> I honestly have no idea how Obama's reputation survived this. Taking executive action that completely undermines an individual's constitutional rights is monstrous. It's really sad that it was a total non-issue.
I'm "conservative" (although I abhor Trump) but I will say in defense of Obama that there clearly are exceptions from constitutional rights. For example, police are clearly allowed to use lethal force to stop an armed and dangerous person.
I cannot speak on the finer parts of US law, but it seems obvious to me that it isn't as clear cut at some people portray it.
> For example, police are clearly allowed to use lethal force to stop an armed and dangerous person.
But in this case it's more like if a policeman stalked and sniped someone that they had an arrest warrant for. They defined a US citizen as a target and drone striked him when they were able.
> But in this case it's more like if a policeman stalked and sniped someone that they had an arrest warrant for.
It's worse than that, Anwar Al-Awlaki never had a warrant for his arrest, he was never charged with any crimes. In fact, after finding out about the "Disposition Matrix" (read: Kill List) that his son was on, Al-Awlaki's father publicly pleaded with the Obama Administration to actually charge his son with a crime so that he could be afforded Due Process. The Obama Administration refused to charge him with a crime, instead they just took him out a few months later with a targeted drone strike.
They essentially said they didn't want to have to explain things in court, so killing him was easier. Despite his scary name, Anwar Al-Awlaki was an American kid born in New Mexico. He may have been a bad guy, but we'll never know because the government decided it didn't need to prove it in court.
> But in this case it's more like if a policeman stalked and sniped someone that they had an arrest warrant for.
Disclaimers:
- I am no specialist on US constitution or laws but generally,
- I don't know this case kn particular except from what I have read from media, especially sites like HN
With that out of the way, from a common sense perspective, stalking and sniping a criminal who is a persistent threat to the public cannot possibly be unquestionably wrong, can it?
I mean, lets just go all out in a thought experiment that goes to the extreme end to prove my point: an American citizen sits in a known location and we know he is about to press the trigger that will release a highly contagious deadly pathogen inside 10 large cities, including at least one in US.
A police sniper has a steady aim on him from 100m and through a bug at the scene he hears him say: "this broadcast is coming to an end, I'll now press the button".
Will it not be correct for the police sniper to fire?
If it is, then the only question left is if it was legal for him to do it according to American law or not, and not something that should be an unrecoverable stain on someone's history.
It would depend on what that officer knew to be his 'rules of engagement', but also he a police officer and so it would be legal. They murder people regularly for far less reason than this without legal consequences. And, because of qualified immunity, even when what they do crosses into illegality, they still face no consequences. The POTUS need not be involved, police can and do violate constitutional rights all on their own.
As someone who does actual software engineering (although I have done my share of software tree houses and garages as well):
If you don't have solid experience already: Don't plan your projects with anything except plain React configured with TypeScript. Use "Create React Application" (cra) to set it up and stick with the standards.
Everything else you can add later - if you need it - and in the mean time you have the chance to move faster without breaking things and make better decisions.
If you already have solid experience: consider this anyway if it is just another web application. I personally at least have seen a lot of time wasted because people always deviate from the standards both in React, Angular and Maven.
In medical school, one of my mother's classes had an exercise one day which took this form:
Here are a bunch of slides of prostate samples. Find the cancerous one.
This led to the teacher getting so many questions about whether the slide someone was currently looking at was the cancerous one that he was forced to interrupt the class to make this more general announcement:
There's a bit of cancer in everyone's prostate. Find the slide with obvious cancer.
I'm not a doctor, but my understanding has been that we all have cancer cells at any given point in time. Consider how many cells inside you are undergoing cell division; errors in cell division are where cancer cells come from.
The question is whether your body sees and kills the cancer cells; most of the time it does, which is why most of us can live pleasantly for most of our lives despite errors cropping up silently. What we term cancer are the cancer cells that slipped past our body's defences, growing into masses that cause no end of grief.
To put it in computer terms, it's like error correction in HDDs and SSDs and ethernet connections. Errors are inevitably going to occur while data is in transit, but they are of no concern so long as error correction and other such mechanisms can correct and recover. The errors do become a concern when they start slipping past such mechanisms, however.
This is my understanding as well and my favorite protein, p53 [1], is responsible for hunting down cancerous cells. From what I remember reading in Robins Basic Pathology, it takes many steps for a cell to evolve into cancer and our body has ways to reduce the probability at each step. The most fascinating topic to me is how someone's lifestyle and environment affect their body's natural cancer defence mechanisms. We can do many things to stack the odds in our favour, but sometimes the odds are still not in our favour. Should we strive to minimize the chance by adjusting our lifestyle and changing the environment, or strive for some kind of balance?
Elephants have 100x as many cells as a human does, live about as long, but have about 1/2 the chance of dying of cancer. Why? A big part is that each elephant cell has ~40 copies of the p53 gene.
>Should we strive to minimize the chance by adjusting our lifestyle and changing the environment, or strive for some kind of balance?
That is as much a philosophical question as it is biological, and one where the answer will vary by who is asked.
Personally, I will say this: If you're miserable while endeavouring to prevent cancer (or any other disease), that's putting the cart before the horse. The goal is, presumably after all, to live happily.
That's my understanding too. But we're talking about cancer that can be observed on a slide. At that point, that's beyond the error correction mechanisms AFAIK.
You're probably correct as to babies. But the prostate gland is extremely cancerous and my assumption would be that that tendency begins at either birth or puberty. The exponential function spends the entire infinite length of the negative x-axis rising from 0 to 1; think about the growth of cancer in your prostate gland that way.
I would not expect a man in his late 20s to fall into the category "men of an advanced age". But I would be unsurprised to learn that there was visible protocancer in a sample of his prostate.
Someone I knew had the slow-growing case for quite some time. Then, it abruptly without warning turned into the aggressive form and killed him. Makes it very difficult to know what to expect. I guess frequent checks are necessary, because once its evident, you're already in a world of trouble...
The stats are still pretty bad. Prostate cancer kills more people than breast cancer (though it's usually men in their 80s, so the QALYS is not as bad). A prostate cancer diagnosis is not terrible (since it's so damn common) and aggressive treatment and overly-aggressive screening might be a bad idea in most cases (since it's often best to not worry too much - over-treatment and even over-testing has its costs) but there's certainly a need for better treatment in cases where it does get bad (which is a very sizable number of older men).
Doctors don't try to do the test on every man over 55 without a good reason.
Not sure where you're getting your stats from. In both US and Canada this isn't true.
There are an estimated 43,780 deaths attributable to breast cancer and 34,500 to prostate cancer in the US for 2022[0] and 5555 vs 4600 respectively in Canada. This is spite of aggressive screening and early treatment vs not really for prostate cancer.
But, curiously, they stop testing at 70 (or was it 72?). That's what my urologist told me last year when I had my exam. Ever since my father had prostate cancer, I've had a yearly PSA and exam by a urologist (thinking that a urologist will be better at detecting tumors than a GP/PCP).
There is weak evidence to support testing over 70 due to increasing risks of biopsy/treatment and no evidence to support improved overall mortality.
Some guidelines suggest that it's reasonable to continue in patients with >10-15 year life expectancy if the patient desires, but there is no strong recommendation or evidence to support this recommendation or screening in this age group.
Some guidelines actually have a strong recommendation to stop screening men with < 15 year life expectancy.
Even less evidence for a DRE. PSA by a GP is sufficient if you desire screening.
> Even less evidence for a DRE. PSA by a GP is sufficient if you desire screening.
I believe my father's prostate cancer was found via DRE and not PSA. That is, PSA was in the normal range. That is what made me get a DRE from a urologist once a year (since then).
It’s hard to comment accurately as prostate cancer isn’t a single disease.
PSA cutoff trades sensitivity and specificity. It isn’t a binary positive/negative.
There are certain highly aggressive but very rare subtypes (e.g. neuroendocrine) that will present with low PSA levels. Rarely an aggressive adenocarcinoma (Gleason 8+) will present with low PSA. Screen detected prostate cancers with low PSA are most likely clinically insignificant [0].
If you are known to have a first degree relative with a rare subtype then routine screening guidelines don’t apply to your circumstance.
Important points to keep in mind:
Just because a prostate cancer is “found” it doesn’t mean it needs to be treated.
There is no survival benefit when comparing treating early prostate adenocarcinoma (conventional and most common type representing 99% of prostate cancers) at very low PSA vs using 4ng/mL as a cutoff.
There are verifiable and proven harms with over treatment of low grade prostate cancer, workup of a “nodule” felt on DRE in the context of normal PSA is more likely to harm a patient than benefit them even if cancerous which forms the basis of current guidelines.
All forms of cancer screening will have edge cases that are missed. Even in your father’s case only the peripheral zone is palpable by DRE (would miss transitional zone or 20% of cancers). When considering recommendations to make at a population level harms vs benefits have to be carefully weighed, in the case of prostate the evidence strongly suggests against DRE, and weakly against prostate cancer screening in general.
Looking towards the future, there is probably a role for prostate MRI somewhere which is good at detecting clinically significant (Gleason 7+) cancers but this is still being actively studied and we don’t have enough evidence at this time to support screening.
How credible is this paper? I see it's highly cited, but I also see that it claims that fungi are cancer causing but not also cancer preventing, which seems questionable.
> Over one third of cancer deaths worldwide (and about 75–80% in the United States) are potentially avoidable by reducing exposure to known factors.
> Common environmental factors that contribute to cancer death include exposure to different chemical and physical agents (tobacco use accounts for 25–30% of cancer deaths), environmental pollutants, diet and obesity (30–35%), infections (15–20%), and radiation (both ionizing and non-ionizing, up to 10%).
> less than 0.3% of the population are carriers of a cancer-related genetic mutation and these make up less than 3–10% of all cancer cases.
What does FM mean in this context? I already see it mentioned in one top level comment and in the first thread but I don't see a definition here or on the project page.
Edit: after adding Large Language Model to my query it seems I found the explanation: FM stands for "Foundational Model".
I'm fairly sure someone here can provide you with a proper citation, but in the meanwhile I was very much online here and elsewhere during that time and IIRC it was common knowledge at the time and AFAIK nobody came up with a better hypothesis.
And there are websites that let you pay for add free.
The original point is simply that RSS would have gone the way of the web, in terms of the presence of advertising, had it become mainstream.
There being workarounds or other models possible doesn't change that and it also applies to the web today. As another commentor pointed out, RSS would have unique difficulties for adblockers as well.
> Or because he's quoting the comment in his question.
On HN the usual way to quote is like I have done above.
I too react like the poster above you and would probably not quote that way except to ridicule. Hopefully there aren't many of these across my posts.
(As for an almost green account commenting on HN standards I have been here is some form or another since around 2009 I think, I just once in a while create a new account so it won't be trivially simple to doxx me.)
Common sense is a thing and what common sense can tell us absolutely isn't an extraordinary claim.
Edit:
By the way, what do you mean by threat level here? And FWIW, here I could have used quotes without being rude.
Also: if you read that sentence again you'll probably find that it wasn't just the use of quotes but the sentence that as a whole that made it stand out as rude.
A baseline AWS account with MFA will not be taken over. That would require a credential leak or an IAM misconfiguration permitting access from some other account.
Suggesting it is an extraordinary claim, and would suggest an extraordinary threat to all AWS accounts. This seems very unlikely.
Every one I personally owned since that was either janky or pulled some stupid tricks on system updates or something.