“It seems from those comments there that a lot of people on here were quite sceptical to their methods from the start.”
This is no different for literally every HN post.
This is no different for literally every HN post.
- You can't trust scientific press releases at face value.
- You definitely can't trust science reporting in media, or any kind of reporting for that fact (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect).
- You can't trust companies not to oversell themselves, in particular startups like this, you never take them at face value.
People are much less cynical when a company is open about what it's going to do and how, talking science and engineering instead of marketing & PR bullshit.
In this particular case I think the criticism was warranted, even if you try to only consider what was known at the time. "We are a new startup led by an inexperienced yougester and we have a product that does everything better and cheaper than the industry standard but we won't peer review" seems like a huge red flag. The Forbes fluff piece with strange and rather dubious claims regarding the level of skills of the founder adds a second layer of redflagging on top of that.