Read the comment. This is cynical and bad because they’re going to advertise that they’re trying to do something socially beneficial.

It’s the top rated comment in the thread. Somebody tried to do something good, this is the response.

This pisses me off severely.

Glad to hear how you feel about it. However, and this applies more generally than your comment above, what people online often forget is that there is such a thing as both positive and negative reinforcement. If you don’t reinforce good behaviours as well as denouncing bad ones, then you don’t get good outcomes.

Not Op but there’s a inch of people asking why, and I have a similar feeling to op so here’s my post hoc justification for a weakly held and poorly supported prejudice:

It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without. This is more in description than judgement, but it’s true in my experience. We can speculate as to reasons, but looking after kids does train a certain kind of selflessness. Agreed we might be doing it for ultimately selfish reasons (self presentational or for care in old age or whatever). But for a good chunk of the time, caring for kids seems to require the fairly consistent subjugation of personal preferences, and a degeee of perspective taking, that I just think people without kids don’t have. And that often shows in their interactions at work and in daily life. Obviously there are myriad exceptions. But it’s true enough in my experience.

The wanting to live forever part also seems weird to me, and correlated with a certain sort of self regarding perspective. It seems obvious to me that I (or my generations) need to die for my children and grandchildren to have a good life. To try and subvert that also seems selfish or self important somehow.

I’m not really arguing this is a correct or good or just position. It might be terrible! But it did resonate..

> I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness.

When I hear people say stuff like this, I hear that they want to remove the single most universal chesterton's fence in all of living systems. I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.

Biological singletons (outside very specific niche situations) are not meant to persist, and most anything that has tried, it has simply been selected out of the lineage. This constraint (which we don't understand yet) is presumably the whole reason why biology discovered and moved into the more ephemeral higher-order substrate of thought and culture.

Just my feelings though. Feel free to disagree.

Yeah we gotta put me on that list too. This is a weirdly specific prejudice.

Do you not want other people to die and be replaced?

I think there's a nuance gap here. Many of us, if offered, would be happy to live for a a millennium or two if we'd stay at worst middle-aged. But there's a giant gap between being willing to take that offer if given, and a desire for it being a big personal motivating factor.

+1

what a weird bias

Don't worry, all these people moralising on the importance of aging and dying will do their utmost to live longer and in better health whenever the time of the choice comes. No one will say "oh well I guess I'll just keep this illness because that's the natural course of things"- they will get the medicines and the surgery, the creams and the lotions, they'll jog and limit exposure to the sun and avoid smoking and drinking. Given the choice, unless incurably ill or in the depth of despair, they'll always choose life. At least for themselves.

The prejudice is based on billionaires being the first to get access to the cure for aging in these hypothetical scenarios.

While everyone else can't afford it. Hard to think of a more demoralizing "off with their heads" dystopian scenario.

Aging is one of the only real equalisers. Maybe the greatest equaliser. Though those that have become old seemed to have become more stubborn in holding on to power but even that will pass.

Not OP, but wanting eternal life without leaving a legacy just sounds like someone trying to be a god and is very narcissistic behavior

I mean, wanting billionaires to not live forever (read: wanting power structures to not become excessively entrenched) is a pretty different thing.

I'd even be fine with people who are billionaires living forever, so long as they don't remain billionaires / don't fuck with politics / etc.

HackerNews' neuroticism is unmatched

Your dramatization of society's ills are not tethered to reality

What's funny about this attitude is that people were having a lot of children when half of them died in their childhood and for those left there were famines, pestilences, wars, no painkillers or anesthesia and no medicines for anything.

The reality is that we don't make many children because our life is way too comfortable for that.

Spoken like someone terminally online & without children. If this is your view of reality (I believe it is an utter fiction but nonetheless), then I don't know how you propose things to be improved without smart people procreating.

In addition to the other comment mentioning CAR-T therapies, we also have therapies based on tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs)

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2024...

https://jitc.bmj.com/content/8/2/e000848 (careful: Figure 1 can be very graphical, but it shows the huge positive impact of this therapy)

We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.

Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.

I don't know about "cured" but I've been cancer free for something like ~27 years. With childhood cancers some of them have very high rates of "cure," but it is true that the impact of the treatments (at that time at least) follows you for life in various ways. The more modern immunotherapies and such seem potentially much better than chemo if they can be turned into successful and consistent approaches.

CAR T-cell therapies (immunotherapy, tldr priming the immune system to respond)

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t...

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunoth...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/10/cancer-treat...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Burn (radiation). Cut. Poison (chemo). Your picks for cancer. IMHO Eat less. Remove all sugar and vitamins. Go a week without food. Give your body time to kill the weak cancer cells before they grow exponentially.

No, the parent post was just using a single example that used an expedited method.

Like fentanyl, tobacco, heroin, sugar,... All very useful...

easily the biggest deal in these fields for a while, and all we get is complaining