Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zarkonnen | Hacker News Reader

Hm, this is at best utterly misleading and at worst a scam.

This is a bad HN comment, not because it's skeptical, but because it has no substance.

An example of a much better comment expressing skepticism is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697876.

Fair point. I was going to get my GF, who actually did spectroscopy and mass spectroscopy as a job at one point, to pitch in. Will do so now.

Interesting that your comment was voted down! How many backers have ever done any spectroscopy? For that matter, how many of those commenting here have done any serious spectroscopy? I have to agree, this seems very misleading.

I did not down vote, but maybe it is because there is no extra information.

Two people have mentioned the possibility of a scam, but there is no additional information as to what indicates that it might be. I don't know enough about chemistry to make an educated guess. It would be nice to know why others think this may be the case.

All the other pocket-scanner devices appear to be scams, and this one doesn't have anything to distinguish itself from those.

I'll find a few links.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668156#up_7668688

Different device http://pando.com/2014/04/04/revealed-healbe-isnt-indiegogos-...

It would be nice if you said why you think this.

I have some experience with fluorescence spectrocopy, to me it seems that if you do a proper control as the first step and then a sweep of wavelengths, look at the reflected and scattered light you can certainly get a lot of info. It doesn't seem like they do a wavelength scan though. But they do look at the spectrum (they say in the movie), do they just excite with one wavelength? Which one? The lack of any information on the inner workings is annoying.

A very big shame though that they don't say anything about the raw data. One could imaging many things (authentication? pollution measurements? ITTT kind of stuff) people could build for this.

I know one of their employees, she's a very close friend. I know nothing of their technology and nothing of the field, but I'm sure it's not a scam.

A scam doesn't require everyone involved at all levels to be complicit, or even to fail to do due diligence.

(This whole thing strikes me as "too good to be true." Note how they put media claims above their own claims.)

You're right about that, I'm just putting it out there that they're not a scam in the sense of "a fake company that's built just to fleece people on Kickstarter without having anything real behind it", which is what some people mean. That's also the kind of "scam" I heard when people discussed other projects like this.

How do you figure?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com