Hacker News Reader

lakhimon Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma

you're also looking at a different, older study. Keytruda is a little strange in that it has a very long tail in survivorship, works best in certain cases, and median PFS isn't a really great metric.

lakhimon U.S. science is in chaos

make the argument explicitly. Here, I'll do it for you: doubling co2 levels should only lead to a 1c increase in temperature (~3w/m2 extra forcing).

That ignores all the other things that happen besides co2 forcing alone.

lakhimon U.S. science is in chaos

dude make an argument or dont, this kind of half assed "I know something but the man won't let me talk about it" is annoying and useless.

lakhimon New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair

enjoy https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

lakhimon Some people can't see mental images

I rely on the feeling, the sounds, the words on the sign, or by analogy to another thing. I don't remember what it looked like in the way that in a dream I believe I physically see things

lakhimon New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

Sorry about my eyes glazing over - I think you are badly underselling how important the biologicals have been in recent decades, and also how there are both revolutionary but won't be used for various reasons mostly around cost (e.g. cas9 therapies) or haven't seen the full impact for yet (car-t therapies, which are wiping out the liquid cancers that the other biologicals didn't get)

lakhimon New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

you're missing literally every biological, most antivirals, and the statins, and that's just off the top of my head.

lakhimon Cancer DNA is detectable in blood years before diagnosis

They did it by killing all the normal blood stem cells in the body. This is difficult to say the least for something that is completely systemic

lakhimon The Gutting of America's Medical Research

Its also explicit policy of the US government to encourage use of the new research done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

lakhimon A Small Violin Part Highlights Bigger Problems for the Global Economy

Think of it like an invasion - shooting people is probably as close to an absolute bad thing as you can get, but if you're getting shot at its pretty much time to start shooting back

lakhimon A Small Violin Part Highlights Bigger Problems for the Global Economy

Its not a fallacy but game theory playing out - known as beggar thy neighbour policies.

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

lakhimon Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

It's worth while reading the literature on pre-insulin treatments, but for type 1 diabetics, the answer is: you might be able to live, if just, for a while (a decade or so), but lifespans are greatly shortened. Probably depends exactly on the particular characteristics of the disease for a patient.

I thought this was a neat discussion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062586/

A transcript of a speech Joslin gave https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1827782/pdf/can...

lakhimon Tesla's 2M car Autopilot recall is now under federal scrutiny

If you sold alcohol called "Safe Drive Juice", implied in advertisement that you can drive safe while drinking it, even made you a better driver, in tweets and press releases said that this is the future and everyone should use it, and if they did they'd be safer drivers, it doesn't matter if you put a note at the bottom that said "doesn't actually let you drive safe, please don't drink and drive"

lakhimon Infected blood scandal: Children were used as 'guinea pigs' in clinical trials

Yes, that's the part here - you die without factor VIII. Its why severe hemophiliacs almost always died before factor VIII because available, and why almost 100% of them had HIV and hepC in the window between those viruses entering the blood supply and 100% testing / heat treatment (which is darkly funny because one of the trials involved was about heat treatment, seems to work for HIV but not for hepC).

From what I can tell, the issue is twofold: Informed consent, of which there was very little, but that's not exactly rare until recently, and running the trials on "marginal cases" - hemophilia comes in differing severity, and given the risks of using known contaminated factor VIII using it unless necessary probably wasn't the best idea.

lakhimon U.S. payrolls rose 199,000 in November, unemployment rate falls to 3.7%

you act like these numbers are hard to find: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

lakhimon Mold Course

please don't randomly dose maois because someone on the internet said so. Talk to a doctor.

Also, for whatever its worth house molds (black molds) are not the same as the fungi that infect us (like candida sp.), and if you somehow did get infected with a fungus that usually isn't part of our flora (like aspergillus does), you have a very severe underlying medical condition and need medical attention immediately.

lakhimon Urgent appeal to get flu jab after virus killed more than Covid last winter

No. Covid 2020-2022 absolutely blew seasonal influenza out of the water. Flu came back winter of 2022 but was still vastly outnumbered about three to one. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2022-2023/NCHS3...

lakhimon America Hit Its Debt Limit, Setting Up Bitter Fiscal Fight

Need a filibuster proof majority which they didn't have.

lakhimon Lung cancer rates by state, 2017

Map of roughly risk of radon: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-07/documents/zo...

Given that lung cancer is driven by a) smoking, then b) radon, one would expect some level of correlation here.

lakhimon Theater of Shame – The rise of online humiliation

Generally, children don't have gender affirming surgery at all, as there really isn't any need. Mostly, you tend to have puberty blockers at best, something that's relatively benign and reversible, and from what I'm aware its not given out lightly just for shits and giggles. It's life altering, but in a good way generally.

So it took me a fair bit of time to actually read what children's boston rather than just accept what you said as true, minutes of my life I won't get back. Enjoy!

>>The center currently offers vaginoplasty, metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, chest reconstruction, breast augmentation, facial harmonization and other gender affirmation surgeries to eligible patients. We are guided by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards and other criteria to surgically treat people who are stable in their gender identity and have documentation of persistent gender dysphoria. You do not need to be a GeMS patient to have surgery at the center. All genital surgeries are only performed on patients age 18 and older.

lakhimon The money is the message

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

If you look at a chart like this, and think: hmm, this is probably fine, you've completely lost the plot. Something is going to happen from this, and its probably not going to be fun.

lakhimon The future of privacy rights in a post-Roe world

You could read Roe instead of asking?

lakhimon Emeryville, California, and the challenge of cleaning up poisoned land

My friend, the right thing to do is not half ass dispose of extremely toxic chemicals in a relatively populated area. It's the municipal equivalent of burying a land mine in your back yard, and putting a note in your deed that its there.

lakhimon Apple removes Python 2.7 in macOS 12.3 beta

Python2.7 was supposed to be EOL in 2015(!). It was released in 2010. It had 10 years of support mainline.

lakhimon CDC reports increase in human rabies cases linked to bats in the U.S.

One of the more interesting government programs is the national rabies management program: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/oral_rabies/downl...

which attempts to keep rabies out of the squirrel population in the west by vaccinating the Appalachian ridge (and to a lesser extent other borders).