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When Hewlett-Packard Co agreed to buy British software company Autonomy in August last year for $11.1 billion, two well-known investors made diametrically different bets on how the big deal would play out. To short seller Jim Chanos, who had been raising red flags on Autonomy for years and had started shorting shares of HP in 2011, the deal was another nail in the coffin of the Silicon Valley tech giant, according to a source familiar with his thinking.