The HN community includes quite a few physicians, by the way, who often add excellent insight to threads. Here is an example from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983369.
My son, found when he was 7 and died when he was 12, had cancer and the idea of a trial can seem almost magical unless.... My son had bone cancer. To be in a trial you have to keep the tumor so you can measure effectiveness. The ONLY cure for bone cancer is surgery. So I hate the way trials work for my son and other's like him. This is why there has not been a single change in chemo or life expectancy for over 30 years for bone cancer!!!! It looks like finally dog research (More money goes to finding cures for dogs then children, let that sink into you when you have a kid with cancer), has the possibility of actually changing this trend.
Now the other issue is your child has cancer and they are only trying to see dosage. So they really want to know how much you can tolerate and not die. Again not a fan of putting my dying kid through more side-effects. Many kids choose to forgo treatment and just die, and you as a parent have to decide do I make the decision for them and every throw up and every pain is your fault (I had to make that decision once and I was glad I did he lived a few more years). I know some parents who agreed with their 5 year old and stopped everything but pain relief. I also have friends who pushed through years of treatments and they still suffer from the experience.
So those who did trials were soft tissue patients. One was with neuroblastoma and one has medulloblastoma (Brain cancer of the brain stem). The girl with brain cancer is still with us 3 years after it relapsed and her trial was not an effectiveness but a dosage but it looks like it has added years to her life already.
So I feel like this kind of discussion is good on HN.
Now my mom took my sister who had medulloblastoma to Mexico and I don't think it did anything but separate us from our family. I know some that I really think that crap killed them early and the stupid diets and painful procedures and false hopes just are horrible. I kind of put this who thing into that category. Your at the point where you will do anything, but in the end you would have better off not even do anything.
Personalized filtering might help with that. And thus help address eternal September effects, of bad content driving out good. Even with HN tech posts, I notice I've a 'this discussion is too reddit' threshold - an "ok, this could have been an interesting discussion topic, but there's too much low-quality discussion already here, and tilting at 'someone on the Internet is wrong' isn't a happy thing, so I'll skip this one".
There are a lot of HN-like communities of expertise across many fields. Public and private. They are often a good place to get news commentary. With the exception of a few reporters who are part of such a community, and write for a more general forum (sometimes with community feedback on their reporting), general news media (NYTimes et al) feel to me like reporting after a foreign bureau has closed - lacking a reality check, insight, and nuance.
Getting better at this seems to be one of those societally critical technologies for which the incentives are poor, so there's little progress decade after decade. For new discussion systems, perhaps being better at insulating experts from this pain, and thus remaining motivated to contribute, might help drive adoption?
Opinions are like yada yada.
Because, our field is not as set as medecine.
I’ve begun actively avoiding them because of how unpleasantly off-base they are. No one wants to read an entire thread of, well, what you imagine doctors would say if they were discussing programming.
As I wrote in another reply, I guess I was wrong about assuming humility in others.
It's hilariously full of "well obviously the solution to X is Y" for things outside the author's area of expertise.