Hacker News: jsperx

New comment by jsperx in "World-first experimental cancer treatment paves way for clinical trial"

jsperx — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:05:34 +0000

Don’t mean to hijack this thread, but I don’t think HN has DMs. Read some of your comments and as a person with cancer would love to pick your brain a little to develop my mental model further (and of course wouldn’t expect anything for free.) Drop me a line at [my HN username] [at] nearby.org if open to discussing more. Thanks!

New comment by jsperx in "60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV"

jsperx — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 04:39:39 +0000

I was ready to quibble with whether a primary care doctor would have the most reliable statistics on this topic but I found this source, with linked study, that implies (s)he is dead on: https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/estimated-hiv-risk-exposur...

(Also estimates chances for other risk profiles, including 0% for undetectable.)

Seems like you’ve got a good doc there

New comment by jsperx in "60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV"

jsperx — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 04:34:47 +0000

This article from the NIH reviewing three large studies across heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual couples says the science is clear:

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/science-clear-...

New comment by jsperx in "Immunotherapy Is Changing Cancer Treatment Forever"

jsperx — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 23:03:01 +0000

The article has a couple paragraphs about the complexity involved in fabrication and how labor intensive it is:

“Maus walked me through some of the steps needed to create CAR-T cells for the trial. We started with the room where the DNA instructions that are added to the T cell’s genome are written. […] We went on to the lentiviral-production room, where technicians create viral vectors carrying this DNA. From there, we moved to the tissue-culture room, where the vector is mixed with normal T cells to create the CAR-T. Finally, we visited the immune-monitoring part of the lab, where lab techs assay blood draws and other samples from patients, looking for proof that the CAR-T cells have made it to their targets.”

“Jennifer Wargo, a professor of genomic medicine at MD Anderson, referred to the cost of immunotherapy treatments as ‘financial toxicity.’ The patent for June’s CAR-T therapy for leukemia is owned by Novartis, and the median cost for the treatment is $620,000. Even if drug companies don’t try to profit from these therapies, the process is inherently labor-intensive: T cells have to be removed from the patient’s own blood, genetically altered, then reinfused. It’s difficult to determine where economies of scale might kick in.”

New comment by jsperx in "Immunotherapy Is Changing Cancer Treatment Forever"

jsperx — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 20:26:21 +0000

Thank you for this, I have an extremely rare subtype of sarcoma and it’s been tough to a) find any research about it specifically and b) find high-quality resources about state of the art treatments and interventions that aren’t like, Facebook groups where people post wacky articles about homeopathic stuff or whatever.

Would love to hear about any more recommendations you or OP might have for good forums etc.

New comment by jsperx in "Immunotherapy Is Changing Cancer Treatment Forever"

jsperx — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 20:20:08 +0000

As somebody who unfortunately has a Stage IV diagnosis I have been researching mRNA and there have been promising results such as the MSK pancreatic study below, but still much to be ironed out — they had half the participants get a response but the other half nothing, even though each treatment was individually targeted and customized. They are doing a larger study now to try to see what other factors may be at play.

https://www.mskcc.org/news/can-mrna-vaccines-fight-pancreati...

New comment by jsperx in "Intermittent Fasting Linked to Heart Risk in Study Surprise"

jsperx — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 04:17:08 +0000

Seems not…the AHA article quotes a Stanford PhD: “One of those details involves the nutrient quality of the diets typical of the different subsets of participants. Without this information, it cannot be determined if nutrient density might be an alternate explanation to the findings that currently focus on the window of time for eating. Second, it needs to be emphasized that categorization into the different windows of time-restricted eating was determined on the basis of just two days of dietary intake[.]”

New comment by jsperx in "Passkeys are now enabled by default for Google users"

jsperx — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 21:25:10 +0000

I think the challenge is more coordinating the 8 people who will be a trusted part of your life long-term. Also they’d have to be sure to keep their fragments of the key intact through replacing devices, etc, no? Seems like just keeping a Yubikey in a safe deposit box would be simpler.

New comment by jsperx in "Antioxidants found to spur cancer growth and metastasis in mice"

jsperx — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 17:34:46 +0000

I just went through 6 cycles of 5-day IV chemotherapy (AIM) and I fasted for all of them, for a total of over 35 days of water-only fasting during the last 5 months. I can’t find the PubMed link right now but there were small studies that looked like healthy cells would go into kind of a suspend/preserve mode that lessened side effects, whereas cancer cells still experienced the intended cytotoxicity. I tolerated the treatments quite well, lost hair of course but only vomited twice during the whole time. Lost weight each time but was able to put it back on quickly during the following week for each cycle, though I do want to watch body composition (don’t want to trade muscle for fat).

Did it make a difference in effectiveness? I actually have my follow up scans tomorrow to find out. As you can imagine, I really really hope so.

https://news.usc.edu/29428/fasting-weakens-cancer-in-mice/

New comment by jsperx in "Why doctors hate their computers (2018)"

jsperx — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 15:34:14 +0000

What specific regulations are you referring to, that apply to EHR software and the like? I know things sold as medical devices/appliances require FDA approval, but for general electronic healthcare record systems (e.g. Epic), what applies other than of course the security/privacy provisions of HIPAA?

New comment by jsperx in "Use clean energy charging on your iPhone"

jsperx — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 18:43:23 +0000

Perhaps a data sources issue?

New comment by jsperx in "The Double Entry Counting Method (2016)"

jsperx — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 08:18:24 +0000

When I am communicating with accountants about this process the verb I use is “allocate”

New comment by jsperx in "I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard"

jsperx — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 15:17:04 +0000

I have never owned a mechanical keyboard but have been curious —- this design looks very sharp. I like the sleek heft of my MX Keys, this seems like it would be an upgrade. I do have a small quibble about the website though: the use of “Kailh©” with the copyright symbol. The name is trademarked, so could be written KAILH or Kailh® but never the ©.

New comment by jsperx in "Excision's CRISPR HIV therapy is heading into human testing after FDA clearance"

jsperx — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 23:48:20 +0000

There are long-acting (e.g. 8 weeks) injectable versions that are outperforming[1] the daily pill so that approach shows some promise. Not that anybody enjoys injections…

[1] https://www.hiv.gov/blog/long-acting-injectable-form-hiv-pre...

New comment by jsperx in "Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud"

jsperx — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 08:10:04 +0000

I believe (s)he meant an alternative to the InDesign rendering workflow that runs on Windows.

New comment by jsperx in "Operations is not Developer IT"

jsperx — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:51:08 +0000

I work in healthcare IT and many times have heard an “I’m just a nurse” dodge, and I respond in just this fashion — “Good! Then you have just the skills needed. In fact you don’t even have to diagnose the problem, just document what you did, what happened, and how that differs from what you expected.” It works pretty well.

New comment by jsperx in "Japan is holding back as the world rushes toward electric cars"

jsperx — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 19:00:01 +0000

Musk said on an earnings call they expect to open the network up to other models by the end of this year.

https://electrek.co/2021/08/18/tesla-prepping-giant-supercha...

New comment by jsperx in "Japan is holding back as the world rushes toward electric cars"

jsperx — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 17:28:37 +0000

It will be interesting to see what opening up SuperChargers to non-Tesla vehicles is going to do for availability though. I often see the sites near me full or near-full as it is.

New comment by jsperx in "Japan is holding back as the world rushes toward electric cars"

jsperx — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 17:25:20 +0000

With respect, I just don’t understand this use case. You focus on 42 miles as being a lot of range for most cases, but exclude the ~300mi range BEV because it’s… not enough?

Less than 5% of daily trips are over 30mi [1]. One study found 70+ mi trips are barely 1% of journeys [2].

Also your example of LA-SF as an example of it being a real drag on time is instead perhaps the canonical best route, for Teslas at least. That’s the corridor between where they are manufactured and their largest market, SoCal. SuperChargers are plentiful, including the super fast 250 kW version that can do 1000mi/hr (when you are at low state of charge.) It also has in the PCH a beautiful view that you’ll want to stop and take in.

So there’s no way you’ll actually spend an hour out of your way, but if you do, why would that single hour actually be material, when the trip is less than 1% of your journeys? Why pick a PHEV for your edge cases?

Rent another car for that trip. Or take a flight (SF-LA fact: that’s also the busiest airline route in the country [3] by aircraft flown; second busiest by passengers moved)

I get the whole “I probably won’t, but I like knowing I could” sense of spontaneity but it just seems a waste to have two separate propulsion systems and the associated complexity just for that.

[1] https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips [2] https://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis.php [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_ai...

New comment by jsperx in "Japan is holding back as the world rushes toward electric cars"

jsperx — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 17:00:25 +0000

Sounds like they do keep track and will invoke special modes if the gas is gonna go “stale”: https://www.cartalk.com/blogs/dear-car-talk/can-gasoline-go-...