Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 426 posts

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#391

Post by theshackleford »

kibibu wrote: post #141
theshackleford wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t fuse this service, but I used another after experiencing life changing health circumstances in an attempt to identify the half of the family I don’t know. Fuck me right?

Ok,i was hasty in listing fun as the only pro (although that's certainly the only reason I can think of for giving these out as Xmas presents) Only you can decide if it's worth it. I hope it was for you.

> I hope it was for you.

Ironically no, because all I got out of it at best was at best your list of pros. I already knew I was likely a european mongrel because i'm white as snow, so largely useless sadly.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#392

Post by randomNumber7 »

goosejuice wrote: post #330
randomNumber7 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why anyone would think that using soft deletion on an actual burn account function would be sensible though. When the data has value to the company and it is legal to keep it it seems very sensible to keep it (out of the perspective of s.o. acting in the interest of the company).

By burn I mean legitimate deletion, as in remove all of my data from your service. If you offer deletion of that sort then it's misleading to retain.

I understand what you mean but you don't want to understand what I wrote.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#393

Post by dkkergoog »

cloudbonsai wrote: post #48

23andMe has been in a deadlock for a while. - The CEO is effectively the control owner of the company, having 49% of the voting right. She has been trying to take the company private for some time. - Last August, she proposed to buy all the outstanding shares at $8 per share. The board rejected. She installed a new board, and submitted her proposal again at $2.53 per share. The board rejected. She tried it a third ti…

[dead]

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#394

Post by potato3732842 »

SecretDreams wrote: post #283
CharlieDigital wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you are not a malicious actor so you aren't coming up with good scams or truly malicious ideas. How about scam emails that open by asking people about their family history of some disease with a genetic marker and promising some miracle treatment? I can think of even worse outcomes depending on how policy on immigration and naturalization shifts

You've gotta think bigger. How about generic profiling by a future malicious government that only wants certain types of genomes to proceed to the next generation?

Sounds complicated. Why not just figure out which genomes are simply correlated with people who don't support you and then pay off a bunch of scientists to write a bunch of garbage so that the medical industry doesn't care for them properly.

You do that kind of stuff across enough axis and the people who ought to be leaving your supporters dangling from the overpass will be too marginalized and preoccupied to do much of anything.

You don't even need "high tech" to do this sort of stuff. Depostic regimes have been doing it for centuries.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#396

Post by jart »

dekhn wrote: post #389
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think because it was unnecessarily conspiratorial. I can’t just sequence DNA can you? Do you think government agencies are collecting your tissues?

Sure, people can sequence DNA in their garage if they want. You need to know how to do it and how to not mess up all the details if you want to get reliable data. As for government collecting samples from the environment, they (researchers funded by the government) already do that- it was used in COVID and many other places.

They have USB thumb drives for sequencing DNA nowadays: https://nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/minion You can use that toy to find out pretty much everything about anybody. This is just a technological paradigm shift that's happening. What made 23andMe different is that (a) they got YOUR consent, (b) they made the information useful to YOU. So no one here should blame the people trying to help. It's always the people trying to help who face the backlash of reactionary fear and anger. Since reactionaries never ask themselves what they're not seeing.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#397

Post by balamatom »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #248
antegamisou wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not speaking from a position of a grifter though. I don't think it's a stretch that some YC funded startup could emerge and claim that they can map and predict everyone's entire actions/personalities/characteristics through their genome, heavily misinterpreting PGS/GWAS. I don't think they would care much for scientific validity in this case. It won't matter to them if the methods used are reliable. All they'…

>It won't matter to them if the methods used are reliable. the method of being a fortune-teller? I don't see how that would ever be reliable unless we figure out voodoo kinds of tricks attacking the nervous system.

>voodoo kinds of tricks attacking the nervous system.

You mean like the art of advertisement, or more like what the extant system of social conditioning does in general?

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#398

Post by balamatom »

nomdep wrote: post #292
1oooqooq wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. fingerprinting is like denying a kid at a carnival ride with a height check. what this thread is about is denying a kid a kindergarten spot because the dna shows their height will never get them a basketball college scholarship.

Your example doesn’t make any sense, because they could do it right now: most of the kids are never going to get a basketball college scholarship, everyone knows it, including schools, and they don’t care

It's an example of a thing that doesn't make any sense.

And people are made to care about things that don't actually make any sense all the time, you just gotta set up the incentives just right.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#399

Post by dekhn »

jart wrote: post #396
dekhn wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, people can sequence DNA in their garage if they want. You need to know how to do it and how to not mess up all the details if you want to get reliable data. As for government collecting samples from the environment, they (researchers funded by the government) already do that- it was used in COVID and many other places.

They have USB thumb drives for sequencing DNA nowadays: https://nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/minion You can use that toy to find out pretty much everything about anybody. This is just a technological paradigm shift that's happening. What made 23andMe different is that (a) they got YOUR consent, (b) they made the information useful to YOU. So no one here should blame the people trying to help. It's always the pe…

I think you probably meant to reply to somebody else. I was thinking of the minion when I said "you can sequence in your garage". I was agreeing that things like airborne detection exist. I'm not blaming anybody, except Anne, who was woefully naive about the business and the science. I did try to point out that most people who try to sequence things on their own mess things up because sequencing and sequence analysis is quite tricky. Svante Paabo, who helped establish that we can sequence ancient humans, acknowledged that his first few people were really just analyzing his own sequences, as he contaminated the samples while handling them.

The minion is really quite limited- it's a convenient tool to have in the field, but nearly everybody who is doing serious sequencing is using larger, more expensive desktop machines in a lab.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#400

Post by zeroonetwothree »

ceejayoz wrote: post #376
lotsofpulp wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "easily". As I understand, it would require amending the Affordable Care Act. Assuming some rules are still being followed at the federal level.

That is well within "easily". One party controls Congress, the White House, and SCOTUS right now, and they're quite notably not showing much restraint right now.

And how many laws have they passed? Apparently it's not so easy, is it...

Congress hasn't really been functional in decades

Post reply on HN