Ask HN: Where do you write? - <AUTHOR> I would like to write some short stories but I don't know where to publish them. Should I go for Medium, or a personal blog ...<p>Whatever you are writing, fictional or not, which platform do you use to publish ? And what are the pros and cons ? <comment><USER2> I recommend a blog with your own URL (WordPress or Ghost). Then you can syndicate to Medium and Twitter with plugins. That way your content stays yours and you remain in control, while also getting the exposure from other platforms.

<comment><USER3> Does it really work to syndicate content to Medium?

I don't remember the exact number, but the vast majority of my Medium readers (something like 80% IIRC) came from HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc. My most read article had about 170k reads before I removed my content from Medium.

<comment><USER4> Unless you have a very large following already, you're at the whim of the Medium editors to "elevate" content to the wider readership of the site, via the preexisting topics, or if you're really lucky, to feature your article on the front page.

* Edit: That doesn't mean you shouldn't! :-) However, you might get more readership - if that's what you're interested in - by writing pretty much anywhere, and just sharing it with the right communities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are plenty of static site generates that you can have on gitlab for free: gitlab.com/pages

Just clone an example repo and push a commit, it should generate your site.

You can still add a custom domain in gitlab project settings.

I really wonder how it could be easier (fork a repo, push a commit) or cheaper (given that it's free).

</comment><comment><USER6> Serious question: have you considered writing for just yourself?

I've found in this age of online sharing my motivations and enjoyments of things is more pure if I just do it for myself, and maybe share with one or two appreciative people.

In addition, I find that not telling anyone your goals or ambitions is _extremely_ underrated. There's research that shows that if you do that, you get some of the reward for having done something worthwhile without nearly as much of the work, so the actual work becomes harder to do. And personally, I find it's absolutely true. The rest of the world's noise and opinions interferes with my own developmental process.

If I do things for myself and only for myself, it usually goes so much better.

<comment><USER7> > you get some of the reward for having done something worthwhile without > nearly as much of the work

I think it's ego satisfaction or something? I personally have started to tell myself "get it done/build it first before you share it". Like buying a domain before the site/app is ready.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The important thing is not where but how. What matters is a platform that doesn't get in your way. You need something that helps you focus on writing while keeping useless distractions (such as colors, formatting or html) away. Medium is good for that and so is the distraction free mode of WordPress. You can always write on Word and copy and paste the text later too. You can even use notepad or wordpad. I generally use metapad for this.

In my personal case I find markdown very useful when I absolutely need some formatting but don't want to waste time with HTML, toolbar buttons or having to remember keyboard shortcuts. The great thing about it is that it doesn't break the flow, I can just keep writing.

For publishing (which I do rarely as I mostly write just for my own amusement) I use Neocities because it's just old school HTML and doesn't get in my way, GitHub pages work for that too. The good thing about those two is that backups are basically hassle free, you always have a local and a remote copy and don't have to worry about having to backup a database or export a blog (as is the case for Medium or WordPress). Since you asked for cons too: static site generators and GitHub commands not only are something else you have to install, learn and keep up-to-date, they also break the flow so only use them once you've finished writing.

So here's my summary: choose whatever platform you feel that doesn't get in the way of your writing.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have used svbtle.com for years, and generally like it.

I am all-in on Notion these days, though, and wish I could use it for my blog. I _could_ but I want nicer URLs and to have it be on my domain.

<comment><USER10> Check this out. Notion as a blog -> [https://github.com/ijjk/notion- blog](https://github.com/ijjk/notion-blog)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've found Duotrope is useful for tracking down science fiction and fantasy outlets if you're looking to place stories in a professional setting.

I've written a bunch of short stories over the years. Some I've trunked after they didn't go anywhere. In a couple of instances, I've published them on my newsletter (andrewliptak.substack.com), and then republished them at Curious Fictions.

</comment><comment><USER12> It depends on how pro you want to get. If you have the means, I suggest getting both a story editor and a proof reader and ask them to give brutal feedback. The reality is that most stories that are written are low quality and thus don't get the audience that the writer would desire. Much like programming, it takes a while to get your stuff where you want it to be.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just do a bunch of markdown files in a private github repo. There are a lot of great markdown editors to make the writing experience pleasant (I use typora [https://typora.io/](https://typora.io/)), plus text analysis is easy given it is just plain text file.

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by text analysis?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I self-host a couple of blogs using Wordpress. For over eleven years, I've posted a photo every day at [https://www.75centralphotography.com/](https://www.75centralphotography.com/), but that's not really writing. For writing, I've just recently spun up [http://www.robotsprocket.com/](http://www.robotsprocket.com/) to share ephemera, code and other things I've found interesting. Having played around with Medium, Squarespace and Wix, I find WP to be superior in its flexibility and the fact that I'm ensured that I own the content.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wrote a blog post about that: [https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/10/14/how-to- start-b...](https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/10/14/how-to-start- blogging/)

But the short answer is: wherever is easiest. I find setting up a wordpress.com blog (free) easiest, but medium or dev.to are good as well.

Don't let your desire to find the perfect platform inhibit your writing. The hard part about writing is the writing, not the platform. As a developer, I find it easy to get tangled up in tech choices, package upgrades and deployment pipelines, which lets me avoid or defer actually writing.

<comment><USER17> > Don't let your desire to find the perfect platform inhibit your writing. The > hard part about writing is the writing, not the platform.

This is why the vast majority of my writing is on paper, never to be published. The act of writing helps me order my thoughts, and that's much easier to do if I can be confident they're only for me.

<comment><USER16> 100% agree that writing clarifies my thoughts.

I will say there's sometimes additional clarification that occurs if I'm going to publish something (internally or to the world). I find that makes me aim for that extra bit of polish or certitude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A good place to start off might be on an appropriate subreddit. It's low effort, pseudonymous, and you get an immediate audience. You can post it somewhere and get immediate (encouraging, good, bad, scathing) feedback.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not so much a recommendation on where to publish, but I do suggest you form relationships and connections with other writers. It may seem like a solitary art form, but you can't do it alone.

Thy said, the platform doesn't matter. No one will find your content unless you cultivate an audience. There's not much difference between Medium and GitHub and pastebin as far as your audience is concerned. If you want readers you'll need an outlet that has them already (existing magazine, for example) or you'll have to learn about marketing and promotion.

Good luck. Keep writing! The world needs your stories.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the key is finding a community, if feedback and potentially an audience is what you are trying to build.

Wattpad has been popular for those who can keep up with the social requirements (frequent updates, networking, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER21> I just use Hugo and generate static html that I rsync to my web host. I have found this much easier to deal with and much less prone to hacking than something like wordpress or other CMS platforms.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would use my own domain, so that I have the control of my site. Why hand over the control to Medium or Wordpress.com?

Same thing with the SEO. Why give the SEO juice to Medium instead of your own personal domain?

Building a static site with e.g. Hugo or Jekyll is an appealing choice. If you want you can use Cloudfront + S3 to host it.

OTOH, Wordpress is very convenient to work with and quick to set up. If you don't have a VPS there are shared web hosting sites that should be good enough in the beginning at least. Shared web hosting can also be used for static sites.

</comment><comment><USER23> I use Hugo and I host my blog out of an AWS S3 bucket.

Pros:

      - Cheap.

      - Static and small. Hugo lets me really make everything tiny.

      - Learned more about AWS.

Cons:

      - A lot of work because I had to setup Route 53, CloudFront, Certificate Manager and S3.

      - Learning about the permission model and setting up an IAM user with right permissions.

      - Figuring out how Route 53, Certificate Manager and CloudFront work together so I could have SSL.

Reading this back, my pros and cons list sounds ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> Also, gitlab pages will host your pages for free, there are many site generates you can choose from ( gitlab.com/pages ), including Hugo, you don't get any of the con, and it's completely free to use.

<comment><USER24> Community Advocate with GitLab here, just wanted to share the link to GitLab Pages in case anyone is looking for it: [https://about.gitlab.com/stages- devops-lifecycle/pages/](https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops- lifecycle/pages/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Vuepress → Github actions → static site deployed to GCP/Storage. Writing Markdown in VSCode is _significantly_ better than all the online editors I've tried.

</comment><comment><USER26> I am using a self-hosted Wordpress instance, lets encrypt, and cloudflare to proxy requests. A few automation scripts to ensure the apps are updated and IP changes are corrected with google domains. Every now and then I check my site to ensure everything is working as it should.

Granted, it doesn't get much traffic except for 2 post that gets me 5-10 visitors daily. [https://ianmf.com](https://ianmf.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> I just have a PHP site on my own domain and I also created a very simple PHP script to load and display markdown files. This way I write new posts as markdown files (so I get versioning and all), and there is no build step, I could edit files directly on the server.

[https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown- blog](https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog)

</comment><comment><USER28> The content matters. The tool doesn't.

Based on painful firsthand experience, don't waste much time optimizing for the 'best' way to share. Just create, share, adjust. You can always switch to another 'tool'\--tools are cheap, plentiful, and don't matter much. You'll kill every ounce of creativity and momentum mucking around in the weeds looking for the best 'tools'.

</comment><comment><USER29> If I would start a blog, right now I would use Gatsby + Markdown + own domain. Using free repository hosting and static cloud hosting which in many places is also free. Basically for 10$/year and occasional backup you would have a platform and service independent blog which can easily be migrated wherever you want. Aware that for these you need some basic tech skills indeed.

<comment><USER25> Do you work on React/etc. on a regular basis?

I attempted to use Gatsby for a personal blog/knowledge base-style setup and was immediately turned off by the seemingly immense overhead involved (React, CSS-in-JS, GraphQL).

I ended up with Vuepress instead and I'm happy (so far, anyway); a big draw is that it doesn't really require any Vue knowledge to get up and running.

<comment><USER29> Of course, Gatsby is just a choice. Using markdown gives you more flexibility. Almost every static site generator support markdown content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm using ghost at [https://mattbrandly.com/](https://mattbrandly.com/)

I intend to write more technical content, and I don't think ghost is that great for the purpose. I wish I were writing markdown and generating static assets locally. Having to send highlight.js to every client for syntax highlighting is unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER31> Always always always own your own content. Don't post on medium often (might be worth it to build a following).

I post exclusively on my own Wordpress blog hosted on vultr for $5/month. If you aren't a developer I'd recommend some self service option.

To build a following perhaps try twitter, Reddit, and medium. There's also probably locations to post short stories I'm unaware of

</comment><comment><USER32> I have my own personal blog using Jekyll.

</comment><comment><USER33> Your own blog first if not for any other reason then the fact that you own it and are not at anyone's whims but your own. I used it as an excuse to get Ghost up and running in my Kubernetes cluster. Win-win.

Then push content out to Medium, dev.to, Twitter, etc if you're looking for more of an audience.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was mainly using Literature & Latte's paid app Scrivener for years, but recently the free open source app Joplin has become my primary drafting environment. I still recommended both -- I use Scrivener for capturing research, organizing projects, and producing publisher-ready files.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've got a blog nobody reads that I host with Netlify. It's just a simple Hugo-based static site.

<comment><USER36> link?

<comment><USER35> [https://github.com/brndnmtthws/brndn- io](https://github.com/brndnmtthws/brndn-io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Write Everywhere.

Write on Medium and Your Blog

Write on Substack. <=== I do. Pros: I can get paid. Cons: Formatting is simple.

Write on Amazon Publishing

<comment><USER16> Do you write the same content (cross post)? Or do you write unique content for each platform? If so, how do you decide which platform for which piece of content?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Running a blog for my outlet: [https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com](https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com)

Started about 7 years ago and still haven't stopped. I did try a few times, but people keep emailing me.

</comment><comment><USER39> For personal blog: 11ty + travis ci + github pages.

Its easy way to write and publish content.

Just checkout git repo, write posts with your favourite editor and push changes to github - thats all.

Previously, I've being using Wordpress and Ghost. Both were real nigtmare to manage.

<comment><USER40> I've not tried out Ghost yet - I thought it was suppose to solve WP's bloat and UX issues.

What was nightmarish about Ghost and when did you last use it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I know a couple people writing on posthaven.com, and when it comes time for me to start putting stuff online, that's what I plan to use.

Their value proposition is 1. they will keep the servers online for all time 2. low bullshit post hosting

</comment><comment><USER42> I keep a blog at [https://vorpalhex.com](https://vorpalhex.com) and I primarily keep it as a repository of thoughts, ideas and odd projects.

I use Hugo because it's simple yet flexible, powerful and produces a static bundle that is easily hostable anywhere. I use the `hello-friend` theme with significant tweaks, mostly a lot of shortcodes for better and more-responsive friendly image handling. I wanted a markdown based flow with minimal JS that didn't require node/rails/etc toolchains. Hugo is available both as a docker image and a small compiled binary so both local builds and CI builds are very easy. Currently I'm hosted via Gitlab for ease (I can use my own CI runner and the hosting itself is free with SSL support) but I've used S3 and others with great results.

I do my drafting in my favorite notes app InkDrop, and then just take my markdown file and drop it into my repo. One git push and it's published. Still haven't found a great platform to let non-technical folks edit my posts though.

I keep my images and big files in a Digital Ocean CDN. I use rclone to manage cdn contents (it uses the s3 protocol) and have some utility scripts to pull the cdn locally and then sync up changes. I ended up having to write a small golang program to easily bulk resize images at responsive breakpoints: [https://gitlab.com/vorpalhex/responsimg](https://gitlab.com/vorpalhex/responsimg)

For me, this setup makes it very low friction to compose blog posts and get them published _and_ it gets good lighthouse speed scores and loads quickly on even low end devices with bad connections. No medium paywall, no facebook SDK, etc. I did end up caving and installing Google Analytics (I was very displeased with piwik).

</comment><comment><USER43> Do you want to advance slowly in your skills? Then self publish.

Do you wish to advance painfully and quickly? Then find a traditional (online or paper) publisher and submit submit submit until you write something someone likes.

</comment><comment><USER44> At work we use write.as for the blog, and I like it so far.

For my personal website, I use Jekyll on Vercel (ex. Zeit). I only did it because I wanted to code a bit and own the domain and the content.

</comment><comment><USER45> Self Hosted WordPress with minimal plugins. Doesn't get in my way and I can write. No need to compile anything or create static files etc except a simple caching plugin.

</comment><comment><USER36> First I put it on my personal blog (11ty+netlify), so I own the rights. I wait at least a couple days before publishing or promoting elsewhere (medium, DEV, hackernoon)

</comment><comment><USER46> Medium will be OK for this purpose.

1\. It's pretty quick to start

2\. It's free but you can upgrade to premium for advanced features

3\. Also Medium's community is a huge advantage

</comment><comment><USER47> If you're interested in short stories To be published I recommend trawling The Submissions Grinder. This is duotrope but free.

</comment><comment><USER48> If you just want to write and could care less about ownership of content, pick Medium.

</comment><comment><USER49> fanfiction.net :D

</comment><comment><USER50> Mostly twitter, and my company's blog.

</comment><comment><USER51> Github?

<comment><USER52> Short stories on Github? Really?

<comment><USER51> Why not?

<comment><USER52> Because that's not what Github was created for, as far as I know... "built for developers" is the first sentence on he homepage.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stencils for Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1768655466/stencils-for-science

<comment><USER2> The name is very misleading. These are stencils of quotes of "not just great scientists, but great people with ideas worth sharing"</comment>


One Word Reviews: More informative than Metacritic, shorter than Penny-Arcade - <AUTHOR> http://owreviews.com

<comment><USER2> I like the idea. But tried to give review "Immersive" to Skyrim and the app told me I can't give review like that because they don't have the word in database. What's with that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's because I'm trying to use a whitelist rather than a blacklist for the words, and although nltk (python lib) has a pretty good corpus, it's still missing a whole bunch.

The plan is to manually ok those words that people add and I don't have, and hope that this doesn't constitute the majority of the words :)

edit: Sorry to immediately disappoint though.

<comment><USER2> Was not really disappointed :) I do think it's a good idea, and feel that the site would add real value. Maybe later show more reviews per game when you have more reviews?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Did APIs Kill the Semantic Web Dream? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes and no.

If the "semantic web" is dead it is that people are sick of updating standards. For instance, we know now that we should have SHACL before we had OWL (forgot the old "garbage in garbage out" thing) but it is too late. Probably the only semantic web "standard" that realizes that RDF can do everything JSON can do is the XMP metadata standard that Adobe has pushed. (Somehow the librarians who made Dublin Core didn't seem to think it mattered what order you listed the authors of a book in -- but the one guy Adobe had thinking about it did.)

One strange thing that turned up with the semweb for instance is that maybe 80% of the time people use an ordered list in JSON they don't really care about the order -- representing facts with set semantics actually works most of the time but unfortunately when you do 80% of the work to get to an MVP it is still not viable.

People at this point might be vaugely aware that SPARQL would be a lot more useful if they added "object-relational" features similar to N1QL but the standards fatigue is too set in. (Eg. you should be able to write queries that know about ordered lists)

The Object Management Group has long been following a path which is parallel to the semantic web. For instance, if you have machine readable API schemas (eg. represent the semantics of the API) you could have API clients that "code themselves". Thus there really is no contradiction between APIs and the "semantic web".</comment>


The iPhone Becomes a Web Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_iphone_becomes_a_web_server.php <comment><USER2> <http://code.google.com/p/cocoahttpserver/>

Is a lightweight HTTP server written in obj-c. A lot of projects are using it, in fact, most "flash drive" apps use it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Eh? I had lighttpd+Django running on my iPhone last April when I purchased it.</comment>


Working (or not working perhaps) with friends - <AUTHOR> http://justinkownacki.blogspot.com/2007/03/get-by-or-not-with-little-help-from.html <comment><AUTHOR> I agree with others around here that doing it by yourself is going to limit your scalability. I'm working with friends right now, but we've done a good job (at least I think we have, we'll see) outlining the expectations and goals of each of us. So far so good, and things are going well. I think that if you've got good, open communication in your business you're fine in general.

I've had issues in the past with friends and business when communication wasn't explicit.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm currently talking with a friend about starting a business that I had already considered starting on my own. We have worked together in the past and things went well but I can definitely see how some of the 'friend problems' in this article would apply to our working arrangement. Is it better to try and go it alone or take the chance and work with a friend as a co-founder?</comment>


Ask HN: Would you sell your baby for just stock? - <AUTHOR>

Myself and two friends launched a site about 6 months ago and we have been seeing consistent traffic growth up to its current level of about 2,500 visits/day.  Our current revenue is $0, mostly because we underestimated the time commitment it would take to sell our services, especially while maintaining our day jobs.  Last week we were approached by a company looking for an acquisition, we compliment their current offerings nicely and let them expand into new demographics.  They would like to purchase our company assets and also higher us to continue to grow the site full time.  For the assets (essentially just the site) they are offering a lump sum of stock that we would have to hold for 12 months, at the current value we would each get roughly 50% of our annual salaries.  Employment going forward would mean a moderate raise and also a good chunk of options vested over a 4 year period. The company is traded on the pink sheets so it feels a little risky to me and we were of course always hoping for a nice cash out.  Our view is in the very worst case we get to break out of our cube-farm jobs and work on something we are passionate about.  Trying to get viewpoints from as many people as possible, what does HN think? <comment><USER2> And I thought you were going to talk about selling human babies for company stock...

</comment><comment><USER3> This is obviously completely dependent on how much you like the acquiring company and if you think you will enjoy working for them. If it was me and I loved the acquirer then I would do it in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER4> No real opinion, but I will note that your question (in the title) isn't really an accurate representation of the situation: They are offering you stock and also jobs, with a pay raise.

I am noting that because the way you worded your question implies that you may be mentally framing the question that way. A more accurate assessment of what is really going on may help you think more clearly about this decision.

Good luck with this.</comment>


Law enforcement seizes dark web market after moderator leaks back end creds - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/law-enforcement-seizes-dark-web-market-after-moderator-leaks-backend-credentials/ <comment><USER2> As usual, humans are the weakest link in the security chain.</comment>


How I Beat Procrastination to Launch a Side Project - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/zero-to-mvp-thirty-minutes-at-a-time-d4661446e081#.uv623mmb8 <comment><USER2> I feel the same way, it's very hard to do anything important if you only have one hour. There might be a positive aspect in that it will force you to slice things up into smaller pieces that will be more easily updated, replaced.</comment>


What about a browser(a la Chrome) with command line capabilities? - <AUTHOR>

I was thinking if it would be interesting to have  browser that at the same time would be acting as command line.
Examples: goto gmail.com compose new
          goto wikipedia.org penguin
          goto ........ <comment><USER2> Have you seen <https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/> and <http://vimperator.org/> ?

Or maybe... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29> :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I have not expressed my self clearly. I was thinking if there is a full feature browser(not a command line browser like lynx) where at the same time will be having command line capabilities. I guess it can be something like kernel on the cloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You're looking at Emacs, which has a terminal, and a browser (well, the browser is a bit trickier to add in: <http://www.haxney.org/2009/08/its- alive.html>), among other things.

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks very interesting. Very close to what I was thinking. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe start here: <http://www.uzbl.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking something with flavor chrome+bash full capability of playing video for example and at the same time be used as text editor if you want, list your offline files etc I am not sure that uzbl is that. But I am sorry if I missed the point of uzbl-browser

<comment><USER4> I think what you are asking for is a browser that also acts as a terminal.

It would have to do both really well to fit into that niche, but I haven't looked too much into uzbl-browser but it may be able to perform such tasks through its extensibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly that "a browser that also acts as a terminal" :). I am not a programmer. I am talking from the perspective of someone that likes the comfort and the goods of a fully featured browser(multimedia, filling forms easily, ..) and the flexibility and the simplicity of a terminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure I understand. What would be the purpose? It seems like needless extra typing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use vimperator for the types of things you have mentioned. Keyboard shortcuts for everything very similar to vim.

But in other comments you seem to ask about actual terminal capabilities. Not really interested in that personally, I am fine having my browser be a browser and my terminal be a terminal. Might be neat to run an instance of a terminal in a browser tab though.

But I do recommend learning vimperator if you spend a lot of time in the terminal anyway.</comment>


Why Elance Wastes My Time- A Typical Experience - <AUTHOR> https://matchist.com/blog/elance-wastes-my-time/

<comment><USER2> There are forms of clever marketing; this is not one of them. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why Apple Wastes My Time - A Typical Experience (Samsung.com)</comment>


Instagram took down private unofficial APIs via DMCA - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram-API <comment><USER2> Looks like this is the takedown request: [https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01-2...](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01-22-facebook.md)

The core allegation is:

> Mgp25's Instagram-API repository (and its forks) offers a tool expressly > designed to circumvent the Company's effective access controls and > protection measures by avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or > impairing the Company's technological measures without the authority of the > copyright owners or the Company. Mgp25's Instagram-API is designed to > emulate the official Instagram mobile app when communicating with > Instagram's servers, which allows users of mgp25's Instagram-API to send and > receive data (including receiving legitimate, copyrighted posts by > Instagram's users) through Instagram's private API. Mgp25's Instagram-API > also permits other types of access to, and collection of, Instagram's users' > copyrighted works in manners that exceed the scope of access and > functionality that would be permitted by a user with a legitimate, > authorized Instagram account.

<comment><USER3> Is this legally a legitimate reason for a DMCA request? That it's a tool that could be used to bypass copyright controls?

It's been a long time since I read it, but my understanding of the DMCA is that you need to claim an actual copyright violation on the thing being taken down. This sounds like a claim of contributory copyright infringement, which a) I don't remember being covered by DMCA, and b) there's a reasonable claim here for substantial non-infringing use, so I'm not sure contributory copyright infringement really applies.

<comment><USER4> This is about Section 1201, one of the most interesting parts of the DMCA, which is about banning circumvention devices. What is confusing me is that I am under the impression that the DMCA "takedown" process (which I know quite little about, to be fair) was unrelated to the anti-trafficking provisions (which I do stare at a lot), so I don't think this is a valid request (even if it were a valid lawsuit... though I frankly doubt that either as I don't think an "access token" can be considered an "effective TPM").

(I am _not_ a lawyer, but I spend an unreasonable amount of my time staring at Section 1201 issues; if anyone needs legal advice they should contact a lawyer: nothing I say should possibly be construed as legal advice.)

<comment><USER5> From what I gathered: The author was banned from service on Instagram, he or she kept getting banned/denied new accounts because they flagged the device's UUID... So the author then made the API to mask/modify the device UUID and try to regain access to the platform (presumably signing up elsewhere, then using that token through this API to maintain access on their phone).

The author admitted to this in the readme of the repo.

Sounds 100% like the API was designed to try and bypass access control mechanisms...

Not sure if that falls under the legal definition or not.

<comment><USER6> > Sounds 100% like the API was designed to try and bypass access control > mechanisms...

Sure, but your parent's point is that this doesn't appear to be grounds for a takedown. Takedowns are for infringing content, which this isn't.

<comment><USER7> According to the 2nd sentence on Wikipedia, which describes DCMA:

> [DCMA] criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or > services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted > works (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM). It also > criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not > there is actual infringement of copyright itself.

While I initially thought (like many others on here) that DCMA was to keep you from spreading copyright content or passing it off as your own, the true purpose of DCMA is actually to criminalize the act of circumventing DRM. Access control on a social network I guess is considered a type of DRM for the content within the network (which, lest we not forget, is wholly owned by Instagram as soon as you post it). It specifically states that circumventing access control is a violation, regardless of whether any copyright was actually infringed upon.

So from my keyboard lawyer perspective, it seems like Instagram is actually within their rights here.

[Source]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act))

<comment><USER8> The point of the parent comment is not that the DMCA doesn't cover anti- circumvention, but rather than the DMCA contains many parts, and only the copyright content part has a safe Harbor and takedown notice provision.

The claim you're arguing against isn't that the DMCA doesn't cover this. The claim is that the DMCA takedown process doesn't apply to all infringements of the DMCA, only those of copyright wrt safe harbor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> IANAL. I'm also assuming this was an HTTP client library.

How could this possibly be a violation of copyright, if it's just a client that accesses their API? Their API is not truly "private," just undocumented. If you distribute a free app that calls a remote API over users' networks, you can't make the case that it's private, because it's clearly accessible from every network/connection/device. Something exposed to the public cannot simultaneously be private.

At least, maybe the author's lawyer could argue the above in court.

Among many things I hate about the DMCA, it's that hosts have basically no option other than to respond to takedown requests by actually taking down the content in question, for fear of litigation. It just rubs me the wrong way.

<comment><USER10> >Among many things I hate about the DMCA, it's that hosts have basically no option other than to respond to takedown requests by actually taking down the content in question, for fear of litigation.

That's the entire point. A DMCA takedown request is supposed to lead to the content being taken down. The person who uploaded it can send a counternotice, which will lead to the content being put back up if no lawsuit is filed.

What would you change about the system? Should rights owners have no recourse short of litigation to get their content taken down?

<comment><USER11> > What would you change about the system?

3 strikes and you are out. Take down 3 obviously (probably decided by a judge) non-infringing things and you lose the ability to send takedowns.

<comment><USER10> >Take down 3 obviously (probably decided by a judge) non-infringing things and you lose the ability to send takedowns.

Once it reaches this point, the service provider would likely stop accepting the notices anyway. See e.g. the recent lawsuit by Youtube against Brady, who sent a bunch of bogus notices. Once they realized that, they stopped accepting the notices.

There's hardly a critical mass of takedowns by people who've been found 3 times by a judge to have sent fraudulent takedowns.

<comment><USER11> > There's hardly a critical mass of takedowns by people who've been found 3 > times by a judge to have sent fraudulent takedowns.

Because those rarely go in front of a judge. Torrentfreak [0] gets many takedown notices where for example their reporting on a leak gets targeted with a DMCA request. If those companies had to fear someone challenging these (in this example an easy win) and making them lose their ability to send them out at all, that would change a lot.

[0]: [https://torrentfreak.com/all-dmca-notices-filed-against- torr...](https://torrentfreak.com/all-dmca-notices-filed-against-torrentfreak- in-2019-were-bogus-191231/)

> In previous years we've received erroneous complaints from the likes of > Amazon, Electronic Arts, Disney, Entertainment One, Vertigo Films, Magnolia > Pictures, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and even BBC Worldwide. This year we can > add more.

> According to Google's Transparency Report, in 2019 Google received a further > 11 DMCA takedown notices targeting our domain, sent on behalf of Columbia > Pictures, Sony Pictures, and sundry others. All of them were completely > bogus.

<comment><USER10> > If those companies had to fear someone challenging these (in this example an > easy win) and making them lose their ability to send them out at all, that > would change a lot.

Why hasn't torrentfreak sued? Presumably because it's not an easy win and doesn't produce real benefits for them. I'm struggling to see how any of that would change under your proposal.

For what it's worth, judges have occasionally issued injunctions preventing people from filing claims, under the DMCA and otherwise. See e.g.

[https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16599762/home-it- inc-v-...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16599762/home-it-inc-v-wen/) ("ORDERED that the Defendant Wupin Wen, no later than eighteen (18) hours after service of this Order on her via email to firstname.lastname@example.com, trynow@cn- ip.cn, and firstname.lastname@example.com: a. Notify Amazon that the trademark owner's allegations of infringement against HOMEIT are withdrawn and that Amazon should re-list the involved products to its website as soon as possible; and b. Refrain from filing or otherwise communicating any allegations of infringement by HOMEIT to any third party, at minimum, for the duration of the instant litigation relative to Saganizer branded products." docket 21

[https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4160397/design- furnishi...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4160397/design-furnishings- inc-v-zen-path-llc/) (older case from 2010), "Defendant is therefore enjoined from notifying eBay that defendant has copyrights in the wicker patio furniture offered for sale by plaintiff and that plaintiff's sales violate those copyrights. " docket 29

[https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16630192/california- bea...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16630192/california-beach-co-llc- v-du/) "THEREFORE, DU AND ALL PERSONS IN ACTIVE CONCERT OR PARTICIPATION WITH DU, ARE TEMPORARILY RESTRAINED from taking down, based on any alleged copyright infringement, from Facebook and Instagram, or any other service provider's website, CBC's online content or product line. Du is temporarily not permitted to file any further takedown notices with Facebook, Instagram, or any other service provider's website as to CBC's online content or product line. Any current and operative takedown notices in effect that were filed by Du as to CBC are restrained, and are to be disregarded by the online service provider. Accordingly, and specifically, Facebook (Report #2576187715997707) and Instagram (Report #1407615876061304) are directed to disregard Du's takedown notice and to reinstate CBC's online content during the period of this Order. " docket 22

<comment><USER11> > Why hasn't torrentfreak sued? Presumably because it's not an easy win and > doesn't produce real benefits for them. I'm struggling to see how any of > that would change under your proposal.

a) I'm not sure they can even sue currently, isn't the only thing illegal misrepresenting that you have the right you claim? b) Even if they could, as you say, no real benefit c) The change would mean that just the threat of getting sued for malicious DMCA notices would make the companies sending them better at actually having a case. Currently, there is no risk at all shooting with cluster bombs when sending notices. Barely any risk using DMCA to prevent speech. That is what my proposal would take away.

<comment><USER10> a) USC 512(f) makes it illegal to misrepresent that something is infringing. Not considering fair use is included, per Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.

c) To do that, you'd need to make suing easier. I don't see how your proposal does that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191207221404/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191207221404/https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram- API)

> Why did I make this API?

> After legal measures, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram blocked my accounts. > In order to use Instagram on my phone I needed a new phone, as they banned > my UDID, so that is basically why I made this API.

<comment><USER13> Anyone has the actual git repo as well?

<comment><USER14> If you fork git repos, make sure to pull them down, if the official repo is taken down, your forks will disappear unless you have a copy.

Here's a script I made to backup all your repos, throw it into a cron and run once a month or something, where 20 is the largest number of pages you have, adjust accordingly. I actually wrote this up when a fork I had disappeared.

       #!/bin/bash
       USERNAME='segmond'
       for i in `seq 1 20`;
       do
            curl --fail -s https://api.github.com/users/$USERNAME/repos?page=$i | jq '.[] | .clone_url' | xargs -t -n1 git clone
            sleep 1
       done

<comment><USER15> > if the official repo is taken down, your forks will disappear unless you > have a copy.

[https://help.github.com/en/github/collaborating-with- issues-...](https://help.github.com/en/github/collaborating-with-issues-and- pull-requests/what-happens-to-forks-when-a-repository-is-deleted-or-changes- visibility)

I don't think that's true, I've personally recovered deleted repositories by finding its forks.

edit: Ah never mind it seems things work differently in the case of DMCA takedowns

<comment><USER16> There is also a big difference between clicking `fork` on github vs cloning and creating a new repository (on github) and then changing the remote URL and pushing.

The latter isn't "github fork" even if it is a "git fork" and won't be affected by most[1] automated takedowns.

1> where most is defined as somewhere between 0 and 100%

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can still find the implem in various language, like this one in js:

[https://github.com/dilame/instagram-private- api](https://github.com/dilame/instagram-private-api)

</comment><comment><USER18> What's the difference between scraping while circumventing anti-scraping measures, which certain circuits have upheld as being legal, and what this unofficial API client did?

This is an honest question, and not a rhetorical one.

<comment><USER19> That was my first thought upon seeing this post. Given the LinkedIn scraping decision earlier this week, i would think that this one should be in the clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Question, is there any way to design an API such that it can't just be reversed into a new client library like this? Certificate pinning makes it harder to MITM but that's trivial to disable.

<comment><USER21> If you create a door, that door is going to be used to enter and to exit.

<comment><USER22> Except if you add a lock)

<comment><USER23> even with that you can use key to open the lock and key has to be stored somewhere and end user can always get it right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone have a mirror? I might download this and keep it just in case.

<comment><USER25> Some of the forks[1] still work, although outdated. There are some on gitlab[2] also. Doing code searches finds other copies[3].

[1] [https://github.com/NantipatSoftEn/Instagram- API](https://github.com/NantipatSoftEn/Instagram-API)

[2] [https://gitlab.com/alihesari/Instagram- API](https://gitlab.com/alihesari/Instagram-API)

[3] [https://github.com/DarriusAlexander/speaklight/tree/1b4167c3...](https://github.com/DarriusAlexander/speaklight/tree/1b4167c3164a8fd1e1779410a61e2841c89ce386/wordpress/wp- content/plugins/social-auto- poster/includes/social/libraries/instagram/mgp25/instagram-php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> unofficial APIs or unofficial documentation about the APIs? what exactly was this, and if the latter, are the APIs still available?

<comment><USER27> "This is a PHP library which emulates Instagram's Private API. This library is packed full with almost all the features from the Instagram Android App. This includes media uploads, direct messaging, stories and more."

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191207221404/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191207221404/https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram- API)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Now facebook developers' app approval is so hard. I submit 6 times to review and every time reviewer point a mistake. I'm building for a tool that sets up a third party API gateway for your 3rd party applications APIs. [https://nocodeapi.com](https://nocodeapi.com)

<comment><USER29> Awesome! I love this tool. What were you doing all these days.

<comment><USER28> Thanks, I'm adding lot's of applications and here are the list you can find them [https://nocodeapi.com/marketplace](https://nocodeapi.com/marketplace)

<comment><USER30> Looks very useful. I like your landing page, it nicely designed, works great on a phone, and communicates clearly.

A tiny suggestion, it looks like a typographical error slipped though in the sentence:

> Convert these applications APIs without any hustle and Power-up your > products, tools & portfolio by these NoCodeAPI.

I think you meant to use the word "hassle" instead of "hustle" as it would be a bit more idiomatic in the sentence.

<comment><USER28> Thanks, todd8 for the catch. I'm working on the content. stay tuned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't know the details of the code, so I'm left with questions.

Is the only difference between using this library and using Instagram's mobile app the fact that the library is not the "right" web browser?

Isn't the library simply a different web client accessing a publicly available API? And requests from the library are properly authenticated / authorized by Instagram's servers through normal means (the library isn't bypassing some mechanism, it's just not the official app)?

If it's true that it's just a different API client, then there may be some TOS violation, but isn't DMCA an overreach? Is there any validity to the claim?

<comment><USER6> A TOS violation is an unauthorised access which is a federal crime. See, for example, the case of Aaron Swartz. Using the DMCA seems preferable. Changing these laws would be better still.

<comment><USER32> So if I put "If you visit the website, you owe me 5 USD" in my Terms of Service, I can have them arrested? Something feels very fishy here, has to be more conditions than just "TOS violation === federal crime"

<comment><USER6> The difference is in what you can convince an investigator, a prosecutor and a jury to take seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Isn't the google vs oracle still on? How did github rule that apis are copyrighted?

<comment><USER34> I think with how DMCA works, Github doesn't have to (or need to) rule one way or another. Someone sends a notice and it is taken down swiftly. If the owner thinks this was in bad faith or a mistake, they can challenge it but if you are not absolutely sure that you can win such a claim you better talk to a lawyer first.

<comment><USER35> Owner needs to send a counter-notice. Github will have to restore it. FB will be forced to take owner to court but the repo will stay up until court decides

<comment><USER3> Easy to say. But I'd be hesitant to invite a lawsuit from a company with infinite money, a predatory attitude to their users, and a proven willingness to spend arbitrary sums of money to maintain their quasi-monopoly.

<comment><USER35> Possibly. Though based on having friends who had DMCA used against them and fought it, a counter-notice immediately put the brakes on large companies.

The reason for that is simple: DMCA takedowns in large companies are handled by someone who at best is a year out of law school who processes hundreds of them per day. 99.99% of those go unchallenged because no one knows about the process. As soon as the counter-notice is served this person/entity indicates that they aren't the 99.99%, at which point someone actually starts looking at their play book. It will be another round of notice/counter notice game before someone that bills $400/h looks at the merit of a company's assertion. In the larger companies the cooler hands tend to prevail in non-obvious cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If this developer had reversed engineered some documentation about the private API could that also receive a DMCA?

<comment><USER37> Yes. I could publish the source code of, say, my access control system, along with instructions on how it could be bypassed, but yet if you use those instructions to bypass it, that is a violation of the DMCA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> In the author's own words, this API was explicitly designed to get round access controls. (see internet archive)

So people should be cheering this no? I mean facebook are protecting their users from nefarious developers seeking to get access to people's data.

The only crit is that it took so damn long to find it. (since 2016!) [https://web.archive.org/web/20160603201221/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160603201221/https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram- API)

I know thats not whats annoyed most people. But if facebook really are serious about privacy, then they took too damn long

<comment><USER39> They should make their APIs secure, instead they abuse DMCA.

<comment><USER40> Exactly. All they did was remove an open source repository. It's still trivial to access their services in a way that they admit is harmful to their customers' privacy. As a bonus, now it's on the front page of Hacker News.

It's almost as if they're making the same error as OP who identified the library as "an API" rather than a client of an insecure API implemented by Instagram. Presumably they know better.

<comment><USER41> Perfect is the enemy of good. And we don't know what work they're doing on the engineering side.

What if it turns out they detected this code was run by other people and responsible for 50% of the unauthorized access? Just because it doesn't entirely solve the problem, does not mean they shouldn't pursue all partial tactics.

<comment><USER40> The problem is that they are abusing a statute that we all know is harmful more generally and creating precedent for others to do it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Which language do you use for day-to-day stuff? - <AUTHOR>

which language do you use for day-to-day stuff? <comment><USER2> English? (depending on who you talk too, they might say barely)

I'm actually a big fan of Python lately

</comment><comment><USER3> Python

</comment><comment><USER4> honestly... ruby, awk, bash (in that order)

</comment><comment><USER5> python (before learning python: perl)

</comment><comment><USER6> perl.</comment>


Art and Tech in the Bay Area - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ramanfrey/art-and-tech-in-the-bay-area-e503f3f3601e <comment><USER2> What about something about what is happening up in Portland and Seattle</comment>


Testers are cool at prime numbers - <AUTHOR> http://dotnetbutchering.blogspot.com/2008/12/software-testers-and-prime-numbers.html A software tester, a software developer, and a project manager are told: "All odd numbers are prime". Result: sadness. <comment><AUTHOR> aren't they? this is not against testers anyway - it's just sad how the 'joke' is tailored by testers for testers</comment>


Someone Has Infected at Least 500,000 Routers All Over the World - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj3ma5/vpnfilter-router-malware-champions-league-cisco-talos <comment><USER2> According to DOJ [1], "Someone" is Fancy Bear [2] and the FBI has seized control [3] of the C&C domain (ToKnowAll.com)

[1] [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department- announces-...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces- actions-disrupt-advanced-persistent-threat-28-botnet-infected)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear)

[3] [https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/24/fbi-seizes-domain- russia...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/24/fbi-seizes-domain-russian- botnet/)

<comment><USER3> I believe this is what Antonov meant when he said: "A pre-designed scenario is being implemented, Again, we are being threatened. We warned that such actions will not be left without consequences." in response to the latest Syria strike.

WWIII may not be nukes, but complete economic chaos after banks, hospitals, militaries, and electricity networks are taken down.

<comment><USER4> Good reasons to start being a prepper if you aren't already

<comment><USER5> And to watch all of Mr. Robot for ideas.

<comment><USER6> And "dai hard 4".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The state of SOHO router security is pretty sad. Sure, most of those infected were probably unpatched, possibly had remote-admin pages enabled, or were using default credentials but... why is it even possible to open the remote admin interface with default passwords?

Why don't they all auto-update by default for critical vulnerabilities?

<comment><USER8> > Why don't they all auto-update by default for critical vulnerabilities?

Because it costs money for manufacturers to implement and maintain this functionality, and there's (currently) zero benefit to them for doing so and (currently) zero repercussions for doing what they do today after they sell you a device: nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of all the routers world wide, this has to be a pretty small percentage, right? How many does it take to create an effective DDoS?

<comment><USER10> Depends on the target site. With half a million routers you could cause problems to 99% of sites out there. The percentage of websites that could handle 500k concurrent connections is very small.

<comment><USER11> If we assume each router has, on average, 0.5Mbps upstream (hopefully it's higher!) then that's a combined capacity of ~250Gbps.

Some quick searching says the average DDOS size at one point in 2017 was measured at ~14Gbps and some larger attacks were peaking at ~120Gbps. Cloudflare's "biggest DDOS ever" was 800Gbps.

Even if we assume a lot of these routers are clustered on specific ISPs or networks and the effective capacity will be less, just on sheer bandwidth we're still well into or above the range of some of the larger DDOS attacks.

Whatever way you look at it, I'm sure 500,000 routers is enough to cause some trouble for most people.

<comment><USER12> A lot of DDOS attacks use UDP-based amplification techniques. I know DNS and NTP were frequently used and could get amplification factors of up to 500x. This year there have been some amplification attacked using Memcache that could get 50,000x amplification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to know how I could detect if anything on my network is infected -- are there any IPs/DNS that I could look out for in my logs?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Talos blog below goes much further in depth on whats actually happening (ip is extracted from photo location data)

Link to blog: [https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/05/VPNFilter.html?m=...](https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/05/VPNFilter.html?m=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In a recent discussion both Netgear Orbi and eero have come up as good options for SOHO WiFi.

I havent used either, but looking at [http://eero.com/](http://eero.com/) seems to indicate 1) automatic updates and 2) built-in VPN .

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not post the original Cisco report. This article barely grazes over the topic

<comment><AUTHOR> I choose this because it links to most of the relevant articles (including the Talos blog & US National Cybersecurity advisory) in the body of the Motherboard article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How do you find out if you are vulnerable to this? I have a router from one of the companies they list (tp link) but there is not much more info. I am allready running the newest fw.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems like a lot of trouble to go through in order to disrupt a soccer game.

<comment><USER17> That's because there's no way its intention is to disrupt a soccer game.

That's Ukraine's intelligence sector's way of driving popular "regular Joe" attention to a security interest that they have (by misleading them about the purpose).

What's disappointing is that the VICE article bothers to repeat it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The journalism on this is awful. The Ukrainian statements are ridiculous and should have been challenged by VICE rather than sensationalized.

A state actor isn't going to run the kill command on 500,000 routers to disrupt a soccer match.

The intention of the compromise is for surveillance.

Not nearly as sophisticated as the NSA capabilities - nearly every router in the world (besides the small percentage not produced in the United States) are compromised by the NSA. It's telling how weak the Russian cyber security program is that they need to compromise routers with an active exploit to get some small surveillance capability. It also sounds like the C&C network didn't get a lot of investment, as its design was easy to subvert.

<comment><USER18> Russians already killed and injured more than 100 000 people in Ukraine, including 2,500 children deaths. More than 2 000 000 left their homes. They shot civil plane full of passengers to blame Ukraine. They used chemical weapons in Syria. They completely destroyed their own major city. And so on.

Why they cannot damage few routers? What will stop them? USA and Britain will declare war?

<comment><USER17> Huh?

Conspiracy theories?</comment></comment></comment>


Google Voice now lets you port your own phone number - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/19/google-voice-now-lets-you-port-your-own-phone-number/ <comment><USER2> Is there any hope of getting support from google if something goes wrong with your google voice number?

Google voice worked great for me for over a year but, now, there seems to be about a 1/20 chance that any particular text message will get dropped, and a 1/10 chance that any call will get a message that says "we're sorry, you've reached a number that's been disconnected or is no longer in service. . ." And if that weren't enough, voicemail stopped working for me a couple of weeks ago.

Cell phone companies are notorious for having poor customer service, but it's at least possible to navigate their phone tree to reach a human who can escalate things to another human, one who actually has the power to get things fixed. Now, I kinda regret giving out my google voice number, since I'm going to have to get everyone to switch to my 'real' cell number if google doesn't spontaneously decide to fix these bugs.

<comment><USER3> As a paying customer of Google Apps, I have an incredibly difficult time getting decent customer support for the paid services, so I wouldn't hold my breath. Also, in the past I have submitted tickets for other free service like Analytics and they have gone unanswered each and every time.

Google is great at innovating, but their support story is pathetic. It's the big reason we stopped a 1000-person migration and stuck withbExchange (except for a small group of techies).

<comment><USER4> As a sucker who bought a phone from google, i'd say Stay away from anything critical from them!

still finds it difficult to answer a simple phone call if the phone is charging for more then 10min. As i have to lock the screen, then unlock (to work around a software bug in the touch driver), enter the password (damn work email), and finally, slide to answer (or more likely, see who called and call them back)

<comment><USER5> You didn't buy a phone from Google, you bought it from HTC (I assume this is the Nexus One, the same as I have) with heavy Google branding on it. If you want to get hardware support, you'll go through HTC directly. Learn your lesson that HTC has shitty component quality and _never_ buy from them again. Google just makes the software, which works fine. The hardware in the Nexus One is another story...

As soon as some good dual core phones ship this year, I'm jumping ship off the HTC boat.

<comment><USER6> Those sure sounded like software complaints...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is like saying "The Titanic now lets you bring your own lawn chair." I wish I had never started using Google Voice. The Android app is so janky that it may as well not exist. It's been three years and I still can't receive picture messages. Text messages get dropped 20% of the time, and you have to choose between having them forwarded to your cell phone with contact names inexplicably prepended to every message (often resulting in long texts being split up into 3 or more parts that get delivered in the wrong order) or having them delivered via pull notification on the Android app, which _might_ notify you of new texts within 24 hours. Sometimes, calls will instantly disconnect when I pick them up. There is no support. There is no hope. There is only Google, the Fortress of Customer Solitude.

<comment><USER8> At the risk of complaining about a free service, the most frustrating/humorous part is their voice to text translation service. While about the only thing that comes out accurate is the number the call came from, the rest of the conversation translates to phrases that are worse than any drunk dial line. Again, good for a laugh but not dependable enough to build a solid business model on if you're trying for a large piece of the cell market.

<comment><USER7> Oh, it's no risk. I openly complain about Google Voice and it has never been anything except 100% free-as-in-beer. I _wish_ I paid for Google Voice so I could demand that they refund me. You see, I got on board when it was still called GrandCentral, and there seemed to be every intention to create a Real Product with Real Support that people would pay Real Money for. Then Google bought it, and I figured, "Great! Now it'll be a Real Product just like Google search or Gmail, but free, or at least affordable!" Instead I got this _bupkus_. Bah, humbug! etc.

The transcriptions are fabulous, by the way--I think a great business model would be piping them into a web service for use instead of Markov chains in spam e-mail. Once it translated an entire message from my Dad as an ominous string of "Ha ha ha ha ha"s.

<comment><USER4> the english transcripts of international messages are the best

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The details:

The cost of porting is $20 (payable through Google Checkout).

Your mobile phone service plan will be terminated when you port your number to Google Voice and your carrier may charge you an early termination fee.

Once porting is complete, you will not be able to receive calls to your mobile phone until you complete the following steps:

Google Voice is not a mobile phone service provider, so you must setup a new mobile phone service plan (with your existing carrier or a new carrier) and request a new number.

Once you've secured a new mobile service plan and a new number, you will need to add this new number to your Google Voice account as a forwarding phone.

You may be unable to receive text messages for up to 3 business days after the porting process is complete.

Your Google Voice number will be replaced by the number you are porting. It will remain on your account for 90 days.

<comment><USER10> This seems like quite a bit of hassle for what it provides. It'll be interesting to see how many users actually go through with this. On a somewhat related note, anyone know what happened with the 333 US area code that google purchased a while back? I know they offered numbers under that for a while, but stopped offering them due to issues with carriers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anybody here also notice a lag during Google voice calls?

Sometimes the lag is up to half a second or one second, and it can really make conversations difficult because you start interrupting the other person (even though you don't realize it and think you started talking when there was a lull in the conversation).

<comment><USER12> Definitely. This is the only reason I won't use GV as my primary number. I don't call often, but when I do, I expect it to work.

(However, after reading some of these comments and using my noggin, I'm not sure I'd trust something as critical as my phone to a company who's notorious for no customer service.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really surprised that mobile phone companies are not providing exact same features as GV ... GV features are nice but not impossible to implement...

so i wonder what will happen if to undermine competition from GV, Verizon gives away a phone number that will be ringed (or forwarded) to 'n' number of devices and sends you sms and email message if someone leaves you voice message... how difficult is this to implement for a company that spends millions of tech dollars on almost daily basis???

<comment><USER14> Wildfire was absolutely spectacular, and I think better than GV. Too bad they didn't adapt. I believe someone has ported similar features to Asterisk.

Bell Atlantic (Verizon now) years ago had something very similar with ContactLine. You had 99 preprogrammed 'call plans'. 1-9 would forward through with various options, 10-19 would forward with screening, in the 30s you could check in and it would forward the call to the location where you were, with a greeting to call the person. 60-69 call plans would page you, allow you to get to a phone, and it would bridge the call. I believe produced by Octel, later purchased by AT&T, spun off into Avaya. Back in the late 80s, made the mobile phone incredibly powerful - back when phones had 3 watts, not the .6 watts we have today. :)

Vonage has Simulring which has some of the features that Google Voice has.

However, to the phone companies, any solution here is a cost center, not a profit center (except ContactLine which was $19.95/month). It is difficult to get them to spend even more money providing a service that a fraction of their users would use.

<comment><USER15> Parts of Wildfire live on under the commercial ownership/guidance of Jive software:

<http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp>

There are quite a few interesting products over there.

<comment><USER14> That doesn't look like the Wildfire from CR Technologies - just a product similarly named.

Wildfire as a phone service ran on Dialogic cards and acted like a virtual assistant. Calls you made were bridged through, so, you could have an 800# pointed to your wildfire number and call from a payphone. You would call in, listen to your voicemail and with voice commands be able to direct it to call the person back, conference in someone, etc. If you were listening to messages when an incoming call was coming in, wildfire would tell you that you had an incoming call, etc.

The real power of it was building your contact list. If you called my number, Wildfire would interview you. I couldn't find any of the old audio demos that used to be online, but, it went something like this:

Chris isn't available can I take a message? you speak the message, Wildfire would say, can I ask for a callback number? you would give the number, I heard, 555-1414 is this correct? yes. Is this a work or mobile number? work. I don't recognize this number, may I ask for more information? Yes (would register your name, additional numbers, weekend number, etc) Ok, thank you, I'll have Chris call you when he get the message.

At this point, Wildfire would page me with a code, # of messages, etc. Keep in mind, while you were on the line, Wildfire was already calling any registered numbers I had to try and contact me and would bridge the connection if possible. You call in, listen to the message, Wildfire would connect the call. During the call, if you needed to conference in someone, you said WildFire 'Here I am' Call Bob, 'Do you want to add this call to a conference?' Yes. 'Dialing'

If you called into the 800#, you could also direct calls from there. Depending on the interview Wildfire got from an incoming caller you could say: Wildfire, 'Here I am' Call Bill, 'I have a work and mobile number' Dial work, 'Dialing'. Wildfire would listen in, make sure the call was connected, offer to dial the mobile number if you didn't get a connection, etc.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOq2Ks-aPcA> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCxtagsvdM>

are two demos that I could find.

I've written so many notes regarding this. With sip service being as inexpensive as it is, and contact management software being in the cloud, it would be a very powerful tie-in. For a product in the mid to late 90s, it was very ahead of its time making road warriors very efficient.

<comment><USER15> Hence "parts" :) Jive used to have Wildfire, in its entirety, in their website. It has since dwindled to the Asterisk integration stuff you see on their website now.

<comment><USER14> That is a different Wildfire. From what I can tell, that is the Wildfire IM platform. The Wildfire I'm talking about was from CR Technologies, and was a voice telecom product, was sold in the mid 90s until it was discontinued around 2001 - with Orange Telecom having the last working enterprise installation until 2005, though, they wouldn't add any new clients after 2003.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would like to switch our land line telephone number to Google Voice. My wife and I use our cellphones 95% of the time, but old acquaintances still sometimes call our old landline number. Looks like there is no support for this?

<comment><USER17> There is a work-around for this, but it's somewhat painful and not guaranteed to work. You can port a land-line number to Vonage (at least in many cases, not all localities support LNP at this time, but you can check your number for portability at Vonage.com). You should then be able to port your Vonage number into Google Voice. I have not tried this second step, but it should work.

EDIT: Apparently, it doesn't work for VOIP numbers at this time. Nonetheless, Vonage does offer many of the same features as GV, like multi-forwarding and VM transcription, for a reasonable, flat monthly fee.

I ported my wife's 212 phone number (the original area code for Manhattan, before overlays, arguably the most sought-after area code in the country) to Vonage before we left NYC. People are always asking me how I did it. To be fair, it took almost two months to complete the port, and there was a lot of yelling on the phone at Vonage and AT&T (previous landline service provider) in the interim. For a while there, I thought that the number was lost for good.

I will warn you, if you move across time zones, porting your home number may come back to bite you -- we regularly get calls from businesses at 9:05 AM EST, which is 6:05 AM PST ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So if I port my real cell number over to Google Voice and my cell plan gets canceled, then isn't Google Voice basically useless because I wouldn't have a cell to forward it to? It'd be nice if they could work with carriers to assign you a new number and transfer your existing to GV in one transaction.

<comment><USER19> The idea is that you then get new service, with a new number you can use as your primary number with the old one still forwarding. Basically the equivalent of a forwarding address.

However, this may be preparation for the other shoe to drop. The other shoe would be some kind of data-only plan for Android phones where your actual phone service is simply VoIP with your Google Voice number, over the data plan.

<comment><USER20> That seems likely in the future, particularly since Gingerbread (Android 2.3) supports SIP-based Internet calling out of the box now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can you also port a GV number to somewhere else?

<comment><USER22> I know you can port them to Twilio :) (I work at Twilio)

<comment><USER23> Interesting. Could you describe the procedure? I started at porting from Google to another (Callcentric) and didn't know how to provide the billing documentation they asked for. What do you ask people to provide?

<comment><USER24> There is no fee to port a number with Twilio, and once you port it in it is $1/month to hold onto the number. To port, you log into your Twilio account and visit the phone numbers tab and select "port number", or hit this URL <https://www.twilio.com/user/account/phone-numbers/porting>

At this point, you fill out a form asking for the billing information and then we follow up with you to get authorization to transfer the number (usually just a signature). It usually takes about 10 business days to complete the port.

(I work at Twilio too)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the follow up. What do you accept as billing information for a Google Voice number? That's the part I got stuck on. Is this merely a formality? Is a screen shot of the account page acceptable? As a free service, they have never sent me a "bill".

<comment><USER25> I'm pretty sure we accept a screen shot of the account page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For me, the beauty of Google Voice is having an additional number through which I can route texts and calls so that I can filter them how I see fit.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does Google Voice number portability apply to:

\- pre-paid mobile numbers?

\- VOIP carriers?*

\- mobile numbers that were previously landline numbers?

\- all US-based mobile carriers or just a handful?

* I remember reading that some VOIP carriers are considered mobile carriers.

<comment><USER27>
      These providers appear to be supported:
        Verizon Wireless
        AT&T
        Sprint (As well as Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Nextel and other related providers)
        T-Mobile
        Tracfone (And other related providers)
      These providers appear to be unsupported:
        Cricket Wireless
        US Cellular

according to [http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=76caf...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=76cafff1fc95a4c7&hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Timed perfectly before the launch of the Verizon iPhone.

I wonder how long Google has been keeping this one up its sleeve?

</comment><comment><USER29> So, _that_ is how google is becoming a mobile phone company (among other things)...</comment>


@ycombinator - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.posterous.com/ycombinator-53

<comment><USER2> I would like to hear announcements of new YC company launches. That way people can see a list of all companies YC funded by following the twitter feed.

<comment><USER3> I second this, and would include major follow-up launches, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> May be RT some good tweets from YC members, News, updates.

</comment><comment><USER5> Curate lists of YC companies, founders, VCs, etc.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I'd like to see a /ycombinator/founders list and a /ycombinator/companies list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would like minute details and stream of thoughts during key YC moments. :) also what PG is having for breakfast - everyday.

<comment><USER8> I would enjoy that unironically — play to the strengths of the medium, don't just syndicate stuff from elsewhere.

Post pithy commentary, triumphant twitpics of shit you're doing, praise/respond/slam others on the web talking about you (via RT where sensible) selectively respond to @repiles, etc.

<comment><USER7> exactly!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would like to hear quality PG essays, or rather similar new content condensed to Twitter format.

Also, it's always good to retweet interesting things the people you follow say, or things that get said over the course of YC presentations and the like.

<comment><USER10> "I would like to hear quality PG essays, or rather similar new content condensed to Twitter format."

Not impossible! pg's written one-sentence essays--he just noted once in this thread (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554907>) that "you have to attribute them to someone else". Oddly enough there is a <http://twitter.com/taraploughman>

I think this might be one of the best uses of Twitter, personally--one sentence essays. Isn't that what shitmydadsays boils down to?

<comment><USER9> @shitmydadsays is my favorite twitterer :)

I also like @kurt_vonnegut... he is a bot my friend set up that tweets quotes from the dead author.

Other good people are @ev, @kn0thing, @raganwald, @jwc, @jeresig... people you might expect would be good. @kn0thing keeps me on top of my reddits :)

<comment><USER11> Check out @fireland and also read his past tweets. Probably not to everyone's tastes, but I think he's hilarious.

You can check out some of his best efforts at FavStar:

<http://favstar.fm/users/fireland>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Clickable: <http://twitter.com/ycombinator>

</comment><comment><USER13> Switch on Posterous auto-tweet into that stream.

\- Also, I'd switch on commenting on the Posterous blog, or else place a link under each article to the HN entry.

</comment><comment><USER14> If the twitter YC account follows mostly YC Alumns, that's pretty useful in itself for keeping up with the brands and people that have graduated.

<comment><USER15> It would be helpful if they created Twitter lists, separating alumni by the year and season when they joined...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I would chart the timedate of when various yc people or companies get followed by the ycombinator account, I bet I would have a lot of information about what is currently happening at the office. But I'm too lazy and I don't really care.

</comment><comment><USER17> On a slightly related note, the @newsycombinator bot hit 10,000 followers yesterday: <http://twitter.com/newsycombinator>

<comment><USER18> Is this your bot? If so a second link to the Hacker News discuss page would be nice.

<comment><USER8> The remaining 60 chars should be enough for three URLs!</comment></comment></comment>


OpenBSD -stable binary packages - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=156577865917831&w=2 <comment><USER2> First sysmerge, syspatch, then sysupgrade, now this. Seems like my biggest complaint about running OpenBSD (difficult to keep up to date) is pretty adequately addressed by 6.6.

<comment><USER3> Same here! I might just take the plunge and deploy my next project on OpenBSD. Does anyone know a good host for it? I've only used Vulture in the past.

<comment> 1e-9 For a dedicated server, there are others that will let you install OpenBSD even though they don't list OpenBSD as an option. Pick a hosting service you like and call their sales department to see if they will allow it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks to solene@, sthen@ and pea@ for making this a possibility!

      pkg_add -u

<comment><USER5> Patiently awaiting the sparc64 ones for my Tadpole Viper.

<comment><USER4> You may be waiting for awhile.

<comment><USER5> I routinely compile things on a 1200 MHz UltraSparc IIIi. I'm used to waiting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a better command for a cronjob to check for available updates? I try to get something like <package name> \- <current version> \- <updated version>

i currently use

      pkg_add -u -n -I -v 2>&1 | grep 'Adding' | sort -u

</comment><comment><USER7> My favorite pufferfish just keeps getting better. I remember my brother installing OpenBSD m68k on an LC II when I was younger. I should install it on a vm and take it for a spin!

</comment><comment><USER8> It says some packages will receive updates. Which ones?

<comment><USER4> The ports that receive -stable updates in CVS. That usually means important security fixes, chosen at the discretion of both the port maintainers and developers building stable packages. The @OpenBSD_stable Twitter account may be helpful, ports tagged OPENBSD_6_5 are stable updates, and should receive updated packages.

[https://twitter.com/openbsd_stable](https://twitter.com/openbsd_stable)

Also a full list on the mirrors.

[https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.5/packages- stable/amd6...](https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.5/packages- stable/amd64/)

<comment><USER9> Is this the same as what mtier provides ? Or are the packages different. I was trying to find chromium as that is about the only internet facing package I would use in a hypothetical desktop setup. I didn't see it on the link you posted.

<comment><USER4> Unrelated. I don't know what all mtier provided, but chromium port updates are not backported to -stable. A quick check indicates they did not provide this.

Also note that mtier announced they will no longer be providing -stable packages of their own.

[https://twitter.com/mtierltd/status/1161639634587279360](https://twitter.com/mtierltd/status/1161639634587279360)

If you want the latest chromium, you need to run -current snapshots. Packages are available. Chrome is enormous dwarfing the OpenBSD kernel and base system combined and is under constant development, it's a challenge to keep updated on -current, let alone attempting newer versions on -stable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Survey Suggests a Public Wariness of Enhanced Humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/upshot/building-a-better-human-with-science-the-public-says-no-thanks.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront <comment><USER2> For me, an interesting take-away from this survey is that people assumed that _scientists_ would jump the gun, that "...scientists would rush to offer each of the technologies before they had adequately tested or even understood them."

In their minds, it is the doctors/scientists that are most excited about the possibilities / opportunities afforded by offering something as soon as possible to the public, as if we could all be further guinea pigs for them, or as if it would make them rich personally, or that they are motivated primarily by the satisfaction of knowing the fruits of their labor were put to use.

Those are certainly some of many valid motivations for people working in intellectual fields. But it is interesting the public does not understand that doctors/scientists are more likely to be reluctant to turn findings into products, instead preferring to follow the new research opportunities and/or building a community or consensus.

It is a different kind of professional that turns scientific innovation into potential products (engineers, entrepreneurs, marketers, bad journalists), and along that spectrum is the increased rushed, cavalier attitude.

This distinction is lost on those surveyed.

<comment><USER3> I remember working in a university physics lab and let me assure you when the patentable discoveries are made they are surely patented.

<comment><USER4> That's not really related to his point. Unless you are implying patenting a "patentable" discovery reflects how "scientists would rush to offer each of the technologies before they had adequately tested or even understood them."

Which it really doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing that is weird about the survey answers, is that we've been using technology to enhance humans for quite a while. This includes vaccinations, eyeglasses, cochlear implants, pacemakers, crutches, nutrition, the list goes on. None of these things are too far removed from the suggestions in the survey such as boosting the immune system through gene editing, or neural implants (how is that much different than a cochlear implant?).

<comment><USER6> Those are mostly things to offset damage rather than to enhance beyond the norm.

<comment><USER7> Post 50 reading glasses push people past the norm for their age. Coffee is a very common enhancement beyond the norm for any age.

PS: Even more broadly tools are enhancement beyond the norm. IE: It's much easier to win a fight while holding a stick vs. bare handed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > the public finds it slightly more acceptable to change a baby's genes than > to enhance human abilities.

This is weird. Making a permanent non-consensual change versus something like an implant. I have to chalk that up to not really thinking about the question that hard. Is there some angle I'm missing here why the first would be better?

<comment><USER9> The first prevents or cures a disease. We vaccinate children without their consent, causing permanent changes to their immune system, because we know it reduces their chances of suffering illness and death. Curing Huntington's or sickle cell anemia, or removing high-risk cancer genes, seem like logical next steps.

Implants that change the way we think and interpret the world are a much bigger leap. They challenge our sense of self and identity. Am I still "me" if my cognitive abilities are modified? I totally get why that's a much more uncomfortable topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how many people who harbor hidden racial prejudice are worried that enhanced humans means the end of any real or perceived or mismeasured racial advantages.

There are other advantages, too: If the safety of Roundup is called into question, just make humans Roundup-Ready(tm).

</comment><comment><USER11> Survey suggests fear of anything new. Don't really need a survey for that. It's human nature. For most of human history new things were more likely to kill you than old things. I'd even go as far as saying it's an instinctive reaction.

</comment><comment><USER12> Foods are now advertised as GMO free. A large portion of people don't even want to eat anything they associate with genetic tampering. Why would they want to use that technology on their kids? We need a popular food or pet with genetic modifications before the general public accepts genetic tech on themselves. So many successful animal trials, as morally sour as that sounds.

<comment><USER13> The GMO aversion is more complex. Many GMOs are deployed to increase the amount of pesticide that can be used. And Monsanto uses their GMO IP to control a significant fraction of the market. So people who don't like large amounts of pesticides and people who don't like IP being used to control food markets have been campaigning to demonize GMOs in the public mind. Without the negative campaigning, I think people would be a lot more welcoming of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Science has been enhancing humans for a very long time. Cellphones extend my ability to research before taking a decision. Current drugs has addressed a lot of human ailments; from pain to AIDS. Vaccines have took away a lot of deadly diseases. Last but not least we have a 35+ years life expectancy.

Edit:

As bogus as it is, also IQ has been increased.

<comment><USER15> So IQ is not bogus when it proves your point, but is bogus when it doesn't. Got it.

(Bite the IQ bullet or don't; going half way and then flip-flopping back and forth is intellectually dishonest.)

Additionally: "enhancement" seems like a bit of a bucket word. There are only a surface similarities between cellphones and AIDS cures, in that they help people. I mean, vaguely speaking, you're pushing the bounds of what humans are able to do; recall information more effectively, live longer, _maybe_ fight disease. But then you end up broadening the category to "all technologies serve as enhancements" and vice versa, which stops describing the specific information that causes some people to be uncomfortable when they hear "enhancement".

I would want to know what connotations about the word enhancement produce a split between the religious vs non-religious, and the spiritual vs the non- spiritual (the two are independent but correlated dimensions, believe me.) In this article the argument has been framed around "meddling with nature" which itself is kind of limiting the discourse. There's probably more to it.

<comment><USER13> IQ isn't as good a measure of "general intelligence" as it claims to be, but it still measures some aspect of cognitive ability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let's be honest - people were even more freaked out by the idea of "test tube babies" a few decades ago. Then, when the world didn't end, and they started meeting people who were actually conceived in-vitro and seemed perfectly normal, they changed their minds.

This is exactly the same way "Enhanced Humans" are going to play out as well. The public is going to be freaked out, but some people will do it anyway. Either locally, or in some foreign country. With time, people will realized that these "Enhanced Humans" are their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and perfectly good people, and their barriers will start dropping. And when the time comes when they have the opportunity to enhance their baby's health/intelligence/fitness, they'll think it's plain irresponsible of them not to do so.

Unless you're worried about regulatory bans, "public fears" are pretty much meaningless. If you can build it, show that it's safe, and demonstrate compelling benefits, the public will change their minds soon enough.

<comment><USER17> I'm not so optimistic about a positive or even neutral response. I say this as a rabid transhumanist who desperately wants to see BCI and WBE come to reality.

My fear is that, an "enhanced" human will significantly outperform it's peers and thus will gain advantage in all aspects of life, that is the point after all. Those advantages will be seen as unearned and thus the "losers" will become jaded and blame the technology - or rather the person's access to it. Someone who was conceived in vitro doesn't pose a threat to it's peers from the perspective of abilities by virtue of being in vitro.

Just like you see jealously now for disparities in abilities, I worry it will be magnified once people start upgrading.

That's without even getting into the "who can afford to upgrade" part of it.

<comment><USER16> I agree. You're going to see a lot of jealousy/envy when this technology is first rolled out. But what are people really going to do? Even if you ban the technology locally, people will just go overseas and get it done. And if you're going to make that an illegal offense and screen for all babies at airport terminals, what about immigration? Is the country really going to ban all immigrants from countries where the procedure is legal?

Once the genie is out of the bottle, people will realize they can only fight it for so long. At some point, people will realize that if you can't beat 'em, they might as well join 'em.

<comment><USER17> _But what are people really going to do?_

Target the people enhancing for discrimination. I mean just look at the state of transgender relations now with targeted bans and targeted murders etc... That's not even someone gaining an advantage - it's just latent fear about differences.

Imagine instead if a trans-HUMAN is threatening your livelihood.

I don't think it's going to be pretty honestly - but in the end I think the upgraders will win.

<comment><USER16> If transhumans are easily identifiable, then I agree. But imagine a GATTACA- like future, where genetically-enhanced humans look just like regular humans - they just happen to be at the 90th percentile in intelligence/fitness. There is very little that people can do in such a scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My issue with gene editing is the problems you could be creating at the end of the lifetime of the person. What happens when you've ensured no heart disease, but have guaranteed them alzheimers. Who is to blame? The now dead scientist who discovered the gene modification? The now dead parents who wanted it done to their child?

Testing a large enough population would take generations.

<comment><USER14> Not taking an option because it's not perfect is called fallacy of perfection.

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

<comment><USER15> Would you on principle release unmaintainable code? If you do so because you're rushed, would you want the same situation to be applied to say, genetic engineering?

<comment><USER14> "Would you on principle release unmaintainable code? If you do so because you're rushed"

The term for this is "technical debt", you deliver when it works but have a debt for fix until it's good enough.

"would you want the same situation to be applied to say, genetic engineering?"

World works on this premise, every drug for every ailment has a secondary effect.

<comment><USER15> But these are inefficiencies that you don't explicitly want; instead you manage them. In some systems these inefficiencies cost lives and instead of managing them you decide to prove them out of existence, or avoid ruinous failure altogether.

Truth be told now that you bring in the drug metaphor I'm torn, because I've been recently convinced that there are opportunity costs and institutional inefficiencies that come from being too risk averse on the drug market. So I would believe that tolerating some error, i.e. some casualty or someone's death, could on average be OK if more people were saved. This is a part of what we mean when we say we're OK with secondary effects in drugs. Usually the prescription ensures that the worst won't happen.

There might be differences to tease out between this example and genetic engineering, however. If a drug fails, you kill off a couple of people and make recalls. But these deaths happen more-or-less independently. The same goes with some software systems that tolerate error: so what if your shitty exercise app goes dark? Or, so what if a single consumer doesn't get served? You lose some money but life goes on. No one dies or no one gets cancer.

The reason why dealing with genetics is more scary, and this applies to manufacturing retroviruses, is that the error can spread or be transferred more effectively than in the case of drugs, whose sale is tightly controlled and whose information doesn't propagate. A virus spreads or a seed scatters or a person breeds and you end up exploring new unexpected territory. This isn't bad per se. But it's harder to control. If I were to deal with that kind of thing I would attempt to see what was invariant with scale and see if I could test on that case, so that if a spread did occur, the "patterning of the network" would be sound (like designing a component of a fractal).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Remember the reaction to Google Glass? That was just a heads-up display for a smartphone.

On the other hand, Apple managed to make wearing iDweebs (their headphones) cool through advertising and branding.

<comment><USER20> Are we really so tribalistic now that we need to make up childish nicknames for the _wrong brand of earbuds?_

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The public is against protecting babies from diseases?

grrrrrr

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Interesting how de-converting people will make them more amenable to transhumanist ideas. Not surprising though, considering the common ground: both fundamentalist Christans and transhumanists want to live forever, happy, etc…

We just think prayers ain't gonna cut it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Submarine for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided?</comment>


"Tribes": ten questions for Seth Godin - <AUTHOR> http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004678.html <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure the need for "tribes" isn't new.</comment>


Harvard students build new recommendation engine - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/05/harvard-innovation-labs-youngest-team-launches-recommendation-engine-side/

<comment><USER2> Sounds interesting. What do you do differently than traditional algos?

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this what Hunch was all about before they got aquired?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is pretty similar to Hunch, but we think there's an opportunity since Hunch had some dedicated users and no one else has stepped in to fill that gap.

We're also trying to be more social than Hunch, and think there's something special about answers by friends (both in terms of the "friends know you better" angle and the fun angle).</comment></comment>