Hacker News Reader

Comment by dinkleberg | Hacker News Reader

This is depressing to read.

This is so close to being the amazing story we all want to hear about.

A veteran, suffering from PTSD, falls on hard times and ends up homeless. Despite his hard situation, he strives to help those who are even worse off. He learns how to program and uses these skills to build something to improve the lives of those are severely disadvantaged. He spends years working on this project and ends up building something really cool and useful.

So useful in fact that his dedication pays off and one of the biggest software companies in the world is inspired and brings him on to scale up this technology to help improve the lives of millions.

Except of course that doesn't end up happening. Instead, we're left reminded that life can be cruel.

View on HN

> life can be cruel.

We can be more specific here. "Some people can be cruel".

(Of course, I'm talking about the one who took all the notes from Oz then instead of giving him the credits ghosted him completely and later co-authored the blog post announcing the "inspired" project. https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-project-gameface)

Ummm it's not the employee it's Google and it's culture of thievery as it ...

- Copied iOS and created Android

- Worked with Sonos then stole from Sonos; Sonos 10 years later wins a victory in court https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/26/23739273/google-sonos-sma...

- To inviting a MIT student out for an interview who demoed her tech & they patented it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929

To many other examples ... it's not the employees it's the company!

> Copied iOS and created Android

Android existed since before the iPhone was even announced. Google did buy the company making it to compete with iOS though. (or maybe sybian/windows phone. depending on who you want to believe)

I would bet 99 percent Android iOS never looked like iOS until iOS was released.

How much you want to bet :)

are you trying to defend apple, or are you trying to shame google? just curious because I understand the latter, but the former wouldn't make sense since apple is not any better in their behaviour

There's really no need to bet. It was a blackberry clone and then pivoted the moment the iPhone was announced. The early Android SDK still had affordances for navigating around the UI using joystick style buttons to select UI elements and physical keyboard use. Apple moved the state of the art to touchscreens with little to no physical controls and Google followed.

A bunch of android still works like that for navagating around the UI. (from my limited experience dealing with cheap android devices via keyboard/remote control) Probably not as well supported in third party apps using non-native UI bits.

It’s always people. People press buttons. Culture might be a reason to WHY people do stuff. But still, people DO stuff. Shifting the blame away to entities that can’t act, or change, actually stops the people from changing their behaviours and attitudes..and as such keeps the culture alive!

People will do what the organization has done itself, allows and promotes through incentivizing each employee with bonuses for new technology they turn whether it's their own work or not.

Yet if society allowed heinous acts, it still makes sense to blame those who commit them. Just because the punishments are removed, or even the acts encouraged, does that give individuals the right to defer the moral obligation to act correctly. Even when governments FORCE you to do heinous acts, we still hold individuals accountable for having done them (Nuremberg trials).

Hmmm society vs. a money making organization to me are two different things.... politicians those who make the laws arent going around doing school shootings and other murderous acts. They do steal, lie, cheat and other bad things and they are brought to justice. So with that in mind Google itself is the politician in this example and or a group of them doing terrible things yet no one cares/nothing is done about their nefarious behavior ... probably because Google has bought the politicians ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com