Bill Atkinson has pancreatic cancer | Hacker News Reader

Bill Atkinson has pancreatic cancer

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    Request for Prayers
    November 12, 2024

    I am asking friends and well-wishers to pray for me. 
    I believe that group intention can actually make a difference.

    On October first, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Because of vascular involvement, surgery is not possible. I am taking weekly chemo treatments to shrink the tumor before surgical resection. I am tolerating the chemo pretty well, and I am in good spirits. Every day I make a point of getting out in the sun and walking with Cai and Poppy.

    I am receiving excellent care for my physical body from a team of doctors and nurses at Stanford and UCSF. I am also receiving several different modalities of holistic treatments for my emotional and spiritual health. The treatments are helping, and I am feeling much less pain now. I am even regaining a little of the weight that I lost.

    From my Iboga experience seven years ago, I know for certain that my consciousness and memories will continue after I leave my physical body. I have no existential fear of death. Actually more anticipation and curiosity.

    At 73 years, I have already lived an amazing and wonderful life. I have loved and been loved, beginning with my remarkable mother who believed in me. With my work at Apple and General Magic I am grateful that I could make positive contributions to the lives of many millions of people, and even affect the course of human evolution.

    But I want more quality time to share life and experiences with Cai and with my friends and family. My bucket list is not filled with places to travel, but instead with quality time with those I love and those who love me.

    I am living my life filled with gratitude. Each day is a special gift to be unwrapped, enjoyed, and cherished. 

    Thank you for praying for me.

    Bill Atkinson

MacPaint, QuickDraw, Hypercard, Atkinson dithering... a true legend.

Bill Atkinson stories from foklore.org

https://folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html

https://folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html

https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

https://folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

https://folklore.org/Mythical_Man_Year.html

https://folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html

also

https://www.folklore.org/MacPaint_Evolution.html

I should point out: pancreatic cancer is not a death sentence, but the prognosis is generally very bad. I lost my wife, who was half Bill's age, to the disease.

Gallbladder, an adjacent organ, is very dangerous too. I lost my wife last year, at 52. She survived just nine months from diagnosis.

I’m sorry, my friend.

You as well. The first year is hard.

I initial thought it was a weird coincidence that both him and Steve Jobs got pancreatic cancer. But then I checked and the lifetime risk of pancreatic cancer for a man is like 1:50, which is sort of insane:

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/pancreatic-cancer/about/...

Wait till you find out what the risk of Alzheimer’s is for someone over 100 years old. (Hint at 120 it’s currently estimated at around 100%)

It’s basically what disease is going to kill you first.

So I find efforts by Bryan Johnson to increase his lifespan pretty idiotic- he won’t be able to avoid the cancer and the Alzheimer’s risks as he ages - to my knowledge nothing In his routines is very effective against those.

> I find efforts by Bryan Johnson to increase his lifespan pretty idiotic- he won’t be able to avoid the cancer and the Alzheimer’s risks as he ages

At worst, he can be another data point. With enough of those, maybe someone will find a better treatment.

And working with certain chemicals can increase that a lot:

> Our meta-regression showed that pancreatic cancer risk increased by a 1% per-year increment in occupational exposure duration to chemical agents

Aside from the obvious incidences in rubber/plastics manufacturing, it's thought to hit pathologists especially hard from exposure to formaldehyde.

[0]https://academic.oup.com/occmed/article/73/4/211/7143670

When I lived in the Bay Area I was told there were some fucked up chemicals used in the production of PCBs that remained in the water from the valley's Golden Era (?). Perhaps there is something in the water then?

Depends on where in the Bay Area. SF gets water from Hetch Hetchy which is really clean. The rest of the peninsula is hit or miss. Some get water from reservoirs fed by the mountain streams which should be safe but anyone using groundwater from the Valley might be in danger.

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-...

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

Steve Jobs also had pancreatic cancer.

Quincy Jones just died from pancreatic cancer.

Jef Raskin also had pancreatic cancer.

All these people too. Hopefully someday we make an effort to cure it. We’ve made so little progress.

Randy Pausch - Last Lecture

Steve Jobs

Patrick Swayze

Sally Ride - astronaut

Piers Sellers - astronaut

Hans Rosling

Richard Hatch

Michael Landon

Bill Hicks - Comedian

Jef Raskin - Macintosh

Aretha Franklin

Luciano Pavarotti

Sharon Jones

Alan Rickman

Dizzy Gillespie

Benoit Mandelbrot

Wernher von Braun

Matt Bencke, former CEO of Mighty AI (bought by Uber in 2019).

He was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Trigger warning: https://www.wired.com/story/the-day-i-found-out-my-life-was-...

Part of the problem with pancreatic cancer is detection. Most people (like my dad) are only catching it when it is stage 3 or stage 4 and you're already way on the wrong side of the odds. If you catch pancreatic cancer as stage 1 or stage 2 in most cases the odds are basically 50/50.

The best time in history to have cancer is now, and we need to make sure that statement continues to be true for every year yet to come. Having cancer is still some of the worst news an individual can hear. And it’s nigh but inevitable; we roll the dice every second.

A lot of the issue is the hush-hush manner we treat the subject with, IMO, and the “us vs. them” mentality with the “pharma industry”. I don’t think anybody should criticize Steve for his course of treatment, but the charlatans that led him down that path. For every Steve Jobs there are thousands of Steves with a similar story.

5 year survival for pancreatic cancer is 12%

https://pancan.org/news/five-year-pancreatic-cancer-survival...

We are seeing some cancer breakthroughs but we’ve got a lot of work remaining

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-69006713.amp

The story afaict is less charlatans and more Jobs' hubris and ignoring his doctors. He has a pretty long history of questionable health decisions from what I have read.

In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid 2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is very poor; *Jobs stated that he had a rare, less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.*

Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months, in favor of alternative medicine. Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that." Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department, on the other hand, said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life ... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable ... He essentially committed suicide."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs (under Health problems)

Did not know his was neuroendocrine. But still, something or somebody led him down that path (or rather, a multitude of someones and somethings, over who-knows-what timeframe). It's sad - not because it was Steve Jobs, but because it's an example of something that in aggregate would lead to substantially less suffering if people understood what was even possible.

I've known a few smart people that died of things that they could have had a high change of not dying from if they took proper action when they first found out. For instance, I've known 2 separate Christian Scientists with (different, treatable - often curable without so much as minor surgery) Stage I or II cancers, who ended up withering away for a few years before passing.

He committed suicide, but more importantly in my view is that he needlessly used a donated organ that could have gone to someone that actually needed it. A real hero that guy.

Doctors say you must listen to doctors or you'll die. Give your money to doctors if you want to live.

Weird to see such self-destructive intellectual nihilism on Hacker News.

One needn't pay doctors to find out what they know, it's all there in the literature that can be found in a library.

Interestingly, where I am they take no money - and give the same advice. My partner just received the all-clear after detecting it early, following advice, and attacking it early. And the doctors got paid the same as if she’d never existed.

There are ways you can have an impact, even with a modest contribution. Find a high-quality research lab, like the Monje lab at Stanford, and make a direct charitable contribution. I went through a number of cancer research foundations' 990s and I was dismayed at the very small percentage of their donations that ended up going directly to cancer research. As someone whose father and mother and aunt and several uncles died of cancer, it matters a lot to me that we make progress on fighting cancer!

CAR-T cell therapies in particular seem to be curing cases previously thought incurable. Just this week we saw the Monje lab make forward progress on curing certain pediatric brain cancers!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08171-9

Leo Reporte with Atkinson on Hypercard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJKjBHCh18

Is this the reason for the current black bar?

EDIT: Maybe Thomas Kurtz? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42141761

Yes, that popped up quickly, but normally isn't that reserved for after someone has passed away?

edi: Oh, for Thomas Kurtz, another thread

[flagged]

Pancreatic cancer is something that has such a low success in treatment, it makes sense why humans would just try whatever.

I think its hard to judge folks in this situation. Most of us aren't faced with Pancreatic cancer to know what it does to the psyche.

Medicine can be reductive to the degree of the blind men and the elephant. Holisticism as a concept makes sense given that contrast.

Your reply does not deserve to be flagged. "Holistic medicine" is just one of the many rebrandings of "alternative medicine." Maybe I wouldn't have put it exactly that way, but "holistic" is definitely one of those key words that should gently sound the quackery alert. Like "herbal" and "detox" and "homeopathy" and "naturopathy" and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com