Hacker News: yepyeppers

New comment by yepyeppers in "FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer"

yepyeppers — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:21:21 +0000

We do. There’s something like half a billion dollars spent on pancreatic cancer research annually in the United States alone. It’s a giant money pit and that’s created an enormous body of research, increased understanding of the biology of the cancer and just how insidious it is, and funded the careers of thousands of scientists, technicians, academics and administrators, but very little of all this translates into better treatment outcomes. There’s no evidence than just pouring more money into cancer research is going to give us a miracle cure. There are competing priorities starved for funding to that we know can use meaningful help. Not incidentally some of those include financial aid, medical care and quality of life assistance for the actual patients and their families, as well as prevention.

New comment by yepyeppers in "FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer"

yepyeppers — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:16:14 +0000

That’s a generalization, pancreatic cancer is often extremely lethal, depending on the type and case the survival rate can be as or more grim than glioma. Bowel and urinary cancers including kidney cancer are often very treatable and survivable when discovered due to symptoms. I don’t think it’s helpful to group all abdominal cancers as being uniquely or especially bad or late discovered. Likewise for the particularly aggressive or advanced cancers these types of announcements and trials rarely translate to major changes in prognosis. More typical if there is any positive result it looks like additional weeks or at best months of aggressive treatments rather than significant ”cure” rates.

New comment by yepyeppers in "Study reveals UnitedHealth's profit margins four times what it claimed [pdf]"

yepyeppers — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:02:07 +0000

This is contrary to GAAP and operationally false. An insurer takes on the risks including the health of the insured pool and cost changes during the covered period. An insurance BROKER or AGENCY only books commissions as revenue, but an INSURER books premium as revenue. Similarly a stock BROKER or AGENT is only acting as an agent and isn’t a party to the actual transaction they execute. Similarly for platforms, auctioneers, or other agents.

New comment by yepyeppers in "Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence"

yepyeppers — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 02:24:13 +0000

There’s also the fact that Swartz was physically trespassing and attaching unauthorized machines into networking closets to run scraping on a university network to exfiltrate the scrapes to the public, versus just scraping public facing web from the public web to train a model. That’s a little different and while the feds were heavy-handed against Swartz these computer crime laws were well known and it was less heavy handed than the hacker crackdowns of the 90s if you want to look at precedents.

New comment by yepyeppers in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

yepyeppers — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:47:26 +0000

You didn’t know about 300 million Americans?