popmystack

And before you say those scandals are a result of partisan witch-hunting, Obama never had these scandals that Hillary did.

Um, are you just blanking 2004 out of your head? This is just the same stuff all over again. All of the screaming and shouting about birth certificates and generally shady connections? His ultimate Muslim agenda to bring down the Great Satan that is America?

Absolutely nothing of worth is coming from the leaked documents, despite all hell being raised about a smoking gun (that no one can point to) in them. It literally is a witch hunt. If these past 4 elections aren't going to kill the GOP in general, I don't know if anything will. It should be disgusting the out right lies and propaganda that they employ, with a complete lack of integrity and standards. But people still buy into the juicy conspiracy theories and the generally "known and accepted" unknowns.

If HRC is the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics, then then last 4 decades of investigations and general obstructionism were undertaken by the most incompetent politicians in the history of politics. Not just one, a whole collection of individuals (senators, house members, governors) from one party who despite their best efforts continually fails at proving claims they have no problem repeating until people start to believe them.

And Huff constantly publishes stories telling gender doesn't exist.

They definitely don't do this. It seems like you have a significant misunderstanding of the literature being discussed.

Look mate I'm not interested in arguing who is more wrong.

No, it's about who is wrong _more often_ and who reports fake stories _more often_. When the standard for one set of sources is consistently absurdly low then you can't just pretend all sources are equal. Again, it's a false equivalency.

I'm sorry, what?

Huff is full of titles Trump is sexual predator without facts, just talks.

We have, on record, him describing sexual assault. With his own words. On the other hand, some of the people who now are claiming Bill is a rapist once testified under oath that he did _not_ rape them. On top of the fact that there is zero evidence in favor of that statement.

That's the difference. And you would definitely know this if you weren't being disingenuous.

That's a really cheap false equivalency. You've basically side nothing while ignorning the practical reality of what we're discussing. Take for example, the fact that Fox News will continually post stories about how Global Warming is a hoax, which is something the Huffington Post definitely won't do. The Huffington Post tends to write click-baity headlines, but they've never out right used lies in their articles. That's not bias, it's an observable trend.

Tell me, which is "propaganda."

I'm not sure what you want me to clarify? At no point did I indicate that it's okay to downvote people you disagree with. They should constructively contribute to the conversation, and in cases where they are not, the downvote button should be used.

You shouldn't downvote based on disagreement, on top of the fact that that seems like an incredibly disingenuous sentiment, what is your point?

primarily the low quality of Google's SDK for Android.

This has always been my biggest frustration with Android. I've written a few applications for the platform, and while their architecture leaves a lot to be desired I've never had any real problems with it. However, the immense disappoint and anger that comes from their SDK idiosyncrasies is astounding. Google really just hates stability and nice API's, in my opinion. Everything from GAE to Android, it's always just so terribly frustrating to keep track of any one-off decisions they make without any form of actual communication from the development team.

I've been writing Android code since the G1 days.

Yeah, all because people wanted to scream "bias." Sadly the community here seemed apt to agree with it, but I definitely have my opinions on that. Quoted from a previous thread:

Did the standard for their sources remain relatively constant regardless of the material being discussed? There isn't a clear answer here, but that doesn't make it defacto censorship of one set of particular political opinions. The sources that were discussed aren't credible in any meaningful form. The fact that they happen to be largely conservative seems like a problem conservatives should address instead of calling it censorship.

But ironically, for posting that, I was meant with censorship.

People in aggregate are terrible at curation. You really do need editors for a reason. But Facebook should have been extremely blunt about the situation before. The fact that its curators let through more "liberal" sources than conservative ones, doesn't necessarily mean they're biased. It really could just be that conservative sources are far more likely to not be at a high enough standard to be posted -- which seems to be the case given the examples in the article.

I'm surprised at how many people are responding negatively to software that improves user experience.

At the cost of doing things technically correct.

They are not doing the same thing. It's two completely different operations.

Consideration of these aspects may help you better convey your technical points.

And yet despite him blatantly confronting me in an aggressive personal manner, you've ignored his original post and decided to focus on my post, all in spite of my attempts to keep the conversation on topic. Most likely because you agree with him. It really removes any credence from his post and other posts echoing him about my original post being "prickly" when you're a complete dick to someone directly. Talk about arrogance.

I can't call a technical concept brain damaged, but aggressively labeling people in a confrontational manner is a-okay. Got it.

and yet I frequently am baffled by the commands required to get from where I am to where I want to be.

Have an example? Most of the examples I've seen come from a fundamental misunderstanding about what git is doing. Git is rarely in the wrong.

There's a lot of internal plumbing commands that are completely backwards (or just have not been updated to align with the rest of the toolset) but an extremely small majority of people will ever even know about them, let alone have to use them. Especially if you're just starting out with git.

think attempts to better align git's command line interface with the underlying operations are commendable

Except as presented in the examples I've given, it's doing the exact opposite of this. It's going against the very basic foundation of git. Git is an acyclic graph with each node representing a change delta from its "parent." The very fact that branches suddenly keep track of which specific changesets (tracked or not!) belong to them is completely counter to how the very core of git works.

That's non-sense.

You consider his first post to be productive? You must be dreaming.

ajkjk strikes me as someone making reasonable points

He is not making any point, so it's weird that you would say that. He hypocritically stated I was coming off as arrogant. Fair game, even though I really don't see how it remotely comes off that way, but you can't exempt yourself from your own criticism in a post that does not constructively further the conversation in any way.

You are coming across as unnecessarily arrogant and prickly, and thus someone with whom it's best to avoid discussion.

Apparently so, but I don't see it. I gave my opinion, and that was it.

you might reconsider ajkjk's criticism

I most definitely will not, as this is a technical discussion. I'm not going to muddle the waters. Nothing I said was needlessly "arrogant" (at what point was puffing myself up?) -- and if it was prickly then I'd question why it was chosen to focus on that aspect of it instead of directly countering what was stated.

When discussing technical matters: leave your ego at the door. At every turn I gave him a chance to actually discuss something and he refused to do so. The fact that you decided to continue this non-sense is mind-boggling to me. What's the point?

Someone makes a project trying to make something easier to learn (so, trying to make the world a better place)

Again, spare me the hyperbolic the "trying to make the world a better place." The principle behind my post, as given in my very first statement is that they basically failed. They are gearing people towards failure. It would have been better to just create a thin layer on top of git with slightly renamed or alias commands -- all while having "release valves" that guide you into the true, underlying community crafted toolset underneath that git has been using for years (and for very good reason). Any errors you're likely to come across while using git have been documented either by the team or in various posts around the internet. It's easy to search for these errors. If your target audience are developers who have a hard time with Git, why would you make it needlessly hard to research errors that are likely to happen (given how new this tooling is). For example: labeling rebasing as "fusing" is basically telling them: "haha, good luck googling what just went wrong!". Good luck hopping on an IRC or Slack channel and getting someone to help you. A decade of community problem solving and documentation just went out the window because the Gitless team decided to play musical semantics with commands.

why would you take such a hostile tone towards anyone's work, ever?

Leave your ego at the door. We're talking about a toolset.

Besides your arrogant "I'm right, you're stupid and wrong, and there's no questioning me" attitude

Please do not respond to any of my posts in this thread anymore, especially if that is the basis of this comment chain. That is a ridiculous sentiment and I'm not going to devote any effort into addressing it.

I'm hugely sympathetic to the opinion that Git is needlessly difficult to learn and needless easy to make mistakes

I would strongly disagree about the "needlessly difficult" part, but I would also claim that the "easy to make mistakes" is demonstrably false with Git. Git makes it extremely difficult again to do something you should not be doing in the first place and then the community over the years has placed plenty of warnings when you do those questionable actions anyways; on top of giving you the ability to revert the mistake and bring your repository to a sane place with one simple command. Checking out branches with conflicting changes is just one of the simpler safety checks and roadblock that Git provides where Gitless decided to just go "Nah, you can actually do that." with seemingly no apology as to why you would ever want to allow such a thing -- other than just for the sake of convenience, but I would label it as laziness as it makes it incredibly easy to pollute your repository at that point. It doesn't even provide any kind of warning mechanism or cleanup tool for this handy "feature."

So instead I'm trying to convey that your arrogance is unacceptable in the community in the hopes that it will not reappear.

The only thing worse than calling me arrogant is your complete, unconstructive obliviousness towards your own attitude. Not only have you still failed to say anything worthwhile or present any kind of counter to my opinion, but you're being a complete dick about it and trying to label me in a negative light for no reason. Which ends up really at the end of the day making you a troll at worst and a hypocrite at best.

Uh, what? You respond to my post with some of the problems with this system in a hyperbolic, confronting manner without contributing anything. They are not "making the world a better place."

Please don't post such non-sense here.

This seems extremely pointless. At worst, this seems like the Gitless team doesn't understand what Git is doing internally, which is a pretty dangerous state to be in when you're trying to "improve" something.

Git as a whole:

* Makes it really hard for you to do something you really shouldn't be doing

* Forces you to stay "clean" and guides you to working well with other repository copies (i.e. the whole point of Git).

* Warns you and makes suggestions when you make a mistake, from silly typos to incorrect command flags.

* Makes it easy to guess how the command should be formatted or how certain structures are formatted based on convention.

They decided to rename certain features that not only give you the wrong idea of what's actually going on, but will no doubt make it extremely hard to research any errors if something goes wrong. A good example of thing is gitless' "fusing" feature. It's just rebasing stuff. Why rename it? Why rename "checkout" with "switch", when this semantic is used throughout git?

And then you have completely brain-damaged concepts such as this:

(i.e., a file can be untracked on some branch but tracked on another and Gitless will remember this):

Honestly? There was no better way to indicate to me that you're just trying to make git fit some erroneous concepts in your head, and that you don't really understand what you're doing. This combined with the "auto-save" feature seems like a terribly, terribly bad idea and is just begging for a lazy developer who didn't take the time to understand his tools to completely shit on the repository he's working on, locally or remotely.

Take the time to understand your tools. Git is incredibly simple underneath. It's not complicated.

Because it's no longer filled with hackers.

Observing that there has been a steady trend of right-leaning opinions being blasted across every thread is not a "conspiracy-theory" (it's extremely ironic that you chose to label it in such a way, in a thread with some heavy conspiratorial overtones about the FDA) when mediums such as hackernews often have a tendency to drift that way as they become more popular. If there is even a hint of a progressive idea in any statement you make on here these days, it gets immediately down voted.

There was no reason to downvote me, so you can concentrate on the source of the problem instead of throwing a silly rule at me. But it's far easier to just pinpoint a silly edit I made, isn't it? Let's completely ignore the fact that we are on a thread about the government controlling the media and that it was somehow sufficiently voted up to receive significant attention and that my initial statement somehow warranted downvotes.

It's not ridiculous. In fact sometimes it's not even thorough enough.

If you can't understand the problems with vetting a device to be used by quite a few people, then you're just being foolish.

They're not refusing to approve competing products. The products refuse to go through the process of being vetted by the FDA.

Get your story straight.

No one is controlling the press. I am not sure where you are hearing that, but it's genuinely concerning that you seem to be concerned about things that aren't happening.

The government is not blocking any information. It is managing contacts. It wants trust worthy contacts who aren't going to spin things around for financial gain.

The actual information related to their policies are accessible again, by people who actually understand the material. Thousands and thousands of scientists from competing organizations observe and consume information from the FDA. There is nothing stopping journalists from seeking out this information and gathering opinions from the employees of these organizations, or professionals in whatever field they're reporting on in general.

"Do the right thing." How shallow and means absolutely nothing in the context of this conversation. Please say something a bit more substantial than that. The FDA wants to interact with reporters who don't spin information or misquote members of the FDA for their own gain. That's literally it. What's this "do the right thing" battle cry in reference to again?

It's extremely aggravating that this needs to spelled out on this forum these days.

PS: Nothing about what the FDA doing is remotely authoritarian. Stop promoting click bait, and furthermore at the very least don't try pathetically defending it.

The FDA is not stopping journalists from being "independent, skeptical." It is stopping journalists who attend their press releases from misquoting their statements -- which in case you missed out on a little bit of history has definitely happened with the FDA in the past.

The FDA is not stopping the press, they are preventing them from misreporting their statements and processes. Spare me the over-zealous "independent" label. The press isn't some magical segment of society with high standards and accountability.

And these general sentiments are definitely "alt-right." It has a generally conspiratorial tone with completely overzealous fear mongering about what the FDA is doing.

a close-hold embargo doesn't really prevent them from doing so;

It makes it pretty difficult to have any kind of information to spin. Whether or not it's 100% preventative measure is as you say, orthogonal to helping prevent the issue in the first place. If they have nothing to quote of context, or twist their words, any material they make will be generally lackluster to their audiences.

What you end up with is essentially a series of glorified press releases.

The FDA does not have a PR branch. It is smartly using the press to get information out to the public.

But even so, valid is not the same as right, and for issues as contentious as the ones the FDA often ends up having to deal with, there is rarely any single right viewpoint.

Allow me to be extremely blunt here: who cares? Again these view points are largely handled through the actual scientific process. The general public with no knowledge on the subject being discussed isn't going to properly shift through competing view points, and it is exceedingly unlikely these other view points are correct by the time the FDA wants to give a press release about certain processes or products.

Again, this information about these other view points isn't private. The FDA just doesn't want the press to misinform the public. What is so controversial about this?

Thus citing a range of sources, rather than providing the public with any organization's viewpoint alone, is the only responsible thing to do.

There is nothing stopping organizations from researching these issues on their own and reporting them. The FDA just doesn't want the press to spin their statements into something that could harm the public in any form. If you go to a press event, you are expected to report accurately on FDA's statements and processes, or else you're not going to be invited back.

I would like an explanation what the big deal is about actions the FDA are specifically taking in direct regards to the close-hold embargo without resorting to absurd claims that the FDA is somehow ruining journalistic integrity. Report the statements accurately and when the FDA is ready for the public to view them. Journalistic integrity is not being ruined. Journalists can still investigate the products on their own, and report other organization's findings.

that omitting this context is an improvement?

The real question is how is that paragraph adding anything of value to the new rules and regulations by the FDA? People tend to get lost in the minuet talking points and stick to pedantic details with stories like these. Again, the FDA wants to have direct statements on these matters so there isn't any confusion about what they're doing or what they're going to try do.

Actually, the FDA is PROMOTING yellow journalism because they refuse to allow reporters to interview independent sources prior to the embargo being lifted.

That is the most backwards statement you possible could have made. I am not even sure if you really believe it yourself.

however the government has no right to discriminate against media outlets.

Yes they do.

my point is that there ought not be exclusionary access lists in the first place.

And you've done nothing to negate my point that not only that they should and it makes sense to do so, but why you think letting news organizations run wild with public health information is a responsible thing to do. It's foolish, naive, and ignorant.

No where did I say the FDA "is never wrong and that its activities need no public oversight." No part of my statement could even be misconstrued that way. But thanks for being disingenuous!

The FDA gets _true_ oversight from the thousands and thousands of scientist who work within the organization, who work outside the organization, and other organizations who have vested interests in "trashing" certain findings and approvals by the FDA. It sounds like you don't know how the FDA is generally set up so it would do you well to look into it. It's not exactly private.

The FDA again, doesn't want to play the game of yellow journalism. Why is this confusing? The following makes absolutely no sense, by the way. From your own post: "they would not pre-announce their activities at all." Please do elaborate how this somehow negates their motivations for not wanting the press to get out of hand and send false signals to the public. You can't just provide one little quip and expect that to unravel all their motivations. Again, I'm really struggling to see how this is confusing to anyone who has worked with anything remotely public, or even at a big corporation!

And no, I am not sure how a direct quote about Fox News and a sentence that follows the direct quote somehow gets misconstrued as me talking about "Scientific American." _However_, Scientific American has been known (especially over the last couple of years), to engage in generally click baity, irrefutably unscientific publications. Just like it is doing here.

That could be seen as false equivocation of positions. The FDA is an organization that needs to broadcast signals to nearly every level of society about certain products. All the way from corporate RnD divisions to consumers.

Not being concise, diligent, and stringent on what messages get sent out could have extremely negative effects. Letting news organizations pander to people's fears or general ignorance is a recipe for disaster.

I am not even sure why this needs to be explained. I mean, actually at this point on HN I do know why, it's people being disingenuous. Seriously how is this non-sense being upvoted?

From the article: >including ones from major outlets such as Fox News

Seriously, are we going to just sit here and pretend why this was done? An organization hell bent on bashing largely agreed upon scientific information is being denied the ability to spin information from an organization dedicated to the scientific understanding and safety of products. The FDA is basically refusing to play the game of yellow journalism and rightly so.

Spare me the patronizing pathetic attempts at an apology, and excuse me for calling out bullshit from scientific american. Shame on them. And shame on HN for upvoting this.

You brought up those points, but there is no supporting evidence for them. There is plenty of accounts from people who went through this process with the exact opposite opinion you are stating.

No where in my post was there indication or any reason to make the claim that I don't understand what you're saying. I get what you're saying, it's just unsupported and presumptuous -- which is exactly what I said in my first post.

Even if we knew that in every single case that your life was completely ruined after the fact for various reasons (which is factually not the case), it's still morally reprehensible that you consider the outcomes marginally different to the point where whether or not we allowed you to live is insignificant.

I don't consider this argument weak at all. There is no reason for it to be weak; in fact the only way it can be weak is if you make certain assumptions (that we know aren't true) along with some other not-so-popular philosophical value judgements. Hence, not only is the position rather disgusting at a certain level, but making a claim that the argument in discussion is weak is actually rather weakly supported in and of itself.

Again, it is you who does not really understand the position you are taking. I'm not sure how much more you want me to spell it out.

I do see the difference, but I'm not convinced it's anything but marginal.

That is incredibly myopic and presumptuous. You're effectively arguing that we're going to destroy your life so it'll be better if we just end it. If the person's life ends up being so terrible after the fact they still have the option of just ending it. There is no benefit to making such a callous decision for them. Calling the argument weak when your own is short-sighted and at the very worst disingenuous is kind of disgusting to me, personally.

I am not even sure you understand your own position completely.

The U.S. wasn't as smart as it should have been. Let's put it that way.