Top all-time · #5427
Alex
Personal blog · atelfo.github.iosciencebusiness
Alex's personal blog at atelfo.github.io covers science and business. Since 2023, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “Why Drugs Got Harder to Develop and What Can Be Done About It”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Personal blog by Alex, described in one comment as mostly about biotech. The other comment, on randomized controlled trials and cancer survival curves, does not link or refer to this blog's posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal site for posts about my interests: the biotech industry, medicine, molecular biology, neuroscience, biorisk, science, consciousness, AI, innovation, decision making, philosophy, games, sci-fi, probability, and forecasting (among other things). I write to learn, mostly about biotech.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Drugs Got Harder to Develop and What Can Be Done About It5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-12-23
- Will all our drugs come from China?4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-12-30
- Pharmaceutical blockbusters: the past, present, and future3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-27
What Hacker News says?
RCTs are fine but the obsession with them is overwrought and counterproductive. My own drum to beat on this is regarding clinical trials for fatal diagnoses like cancer: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/29/the-dead-and-dying-at-the... . We have Kaplan-Meier curves for fatal diagnoses. We know what happens (the tumors grow and metastasize. One doesn't need elaborate phase 3 RCTs to figure out if there's a good shot th…
Comment linking /2023/12/23/biopharma-from-janssen-to-today.html
on “Psychedelics are challenging the standard of randomized controlled trials”Submitted Will all our drugs come from China? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI write about biotech mostly https://atelfo.github.io/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Will all our drugs come from China? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Will all our drugs come from China? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Drugs Got Harder to Develop and What Can Be Done About It as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLMs won't save you from bad software engineering culture as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted From Janssen to today: why drugs got harder to develop, what we can do about it as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Going direct: notes on Eli Lilly at a trillion as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A New Breed of Biotech as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Some Questions about Biotech as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Will all our drugs come from China? (2024) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Will all our drugs come from China? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pharmaceutical blockbusters: the past, present, and future(?) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Some interesting questions about biotech as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A brief history of drug development and recommendations to make it better as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Intelligence as Efficient Model Building as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pharmaceutical blockbusters: the past, present, and future as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pharmaceutical blockbusters: the past, present, and future(?) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
