There are now 141 bio and healthcare companies funded by YC - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/there-are-now-141-bio-companies-funded-by-yc/ <comment><USER2> Though the line of best fit seems to fit well to an exponential for now, it is likely a sigmoid in the end [0]. The real trick is figuring out when you've reached the 50% mark, as any physiologist will tell you! ;)

Also, I might as well mention that I'm a recent bio-eng grad that posts in the 'Who's hiring?' threads still. Details in my profile page. And, sorry to be so blatantly self promoting.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function)

</comment><comment><USER3> And congrats to Ginko on recent $120M deal with Cronos Group. Engineering yeast strains that can produce full-spectrum of cannabinoids via fermentation at factory scale. Really exciting!

[https://thecronosgroup.com/investor- relations/](https://thecronosgroup.com/investor-relations/)

<comment><USER4> Mind explaining what this means and why it's exciting?

<comment><USER3> Maybe some Ginko peeps can chime in ;) But I'm very impressed with the scale. $100M is ballpark scale of all cannabis US research funding per annum.

And most trials investigate CBD, THC. There are hundreds of other cannabinoid compounds worth investigating. Providing high quality samples to researchers will result in discoveries. A single cannabis breakthrough treatment changes the entire game. Plus, expertise for Ginko with synthesizing cannabinoids conceivably translates to opiods and myriad other medicinal plants compounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I define "bio" at YC as anything enabled by biology and anything in healthcare."

Is that a common definition? I haven't consider healthcare companies as bio.

I'd be interested in the list of the 141, unsure if I'm the only one.

<comment><USER5> Okay, thought I would try to answer my own question. We write software[1] that helps research labs save money and here are companies that I'd consider bio:

Sorry if missing some:

Glowing Plant, S14

Ginko Bioworks, S14

Notable Labs, W15

Transcriptic, W15

Industrial Microbes, W15

Lygos, W16

C16 Biosciences, S18

CB Therapeutics, S18

Cytera CellWorks, S18

Hepatx, S18

Borderline:

HistoWiz, W16

Forever Labs, S17

Ambercycle, F2

[1] Lab Spend - [https://labspend.com](https://labspend.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And yet no cure for cancer!

I kid, but actually there are a few YC companies literally working on cures for cancer, and every time I see one I think, "That's the kid of swing for the fences YC is known for, good luck to them!".

</comment><comment><USER7> Really excited to hear this now!! I've been watching the job postings appear for HumanDx and I'm looking forward to what the YC companies can achieve together. I think in healthcare it's particularly important to understand the "user(s)." YC companies have a great opportunity to use smart startup techniques to make healthcare more accessible and more successful.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're interested, YC maintains a list of all the public (ie launched) companies. You can sort by category as well: [http://www.ycombinator.com/companies](http://www.ycombinator.com/companies)

</comment><comment><USER9> If you don't have a lab you are not into bio.

That said there are a lot of companies that are trying real hard to replace their labs with software.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a list of these somewhere?

<comment><USER11> The closest thing I could find was this list: [https://yclist.com/](https://yclist.com/)

A ctrl+F of "bio" gave me a few results.

<comment><USER10> Nice! Very interesting to see the failures also...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> bra-ket it would be interesting to see what these 141 companies be able to accomplish if combined

</comment><comment><USER12> That's nice. But can someone list out the notable ones which have solved important problems.

</comment><comment><USER13> woohoo!

</comment><comment><USER14> "I define "bio" at YC as anything enabled by biology and anything in healthcare. In healthcare, this includes medical devices, tools, therapeutics, diagnostics, and healthcare IT"

Healthcare IT... not what I would think of as Bio.

As noted in the quote if it is "anything in healthcare" that just seems like, healthcare.

<comment><USER15> I don't have any experience in Healthcare IT but I'm curious why you say you wouldn't think of that as bio?

I work at a bioinformatics lab and have been surprised by the big disconnect between the mountains of real-time clinical data produced by healthcare each day, versus the relative trickle of data we get in our lab (after IRB, et cetera).

Seems like there is a lot of room for innovation in Healthcare IT that could connect to bio-research and make the whole research system more like modern software updates versus the box software(research papers) of the 80's.

<comment><USER16> @breck -

I'm working on some projects that are tangential to this on both sided and I'd love to hear your thoughts on connecting healthcare IT to bio-research. What kind of healthcare data would you be looking to receive on the bio-research side? and what features of "modern software updates" are most important to you (regularly scheduled like MS Patch Tuesday? seamless in the background like SaaS products?)? do you think of this data as inputs to your research or living next to your research?

Thanks!

<comment><USER15> Well a large 1M Homo sapiens multiomics dataset with 100+ clinical variables would be great. :) ... the data gets more and more interesting the more variables you have, but generally all the government datasets reduce number of variables for privacy reasons. That's why if perhaps there was a way to get access to the quantity of data on something like GEO or TCGA, but with full clinical, from healthcare providers, you might find some interesting things.

I would like to see more research as dashboards more than research as reports. The book "The Half-life of Facts" is relevant: many bio conclusions we've made in the past hundred years seems to later be contradicted or at least tweaked as new tech and data come out. NIH and others now have big pushes for personalized medicine, like NCIs Precision Medicine Initiative, because it's pretty obvious that a great medicine or piece of advice for one person is useless or even harmful to another. The amount of health data we've collected in all of human history will be dwarfed by the amount of data we will collect in 2028. Instead of looking back on data and making static conclusions, what if we wrote the code that adjusts the conclusions as more and more data come in. So the research findings will be "updated" continuously, like modern software, as opposed to shipping once in the form of a paper.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Implementing Buy 'Til You Die Models for Customer-Base Analysis [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/BTYD/BTYD.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Implement the Buy Till you Die Model, BG/BB, BG/NBD and Pareto/NBD models, which capture/project customer purchase patterns in a typical non-contractual setting.

You can implement this in excel using the instructions in the link [http://brucehardie.com/notes/010/bgbb_spreadsheet_2011-01-20...](http://brucehardie.com/notes/010/bgbb_spreadsheet_2011-01-20.pdf)</comment>


Advanced NLP with SpaCy - <AUTHOR> https://course.spacy.io/ <comment><USER2> I can't recommend SpaCy enough. We use their Prodigy[1] app here at work, it's outstanding.

After experimenting with gensim, nltk, and most everything else under the sun, we primarily rely on SpaCy now with some TensorFlow for specific models.

1\. [https://prodi.gy/](https://prodi.gy/)

<comment><USER3> Glad to hear it! Actually we noticed the order come through for your group and felt it was a shame we didn't have a proper contact email. We're especially pleased to support public institutions like the FRB. I also did a little bit of consulting for the Bank of Canada. Could you email me? firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> Haha, hi Matt! Sure, just messaged you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mordecai uses SpaCy and is worth a look for extracting place names: [https://github.com/openeventdata/mordecai](https://github.com/openeventdata/mordecai)

I wasn't too successful running it against tweets (low hit rate/false positives, low spatial resolution) but geolocating tweets is a hard problem and I'm sure it would work better against more structured text.

<comment><USER5> Are you using the pre-trained NER models or your own? If the former, I wouldn't expect it to work well on tweets since it wasn't trained on them.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any recommendations for building a custom language model for business-specific NER?

<comment><USER5> I recommend Prodigy to label your examples and train a Spacy model. Prodigy is the best tool I have ever used for NLP labeling. Most likely starting with a blank model will work better, but you can try starting with one of Spacy's pre-trained models.

[https://prodi.gy/](https://prodi.gy/)

<comment><USER7> I also recommend looking at ipyannotate if most of your workflow is in jupyter

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> MIT License for spaCy, though you'd never know it from the home page of the site. It is really frustrating to have such a nice tool with such a beautiful site, but have the site have no mention of the word "License" on it. Yes, it's in the code, but if one goes to the trouble to make such a great site, well...

<comment><USER9> sorry but why MIT license is bad here?

<comment><USER10> I don't think parent is complaining about the MIT license, they are complaining about how hard it is to find out what license is being used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm using NLP with Spacy for my slack bot and it's awesome! Glad to see they're offering a more advanced course to use their library.

<comment><USER12> Does it handle dialogs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Curious how people are using SpaCy in production with constant improvement of the model and how that workflow happens from user input & review.

</comment><comment><USER14> spaCy's updated Pattern Matcher is pretty amazing and we use it extensively in our textual content analyses to help SEOs.

</comment><comment><USER15> How good is spaCy for exploratory analysis of a corpus?

I'm thinking, questions like, top adjectives applied to men and women, or top word usage across document classes.

The best I've come across for doing this easily is in R, where they have tidytext[1] which is nice, and very straight forward to understand and work with. However, the data model stores each token and all its meta data (page number, sentence number, document id / title, document class, word type, etc, etc) in its own row, causing the in memory size of whatever corpus you are working on to explode.

[1] [https://www.tidytextmining.com](https://www.tidytextmining.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> spaCy in production for some grammar-based tokenization (frame.ai)! And their model for span annotations is awesome for our research pipeline; very convenient to be able to traverse pipeline objects in both directions to explore results.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is very nicely presented. Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER3> GitHub repo: [https://github.com/ines/spacy- course](https://github.com/ines/spacy-course)

Might also be interesting to others who have DataCamp courses they'd like to release free.

<comment><USER18> > So should I not take your DataCamp course anymore? Probably not, no.

Here's some context for anyone who's wondering why: [https://noamross.github.io/datacamp-sexual- assault/](https://noamross.github.io/datacamp-sexual-assault/)

<comment><USER19> Unpopular opinion here:

I followed the outrage about Datacamp loosely on Twitter. At first I thought it was about an actual assault, but so far afaik the only thing publicly known is "uninvited contact", on a dancefloor and the victim reported that several months later.

Sexual assualt or abuse is a crime and should be punished and prosecuted. However, if we treat every situation where two people interact physically and have a different understanding of their relationship as sexual assault, there won't be any sexuality without a written consent form in the future anymore and real victims get marginalized at the same time. I don't know if that is really what we should be aiming for.

I don't see Datacamps reaction as inappropriate in this case,at least if there is nothing more to the story behind the curtain. Humans do errors and in most cases everybody should get a second chance. One moment of misjudgment can be enough today to get fired, you name gets burned forever in the Internet and your life can get turned upside down. And I don't know if that helps the victim in any way.

Probably I will be downvoted for that, but I want to make clear again that I don't tolerate this behaviour in any way and I think the industry needs to be more inclusive and diverse. I just think that you have to differentiate and that public shaming is not on all cases a good solution.

<comment><USER20> I don't think firing two employees for "poor performance" after they voiced concerns internally as an 'appropriate' reaction.

I don't see responding to a letter from ~100 of your content producers with a legalese blog post purposely hidden from search engines as 'appropriate'

People do shitty things; that doesn't have to reflect on the organization that employs them unless the org decides to do shitty things as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Soul of the World – viz of a cube inside the earth whose corners all touch land - <AUTHOR> http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/soul_of_the_world/index.html <comment><USER2> See also David Barr's "Four Corners Project" from 1985.

Quoting [https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/celebration-...](https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/celebration- four-corners-project-7848) :

"an invisible tetrahedron spanning the inside of the Earth with the outer four corners just protruding from the crust of the Earth. The visible corners are located in Easter Island, South Africa, New Guinea, and Greenland. Barr chose the locations as areas untouched by Western technology and in remote areas in order to bridge diverse cultures."

Yes, they placed little sculptures of the corners at those places.

Video at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-juK0PTbAiI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-juK0PTbAiI)

Mathematics at [https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/58275](https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/58275) .

There's also Ze Frank's "Earth Sandwich" from 2006, at [http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/](http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/) . That only required two points, and had fewer constraints.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great - thank you.</comment></comment>


If Dwarf Fortress sells millions on Steam, its creators will give the money away - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcgamer.com/if-dwarf-fortress-sells-millions-on-steam-its-creators-will-give-the-money-away-as-fast-as-possible/ <comment><USER3> Dwarf fortress always seems like a brilliant idea wrapped up in a terrible ui and execution. I recently started playing rimworld and its a very similar game but much easier to get started on. The game progressively gives you tips and messages on how to get better and do stuff rather than requiring you to spend hours reading a wiki to get started.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the idea of it is attractive, and learning the crazy UI is half the fun, but once you really get into it you realize that there is no there there. It's nowhere near as complex as it seems, and full of bugs, some decades old. Trade is so easily exploited that there is nothing exciting about the elves coming. You can kill them and start a war, but the combat is so unbalanced and exploitable that they pose no threat. Trade being pointless makes half the items in the game worthless. I recently played until FPS death kicked in making it impossible to continue, and didn't feel engaged enough to start a new fort.

The problem is that the brothers do not play their own game, and it clearly shows.

<comment><USER5> DF is a "create your own fun" kind of game. If you try to play in an "optimal" way by exploiting the ridiculous trade values of some items and giving your fortress just one entrance with a drawbridge you won't have as much fun indeed. The solution is to simply not do that and set your own rules and goals.

I'd even say that trade and combat being exploitable is a feature, not a bug, since sometimes I simply don't want to bother with those aspects of the game.

<comment><USER6> >DF is a "create your own fun" kind of game.

That's exactly why i stopped playing Elite Dangerous, devs making empty universes and all the fan boys saying to make your own fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > " [...] at the point where Zack and I would both have like 5 million > dollars, and I don't know what that means," he says. "Is that going to > corrupt my morality somehow and turn me into a strange person?" [...]

The fact that he thinks about it this way, already tells me, that he shouldn't be so worried about it. Put it in a few different banks with a good track record and just let it sit there if you don't want to interact with it. It's there when you need it then :)

</comment><comment><USER8> DF seems amazing but the learning curve is so steep it's discouraging.

I've yet to find a base building game that feels fair and does not put so much pressure on the player. Tried Prison Architect but my prison got burnt to the ground because guards were on strike (and they announced it 3 hours before while it takes 5 hours to be able to offer them a raise). Tried Oxygen Not Included but the water behaves SO erratically that my whole base got flooded because one of my minions stepped on the wrong tile (and it seems like the water keeps on expanding like a gaz, not like a fluid) and they were all frozen. Tried Don't Starve and Banished, and these felt so unfair (I hate dying because I didn't plan for something I couldn't guess 140 turns before).

Base Building Games are hard to program, I agree, but I don't feel they should be hard to play and enjoy.

<comment><USER9> I'd highly recommend giving Rimworld a go. It's like a simplified version of Dwarf Fortress but with a space theme.

The controls are much more friendly and there's a huge number of mods that can completely change the way you can play the game.

It definitely doesn't have the level of depth that Dwarf Fortress has (there's no z-levels for example) but it'll still suck hours of your life away if you're not careful.

<comment><USER10> dungeon keeper is within the same space as well and thematically closer

<comment><USER10> damn I got my names confused, I meant keeperRL

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everyone is always above money until they're looking at a stack of it in front of them. The only folks I know that have the willpower to turn down a pile of money is someone who has their eyes set on a mountain of money.

<comment><USER12> Some people have burned it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation#The_K_Foundation_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation#The_K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Quid)

<comment><USER13> A bit offtopic, but I've been wondering - is it possible to destroy money in any way other than literally burning banknotes. With electronic money you can only transfer them between parties, so while you can give away all your money, the money still exists in the system - you can't call the bank and ask to have 100k deleted from your account. Am I missing something or is there no way for money to ever disappear from the banking system?

<comment><USER14> Money is created when debt is taken out. By repaying debt, the allowed maximum amount of loaned money (i.e. arbitrarily created money) is reduced. If all debts everywhere were repaid, all money would stop existing.

Therefore, if you give your money to people who use it to pay off their loans, you effectively do the same thing as having it "deleted". The other question, of course, is how to keep those people from taking on new debt now that they have some breathing room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm just glad that Tarn is finally looking concerned about his own health, considering he has (according to interviews) been living like a hermit and subsisting on red bull and soft drinks...

</comment><comment><USER16> I've considered this issue before. How much is 'enough'? It certainly depends on what your preference is (are you okay with second hand cars, or do you want to try a Lamborghini for size?), but $5M in the bank is 50 years at $100K a year (ignoring interest, etc). Towards the end of your life you probably don't need that much, but if you didn't want to have 'too much' and were disciplined enough to leave most of what you have in the bank and just give yourself an 'allowance', $5M would not be an unreasonable sum.

<comment><USER17> The decision to monetize DF came after a cancer scare, so it might be reasonable to assume 'enough' would be 'enough to ensure that both of us are comfortably able to handle such a medical emergency'

<comment><USER18> I'm sure you've heard this already, but it would be far more practical to move to pretty much anywhere other than the US that has free health care. The US is crazy when it comes to this.

<comment><USER17> Tell Tarn and Zach... but presumably they like living in the US for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't buy it on Steam. Cut the middleman and donate the creators directly.

<comment><USER20> Buy it on steam. Leave a positive review so other people see it and buy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> i mean.. that's nice. but damn. If they dont qualify as deserving to reap their rewards... I dont know who does!

Edit: It seems like they may be vaguely referencing Markus "Notch" Persson's cash flush success after selling Minecraft.

I think just being self aware enough to be worried about how "money" might change them should be enough to settle their worries.

Notch had a rough time for a while, but he was always a very public person... these guys are a lot less public and I'd suggest less susceptible to being led astray... but who knows I guess.

<comment><USER22> Why do you feel it's alluding to Notch? There are plenty of game developers who've struck it rich and the Dwarf Fortress authors' concerns about sudden wealth seem pretty specific to them.

<comment><USER6> They both rely on procedural generation to build worlds and give users some degree of creative control to build things.

But one became a billionaire and spends his days on twitter whining about how hard it is to be white.

<comment><USER22> I don't see anything about that in the interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A truly American story, basically the only developed country in the world where you can be bankrupted from getting sick.

<comment><USER24> Huh? I'm pretty sure you can get bankrupted by illness in any country

<comment><USER25> No, you can lose your job or means of making money in some countries, but you can't get bankrupted by paying for treatment in countries with universal healthcare (or even close to it).

Most developed countries also have some measures of social security in cases where you lose your job so that even that is rare.

<comment><USER26> There are just a few (under 5) countries in the world where you will get the same treatment for "free" as you'd get in the US. The price is >65% taxation. In most of these "universal healthcare" countries, it's not that easy - <USER2> healthcare "insurance" is deducted from your wage, if you don't work, you have to pay it out of pocket (mandatory, but cheap - around $100 monthly). Social security programmes are useful just for literally homeless people, other people aren't getting much, really (you will not get anything if you have a job).

In other countries with universal healthcare, the law says that you will get only "medically necessary" treatment, amd everything else needs to be paid out of your pocket - and in these countries, no private insurance usually exists, so have fun with that.

Another point is quality of hospitalization care, again - there are less than 5 countries in the world where you'd get the same thing as in the US. In other countries you will share room with 5 other people, and be aware that usually at least one family member per patient is always present. Treatments such as colonoscopy are done in your room, btw. There usually is just one male and one female toilet and shower per ~10 rooms, of course used by the family members as well. The food is literally uneatable 99% of the time, 1% of the time you're lucky and it's plain bread and tea (nothing to screw up on that). Prepare yourself to be screamed at regularly by doctors and nurses. Prepare yourself to be bellitled at every opportunity. And prepare yourself that your family members might die because noone listened to them, and the only compensation you can get is the sentence "well, that's just the system, the government really didn't want that" \- correct, no monetary compensation, no fines, no prison.

Did I mention that there is no way to go private other than paying out of pocket, and of course who would run a medical company in a country with universal healthcare?

Source: my whole life in a "universal healthcare" country.

Edit: Let the downvotes flow, I just stated my experience, definitely a downvote-worthy comment, lol. Dumbass me thought we would discuss.

Seems interesting tho. Almost every time I write my experiences with universal healthcare, I'm immediatelly (within 5 minutes) heavily downvoted, without any discussion. Hard denial? Universal healthcare definitely helps pharma and medical companies (they can overprice a lot, just like with any other governmental project). Lobby?

<comment><USER27> You're being downvoted because you're wrong, and anyone with any familiarity at all with the other systems knows you're wrong.

Let us consider:

> Did I mention that there is no way to go private other than paying out of > pocket, and of course who would run a medical company in a country with > universal healthcare?

Like many people here, I've held private insurance in the UK. The last time I paid for it, I think I paid £150/m for it, but I've had several employees cover it.

<comment><USER26> UK does not have a universal healthcare system in a comparable way to continental Europe. It is excluded from what I said, but it's not much of a change - that makes it sixth in the world. Out of 195.

<comment><USER28> How does the UK not have universal healthcare?

<comment><USER26> Sorry I was mistaken, however: Every commenter here is talking about their experiences in private clinics. These are not a part of most universal healthcare systems and it's polar opposite of what the USA liberals are proposing. That's why I didn't want to count UK in, however other commenters have proved to me that it was a mistake - if any homeless man is able to get such treatment, I have to agree it's universal - but is this true? Noone here confirmed that yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amulyte (YC S13) is Building a Better Lifeline For Seniors on the Move - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/16/yc-backed-amulyte-is-building-a-better-lifeline-for-seniors-on-the-move/

<comment><USER2> I'm super-impressed and really happy to see this recent batch of YC companies tackling some very underserved and unsexy problems.

While Amulyte is not a new idea, I do think their product is a much-needed improvement on what's existed for some time. But will that improvement be enough for it to be a widely adopted product? I don't think so. Products offering similar solutions have been around with moderate levels of success, and neither seniors nor their caretakers are technologically savvy enough to see an accelerometer or self-quantification as selling points. And while selling to nursing homes might seem a good idea, they're already relatively well-monitored settings that account for only 20% of deaths due to falls in people ages 65yo+ [0].

I think this is mostly a marketing issue, and an interesting one. This is a morbid product. Buying it acknowledges to some degree that you're old, and on your way out. It's not like life insurance where you buy it once and don't think about it. Nor is it like taking medications that are _contributing_ to your health. A product like this serves as a constant reminder of your fragility while not providing any immediately obvious benefit. Imagine putting it around your neck every day. Beyond the inherent psychological barriers that a product of this nature can create, marketing for this type of solution just hasn't seemed to help. Life Alert, a wear-around-your-neck monitor for the elderly that's been around for a long time, has been known for its "I've fallen and I can't get up!" campaign [1]. What elderly person or caregiver would ever want to relate to someone in that commercial?

I don't know what the answer to that problem is yet. How do you get people to acknowledge the eventual death of their beloved elderly and push them to be proactive in taking preventative measures without using scare tactics? I'm not sure, but coincidentally, I finally got to reading the article _Slow Ideas_ by Atul Gawande [2] this morning that touches on similar problems -- problems that are insidious and have no immediate solution. He seems to strengthen PG's points on doing things that don't scale [3]. In particular, he talks about how marketing efforts, efforts that scaled, in India to combat cholera were unsuccessful, and how opting for the door-to-door method resulted in significant drops in mortality. The message of the article was that these problems require more than just slick ads and pamphlets. They require changing the norms, changing the way people perceive these problems. And from his experience, the most efficient and successful way of doing that is to do things that do not scale. Maybe that's the answer.

A product like this isn't just a shiny new toy someone orders from Amazon, or backs on Kickstarter. This touches on some very deep problems in our society and its views on preventative health, mostly that we don't take it seriously. I think a company like Amulyte should really focus its efforts on creating an effective marketing strategy. They may have the most advanced monitor in the world, but that won't tear down many of the barriers that exist for this type of product. And if they can crack that marketing problem, then there's a lot more success out there to be had. Some food for thought, Amulyte guys. Good luck! I'll definitely be watching closely.

[0] [http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Falls/nursing.h...](http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Falls/nursing.html)

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQlpDiXPZHQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQlpDiXPZHQ)

[2] [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_gawande)

[3] [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback and input, you bring up some great points. We are currently working on a few ideas to make this device more senior friendly by adding features that would make it more than an alert pendant for them. We feel that the best way to get it right is to actually run a pilot program and get real user feedback. Right now we are focusing on solving a pain point, which for our target user is the fear of falling outside while alone. Once we have perfected this, we will be playing around with a few ideas during our pilot program. You can expect to see some new iterations and ideas emerge down the road that we are hoping will make this more than a simple help pendant.

As for selling to nursing homes, the stats might seem like a reassuring thing, but you might also be missing the underlying story. We have spoken with several retirement homes, and they have told us multiple stories about how staff (not necessarily at their home) have wanted to stop residents from leaving the grounds because they are worried that if something happens they won't be able to get help - and in some cases they do actually stop them from leaving. Point being, sometimes stats look good, because the rules and guidelines put in place to keep them looking good actually have a negative impact on a persons overall happiness and well being. So although the stats look nice, the bigger picture could still reveal that something is broken.

You are very right that this will be a marketing challenge, but I have hope. In my own case, my grandmother lives alone and my family wants her to continue doing so, but we also worry. Rather than having to ask her to move to a retirement home one day, it would be great if we could use a system like this to allow her to keep her freedom and independence while still having peace of mind that she will be ok. Our goal is to try to make a device like this feel empowering, rather than morbid, but we acknowledge that it will take some time. I have faith that something can be done in this space though because when you take a look at it, you can see how obviously broken it is ("I've fallen and I can't get up" is the perfect example of just how broken it is).

I actually read the article Slow Ideas last week and found it to be a great read. I agree that ads and pamphlets will not solve this problem, but doesn't mean we should shy away from trying to fix this broken industry. At YC we are constantly told to do things that do not scale at first, it's a strategy that has proven to work, and I'm all for trying it in this scenario.

Thanks again for your feedback, definitely some great food for thought :)

<comment><USER3> If I can make a suggestion from my limited experience dealing with the older folks in my family - there's a number of older folks who see the current situation as you age as basically a binary choice: A) you stay home and maintain independence at the risk of having something bad happen to you or b) you go into a assisted living facility and give up your life and independence in exchange for better safety.

It's interesting to watch how assisted living facilities have been trying to mitigate b). A number of facilities I've seen recently are structured more as apartments where nurses, doctors, and additional care are on call _when needed_. Residents get to design their rooms when they move in, bring in their own furnishings, etc. It's trying to straddle a middle ground between a and b.

Similarly, I think amulyte can be marketed to families as peace of mind and care - and to the older folks as independence. This little button lets you do what you want without worrying about how someone will get to you if there's an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a smart move considering 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 _every day_. Hopefully they're in it for the long haul.

It will be interesting to see what the marketing strategy will be.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the best kind of startup - targeting an important problem whose current solutions are outdated and not very good.

There are LOTS of seniors already using such a product (usually ordered by their concerned family), and a low monthly fee is not an issue when your loved ones's life is at stake.

The existing solutions are basically a DECT cordless phone with a one-button 911 call. Marketing something like amulyte should be a slam-dunk. Of course you're not gonna sell "it has GPS and an accelerometer" \- you market "it will notice when you fall, it will automatically call for help, even if should be unconscious, and even tell people where exactly you are".

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point - the marketing for this device is going to sound quite a bit different based on the audience that we are reaching out to. For the TechCrunch crowd, we can say things like "a micro-controller to keep all those bits running in harmony"...definitely not something we would be telling our end-user :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's marketed as a device for the elderly but another segment that could benefit from this are disabled people living alone.

When I left my parents house, I looked for something like this to use in case of an emergency. One option was to pay a monthly fee for a similar device, that upon activation makes someone call you and if you don't pick up they send an ambulance or call someone.

In the end I went for a wrist-watch like device that hooks itself to the house alarm and dials a predefined number when you press it. It obviously only works when I'm at home but that was enough for me and it doesn't include a monthly fee.

<comment><AUTHOR> The option to expand into other markets is something that we are always considering. We've chosen to target seniors right now, but we definitely have other markets in mind for which this device might be useful (individuals with cognitive impairments is one of them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> $30/month is too much for this to get Wal-Mart traction (which is what it needs, because not even the daughters of seniors buy FitBits online). Seniors often live on what they call "fixed income" which is a euphemism for government aid, pensions (which are diminishing), etc. A new expense cannot be covered by working harder or smarter. A $30/month new expense is exactly why lots of seniors do not have smartphones (ironic then that Amulyte folks say they considered making a phone app but not enough of the audience have smartphones, then made a device that costs the same as a smartphone data plan).

Consider that the Kindle 3G comes with free cellular service. The hardware is in the same price ballpark, so why does Kindle let me download entire books for free, but Amulyte charges me $30/month to publish tiny updates that I hope I don't need?

Also consider the SPOT satellite messenger. It costs $150 plus $150 per year, which is much cheaper than Amulyte. The main downside for this application is that it does not work indoors--but the SPOT folks could add GSM capability and then their device seems almost universally better (the one exception being ergonomics for seniors).

Finally, ergonomics. Amulyte can't be too large, or it will be a constant dangling reminder of dying. And it obviously shouldn't be black in color--if not because black implies death then because new little black electronic widgets are really confusing and scary to old people. Round and light-colored would make a difference for some of the target audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, you bring up some valid points that we have definitely thought through.

First, the expense associated with the device is comparable to what is currently on the market (in some cases it is actually less expensive than the competition). We realize that not everyone will be able to afford devices like this, which is why we also want to explore ways to get this subsidized. We believe that a device like this can allow seniors to live independently for longer, thus allowing them to remain in their own homes longer, and saving them on the cost of retirement and nursing homes (not to mention studies show that 90%+ of seniors want to remain living in their own homes for as long as possible). Down the road we may even explore offering a less expensive version of this if that becomes possible on our end (we still need to cover manufacturing costs and overhead).

You bring up a few other examples, but none of them are exactly comparable. First, the Kindle makes its profits off the books you do buy (they may offer some for free, but the profit comes from the business model in which users do still pay for books on their device). Second, you bring up SPOT then add that it doesn't actually work the way we do. The added functionality does come at an additional cost on our end. We are also spending more on getting a smaller form factor (this means a lot more work on the hardware engineering side), and we are creating a custom dock so that the pendant can be easily recharged without needing to fidget with a micro USB.

In terms of ergonomics, the device will measure approximately 40mm x 40mm, which is comparable to current devices on the market with a limited set of features. We are continuously trying to engineer the device to be smaller, and over time we will be able to, but this does incur larger upfront costs and a longer period of time. So right now, we are focusing on making the best device possible, and will continue to iterate and improve on it as components get better and better :) As for the black - it tested rather well with males (although my preference, and that of a lot of the female seniors we showed the designs to, did prefer the lighter coloured device).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Firstly it's just great to see someone from YC targeting anyone over 24 :) Ok, snarky joke is over.

I think this is a great idea. I see 3 challenges. i) Seniors tend to be more frugal than the younger generation so $30 per month might be a dealbreaker. Having said that children would probably pay that to know their parent is safe so maybe that's the better angle. ii) Superseded by a smart phone based app. No need for $99 for the device and $30 in a subscription. Will someone do 85% of this for an iPhone/Android device at $5 per month?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points, both of which we have put much thought into: i) our target customer is actually the daughter or daughter-in-law of the device user. They are almost always the ones who make decisions to get a system similar to Amulyte, and they are the ones that typically end up covering the cost for their elder relative. ii) we considered coming out with an app, but after talking to a lot of industry experts we verified what we had suspected - seniors simply don't use smartphones. There definitely are some that do, but the majority of them do not. Even those who have one rarely use it (it isn't uncommon for them to turn it off when they aren't using it or leave it somewhere, unused, for extended periods of time). Getting the right form factor is an important implementation consideration, and a cell phone isn't suited for this user.

<comment><USER8> Got it. I figured you guys would have done deeper research. the flip side of your wireless device research is there might be a partnership opportunity with wireless manufacturers or networks as I agree you'd drive more adoption and usage of their devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounded good, until I heard about the monthly fee.

I don't think this will go very far, as there are probably other companies going after this market without any extra fees.

Also, the battery life needs to be at least a month.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really like what these guys are building. Real market, real need, real customers. Great approach to solving the problem too.

I'd definitely bet on this type of product being the future of senior monitoring.

</comment><comment><USER11> I worry about the battery life here. Other devices can last much longer by using those base stations. And in this population, what happens if they forget to charge once a week?

<comment><USER12> To get around this issue they can build an alarm which starts sounding when the battery is getting low. Another feature would be to send a notification to the care giver to charge the battery. The third fail safe would be to alert care giver if there is no communication with the device.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't have said this better myself, this is exactly what we are doing :) We are also conscious of making sure that charging the device becomes part of a seniors daily routine to help ensure that it remains charged. We are also using induction charging to make charging the device as simple as placing it on its holder (no micro USB to fiddle around with)

<comment><USER13> The daily routine is probably key, you'll get better compliance with something that is done daily than something that can (in theory) be done weekly, even if the batteries _could_ last that long.

<comment><USER11> We take this approach with our biowatch, but it's a different demographic that also charges a smartphone every night. With seniors, I worry that it comes off to charge it may not go back on. And the loss of faculties related falls starts to correlate with loss of memory and further dementia.

That said, they are honing in on the user experience at nursing homes. Independent living facilities offer a slightly different demographic and likely closer to their goal. Worst case, the device is sending low battery pings, and that itself is an opportunity for children to check in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sound almost like A. C. Clarke's CORA ([http://www.e-book2u.org/sf/Clarke08/30298.html](http://www.e-book2u.org/sf/Clarke08/30298.html)):

 _" THIS IS A CORA ALERT. WILL ANYONE WITHIN RANGE OF MY VOICE PLEASE COME IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS A CORA ALERT. WILL ANYONE WITHIN RANGE OF MY VOICE PLEASE COME IMMEDIATELY."_

Another piece of past future come true?

</comment><comment><USER15> It would seem a much simpler solution would be feasible. A small GSM device that is essentially powered off until it is needed, at which time it would be booted up and begin sending GPS coordinates via SMS. If you wanted higher reliability, you could look into the FM-based system that LoJack uses, but either way, constant communication seems unnecessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points, this is something that we have given a lot of thought towards. We are going to be pinging the device at certain points (when someone logs into the portal for example), and the device will also send data at set intervals (we can adjust how often we send data to save battery life, and based on a few other things). When the device is not actively sending data or establishing a connected we do sleep the device.

We opted not to send GPS location via SMS because it is a lot less secure. We are also sending more than just GPS data, all of which we would have to interpret on the server side anyways thus complicating the implementation. We looked into this and for a variety of reasons it made more sense to use data to transmit information from the device.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't that place a pretty large assumption on good data coverage? I live in Denver, which generally has good coverage, but my last place was in a total dead zone and I had to get a microcell device to be able to use the phone indoors. SMS almost always got through, OTOH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What are the dimensions? Although this product isn't intended to make a fashion statement, the elderly may still be averse to carrying/wearing around something rather bulky. Especially if they're having trouble admitting to their fragile state.

<comment><AUTHOR> Size is definitely something we are incredibly conscious of. This device will be 40mm x 40m x 17mm, but we are always working on trying to get it to be smaller. We want this device to look great, and we are approaching it as if it almost were a fashion statement, or at least an accessory that a senior will wear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In some European countries panic buttons for the elderly are provided by public health organisations.

Perhaps Amulyte could target those organisations, aside from marketing to individuals.</comment>


Show HN: An optimized and ergonomic image annotation platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.picsell-ia.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks good, is the usage of the tools unlimited ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Annotations are unlimited and you got 1000 calls of the tools for free during your trial !

<comment><USER2> Ok thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Some Rules and Helpful Hints by John Cage/Corita Kent - <AUTHOR> http://hi-and-low.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/a-new-year.html

<comment><AUTHOR> John Cage's words visually formatted by Sister Corita Kent. Cage's original title is "Some Rules and Helpful Hints for Students and Teachers."</comment>


Moving from YouTube to PeerTube - <AUTHOR> https://battlepenguin.com/tech/moving-from-youtube-to-peertube/ <comment><USER2> The article touches on the importance of YouTube's discovery a bit but doesn't do justice to just how strong it can be.

Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.

From the article:

> " _If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, > I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to > self-host your content in the future._ "

Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.

Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.

There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.

<comment><USER3> YouTube owns more than discovery too: they own relationship between viewers and producers.

Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to actually contact me about new content, and they'd lose me.

Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new platform alone is insufficient.

<comment><USER4> I would really like a recommendation engine that I own and control.

It would know what I read and watch. It would find new stuff for me, dedupe it, listen to my feedback,and learn from its mistakes. It would work with all kinds of media, not just youtube or HN.

And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.

<comment><USER3> As a computer program, this is probably not feasible. While in theory you are possibly capable of writing the algorithms for your own recommendation engine using whatever ML tools are popular today, the issue you'd have is data. YouTube's recommendation algorithm effectively only works because it's capable of aggregating millions of users behavior to feed into their own system. Getting that data personally would be very difficult both because YouTube doesn't want to enable competitors, and because consumers would be extra freaked out to find out about some random engineer outside of YT getting their watch history.

As a non-program, you can always depend on the means that humans have used for content discovery since time immemorial: word of mouth.

<comment><USER5> This is maybe a tangent, but do these ML-powered recommendation algorithms actually, like, work well for people?

I use both YouTube and Netflix pretty extensively. These companies are both held up as ML success stories. But, at least in my personal experience, they suck! My front-page feeds consist of (1) content that the platform knows I have already seen because IT IS IN MY WATCH HISTORY, (2) content that is trivially related, like by having the the same channel/director/actors, and (3) random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on.

It's not that the content isn't out there -- I'm able to find stuff I like through "big spreadsheet of all the Netflix movies" websites, online recommendations from humans, and YouTube channel crossovers/cameos. But I've never had that magical "the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself" experience that every ML engineer I've ever spoken to seems to be convinced their systems achieve.

Are all ML engineers mindless drones with exactly average movie preferences, or am I some kind of incomprehensible weirdo?

<comment><USER6> > random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on

if you regret clicking on it, that means you _did_ click on it and the recommendation did it's job; remember that the job of the recommendation engine is not (directly) to suggest content you'll like, it's to suggest content that will get you to click. Ideally those goals would be aligned, but not necessarily. YouTube is simply incentivised (via ad revenue) to get you to click on as many videos as possible.

<comment><USER5> At least in my case, it's not that I'm constantly clicking on things that it turns out I dislike. Rather, it's that the few times I _have_ clicked on a recommendation (because hey, maybe they know something I don't, maybe Sonic the Hedgehog actually _is_ a good suggestion for people who liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I've regretted it.

<comment><USER6> Right, but my point is that from YouTube's perspective it doesn't "matter" if you like or dislike the video, if they can get you to click. And clearly this strategy works on _some_ people, or they wouldn't be doing it.

So while it may not be overly successful on you (i.e. you only click occasionally), if it works on a significant portion of people it could still be a successful strategy overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember the internet before google - when you would search for anything there would be like a 25% chance that a given search result would be a porn site targeted for random keywords. Google has done a great job figuring out content curation at scale. A competitor for any of their services would need a suite of hard-to-implement features to be viable, including discoverability and content filtration. Are there any good open source solutions to solve these problems? Bonus points if they've been proven at scale

<comment><USER8> I'm amazed that peer tube isn't full of porn by now too.

<comment><USER9> Just checked out the main site - on top of trending is a seven-second clip of a headless woman showing off her cleaveage. Remember when YouTube had to fix _that_ problem?

<comment><USER8> I didn't see that one, but on another instance, I was not at all surprised to see the trailer for the completely debunked film "Plandemic."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >An embedded PeerTube video comes with a warning, because when you watch one of these videos using the web player, you may also be serving that video to other audience members watching it at the same time.

This is something the distributed video people don't seem to entirely understand. Look at how many copyright disputes happen on YouTube - not actual piracy, just disputes. Now imagine every dispute was resolved by sending DMCA takedown notices or subpoenas to individual users who happened to have the misfortune of watching a particular PeerTube video someone didn't like.

Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. So you need some sort of mechanism to ensure people who provide you the video don't have an IP address to trace, which immediately puts you in all sorts of hard UX problems that the wave of encrypted P2P software from a decade and a half ago never really figured out.

<comment><USER11> Is your position that centralized services can out survive distributed ones? Because user IP's are less observable? The past 25 years of cyber/cypherpunk software and legal battles say otherwise. Decentralized solutions outlive centralized ones not because there is "no one to shut down" it's because there's too many people to shut down. Enforcement processes don't scale, especially when it comes to speech.

>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed

A more compelling argument:

>>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. > > >Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. > >Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.

[https://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg09...](https://www.mail- email@example.com/msg09971.html)

<comment><USER12> these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won.

When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.

<comment><USER13> Spotify still isn't accessible where I live, so music piracy is live and well.

On the other hand steam is so game piracy is almost nonexistent.

It's mostly about convenience, since centralized app if designed with users in mind can be more convinient.

More and more people are pirating tv shows aswll, since pirates have the only solution that has all the content in one place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As it relies on P2P, watching a PeerTube video exposes your IP to anyone who wants it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387289)

<comment><USER15> Can you explain why exposing your IP is a problem or security issue? What is the attack I am exposed to because someone knows my IP address?

<comment><USER16> Probably because it's quite a personal thing, which can be used for port scanning, ddos, geolocation and other stuff. Also anyone can monitor p2p activity: [https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/)

Not that big of a problem if it's dynamic.

<comment><USER17> Does this apply to WebTorrent (WebRTC)? I'm not sure

<comment><USER18> It applies to torrenting in general, so I'd assume it also applies to WebTorrent

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well here is another direction I recently learned about: Amazon Prime Video Direct:

[https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G201978440](https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G201978440)

I found one YouTube creator who moved his videos to Vimeo on Demand and then to Prime Video Direct. I think you can choose to require viewers pay for your video, or have them included for free for Prime members, where the pay is $.06 / hour of viewing (it used to be $.15 / hour).

Anyway, it's an interesting alternative for content creators, as long as their videos are high quality. The pay is certainly much better than YouTube, so I have a lot of sympathy for this route. Plus it's like YouTube Premium in that there are no ads.

I'm not sure if Amazon will actively promote these videos, so I suspect YouTube remains king for discovery.

Here are the videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/CountryHouseGent](https://www.youtube.com/user/CountryHouseGent)

[https://www.amazon.com/Travels-by- Narrowboat/dp/B07S6CK8MW](https://www.amazon.com/Travels-by- Narrowboat/dp/B07S6CK8MW)

<comment><USER20> What kind of money is that for the space? Assuming a 10 minute video where you want to make $100 you need 100k views. $100 / $.006 per hour = 16667 hours. 16667 hours * 6 10 minute views per hour = 100000.

Incidentally, Cloudflare Stream charges the same rates for serving video ($1 per 1000 minutes).

Any idea what kind of money a YouTuber would make off 100k views? Does something like Cloudflare's offering make a suitable backup where they could eat the cost of serving video temporarily if YouTube kicks them off?

I think it's a really hard problem because serving video is so expensive. YouTube must be a huge money pit.

<comment><USER19> Wait, it's .06 not .006 per hour, so 10K views of a 10 minute for $100.

Wow, serving video is expensive. I had no idea it was $.06 / hour. I presume Amazon and YouTube have their own CDN or something.

<comment><USER21> Oh yeah. My bad. I got my degree in math from Verizon. Getting paid $1000 per 100k views sounds ok.

On the paying side I'd hate to end up on the hook for a video that goes viral and gets a million views.

Keep in mind that Cloudflare is making a profit on that and Amazon, Google probably have lower costs than Cloudflare. Still, it has to be a huge money pit to host that stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like the idea of PeerTube, but every time I try to play a video, it buffers to the point of being unwatchable.

<comment><USER23> Streaming video is hard and expensive, I think that's why there's very little serious competition to Youtube.

You not only have the network effects of social media ("everybody is on Youtube") but you also have to host and stream petabytes of data and still manage to turn a profit.

Now if on top of all of that you want to do it with decentralized technologies it become even harder to reach the same level of quality. Anybody who's attempted to download some niche torrent from a few years ago knows that the success rate tends to be very low. Meanwhile you can still watch the holiday video of some Polish family in Italy in 2011 on Youtube, even if it only has like 20 views.

I want a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet but when you face the technical and financial realities you realize that it really doesn't add up, IMO. You need huge economies of scale to make it work.

Or alternatively you need to convince people that things like web search, video streaming and email hosting are actually worth paying for. Good luck.

<comment><USER15> Interestingly, part of the problem is that people have switched to smaller and portable devices like laptop, tablets and phones, and away from desktop computers. Desktop computers are not constrained as much by energy consumption problems, can usually have more storage at the same price point, and can persistently connect to reliable internet.

In other words, and ironically, the physical deanchoring of compute devices has made it harder for virtually decentralized video sharing to take off.

<comment><USER23> True, and also IPv4 and mass-NATing everything by default was an other factor IMO. If you've been coding some network application over the past 3 decades you basically have to assume that most of your users are going to run it behind a NAT. That creates a world of issues for anything p2p.

I wonder if the situation would've been different had something like IPv6 been adopted much earlier. Then even end users might have integrated the idea that their devices would remain accessible remotely once connected to the internet. That would have made it harder for ISPs to sell these connections where basically nothing but HTTP(S) makes it through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > It's 2020 and YouTube, as well as the rest of big tech, is continuing to > remove content they don't agree with from their platforms.

Bold of these folks to assume their little self-hosted hard disk will outlive YouTube. When an individual is in charge of keeping some resource online, it's a matter of _when_ it disappears not if. I don't care how controversial your content is, it's more likely to be accessible by me in 10 years if you put it on YouTube versus your torrent or personal website.

<comment><USER25> Piratebay did a good job of self-replicating itself and outlives many others.

<comment><USER24> Yes, the website and its database are resilient. Torrents are less likely to be struck down by a singular authority like YouTube but on the other hand it suffers from the same problem as personal websites. Almost every torrent posted to tpb over the years, if you tried to download now, would have zero seeders. It's the same thing with IPFS. None of these P2P solutions will ever be like S3.

<comment><USER26> I have a feeling that once IPFS and torrents become more popular on anonymous networks like I2P, the copyright mafia will have a real problem trying to shut that down.

Right now the speeds are pretty bad (20 KB/s average 100KB/s for "fast" torrents), but with more users, that can drastically change. If 400KB/s becomes the average, watching 720p on a peertube instance on I2P will be possible without lag. At 800KB/s 1080p becomes possible without lag. [https://stream.twitch.tv/encoding/](https://stream.twitch.tv/encoding/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "However, self-hosting might also be the only alternative, if Google decides to ban you from their platform"

I'm not familiar with the YouTuber industry but this scenario sounds like a death knell. Are there popular video bloggers that aren't on YouTube?

<comment><USER28> ChemPlayer basically had so many videos taken down that he moved off platform.

<comment><USER29> I thought they deleted his account last summer.

Personally that seems so weird. The amateur chem videos where what got me to start subscribing to YouTube channels.

<comment><USER28> But the children might learn to make naughty chemicals, can't let that happen.

In all seriousness, nearly every major chemistry youtuber that I have seen has had several videos struck for seemingly pointless issues. There are many many videos showing poor technique and potentially extremely dangerous synthesis - those remain up. I don't understand the criteria behind it in this domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> YouTube's unassailable feature is discovery.

Would be great to see competition in video hosting though.

<comment><USER31> There is an ongoing crowdfunding campaign, to finance peertube's ongoing development. One of their goals for this year is discovery, with global search.

[https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap](https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap)

<comment><USER32> And they added it in 2.3, last month.

[https://joinpeertube.org/news#release-2-3-0](https://joinpeertube.org/news#release-2-3-0)

<comment><USER31> Ah, thank you, I had missed it. It is quite unfortunate that they don't have an RSS feed on that website. I just tried setting up [https://kill-the- newsletter.com/](https://kill-the-newsletter.com/), we'll see how that goes...

Unfortunately, I cannot share the generated feed here, as it's too similar to the inbox address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> anecdotally youtube seems to have aggressively increased the number of ads just in the last few weeks or so

i see ads on almost all videos i watch now, there are two ads before the video (the first one i can't skip at all, the second i can sometimes skip after a few seconds), and then some videos have more ads at different points in the actual video that show up out of nowhere.

and then there's the search ads that take up the entire mobile interface plus ads beneath the video

given i've mostly been using youtube for recipes lately and skip around the video a lot the experience is like being forced watching 30 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content.

it's completely completely unbearable

<comment><USER34> YouTube Premium is by far the best $10/month that I spend. Zero ads on YouTube and creators get a share of that, which is typically more $ than they would get from ads.

<comment><USER35> You can get the exact same thing with ad blockers.

<comment><USER36> I would much rather pay the content creators with YouTube Premium than by using an ad blocker.

<comment><USER37> If your concern is for supporting content creators, and if you have any reservations about the intrusiveness of adtrackers -- and also maybe you'd like to conserve your system resources when you browse the web -- wouldn't it make _much more_ sense to support the content creators you enjoy directly through Patreon and use an adblocker instead?

<comment><USER38> You're positing that YouTube itself provides no value, but I strongly disagree with that. I find YouTube to be very pleasant to use, I have found a lot of great stuff through their discovery algorithm, and obviously the bandwidth and storage itself isn't free. I think it's worth paying for. Separately from that, I also support several creators on Patreon directly.

And yes, I use an ad blocker. You'd be crazy not to.

<comment><USER37> No, I was not positing that YouTube itself provides no value -- I was responding to a comment that asserted their reason for subscribing to YouTube Premium was to support content creators. I suggested an alternative.

Personally, I do not disagree that YouTube is worth paying for. But I have reservations because I believe their parent company (Google) already profits tremendously in morally objectionable ways. Thus, I try to avoid giving them my business as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the reality is Google (and YouTube) are practically _impossible_ to compete with in all things data.

To play devil's advocate: you say you use adblocker (I assume you use it on sites other than YouTube) -- but why? Because the modern web is practically unbearable without it? But is there not an implicit contract when you visit a website and consume their bandwidth, that you view the ads? Are you not, in effect, _stealing_? Sure, advertisers don't have the right to your attention, but don't the content creators have the right to your financial support?

<comment><USER38> I feel we are talking past each other. I apologize for missing your original point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is the premise here that the author wants to move away from YouTube because YouTube removes racist or violent promoting, or fake news posts? If PeerTube doesnt block these videos, then I rather stick with YouTube.

<comment><USER40> PeerTube effectively doesn't block anything... It's just a piece of software. PeerTubes can connect to other instances of PeerTube or other fediverse servers like Mastodon... and those other servers will likely block a server posting harmful content. But they can't take down a PeerTube posting harmful content, that'd be up to the hosting provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone else thing this is a terrible name? Reading the topic, I immediately went to peertube.org/.com/.net to check it out. Turns out it's really just software for self hosting your own videos.

<comment><USER42> > Turns out it's really just software for self hosting your own videos.

Not exactly, since you can join a node and upload there and it's also like Mastadon in that it's federated.

<comment><USER43> See:

[https://joinpeertube.org](https://joinpeertube.org)

[https://peertube.fr](https://peertube.fr)

<comment><USER42> Yes?

[https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances](https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances)

Some of those are federated with eachother and you can upload to them and your videos are stored on the instance. You do not need to run your own instance but obviously it can be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124214)

</comment><comment><USER44> Would have been nice if the article could have embedded a video towards making a statement of ease of use of peer tube :)

</comment><comment><USER45> >PeerTube does this using technologies such as WebTorrent and WebRTC. In theory, this can help PeerTube scale without expensive centralized servers.

I wonder if this is actually that useful for reducing server bandwidth for the long-tail type of content that self-hosters are apt to produce.

<comment><USER46> Spotify used P2P in the early days for this reason I belive. Worked out for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I can only ever see a large company like Amazon or Facebook try to take on Youtube sucesfully.

They have the server capacity/capability and have more than enough capital to try and incentivise creators across if they think the venture is worth it, which it probably isn't.

<comment><USER48> Facebook tried, and was incredibly deceptive about the numbers.

I'm not sure I'd like Amazon any better... they really need to improve the UI/UX of the video services they already offer.

<comment><USER47> Yeah, I recall College Humor attributing the deceptive FB stats as something that hurt their focus on what was important to stay alive come to think of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is a complete aside, but what are some examples of other acquisitions that have lived on as well as Youtube after they were bought? I mean, there is of course that time when Apple was taken over by Next. What are some other standout acquisition survivals?

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there a way to become a node for PeerTube, and help the cause with your CPU and bandwidth?

<comment><USER8> This is kind of close .. become a redundant peer

[https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/contribute- architecture?id=r...](https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/contribute- architecture?id=redundancy-between-instances)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I have been looking for a good video aggregator website. Something like digg, but for videos. Most of the videos would naturally link to youtube, which is fine, but they could just as easily link to peertube, vimeo, self-hosted, etc. This would solve a number of problems:

1\. Better (or at least a different) way of discovering. I'm a pretty heavy YouTube watcher, but my recommendations are bland and full of reruns. It knows what I've been interested in the past but I find them tiresome. It does a terrible job of recommending new things that I might find interesting. It needs to take more chances.

2\. As many have already said, there are plenty of ways to host a video but none of them have good discoverability. If there was a good video aggregator site, it would help to begin diversifying this aspect. Even better, it could be successful even without convincing content creators to use it directly, because much of the content could still just link to YouTube.

Does such a site exist? One that I've found is browsing lobste.rs' [video] tag, or HN for the youtube.com domain, but that's not really the same.

</comment><comment><USER52> If you like PeerTube please check out LBRY, too. It goes a step further and is even more decentralized and doesn't rely on server instances like the one you have setup.

</comment><comment><USER26> Once peertube starts using distributed storage and goes onto I2P or other anonymous networks, I think paid services can kiss their asses bye bye. Good on battlepenguin to join the movement.

</comment><comment><USER36> The article can be improved by embedding an example video.

</comment><comment><USER53> i've tried using peerTube a couple times, but the discovery system is totally broken

even if you setup the main language to english a bunch of other languages keep poping up on top on every search

the only reason youtube is so good now is because is tied with google, thus making the search/discovery process fully efficient and am sorry my friends, thats exactly what am looking for

</comment><comment><USER54> LBRY has done the same pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER55> Every time youtube breaks the old UI current workaround I start looking for alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER56> Google should spin off YouTube.

<comment><USER43> YouTube runs at a loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> What's a cheap, reliable way to have cloud backups for videos?

</comment><comment><USER58> I don't understand why (other than Stallman religious reasons) you would go through the effort of hosting a PeerTube instance when you could just serve a static video file and call it a day

</comment><comment><USER59> You are missing an important link here, peertube does P2P ON DEMAND. You "CAN" disable it and you are out of the p2p scene. Dont know why people here seem to equate peertube=p2p=insecure.

<comment><USER23> I don't equate p2p with insecure but what's the point of turning it off? If you do that aren't you better off just hosting some basic HTML/CSS/JS to serve your videos directly from your self-hosted website without bothering with PeerTube?

Maybe I'm missing the point but I though the advantage of PeerTube was using P2P file sharing to cut down on the huge amount of bandwidth necessary for video streaming.

<comment><USER60> You can disable it client-side if you, the viewer, don't want your ip visible to the peers.

As it's opt-out, most people won't do it, so the host can still reap the benefit of the p2p system.

Aside from that, another goal of peertube is the ability to federate instances together so that a search on one site can return results from all federated ones. The hope is to build a decentralised, federated youtube competitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> +1 for decentralization.

</comment><comment><USER62> Viemo = Vimeo. I was thrown off at the start until I realized that's the platform the author meant.

<comment><USER63> The proofreading for this article is atrocious.

<comment><USER64> At least the misspelling is consistent, except for the mention of "Vimeo Pro".

Maybe the author thinks the video service "Viemo" sells the pro account with that name..</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Trends HN helped you see - <AUTHOR> So in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, there a number of "things" that I knew would be big before most of the general populace would be big.
The most memorable one for me was I had decided to invest $100 into bitcoin when it was under $1. I went to an exchange, created an account, and then chickened out when they asked for my bank info. I just didn't trust the exchange yet since it was so new. Could've been retired by now :)
The rise of data-science and the global impact of COVID were two other trends that I was aware of "ahead of time" due to regular reading of HN.
What trends have you seen coming that (with the benefit of hindsight) you had a pretty good feeling would be big because of the coverage here? Any trend predictions that were way off? <comment><USER2> Digital web privacy

I don't dare try to list any beyond that. The fact of the matter is, I'm gullible when it comes to reading most HN comments, so I don't tend to recognize HN group-think until some other poster points it out.

I don't know if it is because of the lack of text formatting, my lack of knowing that there are people behind the usernames, but as long as someone doesn't type something that trips the off-topic/downvote-o-meter, the various voices all blend together into one large somewhat reasonable sounding blob...at least until someone says something that I have a strong knowledge (or belief of strong knowledge) of, then I have an opinion.</comment>


Ask HN: How often do you type a comment and not submit it? - <AUTHOR> How often here on HN or anywhere else do you type a comment and not submit it, because in the end you think it's not insightful enough, too controversial, too political, too inflammatory or any other reason? <comment><USER2> Somewhat often. One of the moderators here, dang, reminded me once that if I made a good/insightful comment, and that someone else responded with a bad argument, people would see both, and judge accordingly, so there's no reason to engage in further argument with someone else if there's nothing else valuable to contribute to the discussion.

Sometimes I type up a response to someone, and before sending it, realize I'm not really adding anything new after re-reading it, just reiterating that someone is wrong, and I delete it.

(edit) One thing I do a lot of, shamelessly, is clarifying edits. If after seeing a couple comments, I feel my comment is missing something that would've addressed the replies better, or if I felt like my point was misunderstood, I'll fix it. (edit2) It's somewhat common for me to post a comment and then edit it to add more thoughts a minute or two later.</comment>


Gaming Wars - PC vs Console Gaming [INFOGRAPHICS] - <AUTHOR> http://www.sociableblog.com/2011/09/29/gaming-wars-pc-vs-console/ <comment><USER2> I am a longtime proponent of PC gaming, although I do own a PS3 and Xbox 360. But the cost of getting a top-notch gaming rig is high. I've been building my computers from scratch since 1998, the last rig I built was just this past December and ingest parts alone a cost approximately $4000. If you were to buy what I built retail you can easily spend $7-$8000. However there are less expensive options out there. I think it's an indisputable fact that PCs outperform their console counterparts in just about every area. One area consoles excel in is the social experience. You do have a lot of options and PCs but the experience is not as streamlined as the Xbox 360. However from what Microsoft has been saying Windows 8 will blend the Xbox 360s and PCs social experience seamlessly. Love the wait-and-see. Interesting article though.

<comment><USER3> way to brag about your way to expensive pc. nice that you found a hobby but spending more than 2k on a pc for gaming is crossing the edge to wasting money imho. you will have to replace the gpu with the new price/performance king eventually.

i don't get what this 'infografic' is going for anyways. so pc gaming not dead yet? comparing arbitrary numbers like 'time spent' between a pc and a console is quite ridiculous. the only interesting info in it for me is that half of the games played on the pc are small repetitive fun games and those will probably played on tablets soon .. speaking of which where are cellphones and tablets in this infografic?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Stack-Ed for iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stack-ed/id612500156

<comment><AUTHOR> After an exciting launch on HN 6 weeks ago (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127400>) garnering 18.5K visits on launch day and 30K visits to date, I'm excited to present the iPhone version of Stack-Ed.

With this update I've taken advantage of the amazing, consistent StackExchange API and included access to all the sites: Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, Game Development, Mathematica, User Experience, Programmers, Ask Ubuntu, the list goes on.. I have also updated <http://www.stack-ed.com> to reflect this change. The iPhone version renders LaTeX appropriately, so for those interested in the Mathematica or Computer Science sites, Stack-Ed is finally usable. (have yet to bring this to the web version)

FWIW it took 6 days before undergoing review, inline with <http://reviewtimes.shinydevelopment.com/>. Also Apple just approved it a few hours ago, which is nice to know that apps are approved over the weekend!

Hope you like it!

<comment><USER2> This looks slick and is a good development of the original idea! I would like to see another angle/play. Maybe there could be crowd-sourced curricula with SO answers as the content? Just looking for a way to make it less random. Also, it's a shame your HN post hasn't gotten more attention for your efforts --i was there a couple weeks ago. Keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words and support. I agree it feels a bit random at the moment, and I've been mulling over what would work. Crowd-sourcing is an interesting idea, will definitely think about this some.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very slick. Wish there was more room for the question titles while browsing, but love the clean interface and left/right swiping navigation. I'll definitely be popping open this app when out and about to absorb some insights from the top gurus in the RoR community. Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very impressive what you built in such a small timeframe. Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER5> Very impressive UI.</comment>


Sorry state of dynamic libraries on Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.macieira.org/blog/2012/01/sorry-state-of-dynamic-libraries-on-linux/ <comment><USER3> For a long time, I thought that the ELF shared library model was the obviously correct thing, but over the past few years, I've come to realize that Windows got shared libraries right after all.

On Windows, all inter-module dependencies are (module, symbol) pairs (written "module!symbol"), not just bare symbol names as on ELF systems. That is, modA!fun1 calling modB!fun2 can exist in the same process as a modC!fun1 calling modD!fun2. The Windows model doesn't permit global interposition, but that's a good thing: the lack of interposition support permits the optimizations Macieira mentions, but "hooking" is still possible through a variety of mechanisms, which usually involve either overwriting import and export tables or the replacement of function preambles with jumps to trampolines.

Regardless of the performance considerations, I think the Windows DLL approach is the more robust and conceptually lighter one. That the Windows approach is also faster is simply a beneficial side effect.

<comment><USER4> While ELF has its problems, I wouldn't call Windows's approach 'right', by a long shot.

* Writing libraries is a big hassle in Windows because you have to explicitly define all exportable symbols.

* DLLs have all kinds of strange boundary rules. C++ exceptions cannot pass DLL boundaries. Heap memory allocated by one DLL cannot always be freed by another. Etc etc.

<comment><USER5> The first problem is actually not a problem but one of the reasons DLLs are better: private by default reduce linking problems.

The second problem has got nothing to do with DLLs and everything to do with the fact that there is no C++ ABI.

As for memory allocation, it's not really a good idea to allocate memory in a library and free it in another, is it?

<comment><USER6> _As for memory allocation, it's not really a good idea to allocate memory in a library and free it in another, is it?_

Ah, I guess I'll have to stop using strdup() then.

<comment><USER5> strdup(), part of the libc, allocates memory with a function from the libc (malloc), therefore you are allocating and freeing memory with functions within the same library.

However, yes, for security reasons strdup should be avoided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The case for sacrificing flexibility for performance microptimizations gets weaker by the day, and it's certainly not worth the transitions cost - <USER2> incompatible ABI change would kill linux dead.

I suspect that the compiler generates the indirections itself to handle linkers that can't; making the linker easily replaceable involves a bit of overhead now but gains us in the long run (e.g. it allows new linkers like gold to be developed more quickly).

If you want to microoptimize how the linker loads function addresses on x64 then be my guest. Just don't expect the devs to treat it as high priority

As the article says, visibility modifiers exist and can be used by those who care about them. I think that will have to be enough, in the interests of usability.

<comment><USER8> Not only that, but LD_PRELOAD and the ability to override symbols is a very valuable debugging tool.

It also has value in other areas. For example, it is possible to make any binary -- even an entire virtual machine -- send all network traffic through SOCKS by wrapping it in a socksify library. You can't do that on Windows or (to my knowledge) OSX.

Part of the strength of Linux is how unbelievably hackable it is. I don't see the point in sacrificing this flexibility for a tiny microoptimization. And it's very tiny... that code has no branches and is just a couple of MOVs, so it's just going to get pipelined. It would only be worth it if it involved a bunch of extra conditional branching. Removing a few MOVs per function call is going to do nothing. It might literally do nothing, given that it might be buried beneath the waves of branch prediction failure overhead, cache misalignment overhead, etc.

Linux _performance_ is not a problem at the low level. Linux performs very, very well. Its disk and memory allocation performance is noticeably superior to any other OS on the same hardware, in my experience.

The problem with Linux is usability and cruft.

<comment><USER9> You can pull that off on either Windows or OS X, it just takes a little more work. On Mac OS X there is even a supported simplerish feature for it called "interpose".

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Tuna-Fish > That is, it's a doubly-indirect call. I seriously doubt any processor can do > proper branch prediction, speculative execution, and prefetching of code > under those circumstances.

His doubts are entirely unfounded. Branch prediction of indirect calls is not done at all based on the value they are provided, but on the address of the call instruction, and the previous targets called from that instruction. A one-target trampoline will add one cycle of latency to a path, and will be predicted perfectly every time after the first. The largest cost is that no useful instructions can be decoded on the cycle that the trampoline is fetched (which does not hurt you at all if you have excess decode throughput to make it up on the cycle before or after), and that the second indirect call takes another entry in the BTB.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is not optimization of a corner case over optimization of the common case; it is _enabling_ of the corner case over optimization of the common case. Making the corner case slightly less efficient, that the common case can be slightly more efficient is obvious. Making the corner case impossible is not the same thing, and requires a much stronger argument.

</comment><comment><USER11> Already discussed on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3472142> .

Every time this gets discussed a new security vulnerability comes up and is caused by the lack of -fPIE or -fPIC: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473068> .

</comment><comment><USER12> > No, I don't have any measurements

Measure or GTFO.

<comment><USER13> How about: watch your language, or get off HN?

No, he doesn't have to measure. He wrote a post in his own blog. You are neither forced to read it, nor to take action on what it says.

If you are interested in the actual profiling to see the performance penalty, you can do it yourself. It is enough for him to start the discussion on the matter, which is far more than you did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing I find interesting, is that he makes a case for optimizing something without providing any profiling data. As others have pointed out, he's talking about doing away with something that offers flexibility, and doing away with it might lead to security problems, while not offering any good reason why it is necessary. The least he could do is profile a few representative programs (say, Firefox and Apache) to show that this is a real hot spot that needs attention. That's why we have things like sysprof and valgrind/cachegrind.

</comment><comment><USER14> I remember people complaining loudly about the transition to Mach-O from PEF, but I don't remember seeing solid data that the situation was a problem. Is there data here that supports this?

Some of this just makes sense (resolving function addresses through the GOT, which has an impact on correctness), but for the performance issues it would be nice to know how much is at stake here.

</comment><comment><USER15> The right way to do it:

1\. Present data showing there is a problem. 2\. Propose fixes.

But that's harder than doing it the wrong way:

1\. Screed. 2\. Propose fixes.

</comment><comment><USER16> The only problem described in this article appears to be of performance, but I can see no objective figures on what kind of performance improvement we'd see if the proposed loss of flexibility were made.

The title of the article is "Sorry state of dynamic libraries on Linux" which implies that other OSes do it better. But the article does not cover what other OSes are even doing.

I'd love to see:

1) Objective and compelling figures that show that changing the current system would result a significant improvement.

2) A discussion about what other OSes are doing and justification of why Linux is in such a "sorry state" (or an article title that isn't linkbait).

<comment><USER3> > The only problem described in this article appears to be of performance

Correctness is a serious problem. ELF symbol interposition is dangerous because it can be done unintentionally. For the most part, the flexibility afforded by ELF goes unused except for LD_PRELOAD, and LD_PRELOAD can be accommodated using a safer and less general mechanism.

Systems with module-specific binding don't have to worry about unintentional symbol interposition. On these systems, adding a module to a process never causes another unrelated module to sometimes stop working depending on exact load order. On ELF systems, this catastrophe happens.

<comment><USER10> It would seem that somehow warning about interpositions would be the right thing. Makes it easier to debug weirdness, warns users if someone surreptitiously set LD_PRELOAD, but doesn't get in the way when someone wants to use the functionality.</comment></comment></comment>


Put a burger in your shell - <AUTHOR> http://notes.torrez.org/2013/04/put-a-burger-in-your-shell.html <comment><USER2> Beat me by a minute. Was busy editing the bash profile.</comment>