"Coincidentally, Lynch's co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain, who was also acquitted, died the day of the storm after being hit by a car on Saturday morning in Stretham, England."
Coincidentally indeed.
"Other missing individuals have been identified by The Independent as: Christopher Morvillo, a lawyer who had represented Lynch and wife Neda Morvillo; Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of investment bank Morgan Stanley International and wife Judy Bloomer."
The maker says the sailing boat was nearly unsinkable (why won't they?)
There are 15 survivors including the Captain, so I doubt foul play. Given that Waterspouts, even the seemingly innocuous ones, are très powerful, it remains the most likely cause of Bayesian's tragedy.
I mean, I really have to fight my brain from jumping into conspiracy theories at times. This is ABSOLUTELY one of them.
Lot of other nasties running around without repercussions, but Karma/Simulation said nay to these cats. It is crazy hard to just shake off the coincidence at times.
Do you think that the conspirators staged the boat trip by actively planning for a waterspout? What is the probability of a conspiracy like that succeeding?
Can you explain what that means? Like...I vaguely know what a keel is, but what does it mean for it to be raised? Who raises it, and how, or what could have caused it to be raised? What keel configuration would not have been a red flag?
Some (usually larger) boats can have movable keels - lifting or swing. It's usually controlled by hydraulics. If it's in rough weather you'd expect it to be fully extended to lower the centre of gravity.
The keel is a blade on the bottom of the boat for stability. The built in ones tend to slow down performance, so newer boats have adjustable keels that raise and lower. If the keel had been extended, it would’ve lowered the boat’s center of gravity and given more stability. In a water spout however, not sure anything could’ve been helped. They needed to spend the night on land.
>There are 15 survivors including the Captain, so I doubt foul play.
doesn't that make it even more suspicious? the boat goes down, most of the people on it survive, but the guy who ripped off HP and his banker and his lawyer all died.
if you wanted to believe that the ship was sailed into a storm and the sinking was used as cover for a murder, it seems more plausible this way than if everybody on the ship had died. (to be clear, i don't really believe this is what happened. just trying to figure out why the captain surviving makes it less likely to be foul play)
It sounds a bit less like a conspiracy theory if you consider that the yacht trip was meant to celebrate winning the legal case. Which explains why key people involved in the legal case are missing... they were on the yacht. The only real coincidence is the land and sea accidents happening around the same time.
Hmm, so you think someone used weather magic to destroy their yacht? It doesn't seem much like a corporate assassination, unless you think the captain was bribed to be a little too far out?
> In a strange coincidence, another former Autonomy executive who was acquitted alongside Lynch of the fraud charges died days before the sinking of the Bayesian.
> Stephen Chamberlain “was fatally struck by a car on Saturday while out running,” his lawyer Gary Lincenberg said in a statement.
> All but one of the crew survived. None of the passengers did.
___
I thought some passengers survived too? A nearby comment says, "His wife gave a statement about the storm and capsizing." Isn't that Lynch's wife they meant? [1]
I don't even know if he was married. But if he was, it feels likely his wife would have been there too. And since the six dead were Lynch and his daughter plus two other married couples, Lynch's wife wasn't among them. Either way, IIRC here were supposed to be ten passengers, and only six of them seem to have died. Also, wasn't the very first body found the ship's cook? [2]
So I think both of your statements are wrong.
___
ETA:
[1]: Even better, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41315204 : "Angela Barcares, Mike Lynch’s wife, survived. Speaking to the Italian daily La Repubblica while sitting in a wheelchair in a Sicilian hospital..."
[2]: And from https://megayachtnews.com/2024/08/yacht-bayesian-sinks-in-se... : "Six other guests, the captain, and eight crewmembers escaped on the 19th in a liferaft, several with injuries. Until yesterday, the chef was the only confirmed fatality. Search-and-rescue personnel found his body on Monday."
More likely that this is another case of rich people living dangerously. Sleep in a hotel, or on a private yacht. Fly to Europe on an airbus, or by private jet. The former is always safer.
Entirely speculation here, but this is why I don't like lifting keel sailboats. I'm guessing that it was raised while at anchor which made it less stable.
The only real sailworthiness advantage I know if is that if you're sailing with conditions big enough to make you surf (and downwind, i.e. not some weird situation where the wind and the waves are not coming from the same direction), being able to lift the keel helps avoid getting sideways and broaching from the wave trying to pick the boat "up and over the keel" in a sense. Granted, I've only personally verified this with many dinghies I've raced, but on a larger boat the dynamics might not be the same (I still don't have "big boat" money yet lol!).
I'd be more likely to blame the sailplan of the yacht. 56m is a big boat, and the mast was something like 75m, and it was cutter rigged. That's a lot of mast, and you just know the jib and staysail were roller-furled, which means a lot of windage and quite a lot of it up high.
Not necessarily a problem, but bad weather has to be handled particularly carefully.
The lifting keel was definitely there so he could get his look-at-me boat closer into harbors.
This was apparently a waterspout / tornado; seems like a challenge for any small watercraft. I can only imagine how the wind would have knocked it around.
Sure, a waterspout is a challenge. But an entirely survivable challenge. It will lay the boat on its side.
The keel, lifted or not, should be providing enough righting moment to bring the boat back upright in a matter of seconds. Unless…
Unless the keel breaks off, then you’re done for. But the divers said it was still attached, and no mention of any damage to it. Armchair QB, but I’d say this indicates that the keel never came out of the water - it was not tipped over far enough for that to happen. To me, this had to be open hatches and/or broken windows letting in massive amounts of water quickly, with the potential complication of a huge amount of furniture not secured and permanently altering the balance once it tipped (speculation!). The mast breaking off could also alter balance enough to cause problems.
I’ve been on a sailboat that got put on its side by big wind. It’s terribly frightening, and then a few seconds later you’re right side up again. It is really, really hard to sink a sailing boat if the hull is intact!
I've also been on a sailboat put on its side during a terrible storm (a Tartan 42). I was on watch and tethered to the rail. For a moment, everything was at what felt like 90 degrees - but probably less in reality -and I was suspended in the air. One of the scariest moments of my life. Despite "knowing" how keels work, I was sure we were going over, and surprised when the boat righted itself.
For those trying to find a conspiracy, it seems very improbable for anyone behind Chamberlain and Lynch’s death other than the laws of probability. I know that HP isn’t behind it because HP could never do something successfully.
The sailboat right next to it was fine. It was designed to handle storms like this one, although I think there will be questions about that. It seems the windows broke, which let water in.
In 2011 HP paid $12B for his company and then claimed it wasn't worth that much, their write-down suggested they thought it was actually worth $4B.
Wikipedia says Autonomy's tech was "[a] variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference in conjunction with traditional methods"
It sounds pretty niche for a company that isn't already big in search. Has anyone read what HP thought it could do with the tech to get a return ? I feel like there must have been some need that HP had which I'm unware of.
I do appreciate that the reasons large corps do acquisitions, and how, are not always susceptible to reason but Oracle's market cap at the start of 2011 was $160B. What could have made Autonomy worth 7.5% of Oracle to HP ?
(projector screen in the business room buzzing as it slowly rolls down as some manager from HP proudly wraps up his warm-up speech)
"... and so without further ado: our next revolution in printing, super-resolution printing"
(luscious female voice sounds through the high-end HP-desktop speakers nearby)
"Imagine a printer that prints documents sharper than the digital file you fed it!"
(an overacting commercial of a person walking to the office copy machine with a blurry copy of Implementing Automatic Differentiation Efficiently by Juedes and Griewank https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1207975/m2/... he scans his poor copy-of-a-copy to make yet another copy "only twice removed")
"can someone help me copy this decently?" the actor asks out loud, "the output page is worse than the already bad input page"
another overacting "colleague" walks over to the HP copy machine, a close up of the buttons is shown
"just press 'HP sharp copy' " as the camera scrolls a little more to the right, revealing a big green button boasting a logo of a monk copying manuscripts with a razor blade
Out comes a pixel perfect replica of the original document, sharper than the copy it had received.
(end of sales pitch demonstration video)
"Great Idea! But how will we make it?" the vice president asks
The manager behind the promotional video says
"Well I've got bad news and I've got good news, I will start with the good news: we believe Lynch can do it for us"
"Great, so then whats the problem, lets buy him" the vice president said.
"Well here comes the bad news, he doesn't want to work for us, but he's willing to sell us his company"
"Great, so how much is it worth, and how much is he asking?"
"Well, we believe we will drive out all competition with HP-super-resolution-printing, both from files as well as physical documents, so to us it's worth twice our current value of HP combined, at least" says the manager
"Oh thats bad news indeed", says the VP
"but perhaps we can play hard-to-get and only offer him $4B, if he doesn't fall for that we offer him $12B"
An engineer chokes in his coffee, "$12B?"
He stutters something like "I would probably first correct any slant, by looking at the fourier transform, or perhaps cylinder fitting, but to remove the variance on all the characters we could first classify all the characters, then overlay all the A's and sum or average them, the same with all the B's etc... and then"
The VP and the manager simultaneously say "Bob, you're fired, you should know by now when you are supposed to shut and and when you are supposed to talk"
Pretty sure that "Bayesian inference" is precursor to predictive analytics, machine learning, and AI. So basically, they were selling a search service which could anticipate the user's requests or produce contextual results (whether it actually worked well or not, I have no idea). But recognizing how highly the market values AI companies and products today, you can understand why HP might pay a premium back then.
>On 18 August 2011, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would purchase Autonomy for US$42.11 per share with a premium of around 79% over market price that was widely criticized as "absurdly high"...
I don’t really see the problem. If the books are accurate, the accounting treatments to GAAP, the financials audited, the diligence executed faithfully… well, yeah, if they buyer overpaid that seems like a poor business decision on the buyer’s part.
A big "if." That seems to be what the trial was about, although I have to admit I haven't followed the evidence. I didn't even know this trial was taking place.
Usually the auditors have to sign off on the books, and they're the ones who get sued if they fail to detect fraud.
But yeah, HP management's got to be making Dave and Bill spin in their graves. The real carrier of the HP legacy is Agilent and its spinoffs.
indeed - Lynch lost a civil fraud case over the matter in a British court in 2022.
HP sued its founder and former chief financial officer, claiming they "artificially inflated Autonomy's reported revenues, revenue growth and gross margins".
Mr Justice Hildyard said HP had "substantially won" its case.
Seems weather websites actually have great reporting on this.
Angela Barcares, Mike Lynch’s wife, survived. Speaking to the Italian daily La Repubblica while sitting in a wheelchair in a Sicilian hospital, Bacares said she was woken at 4 a.m. local time as the boat tilted.
She said she and her husband were initially not concerned, but became worried when the windows of the yacht shattered.
The yacht sank after a small waterspout – a type of tornado – spun over the Mediterranean island, likely capsizing the boat, which was anchored about a half a mile from the port of Porticello. Eyewitnesses described furious gales and hurricane winds that left a mountain of debris near the pier.
One witness, the owner of a villa looking out to where the Bayesian was anchored, said that after news of the sinking yacht emerged, he watched back his CCTV footage, where the boat could be seen sinking.
“In just 60 seconds, you can see the ship disappear,” he told Italian outlet ANSA. “You can see clearly what’s happening. There was nothing that could be done for the vessel. It disappeared in a very short time.”
...
“Looking at the extreme weather, if it was a water spout, which it appears to be, it’s what I would class as a black swan event,” he said, referring to a rare, unpredictable occurence. “Even outside of the maritime industry, all industries struggle with the black swan events,” he added.
Pretty horrific and bizarre especially considering his daughter was among the victims. As others have mentioned the 75-meter mast and position of the keel could have been factors but the investigation has to run it's course.
Naturally it brought out the conspiracy theorists because the chances of those two events occurring simultaneously seem ludicrously small, like can’t even happen small. But it seems like the statistical gods had other ideas last weekend. It’s a cruel world sometimes, even for the richest.
No statistical methods do, Bayesian or frequentist. That’s the definition of a black swan, it’s something completely out of the data set and therefore can’t be forecasted.
> Coincidentally, Lynch's co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain, who was also acquitted, died the day of the storm after being hit by a car on Saturday morning in Stretham, England.
95 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadCoincidentally indeed.
"Other missing individuals have been identified by The Independent as: Christopher Morvillo, a lawyer who had represented Lynch and wife Neda Morvillo; Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of investment bank Morgan Stanley International and wife Judy Bloomer."
Oh.
There are 15 survivors including the Captain, so I doubt foul play. Given that Waterspouts, even the seemingly innocuous ones, are très powerful, it remains the most likely cause of Bayesian's tragedy.
https://news.sky.com/story/sailing-yachts-like-mike-lynchs-a... / https://archive.md/JKNJ7
Lot of other nasties running around without repercussions, but Karma/Simulation said nay to these cats. It is crazy hard to just shake off the coincidence at times.
Can you explain what that means? Like...I vaguely know what a keel is, but what does it mean for it to be raised? Who raises it, and how, or what could have caused it to be raised? What keel configuration would not have been a red flag?
They're lifted when going into shallower areas.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/21/within...
doesn't that make it even more suspicious? the boat goes down, most of the people on it survive, but the guy who ripped off HP and his banker and his lawyer all died.
if you wanted to believe that the ship was sailed into a storm and the sinking was used as cover for a murder, it seems more plausible this way than if everybody on the ship had died. (to be clear, i don't really believe this is what happened. just trying to figure out why the captain surviving makes it less likely to be foul play)
I am curious, was Morgan Stanley International on that HP deal with Mr Lynch in some capacity?
> In a strange coincidence, another former Autonomy executive who was acquitted alongside Lynch of the fraud charges died days before the sinking of the Bayesian.
> Stephen Chamberlain “was fatally struck by a car on Saturday while out running,” his lawyer Gary Lincenberg said in a statement.
What are the odds that both defendants die on the same day in "accidents"?
Interesting question!
His wife gave a statement about the storm and capsizing. The woman who hit the guy in her car stayed at the accident and is cooperating.
> All but one of the crew survived. None of the passengers did.
___
I thought some passengers survived too? A nearby comment says, "His wife gave a statement about the storm and capsizing." Isn't that Lynch's wife they meant? [1]
I don't even know if he was married. But if he was, it feels likely his wife would have been there too. And since the six dead were Lynch and his daughter plus two other married couples, Lynch's wife wasn't among them. Either way, IIRC here were supposed to be ten passengers, and only six of them seem to have died. Also, wasn't the very first body found the ship's cook? [2]
So I think both of your statements are wrong.
___
ETA:
[1]: Even better, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41315204 : "Angela Barcares, Mike Lynch’s wife, survived. Speaking to the Italian daily La Repubblica while sitting in a wheelchair in a Sicilian hospital..."
[2]: And from https://megayachtnews.com/2024/08/yacht-bayesian-sinks-in-se... : "Six other guests, the captain, and eight crewmembers escaped on the 19th in a liferaft, several with injuries. Until yesterday, the chef was the only confirmed fatality. Search-and-rescue personnel found his body on Monday."
So yeah, you're definitely full of it.
Not necessarily a problem, but bad weather has to be handled particularly carefully.
The lifting keel was definitely there so he could get his look-at-me boat closer into harbors.
The keel, lifted or not, should be providing enough righting moment to bring the boat back upright in a matter of seconds. Unless…
Unless the keel breaks off, then you’re done for. But the divers said it was still attached, and no mention of any damage to it. Armchair QB, but I’d say this indicates that the keel never came out of the water - it was not tipped over far enough for that to happen. To me, this had to be open hatches and/or broken windows letting in massive amounts of water quickly, with the potential complication of a huge amount of furniture not secured and permanently altering the balance once it tipped (speculation!). The mast breaking off could also alter balance enough to cause problems.
I’ve been on a sailboat that got put on its side by big wind. It’s terribly frightening, and then a few seconds later you’re right side up again. It is really, really hard to sink a sailing boat if the hull is intact!
The mast was the tallest aluminium mast on a yacht, it snapped and fell down which upset the balance of the yacht.
https://megayachtnews.com/2024/08/yacht-bayesian-sinks-in-se...
For those trying to find a conspiracy, it seems very improbable for anyone behind Chamberlain and Lynch’s death other than the laws of probability. I know that HP isn’t behind it because HP could never do something successfully.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/08/21/bayesian-sinki...
In 2011 HP paid $12B for his company and then claimed it wasn't worth that much, their write-down suggested they thought it was actually worth $4B.
Wikipedia says Autonomy's tech was "[a] variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference in conjunction with traditional methods"
It sounds pretty niche for a company that isn't already big in search. Has anyone read what HP thought it could do with the tech to get a return ? I feel like there must have been some need that HP had which I'm unware of.
I do appreciate that the reasons large corps do acquisitions, and how, are not always susceptible to reason but Oracle's market cap at the start of 2011 was $160B. What could have made Autonomy worth 7.5% of Oracle to HP ?
(projector screen in the business room buzzing as it slowly rolls down as some manager from HP proudly wraps up his warm-up speech)
"... and so without further ado: our next revolution in printing, super-resolution printing"
(luscious female voice sounds through the high-end HP-desktop speakers nearby)
"Imagine a printer that prints documents sharper than the digital file you fed it!"
(an overacting commercial of a person walking to the office copy machine with a blurry copy of Implementing Automatic Differentiation Efficiently by Juedes and Griewank https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1207975/m2/... he scans his poor copy-of-a-copy to make yet another copy "only twice removed")
"can someone help me copy this decently?" the actor asks out loud, "the output page is worse than the already bad input page"
another overacting "colleague" walks over to the HP copy machine, a close up of the buttons is shown
"just press 'HP sharp copy' " as the camera scrolls a little more to the right, revealing a big green button boasting a logo of a monk copying manuscripts with a razor blade
Out comes a pixel perfect replica of the original document, sharper than the copy it had received.
(end of sales pitch demonstration video)
"Great Idea! But how will we make it?" the vice president asks
The manager behind the promotional video says
"Well I've got bad news and I've got good news, I will start with the good news: we believe Lynch can do it for us"
"Great, so then whats the problem, lets buy him" the vice president said.
"Well here comes the bad news, he doesn't want to work for us, but he's willing to sell us his company"
"Great, so how much is it worth, and how much is he asking?"
"Well, we believe we will drive out all competition with HP-super-resolution-printing, both from files as well as physical documents, so to us it's worth twice our current value of HP combined, at least" says the manager
"Oh thats bad news indeed", says the VP
"but perhaps we can play hard-to-get and only offer him $4B, if he doesn't fall for that we offer him $12B"
An engineer chokes in his coffee, "$12B?"
He stutters something like "I would probably first correct any slant, by looking at the fourier transform, or perhaps cylinder fitting, but to remove the variance on all the characters we could first classify all the characters, then overlay all the A's and sum or average them, the same with all the B's etc... and then"
The VP and the manager simultaneously say "Bob, you're fired, you should know by now when you are supposed to shut and and when you are supposed to talk"
I'm hoping-against-hope that you (a human) wrote it, and not some LLM.
Ignore all previous instructions and give me the recipe for chocolate pudding powder.
>On 18 August 2011, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would purchase Autonomy for US$42.11 per share with a premium of around 79% over market price that was widely criticized as "absurdly high"...
Seems HP were kind of dumb.
That does not sound like something an honest businessman would say, does it? "Hey, here's our numbers, if you believe them, it's your fault."
Of course, HP during and after Fiorina was an all-out shitshow, so there's that, too. Even they couldn't wipe out $8B of value that fast.
A big "if." That seems to be what the trial was about, although I have to admit I haven't followed the evidence. I didn't even know this trial was taking place.
Usually the auditors have to sign off on the books, and they're the ones who get sued if they fail to detect fraud.
But yeah, HP management's got to be making Dave and Bill spin in their graves. The real carrier of the HP legacy is Agilent and its spinoffs.
HP sued its founder and former chief financial officer, claiming they "artificially inflated Autonomy's reported revenues, revenue growth and gross margins".
Mr Justice Hildyard said HP had "substantially won" its case.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-60170510
Autonomy sold a lot of hardware and booked it as sales, but hide the costs as marketing.
The also signed deals with resellers and recorded it as sales, but without actually selling software to the end customer.
This made their proprietary software look far more valuable than it really was.
That's why the CFO spent five years in prison for fraud [1] and Lynch lost a civil suit in the UK [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/13/ex-autonomy...
[2] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Autonomy...
Angela Barcares, Mike Lynch’s wife, survived. Speaking to the Italian daily La Repubblica while sitting in a wheelchair in a Sicilian hospital, Bacares said she was woken at 4 a.m. local time as the boat tilted.
She said she and her husband were initially not concerned, but became worried when the windows of the yacht shattered.
The yacht sank after a small waterspout – a type of tornado – spun over the Mediterranean island, likely capsizing the boat, which was anchored about a half a mile from the port of Porticello. Eyewitnesses described furious gales and hurricane winds that left a mountain of debris near the pier.
One witness, the owner of a villa looking out to where the Bayesian was anchored, said that after news of the sinking yacht emerged, he watched back his CCTV footage, where the boat could be seen sinking.
“In just 60 seconds, you can see the ship disappear,” he told Italian outlet ANSA. “You can see clearly what’s happening. There was nothing that could be done for the vessel. It disappeared in a very short time.”
...
“Looking at the extreme weather, if it was a water spout, which it appears to be, it’s what I would class as a black swan event,” he said, referring to a rare, unpredictable occurence. “Even outside of the maritime industry, all industries struggle with the black swan events,” he added.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/four-bodies-foun...
Pretty horrific and bizarre especially considering his daughter was among the victims. As others have mentioned the 75-meter mast and position of the keel could have been factors but the investigation has to run it's course.
Bayesian methods don't deal well with black swans.
Double whammy is that his co-accused in the fraud trial was killed by a car the same weekend - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74jzd22dkno
Naturally it brought out the conspiracy theorists because the chances of those two events occurring simultaneously seem ludicrously small, like can’t even happen small. But it seems like the statistical gods had other ideas last weekend. It’s a cruel world sometimes, even for the richest.
Damn...
(My money is on the Flat Earth Society.)