Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | SoftTalker's commentslogin

I'm pretty much a pessimest when it comes to fighting cancer. I think it's just one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out. I say that not as a biologist or anyone who has done any work in the field. But I've seen people close to me die of cancer and it seems like the treatement is almost worse than the disease. I agree that the standard first attacks are very crude and have broad systemic side effects and the attitude seems to be "you'll die without this so that doesn't matter."

I read some stuff about mRNA treatment a while ago that seemed like it might be promising.


> seems like the treatement is almost worse than the disease.

I think that's what the poster above you was saying. "Oldschool" chemo is basically poison, and the hope is that it kills off the cancer before the patient. But there are newer drugs that are extremely effective with way way way less side effects out there, depending on which type of cancer one has. Things like immunotherapy are really effective if you happen to match their targeted types of cancer, and some have basically 0 side effects, leading to a QoL improvement if they happen to work. People have gotten nobel prizes for some of these discoveries, it's really insane how far we've come in the last 30-40 years.


> I think it's just one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out. I say that not as a biologist or anyone who has done any work in the field.

I'm just curious, do you know what the opinions about this stuff are from people that work in these fields, or that have dedicated their lives to it?


I work in this field. It’s more or less correct but kind of lacking in detail. Cancer is a property of all multicellular life. I think it’s best understood as the behavior of a dynamical system that loses the feedback control that keeps cell growth under control.

Check out this paper from the Lander lab: https://elifesciences.org/articles/61026

It’s a bit jargon heavy but it’s a nice case study in how tumor growth is controlled through all the same mechanisms that normal tissue growth uses. Even cells with an outright cancerous gene mutation are basically still just doing normal growth and development.


I am guessing: There is an evolutionary "shadow". Genes for getting old and healthy are not selected for, because you get old after having children. Evolution optimizes for the survival of your children.

Might be that cancer hits after creating offspring.


In a social species such as ours, with such a prolonged childhood, having healthy parents and grandparents is likely to affect the survival of children so there will be some selection pressure on a long life there.

I read a theory that we actually evolved cancer to ensure that something kills us.

Mortality is a feature when it comes to species level fitness. Sucks for the individual though.


Cancer is too broad of a term. Some cancers like Hodgkin's lymphoma or testicular cancer respond extremely well to treatment. Some cancers are caused by cell damage from viruses such as HPV and can be prevented by vaccines.

I get the pessimism because "curing cancer" can essentially be interpreted as "curing aging" but progress is being made.


i'm pretty much a pessimest [sic] when it comes to fighting smallpox. i think it just exploits one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out.

Not good enough, body fat contains about 35kJ per gram. So nobody with over 1lb of excess body should be allowed on board. People are known to occasionally spontaneously combust.

I thought that was proven to be people falling asleep with a cigarette in their hands and lighting a blanket on fire.

The Chinese fly internationally too. So there's some motivation to not have these in other countries.

Not really worried about the Chinese. As was pointed out, they just hang a sword of damocles over the head of every entrepreneur and engineer who even thinks about doing something like that.

What about power banks from India? Vietnam? Malaysia? Korea?

That's what I'm saying. If there are nations where you can get away with it, then those power banks can end up in Western, African or South American markets.

(I'm counting getting a fine, or paying a bribe, as getting away with it. I don't really consider those punishments that will provide sufficient deterrent.)


> What about power banks from India? Vietnam? Malaysia? Korea?

90% of powerbanks made are from mainland china. Worrying about powerbanks made outside of China is like worrying about guns made outside of the USA, theoretically possible, but those countries are so dominant and efficient in those fields that it is more of a "what if" rather than a real concern.


You can get away with it in the US, if you can get regulators to approve it.

What about tonight?

Weird post given it looks like an LLM wrote it.

I'm sick of hearing about AI, but I'm significantly more sick of anyone who knows how to write English prose at a level higher than "typical rural American" being accused of using AI to write.

Agreed. Feels like I see this accusation made on every other post on this site nowadays. And maybe it's even true.

But if it's not, it's insulting to the poster, and if it is, then who cares if people are engaging with the post.


Well that's the world we live in now.

It doesn't have to be. Comments such as yours add nothing to the conversation. It's an ad hominem attack. In the absence of explaining why you believe it "looks like AI", it's a baseless accusation

Implicit in "this post looks like AI"—at least the vast majority of the time—is that it is a wordy ramble with no real value because it says nothing novel or substantive—so I would not call it an hominem attack, but rather an honest criticism of the actual (lack of) content.

It has the typical patterns: em dashes, "it's not A, it's B" constructions. Also relatively new, low karma account, and its other comments are similarly LLM-ish.

Em dashes are—hear me out—easy for anyone who knows how to type a hyphen twice.

Looks like what you might expect in a standard marketing app from a consultancy. They probably hired someone to develop it, that shop used their standard app architecure which includes location tracking code and the other stuff.

The location tracking code is within the OneSignal SDK - which is just a standard messaging platform for sending emails/push messages to users. It doesn't have some magical permissions bypass, the app itself has to request it.

That's exactly what 45Press is. They won a 1.5mil contract to spit out this tripe (tbf the contract includes other wh.gov support).

If only the US Digital Service still existed as an agency to do this right. Too bad it's now been hollowed out to be DOGE, subject to multiple active lawsuits.

What are your taxes paying for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service


And r8 which does tree shaking to remove dead code is not smart enough to understand react native so it won't strip it out without extra work from the developer.

Cross referencing these different things in the article to other apps that exist was my first thought as these seem pretty generic and probably reused from somewhere else.


The Polish covid quarantine app was famously adapted from some app for store inspectors or something, as it already implemented most of the required functionalities, like asking for photos via push at random times, sending them along with a location etc.

They likely did a search-and-replace on the brand name, so you had strings like 'your invoices from Home Quarantine inc' in the code.

Not a bad thing per se, getting the app out the door asap was definitely a priority in that project for understandable reasons, but funny nonetheless.


  "Visit TrumpRx.gov"
Holy crap, the grift never ends! Is he even allowed to do that, use a .gov address to peddle dodgy meds?

Hatch Act won't be enforced until the next administration and next DOJ.

At least. I'm not hopeful.

The liberals (or anyone in government) don’t seem eager to punish crimes committed by their peers.

They are terrible for anything motorized though. The one in my bathroom trips every time I turn off the vent fan.

What tripping curve do your RCDs have? That is not normal if they are the right type, really sounds like something is wrong!

Parts of Chicago are nice. Vast swathes of it are best avoided.

My personal opinion is that all of San Francisco is best avoided, so I feel comfortable with my assessment even stipulating, arguendo, what you just said. :)

I lived in Chicago for about a decade, and around 2017 to 2023 I set a goal of biking to every one of the 76(?) neighborhoods. I made it to about 63. There are definitely neighborhoods rougher than others. But tbh every neighborhood has good food, and, you know, normal people living there. Like, in Garfield park I remember buying ribs from a guy that was just sorta cooking them outa the back of his truck. They were terrific. Pilsen has great Mexican food, and Devon has nuts Indian food (Ghareeb Narwaz is by far my favorite). Yeah, in some neighborhoods, on a couple of blocks there are guys out on the corner selling. But no one's bothering anyone. There's nowhere you can't go on a Saturday at 1PM. Basically, what I'm saying is, the Chicago you see on the news isn't the one I live in. So, you know, keep your wits about you, take care, but I think everyone in Chicago should go to a random neighborhood and get some food.

Ghareeb Narwaz and the cheap platters of chili chicken biryani got me through my undergrad

I've lived in some of the roughest neighborhoods there and never felt particularly unsafe walking around at all. A couple of times people dumped bodies in my yard, but I also had that problem when I lived in a really nice area too :D A couple of other times I took to my basement while there were gang shootouts happening outside my house.

There is lots of great food in Chicago. Downtown is nice to me. You can get around the whole city on bike + El (subway).

It's still my least favorite major city, though. I have no urge to live there again.


How can someone talk about a trivial experience of exploring food while acknowledging that they had bodies thrown into their yards? In both countries in Europe I lived I have never in my life seen a corpse outside of a funeral and even then. I also never heard gun shots except for hunting and never in an urban setting.

I can’t imagine having my little children suffering seeing the corpse of a dead human being and I would curse and never set foot on a land where that is normalised.


I grew up here and have lived here for the last 20 years and I have never met anybody here who could tell either of those stories. It sounds pretty made up.

Later

I should add, I have friends who grew up in Lawndale, Gage Park, and Auburn Gresham. They don't tell these stories either. Witnessing violence, lots of property crime, being fucked with by the cops, feeling threatened by gang activity, sure. Bodies dumped on their lawns? Hiding in their basement from gun fire? Not so much.


This was mostly in East Chatham, just south of Woodlawn.

Bullshit. You could drop every Chicago murder victims body for a year in east Chatham and the chances of it landing in any particular yard would be small. And clearly most murder bodies don’t end up in any yard. For it to happen multiple times is a ludicrous claim.

I lived in Woodlawn for 15 years and never heard a gunshot, more or less went to my basement.

I’m not sure what your goal is. Chicago has a gun violence problem, like many cities in the US but claiming it’s that common is just for tricking gullible Europeans or making political hay.


I assume Woodlawn was probably peppered with Shotspotters just like Chatham was, so it's odd that they would install the equipment if there were no shootings at all.

Dude there's a shotspotter a couple blocks from my house and our police discharged a sidearm in the line of duty for the first time in over 10 years last year. Nobody was dumping bodies on your lawn.

You get that we live here right? How is this argument supposed to work out for you?


If you want to do some FOIAs on the CPD to prove the veracity of my statements I might be able to find the dates since I texted my landlord both times. The police wanted the camera footage from my building, but the camera wasn't working, so it didn't help them. There was also a Shotspotter on my block, so if you FOIA all the recordings from that you'll be able to see how many times there were shots detected from it.

Because it’s an obvious troll.

Is your assessment based on no physical harm befalling you specifically? Because what you describe is objectively an unsafe environment.

Cheaper to buy huge spools of gray clad wiring than a lot of different color coded wires? Also you don't have to stock a lot of different colors for repairs.

It's common for homes especially when prepped for sale because neutral colors won't clash with whatever the potential buyer might want to bring in e.g. furniture, artwork, or other decor.

Most of the rooms in my house are painted in colors and I mostly like it but it can sometimeds feel fatiguing. I've thought about repainting in a neutral gray or green.


I get that argument, but as a counterpoint of one: Our last house we got so tired of the drabness, we used rich reds, golds, greens, and an even a bright orange in one room. It made the whole house feel so much more vibrant, it's hard to explain but it was just... pleasant to look at.

Anyways, the new owners tracked down my wife over some old mail, and during the conversation they thanked us for having painted it so vividly and said it was part of why they were drawn to it. They shared pics and they've done a -ton- of work, but the paint colors remain :)


2018 was peak chip and jojo. Every suburban chick was into grey and barn doors.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: