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Comment by BiologyRules | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed at Theranos a year ago, and found the employees to be smart and dedicated.

However, the company was the most secretive I've interviewed at and the employees complained about being overworked. The fact the founder sold C++ compilers to Chinese universities when g++ is open-source sounded odd.

But I still had hope in them even after they passed on me -- a Silicon Valley company actually making a difference in the people's health. I WANT TO BELIEVE.

If this turns out to be smokes and mirrors, I'd be very saddened. Theranos' failure would confirm what everyone interested in biotech knows but wishes wasn't true: that advancements in this field do not move at the speed of the digital economy.

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Holmes ran that business in high school. She was born in 1984, so that would put the date around 2000. There were good reasons not to use G++ in 2000. When Alexandrescu's book was published, in 2001, it was somewhat notorious on my team (shipping code on G++) for how much of it didn't work well, or at all, in G++.

Heck, virtually any C++ compiler was a big pile of sharp edges back then, by comparison to just a few years later. Especially if you dared to use it for embedded work, not so much due to the "embedded" part but just because the embedded suite compilers were just so much further behind the C++ curve.

Yep, but the commercial compilers generally had better STLs (particularly for debugging), debuggers that could properly mangle/demangle symbols, and precompiled headers --- in addition to different sets of C++ features that did or didn't work properly.

Largely true, but I recall actually isolating one chunk of code and compiling with g++ just to get halfway sane error messaging around a (IIRC) template-related error. I.e. you could do worse. The primary compiler for that code was the circa-2001 ARM tools suite. I wrote a few novels worth of feedback and bug reporting to them...

And to think I was shipping C++ software compiled during the egcs days. Of course, it compiled on IRIX, AIX, HP-UX and a few other compilers - I think some were still based on cfront - so we were using the boring, simple parts of C++ that everyone supported.

The compilers thing sounds like a made up story to give her am interesting bio. None of the news stories about it have any details.

She obviously didn't write a C++ compiler worth selling at that age in that time period , so at most it was likely some sort of off-the-shelf reselling sales gig.

Exactly what I thought when I read it. Her entire bio reads like nothing but fluff to make up for her lack of credentials or experience.

[...] a Silicon Valley company actually making a difference in the people's health.

Except, in many ways, it isn't: 'disrupting' lab blood testing[1] is far from a public health priority --just because the founder is scared of blood and thinks phlebotomies are "barbaric" doesn't make it so.

[1] As opposed to point-of-care (viz, no-lab) testing, which is a genuine public health priority: i.e. portable glucose monitors, field tests for malaria, and so on.

I don't think it's all smokes and mirrors. I think there was likely a legitimate intent. After all, everyone has been talking about using microfluidics and microliter quantity samples for assays for nearly decades. It seems like the time is right in terms of tech maturity, for these things to hit clinical reality... Why not try to be the first on the scene?

FWIW, this isn't the only company to be trying this sort of thing, there was a company in the first batch of indie.bio claiming to do this, perhaps tellingly at demo day, the attempted live demo failed.

> I don't think it's all smokes and mirrors. I think there was likely a legitimate intent.

It could have easily began with good intentions but slowly devolved into a house of cards over the course of a decade.

One reason they are so secretive is because they are trying to maintain many of their technical advances as trade secrets rather than patent them.

> maintain many of their technical advances as trade secrets rather than patent them.

That... is true about most companies. Patents are almost always strategic disclosures.

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