Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

From the TED site, posted by one Matthew Trost:

I want to let everyone know that TED is working quickly to fix the missing acknowledgments.

We're speaking on the phone with Chris Hughes, who sends his sincere apologies for neglecting to mention FLARToolkit and Papervision3D on stage. When Chris showed us the software off stage at TED, we jumped at the chance to show it to our audience, and swooped him up to the stage after a very short prep time! He was also careful to mention that he based his project on the work of many others in his TED Blog interview.

This is such an astonishing development in software, and we want to make sure those who participated in it do not feel cheated. We're going to add prominent acknowledgments to the video and our blog posts so our audience is clear about the work and talent that went into the toolkits that were the basis for what Chris presented. If you have any questions or further suggestions, please contact me -- we're listening.

Sounds like a lot of noise about not much.

I'll side with Chris Hughes, against the overly pedantic, on this one. It's hard enough to say anything in 2 minutes. To say it right and without making slips is not something I'd expect of anyone other than a PR professional.

Before you say "but he clearly said that..." think of how much pressure you'd feel standing on the TED stage with just 2 minutes to make everyone go "Wow!". In those conditions, your brain will naturally be focused on something other than making sure everyone gets a mention.

Edit: for those pointing at the blog for evidence, I doubt Chris Hughes wrote that blog post himself. It was probably based on his talk and some quick chatter with the writer. So it's just an amplification of a slip.

I usually hate these tempest-in-a-teapot flame wars, but I'll actually have to disagree here. He gave a whole demo on stage claiming credit a bunch of times. I went to the FLAR toolkit page and downloaded the demo apps. This is exactly identical to the demo, just with the logos swapped. There is not one bit of original work that I can see. I'd like to believe it's an accident, but it seems like if I demoed Google with my logo slapped on it and accidentally forgot to mention that someone else wrote the search engine.

Download the toolkit and check--I'd love to be wrong, but I don't see how. And it would be unfair to pretend this is a slip a steal credit from the people who clearly spent years actually building it.

I'd like to believe it's an accident, but it seems like if I demoed Google with my logo slapped on it and accidentally forgot to mention that someone else wrote the search engine.

Perhaps I'm blind, but I didn't see his logo on there.

What I did see was a TED video being streamed over that square.

So, a more apt analogy would be: it's as if I took a laptop with a wireless connection to a part of the world that doesn't know about Google (let's call it Grahamia), and I said, "Look what we can do with this! We just type 'Grahamia' in there, and within seconds we get all these awesome bits of information about Grahamia. That's great, isn't it? Oh, my 2 minutes are over. Thanks everyone, hope this helped!"

If you have 2 minutes to get a cool piece of tech across and you decide to spend it talking about what technologies it relies on, I don't want to see your demos..

I see your point and how it's somewhat in-between but would argue that my metaphor is closer.

The TED stage has a well-known role that's clearly understood by everyone there. I would never get ask to go up on stage to demo Google. Larry and Sergey would. If I got asked to demo someone else's work, it wouldn't slip my mind. While it sounds short, 2 mins is a pretty long time.

As I mentioned, just my opinion. But I do think someone's got to stick up for the developers who wrote the sw.

Erm, no.

Here you go:

> I'd like to believe it's an accident, but it seems like if I demoed Google with the TED logo slapped on it and accidentally forgot to mention that someone else wrote the search engine.

Did they change the audio from the originally posted video? I just watched it and I didn't hear him claim to have developed anything he was showing.

Nope, I don't think they changed it. Which is why I think this is overblown.

Swombat, wtf is your agenda? Yes, the audio is changed because the new one no longer has him saying "I've written a bunch software".

If you're trying to back up a friend, you're being way to obvious. This is definitely not overblown, taking credit for other people's work should be career changing and in the downwards direction.

*Edit: the change was really subtle too, go to 0:20 on the original

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CRI3X0pjaU

I didn't notice the change, my mistake.

And no, I don't have an agenda. I don't know this guy, but I know a lynch mob when I see one, and I don't like siding with the pitchforks.

My impression was that the "idea" he presented was not a piece of software per se, but what you can do using widely available tools. He said at least 3 times that the important part is that you can do this using a browser and adobe flash. That you also need a couple of libraries is pretty much obvious.

This being said, I'd expect that somewhere around the video to find links to the software he used. Otherwise the whole presentation doesn't really make sense.

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