- "it does not consist of a simple copy/paste or paraphrase of the NASA source," It is exactly that and it copies it (and the other sources) extensively. It on

- "it does not consist of a simple copy/paste or paraphrase of the NASA source," It is exactly that and it copies it (and the other sources) extensively. It only makes very superficial word changes—enough to throw off exact string matches; not nearly enough to create a passable pretense of "I wrote this". - "The NASA study is properly cited as one of the references at the bottom of the article." It's not properly cited because the text they're lifting isn't in quote marks or a quotation block or anything like that–isn't in any syntactic way attributed to the person who wrote it. There's nothing saying "I didn't write this part; I'm quoting this from someone else's work". (It's not sufficient disclosure to just include a link to the lifted text in "references". Most people won't look at the cited references, let alone read all of them in their entirety—as would be required to figure out what text's being lifted from where. It's the author's burden to disclose all that). I respectfully disagree with your disagreement. This is straight plagiarism: it's in my view a pretty typical and low-effort example of it. - "and the format is HTML rather than PDF, which greatly reduces already substantial frictions for HN members" The problem isn't that they're re-publishing parts of someone else's text, but that they're pretending that they wrote it.