Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kurzweil-terminator-singularity-artificial-intelligence/print <comment><USER2> > But isn't he simply refusing to accept, on an emotional level, that everyone > gets older, everybody dies?

Why? Why should we accept on an "emotional level" that we are about to die? Just because it's _currently_ "inevitable"? Seems like a cop-out to me. I think humans are meant to be better than just "accepting their fate", and that we should always try to improve our lives and conditions.

<comment><USER3> The ideas of singularity are based on extrapolating from the past (progress of technology). If you extrapolate from the past human lives, eventuality of death seems pretty inevitable for many generations to come. Which extrapolation you choose probably says more about you than it does about the world.

<comment><USER4> > _Which extrapolation you choose probably says more about you than it does > about the world_

Exactly, i.e. you can't just go and extrapolate stuff at will, lest you end up talking like that guy: [http://xkcd.com/605/](http://xkcd.com/605/).

Some extrapolations are more valid than others. There are casual reasons to believe that the rate of progress will continue for some time. There are no reasons to believe that death will always be inevitable (sans the thermal death of the universe stuff, but I'm sure we'll figure something out by then).

<comment><USER3> > There are casual reasons to believe that the rate of progress will continue > for some time.

What are those reasons? What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago. Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel?

What if AI is just like that? We'll keep improving, and then it'll stall. It may later recover. Or not.

That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not.

<comment><USER5> Biotechnology is an infant, like computers at the 50s. Why should we not expect huge progress from it?

Now, I guess he'll have to redo his AI extrapolations. Chip manufacturing is now mature, and while we'll probably be only slightly latter at the computers that put 70% of the population out of a job, the current smaller rate of improvement will make a lot of difference for his 2029 prevision.

<comment><USER4> > _Chip manufacturing is now mature_

Yes, but while we're hitting the limit of our current solutions, AFAIR there's a lot more room to explore with 3D chips and optoelectronics. We might yet squeeze some more progress out of it.

> _Biotechnology is an infant, like computers at the 50s. Why should we not > expect huge progress from it?_

We should, and in this case we have a good reason to believe it - every living thing on this planet, and every little bit of what we discover about them, is an evidence that nanotechnology is possible, works, and can do amazing things. The challenge in front of us is to understand, take control and re-purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One point the article misses: Ray is _a_ director of engineering, not _the_ director of engineering. There are more than one engineering directors at Google.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes I think Ray runs into the risk of becoming some sort of a PR mascot for the company...

<comment><USER8> I think he serves as an optimistic distraction as Google integrates itself into the military industrial complex.

<comment><USER4> > _as Google integrates itself into the military industrial complex._

This is a very bold claim. Care to provide any reference/support for it?

<comment><USER8> The Boston Dynamic acquisition. Also the marriage of American intelligence services and the tech sector as the military increasingly takes to cyber space.

<comment><USER9> "Following the Boston Dynamics acquisition, Google says that it plans to honor its existing contracts, including the military contract with DARPA, but it doesn't plan on pursuing any further military contracts after that."

Stop spreading FUD.

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/172859-google-acquires- bo...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/172859-google-acquires-boston- dynamics-and-seven-other-robotics-companies-next-stop-judgment-day)

<comment><USER8> Oh yeah, "Don't Be Evil"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always like to remind people that the road towards immortality is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with immortal rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of.

Don't be surprised if they realize there isn't enough room for the rest of us. These new 1% immortals may also require a special country in which they are not at risk of being tragically harmed by one of us billion mortals. Watch you don't get bit by their 2 tonne Boston Dynamics guard dog...

<comment><USER10> [Rewind to 1940s]

"I always like to remind people that effectively treating heart disease is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with long-lived rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of."

[Back to the present]

Our age is characterized by the fact that access to types of medical technology is basically flat. Rich people get to hire better doctors, but there are no super-secret, ultra-restricted forms of medicine that are inaccessible to everyone else. Your chances of getting into clinical trials of the new new things are about as good as theirs, provided you are prepared to pick up a phone and put in the time.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that's true. To take one example, Steve Jobs famously gamed the organ donor system by buying houses in many states in order to get on multiple statewide registries. Now, most medical treatments aren't zero-sum in the way of organ transplants, but let's not pretend rich people can't buy better health than the rest of us.

<comment><USER4> Sure they can, but I think of it as rich people subsidizing the medical research for the rest of us. It trickles down, and as the progress continues, there's always another new expensive thing for rich people to pay for.

As for the organ transplants; somebody needs to pour more money into stem cell research and related fields so that we can start growing organs, thus eliminating the whole organ market (including the black one) and zero-sum dynamics of transplats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _But he 's the sort of genius, it turns out, who's not very good at boiling a kettle. He offers me a cup of coffee and when I accept he heads into the kitchen to make it, filling a kettle with water, putting a teaspoon of instant coffee into a cup, and then moments later, pouring the unboiled water on top of it. He stirs the undissolving lumps and I wonder whether to say anything but instead let him add almond milk – not eating diary is just one of his multiple dietary rules – and politely say thank you as he hands it to me. It is, by quite some way, the worst cup of coffee I have ever tasted._

Slightly off topic, but this sort of guff makes me abandon a lot of articles in the first few paragraphs. In fact, I just did exactly that to come here and complain. It's little more than the writer exercising his/her own ego. I'd much rather they get to the point, which is what their interviewee has to say.

<comment><USER13> > It's little more than the writer exercising his/her own ego.

No, it's adding what is called "human interest" to the story, which (the theory goes) makes it more interesting to non-technical people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd suggest "The most human human". It's unfortunate that those calling themselves "futurists" somehow seem to think that being alive forever... is kind'o shallow.

Death may be inevitable, but hopefully those who preach from the pulpit, have a little more depth to them and have hopefully examined their lives more carefully than to simply say, I'll just live forever. In that sense, I think Jobs had the right idea. If life were "infinite" or even significantly prolonged (i.e. 10 times the current life expectancy), I think we'd have a lot of thinking to do to come to terms with such a new reality.

<comment><USER15> Isn't our willingness to take risks connected with our inevitable, eventual, death? Without a guaranteed eventual death few would take risks without massive compensation.

Consider the need in human societies for revolution. With a massively long lifespan, no one will revolt when the need arises, due to risk of death. Leading to a pretty shitty state with no way out.

<comment><USER16> There's a great short story along these lines from Larry Niven. I can't remember the name or the collection, but maybe somebody else will.

A spaceport bar's noise suppression system is on the fritz, so the human bartender keeps hearing random bits from a conversation somewhere in the bar. One alien, a DNA-based one, has come to sell their life-extension technology. The other points out innovative things that humans are doing, and speculates that it's related to the short lifespan. Eventually, the DNA-based alien agrees and decides to wait a few human generations just to see what we do next. The bartender looks around desperately trying to figure out which of the many tables it was, to no avail.

It's a commonplace among artists that constraints force creativity. A small example is the 6-word-stories thing [1]. An example more relevant to your comment is Kevin Kelly's life clock [2]. If you talk to people who have cheated death, you might expect them to talk about being more careful. But the ones I know all talk about being reminded to live fully while we can.

[1] [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html) [2] [http://kk.org/ct2/2007/09/my-life- countdown-1.php](http://kk.org/ct2/2007/09/my-life-countdown-1.php)

<comment><USER17> The story is called Limits and it is part of his Draco Tavern series.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> seems more like a article the virtues of Rays past predictions and is rather one sided. Ray Kurzweil, the man with the crystal ball

</comment><comment><USER19> Or you know, it's just another premature product from Google, to get news coverage as an "innovative" company by rehashing older stuff in not-marketable forms.

Like self-driving cars, computer-glasses, cloud-only-laptops and the like, all met with minimal success.

<comment><USER20> What's with this attitude? How can you be innovative without failing 9 times out of 10. That's what innovation entails! If you haven't failed while innovating you either was extremely lucky or you got yourself some divine superpower.

The iPhone wasn't new either - as in not a rehash of old ideas. But it was a new execution. These are all new executions.

<comment><USER19> > _What 's with this attitude? How can you be innovative without failing 9 > times out of 10._

Easily, by not making PR announcements before you succeed.

Plus, I don't think is an absolute that it's necessary to fail multiple times to get something innovative. Take for example Xerox Park for research. Or, in the market area, Apple.

> _The iPhone wasn 't new either - as in not a rehash of old ideas. But it was > a new execution. These are all new executions._

Well, there are new executions that are ready to succeed, and new executions that are barely held together with chewing gum and wire. I don't think it's any service to the public to tout the latter to high heavens.

<comment><USER4> > _Easily, by not making PR announcements before you succeed._

Oftentimes it's the PR that is the difference between success and failure.

<comment><USER20> Indeed, the question for many of these innovations is not wether they will work from a technical perspective but if they will work with the public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm predicting a future where most people will live on in a virtual world with 'unlimited' lives. Just the brain will be kept alive in a box somewhere. Well, that sounds like Matrix, but I think it's pretty inevitable.

<comment><USER19> Or you know, where only a handful of people will live this way. In isolated, heavily guarded, areas. With tons of energy, food, toys, technology, medicine and the like.

And the majority will slave away and be harvested for work, organs, sex slaves and such.

You know, sometimes you need to provide a more realistic picture of the future (this is not totally unlike how people actually live in places like Rio or Russia for example, and even L.A. [http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz- Excavating-Future-Angeles/...](http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating- Future-Angeles/dp/0679738061)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thats his schtick- publicly speculating on this is a big part of his fame.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of Ray Kurzweil - he's one of a large group of people who believe that accelerating change will almost certainly be good. I think the singularity could be good, but it could also be really bad, and it's important to spend some resources on making sure it goes well.

MIRI (formally the Singularity Institute) has a mixed reputation around these parts, but after reading fairly widely over the last year I think they have the deepest thinking on the topic of AI. Here's a concise summary of their worldview: [http://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas- an...](http://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-and-a-couple- of-strategic-implications/)

As I see it, their argument goes:

1\. It's tempting to think of AIs becoming either our willing servants or integrating nicely with human society. In actuality, AIs will likely be able to bootstrap themselves to superintelligence extremely rapidly; we'll soon be dealing with alien minds that we fundamentally can't understand, and there will be little stopping the AI/AIs from doing whatever they want.

2\. It's tempting to think, from analogy to the smartest human beings, that superintelligent AIs would be wise and benevolent. In actuality, a superintelligent AI could easily have strange or bizarre goals. I find this makes more sense if you think of AIs as "hyperefficient optimisers", as the word "intelligence" has some misleading connotations.

3\. OK, well surely we can leave the AIs with weird goals to do their thing, and build other AIs to do useful things, like cure cancer or research nuclear fusion? The trouble is that even an innocuous goal, when given to an alien superintelligence, will very likely end badly. An AI programmed to compute PI would realise that it could compute PI more efficiently by hacking all available computer systems on the planet and installing copies of itself. Or developing nanotechnology and converting all matter in the solar system into extra computational capacity. You have to explicitly the program the AI to not do this, and defining the set of things the AI should not do is a hard problem. (Remember that 'common sense' and 'empathy' are human abilities, and there's no reason that an AI would have anything like them).

4./5\. OK, well, we'll build an AI with the goal of maximising the happiness of humanity. But then the AI ends up building a Brave-New-World style dystopia, or kidnaps everyone and hooks them up to heroin drips to ensure they are in constant opiated bliss. It's really hard to come up with a good set of values to program into an AI that doesn't omit some important human value (like consciousness, or diversity, or novelty, or creativity, or whatever).

I'm glad that Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) is concerned about the issue of friendly AI. I'm curious to hear what other HN readers think of these ideas.

Anticipating some common objections I hear from friends:

 _How could a superintelligent AI have a stupid goal like computing Pi? /Wouldn't it be smart enough to break any controls we put on it?_

I think this objection assumes an AI would be wired together like a typical intelligent human mind. If you think of an AI as a pure optimisation process, it's clear that it would have no reason to reprogram the ultimate goals it begins with.

 _If they 're smarter than us, we should just let the AI take over/AIs are like our children, ultimately we should leave them free to do whatever they want_

Again, this assumes the AIs are like super-powered human minds and that they will do _interesting_ things once they take over, like contemplate the deep mysteries of the universe. But it's clearly possible for the AIs to devote themselves to really trivial tasks, like calculating digits of Pi for all eternity.</comment>


How a nation of junkies went cold turkey - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113051/georgias-war-drugs-how-its-subutex-addiction-ended# <comment><USER2> Substantial discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695781></comment>


Does Ruby Have Too Many Equality Tests? - <AUTHOR> http://rubylearning.com/blog/2010/11/17/does-ruby-have-too-many-equality-tests/

<comment><USER2> Syntactic sugar implemented as double dispatch...I don't know what to think about that!</comment>


Does programming do something to the mind? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163954/are-there-studies-on-what-programming-does-to-the-brain

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://thecodingbrain.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/evidence- sugg...](http://thecodingbrain.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/evidence-suggesting- that-young-computer-programmers-have-bilingual-brains/)</comment>


Like.com team shuts down visual search site Riya - <AUTHOR> http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/08/14/likecom-team-shuts-down-visual-search-site-riya/ <comment><USER2> For those that don't remember, the early days of TechCrunch were all about "who is getting bought today!" A big part of the "sellout to google" dream started from TechCrunch making it seem like Google would buy any and every startup.

Here's what TechCrunch wrote in 2005:

And as an interesting side discussion, Peter Rip, a Riya investor (and a friend of mine) takes us all down a notch (TechCrunch is specifically mentioned) saying "Every report was factually incorrect at the time it was printed. I did not see one accurate characterization of any discussions Riya.com may or may not have had."

<http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/12/18/google-passes-on-riya/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember when Riya was founded. Kudos for reinventing themselves to a huge new market with Like when Riya (basically) failed.</comment>


Architecture of HP's "The Machine" - <AUTHOR> http://keithp.com/blogs/the_machine_architecture/# <comment><USER2> No mention of prior work on memristors? From [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor) :

 _" Leon Chua ..argued that the memristor is the oldest known circuit element, with its effects predating the resistor, capacitor and inductor. In 2008, a team at HP Labs claimed to have found Chua's missing memristor.._"

Imagine an alternate universe where Bell Labs decided to use transistors to build "A Machine", instead of enabling others to construct many possible machines.

Hopefully HP research on memristors will inspire the worldwide scientific community.

</comment><comment><USER3> interesting, so essentially a giant memristor blob store which a bunch of compute nodes can simultaneously leverage? If the memristor promises are to be realized, TB if not PB levels of storage at >SSD speeds, accessed by many compute nodes as shown in diagram, which could also be many cores by themselves. Think of like a hadoop style cluster, self-contained on amphetamines?

If any of this is true, why not start in phases where you have memristor replacing SSD/existing system memory.. why this monster design? unless they are trying to leverage their new fancy technology to disrupt the cisco/dell/supermicro enterprise server market?

<comment><USER4> Because that's exactly what HPA want to do, foolishly try and disrupt the market with unproven hardware no one can afford.

<comment><USER5> > foolishly try and disrupt the market with unproven hardware no one can > afford.

Sometimes, that is what research is all about. Some work out, some don't. I am actually quite excited about this for HP.

<comment><USER3> nobody objects to that.. the thing is, it sounds as if they have some very cool technology (memristors) which could make other existing products significantly better, but are explicitly withholding because they want to force some paradigm shift.. that seems like a pretty bold bet. What if nobody wants it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If anyone is wondering: KeithP is Keith Packard of X.org fame - he was the driving force behind forking and advancing an otherwise stagnant xfree86, giving us things like the DAMAGE extension and other good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd be interested in seeing whether different hardware paradigms lead to different OS paradigms. He says they're working on Linux for The Machine, but I wonder if that's their endgame or if it's just to have something to run on it for now.

Any OS-dev people able to chime in on what they would do?

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to rain on anyone's parade, but where are the hard facts?

        HP has that solution in The Machine. By discarding a computing model that has stood unchallenged for sixty years, we are poised to leave sixty years of compromises and inefficiencies behind. We're pushing the boundaries of the physics behind IT, using electrons for computation, photons for communication, and ions for storage.

Where is the review of the hardware? The pictures? Prices?

I'm glad that you're having fun there, getting your 15 minutes of fame, making a living doing R&D. I'm sure you work hard. I wish that when you publicized - you had something more than a generic PR site with pablum.

I'm sincerely interested in what you're doing. Please show actual prototypes, or there's nothing to prove to us it's not Vaporware. I'd be more satisfied your tithe is justified.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8RyKrREzuI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8RyKrREzuI)

<comment><USER9> > I'm glad that you're having fun there, getting your 15 minutes of fame

Your comment's substantive point is squandered by this personal ugliness. That's not ok here.

<comment><USER8> People have personalities.

If you don't like people's personality, or at least give them the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith - do expect other's to just lobotomize themselves for you?

When I said that, it's really my initial impression and feeling. It's a comment. I think, if done civilly, people can be allowed to express themselves without being PC robots.

Edit: Oh sorry, When I said "Having fun, getting 15 minutes of fame", I meant those as _two separate things_. However, it reads as if I'm brushing them off.

<comment><USER9> I hear you about expressing feeling, and it's a fair point. The problem is that some of those expressions, perhaps normal in regular conversation, become volatile chemicals online. There's too much room for misinterpretation, and the downside is unbounded.

The rules on HN aren't anti-personality, they're based on long experience with what we all have to do to maintain the substantiveness and civility of the discourse. It's a tradeoff. The cost is a certain blandness sometimes. But the alternative would, in the long run, ruin the community.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anatomy of a Celebrity Tweet: CTR & Other Statistics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.swagsy.com/anatomy-of-a-celebrity-tweet-ctr-other-statistics/

<comment><AUTHOR> Would be great to hear your feedback on this.</comment>


James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/08/james-damore-just-filed-a-class-action-lawsuit-against-google-saying-it-discriminates-against-white-male-conservatives/ <comment><USER3> Honestly, this whole thing is just ugly. I read what he wrote. It was (mostly) ugly but contained a lot of truth.

Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech.

I definitely see people hired just because of their minority status. I also see people hired who are minorities but also great at their job. It's not a binary pattern. But those who are hired just because they are a POC or female, yet are terrible at their job stand out. People notice it, but few say it.

Our company recently hired a black woman as a "Software Engineer" who can't write a SQL statement. She has a "taken some tutorials" level of programming skill as far as I have noticed and produces things very, very slow. People notice this, and it makes them angry. I'm sure the other engineers talk about this even more when I'm not in the room. Our boss is proud of how much he is "making the team diverse" yet it's only going to cause problems for the team.

I like to think I was hired based on my skillset, not to improve the numbers. I've worked hard to get here. People likely forget or don't care how "diverse" I am when I am working because I produce. And I fully support bringing in diverse candidates, it's essential to get those viewpoints, so long as they are a qualified candidate to start with.

I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women. Almost all of the women from my social circle are smart, pragmatic, driven and successful yet have zero interest in a technical career. They excel in their given industries but ours they want no part of. I don't believe intelligence is more prevalent in either gender, but I do believe there are some traits that shape who we are.

That's something that's rarely addressed, for fear of being ostracized.

As far as his "conservative white male" discrimination claims, I've seen that too. My boss specifically requested candidates that are not middle-aged white males. But it's nowhere near the same level of discrimination that people of color or women have endured for decades. Perhaps the reason people don't feel sorry for conservative white males is that if they are rejected by one company they can keep trying and will find an "old school" company that will hire them. We have not had that luxury, for blacks and women it was 100 nos for every 1 yes. It's not that way for white guys, sorry.

<comment><USER4> You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engineer, and you write him off as an idiot and forget him. You see an incompetent woman, and she becomes evidence that there is a problem with diversity programs. You remember evidence that supports your narrative.

Obviously my statement is not evidence either. I only wanted to point it out because this is so often overlooked when it comes to these issues. This is an arena where our cognitive biases are especially pernicious, and any discussion needs to address them.

<comment><USER5> It depends on whether the incompetent male engineers are just as incompetent as the incompetent female engineers. For instance, she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries. Are the incompetent male developers at that same level of incompetence?

Of course taking this into account cannot completely eliminate selection bias, and the sample size either way is probably too small to be all that meaningful. It sounds like the attitude of her manager towards the incompetent developer is actually the most significant point here: this incompetent developer is being retained and in fact praised by her manager for diversity despite the obvious issues. Does the manager treat incompetent male developers the same way? The implication of the post is clearly "no", but again selection bias is possible.

<comment><USER6> > she mentioned a female _developer who couldn 't write SQL queries_

I'd wager a third of the nodejs "developer community" could be described that way. The key thing is was she _hired_ to write sql queries?

<comment><USER3> Yes, that is part of her job, but it wasn't covered in the interview process from what I've been told.

<comment><USER6> I've worked with plenty of tech and related people who didn't understand basic technologies we expect in a given field.

I tend to reserve judgement until their effort can be judged. If he or she is slow but learning and improving, I'd accept (and probably raise with a manager) that the hiring process is flawed and try to help him/her.

If its just utter idiocy, I'm less forgiving.

I literally had a business analyst come to me - the new guy at the time - <USER2> her last day after several _years_ of working in the org and ask me what _her_ email address is.

Or the BA who insisted she didnt need to write a clear and specific spec for a feature, because she could just open up dreamweaver and put some buttons on a page.

Those sorts of people I have zero fucking time for, and will drink merrily when they quit/are fired.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, they tend to be promoted quickly. For being so brilliant, you understand.

And then they're your boss. Or your boss's mate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He doesn't have a choice really. With the PR mess he got himself into, no big company will ever hire him. Imagine the possible headlines "Microsoft hires the James Damore, the male supremacy advocate fired from Google". Nope, regardless the technical skill or his actual personality, his public image is forever ruined.

So he realistically has a choice between becoming a paid speaker for fringe ultra-right organizations, trying to sue Google and retire off the proceeds, or leaving tech and becoming a noname blue collar or a freelancer forever hiding his face.

I hope they will settle for an amount sufficient for retirement and the dude's life won't get ruined due to a stupid political game he didn't even realize he was playing.

<comment><USER9> This is true. If the memo wasn't enough, him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like Stefan Molyneux, Jordan Peterson, Mike cernovich, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, etc. is suspicious. [1]

Generally I wouldn't have minded if he went to right wing outlets, as long as he had also gone to left wing outlets. I was willing to listen to his reasoning. But it became clear after the memo came out that he didn't engage with left wingers and maybe he was indeed just appealing to the right.

[1] I don't want to use "right wing" in a disparaging way. I think classical liberalism is perhaps right of center today. I think some of the right wing narratives make sense, but with big caveats. The far right is just a slip away, though. And they would hunt people like me down...

Edit: I don't mean right wing in a disparaging way. I enjoy Joe Rogan (his interviews with NDT and Lawrence Krause are a lot of fun), Dave Rubin (his interview with Faisal is fantastic) and Jordan Peterson. But they are clearly classical liberal, which is arguably right of center today.

Maybe I was extreme in saying far right is just a slip away. I think similar things can happen on the left too of course. Let just not go to the "far-*"...

<comment><USER10> Wait, Joe Rogan is considered a right wing youtuber? I listen to his show all the time and I'm a pretty big liberal and while he sometimes does the whole "everyone is sooooo PC now" thing, he also talks negatively about Trump, the GOP and right wing politics constantly.

I also listened to the James Damore episode, and while I thought James did a good job of making his point and Joe did an AWESOME job of interviewing him while not taking sides, it felt like James was pretty disingenuous and lacked a general understanding of how to behave in a workplace as well as how to treat other people.

<comment><USER9> As I mentioned, I don't disparage "right wing". I actually enjoy Joe Rogans podcast, and also Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson. All three of them are solidly classical liberal, which is probably right of center today (individualism vs. collectivism, equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome, etc). But AFAIK, damore never came to the young Turks, Chapo trap house, which are leftist podcasts. I could be wrong.

<comment><USER11> > All three of them are solidly classical liberal, which is probably right of > center today

Classical liberal just seems like yet another rebranding by people who don't want to just call themselves conservatives. I've yet to hear a "classical liberal" who doesn't seem like yet another libertarian/conservative.

<comment><USER12> I've consistenly voted Labour / Labor for all my life, and my poliics haven't changed. I still believe in looking after the elderly, children and the ill, and negotation. I loved Milliband. But the left (at least Labour in the UK) has been siezed by a hard left group called Momentum, that supports far-left political violence, is often openly hostile to people based on skin color and gender. Classical liberals haven't changed, the far-left has just taken over left wing politics.

<comment><USER12> Small edit: "and negotation" should be "and collective negotation"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the article:

> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically > less capable of engineering

Why do news outlets persistently misrepresent what he actually said? I've read his memo and just about every news article says it contains claims that it doesn't. I have no view on whether he's right or not, but I remain shocked at the misrepresentation of his views throughout the tech media.

<comment><USER14> From his memo:

> I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or > that these differences are "just." _I'm simply stating that the distribution > of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to > biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see > equal representation of women in tech_ and leadership.

He said _exactly_ that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap.

<comment><USER15> I think the "preferences" part carries more weight. More men _want_ to be engineers than women.

<comment><USER16> And if all Damore said was that he would still be at Google.

<comment><USER11> I don't know why you are being downvoted.

I think if he had made a better written argument that focused more clearly on the idea that part of the gender gap is due to a lack of interest by women, that he probably still would be employed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> After reading the memo and after reading most of the comments here that claim that users also read the memo makes me very afraid on the state of educated people in America.

I cannot believe that most of you still go with the media narrative that Damore claimed "women are worse than man at engineering" while this is a very obvious misrepresentation of what he wrote in order to fill a narrative.

This is all part of a politically driven agenda that destroys everyone trying to question the unique, politically-correct acceptable way of thinking.

And it kills me that smart people in HN are falling for it so easily.

<comment><USER18> What? He _actually does_ say that...

> I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men > and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences > may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and > leadership.

[...]

> This is all part of a politically driven agenda that destroys everyone > trying to question the unique, politically-correct acceptable way of > thinking.

This is nonsensical. He wrote bullshit, he caused a problem at his office of employment, he was fired. End of discussion. If you end up pissing off most of your co-workers it leads to a hostile environment so you remove the fewest amount of people to fix it. It doesn't even matter if what he wrote is or isn't correct at that point.

<comment><USER17> No, he didn't say that.

He speaks about the `distribution of preferences and abilities`.

Going from a distribution to state that `women are worse then men at engineering` is a false narrative and COMPLETELY different. You probably didn't realize that because you already made your own politically-correct version of the truth on that subject, and refuse any discussion about those topics.

For example, what he said doesn't say anything about two specific individual women and men abilities.

About your second point. That's the whole issue! Bringing up any point of debate or discussion on those politically-driven topics will end up pissing of some people (while a majority might agree, but will stay silent because politically incorrect). It is very very sad that this is the state of affairs, and that we cannot discuss those sensible subjects anymore without being fully ostracized.

<comment><USER19> I'd say that the very fact that identical quotes from the memo can be used to argue opposite positions in earnest shows - with no judgment for which side is correct - that the memo itself is poorly written.

<comment><USER17> That's maybe why we should stop focusing on a 10 word quote and maybe read and understand the full memo (which provides context) ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I never really saw _too_ much issue with what he wrote. It seemed a lot of people were mad at him for things he never said. It's been awhile since I read his document, but I remember expecting it to be so bad from all the uproar I was hearing, but after reading it I couldn't find much to be angry about. Can someone enlighten me - i'll admit, this may be a highly ignorant topic of mine.

<comment><USER21> I'm a former Googler (left before the memo) and I was upset by the memo because, in implying that the hiring bar was lower for women, it contained the thinly veiled corolloary that my female colleagues were less capable than my male colleagues. That did not match my experience at all.

<comment><USER22> Affirmative action is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who suffer or have suffered from discrimination within a culture[1]. Google is an affirmative action employer[2]. If women are favored over men, then wouldn't it make sense that a less skilled woman has the potential of being selected over a more skilled man?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action)

[2] [https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/](https://careers.google.com/how- we-hire/)

<comment><USER21> I don't see any support for [2] in the page you linked (maybe because I am on mobile). There may have been efforts to recruit that were directed at women (e.g. sending employees to Grace Hopper), but ultimately the bar was the same for everyone.

<comment><USER22> It's at the bottom of the page.

> Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative > action employer.

<comment><USER21> I see it now. I believe that's something every major US Corp that sells to the federal government has to say: [https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools- and-samples/hr-...](https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and- samples/hr-qa/pages/cms_013810.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You need a very minimal amount of social skill to succeed in programming - just enough to not piss coworkers off too badly while working together on projects. Past that, you get mostly quiet and controlled environments, managers willing to let you work on your special interests, and generally get left alone to stare at your screen and type things out. This is one of the best working environments you can find for autistic people. And all these factors that make it so good for autistics makes it more hellish for neurotypicals: you have techies to socialize with who do not like to be interrupted, lots of time expected to be working instead of socializing, and your soft-skills aren't particularly well suited for making the computer do the things you want.

There are something like three to five times as many autistic males than females, depending on the cutoff point and study used. I'm honestly astounded that people are rejecting the biological claim, given how strongly it attracts autistics.

IMHO, a lot of inclusivity-in-tech movements are horrifically ableist for wanting to destroy this niche in the pursuit of making the programming niche more welcoming to other groups. It's about goddamn time there's some push-back against these sorts of gentrifying movements, they're incredibly bad for the work environment interests of autistics.

<comment><USER24> Your argument that "inclusivity-in-tech [is] ableist for wanting to destroy this niche in the pursuit of making the programming niche more welcoming to other groups" is interesting and probably a much better way to represent a claim similar to Damore in a far less offensive way to women. I can personally name a handful of non-neuro-typical people who would wholeheartedly agree (half of them females because my friends are frustratingly non- representative).

However, if you check the ratio of people even moderately high on the Asperger's scale among programmers, it is much higher than other more social profession but still a _small portion overall_. That difference doesn't come close to explaining the gender gap. Maybe you care for all introverts (who resent interruptions) including the majority of introverts who are neuro- typical. I do believe most programmers are introvert but I'm not familiar with the gender distribution of introversion but I'd be surprised if it were large enough to explain the gender disparity in tech.

<comment><USER23> >However, if you check the ratio of people even moderately high on the Asperger's scale among programmers, it is much higher than other more social profession but still a small portion overall. That difference doesn't come close to explaining the gender gap.

That's why I included the part about the programming work environment generally being unpleasant and demanding. I didn't make the connection explicit, but "high paying job that sucks" is a preferential attractor for male workers. 90% of workplace deaths are men, men tend to do more things like "work on dangerous and dirty oil rigs", men tend to work more hours than women, and women tend to accumulate in more personally rewarding jobs such as teaching or social work. The end result is a gross earnings gap that basically disappears when you control for these sorts of choices.

So to be explicit: becoming a programmer is a choice that pays well, but is difficult work, requires a large time commitment to study, and is not intuitively gratifying. On that basis alone I'd expect outsized male participation.

>I'm not familiar with the gender distribution of introversion

In terms of big-5 personality traits, the gendered differences are that women tend to score higher on Agreeableness and Neuroticism. I don't think it's particularly relevant to this whole discussion, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So, having finally gone through this in detail, what strikes me the most about this _as a legal filing_ is that it seems very unlikely to be certified as a class action. A class action usually required a simple factual mechanism to identify class members; part of the point of a class action is to avoid needing to litigate the details of each individual case.

But instead of identifying a specific, readily identifiable class that is affected, the classes in this suit are defined as any Google employee against whom Google engaged in certain classes of illegal discrimination in California in a given timeframe; this require litigating individual discrimination claims for each potential class member to determine if they are a class member. Since class members have to be identified and given a chance to opt-out before settlement or trial, this is impractical—its what a class action exists to avoid.

Compare to the Microsoft sex discrimination class action, which defined the class as all women employed in defined roles and levels in particular parts of the organization during a given timeframe.

Also, a class lead plaintiff's claims—not just the law claimed to be violated but the specific manner—are supposed to be typical of the class; while it's very hard to make any guesses of what would be typical of such an ill-defined class, Damore's case seems to all appearanced to be _sui generis_. Maybe I'm missing something, but the class action aspect here seems to be either a complete Hail Mary or a ploy for additional media attention.

</comment><comment><USER26> This clearly is (or is going to be) a Demon Thread. [https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/BZtAavpsy9WtMYgEL/demon- th...](https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/BZtAavpsy9WtMYgEL/demon-threads) . People seem to be angry about what was said in the past, but don't agree on what was actually said or what those things meant. Attempts to clarify seem to mostly be throwing fuel on the fire instead. None of this is helping.

<comment><USER27> I think you're right. My instincts must be improving because something felt off after I made a few comments, and then I paged down a few times to here. And by a few I mean a few tens. I tried collapsing subthreads to get a handle on it, but it's really just a mess.

How else would several subthreads of subthreads report 40+ replies in an hour once the whole thing is collapsed? There be demons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > illegal hiring quotas

Whether or not this is illegal, or true, this is an anti-pattern. If you want representation (and PR) hiring quotas are great; however, if you truly want to empower they work against your goals. At the end of the day any person who walks into a job because of a quota will question, "did I get this job because of my gender/race/creed/orientation?" While you have provided them with opportunity it would be very difficult for that person to fairly evaluate themselves and especially determine whether they are making progress in their career.

<comment><USER29> Making someone question whether they are qualified is better than not hiring them at all. Quotas are useful if you have reason to believe that your hiring process is biased and you are missing out on qualified candidates. That way you're not passing up too many candidates from specific groups that you're having a hard time characterizing.

<comment><USER28> Quotas do have their place for instigating change, to more correctly state my views (which are incredibly complex, just like the subject is): I think that they rapidly outgrow their usefulness. If you have women in hire/fire positions, _in theory_ the bias should work itself out. It probably wouldn't in reality.

It's a nasty situation. We want to make progress as society, which means quantifying that progress (quotas make this impossible). However, at the same time we are trying to make that progress to represent individuals and, yes, place them in lucrative jobs to level the playing field (which quotas assist).

> reason to believe that your hiring process is biased and you are missing out > on qualified candidates

That is to my point. How could you justify that position if you have no way of measuring it? Find 50 lions and 50 white lions, put them in an enclosure and ask a scientist to tell you what percentage of lions are white based on that sample.

I'm not saying that we don't have to solve this, or that it has been solved. It hasn't. I really question our approach (and I don't have a better alternative, apart from eradicating gender stereotypes from a young age).

Are we still in the 1990's with a social equality facade?

<comment><USER29> > Are we still in the 1990's with a social equality facade?

No, things have gotten worse since the 90's. [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in- tech_n_69...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in- tech_n_6955940.html) Women have a >40% quit rate, so it's not just the hiring practices which need work. [https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/womenint...](https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/womenintech_facts_fullreport_05132016.pdf) (PDF)

<comment><USER30> Define "worse".

An easy explanation for higher quit rates is that the various programs to get more women into tech worked, but the percentage of women who actually _want_ to be in tech hasn't budged.

When you interview both men and women, women actually report higher rates of support from their companies and superiors than the men. It is one of the few areas where there are differences. The other is "enjoy the work", which women rate a lot lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Even if James Damore does not win Google has a number of practices that could be considered embarrassing if they were to be made public. I know a number of Googlers who confide to me privately about their experiences. Traditionally they would not have an outlet to express their grievances because no-one really cares. I'm hoping this lawsuit will give them and others a chance leak some of these practices. I'm interested in what people outside of SV tech bubble will think about it.

<comment><USER32> Could you describe some of these practices?

<comment><USER33> If there's any veracity to the lawsuit's claim that Google employees maintained blacklists of employees based on their political affiliations, or boo'd new hires on the basis of their skin tone, Google just handed Fox News an excellent ratings boost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why would a "white male conservative" sue a corporation when the conservative platform believes that in a free market corporations should be allowed to discriminate as they please ? I have heard Ron Paul (ok, a libertarian) state numerous times how he doesn't support civil rights, because the public will stop visiting those businesses who engage in discriminatory behavior. Shouldn't James Damore just let the free market take care of Google for its allegedly discriminatory position and wait till we all migrate to Duck Duck Go and iOS to teach Google a lesson ?

<comment><USER35> Damore wouldn't describe himself as conservative I think.

<comment><USER36> And even if he did describe himself as such, the idea that all 'conservatives' are free-market absolutists is strange. The sort of free-market-first small- government-at-all-costs ideology has only in the past few decades become a fixture of US right-wing movements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> _presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with 'boos' during companywide weekly meetings._

What does this even mean? People booed simply because they were white and male? I honestly don't get it. And who did the booing?

<comment><USER38> Yes sir. It's happened all over. Even at Github: [https://imgur.com/7YaVYUx](https://imgur.com/7YaVYUx)

</comment></comment><comment> GCU-Empiricist Watching discovery occur on this case will be interesting.

<comment><USER23> It'll get settled first to avoid discovery, I suspect. Class action makes settling more awkward, but still, Google has more financial interest in avoiding discovery than winning the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Legal question: Most employment agreements require employees sign an arbitration clause. Even though these have mixed enforceability, they are very intimidating (which I believe is their intended purpose).

If you had a high-profile case like this, are you choosing to defy the arbitration agreement? Anyone ever gone through this and willing to share the process?

<comment><USER25> California has a very high minimum standard for am arbitration agreement to validly cover fair employment claims, including the employer covering _all_ arbitration costs (irrespective of outcome), where they would not have to cover all court costs unless they lost and the employee was awarded costs. _Armendariz v. Foundation Health_ , 99 Cal.Rptr.2d 745 (2000) [0]

I wouldn't be surprised if an employer chose to leave claims to which those rules apply out of the coverage of any arbitration agreement; leaving the employee on the hook for court costs is probably a better discouragement to claims, especially meritless ones, than arbitration is.

[0] [https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=160495945137091...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=16049594513709134145&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Most of the discussion here focuses on The Famous Document which I think is missing the point. TFD could be totally right, or totally wrong but the lawsuit is about wrongful termination and discrimination and has only remote relevance to the document.

Would be interesting to hear the opinion of the people with legal experience: what are the merits of the lawsuit?

My personal unqualified opinion is that they will settle out of court for wrongful termination. Since white males are not protected class, the discrimination case is much weaker.

It is much easier for Google to settle this lawsuit than to deal with hundreds of others they would get should they kept Damore on payroll.

I think regardless of the merits of TFD this lawsuit is a good thing because companies would be less inclined to punish people for objecting groupthink.

<comment><USER41> >Since white males are not protected class.

Yes they are. Or at least whites and males are a protected class (at the suit alledges discrimination against these classes independently, not just their intersection).

It is true that the _intent_ of the anti discrimination laws was to protect non-whites and females, codifying that into law would be a clear violation of the equal protections clause and make any such law unconstitutional.

>My personal unqualified opinion is that they will settle out of court for wrongful termination.

The wrongful termination argument defiantly seems stronger here. However, it is worth keeping in mind that they have not settled yet. I assume Damore's laywers would have tried settling before even filing [0]. If Google wanted to settle they should have done it back than, before the PR hit of the suit being filed happened. Coming up is the PR hit of discovery, which is going to bring to light a lot of skeletons that Google would rather keep hidden. (Even if Google did nothing wrong with regards to this case; no organization the size of Google can go through discovery without something coming out)

[0] Assuming their actual goal is just money. They claim to be doing this to effect change. While their public statements on motivation are highly suspect, it is within the realm of reason that they are actually interested in this case for the political agenda, in which case they would want to take it to court.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Reading through the court document [0] makes me deeply concerned. Some of the stated actions, if they turn out to be true, are uncomfortable. I believe that in a modern society like ours, such discrimination should not be necessary, advocated for or considered in a healthy workplace. I do hope for Google that none of this is true.

0: [[https://www.scribd.com/document/368689407/Damore-vs- Google-C...](https://www.scribd.com/document/368689407/Damore-vs-Google-Class- Action-Lawsuit)]

</comment><comment><USER43> "James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board arguing that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering..."

I have stopped reading TechCrunch, ArsTechnica and Vice magazine because they continually report this inaccurately (at best) if they are not outright lying.

Once again, Damore never says that women are biologically less capable. Nothing like this is every stated nor even implied. In fact he goes out of his way to say this is not so, in the memo. Frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER44> Whatever you think of the memo, you have to be a little concerned about the precedent this would set if companies were not allowed to discriminate based on 'political' views. Should I be forced to hire a neo-nazi or a terrorist sympathiser so long as they're up to the job?

<comment><USER45> And this is the crux of the problem with his lawsuit. Political views are not a suspect class in US law afaik.

What Damore may be trying to do is establish a legal understanding that the political discrimination (which definitely happened) was connected to racial discrimination (which would need to be proven in court). If Damore can do that successfully, he should be able to win the lawsuit.

But I don't think it's possible. At least it shouldn't be possible. Like you suggested, companies must be able to discriminate against political behavior at work that is disruptive.

Damore's memo was released in an unruly manner that disrupted Google's bottom line. It also brought down company morale, alienated fellow coworkers, and caused undue internal strife. His resulting unwillingness to help contain the drama demonstrated his lack of allegiance to the company's interest. Behavior like this cannot be protected from termination.

<comment><USER46> From my understanding he was getting death threats and misrepresented. He did the only thing he could do and try and set his name strait.

The person who leaked it to vox should be on the chopping block.

<comment><USER45> I agree that the person who leaked the memo against Damore's intent should be punished similarly (and I hope Google did).

However, the death threats and misrepresentations of his text were not simply a factor of it being published globally. From what I have heard, the discussion was already heated inside of Google before it even got leaked.

Also, I don't think Damore was ignorant to the fact that his content was divisive in nature. I think he knew exactly what he was trying to say and knew what kind of reaction it would provoke.

I really think he needs to own it, and the lawsuit just proves the point to me why he was fired. He's not a "team player"; can't own up to his mistakes. Sure, perhaps this lawsuit will make it easier for people to discuss politics in the workplace without being fired, but his actions telegraph his intent, at least to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I find this kind of funny...

The king of search finds it too hard to compile data.

[http://fortune.com/2017/05/27/google-gender-wage-data- report...](http://fortune.com/2017/05/27/google-gender-wage-data-reporting/)

<comment><USER48> it wasn't that it was too hard. It was that there's a cost to compile the data, and Google shouldn't have to pay 250k to compile a data inquery just `because`.

Just like you aren't asked to strip search when going through TSA, `just because`. There needs to be a legitimate reason and suspicion.

<comment><USER47> I think the reason was government contracts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is there actually any US law against discrimination based on political stance?

<comment><USER50> They aren't a federally protected group according to this list. This particular situation though is extra hairy because even if it was religious the offended parties could argue that a protection is not a license to advocate discrimination.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group)

<comment><USER51> Good job he wasn't advocating discrimination then

<comment><USER50> He'll have to explain that to a jury, and I've read the memo that claim is not abundantly clear.

<comment><USER52> Google will settle this long before it goes to a jury.

<comment><USER50> Argument by assertion, bold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's like if any concept can't be fully realized in the size of a tweet people are going to just misconstrue it.

Read the memo before telling people what it said...

Twitter has eroded out society.

</comment><comment><USER53> Just for once, I'd like a story like this to turn out positively. Not in that James wins or loses this lawsuit, but that something could be positively gained in his life from this experience.

Being fired from Google has been traumatizing. He's gone farther and farther into the "unrecoverable from a PR standpoint" zone, and that's really horrible. 10 years from now, he's going to have a hard time finding employment or basic living possible. He's still a human though. If he committed himself to _being humble_ and actually trying to work on himself, it would be really positive. Even the PR thing can go away -- everyone loves a redemption story.

The problem is that moves like this just deepen the hole. A lot of people are cheering for his demise, and seeing that hole get bigger is eye candy. But again, he's still a human. He still has hopes, dreams, fears, etc., just like the rest of us. Maybe positive encouragement to change is a better route to go than just watching him keep digging. In no way do I support his ideas -- quite the opposite -- but is it fair to characterize someone as fully a lost cause this early?

<comment><USER54> The right wing and egging him on did not help him. It probably contributed to him not realizing the mistake he has made.

Saw an interview with him and saying he needed to have his GF filter what he writes. I was thinking no that is not the issue. Instead do not share these things if they are in your head. Swear him saying that just made it worse. He clearly still does not get it.

<comment><USER55> He did nothing wrong.

<comment><USER56> He did several things wrong, and simply _stating_ that he did not does not make it true.

<comment><USER55> He did nothing wrong, and simply _stating_ that he did does not make it true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The merit (or lack thereof) of his claims and views matter little in this case. The case is visible enough and touches on politically relevant points enough so that there will be tons of people on both sides willing to fund this case all the way to supreme court. Then there is the problem with how damaging discovery would be to the company. It will probably will get settled fast, with Google paying him a few years worth of salary and a non-disclosure clause that will make him never speak publicly about the episode again. Unless the guy gets too greedy and push for too many figures, then it will be a shit storm.

<comment><USER58> It simply comes down to money.

Damore was fired because he was bad for business. Not because he's white, male, conservative, or the contents of his memo. Had the memo not been leaked publicly, I have no doubt he'd still be working at Google and his memo ignored and/or forgotten. He simply became too much of lightning rod for Google to continue to employ him.

Google will settle for the same reason. It is better for business to pay him off and make sure he never talks about it again, than to drag this out.

The only people who will be financially better off in this whole deal will be the lawyers, and nothing will be resolved in reference to the larger issues surrounding this case.

<comment><USER55> He was fired for going against the "feminist" narrative that dominates Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Legitimate question here, how is it ok for all the screenshots of internal tools which the authors must have assumed would remain internal to Google to be put into this publicly visible suit? Their names are visible and not redacted?

Is this just a reminder to be careful what you post at work?

<comment><USER60> Generally good work advice: assume every internal email or slack IM you send might one day be read out loud in court.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I feel like this study published in july 2017 is very relevant: "Sex differences in brain size and general intelligence (g)"

link: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616302975)

Abstract Utilizing MRI and cognitive tests data from the Human Connectome project (N = 900), sex differences in general intelligence (g) and molar brain characteristics were examined. Total brain volume, cortical surface area, and white and gray matter correlated 0.1–0.3 with g for both sexes, whereas cortical thickness and gray/white matter ratio showed less consistent associations with g. Males displayed higher scores on most of the brain characteristics, even after correcting for body size, and also scored approximately one fourth of a standard deviation higher on g. Mediation analyses and the Method of Correlated Vectors both indicated that the sex difference in g is mediated by general brain characteristics. Selecting a subsample of males and females who were matched on g further suggest that larger brains, on average, lead to higher g, whereas similar levels of g do not necessarily imply equal brain sizes.

Highlights • Sex differences in brain morphology and general intelligence were examined.

• MRI and test data of the Human connectome project were used (N = 896)

• Males and females differed in total brain size, gray, and white matter volumes

• The male-female difference in general intelligence, g, was d = 0.25.

• Sex differences in brain morphology mediated the sex difference in g.

<comment><USER62> Do we really need to rehash the whole phrenology period of our history?

<comment><USER61> wait so a correlation between brain size and "generral intelligence score (g)" is phrenology? don't you feel like your mispresenting the study?

<comment><USER62> Phrenology was used to justify pre-existing racism.

All these studies that show that men are naturally more intelligent because their brains are larger amount to the same thing, but racism is out of vogue, so let's use it to justify pre-existing sexism this time.

If 3 women published a scientific paper with the conclusion, "girls rule, boys drool," you wouldn't feel at least a little suspicious of the authors' intentions?

<comment><USER61> do you believe that the authors falsified their findings?

and also the idea is not to justify sexism, but to provide another possible reason for why a trend seems to perssist after apparent bias is eliminated. This is in response to the idea that oppression is somehow responsible for 100% of the gender-ratio gap.

I don't claim that biological reasons are the only reasons but I stress that they do in fact exist and that a violent response to suggesting that they might exist is not normal.

To use this studies to be sexist, is the wrong idea ,as the memo's author explained, because there is overlap between the populations and while on average one is better (in that respective function) then the other, that does not preclude that someone from the second group is better then someone one the first.

In other words, the result on hiring based on merit alone is better then both: \- hiring only males \- hiring based on prescribed gender quotas.

and by the way, there is studies that indicate that woman are better at empathy ( a sign of emotional intelligence): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Are there (in part) biological reasons for the differences in behavior between men and women? Clearly there are sociological differences. Damore clearly did not separate the two ideas or their relative impact on the issue, which led to the enormous amount of publicity.

The idea that the tech industry needs to change their approach to incentivizing women to the workplace still stands regardless.

</comment><comment><USER64> I think this lawsuit is a sign that Google's management miscalculated. The last thing they wanted was for this issue to drag on. They don't want to be on the front lines of the culture war. They want to build great things and make piles of money.

</comment><comment><USER65> _"...employees of Google who've been discriminated against due to their "perceived conservative political views by Google_"

Is that really illegal? If someone was not hired on account of his being a White supremacist, would he have any basis for a lawsuit?

<comment><USER66> In California, yes. See section 4 of:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2014/05/05/does-california-law-protect-employee-speech-hostile- to-homosexuality-as-well-as-employee-speech-that-defends- homosexuality/?utm_term=.3a24b7c71215)

<comment><USER65> Interesting. I guess that law would have protected both Brenden Eich and Donald Sterling, if they had been fired during their respective controversies.

To anyone assuming that I'm opposed to such a law: you're wrong. I've written in favor of such laws in the past, and think they should be strengthened even further. Assuming of course that they are used to protect all political opinions, both left wing and right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> The lawsuit says he was discriminated against not only for being a white male but also "discriminated against (i) due to their perceived conservative political views by Google".

Discriminating against someone for their political beliefs is not illegal. Federally political affiliation is not a protected group and in California apparently 'political affiliation' is according to wikipedia[1] however I couldn't find the relevant section of the CA statute on the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) of CA[2].

If he was discriminated against because of his race or gender, then that is a problem. But firing him for having conservative views should be entirely valid. I am not saying that believe firms SHOULD fire people who have X view or Y view so much as they should have the right to.

While we can debate the merits of James' individual views, let's take a more extreme example. If an individual regularly spouted off white supremacist and neo-NAZI views, I don't think any of us would have a problem with a firm firing that co-worker. Firms are trying to create a culture that aligns with their objectives and enhances employee/workplace happiness and harmony. Some views are antithetical to that.

Furthermore, we can back away from such extreme views and still find cases where it would be legitimate to make decisions based on individual's views and perspectives. If you owned a company focused on selling sustainably sourced, carbon neutral products. Hiring a sales person who does not believe in climate change and is actively hostile the the concept of environmentalism would be a bad idea. It is entirely logical to hire/fire people based on non-religious beliefs.

Beliefs are choices individuals make, and thus they should be judged by their choices.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_in_the_United_States#State_law) [2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20160909163923/http://www.dfeh.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160909163923/http://www.dfeh.ca.gov/Publications_FEHADescr.htm)

<comment><USER68> >Discriminating against someone for their political beliefs is not illegal

In Cali it is. These laws were enacted in the 30/40s when people were blacklisted for being Commies.

[https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=1101) [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=1102)

It would be interesting if this goes to the supreme court and the conservative court rules these laws unconstitutional on freedom of association grounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Just to clarify, is he stating he was fired due to his gender/political views? I would assume the literal army of attorneys will point to various violations of Code of Conduct or Employment Agreement Damore undoubtedly broke.

He openly published a memo condemning his employer, tarnishing the brand and bringing the company under considerable negative press. I figure there must be some clause in any employment agreement stating that you can't actively cause damage to the company.

Edit: Looks like the memo wasn't intentionally released to the public, but it still caused damage. If I drop tables unintentionally on production, I'm not surprised if I'm fired- even if it was an accident.

<comment><USER70> OK, but continuing with your analogy, what about if you write a script that drops tables from a database it's pointed to, for internal use, then someone else runs it against the production server? And then you, not whoever ran it, get fired.

<comment><USER56> The analogy is flawed.

He did not write a piece of software, he wrote a piece of rhetoric which had very little to do with reality and had a lot to do with making people dislike Google and its policies.

I also write a lot of rhetoric designed to do that. The difference is I'm not a Google employee. Were I, I would fully expect to be fired, regardless of what I did with that writing (except perhaps leave it unreleased on my home computer, or write it to /dev/null).

<comment><USER70> Of course the analogy is flawed. The analogy I was replying to is even more flawed. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Are White Men really booed during company meetings?

<comment><USER72> I think this is maybe what the suit is referring to: [https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950452593565798400](https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950452593565798400)

The person in question is talking about what they presented at a meeting, but I don't think it should be interpreted that the booing actually occurred during the meeting itself. In any case, it's not really the best look, but the suit is mischaracterizing it IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I hope he does not settle as a matter of principle.

<comment><USER74> I agree. He needs to lose on the merits and walk away with nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I wonder if there should be a court that decides what is ethical and what isn't (according to the prevailing view of the society) as opposed to the current system where all you can do is try to right wrongs or punish actual harms to society.

</comment><comment><USER76> Will watch this with interest AFAIK discriminating against conservative white men isn't illegal. It's not a protected class. There must be some twist here.

<comment><USER77> In California, workplace discrimination due to politics _is_ illegal [1]

In USA, discrimination due to sex _is_ illegal.

[1] [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=1102&lawCode=LAB)

<comment><USER50> Yes, discrimination against men, and or white people is illegal. They can show though that they hire plenty of white men. You are correct in California you cannot discriminate against employees due to politics, however I'm sure they'd be able to show they hire plenty of republicans. It is also an uphill battle for Damore since he'd basically be claiming that he was discriminated against at the same time as arguing that they shouldn't do more to balance the apparent discrimination against women. Whether or not any of that is true, it's going to be a hard sell to a California jury

<comment><USER77> > however I'm sure they'd be able to show they hire plenty of republicans

Discrimination is not just about hiring but also about workplace comfort. And let me tell you, being a non-democrat at google is _NOT_ comfortable! VERY not comfortable!

<comment><USER50> IANAL, but as I understand it, it depends on what causes the discomfort. If your discomfort comes from the existence of other protected classes, like a baptist in a den of atheists then it's tough beans. If however you can evidence that they've created a hostile environment for you outside of your relation to other protected classes then yes that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Damore's name will now go in the history books along with such luminaries as Allan Bakke, Cheryl Hopwood, and Abigail Fisher.

<comment><USER79> Placing Supreme Court bets eh?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v._Bakke)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopwood_v._Texas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopwood_v._Texas)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_\(2016\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how much evidence google has of people who were pissed off by Damore's memo.

Cause really, that's all it should take. "He made his continued employment here impossible because he pissed off his coworkers". Sounds like a completely valid reason to fire me.

<comment><USER55> Is Damore responsible for the failure of some of people in managing their own emotions? "He's saying things we don't like! Fire him!" That doesn't seem valid to me.

<comment><USER80> > Is Damore responsible for the failure of some of people in managing their > own emotions?

That line of stoic reasoning really justifies anything though. Like, my co- workers should manage their anxiety just because I like to work with a firearm strapped to my chest and 2 grenades on my desk.

<comment><USER55> Anxiety over close proximity to explosives seems justified. Anxiety over somebody stating ideas you simply disagree with doesn't.

<comment><USER80> There are disagreeable ideas that nobody has anxiety over though, so it's not just that.

But I think you can see that too. If you assume his ideas are correct:

1\. His letter becomes well received, my employer changes their hiring policies

2\. The current gender ratio was propped by non-gender-neutral hiring practices, without them, that will change back in-line to the base rate

3\. My job is in danger

Is anxiety over losing one's job justified?

Or, another line:

1\. His letter is well received, but my employer doesn't change their hiring policies

2\. My co-workers now think that I have my job not because I earned it but because of the non-gender-neutral hiring practices

3\. My job is in danger

I can produce more, but at the end of the day they all threaten either status or jobs, so I don't fault why people would defend their interests with all their effort.

<comment><USER55> Being anxious about losing your job doesn't justify getting somebody else fired. Specially through vile means such as character assassination.

Edit: Besides, those same arguments apply against the diversity advocates. They openly claim that white men dominate the industry because of sexism, that they don't hold their positions because of merit but because of bias. They're guilty of the same crime they accuse Damore of committing.

<comment><USER80> I will agree that getting someone else fired for your own benefit is deeply selfish, but I also expect people to fight for their own interests when livelihood is on the line. And a job is closer to 'food on the table' than 'new discount TV on black friday' (it's closer to the bottom of maslov's hierarchy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> He got crucified because he didn't make anybody laugh -- now he will be paraded around as a poster boy for the alt-right or w/e. Aren't autistic traits highly prelevant in programmers? Isn't it also true that those traits will show up much more often in men compared to women -- a token factoid curtesy of wikipedia. Also anecdotally, how many male devs do I know that started hacking at 13 -- _a lot_. How many women? Personally none, but I know colah from Google Brain is one example, and a rather extreme data point too -- at the extreme end of the scale it's irrelevant anyways, a successful female comp sci prof or a female researcher will be _picked_. Unless there is some extremely good reason like _Google drained all the capable men already out of the ecosystem_ there doesn't seem to be rational reason to explicitly optimize their hiring pipeline for the wrong demographic -- maybe they don't optimize it like that, but a lot of people have the _perception_ that they do which will get you the same result in the end.

Update: one moment this gets up voted and the next moment it gets down voted and this repeats, is anybody willing to actually argue? Call my bs, I have thick skin.

</comment><comment><USER54> Why does the right wing embrace Damore instead of being pissed at him?

There are people that might generalize and think all right wing people feel this way about women.

I have right wing friends and know that is not true but others might.

Instead Damore has become some kind of right wing matre which seems really strange.

</comment><comment><USER54> The most fascinating part of all of this is who thought up making it a social justice issue? Gen up the right wing? Also it is really that easy to manipulate them?

I mean we have an employee who does not work in HR and I do not think a manager working on something that has nothing to do with their job. Something people are fired for everyday.

Then on top is negative no matter how you look at it towards other employees that makes it impossible to keep and have him on a team. Double firable offence and Google would be wrong not have.

Then it is freaking California where the law is in the employer side.

But somehow it has become some weird rally call for the alt right and the abuse of white guys which I am actually am one of.

Someone should write a book. It is just insane how easily some are being manipulated. But there must be something deeper inside that makes it this easy that for some reason I am missing as a white guy.

Why do we have angry white guys? Why not me?

</comment><comment><USER82> Go for it.

</comment><comment><USER83> I hope he finds some right-wing outlet to hire him, because at this point it seems like he's radioactive waste and no real company is going to hire him ever again.

<comment><USER54> Kind to have to be a right wing organization he is not working along side of women. You do have to think of everyone on your team including the women.

<comment><USER84> > not working along side of women Women able to read and comprehend at high > school level would have no problem working along side him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> And now the boomerang is coming back... But judging by the reactions here i see asking for the right to express complexity isn't always welcome when it comes against the moral values of the day.

(and just to make sure : people should be treated just great even if they're different, meaning they have different abilities somehow, somewhere, and we don't know them all because science isn't advanced enough yet to make any kind of definitive statement).

EDIT : And for those with a great desire of flaming people in public, i suggest tracking people that :

\- don't believe climate change is due to human activity

\- don't believe public social security should cover every expense

\- don't like electric cars, or keep driving SUVs

\- have been found watching (racial) porn at the office

\- have made any kind of bad joke on any minority

\- have made public declaration (at the office cafetaria to his neighbor) supporting any decision by president Trump.

\- has bought a gun for his home

\- think Google should pay its taxes. Oh no, wait this one is still too controversial.

<comment><USER86> > have been found watching (racial) porn at the office

pretty sure we don't want anyone watching any sort of porn at the office

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> A fool and his money are soon parted.

<comment><USER87> You really think the firm is taking an upfront fee or retainer for this? I assume they are expecting a settlement from Google/Alphabet so that the company can put an end to this PR nightmare once and for all, from which they will take a cut.

<comment><USER88> Google's PR Nightmare? Honest question: Don't you think that the one with the PR nightmare is Damore?

<comment><USER89> He's beloved by a certain right-leaning or libertarian bent portion of the tech world, and everyone else except for maybe Google's lawyers have forgotten about him. So it seems like he is in a better place now than simply being a midlevel employee in MegaCorp

<comment><USER50> Yes from a certain angle it's a PR win/win. However if he actually pursues a lawsuit with his money he's with near certainty going to be the loser.

<comment><USER89> I really doubt it is with his own money. Google pays pretty well, but he was only employed for a couple of years outside of school, so I doubt he has millions just sitting around. Almost certainly this case is taken on a contingency basis or they are using crowdsourced funds.

<comment><USER50> I suppose if it's crowd sourced he has no choice but to tilt at windmills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> thank you hacker news randoms for telling me what my opinion is on james danmore because with my finite and trivial amount of wisdom I cannot possibly be depended on to form my own thoughts of a classic white racist screaming about how oppressed white hetro males are in a social culture shaped by 1000 years of white dominance _roll-eyes_

<comment><USER91> _a social culture shaped by 1000 years of white dominance_

Every culture is shaped by the people it's comprised of _by definition_. Do you have a problem with the fact that Chinese culture is "shaped by 1000 years of Chinese dominance"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> As a white male, good for him

<comment><USER93> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Also, we ban accounts for race war, which this arguably is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Brace in for the brigading. I'm flagging this article because it always results in a bunch of trolling rather than any substantial discussion.

<comment><USER95> I personally hope we can avoid this attitude by and large on HN. The idea that this community needs to be proactively stopped from discussing a topic because a small subgroup decides that the larger community can't handle it maturely seems to be an abuse of flagging, to me.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why my Android App is not seeing any downloads? - <AUTHOR>

Hello All,
This is not the first app I am uploading on Play Store. My previous apps got decent 50k or 100k downloads in 1 or 2 months time frame.
We released a new app called Fundom - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tobhq.fundom (Meme and Funny images) We have content team of 3 people, who are digging best content everyday to entertain people.
I am not seeing it listed on Play store? It is not even getting listed in Google search results.
One of my team member unpublished app on first day to renew the Screenshots ? Can that be one problem?
How do I need to plan a strategy only Paid ads are the option? <comment><AUTHOR> Can anyone guide on strategy how to publish and manage Android Play Store ?</comment>


Ask HN: Unsure which image extraction techniques to utilise - <AUTHOR> For a side project i'm taking a look at how to extract information from Apex Legends (for starters) game play videos. Example screenshot:
https://www.gameprime.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/gp-apexlegends-6.jpg
There is a log on top right corner and player status on bottom left corner (health/shields).
Id like to:
- extract <player A username> killed <player B username> with <weapon name> (at time mm:ss) from log, and other information displayed on that log
- from player health extract health/shields percentage (at what time)
Also detect game start/end screens and possibly extract info from them like which characters compose the current player squads.
Apart from OCR, what kind or specific techniques should i learn to implement this ? <comment><USER2> If the text is in a predictable position on the screen, this should be easy.

An image processing pipeline like this usually has a filter up front that drops out the environment and leaves a monochrome image of just the text and associated graphics. The text is white and is usually on a background that provides a lot of contrast since it designed to be readable by you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep makes sense. For the OCR part a colleague suggested something like Tesseract or Google Vision but, what about the shapes, like weapon (type) symbol on top right and health/shield bar percentages and etc ?

Maybe i should just get started small with the OCR part

<comment><USER2> The weapons symbols are just very big characters.

The health and shield bar percentages could be measured by counting pixels. For instance you could draw a horizontal line across the bar and see how many pixels are lit up.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: FunctionKit – Approachable functional concepts brought to Swift - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mpangburn/FunctionKit <comment><USER2> Just reading the README.md makes me feel like I've leveled up my understanding of functional concepts, well done!

That said, pardon my ignorance on the subject -

> This seems nice, but we've introduced an inefficiency: in mapping over the > array twice, we unnecessarily create an intermediate array.

Isn't this an optimisation that could/should be handled by the compiler (JIT evaluation or something like that)?

<comment><USER3> We call this type of optimisation "stream fusion".

In an ideal world, the compiler would always know to do this for us. In practice, it's very difficult (in most languages) to determine whether this optimisation is correct.

In the README example's case, the optimisation happens to be correct because both mapping functions are pure. If they had side effects, then stream fusion might create different results than the original code. Let's make this concrete with an example.

Say our array is `[1, 2]` and our functions are `function A(n) { print("A: "+n) }` and `function B(n) { print("B: "+n) }`. Then _without_ stream fusion, we would see the following output: ``` A: 1 A: 2 B: 1 B: 2 ```

_With_ stream fusion, we would see different output: ``` A: 1 B: 1 A: 2 B: 2 ```

Since the mapping functions have side effects, stream fusion is not valid here.

Some languages can do automatic implicit stream fusion. Haskell is a great example of this: it's able to determine when stream fusion is correct because the language has an _effect tracking system_ where functions with side effects are distinct from functions without side effects.

<comment><USER4> > In practice, it's very difficult (in most languages) to determine whether > this optimisation is correct. > > [...] the optimisation happens to be > correct because both mapping functions are pure. If they had side effects, > [...]

TLDR: make all your functions pure. It'll make it so much simpler for you, your coworkers, but also the compiler(!) to reason about your code.

About half of the bugs and issues I come across in my $DAYJOB are because code that I use (through a third-party library) is not pure. If I had a penny every time I fixed a bug caused by impure code, I'd be rich.

<comment><USER5> > If I had a penny every time I fixed a bug caused by impure code, I'd be > rich.

Ok, let's be extremely optimistic and say you fix 25 functional purity bugs a day and you've been fixing impure code for twenty years.

$0.01/bug * 25 bugs/day * 250 working days/year * 20 years = $1,250.

I guess that $1,250 could be rich to some, but I do think making a quarter per full day of fixing bugs doesn't seem like a great way to get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This would likely pair well with this functional interface to uitableview.

[https://github.com/Shopify/FunctionalTableData](https://github.com/Shopify/FunctionalTableData)</comment>


Why The Undead $99 TouchPad Might Portend The iPad's Doom - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2011/08/30/why-the-undead-99-touchpad-might-portend-the-ipads-doom/?partner=yahootix <comment><USER2> Give me a break.

This is horribly poor reporting and speculation for Forbes.

HP is almost literally giving these things away, and it took a $99 price point before anyone gave 2 shits about it. From the comments I've seen online, these are being purchased by geeks to "hack" on, people who think they're getting a deal, and consumers to uneducated to understand they are basically purchasing a very expensive paperweight. None of these demographics are Apple's core business.

Additionally, there is no evidence that a loss-leader style tablet market has much merit, the one _possible_ exception being Amazon since they have a reseller ecosystem setup that can rival Apple in some cases.

All this whole HP tablet giveaway really says right now is that WebOS, Android, Blackberry, etc. have not been able to create a device as elegant, compelling and profitable as the iPad.

Apple _created_ the tablet market, and now everything that comes out is compared to it on all aspects. Consumers are trained to expect something both better and cheaper as the next thing, and so far that product has not emerged.</comment>