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Comment by akaru | Hacker News Reader

Strange hill to die on. Lots of people scam by expecting to right their wrongs in the end. Hell even Theranos may have believed with enough scam money they could eventually have made right with the tech. Still a scam. Same here. If it’s not what you’re selling, it’s a lie, and a lie is a scam.

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> Strange hill to die on

Not at all strange. The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning.

If every company is a scam(as almost everyone intentionally overhypes or does something similar to humane), then no company is a scam. Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?

I think the issue here is that arguably startup culture has _redefined_ scam to _not include_ "fake it till you make it gotta get funding" bullshit. In a previous era that stuff might arguably have been non-controversially been though of as a kind of scam. My own experience with startups is that they often hew as close to the line of scam as they can get away with and this behavior has been normalized.

This has nothing to do with startup or current times. That's why I gave example of Google. Google is not a scam in my definition but still has clearly faked gemini demo. Even Wright brothers admitted to faking a lot of news and claims before they could make real working planes.[1][2]

[1]: https://www.nps.gov/teachers/classrooms/the-wright-brothers-...

[2]: http://wright-brothers.wikidot.com/

It still counts as a scam even if someone eventually succeeds. Whether the given thing is a scam depends on whether, at the moment of utterance, the statement is a lie meant to accomplish some goal or not. It doesn't exclude the possibility that success might happen someday. This is what I mean about the bizarre morals of startup hustler types. Lying to extend your runway is still lying and normal people still think its a scam.

Do you use any word to distinguish what google did in my example vs what theranos/FTX did? Or would you put both in the same category as one small lie is same as basing existence of a company on lie.

Is this the same google that raised money under the motto “don’t do evil”?

Google raised money under the motto of:

>Digital Library, “birds of a feather” identified inside sea of information so communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way

"Highlands Forum", DLI (NSF, NASA and DARPA), MDDS program, In-Q-Tel etc

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

> The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning

Language is not something you can manipulate so easily and you absolutely cannot fight language changing, but also I promise that no one is diluting the meaning "scam".

Saying google is scam similar to theranos/FTX dilutes the word scam.

If my boss uses my social security number to get a credit card it's not "diluting" the word fraud just because SBF also did fraud at a much larger scale.

But like sure, tilt at that windmill.

No kidding. I get the sentiment but the argument doesn’t hold water. A scam is a scam. There are big scams and small. There are lies big and small too. We can even call the small ones white lies. But they are still lies.

> Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?

That video was more of a fraud than a scam, but I think we're just splitting hairs at that point.

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