Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

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Sometimes I think Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos and Musk are not that different.

However Musk has much stronger persistence and likability. He can keep promise things and collect money for much longer and be forgiven when delivers much less of what he promised.

I bet Theranos could have still be a thing today if Musk was the CEO instead of Holmes. Instead of failing, they would have delivered slightly smaller machines that work with about the same amount of blood but with better UI and integrated fart jokes.

That said, I don't think that Musk is a fraud. I think that he is amazing in building financial hype machines, thus capable of concentrating wealth that can be used to work on far fetched ideas. Even if he fails to deliver on the high promises, he menages to change the landscape. After all, electric cars and commercial space flight are a thing now, aren't they?

Holmes should have delivered iOT blood testing machines of regular type when being funny on Twitter and could have been fine. When asked when the 300 test from 1 drop of blood is coming, she should have always answered "I'm confident that we will have it in 2 years". Even maybe she could have sold a more expensive machine that "has the hardware to do 1 drop blood test but will be enabled with a software update later".

Holmes delivered nothing. She claimed that accurate blood tests could be done with much smaller amounts of blood and never even built a prototype that could deliver that.

Musk claimed that reusable rockets and electric cars were the future and people said those things wouldn't happen for 50 years. Now where are we? Saying that FSD is 50 years away seems like a risky bet given what musk has accomplished already.

>Holmes delivered nothing

What I am saying, she should have delivered what she could and promise to devliver better in the feature instead of failing to deliver on the promises.

She could have bought a small manufacturer with all that funding, slap a nice UI and iOT functions on top of it and deliver that. Continue to work on the original 1 drop of blood tests, maybe integrate it into the more expensive version of the machines of the manufacturer she bought, call it beta and use on own risk and the accurate version will be enabled through software update in the future.

Also, being funny on twitter could have been better strategy than imitating Steve Jobs.

I agree that not committing fraud would have gotten her into less legal trouble, but I don't know how much funding she would have got with that approach. Her whole scam was that she was the blond steve jobs of biotech. She needed to promise a "revolutionary" product was possible soon to keep that image alive.

She failed to keep the machine churning. She was not likeable and banked on being paddled by people with their own agenda(people who advocate for the women in business). She didn't have to be fraud, had she acted smarter IMHO.

The problem though is that what she was selling was complete fantasy. Tesla raised some eyebrows over whether they would be able to produce faster, better and cheaper, but the product Theranos had didn't even exist with higher costs or quality control issues; it simply was inexistant.

Theranos was fraud from beginning to end. They literally tested samples on Siemens machines and pretended that their own machines did the analysis.

I don't think that it was complete fantasy but unsolved Engineering problem. It's not like she promised something unscientific like faster than speed travel or free energy device.

Also, Tesla too failed on cost and quality control issues until they stopped failing.

Yes, she apparently faked the tests but faking till making is nothing new in SV. With all that money, she could have bought a manufacturer or lease buy and rebrand from Siemens by adding something on the top of it. Many big names start by acquiring their parts from OEMs. She could have build on top of some less known European company that sucks at the software UX, for example and keep kicking the can down for the one one drop blood tests. When asked what is going on, give a presentation about the challanges and about the work you did and say that it's going to be ready in 2 years.

Theranos's whole product concept was unscientific and far more than just an unsolved engineering problem. It is biologically impossible to get accurate results on most assays from a single finger prick drop of blood. That can work reasonably well for a few things like glucose level or positive/negative on antibodies but generally it's a dead end.

You need to add "with the current technology" at the end, and the statement will be accurate.

You can't know what a research will bring, maybe it will be discovered that you can do all these tests through some proxy measurement etc. In biology they don't deal with "laws of nature" in the same sense with the physicist, therefore everything is engineering problem since you always have the option to go above or below the biological processes.

You can't transplant a heart until you find a way to do it, you can't change genes until you find a way to do it.

There's no natural law prohibiting measuring something something from the finger that can be measured from somewhere else, it simply cannot be done with the current methods due to some process going on in the human body. The task would be to find a way around the mechanism that is preventing you doing it.

You have misunderstood the basic biology. This is not a technology issue. For most blood assays the necessary analytes are simply not present in a single finger prick drop of blood at levels that consistently correlate with venous levels. This is pretty much a law of nature and no amount of engineering or research will alter that reality.

Sounds like an engineering issue. I doubt that it's random, therefore other signals could be used to estimate at good enough accuracy. Maybe combining it with saliva or urine samples or finding a correlation with the existence or levels other chemicals etc. can give it away.

You seem to be doubling down on aggressive ignorance of human physiology. You can believe what you like but what you're proposing is simply nonsense in the general case, more akin to alchemy than anything resembling actual science or engineering.

I'm not proposing anything since we talk "in principle", not about anything specific. What I say is that the current technology is not final and anything could be possible and it is an engineering problem unless it's restrained by the fundamental laws of physics. Could be hard or impossible with the current state of the art but that's why we do research and development, aren't we?

"single finger prick drop of blood at levels that consistently correlate with venous levels" is definitely not one of the fundamental laws of nature. They may not correlate but maybe it's possible to acquire the information about the body through some other channels. It's not like there's a single way of surveying the body, right? A specific test can be impossible but another method can be develop for obtaining the same information.

In which case, it wouldn't be done through a drop of blood, as Theranos advertised. It will be done through those undiscovered "magical" means (in the sufficiently advanced levels of technology are akin to magic manner of speaking) that currently elude our understanding both technical and theoretical.

It doesn't matter how it's done. When they promise a drop of blood, what they promise is not drop of blood but a value associated with being able to do these test from drop of blood. If similar value can be delivered through other means, it would be fine. Not drop of a blood but saliva and breathing analysis? Just as good.

Blood test nerds can be disappointed, of course. I doubt that the core audience are the blood test aficionado, but you can always make them happy by saying "We are confident that the test can be done through single drop of blood in 2 years".

What you are proposing is like trying to calculate the current weather in New York based on cloud cover in Detroit. Sure you can probably find some small statistical correlation but the results won't be useful to a New Yorker trying to plan her day.

If a doctor needs the patient's current platelet count for treatment they're not going to be able to get it through a nasal swab or urine test or whatever. This is restrained by fundamental physical laws. If you're still not getting it then all I can suggest is taking a remedial biology course.

It was worse than just using siemens machines and claiming they were doing it with their own.

They were taking small amounts of blood, too small for the siemens machines and then diluting it down to increase the volume.

So not only were they passing it off as if it was their own machines, but they were providing inaccurate test results leading to incorrect diagnosis.

And I can't believe they got as far as they did with the scam because lots of experts were saying what she was claiming was not possible. Because a drop of blood is simply not large enough to get a statistical result for most things tested. It doesn't matter how amazing or sensitive your machinery is, you can't give a correct result if you simply don't have a large enough sample.

> I bet Theranos could still be a thing today if Musk was the CEO instead of Holmes.

How so? The very basis of what Holmes promised with Theranos is impossible based on current knowledge. Musk promised something that at least had a basis in reality, and could be worked on refined (not the autonomous driving, but an electric car).

Holmes just promised something arbitrary and then hoped for a scientific breakthrough.

Musk is also hoping for scientific breakthrough. When the breakthrough is not there, he says it will be there in 2 years.

What he does is nothing new, electric cars or vertically landing rockets, reusable space vehicles are not new but he is the only one who could manage to collect the funding necessary to work on these things again and be the one who is doing it with the current technology(which could end up financially sound this time).

For example, hyperloop is proving to be total BS, no roots in reality. Just look what he promised and what he delivered. The trick to keep party going on, if the party is not over you don't fail. "Hyperloop delivered nothing" is a failure, "Hyperloop delivered something that is nothing that was promised but a car in a concrete tunnel, nice CGI and a model of what it could be" is work in progress.

If you can keep the party going on for long enough, ether the technology will catch up or people will forget the original promise and accept the current delivery. Musk could end up being Tube magnate if he can keep up the funding despite not delivering on the vacuum tube hypersonic travel stuff.

> Musk is also hoping for scientific breakthrough. When the breakthrough is not there, he says it will be there in 2 years.

Yes, a lot of what he says is nonsense, like Holmes. But the difference is he also delivered big time on some of what he said. I assume many people are aware of his pie in the sky hopes for the future, but that is different from Holmes claiming she already had a technological breakthrough and succeeded in something all the other scientists with decades more experience knew wasn’t possible, and yet not providing any evidence.

Any examples of the big time deliveries? Except the stock prices and cryptocoins? I think his first big time delivery of something revolutionary is about to be StarLink.

I see quite a few people driving Teslas, and as I understand, SpaceX has successfully launched a few times.

I see a lot more driving Toyota Corollas. Making a car is not a new thing, even electric cars are nothing new.

And as for Space X, space travel is also nothing new. We have been traveling to space since 60 years and vertical landing and reusable space vehicles had been done before.

All these stuff is simply re-do of the stuff humans did in the past but failed commercially. As I said, Musk is brilliant in building commercial systems. This time we have better cheaper technology and these things can actually be feasible.

How are Corollas relevant to this discussion? If you think scaling up a car manufacturer to becoming a mainstream brand is not “delivering big time”, then I guess I will simply have to disagree.

> All these stuff is simply re-do of the stuff humans did in the past but failed commercially.

That was my point. At least some of Musks’s claims were based in reality and so he was able to deliver something. The entirety of Holmes’ claims were fictional. That’s the difference.

Becoming a mainstream brand is definitely not a big delivery on the promise that in 2 years you will tell your electric car where you want to go and it will take you there without further input from you.

As a financial delivery, sure. It turned out to be a good stock investment. So may others like AMD, Apple or GameStop. I don't argue that Musk can't make brands and money, he surely can.

You're running some very weird arguments here. Bringing costs down and volumes up are significant achievements in any industry.

Sure there were a few other electric cars out there before Tesla but nothing with 500km range that was compelling and affordable to the middle classes. There were other rockets too but SpaceX significantly reduced cost and launch frequency. Nobody had recovered an orbital rocket before SpaceX, let alone reusing it another 7 times.

I don't think that I argued against any of that, I don't know what do you expect me to say but I have to point out that the pace shuttles were re-used much more than 7 times. I'm sure that SpaceX will surpass these numbers some day, after all it's a work in progress as long as you don't accept that you failed. Space X is doing some cool stuff and spectacular videos.

The orbiters and solid boosters were but the massive external tank was not recovered. The time and complexity associated with the refurbishment of the orbiters and booters resulted in a program cost of over $1b per launch. SpaceX can launch similar sized payloads on FH for ~$150m.

nice factoid, thanks.

> Any examples of the big time deliveries?

Musk's biggest achievement is changing the Conventional Wisdom[1] of government policymakers in the west from "electric vehicles are a nice idea, but a toy for rich people" to "right, we're phasing out fossil fuel powered cars" in the space of a decade.

That is something I did not expect to see in my lifetime.

You will quibble that lots of other people did the technical work. But Musk had the public visibility.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_wisdom

That's a pretty wild statement, even if it was about Tesla instead of Musk.

Especially considering that a ton of these policies are about as old as the Tesla roadster. Must be a hell of a achievement to change policy retroactively.

The reason why we have an electronic car revolution now is because batteries have finally become cheap and dense enough. Maybe the largest manufacturer of EVs deserves some credit, but that's of course never been Tesla.

> a ton of these policies are about as old as the Tesla roadster

Then why did newspapers only report them in the last 18 months?

I don't know what newspapers you read. Even the Model S was wildly successfull by 2017. I certainly read about that car topping sales charts in Norway thanks to government subsidies in 2013 or so.

There were government subsidies for EV cars more than 18 years ago, and they were almost everywhere 18 months ago. Anyway, what newspapers report and what's the "conventional wisdom of policymakers in the west" is unrelated, if we even accept that "the west" and "conventional wisdom of policymakers" aren't nebulous constructs.

Oh, OK. There was a misunderstanding.

I was talking about announcements of government policies in various European countries to prohibit or tightly limit sales of new fossil fueled vehicles by 2030 or 2035 or similar year, not about current annual sales of vehicles.

As I said, the conventional wisdom changed from "electric vehicles are not practical" to " we must have only electric vehicles" in the space of a decade in which Tesla showed that EVs could be as practical as fossil fuel vehicles.[1] Other manufacturers (VW, Toyota, Hyundai-Kia, etc., are now scrambling to catch up.

1. Yes, the Nissan Leaf was there too, and a few others, but it/they suffered from short range and/or other compromises, so the "impractical" label remained in the minds of policymakers. And it/they suffered from undermarketing, because the makers didn't want to cannibalise their ICE vehicle sales.

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