Hacker News Reader

Well, in a study that only tests on cancer patients, there are no negative examples to wrongly be classified as positive. That's for the second study (mentioned in the article) to show.

Still, this would be great, probably combined with (nearly) equally simple follow-up tests.

View on HN

False positive rate seems pretty key, or the test could be testing for brunettes where 70% of the population is brunette.

they can falsely diagnose the wrong type of cancer?

This test is probably not being used for "what kind of cancer" but as a cheap and easy way for yearly/bi-yearly tests of the general population as part of prevention.

With a 1% false positive rate that won't work I guess. False positive rate needs to be much smaller.

I don't think they do. If someone tests positive, I imagine the next step would be to do more thorough (and expensive, and time-consuming) tests and find out for sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com