Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

sytse.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 285 posts

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#71

Post by Fordec »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #46

(slightly sarcastic) So we should give rich people diseases so they are incentivized to fund medical research? Sid seems like a decent person. I'm glad that he's able to push cancer research forward on his own. Hopefully his work will make things better for everyone else with bone cancer. Seems like that is well under way. (and I guess I should recognize that he funded a cancer treatment company years before he knew…

In individualistic societies, the cultural motivation isn't going to come in the name of collective action. In the era of how much state funding of state driven science in the US is being pulled, you're 100% correct that all that will be funded will be rich people looking to cure themselves. But just because it's factually correct, doesn't mean it's not an indictment of the society we've built.

mRNA research, first discovered in the 1960s, couldn't get much funding for years/decades and had to scrimp through what they had. And then it got a burst in funding and was publicly available in a year.

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#72

Post by crote »

perch56 wrote: post #26
chaps wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friend, $3B is unfathomable wealth for an individual.

I can fathom 3B, I can’t fathom 300B

Quick, without doing any kind of Googling or calculation: if I asked you to count 3B grains of rice by hand, how long would that take you? How big would that pile of rice be? How long would it take you to eat it?

A billion is already unfathomably large. If you think it isn't, you just haven't tried imagining what a billion of anything would be like.

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#73

Post by georgemcbay »

melling wrote: post #48
parsimo2010 wrote: post #46

(slightly sarcastic) So we should give rich people diseases so they are incentivized to fund medical research? Sid seems like a decent person. I'm glad that he's able to push cancer research forward on his own. Hopefully his work will make things better for everyone else with bone cancer. Seems like that is well under way. (and I guess I should recognize that he funded a cancer treatment company years before he knew…

Why can’t we just ask our governments to spend more on research? Want some rich person to donate $100 billion on cancer research? The US government and European governments could find that amount of money every year.

> The US government [...] could find that amount of money every year.

Sorry, that money is already earmarked for killing Iranian school girls and funding a gestapo to terrorize immigrants and American citizens. Ain't got enough left over after we cover those essentials.

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#74

Post by MindTwister »

appstorelottery wrote: post #40

This is the most supremely motivating post I've seen in a long time. I know what it is to be diagnosed with cancer, being rushed to surgery - it's amazing how quickly the medical-industrial complex can move once you've got a diagnosis (at least in Australia). I had a short period of contemplating terminally, because cancer claimed the life of most of my family. Thankfully, after surgery it was gone. To see Sid use hi…

Several years ago I was doing advertising websites, one of our customers was (Pfizer? Bayer? both were customers) they had developed a drug against Dupuytren's contracture[1] and apparently found it effective enough against Peyronie's that we were asked to create a website describing this (possibly off label) use of that drug.

Honestly I have no idea if it was effective or not, nor do I know anything about the side effects, but just in case you were unaware of that particular option I want to put it out there.

From what I can find, doing an online search along that path it might have been Xiaflex/Xiapex by Pfizer.

(Not paid by anyone in this particular business anymore, just remembered it when I read your comment).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupuytren%27s_contracture

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#75

Post by HorizonXP »

menno-sh wrote: post #15

There's a crazy story in here where Sytse invested in a click chemistry cancer research startup (Shasqi) in 2017 and ends up becoming a customer six years later. I sincerely hope it works out for him.

Also helps we were all batchmates in W15, so the serendipity is even higher.

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#76

Post by dasil003 »

fumeux_fume wrote: post #28

The linked post about his treatment is basically a vanity article; low in useful information, but high in vague assertions and platitudes. There's also a link to a post griping about the red tape someone experienced while trying to self-treat their dog's cancer that's weird. I clearly live in a different world than these people.

It's wild to me to hear this being spun as vanity, like it's some influencer clickbait or linkedin slop. You could argue anyone posting anything online is driven by vanity, but in this case we're talking about someone who took agency in his own medical outcome, and essentially experimented on himself. Sure it was selfish in the sense that he didn't want to die and he bent all his effort and resources to it, so what? I don't see exercising ones will-to-live in this way being a huge moral gray area. Other commenters are saying why don't we fund more research? Well sure we should do that too, but it's important to recognize that the type of approach he took here only works because it was one individual willing to combine a significant amount of personal effort with his own moral authority to try out risky things on himself. Even with orders of magnitude more funding, you can't ethically do this kind of thing without the consent of the patients, and there's not enough data on these types of approaches to adequately describe the risks to patients if they aren't specifically motivated to lean into the details like this guy did.

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#77

Post by appstorelottery »

MindTwister wrote: post #74
appstorelottery wrote: post #40

This is the most supremely motivating post I've seen in a long time. I know what it is to be diagnosed with cancer, being rushed to surgery - it's amazing how quickly the medical-industrial complex can move once you've got a diagnosis (at least in Australia). I had a short period of contemplating terminally, because cancer claimed the life of most of my family. Thankfully, after surgery it was gone. To see Sid use hi…

Several years ago I was doing advertising websites, one of our customers was (Pfizer? Bayer? both were customers) they had developed a drug against Dupuytren's contracture[1] and apparently found it effective enough against Peyronie's that we were asked to create a website describing this (possibly off label) use of that drug. Honestly I have no idea if it was effective or not, nor do I know anything about the side e…

Thanks for your comment. I'm aware of Xiaflex, and it's been clinically proven to work against early-stage Peyronies. When the disease has reached the chronic phase (and calcified) - Xiaflex hasn't been clinically proven. Xiaflex is now on-label for treating Peyronies.

My mistake wasn't acting earlier, because I had no idea what was happening. But thank you again for your comment. Thank you!

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#78

Post by appstorelottery »

elric wrote: post #63
appstorelottery wrote: post #40

This is the most supremely motivating post I've seen in a long time. I know what it is to be diagnosed with cancer, being rushed to surgery - it's amazing how quickly the medical-industrial complex can move once you've got a diagnosis (at least in Australia). I had a short period of contemplating terminally, because cancer claimed the life of most of my family. Thankfully, after surgery it was gone. To see Sid use hi…

I commend you for speaking openly about Peyronie's, I imagine that isn't always an easy thing to do (or to deal with). Best of luck, and I hope you manage to make progress with it. Effective treatment wouldn't get as much airtime as effectice cancer treatments, but it would certainly have a positive effect on the lives of millions of men.

You are right on the mark. What triggered me was the slide in Sid's presentation: "Assessing Fibroblast Content of Tumor". Peyronie's is all about Fibroblasts. I actually typed my reply quite a few times, deleting mention of Peyronies and retyping it. It's a shameful condition for me, and I realize that I have to get over this. Peyronie's affects 1% to 20% of men, primarily because it's (if you're anything like me) - is impossible to talk about.

Again, you're completely right. Talking about the disease is the first step.

Re: Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

#80

Post by miki123211 »

declan_roberts wrote: post #50
melling wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t we just ask our governments to spend more on research? Want some rich person to donate $100 billion on cancer research? The US government and European governments could find that amount of money every year.

The United States and world spend huge amounts of money on this, not even to mention the enormous amounts of private research. The takeaway here is getting money into the hands of smarter and more motivated people.

It's a problem of incentives.

Governments have a limited (although large) budget, and no incentive to spend it well[1]. You don't get promoted as a government administrator if you approve a Nobel-prize-winning grannt.

If you don't get rewarded for good work but may get punished for taking risks, you optimize for risk minimization, even if this means a lot of potentially-good work not getting done.

Nobody blames the FDA when millions of people die from the-medicine-hasn't-been-invented-yet-itis, everybody blames the FDA when ten or so people die from a side effect nobody saw. This impacts FDA policy.

This person has the best incentive there is in the world, the incentive to live. He didn't care whether the people getting his money correctly filled form 437-F, or whether they have the relevant paperwork that verifies their legitimacy in a way which can be described by legal rules.

[1] Incidentally, finance has (had?) the opposite problem. If your bonus is calculated as min(0, percentage * profit_generated), you will maximize risk, optimizing for bets that give you great returns most of the time, but wipe you out completely some of the time, as your losses are clamped to 0.

Post reply on HN