Thank you for actually spelling porn. This whole thing around altering spelling to avoid blocking which I presume comes out of other apps has gotten to be quite annoying.
It absolutely came from censorship. IRC chat rooms and PHPBB message boards with blacklists of words that would get starred out. Hoping it wasn't implemented with substring match so typing "shell" didn't come out "s****".
I have heard some people having luck by switching to a ketogenic diet. Here’s a paper I could find on PubMed about this. Sorry to hear about your friend.
This. It is very dependent on the type of cancer. There is a lot of research on this. For a little context, I was a pediatric neurology professor for a while, and have been on a low carb diet for a decade. Much of the department did low carb, as did much of the oncology dept. Many kids with epilepsy are put on keto as well with great effect. I did a deep dive into low carb research before starting and keeping with the diet, and found a lot about using it for cancer therapy. I'm not sure what has changed in the last 10 years, but the above abstract looks promising. With a GBM, they probably don't have much to lose. *This is not medical advice, I'm not an MD (I was a BME doing epilepsy research), have them check with their Dr.
I wish I had something better to add, but I can add an anecdotal +1 to this.
A relative went keto pretty hard after a bad diagnosis and they are still going strong. As far as I understand it, cancer cells can only function on glucose.
+1 on this. I did my thesis on Glioblastoma-related imaging stuff [1]. The state of the art at the time (~2016) was that, realistically, none of the current treatments were "great", unfortunately. In short, you have 1) surgery, 2) chemotherapy, 3) radiation. Those treatments did extend survival in studies, but the overall survival of Glioblastoma patients was (tragically) still very bad at 12-24 months, and none of those therapy options were a cure.
As a side note, I recommend the book "Being Mortal" from Atul Gawande. The TLDR here is that our healthcare systems tend to overtreat patients, especially those with cancer who actually have a rather bleak prognosis, because it's easier for a physician to simply order all treatments and tell the patient "all good here, good luck" instead of taking the time to sit down and have a (long) conversation about the bleak prognosis and which options are actually still worth it. By "worth it" I mean that there are trade-offs to each treatment option, and it takes some very careful weighing whether each one provides a net benefit for your friend's individual situation. E.g. surgery might extend survival by X months, but might also create, worst case, new disabilities. So now you're faced with the very difficult decision of whether to potentially live for a shorter time with less disabilities, or for a longer time with more. There's no perfect answer, but having this sort of discussion is a good step which many patients unfortunately never take. I think this is a failure in our healthcare systems and maybe in the education of physicians.
Now, if I personally had a Glioblastoma, on top of the standard of care (surgery probably makes sense etc.), I think the ketogenic diet would currently be my best shot. Yeah, sure.. it's mostly only case reports so essentially anecdotal evidence, but it does look promising.
I'm pretty sure that's an old myth that sugar preferentially feeds cancer cells and that you somehow starve them by reducing sugar intake. After all, the body maintains stable blood glucose levels regardless of how low your sugar intake is.
"Reducing sugar intake" is not the same thing as ketosis. I have no strong opinions on whether it would work or not, but that's an article addressing something different and more clearly a misunderstanding.
All cancer treatments are probabilistic. There are no cures, just interventions that increase survival rates. There are no honest sentences that begin with "every cancer".
There is no diet that will even intervene with cancer, unless the patient dies.
Cancer is the patient's own cell that has mutated to a point beyond apoptosis and adapted to be able to draw nutrients from cells around it. It started from just one cell. It has already evaded dietary fluctuations and adapted.
EDIT: the reason I'm a spaz about this is I feel too many people focus on diet as the focus of cancer. While it might be good for some prevention, it will not stop it, and I want people to focus on real treatments.
I'm with you on this: Anyone that rejects clinically studied treatments in favor of "alternative" treatments is an idiot.
That said, the keto diet is being studied clinically and preliminary research does seem to indicate that it has an effect. So it may be an "in addition to" treatment. That said, the news isn't entirely good:
Are you sure about this? There is data to back it up in The China Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study and mentioned in the Forks over Knives documentary. That's more about prevention, but it has a measurable impact on cancer rates, I don't see how that could be classified as no impact.
If diet stopped cancer, then the patients who eat less would see noticeable effect. This has never happened, except for maybe Otto Warburg, but even that is disputable[1].
I don't understand unreasonable positions like this.
Nobody is saying that people should stop "real" treatments or that diet must be the primary or sole focus for treatment. But given that a change of diet (a) costs nothing, (b) has no downsides, (c) potentially may work it seems strange not to do it.
Are keto diet/lifestyle changes/etc actually used by doctors for cancer treatment? Even if those were effective you can't expect cancer rates to go down until they get deployed massively
> Effect of fasting on cancer: A narrative review of scientific evidence
> Emerging evidence suggests that fasting could play a key role in cancer treatment by fostering conditions that limit cancer cells' adaptability, survival, and growth. Fasting could increase the effectiveness of cancer treatments and limit adverse events. Yet, we lack an integrated mechanistic model for how these two complicated systems interact, limiting our ability to understand, prevent, and treat cancer using fasting. Here, we review recent findings at the interface of oncology and fasting metabolism, with an emphasis on human clinical studies of intermittent fasting. We recommend combining prolonged periodic fasting with a standard conventional therapeutic approach to promote cancer-free survival, treatment efficacy and reduce side effects in cancer patients.
This paper you linked didn't solve anything. Please read it, and stop spreading misinformation:
>> However, patients may not tolerate such a CR diet for prolonged time. Therefore, as alternative, it has been proposed an intermittent fasting regimen, whose beneficial effects also appear promising though somehow controversial in preclinical settings. This will require further elucidation in controlled clinical trials.
Have you spoken to oncologists and cancer nutritionists? I have.
It seems there's some misunderstanding here. The paper doesn't claim to have solved the issue but highlights areas requiring further research, particularly controlled clinical trials to confirm the effects. Intermittent fasting is indeed a complex and debated topic, as preclinical findings often don't translate directly into clinical practice.
I appreciate that you've spoken to oncologists and cancer nutritionists—real-world expertise is invaluable in discussions like this. Could you share any insights or perspectives they provided? It could help clarify and enrich the conversation for everyone.https://pakrozee.pk/
You cannot stop cancer cells with diet alone. If you think otherwise, make your own clinical trial and publish results. I'm not spreading misinformation, instead, I'm challenging those who claim their diet can cure cancer. Copy-pasting internet links doesn't cure cancer either.
Coming back here to really thank you for this. I converted my resume into LaTex today then to pdf. Began uploading it to a few listings and where I would previously have to go back in and correct things this is no longer happening. Much thanks.
I feel it too. My kid is 6 and my most important goal right now is survive and be able to provide until he becomes a young adult. My father died right when I was 20 year old and while it was hard I managed. I can't image how hard it would've been growing up without a dad. And without a mom is probably even worse but I let moms worry about that.
Absolutely, staying alive but not being part of the child's life is not much different than being dead from their point of view. In my case I have a very good connection with my kid and spend a lot of time together, my kid gets priority over a lot of other things such as personal goals...
Yea, I find myself growing increasingly sensitive. I spent several years in Afghanistan and now the most mildest of violence even in media bothers me. I couldn’t imagine either of my sons having to go through that or anyone else’s children. Life is so incredibly precious and until proven otherwise rare.
Yeah. This really changed for me after getting a kid. The thought I hope to live long enough to see my kid do X crosses my mind on a regular basis. Makes you enjoy all of it much more, especially because a lot of things that I can see her do now, I wished to see ~10 years ago.
I don’t know if that’s true. SV culture has always been a very big tension between monied military-industrial types and (eventually also monied) antiwar hippies.
It’s well-documented in SV’s military history, as well as recently, where Apple wasn’t involved in FAA702 illegal spying on americans (PRISM) until after the famously anti-establishment Jobs died.
The SV culture seems to have shifted a bit rightward (as has the whole country, tbh) but the tension is still there, and the social conflict remains (although I think there are other factors, not the least of which is the skill and grace of @dang, that keep people on the better side of their behaviors here).
I agree with what you're saying about SV, especially the military-industrial types. I'm not entirely sure what the makeup of HN demographics is, and would like to know. I have a suspicion that it's not just folks in SV. I also should have clarified more. In my opinion, the discourse here is more civil than on other platforms. I would suggest that has something to do with a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base. So maybe not in terms of factual correctness, but certainly in terms of the ability to have a civil conversation.
At scale, the long term community civility balance point is likely dominated by the average user's willingness to change their behavior as a result of peer feedback.
The HN userbase, feedback tools, karma-level-locked tools, and new users' personalities seem to create decent outcomes.
Which is to say, if someone acts like an asshat, folks let them know (either through downvotes, flags, or replies), and they modify their behavior to be closer to the community norm.
That said, I'm aware I don't see a lot of the most egregious stuff the Good Ship Dang torpedoes. Or what I expect are non-zero repeat trolls.
And honestly, the fact is that outside of very nerdy street cred, there's little incentive to actively manage discourse for commercial purposes on HN.*
* Outside of, you know, cloudflare tailscale rust (any other crawler alarms I can trip)
That’s a rather reductionist and slightly disparaging point of view. Moderation has its place I never said it didn’t, but do you really think that moderation is the only thing keeping this place from being 4chan? I think you have one deeply entrenched opinion and are ignoring that these are very different platforms.
HN is heavily moderated through a number of mechanisms: explicit community guidelines, community moderation (through voting), and active automated and manual moderation.
I think all of this working in conjunction is why it has remained a pretty great community for almost two decades. And I think that's a really impressive feat. I don't think it was accomplished via "a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base".
Indeed, I think HN has gotten better over time, even somewhat so in absolute terms, but very starkly relative to the deterioration of everything else. For example, back in the day, when twitter was first getting big in tech, a lot of people felt that it was a healthier place to discuss those topics than HN. I was never completely convinced of that, and have always been more active here than on twitter, but it was at least a very reasonable thing to think for awhile, IMO. But now I think it would be pretty crazy to think that twitter is healthier than HN. Similarly with similar communities on reddit.
I dunno, maybe there are some healthier spaces on mastodon or blue sky or threads or something now, but at least to me, HN has maintained a fairly stable fairly decent level of discourse for a very long time, and I don't think it is a result of luck or magic, but rather of hard and tireless work moderating the community.
Yea, I’ve become more aware of this since yesterday. I also think I should have provided way more context to what I was saying. I believe I came off as being against moderation but I’m not, I do think there is something unique about the user base just from the quality of content I see compared to other spaces, but I digress. I appreciate your thoughts and it gave me something to think about.
Yeah, and I probably should have figured out a more tactful way to make the point I was making. I wanted it to be more like a "you're one of today's lucky 10,000!"[0] to point out that I think you've been swimming in water without knowing it[1], but I think it ended up just being condescending.
Last I ran the numbers, which was quite a few years ago, about 10% of HN posts were coming from IP addresses correlated to Silicon Valley (well, the Bay Area with a relatively wide radius). About 50% were coming from the US, and so on.
Thanks @dang. Turned on showdead. I will say that I was completely unaware of the moderation efforts here and appreciate having this pointed out to me. I like this option too. As far as transparency goes I don’t think it gets much better than this.
Oh, I meant on the frontpage. I am quite curious about stuff “popular” enough to make it out of newest and into the top30, but off topic/rulebreaking enough to get nuked (either by mods or by flags).
i'm not from silly valley, but its the dominant voice here.
some of my downvotes are from bad tone, overreaction, hyperbole... some are because of the silly valley culture not realising they are a bunch of deluded maniacs, or just producing absolute garbage products.
its mostly the former.
as for demographics... well, i'm a single data point, but HN has a wide reach. its why a lot of us are here imo.
Do you have showdead on? There is definite moderation going on, but a lot of it is collectively imposed (down votes, flagging). But, if you have your HN account set to show dead posts, you’ll see that even with this demographic there are still a good number of low quality posts.
I read with showdead on. I feel like people don't get modded for opinions here. Usually if the comments are dead it's because something is perceived as ad hominem, hostile, aggressive, violent, etc. It's usually the tone that gets them modded out and the content of the message, and a polite version of the same statement would stand.
There are outliers of course, but that's the general vibe.
> I feel like people don't get modded for opinions here.
Agreed. That's why I used the term "low quality". The comments that get downvoted or flagged are usually either blatant spam/trolling or rude. If someone makes a quality argument, regardless of the opinion, it generally sticks around. I'll even up-vote comments I disagree with, if the author is making a good-faith effort. Not everyone does that, but enough people do and do so often enough that it helps to keep a complete hive-mind at bay (about most topics...).
But, I think that it's that simple level of moderation (which, I consider to still be moderation) that helps to keep discourse around here civil and interesting...
Yes, there are some threads that start where you just know nothing good will come from it, and in those cases we do see some admin moderation (hi @dang!). But, even then, I think the idea is that when discussing some topics, the thread will invariably end up going sideways. Those are the topics that end to get immediately flagged. And that's okay with me, because who has time for that, when we have so many other, more interesting things to argue (civilly) about?
Do you just like collecting links to online "guides" to anything? No preference for any subject matter, just a collection of random "guides"? Interesting, you could make a guide for that!
You could say that. I have found that a lot of guides produced by folks on Hacker News to be generally interesting. Probably too much free time? Either way a guide of guides does seem like a good use of that free time.
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