PI at a cancer center here. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. Cancer is indeed not 1 disease but many countless ones. At the same time, cancer diagnoses are based on site of origin and histology (how it looks under a microscope). But often what drives a cell of one tissue toward pathogenesis is the same mutation or other molecular malfunction as a cell of another tissue type. In those cases, we can develop drugs that target that specific component and it may work across both cancer types.
Unfortunately, there are countless ways things can go wrong in cells. There are also rarely drugs that truly span a large swath of cancer types effectively. That's because even though two cancers from different sites may have the same driver, how they respond to treatments can differ. The difference in cell state may allow one of the two cancers to adapt to the treatment, such as by activating an alternative growth pathway, whereas the other cancer type's cell of origin may not have such an easy road to therapeutic escape.
Also, maybe, the fact that what cancer cells have in common, they tend to also have in common with cells that aren't cancer, and therefore make poor targets for therapies.
That's kinda a defining characteristic of cancer. It's your own cells, so your immune system doesn't recognize it as foreign and take care of it. Just about anything that targets cancer targets the non-cancerous cells it started in. Most chemotherapy boils down to "kill it all and hope the cancer dies before the non-cancer, and leaves enough non-cancer behind to keep you alive". There have been a lot of advances in targeted cancer treatments, but even most of them just selectively target the type of cell (healthy or not) that became cancerous, and do less collateral damage to "innocent" cells. It's incredibly hard to target an individual cancer, and so far impossible to target cancers broadly.
I'm no expert, but I know cancer cells promote adding blood pathways towards them, so it might be that they have an "uneven share" of the nutrients transported to them, and thus die out later than the healthy tissue.
I don't know anything about cells going dormant as a result of fasting. That sounds questionable to me. There's been some research on fasting and cancer, but there haven't been a lot of studies, and results are inconclusive. Some of the ideas sound sensible. Cancer cells are incredibly greedy and slurp up glucose as they constantly divide. The thinking is that you can starve them and slow progression, in conjunction with chemotherapy and other treatments. It's not widely supported or practiced and more study is warranted. It's hard to find real information on it, because the idea that you can miraculously cure cancer and other diseases by changes in diet is embraced by millions of anti-science crackpots, so there's a ton of disinformation and speculation out there.
So what you’re summarizing is that cancer is definitely a single disease with multiple types but there are commonalities. Which makes sense. Which is why I never bought this “we can’t cure it because it’s not one disease”. We can’t cure it because we aren’t smart enough.
> Which is why I never bought this “we can’t cure it because it’s not one disease”.
Really, in an important sense, cancer isn't one disease because cancer isn't a disease at all. It's a mechanical malfunction, kind of like having a cleft palate.
On the other hand, it is more disease-like than most mechanical malfunctions.
Perhaps you have an overly narrow definition of the word disease? Cleft palate is, in my opinion, a congenital disease. A fractured bone is also a disease.
I have a cancer, a basal cell carcinoma. Like other cancers, it's a transformed cell type with dysregulated growth. But, it's likely to be completely excised surgically, unlike pancreatic adenocarcinoma, which would likely kill me in a few months.
> Perhaps you have an overly narrow definition of the word disease?
I'm intentionally highlighting here a definition of 'disease' that is much narrower than the norm, yes.
> A fractured bone is also a disease.
On the other hand, you're trying way too hard to correct that. Nobody considers a broken bone to be a disease. A broken bone in your leg is not fundamentally different from a broken rock outside your leg, and -- more importantly -- this lack of difference is easily understood by everyone.
But while e.g. diabetes is not caused by external agents, it looks from the outside just like other types of problems that are. This leads to both types of problems being called "disease", even though the radical difference in how the problem occurs means that the treatments and ways of thinking that apply to one type are not appropriate for the other type.
Diabetes is purely mechanical, and if you take measures against it, you can suppress its effects. It will never fight back or attempt to circumvent your efforts. Malaria is purely external, and if you take measures against it, it will take countermeasures.
Cancer is an intermediate phenomenon. It is not caused by external agents. But it is alive and may respond to measures taken against it -- it consists of part of yourself 'going rogue' and becoming as malicious as an external agent.
This intermediate status suggests that approaches from either end of the "disease" spectrum might be fruitful. One of the biggest problems we have in dealing with cancer is that we want to treat it as a malign external agent to be removed from the body, as would be appropriate if it were really a disease. But while there are many effective tools to do that for diseases, they all fail badly in a couple of different ways when the "disease" is indistinguishable from the rest of your self.
I think you should maybe come up with a new word. You're heavily overloading terms that have medical definitions with your own meanings, and expounding an alternative philosophy of medicine, which is fine but shouldn't depend on semantics, perhaps.
No, they do what most cancer researchers do, which is wrap the truth around so much bullshit that you can read it however you please. I’m also not an amateur, I spent most of my PhD studying cancer drugs.
Jokes aside, there are a few natural sugar sources without fiber, like sugar cane (it has fiber, but we just spit it). I think we can all agree that eating too much honey or sugar cane juice would be bad for our health.
There's also sugars like inulin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inulin), which are actually classified as soluble fiber because we can't digest them, so the bacteria in our digestive system does it for us. Inulin is a prebiotic, so it's actually healthy to eat in moderation.
Inulins just aren't sugars. As you say, they're categorized as soluble fiber. Any definition of sugar that included inulins would include all soluble fibers.
Yeah nature does create sugar with little fiber, but it's not comparable to 1) the amount of high-fiber sources, and 2) the amount of refined industrial sugar.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I wish this ‘guideline’ or any guideline would attempt to even define what the moderation team considers to be ‘political’ because it seems like the community itself cannot agree on a universal-enough term that would apply to the types of discussions where politics and technology may intersect.
- bio startups rise, ag tech startups rise, food startups rise-- everything to do with engineering life.
- second and third tier cities rise in the US while first tier cities ebb. Places like Austin see continued growth, while cities like Baltimore and Cincinnati begin to really revitalize as local market become more important than global markets.
- mobility increases as people are less tied to their jobs/families
- Google slows on the innovation front. FB is increasingly weak as social networking just isn't as profitable anymore. Amazon keeps churning away. Netflix wins best picture at the Oscars.
- AI progress slows. The ML community fragments again. Neurips is no longer where the best ML researchers publish.
- At least one climate protest with over 5M people involved nationally, calling on Congress to act now
- China, mired in internal political upheaval, faces a lost decade. They will either no longer be one of the two biggest economies or they will be on a clear trend down but third place is a long way to fall
- twice as many people consider themselves vegetarian or vegan. Foods for this demographic have gotten much better and more diverse. Consumption of meat is still high, but the trend in 2030 will be clear: the meat industry is shrinking rapidly in the US and Canada. Other nations will lag here, meaning almost all of the innovation will happen in North America
- NYC will have built only two new subway stations
- a third political party will gain at least 5 seats in the House
- there will be a recession. Likely due to housing again. As the boomers die out, their millennial children inherit their suburban homes. Unfortunately they don't want to live in the suburbs and selling the house would pay off their student loan debt. But who is going to buy all these houses?
- political divide in the US heals, but it's not pretty and it all feels chaotic. Political parties weaken in favor of some new form of factions.
- CS undergrad enrollment declines but CS course requirements pervade nearly every STEM field. The common wisdom will now be that interdisciplinary jobs, not vanilla software engineer, are the growth sector, especially in bio/medicine/food/agriculture.
- Medicare age lowered to 50 as a transition toward single payer that will take another decade
- the world has missed its chance to avoid global warming. The schism in the debate will now be about what to do. Radical positions (open borders for mass refugees, a trillion dollar climate change R&D bill) will become more mainstream.
- Cities all over the US will be calling for federal infrastructure to build new train and tran systems, obviating the market demand for autonomous taxis. Uber and Lyft go under. Long haul autonomous vehicles are at 10% of all interstate traffic
- a common political point will be about how the US needs to stop subsidizing corn. As crops becomes more important in this decade (ag tech, rise of vegetarianism, climate change) it will be clear that corn is an over investment but political inertia will not let things change this decade.
- A dominant Canadian tech company will arise that rivals Google/FB or is at least rising rapidly
- towards the end of the decade, robotics is starting to reach the early-success stage. This will have impacts on all sectors as co-working spaces pop up with access to reprogrammable devices that can prototype commercial products. Think: Roomba for X. 2030 is still early days for this, but there's buzz, articles about robo-spaces Wired, etc.
Yes. Exactly this. Building models that assess risks and potential gains. A quant is a catch-all term though, so one person may be working on models that predict some sector of the market and another person could be looking at online allocation algorithms for maximizing risk-adjusted returns.
Twin studies have shown that at least 30% of intelligence is determined by post adoption environment. (This is a lower bound because adopters must meet a minimum bar, limiting the differences in adoption environments.) Add that with prenatal environment, and you could have differences in intelligence distributions across races entirely explained, but again, twin studies aren't enough to show that.
The problem with the idea of cheap screening tools is Bayes' theorem. If doctors go ordering this for most people since it's just a blood test, and if only 1% of people ever really have cancer when tested then the 1% false positive rate means there's only a 50/50 chance you have cancer given the test is positive.
So that's one "wasted" advanced screening for one where cancer is found. That seems great to me.
Also, I assume it would be mostly done on higher risk patients (certain work conditions, certain age, etc..). Only once in couple of years on younger population for example. Or if it's really cheap everyone could get it and then there could be more focused blood screening done next so you don't have to get full body cat scans.
It's not that simple. If the worst effect was some unnecessary secondary screening, it would be a no-brainer.
But first of all you need to account for the negative effects of a false positive, and they are much worse than that. They include anything from stress and psychological effects, cost and risks of all the additional screening, to the much worse issue that you also need to account for the fact that for some cancers in some instances it will be hard enough to determine if the growth is malignant in the sense that some proportion of cancerous growth will never pose a threat to the patient, but once diagnosed there tends to be a strong pressure to treat. As a result too frequent screening will save some, but will also result in a large amount of unnecessary chemo, radiation therapy and/or surgeries - all of which come with risks in addition to the pain and discomfort.
Then you need to account for frequency of testing. A 1% false positive rate per test looks distinctly worse if the test is repeated every year for a 10-20 year timespan, for example.
Then you'll also want to account for how much it improves outcomes. If the cancers it detects are ones that would generally be detected in time anyway, and/or have low mortality, and where treatment outcomes are good, the incremental improvement would not necessarily be big enough to justify the negatives.
For breast cancer, for example, there has in recent years been a push to reduce large scale routine mammogram screening because it's not clear if it does more good than harm for many groups of patients (in large part because it leads to overtreatment). This article goes into some of the issues related to that in some detail (and presents both proponents and detractors of large scale screening):
Wasn't there a similar argument (linked to here on HN a few years ago) against early screenings for prostate cancer using highly sensitive techniques?
If I remember correctly, the argument went like this: early screening may detect some forms of prostate cancer which, given the estimated natural lifespan of the patient, would have failed to kill/discomfort him before he died of other causes. But once it's been detected, the recommendation will be to treat the cancer; and treatment has a chance to cause discomfort (such as impotence) right now. So in effect, early detection of some forms of prostate cancer may negatively impact the quality of life of patients who would have otherwise lived a normal life without noticing the cancer.
I'm not sure the pressure to treat is a real issue. Some types of cancers (lymphoma for example) are only monitored in early stages. So if this would result in increased early detection, it might be a standard procedure to just keep an eye on the cancer, even for wider ranges. It's better than waiting for symptoms to appear (and the tendency for people to ignore the symptoms for a year before seeing a doctor).
See the link - it includes details about studies done on breast cancer for example where overtreatment is a real issue. This is not a hypothetical concern, but a concern that's significant enough that large scale screening programs have scaled back in some countries in response.
It was a real issue for relatives of mine, who had to argue down doctors ordering invasive procedures for things that over the long term turned out to be non-issues.
Except it seems there is good case law to show that in fact suspected cannot be forced to open a combination lock, as it falls under fifth amendment protection. They can, however, be compelled to provide a key if it is a key-based lock. This applies similarly to biometric-based locks.
It's hard to believe that an encryption key is any different than a combination lock in this "encryption is like a safe" metaphor.
Could it just come from our particular choice of words?
An encryption key sounds closer to a safe key than to a combination lock. A small broken analogy later, the judge rules that encryptions keys are keys, and the defendant may be compelled to provide them.
Just because we called it a a "key", instead of the more accurate "combination", or "code".
Law can be difficult because tiny nuances like this can sometimes matter. It's usually not because judges are too inept to comprehend the subject matter, but because they feel that the laws still on the books require them to undertake a stringent interpretation that has an effect most people would consider undesirable. In some highly technical cases, while judges can generally be taught the meaning, their unfamiliarity with the subject matter may cause them not to fully appreciate the effects and ramifications of some of their rulings.
Legal professionals tend to be technically minded and frequently accept conclusions that do not serve the interests of justice (except in the theoretical, abstract context of a perfectly-reflective, well-functioning republic) in order to comply with a strict reading of the text of the law.
That's a double-edged sword. It provides some protection against judges who would "legislate from the bench" (i.e., change the effects of the law based on their personal values instead of the values the community has codified through the legislature), but it also frequently restrains what would be considered a rational and fair implementation of the law in order to serve an ideological commitment to the particularities of wording.
Pretty much everything involved in attempting to create a generally applicable, fair legal system is a delicate balance. Too much familiarity with a subject and the judge can be accused of bias; too little and the judge may not understand the impact of their rulings. Too much commitment to legal wording can lead to some plainly undesirable conclusions where the real people and businesses before the judge become the collateral damage of a thought exercise, but insufficient commitment to implementing the community's values instead of one's own can lead to judges whose influence becomes oppressive or despotic. It comes down to needing judges with good judgment.
Constitutional reforms may be reasonable to modernize the system to be more responsive to the community's values and less dependent on the technicalities of outdated verbiage (the All Writs Act, which is referenced in this case, was codified into law 227 years ago), now that we live in an age of instant global communication and industrialism. Many such reforms could happen at the state level.
Gosh, compelled is such a nice euphemism for "psychologically and physically brutalized until complicit". I don't think it is right to "compel" you to produce anything, key nor combination.
I think it's pretty clear that the parent is accusing the state of using torture to coerce compliance, which is a strong indication that the state itself is no longer legitimate.
I think you make the mistake of thinking that people oppose all state violence. Many people approve of some state violence in the name of maintaining societal order, but oppose torture. And I would posit that coercive incarceration is a form of torture.
It is a mistake to believe that people are ideologically consistent. And I would be hard pressed to believe that torture is not more extreme or less legitimate than other forms of violence.
Thank you. That pretty much sums up what I was getting at. I understand the need for violence when one man attacks me or my family. And I understand the need for violence when one man attacks any human around me.
These people break the Golden Rule and remove themselves from its binding contract of being treated equally. BUT, they still deserve to be treated fairly.
Sometimes, even you can get them to see the error of their ways, and use their past to create a better future for others, and all without violence. But asking someone to give you a variable to a mathematical algorithm that he owns is absolute horse shit.
This is just a very abstract way to say that you don't like some of the things that the state has characterized as crimes. That's fine, and you can utilize the organs of representative democracy to make your will on that point known (though a world where only violent crimes are recognized, like you're suggesting, is not usually considered appealing).
However, attempting to trivialize the issue by abstracting it out to "giving a variable to a mathematical algorithm" is not persuasive. Any sort of cooperation could be extrapolated to a similar point of abstraction that makes it sound absurd; in fact, furnishing a physical key to a physical lock could be described with no modification to your terms. In that case, you're ultimately asking for the pattern needed to actuate the pins such that they stick up in the lock mechanism and cause it to disengage. That's just "providing a variable to an algorithm"; the physical key itself is an implementation detail.
If you do not believe the court should have the power to compel some types of individual cooperation with the police, you should take that up with your local legislator. The Fifth Amendment itself provides no such protection. It prohibits the government's usage of only a very specific tactic: mandatory testimonial self-incrimination. Allowing the police to execute warrants and complying with lawful orders pursuant to the state's interest in enforcing its laws is not testimony.
I'm sorry, but I didn't conduct any sort of ideological flame war. I simply stated my stance on the issue that the thread was about. Other commenters took up the mantle of twisting my words and forcing me to more clearly explain myself.
I didn't realize "gtfo" was too uncivil for HN. I generally do not use such language here, but...
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
I did not break that rule. I was not gratuitous about it and was trying to end an argument.
I understand that you think you know what this site is for, but my original comment was in line with the subject matter and was not flamewar bait.
And while I'm sure he does a fine job, I'm contesting his assessment of my motivations and insinuating that I broke any rule. You really like to drag things out. Why don't you just drop it?
>I am stating my views on state violence, and what power the state should have over others. And the state should never use violence, physical or psychological, to "compel" people to do anything.
This allows only for crimes of commission. Crimes of omission, like negligence, failure to pay taxes, etc., could not be prosecuted against this, because the state would be using its monopoly on violence to compel compliance with laws which impose affirmative requirements on individuals instead of merely enforcing laws that proscribe individual behavior.
Are you arguing only against indefinite detention on contempt charges or are you arguing against deploying state force to compel any type of active compliance?
>If they are a danger to society, then they can be locked away, but if they are not provably a danger to society in an uncompromised court of law, then that's it. Indefinite incarceration without legitimate reason is torture.
This isn't indefinite detention without reason. Habaes corpus is fully satisfied here. The government has given the detainee a rationale for his detention and, in this case, they've provided a remedy that he can employ to end his incarceration at will.
For the third time, I believe that the virtues of indefinite detention via contempt-of-court are dubious and that reforms are welcome. I'm not sure what you think you're disagreeing with here.
>Are you telling me if I have a problem with the way my state is run I should call my local Republican state representatives and not discuss my views on a mature open forum? Gtfo with that shit, this isn't your forum my dude.
Expressing your views to your state representative (not sure why the party of that representative is significant) is not mutually exclusive with expressing your views on HN. I was suggesting an option by which you could attempt to enact your views in order to clarify that those views do not reflect the current state of the law and would need legislative action to be realized. That has nothing to do with where you're allowed to express them.
If a citizen does not want to pay taxes, and if the taxes are fair and used efficiently, then they still should not be compelled but they can be denied all government aid as well as access to certain infrastructure, or possibly even deportation. None of these things compel someone to do anything.
If the person wants to live on their own, in the wild, then there is no reason our government needs to collect taxes from them. But do I believe someone should be jailed for not giving our country money annually to be spent on things they don't support? Absolutely not. I don't even agree with sales tax. Traditionally that tax is paid for by vendors, but in modern times it has been passed on to the consumer.
And this "if you don't like it, go somewhere else" mentality most folks have about things like taxes is something an abusive partner would say. Sometimes people can't feasibly go somewhere more in line with their beliefs, but they still choose to live peacefully on their own terms.
And believe me, I have attempted to communicate with my representatives and it is fruitless and now I receive spam mail I can't seem to get rid of. Even when I get direct responses, they are empty and simply say, "I get you feel this way, but this is how I feel."
It sounds like you believe the only legitimate state is one where a criminal suspect can say "no thanks" and walk away in response to a court summons or arrest warrant. What brings anyone to walk into a courtroom to face charges at all, other than the knowledge that they will be tied to a chair and wheeled in if they refuse?
Of course the state uses violence to extract compliance with social norms. That's what it's for. The much more interesting questions are about which norms it should enforce (criminal codes) using how much force (sentencing, prison conditions, police rules of engagement, etc) and subject to what controls (due process, civil rights, etc).
This seems like more a flaw in the legal systems desire to make decisions based on analogies, rather than a reason for the right to exist.
There's a public good from the right to avoid self incrimination, it's less clear what the public good of protecting people's right to keep content hidden in the face of a court order.
Your first citation has nothing to do with disclosing combinations. It's a question of whether documents that would be protected by the Fifth Amendment if they were in the clients' possession are likewise protected when they've been transferred to the clients' attorney's possession. SCOTUS ruled that the documents would've been ineligible for Fifth Amendment protection because they are evidentiary, not testimonial, so it didn't matter whether or not the attorneys or the clients physically possessed them.
Quoth Justice White from that decision:
> Within the limits imposed by the language of the Fifth Amendment, which we
> necessarily observe, the privilege truly serves privacy interests; but the Court has
> never on any ground, personal privacy included, applied the Fifth Amendment to
> prevent the otherwise proper acquisition or use of evidence which, in the Court's
> view, did not involve compelled testimonial self-incrimination of some sort.
The second case also does not involve either the disclosure of combinations or compelled opening of locks. It affirms that compelling a person to sign a document granting banks permission to transmit any account records which may exist to the government does NOT violate the Fifth Amendment because it is not testimonial self-incrimination.
The third case appears closer to the mark in that it discusses the way in which produced documentation can be employed to incriminate a witness who produced it, but that case specifically seems to involve the interaction of the statute under which the accused was granted immunity. It also deals with a witness who produced documentation pursuant to a subpoena and a grant of immunity provided in connection with that, not an accused who is the subject of the investigation.
I'm not sure where you pulled these citations, but none of them appear to have any relevance to the assertions you've made.
Some research seems to indicate that the question of whether a defendant must supply the combination to a safe has never been directly considered by the Supreme Court, though it's been mentioned, tangentially, as a distinct thing from using a key to "open a strongbox", with the implication that disclosing a combination may be protected but opening a safe with a key wouldn't be. This analogy is employed in one place in the decision issued in the third case, but it's only for illustrative effect.
I'm sure that in the not-too-distant future we'll see a case about this make it up to the Supreme Court (possibly even this one). My expectation is that SCOTUS will rule that it is proper to compel the defendant to decrypt the disks.
Unfortunately, there are countless ways things can go wrong in cells. There are also rarely drugs that truly span a large swath of cancer types effectively. That's because even though two cancers from different sites may have the same driver, how they respond to treatments can differ. The difference in cell state may allow one of the two cancers to adapt to the treatment, such as by activating an alternative growth pathway, whereas the other cancer type's cell of origin may not have such an easy road to therapeutic escape.