<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: zosima</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zosima</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 08 Nov 2026 18:10:52 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=zosima" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Ozempic-style drugs now in trials for heart failure, addiction and even aging"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've had similar ideas for a while. That there's either a blocker of GLP-1 in our modern environment or something that previously produced or triggered production is missing.<p>I've not found any promising leads, besides maybe something fuzzy about intestinal microbiome. But I've not given up hope of figuring it out.<p>Especially, I'd note that if a food production company had accidentally added, say a GLP-1 antagonist (without knowing what it was) to their product, they'd just notice sales go up and consider it quite good business.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Nov 2026 15:16:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50405266</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50405266</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50405266</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is ridiculous.<p>Your meta review has like 80%-90% of the studies on semaglutide and liraglutide. When finding random effect per drug, they even say this:<p>> Hence, the drugs eligible for meta-regression were semaglutide (subcutaneous injection, once weekly) and liraglutide (subcutaneous injection, once daily), which both showed a dose-dependent treatment effect in terms of weight and BMI.<p>And the class-effect is much more modest than semaglutide by itself would have shown, exactly as I said. What is the point?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:30:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935956</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935956</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935956</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But has only weak/moderate effect on weight loss compared to semaglutide, tirzepatide and retatrutide.<p>Alzheimer is a lot more difficult to measure than weight and amyloid-beta in the brain obviously significantly harder to target than the GLP-1 receptor in the body.<p>Also, a review pooling together all GLP-1's (including those that failed in development) and concluding that they as a class have only moderate or weak effect on weight loss, would obviously be badly misleading.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:27:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931817</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931817</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931817</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, the new anti-amyloids are not a revolutionary therapy. But they do have a small but definite effect on disease-progression. (something which in a highly noisy indication like Alzheimer's may actually mean a lot more to the patients than it seems by looking at the data. E.g. donepezil and memantine have very modest effects too, but patients and caregivers are still surprisingly positive about them).<p>And since these were developed using different methods and epitopes, it does not make sense to pool them together when doing a comparison. It's obvious that if you combine modestly beneficial compounds and compounds with zero beneficial effect then the mean effect will be worse than the modestly beneficial compounds.<p>And when you do so just because they were aimed at the same molecular target, not even considering if anyone claims that the old, unapproved antibody-therapies, with no positive studies to support them, have any effect, what you are doing is somewhere between extreme ignorance and deception.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:33:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926959</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926959</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926959</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wonder. Because if that was the question, why would they include anti-amyloid treatments that were never approved and are not part of any current treatment regimen and dilute the real effect of the approved antibodies? (Not that the approved antibodies are a silver bullet, but clearly they have some positive effect.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:32:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47918734</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47918734</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47918734</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That systematic review is unfortunately severely flawed. They pooled the old anti-amyloid antibodies (which everybody agrees are inefficacious) and were never used outside clinical trials, with the new anti-amyloid antibodies, that does show modest efficacy in reducing the speed of progression.<p>While these two classes of drugs target the same molecule, they are developed to target amyloid-beta in very different forms. Pooling all those drugs together, and then showing very weak effect, makes absolutely zero sense, and I hope and expect this review to be pulled soon.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:18:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913060</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913060</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913060</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The genetic evidence that amyloid-beta is in some way causative of at least a subset of Alzheimer's disease is still extremely strong.<p>The fact that amyloid-beta binding drugs like Lecanemab and Donanemab decrease progression is also very strong evidence for the amyloid-beta hypothesis.<p>What seemed to be the hurdle was likely, that targeting amyloid-beta in its pathological form just wasn't easy and developers of pharmaceuticals instead focused (for unknown reasons) on the solid amyloid-beta grains in the brain.<p>The major reason things are moving so slowly is because of the long development times of pharmaceutical compounds. A new compound will at least have to spend 2-3 years in safety studies before being tested on its first real patient, and then for Alzheimer's, which is a slowly developing disorder, nothing short of a 2-year followup time will show efficacy unless it's truly a miracle compound.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:45:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912222</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912222</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912222</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "[dead]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What has closing a government agency to do with free speech?<p>Did you interpret the calls for the end of censoring and cancellations that all government agencies must continue to exist forever?<p>And if so is there any resemblance of logic behind that interpretation?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Dec 2025 22:39:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406111</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406111</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406111</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wouldn't bother commenting if I were hallucinating figures. There is no figure 4a.<p>If you look at figure 4 in the supplemental material you also see, per your expertise, that covid vaccine protects against traumatic injury. However even adjusting for the protective effect against traumatic injury there is still quite a large protective effect against all-cause mortality. So the beneficial effect of the vaccine is not solely caused by its protective effect against traumatic injury.<p>Or it could be, bold proposition I know, that there is a difference between the groups that both protects against traumatic injury and protects against all-cause mortality, independently of the vaccine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:17:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165967</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165967</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165967</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is rather weird. Mortality in immediate connection with the vaccine (index time) would not have been captured here. I would hesitate to draw any conclusion from this paper.<p>> For all individuals, vaccinated or not, follow-up time zero began 6 months after the index date.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:28:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163505</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163505</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163505</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am speaking about what the paper shows.<p>There are other sources of evidence for efficacy. This paper is not a very strong source of evidence for efficacy due to some obvious uncontrolled difference between groups.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:18:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163365</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163365</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163365</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.<p>Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.<p>This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.<p>Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:10:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163232</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163232</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163232</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe those you call extremists are now the only sane people.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:37:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277135</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277135</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277135</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "Air pollution directly linked to increased dementia risk"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>People who are poorer and have worse health are predisposed to live in cheaper dwellings, many of which are closer to roads and thus more noisy and with more air pollution.<p>People who are poorer and have worse health, also have an increased incidence of dementia, seemingly independently of the number of particles in their dwellings.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Sep 2025 18:31:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160906</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160906</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160906</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "In the Matter of Lisa Cook"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is not "everyone".<p>I'd hope we'd fire anyone incompetent that's in a position to control the interest rate.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2025 13:16:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026103</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026103</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026103</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, and so is big parts of Russia. Attacking one country is not the same as attacking a continent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 Aug 2025 18:07:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006322</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006322</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006322</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, it's not. Social media is massively censored in many EU countries (and UK).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 Aug 2025 13:08:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45004000</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45004000</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45004000</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Russia has attacked Ukraine. Not Europe.<p>Neither Ukraine nor Israel is part of EU or NATO.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 Aug 2025 13:07:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003993</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003993</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003993</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Copyright is not censorship.<p>Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.<p>Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 Aug 2025 13:04:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003970</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003970</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003970</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zosima in "A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The vast majority of known blocks are missing on that list.<p>It's in fact worse than no list as it gives the impression of transparency, where there isn't any.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:18:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003318</link><dc:creator>zosima</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003318</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003318</guid></item></channel></rss>