It’s a magazine. Many magazines have a readers’ letter section, an opinion column, a short story, … and in case of science magazines, the short stories are traditionally science fiction.
You say that as if the people running KF didn’t know what the site was for. And a publicly known reason for that website’s existence is because bullies need a place to coordinate harassment.
Having the power to shut that place and therefore behavior down but choosing not to means they were complicit. Deplatforming works, the influx of new bullies shrinks when you make their place less public.
funny that you mention rST. i also talked about it here, and i said that its only syntactical flaw is inline link syntax, and how that’s only a problem if you don’t write a lengthy document with it, because in that case, you don’t want to inline your links anyway.
markdown is perfect for forum comments, but idiotic to extend too far. if you’re a programmer wanting to write a book in markdown, you’ll find yourself thinking of markdown syntax extensions more than thinking about the book.
if you want extensibility and still a rather lightweight syntax, try restructuredtext. it has exactly one flaw compared to markdown, which is the hideous inline link syntax (which practically forces you to use named links). that makes it less suited for forum comments (where you might want to quickly inline 1-2 links), but perfect for books (where you can neatly specify your link targets below the current section)
LuaLaTeX is a reimplementation of PDFLaTeX on that base.
ConTeXt is a new syntax/concept based on LuaLaTeX (that doesn’t want to be compatible with LaTeX and its errors)
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That shell is unfortunately MS PowerShell. There are several approaches to do it in a way more familiar and compatible with unix shells. (some of which have been started recently, such as Final Term, and some are vaporware, such as TermKit)
And most editors are like that, some of which even have an optional vim mode for fans of that control scheme (my favourite is Kate)
If you know you’re replacing many parts of your page with data you have to load, use a framework like angular, backbone, ember, …
If you visualize data, use d3.
If you need to animate some UI elements but don’t need much else, use jQuery.
Else use plain JS, maybe with some shortcuts like
function $(sel) { return document.querySelector(sel) }. maybe with underscore.js if your love funtional programming.
In any case, strive to write idiomatic code. d3, jQuery, and many else e.g. have their own variant of $, select, querySelector, … – decide on one framework and use its way to write code.