Elizabeth Holmes found guilty • Hacker News Board

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#781

Post by bakul » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

approxim8ion wrote: post #468

lotsofpulp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very little is known of Mr. Balwani, including why he is called “Sunny.” This might be because Saturday in Hindi and other Indian languages is “sunny-var”, and the day of the week you are born on is a common nickname, in conjunction with “sunny” being an easy to pronounce and common English word.

This is absolutely incorrect. Saturday is called "Shani"-var (pronounced shunny) after the name for the Hindu god of justice [1]. Hindus also map his presence to the planet Saturn. Either way, no relation to the name Sunny at all. Source: several Indian friends of ages 18-50. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shani

More commonly Shani is the harbinger of bad luck & retribution, which is why you’ll rarely see any Indian origin person named Shani. In a Hindu mythology Shani is the elder brother of Yama, the lord of death & justice.

Sometime people named Sunil, such as the cricketer Sunil Gavaskar, use Sunny as a nickname.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#782

Post by deepsun » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #753

ferdowsi wrote: post #737

I'm loving reading through all of the sickening puff pieces that business/tech journalists put out about her and Theranos. It's funny to think back to 2015 and the hagiographical void still left in tech journo hearts after Steve Jobs died. https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-i... > How Elizabeth Holmes Became America's New Entrepreneurial Icon > She represents the part of entrepreneurship that…

Gell-Man Amnesia Effect in full effect. Will we remember when we read the next PR piece/pump and dump disguised as journalism?

Well, some icons are half-lying/half-BSing/half-actually doing cool stuff. Will we remember their lies?

PS: you know who I'm talking about, just don't want to invite fans here.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#783

Post by cryptica » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

Kind of interesting how she attends court without any makeup and with scruffy hair; she looks unrecognizable. I guess this is done intentionally to distance herself from her previous identity and also her crimes.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#784

Post by ineedasername » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

dpierce9 wrote: post #738

snek_case wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just about biotech startups. I think the obvious distinction here is that her behavior put lives at risk fairly directly. Theranos was administering blood tests to a large number of people in a beta program. These tests were incomplete and inaccurate. Said tests were used to monitor the status/recurrence of cancers and other conditions like diabetes. If you similarly put people's lives or safety in…

“This case was specifically about what Holmes told Theranos investors, although her lies also impacted partners and patients.” This had nothing to do with patients though I am sure the patient angle helped underscore the lies to investors.

The actual convictions didn't have anything to do with patients, but if there hadn't been a direct human safety aspect to this then I doubt it would have received as much attention, and maybe not even prosecution. I really don't think much would have happened to her if this had been an AI startup claiming to use ground breaking techniques (black box) to achieve nearly general purpose AI, when in fact they were just using bog standard methods in xgboost or TensorFlow.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#785

Post by gameswithgo » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:19 PM UTC

I wonder what parallels we can draw between Holmes and her blood testing, with Elon and full self driving. I suppose Elon has covered his bases by saying it is still a work in progress while charging for it, but he has also been saying it will be ready in about a year or two since 2016.

I think the FSD research Tesla is doing is interesting, but man I would rather all of that money gone into a carbon fiber roof or something on my model 3 instead!

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#786

Post by bb101 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

ferdowsi wrote: post #737

I'm loving reading through all of the sickening puff pieces that business/tech journalists put out about her and Theranos. It's funny to think back to 2015 and the hagiographical void still left in tech journo hearts after Steve Jobs died. https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-i... > How Elizabeth Holmes Became America's New Entrepreneurial Icon > She represents the part of entrepreneurship that…

I do feel sorry for her in a way. She was riding a treadmill of expectations. Started off slowly, probably thinking "yeah, we can do this" and by the time the treadmill was moving at light speed, it was too late to get off.

Even TED has removed her talk from YouTube. What responsibility do the media bear when their shallow hype turns out to be false and damaging to all parties?

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#787

Post by caslon » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

johnebgd wrote: post #775

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gell-Man Amnesia Effect in full effect. Will we remember when we read the next PR piece/pump and dump disguised as journalism?

No one in the media seems to still question if cryptocurrencies are serious investment assets despite little actual proven utility beyond being a speculative investment asset.

>Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud

>Speculators might make money on it, but the arguments for its usefulness fail completely.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is...

>Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history

>It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocu...

>The Great Cryptocurrency Scam

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2018/11/20/the-grea...

>Dogecoin Creator Says Crypto Is a Scam

>Jackson Palmer went on Twitter for the first time in two years to remind us that the wealthy are ruining everything—even cryptocurrency.

https://gizmodo.com/dogecoin-creator-says-crypto-is-a-scam-1...

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#788

Post by asah » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

Of course she's guilty and should get a long prison sentence.

But is it realistic to assume founders will self-police given the pressures? Or should we expect investors to look at these BIG WARNING SIGNS and do more due diligence??? Seriously, having no subject matter experts on the board etc is ridiculous and all the valley insiders knew it. One call to her thesis advisor is all the due diligence they needed to do.

Put another way, is the next Elizabeth Holmes going to be deterred by her prison sentence? Was she deterred by Bernie Madoff or 100s of others?

Again obviously they just wanted to nail her on something and didn't have enough evidence for the reason crime, which was lying to end users about their healthcare.

And obviously it's illegal and bad and wrong to lie to investors duh.

I'm just saying that perhaps we shouldn't use self-policing or the courts to solve the startup-investor-fraud problem because they're (a) ineffective, (b) we have other & better ways to solve this, (c) solution b leads to the more efficient market and therefore the greater innovation and therefore wins.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#789

Post by biztos » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

ferdowsi wrote: post #737

I'm loving reading through all of the sickening puff pieces that business/tech journalists put out about her and Theranos. It's funny to think back to 2015 and the hagiographical void still left in tech journo hearts after Steve Jobs died. https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-i... > How Elizabeth Holmes Became America's New Entrepreneurial Icon > She represents the part of entrepreneurship that…

> She only pauses in her work to run — seven miles a day.

-- Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, yes that Andreessen, writing in the New York Times Magazine about Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs with, um, no conflict of interest whatsoever I'm sure.

Turns out Palantir's Alex Karp was also "harnessing goodness through technology." No idea how she missed Adam Neumann.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/el...

[Edit: there is an implied conflict of interest in the spouse of a major venture capitalist hyping startups in a supposedly neutral publication, which is something I'm kind of surprised needs clarification, but there is also an explicit conflict of interest -- if we treat the author as a journalist anyway -- in that one of the five companies thus hyped in the linked article was an A16Z portfolio company. Sorry to anyone who thought I was implying that the Andreessens or A16Z were investors in Theranos, I assumed they were not and I didn't intend to imply that. Nor do I think it is in fact implied, but I obviously should have been clearer since people took it that way.]

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#790

Post by himinlomax » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

lbriner wrote: post #746

nathanyz wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying in both startups and even later stage companies has been way too accepted in the recent past. Granted investors should be doing better due diligence in general, but the amount of acceptable deception going on is mind blowing when you get a chance to see behind the curtain. My hope is that a precedent is set that you can boast and talk about the future, but claiming something to be true which is patently false s…

The definition of fraud is to make false representation for "gain". In many cases, lying is not automatically fraud. The burden of proof is also on the prosecution so if you claim, "Salesforce will transform your business" and someone says it doesn't then they have to prove. 1) A reasonable person would understand the statement as fact rather than hyperbole 2) You have objectively not been transformed in your busines…

> "Salesforce will transform your business" and someone says it doesn't then they have to prove.

You'd have to prove that Salesforce didn't believe they could transform your business, not that they didn't do the transformation.