Comment by victorhooi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by victorhooi | Hacker News Reader

I know it's popular here to bash on non-technology people.

And yes, apparently Fox News is terrible (I wouldn't know, I'm Australian).

But seriously, there are people outside our circle, for whom computers are not their every waking moment.

Heck, I know people for whom using a featurephone is the most advanced "computer" they touch (and to them it's a phone, not a feature-phone).

So look, I think we should cut them some slack - the reposotory typo was just embarassing and unforgiveable, and whoever let that go to air should be reprimanded - but the rest of it's, while not great writing, isn't terrible.

However, instead of lambasting it, people be constructive and positive share how they might explain it to a non-technical person?

I'll start:

* Repository - the source code that we turn into a program

* Forked - where we clone a "repository", and then make amendments to the copy

* Pull Request - where we try to merge our amended "repository" and the original "repository" to produce a better program

If you are a technology/business reporter reporting on technology from within the silicon valley, you are obligated to be knowledgeable about those things which you report on and the same is expected of a medical correspondent or political correspondent on an editorial staff, for their areas of coverage.

On that note would a business reporter about bioengineering firms's stock movements be obligated to know about the specific terminology of bioengineering? Fox got it wrong to be sure however reporting on financials doesn't make it necessary to be an expert in the technical aspects. There are plenty of software engineers building business software that don't know the first thing about calls and puts, options and derivatives trading strategies despite the fact that they build software that drives those systems.

I won't cut Fox any slack, however lets ask ourselves -- did MSNBC or CNN ever cover this story at all? The gist of the Fox story was to talk about the value of the company, not the details of what a 'fork' is. Besides, how many VCs have we been in front of that don't have any clue about the tech in which they are prepared to invest millions of dollars?

Even worse is how many engineers at startups have no clue about the business aspects of investing, valuations, dilution, option pools and such. Many engineers who think of themselves as 'startup people' have no idea what convertible notes are nor even how to read a deal memo. And forget about talking about valuations -- nobody know about that, yet many people claim they're valued at $1 million or whatever without any clue about where those numbers come from. I'm generalizing of course, but the exceptions really prove the rule.

There's something in the Bible I think about casting the first stone.. It might apply here. Pointing out the inaccuracy is certainly relevant, but using that as a rationalization of pre-conceived notions about Fox isn't really fair. I remember when I was in the Army in 2003 and CNN reporters embedded with our unit had no idea about the chemical weapons about which they were supposedly reporting. How many times have I heard "machine gun" used when describing an M4 rifle.. Another example is when news outlets say 'CIA Agent' when they actually mean CIA Officer. An agent is a foreign asset, no actual CIA employee is ever an 'agent.' Yet the media gets it wrong almost constantly. Snowden, for example wasn't an 'NSA employee' as was reported by many outlets, but a Booz Hamilton employee. The reporting on Syria has been questionable as well -- not just from a bias standpoint, but from a pure ignorance of the political forces within Syria that are driving their civil war. So excuse me if I hardly give a shit about Fox getting the definition of "fork" wrong. I'm pretty sure a large number of us would get the definition wrong of the financial terms "Special Purpose Vehicle" or "Trust Preferred Security" if we suddenly switched places with a Fox Business reporter.

So sure Fox got some irrelevant details wrong, but every news outlet does that every day. Those details didn't affect the intent of the story or the material facts, so who cares? We could start an entire board on simply media misteps and it would be filled with content on a daily basis.

The issue here isn't with tech vs. non-tech people, I think the issue is that Fox News (and they're not alone as others have mentioned) clearly didn't take the time to ask someone who DID know what they were talking about to review their content.

When you have clueless reporters telling clueless viewers the news, that hurts everyone and spreads ignorance and bias, no matter the topic.

The last person who touches the copy is someone non-technical. Their job is to make the content accessible to "slow joe in the back row", the least common denominator, etc.

Inaccuracies occur all the time when the last person to touch the text is a general-purpose reporter, not someone with domain expertise. It happens in reporting of economics, medicine, sports, etc.. I don't think they did all that bad considering the circumstances.

"Repository" isn't a technical word. It's a basic spelling mistake and the proof-reader should, at the very least, pick that up.

I think they meant suppository.

Also the velocity with which those stories are produced is very high. This isn't exactly "breaking" news, however they also don't have days to prepare the stories. If this was an in depth story for a long-form show, the standards would necessarily be much different.. although the news often gets those wrong as well.

It is not about bashing non-technology people. It is about bashing the news, who are disseminating bad information. If they got this wrong, what other things have they gotten wrong? And why do they need to explain what github is?

They were doing a story on Github as part of a series of tech startups. They thought explaining what fork and pull request were was relevant to the story. It was not.

Enote me the source codes for the github.

Clearly nobody even proofread it. Look again, there is spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, and the formatting is inconsistent. Nobody cared when they put it together. Nobody from a non-tech background needs to know what forking is, unless you had an interest in software development.

There are spelling mistakes...

Sorry, couldn't resist =).

See, everybody can make mistakes.

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