And here I thought my comments represented the ugly side of hacker news.

I personally thought the above comment provided detail and references as to why this a tough nut to crack as well as what the current promising approaches may be.

And yes, the company should be given time to prove itself.

But given that they are well-funded, and that their public face is their web site, I would think (and maybe I'm crazy) that they could provide something more interesting than a bunch of vanilla executive bios. This is an amazing area of research and this is the best they can show for it? Not impressed (so far).

I agree.

Yes, it could be seen as "If Calico hasn't even invested the time and energy necessary to build a decent and informative web presence, they're obviously not serious about what they're doing."

... but it could also be seen as "If Calico hasn't been concerned about their website, maybe that's because they're concerned about other things and have made the decision that the benefit they'd get from a website isn't worth the administrative overhead."

How can someone be both a fanboy and a shill?

Given that a fanboy is an uncritical true believer and a shill is paid to claim an opinion that they otherwise do not hold, the two terms would seem to be largely incompatible.

Well, he also was the OP of this (interesting) link, so without this "shill", you wouldn't have anywhere to put this ad hominem comment.

I don't really agree with all of what he's saying either, but at least address the content...

The content is vacuous, he vaguely dismisses any and every competing longevity research project in favour of SENS, which he has doggedly promoted throughout HN for some time.

I'm a comp. bio. PhD student so don't think this isn't a topic of interest to me, but the answer to every age related topic just isn't "here's a link to some sens promotional material". SENS has some fringe ideas and was mostly rejected by scientists as silly and founded by a charlatan, now Peter Thiel has shown an interest it's got a kind of misappropriated authenticity among those with no scientific background.

I would rather say SENS is on the edge of the mainstream. de Grey attended and SENS partially sponsored the last major aging conference this year (AGE in San Antonio). If SENS were truly a fringe organization, the conference organizers wouldn't have allowed it. SENS did start out a decade ago by making very extreme statements, but they have moderated their tone significantly since then.

It's fair to say OP is a SENS enthusiast. But, as a fellow researcher, you know that there are always differences of opinion about what avenues will be more or less fruitful in a field. That's OK, time will tell.

Personally, I'm not certain whether SENS' fundamental position -- that we should focus on engineering solutions to damage rather than identifying causes -- is correct, but it seems at least a coherent argument. Suppose OP is right: that we are wasting too much money on one rather than another. It would be a real problem, with real consequences: lives lost, and so on. Worth debating, at least.

Interesting point. Wonder where the downvote comes from? Googling the nick + sens leads to quite a lot of SENS-related comments.

I downvoted because an enthusiasm for SENS is irrelevant to the accuracy or otherwise of the points made, and commenting on it doesn't add to the conversation.

I've enquired about a link between him and SENS in the past and also received a few quick downvotes, possibly HNers don't like the tone (fair enough) but I'd suggest it's possible he is using multiple accounts.