Hacker News: epmaybe

New comment by epmaybe in "People with blindness can read again after retinal implant and special glasses"

epmaybe — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 14:55:54 +0000

It’s not often that an ophthalmology study makes it into the New England journal of medicine. This is pretty neat technology, but subretinal surgery is a skill mostly forgotten by retina surgeons. It will be interesting to see who will end up offering this kind of surgery.

They didn’t really demonstrate that patients without the implant had worse vision. You could argue that with the magnifying glasses themselves that patients could improve their vision without surgery. So it will be up to a future study to determine this.

New comment by epmaybe in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead"

epmaybe — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 02:52:16 +0000

As someone at an academic institution, this drives me insane. I mean, have some sort of pride in your work. Copy forward but make the necessary changes!!

New comment by epmaybe in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead"

epmaybe — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 02:49:54 +0000

Isn't that a Stark law violation?

New comment by epmaybe in "The history of cataract surgery"

epmaybe — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 02:04:22 +0000

Most people don't get blocks nowadays for cataract surgery. I will do so for patients with wandering eye movements or for more difficult cases, or for more invasive surgery besides cataract surgery. I just did a cataract surgery on a young patient today using topical numbing drops. But I have them monitored by an anesthetist with mild sedation during the entire case.

New comment by epmaybe in "The history of cataract surgery"

epmaybe — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 02:01:27 +0000

Eye surgeon here: FLACS isn't really that amazing. I would actually argue that a man made incision using steel or diamond (yes, diamond) is better than the incision made using the femto laser for long term safety/sealing. Number of studies have borne this out.

95% success rate seems low. you need to define success in this scenario. Are we aiming for 20/20 vision outcomes? Just getting the cataract out in full?

New comment by epmaybe in "Metagenomics test saves woman's sight after mystery infection"

epmaybe — Sun, 04 May 2025 19:44:42 +0000

Eye doctor here: some hot takes in this thread about the diagnostic abilities of the specialists involved in this patient's care. It's easy to be an armchair clinician.

The timeline for delayed immune reaction to a leptospirosis infection makes diagnosis incredibly difficult. There was no mention of an acute febrile illness preceding this during the patient's trip to the tropics, which I assume a uveitis specialist would ask.

While empiric treatment with doxycycline wouldn't be a bad idea, you have to decide what to empirically treat with, and for how long, and what the ramifications of increasing resistance to antibiotics are for society. Do I commit a patient to the hospital for two weeks of IV penicillin because I "suspect" syphilis? of course not.

Better diagnostics for these occult diseases should be applauded. But we shouldn't be vilifying the clinicians that are by all accounts doing their best.

New comment by epmaybe in "Flappy Bird for Android, only C, under 100KB"

epmaybe — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 16:55:59 +0000

This is something that really bothered me - I had an app that was small and worked fine on the latest Android OS, yet they took the app and account down because we hadn’t uploaded a new version in a year. Appeals didn’t help

New comment by epmaybe in "Feds killed 2014 plan to curb Medicare Advantage overbilling"

epmaybe — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 10:15:41 +0000

Advantage is relevant. Medicare advantage is a specific type of plan that isn’t quite Medicare that insurance companies offer. And it’s at the center of that case.

New comment by epmaybe in "Show HN: I made a tool to compare time zones"

epmaybe — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 17:51:00 +0000

This reminds me of https://timezen.com/

New comment by epmaybe in "How a script doctor found his own voice"

epmaybe — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 16:38:01 +0000

“Up to”

New comment by epmaybe in "Amazon receives FDA warning letter for supplements with undeclared ingredients"

epmaybe — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 17:41:18 +0000

holy crap, that’s insane. You don’t just accidentally add sildenafil or tadalafil to your supplements. Unless the FDA is misidentifying compounds present in the herbs in these supplements, which seems unlikely but I’m no pharmacology expert.

New comment by epmaybe in "Fish skin can heal other animals' eye injuries"

epmaybe — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 22:06:35 +0000

Also, most cornea research in vivo is done on rabbits, not dogs.

New comment by epmaybe in "Fish skin can heal other animals' eye injuries"

epmaybe — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 22:03:15 +0000

Has anyone ever brought up superficial keratectomy to you? Risk benefit discussion at least. Also, muro drops are otc and can help acutely

New comment by epmaybe in "Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days"

epmaybe — Thu, 18 May 2023 13:16:57 +0000

Note this strategy is mainly only being executed by Nintendo, who insists on selling their hardware at a profit. I still suspect they are making more money on their software though.

I believe Microsoft And Sony lose money per console sold

New comment by epmaybe in "Framework Laptop 16"

epmaybe — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 11:26:50 +0000

Most if not all MacBooks today are still 16:10 ratio..

New comment by epmaybe in "WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health"

epmaybe — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 13:06:46 +0000

This is correct. Do you know what percent of lung cancer is attributable to smoking? 90%! 9/10 lung cancer deaths are attributable to smoking.

Compare this to ~5% of cancer related death attributable to alcohol use.

It's just not even an accurate comparison.

To be honest though? I am willing to bet that cost to healthcare system for alcohol related illness is outpacing that of smoking related illness. Cirrhosis of the liver is a very costly disease when it gets close to end stage.

New comment by epmaybe in "Tiny ion is crucial for HIV replication, say chemists"

epmaybe — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 18:33:56 +0000

Just a small note - lenacapavir has been approved by the FDA since December 2022

New comment by epmaybe in "Luck based medicine: my resentful story of becoming a medical miracle"

epmaybe — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 15:00:53 +0000

Armchair thought that the author never brought up - food with high protein “tasted gross” per author, until starting what they thought provided anti histamine activity. I know that if I have a stuffed nose from cold or allergy, I also find that food tastes miserable, because sense of smell is so important in human perception of taste.

New comment by epmaybe in "Stable Diffusion on AMD RDNA3"

epmaybe — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 09:49:49 +0000

I don’t think there’s truly a competitor but opencl is the alternative to shoot for. Otherwise for machine learning purposes amd helps develop ROCm.

New comment by epmaybe in "The $8 Linux Computer"

epmaybe — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 16:38:38 +0000

I think zigbee is more "resilient" because it piggybacks off all the other zigbee devices via mesh instead of each device talking to the central router.