When I had a corporate job, I wrote a proposal and a new manager essentially took credit for it and botched the implementation so badly I didn't want my name associated with it.
Life frequently looks like Pinky and the Brain where who really did what is unclear.
> The Times spoke with 20 people who worked at the Frito-Lay divisions responsible for new product development 32 years ago, when Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were first extruded into existence. None recalls anything like the episode Montañez describes taking place.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35464229
I could have sworn there was a submission with comments. I can't find it.
Maybe I'm misremembering that.
¯_ (ツ)_/¯
Edit: There's also a phenomenon known as lying. I've seen underprivileged people hurt by more "reliable, upstanding" sorts taking advantage of the other's lack of credibility.
Last, group think is a thing. Everyone agrees X is the truth, they all swear that's the truth.
Is your argument that Montañez's memory is accurate but that of everyone who was interviewed (20 people?) are not?
My position -- stated elsewhere -- is we can't really know for sure and it's not worth my time to try to figure it out.
Multiple people have some issue with me feeling that way and feel compelled to tell me I'm wrong, it's knowable, here are the facts -- though they weren't there personally.
Why so many people feel compelled to argue this with me is beyond me.
But I feel entitled to not care and not agree with people insisting they know for absolute certain what happened decades ago to someone else based on reading stuff and they are right for caring and feeling absolutely certain and I'm wrong for not.
* the reporter invented 20 interviews
* 20 people all completely forgot what would have been a memorable event
* 20 anonymous sources conspired to lie for no apparent gain
...vs. "the guy making money off of this story is lying"?
If the standard is "all things are completely unknowable unless you can eliminate every alternative, no matter how ludicrously unlikely" then we may as well not attempt to ever ascertain facts about anything.
I have a deadly genetic disorder. I have spent more than twenty years getting better while the world spits in my face, calls me a liar, tells me I'm making things up, bans me left and right from various forums, etc. I talk less about that than I used to. Truth being on my side has been irrelevant in the face of internet strangers feeling like a former homemaker isn't allowed to know anything medically significant and I've essentially been bullied into silence on the topic.
So I decided the article isn't my cup of tea.
Is the token woman on the HN leaderboard not allowed to feel like "I identify too much with the minority individual people are calling a liar. It seems pointless to read this."?
Apparently, commenting about this article at all was a huge mistake. The number of replies from people insisting I'm wrong to not wish to invest myself in this story seems ridiculously high.
On the other hand, you went into this thinking the world was one way and found out it was somehow different in this case (unless your take-away was just "sour grapes").
No, I haven't. You seem to be -- like many other people here -- determined to believe that I am "on his side" because I don't agree with your conclusions. I've stated repeatedly that the interviews were decades after the fact, I don't feel it's possible to know exactly what happened and I just know too much about how human bias influences conclusions in spite of all the evidence.
Truth often has little to do with what groups of people agree is the correct narrative.
That absolutely does not mean "I am totally on his side and it's the other 20 people who are liars, I'm sure of it!"
I don't intend to comment further. This whole thing just seems bizarre to me.
The article provides lots of convincing evidence. Montañez timeline is completely off. There is proof (photos and videos) that flamin hot they were on the shelves years before the executive took over who Montañez claims he pitched the idea too. They also interviewed the woman who was responsible (according the corporate records) for developing the brand.
13yr old me was shocked to see the Federation laying mines in the worm hole a year later. :D
I'd often jokingly mention an idea, only for someone to get a state-of-the-art paper out of the exact same idea within a year of that. It annoyed me at first, but with time, I realized that this was a rather familiar occurrence.
Many top labs are tight-lipped even when talking about peripheral topics, because so many of their peers are within months of reaching the same answer, and even the smallest hint might lead to a peer getting there first. My conversations with top researchers indicate that all research in ML is about 'getting there first' rather than producing something that requires a mythical epiphany.
It does take away from the glamor of it a little bit. If Salieri had been months away from composing Mozart's best work himself, that would have taken away from the timelessness of his work.
Modern Calculus can be reasonably thought of as the most important mathematical leap forward of the last 1000 years. If there was ever an invention that can be considered a piece of unquestionable genius, then that's calculus. And somehow, it was simultaneously invented by 2 different people within a few years of each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...
Worse, we started a business and scoured around, looking to see if anyone had ever tried it. A little over a year in, we realize someone else had started it, two years before us, but with slightly different terminology. Fortunately, but we're both still around and kicking over a decade later, though with a good understanding now of why not many other folks had tried it.
A friend was discussing how her cat loved to be with her 100% of the time, but when she took a shower, the cat was distressed.
In a moment of cleverness, I suggested the obvious solution: a cat raincoat.
Then I searched the web and found lots of cat raincoats.
It is really amazing to see how many discoveries and inventions I've heard of were independently made by two or more people within a few years of each other.
The DS9 folks have outright said that they've not done things because people assumed or guessed online. The first one that springs to mind is Eddington.
> Although "The Adversary" shows Eddington was misidentified as a Changeling, public opinion nevertheless became wary that he was a member of that species, to the puzzlement of the DS9 staff writers. Stated Ira Behr, "After 'The Adversary', everyone on the Internet was convinced that Eddington was a changeling, even though we went out of our way to show that he wasn't. We all looked at each other and said, 'There's no way this guy is ever gonna be a changeling!'" Behr laughed. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion (p. 253))
His story heavily focuses on pitching to a CEO who wasn't running the company when the product was already out on the market.
Him misremembering some details doesn't prove it's fabricated.
Getting the year wrong: Forgivable. Getting some minor details wrong: Understandable.
But when literally nothing about your story fact checks and the most critical parts are contradicted by evidence, I think it's time to reconsider whether it really happened at all.
Well that's the thing: a lot of pieces of the story do fact-check, but for entirely different products rather than Flamin' Hot Cheetos specifically.
I reckon it's much more nuanced than "it totally happened" v. "it didn't happen". Even if he didn't invent Flamin' Hot Cheetos per se, he could very well have contributed to them hitting shelves nationwide instead of being confined to test markets, probably as a precursor to or component of his campaign around Flamin' Hot Popcorn et al. Or he could simply be getting things mixed up. Either way, it's concerning to see so many comments implying (or explying) malice on his part when the more likely explanations are both more mundane and more charitable. Hanlon's razor and all that.
He has a very clear story. He says the machine that coats the cheetos in cheese powder broke, so he took some home, developed a spicy powder, and coated them. Then he called up the CEO, Roger Enrico, and had a meeting with him and 100 other people where he pitched his invention.
There's no way he was somehow involved in the marketing of hot cheetos, got confused and accidentally came up with a story like that.
I'm sure the charitable version is that he slowly embellished over the years until one day he invented hot cheetos instead of being involved in popularizing them.
That doesn't necessarily mean what he (claims to have) pitched was the exact recipe for the Flamin' Hot powder. Mixing up which CEO he pitched to aside, it's entirely possible (probable, even) that he could've presented some homemade powder only for Frito Lay to then decide "well wait, we already have this spicy powder from McCormack we're using for a Chee-tos flavor we're testing in the Midwest, so we'll just use that and greenlight it for national distribution; yo Rick, anything else we should spice up for the Latin American market? Popcorn? Fritos? Fuck it, why not?". The timeline of when Montañez allegedly "invented" Flamin' Hot Cheetos does line up with when they hit shelves nationwide; I'm willing to bet it's less a matter of him deliberately stealing credit from others and more a matter of him not having been aware of prior efforts and his independent invention being of something already in the works.
I just know it's shockingly common for "nobodies" to have a good idea, share it in some way and someone else with more status runs with it and gets the credit. And I can well imagine someone feeling like "No one will believe what actually happened" and trying to fudge the details a bit in hopes of being heard.
I'm old. I'm cynical. I'm tired.
Frankly, I didn't bother to read the full article because I'm so convinced that it's not possible to know what really happened and that if a Hispanic janitor did come up with the idea, the odds are long against him getting a fair shake. So why bother?
The only person in this story who have any incentive to lie are the sales guy, and the MBA who are claiming that they pushed for and invented hot cheetos.
But their story is backed up by documented evidence that the product existed years before Montañez claims that he invented it, and Frito-Lay confirms their story.
What sounds better--"Janitor rises to Executive by inventing flaming hot cheetos", or "MBA creates new brand by copying existing competitors"? When the vast majority of the evidence supports the 2nd version, despite it being a less compelling story, I think it's pretty safe to go with that one.
This argument holds up when you're looking at truly old historical facts with no good evidence. We're not talking about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. This was 1989, in a big corporate office. There is documentation, they know who worked there when, and in which offices, there are dozens of people involved in the story, most of whom are probably still alive.
Throwing your hands up and saying "it's unknowable" doesn't really make sense here.
What doesn't make sense to me is why so many internet strangers feel compelled to argue it with me.
Well, here's why it bothers me but obviously that doesn't have to be your reason: Because there's a woman named Lynne in the story who seems likely to be the one behind a lot of it, and a man is taking credit for her work.
Frito-Lay would rather push a rags-to-riches story about a man than credit a highly-qualified woman for her work.