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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

"39. Remove Microsoft Bing from Notepad++ for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability."

That's in response to the tankman problem btw. They now redirect people who have used Bing so far to DuckDuckGo. I am not sure what I should think of this. On one hand, it is understandable, on the other hand it shows disregard for the choice of their users. I would have understood if they had simply removed it from the default list and let current users continue using it but forcefully redirecting existing users seems encroaching.

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>That's in response to the tankman problem btw. They now redirect people who have used Bing so far to DuckDuckGo.

If Bing's handling of "tank man" was truly the reason, why would DDG be an alternative since they also had "no results here". See screenshot: https://imgur.com/GbyQCiy

I'm not familiar with the internals of how DDG works. People say that DDG sources its search results from Bing but others say DDG actually pulls from additional sources. If that's true, why wasn't DDG able to retrieve images from those other sources for "tank man"?

It is probably the reason. It was Bing’s decision to filter the searches, DDG was just the effect of this. The author of notepad++ has a history of activism against CCP.

Good. We have got to band together against authoritarianism.

He's against a lot of things - not just authoritarianism.

Are you confident you'll remain on the "good side" of his politics forever?

I don't need to. He can mean whatever he wants. I am a user of a technology he has created. I don't care about the wild ride of politisation of everything in the States and "identity poltics"... See how far that has gotten you.

Why would they need to? They could just change their opinion.

DDG pulls search results in general from a number of sources. It pulls image search results solely from Bing. That's clearly problematic, but they could add more backend providers of image results.

I can't say I've ever used search in Notpad++ so I don't care either way - but if they're going to remove bing, it seems hypocritical to not also remove DDG, since they pretty much just proxy search results over to bing? They are probably one of bings bigger customers for API usage (I'm just guessing here, I might be completely wrong).

There's also a decent argument to remove Google too, if you're going to start removing search engines based on moral grounds.

Notepad++ author is using his software to push his political agenda. Although I dislike it, that's his right. If you dislike it too, there are less politicized alternatives, like PSPad.

Just look at his blog https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/ lots of anti-mainland China comments as well as references to "Gilets Jaunes" (a protest movement in France), reaction to Islamic terrorism,... At some point he told that people who voted Front National (French far-right party) couldn't use the software.

EDIT: Just noticed that PSPad is not open source. Well, you can always use VSCode, or one of the scintilla based editors.

There was one update a couple years ago that after the first time it ran, it opened a new document tab, and started typing a political message (I think it was about Snowden leaks/privacy).

Watching a document open and someone seemingly remotely type in the window made me very very uncomfortable. I agree it is his right, and I even agreed with the message, but it completely discredits the tool and the developer.

I have no idea what the developer's politics will be tomorrow, whether he'll see me, or Americans, or guys like me, or whatever "category", as an opponent, and maybe he'll get emotional and somehow nerf the software to punish his perceived political opponents. It's juvenile and destroys trust. It's indicative of someone who simply cannot create boundaries in his life, and worries me that he won't respect other boundaries.

Politics are transient. Tools should be forever.

> Watching a document open and someone seemingly remotely type in the window made me very very uncomfortable.

I remember this and had the same uncomfortable reaction, but because I was uncomfortable I thought it was a great way to alert people to the type of spying Snowden made public.

What you bring up is an old question for companies, should you sell typewriters to Hitler? Or should you be political? Most American companies have leaned towards selling the typewriters without the gov preventing them from doing so.

Was it effective if you think it was something related to Snowden? The phrase that it typed out was "Je suis Charlie". That was about a mass shooting at the HQ of a satire publication.

I’m not really sure how I feel and I’m very curious what the reaction of others on HN will be.

For those that supported Basecamp and Coinbases’s “no politics” policy, would you also support “no politics” in open source software?

I guess it’s different since this is a single developer doing it for free, so they can do whatever they want. If someone objects, they can branch it.

An electron app, Visual Studio Code, is displacing notepad++. I was an avid notepad++ user for years but now I just use VS Code because it's easier/faster and more familiar since I use it for most other development.

Cross platform ability just clinches it.

If you look at their previous release names it is really not surprising https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/

Notepad++ is also pretty much the reason that GitHub added tools to deal with massive scale abuse iirc as the repo was spammed with issues and prs for days after the first "Free Uyghur" release

https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/31/notepad_china_spam/

I wonder if this was being planned for June 4th?

Didn't DDG have the same issue?

DDG uses Bing results.

Right, so shouldn't they have instead redirected to a provider which didn't have the issue, rather than another provider having the same issue?

That depends on your objection. If your object to the fact that no tank man results were shown, then yeah, maybe that's a fair argument. But if you object to the decision to remove tank man results, then it makes no sense to penalise Duck Duck Go for that. In fact, if you trust Duck Duck Go's authors more than Bing's, you might want to actively direct traffic to them in the hope that they can obtain enough users to become independent.

Even those who take ideological stands can object to purity. The FSF publishes the LGPL alongside the GPL and even has an exception to the GPL for GCC, to make it usable also by those who aren't fans of their position

They should remove google too for blatantly manipulating their search results in a similar manner.

To censor Bing for an infraction is not a consistent free speech position. It has clearly become a political, and extreme (becoming user-hostile), position.

[Edited to note: the parent's claim is confirmed by the link on the page]

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