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Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

For whatever it's worth, I came across this incredible piece in going through some of the older HN stories on Theranos[0][1], which make for absolutely mesmerizing reading now -- and a vivid reminder that HN is an important historic record!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951019

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Never forget Medman77 with the call of the century on that one in the comments.

and that is their only activity on the site too

That account was created the same day the comment was posted, most likely for the single purpose of posting the comment. Makes me think it's either an insider or someone with beef against the company.

> someone with beef against the company.

Someone who turned out to be dead right.

People create throwaway accounts to post comments all the time, so that conjecture is quite far fetched.

Please link to the comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349808

And notice how it was downvoted to near the bottom of the page. Not all of the best/well informed comments rise to the top.

At the time, that comment could easily be read as angry and irrational, posted by someone who hates on success or simply enjoys trolling. In retrospect, it’s quite possible medman77 had inside knowledge of the company.

It’s interesting to compare that against a different comment [1] made the following summer from someone with inside knowledge of the field but not of the company.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951861

By "easily", you mean "lazily". It's one thing to assume the comment is irrational, it's another thing, and even lazier thing, to assume that the commenter hates on success or enjoys trolling.

It must be uncomfortable to see that our community was fooled. But blaming a whistleblower isn't the right coping strategy.

That time was possibly the peak for using baseless accusations of sexism to counter any criticism of women, at least in the online reddit/twitter/facebook/etc sphere. The old HN threads even have some. I feel people have been gradually getting slightly braver in standing up to this.

You really don't need insider knowledge to make an assessment like that. You just have to learn what you look for when it comes to BS and be prepared to get some negative karma points for calling out companies due to the multiple social media PR companies they employ that use various reputation defense techniques.

Just because you're angry and irrational, doesn't mean that you're wrong. In fact one could argue being the only one to see the scam might itself make a lot of people angry

I upvote now and send a tiny ripple into the fabric of the universe’s karma.

medman77 only ever posted that one comment and had karma of 81 as of just now (2022-01-02T04:53Z).

Why does he have a green username? I was always under the impression that green usernames were for newly created accounts.

It was newly-created at the time the comment was posted.

The adulation for the "big names" in Theranos's board of directors is absolutely cringey to read in retrospect. No wonder Holmes managed to fool the world, it's too easy to be mesmerized by undeserved clout.

It's amazing how quickly people get fooled when they are offered money and "kickbacks" in return.

For now at least. I would use archive.org on that.

re: FN1

Fortune uses a fake "paywall". View source to see the text. Reader mode on Firefox should work. Alternatively, use AMP for text-only page. No distracting photo of Holmes pretending to to finger-pricked, just the text.

For example,

   curl  https://web.archive.org/web/20211231035501/https://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/amp/|sed -n '/<meta charset/p;/<p>/p' > 1.htm
   chrome ./1.htm

Theranos refused to publish validation studies in peer-reviewed journals. Theranos refused to sell its analysers to existing labs.

Someone else can confirm the details, but if I am not mistaken Holmes is a named inventor on almost 20 of Theranos' US patent grants, always with co-inventor(s) who had unlike Holmes finished school and worked under others to gain work/life experience. Usually, Ian Gibbons was a named co-inventor. One can interpret the facts we are given in different ways, but certainly one interpretation is that Holmes' affinity for fraud drove this man to suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gibbons_(biochemist)

"Fake it till you make it^W^W get caught"

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