiosity papers is that not all of > the authors are US Government employees, and thus the work is, I am told > "co-owned" by the authors.

Amazingly, this is an almost exact re-hashing of the debates on IP that occurred between Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker in the 19th century. Tucker presented Spooner with a thought experiment: If two people should co- invent, how should the property be allocated. Spooner, of course, said 50-50. Then Tucker rejoined - what if one of the co-inventors should choose to give the patent freely, does that impinge on the property rights of the one who does not so choose (if you choose to disallow the scenario, does the holding of the patent impinge on the property right of the one who would choose to give it away)?

</comment><comment><USER32> God bless you, Michael Eisen. May the force be with you

</comment><comment><USER33> Links to the PDF documents have been made available by the MSL mission.

[http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/whatsnew/index.cfm?FuseAct...](http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/whatsnew/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=1523)

These are published in a manner that is consistent with Science's publication rules.

</comment><comment><USER34> As an emerging space power, I believe this campaign needs to get some media coverage in China.

</comment><comment><USER35> way to go

</comment><comment><USER36> Fuck man, let NASA have the $20. I understand the consternation but of all the agencies who need money... just let people pay for it.

We aren't talking about pirating lil'wayne's next album or someone who has too much money.

<comment><AUTHOR> NASA doesn't see a penny of that $20, which is the problem; it goes to the publishers of Science (the AAAS, which is, to be fair, a non-profit organization). While musicians don't get much from the average record sale, scientists get exactly nothing.

<comment><USER36> yeah... that's lame. NASA should take a cut. in fact, new decree.. all sales from academic papers should go to NASA. agreed?

<comment><USER36> since when does HN support downvotes?

<comment><USER37> Anyone with karma high enough can - and should - downvote comments that detract from the overall quality of the discussion.

Your karma is close to that point. When you get there, use it wisely.

<comment><USER38> FWIW, I think it must be based on the average karma, because my profile is older and I have more karma than wheelerwj but I have no downvote capacity.

Also, I can't even imagine the amount of contributions that are required to reach the amount of karma you have.

<comment><USER39> It's total karma, but the line keeps rising as HN grows. I've only gained them when my karma reached 500.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vim plugins I use - <AUTHOR> https://prakashdanish.github.io/2018/06/30/vim-plugins-i-use.html <comment><USER2> Here are some I find invaluable:

* FZF. Perhaps the best fuzzy finder for Vim [https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/)

* ALE. Asynchronous Linting Engine, totally awesome. [https://github.com/w0rp/ale](https://github.com/w0rp/ale)

* Polyglot. A "best of" language pack. [https://github.com/sheerun/vim-polyglot](https://github.com/sheerun/vim-polyglot)

* Plug. IMHO the best plugin manager going [https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug](https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug).

* Fugitive. The best git wrapper there is [https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive](https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive)

* vim-test. A plugin that helps you run tests from inside of Vim. [https://github.com/janko-m/vim-test](https://github.com/janko-m/vim-test)

Outside of that, switch to NeoVim if you haven't already ([https://neovim.io/](https://neovim.io/)). Or give Oni a chance, it looks really promising ([https://www.onivim.io/](https://www.onivim.io/)).

<comment><USER3> While I appreciate your comment, we can already guess that you believe the packages you have chosen to be "the best" at their job. Without further narration (and I've only singled you out due to being the topmost comment), comment sections like this have a tendency to become a dumping ground for vimrc snippets.

Could you expand on why? Personally I'd be particularly interested on your thoughts about vim-plug, as I use pathogen currently and I seems to do everything I need.

<comment><USER4> \- You can update all the plugins with PlugUpdate; furthermore, they are updated in parallel.

\- You can lazy load plugins

\- You can execute commands after a plugin update (e.g. building the new binary for youcompleteme)

Those are the major points I think.

<comment><USER5> Lots of people like plugin managers. I prefer to use "git clone" and "stow". Much less magical, and I feel I have a better understanding of what's going on with my configuration.

<comment><USER6> I have a plugin manager that can help you with that!

Seriously, isn't part of the problem that vim by default looks for all plugins in one directory? Tim Pope's Pathogen does the minimum here and lets each plugin have its own directory (which translates to git repo). You're responsible for going to each directory and updating them.

<comment><USER5> I'm doing that too. I clone into "~/.config/nvim/stow/", then _stow_ figures out how to put all that stuff into the proper places. Occasionally there is a conflict, but that is usually for files that I don't want anyway, like "build" or "LICENSE".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's get this out of the way: "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2WjJbmmoM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2WjJbmmoM)

And if you want to see some crazy vim usage, there's always Damian Conway: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHm36-na4-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHm36-na4-4)

<comment><USER8> I keep a semi-pristine vimrc because of the first video, after having seen how heavy vim plugins can be on my low end equipment

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I gave up trying to make Vim into an IDE. It's a text editor. It's an excellent one, but that's what it does. The plugins just aren't very good. NerdTree is not a good file browser. None of the autocomplete/intellisense works very well. It does work, but requires a lot of setup, and let's be honest, a TUI isn't the best way to interact with autocomplete dropdowns.

Most of the IDEs have vim like features or plugins. It works a lot better the other way - make your IDE into Vim.

<comment><USER10> Text editors and IDEs are quite different.

For everz we've ben trying to shove one into the other.

Every IDE has a sort of shitty text editor.

Every text editor tries to make a shitty IDE.

Can someone please ackgnowledge that the reality is that neither is a good approach? I wish that I could have complete integration between VIM and JetBrains suite. Would be nice if the JetBrains platform could render a VIM inside itself as the actual text editor but kept 100% of its features as vim plugins to be installed. That way nobody has to re-invent the wheel on great text editing (emacs falls into this category too) and actually making intelligent IDEs.

<comment><USER11> This is the goal of the Oni project, but it's still early in development and there's lots of work left to do. Yes, it's electron but in my experience it never uses more than a few hundred MB of ram.

[https://github.com/onivim/oni](https://github.com/onivim/oni)

<comment><USER12> Oni is my current text editor, and even though it's pre-1.0, it's been a fantastic experience. It starts fast, looks great, works perfectly as a Vim (it supports standard Vim plugins), and requires almost no configuration (I don't know why the built-in Prettier code formatting is shipped disabled, but you should turn it on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This list is far from conservative. Vim isn't an IDE and shouldn't be made into one - effective vim users ^z out of vim and use Unix as their IDE.

Here's my more conservative plugin list:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/.vimrc](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/.vimrc)

fugitive: I use this for the sole purpose of :Gblame because the command line blame tool that ships with git is frustrating to use.

ctrlp is there for opening files quickly in large codebases. It's better than NerdTree and fits more nicely into my workflow.

surround should be built into vim.

editorconfig is useful because I work on a large variety of projects.

The rest of the plugins are syntax highlighting related. ctrlp and surround are the only ones which meaningfully change the experience of using vim.

<comment><USER14> I don't see why being effective in vim means you ^z out of vim to run `ack` or `grep`, instead of pressing ^f (for example) to run Ack.vim on the <cword> and have the results displayed next to your code in a window that, when you select the item you want, opens that corresponding file in a buffer with your cursor already on the line in question. Certainly you don't need ack.vim, you could just ^z and do it the old fashioned way, but where is the utility in that?

As for the unix philosophy, it's all about programs doing one thing and doing it well... but isn't it also about composing those programs to do the job you need done? If you're just ^z'ing out of vim to run `grep` or `ack`, how do you get those results back into vim? copy/paste it through your terminal emulator, using tmux in the best case scenario? How is that more in line with the unix philosophy than simply having vim shell out to those utilities for you?

^z to run unix utilities is like coping the output of one command into a file on disk before sending it to another, instead of simply piping the output of one into the input of another using the functionality of your shell. If vim filling in for a shell violates the philosophy, then damn the philosophy. I'd rather have _" the traditional shell+domain specific shells(vim, ranger, etc)"_ than turn the traditional shell into a one-size-fits-poorly shell.

[https://github.com/mileszs/ack.vim](https://github.com/mileszs/ack.vim) (Because ack.vim and plugins like it are actually in keeping with the so- called unix philosophy for reasons I outlined above, you don't actually have to use `ack` with ack.vim. I use it with `ag` (the silver searcher) instead.)

<comment><USER13> >Certainly you don't need ack.vim, you could just ^z and do it the old fashioned way, but where is the utility in that?

Because ack.vim can't be piped into other tools. You can't, for example, limit your search to the last 50 files modified. Or only to executable files. You can't pipe the results into sed or make matching files world-readable. Sure, you could install ack.vim, slow down vim's startup and bloat your installation, or you could just hit ^z and use the unparalleled power of the Unix shell.

>How is that more in line with the unix philosophy than simply having vim shell out to those utilities for you?

Sometimes it's not. But vim has ! built in, you don't need plugins to run commands from it. I do it all the time.

<comment><USER15> One thing I don't understand, is how do you handle mistakes with the 'unix-as- ide' approach? I was using sed to refactor. Now, I typically use bufdo %s/foo/bar/gc, because it's much more forgiving. It's the same story with a lot of stuff you can ctrl-z for - if you can do it inside vim, it's usually far easier to control and roll back.

<comment><USER16> Git helps you with those mistakes, otherwise, yes, very unforgiving

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I personally use no plugins [1]. Zero friction moving from host to host. Vim is a great text editor, not a great IDE. For anything more sophisticated I prefer just switching to something like VS Code (with Vim bindings of course).

[1] [https://github.com/hoffa/dotfiles/blob/master/.vimrc](https://github.com/hoffa/dotfiles/blob/master/.vimrc)

<comment><USER18> Same. I had quite a lot some time in the past, but also made the "using vim on some foreign machine and being confused as hell" experience by trying to use hotkeys or commands that didn't exist. Also just keeping the config synched between my own hosts was more annoying than I anticipated. Not to mention resolving conflicts between different plugins, or random stuff breaking when updating anything.

Nowadays I have a vimrc that just tweaks vanilla features the way I like, plus some highlighting for certain keywords regarding a C codebase I occasionally work on. The only plugin I use is a modified version of DetectIndent.

<comment><USER14> > _" Same. I had quite a lot some time in the past, but also made the "using > vim on some foreign machine and being confused as hell" experience by trying > to use hotkeys or commands that didn't exist."_

I've found that setting a custom colorscheme in vim averts this problem completely. If I see my colorscheme, my muscle memory is primed for my config. If I see the default vim colorscheme, my muscle memory reverts to default vim.

If somebody gave me a copy of otherwise vanilla vim to use that had my colorscheme, that would certainly throw me for a loop. But so far nobody has been that diabolical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> People seem to swear by NerdTree, but I personally don't see the purpose of it. Sure it may be nice to see your file structure sometimes, but having a terminal open or even just the actual folder window open solves that. Everything else can be done with the built-in :Ex command, which lets you navigate to open files, create new files, rename, delete, mostly everything you want.

As for other plug-ins, there are a few I would recommend (can you tell I'm a Tim Pope fan?):

\- vim-commentary: Gives bindings for commenting out code quickly: [https://github.com/tpope/vim-commentary](https://github.com/tpope/vim- commentary)

\- vim-surround: Easily surround selected text with symbols: [https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround](https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround) \- vim-unimpared: Adds bindings for some misc. commands, like enabling relative line numbers and spellcheck: [https://github.com/tpope/vim- unimpaired](https://github.com/tpope/vim-unimpaired)

\- vim-repeat: Allows many more commands to be repeated with . : [https://github.com/tpope/vim-repeat](https://github.com/tpope/vim-repeat)

\- VimCompletesMe: A much more bare-bones auto-completion tool than YouCompleteMe, hitting tab gives you matches from your previously typed text. It's also all in vimscript so it's much easier to install and manage: [https://github.com/ajh17/VimCompletesMe](https://github.com/ajh17/VimCompletesMe)

\- Pathogen: A plug-in manager, if you can call it that. It simply re-adjusts the file paths so you can centralize your plugin directory. Some plug-in managers will auto-update, but I never liked that, just run git pull if you wish to update a plugin: [https://github.com/tpope/vim- pathogen](https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen)

There are some other cosmetic ones I like as well, like airline, and vim- highlightyank, but that's a personal preference.

<comment><USER20> > Sure it may be nice to see your file structure sometimes

And you can just use the built in :Ex for that

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > vim-gitgutter

I'm not a vim user (yet), but this feature is built into Atom and I've come to find it indispensable. I'm a bit of a commit diff freak (I like it neat and tidy), and once i've finished messing around on some branch I want to gradually converge to some simple differences, a git diff type gutter is really helpful in visualising ("watch git.." can come close but nothing is as good as in editor integration).

</comment><comment><USER22> If you write C or C++, this script is handy for switching between source and header files: [https://github.com/vim-scripts/a.vim](https://github.com/vim- scripts/a.vim)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's simple but tpope/vim-surround is another favorite. Pope pope pope pope.

<comment><USER24> This plugin should have been implemented in vim proper. Many vim binding plugins for other editors do, e.g intellij vim bindings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like that the intro paragraph discusses the pros and cons of vanilla vs plugins.

For those that want to take a look at some more vanilla approaches to some common tasks, Max Cantor has a great talk about that on YouTube [0].

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2WjJbmmoM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2WjJbmmoM)

</comment><comment><USER26> How is the plugin management in vim? I use emacs and it's a pain to setup. You need to modify a config file (.emacs) in order to add plugin lists (melpa). You then browse the list through a shortcut (M-x list-packages) and you only see names, no description or ways to look for something specific. Once you installed your plugins there are no real way to access a manual or learn them. Often you will need to modify config files to make them usable.

<comment><USER7> The Emacs package list has a description field on the right, a shortcut for more info (?) and after it's installed you've got C-h m and often info pages (C-h i). What's wrong with that?

Vim has no unified plugin structure, there are several plugin manager packages (often installed via git clone). I personally use vim-plug[i] which is more on the minimal side, but there are others like pathogen or vundle. No real centralized plugin repository like melpa, I don't think one of the plugin managers I've used had some kind of common install-screen. You mostly enter the github address and execute the package update vimscript. I've seen more Emacs info packages than :help docs, but in most cases I'm browsing the githup README.md/.org anyways.

[1]: [https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug](https://github.com/junegunn/vim- plug)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Missing the most important one:

[https://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/](https://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/)

:)

<comment><USER28> I've moved from YouCompleteMe to Deoplete. While YCM is good, the plugin support for deoplete seems a bit more extended and easier to set up (ymmv). Maybe I just messed something up every time I tried to rework my vimrc with YCM though, it's probably likely :D

<comment><USER29> +1 for Deoplete. As long as you're using NeoVim or a more recent version of Vim (8.0+) with a few plugins, it just works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've doubted for long about learning Vim or Emacs.

I like the default vim keybindings, but I don't like having to install plugins in order to make my editor usable, I like the batteries-included concept.

But when I try to learn Emacs I can't accept the fact that I have to press M-v to go up one screenful. It must become really uncomfortable really fast.

<comment><USER20> You can try Evil mode which gives you vim keybinds in Emacs: [https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil](https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I spent a day or two recently figuring out how to get the vim-airline (aka powerline) icons to work properly, going through pretty much every single font/theme option on Windows (even in the DOS prompt) and Linux. I added a dummies guide [0] to the Wiki.

For a Windows console user - it's worth noting that since they got 24-bit colours working in the console the work is now on-going to get the colours properly working in terminal Vim [1].

[0]: [https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline/wiki/Dummies- Guid...](https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline/wiki/Dummies-Guide-to- Powerline-fonts-on-Fedora,-Ubuntu-and-Windows)

[1]: [https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/2060](https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/2060)

</comment><comment><USER32> The build in vim alternatives for

nerdtree :E<CR>

fuzzy finding :e __/ index<Tab> (index being part of filename)

autocompletion <CTRL-P> while in insert mode and typing word

</comment><comment><USER33> no mention of my favorite, vimwiki:

[https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki)

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there anything for Vim that mimics the Syntax formatting of Source Insight ([https://www.sourceinsight.com/doc/v4/userguide/Manual/Concep...](https://www.sourceinsight.com/doc/v4/userguide/Manual/Concepts/Syntax_Formatting_and_Styles.htm))?

I'd love to switch to Vim...

<comment><USER35> that would require actually understanding the code. it could be done i guess these days with the async that came in 8.0 but would require some pretty heavy vimscripting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As an Emacs user, I'm so curious about vim packages. Does vim have packages that are akin to adding a major mode in Emacs? Some of the packages on this list look like the vim version of minor modes or little helper functions.

<comment><USER37> Vim has a limited number of "modes" \-- insert, normal, command and visual. These are not analogous to Emacs modes AFAICT. A vim package/plugin typically modifies/enhances behaviour in these modes. Where they can, useful operations are bound to a key combination.

You spend most of your time in Vim (when editing) in normal mode, executing deft movements and register usage to behave as a surgeon upon the text, as it were. Vim's noun/verb with multipliers make this an effective editing paradigm. Enlightened users have reported "thinking in Vim."

Vanilla Emacs to a vim user feels like you're always in "insert" mode. Chording everything felt a little weird, and I gave up on evil-mode because it wasn't vim enough for me.

<comment><USER36> Right, I am an evil user myself. My question was about the vim equivalent of major modes in Emacs --- Does vim have a concept of major mode (a set of language specific functionality, one major mode per buffer)?

<comment><USER14> Not formally in the Emacs sense, but you can of course have configuration only load depending on the filetype so you end up with different keybindings (or other settings) depending on what sort of file you're in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Vim-zen fails to install on Windows [https://github.com/prakashdanish/vim- zen/issues/9](https://github.com/prakashdanish/vim-zen/issues/9)

</comment><comment><USER39> I think that [https://github.com/simeji/winresizer](https://github.com/simeji/winresizer) is a good tool. we'll able to become windows resize easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> I came across this before but since I was using tmux splits back then, this sounded like unnecessary overhead but now that I've been using vim splits excessively, this is proving to be a nice little addition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I stay away from plugins for fear that I'll get so used to them, I'll be lost if I sit down in front of a terminal that doesn't have them installed.

<comment><USER41> And you waste 95% of the time you use your own vim with painful default? Some people seem to want to live by your statement but I treat it pointless. Just pretend the default vim is another editor and live with your customized version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> hmmm. i dont use any myself (i tried omnisharper and the java equivalent for more quickly finding syntax errors but quickly dropped them as they are unreliable).

here are some plain vim alternatives:

1\. goyo: i write markdown quite a bit. it is not necessary to have much for this except perhaps syntax highlighting. hiding the status line can likely be done with a few configuration directives.

2\. gitgutter. for the described use case: <ESC>:new<ENTER>:read !git diff use the search :/ to go from one diff to the next

3\. vim-surround

for a word: (<ESC>wa) for a line: (<ESC>$a)

depends on the situation, but i'd need more to be sold to use this plugin.

4\. vim-autoclose as described here it might possibly be nice except if you have to write a smiley, an arrow, or similar. if you never need to i can see this being useful, but the effect is quite minimal, as going to the end of the current line is a matter of <ESC>$ and inserting a closing parenthesis after it is a matter of a) .

5\. vim-commentary visual block mode is sufficient for this usually. java: (<ctrl>+v)<ESC>$g$0i//<ESC>

6\. the gruvbox color scheme looks pretty neat. however: the built-in desert scheme works well on almost every machine and is included by default, so there is no real need to go to this amount of trouble. if you work regularly under a shared root account via ssh, i think it is wise to stay away from custom color schemes.

7\. could be useful actually, i might try it. however find and grep and other external tools can be used from vim as well. the only gain by using this is that results appear as you type instead of after. marginal gains.

<ESC>:new<ENTER>:read !find -name 'bla' 8\. i think the preinstalled netrw plugin is just fine for exploring. it can be configured to run in a treemode too with some configuration. and the advatage is that it will be available on your average shared server account as well, so it pays much more dividend to learn netrw over nerdtree.

9\. sounds like a simple remapping. you could just use the default key <ctrl>+p . the nice thing is that this will be available on shared servers.

10\. importing is pretty easy already. here is how i do it. importing <ESC>1giim<ctrl-p> whatever dropping <ESC>/import\ what*<ENTER>dd

<comment> git-pull > 6... the built-in desert scheme works well on almost every machine ...

Agreed.

For a bit of an optimization to that:

\- [https://github.com/rainux/vim-desert- warm-256](https://github.com/rainux/vim-desert-warm-256)

Not many stars on it, but works on a few machines without needing to have extra stuff installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Here are all the ones I use. Out of this list, tkae a look at vim-sneak. It's very lightweight and quite cool.

      Plug 'mileszs/ack.vim',                        {'as': 'vim-ack'}
      Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline',                {'as': 'vim-airline'}
      Plug 'slashmili/alchemist.vim',                {'as': 'vim-alchemist'}
      Plug 'ap/vim-css-color',                       {'as': 'vim-css-color'}
      Plug 'hail2u/vim-css3-syntax',                 {'as': 'vim-css3-syntax'}
      Plug 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim',                     {'as': 'vim-ctrlp'}
      Plug 'ck3g/vim-change-hash-syntax',            {'as': 'vim-change-hash-syntax'}
      Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate',                   {'as': 'vim-delimitmate'}
      Plug 'junegunn/vim-easy-align',                {'as': 'vim-easy-align'}
      Plug 'elixir-editors/vim-elixir',              {'as': 'vim-elixir'}
      Plug 'airblade/vim-gitgutter',                 {'as': 'vim-gitgutter'}
      Plug 'fatih/vim-go',                           {'as': 'vim-go'}
      Plug 'junegunn/goyo.vim',                      {'as': 'vim-goyo'}
      Plug 'othree/html5.vim',                       {'as': 'vim-html5'}
      Plug 'pangloss/vim-javascript',                {'as': 'vim-javascript'}
      Plug 'othree/javascript-libraries-syntax.vim', {'as': 'vim-javascript-libraries'}
      Plug 'tpope/vim-markdown',                     {'as': 'vim-markdown'}
      Plug 'tmhedberg/matchit',                      {'as': 'vim-matchit'}
      Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter',               {'as': 'vim-nerd-commenter'}
      Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree',                    {'as': 'vim-nerdtree'}
      Plug 'chr4/nginx.vim',                         {'as': 'vim-nginx'}
      Plug 'prettier/vim-prettier',                  {'as': 'vim-prettier'}
      Plug 'tpope/vim-rails',                        {'as': 'vim-rails'}
      Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat',                       {'as': 'vim-repeat'}
      Plug 'cakebaker/scss-syntax.vim',              {'as': 'vim-scss'}
      Plug 'justinmk/vim-sneak',                     {'as': 'vim-sneak'}
      Plug 'tpope/vim-surround',                     {'as': 'vim-surround'}
      Plug 'gasparch/tagbar',                        {'as': 'vim-tagbar'}
      Plug 'SirVer/ultisnips',                       {'as': 'vim-ultisnips'}
      Plug 'mbbill/undotree',                        {'as': 'vim-undo-tree'}
      Plug 'maxbrunsfeld/vim-yankstack',             {'as': 'vim-yankstack'}

</comment><comment><USER43> I have a somewhat similar setup with the addition of BufferGator and YCM.

That said, what's described here is nowhere close to "vanilla" vim.</comment>


Poiticians Could Learn From Nordic Countries - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571136-politicians-both-right-and-left-could-learn-nordic-countries-next-supermodel

<comment><USER2> Didn't we read an article recently about how the nordic countries want to be more like western countries?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't, do you have a link?</comment></comment>


Why Every City Car Should Be Electric (and Self-Driving) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cruise/why-every-city-car-should-be-electric-and-self-driving-853084d9d50e <comment><USER2> Eh, i don't know.

I would like to get a car after using and abusing the public transport for the last seven years, but beside moving in the city I would like to occasionally drive further and farther, maybe for a weekend. Besides top electric cars (read: Teslas, still prohibitively expensive here) no electric car would allow that.

<comment><USER3> Electric cars have many negative externalities too, tires, brake dust and such don't magically disappear due to the change from Gas to Electric. Even my bicycle produces a surprising amount of brake dust!

None of this is healthy to breathe in or let get washed into our streams and rivers.</comment></comment>


5G Got me Fired - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dvorak/5g-got-me-fired-ce407e584c4a <comment><USER2> >This is a cautionary tale. Anyone writing for any publisher in today's commercial market, where the managed advertorial and native ad seems to be the only way to make money, needs to be cautious. More importantly today's readers need to be a little more than cautious when believing anything. Native advertising is a most insidious concept and should be rejected by every publisher. Instead it is welcomed by the broadcasting networks and most of the major newspapers including the New York Times. Are the writers saying nice things or are they paid to say nice things?

I think we quickly need changes in the way we handle native advertising. It is hugely problematic and basically predatory.

I believe that there are ways to genuinely advertise if the advertisement is openly disclosed and the ad is informative, but native advertising is essentially just a sophisticated and insidious form of manipulation. It turns readers into non-consenting consumers and the purpose of journalism from informing truthfully to a sales pitch. I have trouble imagining that many people think this is tolerable if we'd be debating it openly and brought it to the forefront of the news (which ironically is not going to happen).

<comment><USER3> "The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs-they are the "patrons" who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media compete for their patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit advertisers and necessarily having to explain how their programs serve advertisers' needs. The choices of these patrons greatly affect the welfare of the media, and the patrons become what William Evan calls "normative reference organizations," whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed." \- Noam Chomsky , Manufacture of Consent.

<comment><USER4> This makes me think that, besides the fact that Elon Musk seems to constantly has his foot in his mouth nowadays, this may be partly why Tesla has been getting so much negative press coverage (particularly headlines, which are usually written by editors, not the journalists who seem more objective to me). Tesla doesn't advertise. Everyone else in the industry does, bankrolling the press.

I know the press will deny this motive, but how can it not be a factor, even slightly?

<comment><USER5> Maybe Tesla receives negative press coverage for its poor workmanship, constant delays, near-unrepairability, bad labor conditions, union-busting, the CEO lying to investors, the CEO being unstable, precarious financial state, unfulfilled promises, reckless deadly computer-assisted driving sold as if it were self-driving, lack of independent competent management, a valuation highly dependent upon retaining a single executive, a valuation wildly overinflated by any objective measure, nonsensical acquisition of a failing home solar company run by a family member of the CEO, nonsensical and distracting forays into products unrelated to building and selling cars, it goes on...

This is not to mention the constant good press it receives.

<comment><USER6> It blows my mind how many Tesla apologists/fanboys are in this thread. Liking Elon Musk and thinking Tesla is heading for bankruptcy are not mutually exclusive. I think he's generally a force for good in the tech industry and greater world, but I've been pretty grim on TLSA for almost 3 years now. They are overvalued, under delivering, and Elon has seemed to be in the midst of a manic breakdown pretty much since his breakup with Amber Heard.

<comment><USER7> For what its worth, I'd probably lose my mind too if I was dating Amber Heard and we broke up. Godspeed, hope he recovers soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I missing something? He says PC Magazine fired him because he was critical of his 5G article and that rankled the magazine's sponsors. Who specifically are the sponsors he's thinking of? Is there _any_ evidence whatsoever that this is what happened?

So they linked his article about 5G to a different one. Why does that mean he was fired for writing the article? I feel like an application of Hanlon's Razor (not quite right, but I don't know of someone else's who fits the situation better) is called for. Is it more likely the editors thought his article sucked and used their editorial discretion to redirect his 5G article to a different one or that there was a conspiracy between his advertisers and the magazine's management to fire a guy who's been wrong on just about everything for the last 30 years because he hit the nail too close to the head?

I don't buy it.

<comment><USER9> Having run a newspaper, I can confirm that advertisers do contact management and say "I didn't like that article, do something about it or we won't be advertising with you again". And the financial pressure is intense. You have many, many staff to pay, and the commercial pressure to keep advertisers happy is real and difficult to manage.

I can totally believe that the magazine caved in to pressure from an advertiser to sack a journalist and pull a story. It happens every day. Luckily I never had to do it, but there were times I was very tempted.

I totally agree with his comment that the only way journalism is going to survive is if readers start paying for it. What we have now is mostly not- journalism.

<comment><USER10> > I can totally believe that the magazine caved in to pressure from an > advertiser to sack a journalist and pull a story.

As an example of where it has happened:

> Gerstmann revealed that his firing was in fact related to the low review > score he had given to Kane & Lynch, though his explanation cited other > similar events that led up to the termination, including a 7.5 (good) rating > given to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction by Aaron Thomas, then > an employee under Gerstmann. Events such as these led to him being "called > into a room" several times to discuss reviews posted on the site. Gerstmann > went on to lay the blame on a new management team that was unable to > properly handle tension between the marketing and editorial staff, laying > additional blame on the marketing department, which he claimed was > unprepared in how to handle publisher complaints and threats to withdraw > advertising money over low review scores.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann)

<comment><USER11> Lots more examples in my media literacy guide:

[https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media](https://github.com/nemild/hack-the- media)

Search for _Access:_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With respect to the actual post, the issue has come up, e.g. [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa8bpk/5g-wireles...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa8bpk/5g-wireless- rekindles-fight-over-cellular-health-risks) (And, yeah, Marin County.) Even if it represents a minority viewpoint, 5G health concerns aren't quite crackpot theory land.

That said, column seems more than a bit sensationalistic and one-sided --but not really all that different from many things that Dvorak has written over the years.

<comment><USER13> The same city that banned 5G for health reasons also leads the state in rejecting vaccines for children (anti-vaxxers).

[https://patch.com/california/millvalley/mill-valley- parents-...](https://patch.com/california/millvalley/mill-valley-parents- reject-vaccines-at-a-higher-rate-than-state-and-marin-county-averages)

<comment><USER14> This. People claiming that cell phone signals cause cancer or other ill health effects are crackpots, nothing more, nothing less.

The claims simply don't make sense. Non-ionizing EM radiation has absolutely no documented effects on humans.

<comment><USER15> You mean the people at the World Health Organization are crackpots? Microwave radiation is classified as a Class 2B carcinogen by WHO.

Here's 67 studies on the biological effects of microwaves, ranked by transmission power:

[https://i.imgur.com/14uxRru.png](https://i.imgur.com/14uxRru.png)

All of them crackpots?

Here's a study of EM fields on neonatal babies:

"Electrical Grounding Improves Vagal Tone in Preterm Infants"

[https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/475744](https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/475744)

There was also an article written on this publication:

[https://www.futurity.org/grounding-nicu- babies-1507412/](https://www.futurity.org/grounding-nicu-babies-1507412/)

I guess the babies were not informed of your crackpot theory?

Here's a website with a database of 26,819 publications on the effects of electromagnetic fields on biology, including human and animal studies:

[https://www.emf-portal.org/en](https://www.emf-portal.org/en)

More crackpots, I assume?

We have constantly accumulating evidence that EM radiation in fact IS harmful. The biggest reason the public is not aware of this, is simply because the wireless industry is making too much money from this technology.

The wireless industry employ some of the biggest lobbying groups in the world. With the amount of funds and leverage available to them, it becomes easier to influence legislation and decision makers.

That's all there is to it. No conspiracy, no crackpots. It's simply business

<comment><USER14> What a wonderful Gish Gallop. Thanks for letting me be another in your long line of intellectually dishonest copypasta responses. Keep on pushing conspiracy theories like the "deep state"!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Addendum — the original 5G column is still up in India! Click here.

Then the dreaded "403 Not allowed".

Archived here: [http://web.archive.org/web/20180913212959/https://in.pcmag.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180913212959/https://in.pcmag.com/opinion/124983/the- problem-with-5g)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for that!

Here's the critical bit...

<I'm not saying this because the technology does not work. It's a bad bet because so little is known about the effects of millimeter waves (30GHz-300GHz). While these frequencies only permeate a small fraction of the human epidermis (the skin), the effect on the cornea, in particular, needs serious research.

Because the industry is too cheap to study the health effects of the technology itself, it lets this sort of product out the door despite the fact that it has already been weaponized by the military

[http://web.archive.org/web/20180930061356/https://jnlwp.defe...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180930061356/https://jnlwp.defense.gov/About/Frequently- Asked-Questions/Active-Denial-System-FAQs/)

These frequencies are so poor at travelling long distances, they need a transmitter on nearly every telephone pole and light pole to make 5G work.>

<comment><USER18> Aren't the frequencies regulated by the FCC? Why should industry bear the burden of proving something safe that the government has already approved? It's not the world I like, but it's the one we're in.

Edit: just realized I missed where the quote ended. My question remains, though I suppose patent isn't really who I meant to ask.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's some sort of weird redirect loop going on if you do a Google search and try to go to that link:

[https://www.pcmag.com/article/345387/what- is-5gpcmag.com/com...](https://www.pcmag.com/article/345387/what- is-5gpcmag.com/commentary/363244/the-problem-with-5g)

CMS problems aren't exactly uncommon. But he was apparently fired and, absent a big backstory of which people are unaware, it's bizarre at the least to fire someone with such a long tenure without any explanation. Regardless of the sorry state of so many long-established tech pubs.

<comment><USER19> /!\ Working link

Thanks for this! The in.pcmag.com link to Indian PC Mag shows a very suspicious 403 error now (not even a 404). But yours works. It's fascinating, two pcmag.com links back to back somehow confuses the CMS's router and shows the old article. Nice one.

Since this'll probably be "fixed", I fed the URL to archive.is: [http://archive.is/KbsW8](http://archive.is/KbsW8)

[Also, for posterity, the view of the 403: [http://archive.is/ggMat](http://archive.is/ggMat) \- thanks to whoever added this]

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> He raises many good points about the potential downsides of 5G. US telecom corporations are rushing to beat China Telecom companies & South Korean companies to the punch. The US is definitely not going to have the same dominance in 5G that they had with 4G, especially if they take hazardous paths to a nationwide rollout

<comment><USER21> Does he raise good points? Reads like FUD to me. You could write basically the same article about wifi

<comment><USER22> I don't know what was the cause of him getting fired, but he certainly SHOULD be fired for such a sleazy sensationalist piece:

> When you do a search for "5G is Safe" on Google and Bing, you get a number > of negative stories and a laundry list of why some people believe it's > unsafe. Companies may as well begin to market a 5G mobile phone with a skull > and crossbones on it.

Really, the entirety of his journalistic research is a Google search that somehow justifies him to reproduce conspiracy theories as facts? Technology similar to 5G "has been already weaponized"? Good riddance.

<comment><USER23> I guess we read the article differently. Because he didn't seem to be saying 5G was dangerous, more that this was the public perception, and that vendors are doing little to manage the PR around this.

<comment><USER12> If that's the intent, it's poorly written.

It's fine to observe that search results pop up a lot of pieces and discussions about 5G health concerns. And those may lead to adoption problems whether they're true or not. But if you're writing a good column, even though it is an opinion piece, you should probably then point out things like: XYZ studies dispute these health effects and that these sort of concerns have been brought up with pretty much every new radio technology.

If you just say there's a bunch of scary information out there (without even pointing to anything specific), you leave the impression that there's likely some truth in all of it.

Dvorak at least was a pretty high profile tech columnist. But he's tended toward a clickbait style even before there were links to click on.

<comment><USER23> That maybe the case, but bad enough to get fired over? That's not clear to me.

The way modern writing works, I would expect he got paid very little for writing this. You're kind of asked to push out X many blog posts a day, there's not a huge amount of time for research... or even re-reading/thinking over the implications of your work.

<comment><USER12> Please let's not just surrender to "That's how modern writing works." I suppose it is at some publications, perhaps including pcmag.com. But there are plenty of thoughtful, researched articles and columns out there to read. That column has maybe a tweet's worth of content.

<comment><USER23> It's not how things work everywhere I'm sure. But it seems likely in this case. As such, the content doesn't surprise me, and I would put the blame solely on the author in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Dvorak is a troll. I could go show the reasons, but he's all about saying inflammatory things (mostly at apple fans) and getting them to buy magazines / click things. This is a continuation in that trend, but may or may not be true.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dvorak has been known to troll but when you write a typical Dvorak-tier skeptical piece on 5G then new management fires you and suddenly your 5G-skeptical piece has been replaced by a pro-5G piece, I don't see how you can reach any conclusion other than the same one he did in this post. Did you even read the post?

<comment><USER25> Especially since they presented demonstrably false pretenses in their notice to him as to why he was being let go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I did post about this in the other thread and folks piled on calling me a conspiracy theorist, but in the letter JCD received from his editor, they said they were shutting down all outside columns.

This is in fact not true -- other columns have continued since then and some other columnists have had the title listed in their author bios changed while continuing to have articles published.

<comment><USER12> In my personal experience though, ending these sorts of outside contracts with a half-truth in the vein of "the organization has decided to make a change" isn't remotely unusual. It's entirely possible that PC Mag decided to prune their outside contributors to a core group and perhaps change their relationship somewhat with the remaining ones.

Is it disingenuous, especially with someone who has been working for you in some form for a very long time? Sure. But I've seen a number of online pubs that go through changes with their outside contributors and communication is mostly pretty poor.

<comment><USER25> The still retain outside columnists. The PC Mag editor straight up lied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Updated link in the post is broken, here's an internet archive link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180911200355/https://in.pcmag....](https://web.archive.org/web/20180911200355/https://in.pcmag.com/opinion/124983/the- problem-with-5g)

</comment><comment><USER27> As far as I can tell, it's almost as if the vast majority of articles on the web are native ads. When the regular article writers have to compete against the native ads to get views on their content... they really don't have a choice.

Native ads are presented as stock market news, the NYT publishes it regularly, really what's the point... Figured I'd even start doing it on my blog (mostly a joke):

[https://austingwalters.com/mainstream-news-is- awful/](https://austingwalters.com/mainstream-news-is-awful/)

Fact is, it's the new world we live in. Just like I may pay for cable and I get ads; I can pay for the NYT and their content is nothing more than an ad.

</comment><comment><USER28> John C. Dvorak is a troll and the record holder of being wrong.

He is almost everything that's bad on "tech journalism" concentrated in one.

Specially regarding his brand of hate, Apple.

He mentioned that the "mouse" of the Macintosh was bad ("There is no evidence that people want to use these things."), he claimed that Apple was going to discontinue OS X and switch to Windows (according to his "sources"), he argued that Apple should cancel the iPhone even before the thing came out, etc. etc. etc. the thing only repeats after each Apple new product, and even claimed that the $1T company was dead because the iPhone 5 was going to flop (the iPhone 5 was Apple's biggest success until the date).

There is only one reason why companies hire him or fire him, he drives clicks and magazine purchases. He is the Alex Jones of tech.

Thing is that today, people can go to many other places to get their Apple hate validated, on top of that, he wrote a negative article about 5G, and the PC Magazine sponsors are waiting for that to sell more phones, so he had to go.

<comment><USER29> He may be a troll but that doesn't discount the point he's addressing that in the absence of subscription model, content will be driven by who pays for it (ie. other than the readers).

<comment><USER30> It's been _decades_ since subscription revenue drove the majority of magazine and newspaper revenue - probably about the time most of use were in diapers...

<comment><USER31> >It's been decades since subscription revenue drove the majority of magazine and newspaper revenue

Yeah no. If you're going to make claims like that you better source it. Source for the NY Times says the exact opposite: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/192911/revenue-of-the- ne...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/192911/revenue-of-the-new-york- times-company-by-source/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> One of my favorite computer articles of all time is also written by Mr Dvorak: [https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp](https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp)

<comment><USER12> It's mostly nonsense though. Itanium ended up being a bad bet for Intel and HP but both companies mostly just moved on with Xeon. Intel's worse bet was on x86 in mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This was my first encounter with the term "native advertising", and it's a perfect term for describing the bulk of YouTube content. A welcome addition to my vocabulary.

</comment><comment><USER34> It appears the Indian edition has also removed the article now.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is John C Dvorak style. I guess if they don't like it, they had to fire him. But, if this gets you fired, how can you write about anything.

I hope he gets hired quickly somewhere much nicer.

Really concerned about 5G now that I connected the dots. I don't mind 4G being branded as new 5G and being always connected.

<comment><USER36> There's already loads of millimeter wavelength gear deployed : P2P links between buildings; TSA machines at airports. So..although some caution is of course appropriate, it isn't like this stuff isn't already irradiating humans widely.

Disclosure : based on my understanding of EM radiation as an EE and person who deploys microwave gear around my own house, I'm fine with anything non- ionizing. I'd like to see the general public more educated on this subject. Obfuscation is not in anyone's interest.

<comment><USER37> > _I 'm fine with anything non-ionizing_

Marie Curie was also fine with working with Radium... until we found out that it wasn't good for you. The thing about stuff like cancers is that it's really difficult to say "this person's cancer was caused by X." The best we can do are wide spectrum studies about cancer rates, and try to use statistics to limit the variables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Atleast we now know that the "PC" in "PC Magazine" now stands for "Politically Correct".

Everything now needs to be neutered down without offending anyone, especially any groups with deep pockets.

</comment><comment><USER39> I _really_ wish posts to Medium would indicate if its a story that hits agains the Preview Member stories.</comment>


Hydroxychloroquine with Azithromycin increase risk of cardiovascular mortality - <AUTHOR> https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.08.20054551v1 <comment><USER2> A 20% increased risk of heart attacks for 5 days of treatment for covid really isn't a big deal compared to being sick with covid, unless the patient already has heart issues.

For covid patients with heart conditions, doxycycline may be a decent alternative to azithromycin.

</comment><comment><USER3> Millions of Americans have taken these antimalarial drugs at the direction of the US government for at least 80 years. If you served in Vietnam, you know what I'm talking about. If you were in the Peace Corps in sub-saharan Africa, you know what I'm talking about. And on and on, ad nauseam.

But suddenly this relatively innocuous drug has grave and ominous overtones? Something is clearly out of order. Why weren't people warned about this long ago? Is the federal government now responsible for the coronary ailments of unknown numbers of citizens?

There is little, if any, evidence that the combination with Azithromycin is being highlighted as the culprit. So what is going on here?

Me thinks the current mixture of politics and medicine make everybody sick.</comment>