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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that The New York Times, where Nick Bilton worked previously, did not write any articles about Theranos/Holmes. (I checked)

The discussion about the suspiciously positive press strongly resembles uBeam (http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/26/kill-the-cord/): the wunderkind founder, the game changing product. But no practical proof of concept and a weak defense when others point out it violates the laws of physics. (http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/07/wireless-power-charger/)

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I wrote about UBeam here.[1] It's come up several times on YC, and most readers are skeptical. The megahertz ultrasound part can't work in air; attenuation goes up rapidly with frequency, which is why megahertz ultrasound isn't used much. Their patents talk about 75 KHz, which propagates OK in air.

But the sound levels they talk about are insane. Their numbers imply a few kilowatts of power going in. You do not want to be in a kilowatt sonar beam. Maybe you can't hear it, but that energy has to come out as heat,

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10420539

There's a whole lot of people who want there to be a successful female entrepreneur so badly that they're willing to give a rising star the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't help that most members of this cheerleading squad seem to have little more than a middle school level understanding of physics or biology, and no desire to dive into the science before heaping praise on the charlatan of the hour.

I really think the "woman issue" is tangential at best, and distracting at worst. The simple fact is that a good deal of tech "journalism" consists of rewriting PR pieces and very little more.

Investigative tech journalism is a very rare beast, and always seems to come from major media outlets taking an interest in tech, not tech media outlets taking an interest in actually investigating something.

I would imagine this is because its rather boring to most readers. Good investigative tech journalism often just looks like Tom's hardware or anandtech. Page after page of technical specifications and comparisons to similar products.

There already are successful female entrepreneurs. I don't see them as linked to the bad press so much as the absolutely massive amount of money sunk in the company.

I think w1ntermute's point is that ubeam, like theranos, if working as advertised has the potential to become an ultra successful company. It's not just about having another good company started by a woman...but more about a game changing technology company founded by a woman.

Yes, exactly.

I still don't see the tie to sex/gender. Yes, it's a compelling angle, but I don't see it dominating the offering as interesting. Theranos has been pitched as revolutionary without even mentioning the founder--I only learned about her long after the skepticism hit hard.

> Theranos has been pitched as revolutionary without even mentioning the founder

That is false. Almost every profile of Theranos doubles as a profile of Elizabeth, complete with photo shoots of her in her signature black turtleneck (after all, there is no actual technology to be shown) and the statement that she's the youngest self-made female billionaire.

The black turtleneck itself is no accident or coincidence. It's a carefully calculated wardrobe choice meant to invoke images of the late Steve Jobs.

I think you may have meant evoke: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/evoke.html

The attractive, charismatic female founder is what makes the story irresistible to the press. There still would have been Theranos stories in the business press if the founder had been a middle-aged guy, but the number of stories would have been smaller and the adulation would have been less.

Holmes is not attractive.

Meh. Same things would have happened if it was a stereotypical founder. I think being female is tangential.

Look, fraud and deception have been around for much longer than political correctness.

The female angle is definitely a cherry on top, but it's not the substance of the shit sundae served up by Theranos.

The problem with this indiscriminate propping up of women is that it doesn't work, or else we'd be doing this for everyone. But we live in a mostly meritocratic society because that system is better than indiscriminate merit.

So while they indiscriminately endorse any women, the women who merit endorsement more will inevitably be disenfranchised more.

Yes, there was a time briefly where the topic of 'Diversity' was the only thing the media talked about. It seems that the media sometimes get caught up in their own hype.

She was featured in this one: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/eli...

Technically that's a guest post (by Marc Andreessen's wife, where the OP already discussed the Twitter-blockings by him) and was not at the peak of the Theranos hype when the referenced New Yorker article was written.

Although that article is (misleadingly) hosted on nytimes.com, it was not published in the New York Times, but in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Also, it was written by Silicon Valley socialite Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, and not an NYT reporter.

And the author was slammed by the NYTimes editor for not disclosing conflict of interest throughout that piece (Marc Andreesen invested heavily in AirBNB through A16Z / Laura Arrillaga-Andreesen is his wife)

http://recode.net/2015/10/29/nyt-public-editor-blasts-arrill...

By the New York Times Public Editor, who isn't part of the normal editorial process - she's meant to represent the readers and handle their complaints about things like undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Which was followed by an admission of the conflict of interest in running a tech-hype story written by the wife of a wealthy VC.

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/conflict-of...

This is some incredibly bizarre reasoning from the T editor:

> it was my mistake in not asking her if there were any potential conflicts. This was an oversight on my part. I say this not as an excuse, but she is, separately from her husband, a billionaire (making her through marriage a billionaire twice over) and for that reason I think I failed to consider any monetary conflict in her case.

She assumes that rich people have no 'monetary conflict' [of interest]? What?

I think what they are saying is that she is independently wealthy - as such they didn't check into her husband in the same way they would have if she depended on him for money.

I take it that you are not claiming it is not wrong ?

Regardless of whether she depends on her husband for money, or if she was independently rich, there can still be conflict of interest.

I'm not claiming anything. It's obviously wrong, and the editor admits as such - I was just paraphrasing their reasoning behind the mistake.

The New York Times have referenced Theranos and Holmes in three separate articles discussing the company - you're not looking hard enough.

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