E-VENT: Emergency ventilator design toolbox - <AUTHOR> https://e-vent.mit.edu <comment><USER3> I can't find it at the moment, but I recall seeing a report from China that 80% of COVID-19 patients placed on ventilators still ended up dying. I assume that's not the case in the US? (does anyone have stats on this yet?)

I also recall seeing (again, can't find it right now) a scientist concerned about the potential for widespread usage of ventilators to rapidly increase the prevalence antibiotic resistant bacteria.

My point is, having as many ventilators as we need is good, but it's even better to not need the ventilators in the first place. I hope we don't fixate on ventilators too much at the expense of mitigation and other treatments.

<comment><USER4> The number of people dying on ventilators is not meaningful question because patient dying from COVID-19 almost always becomes critical before dying. If there is ventilator, they get hooked into them for a some time.

The real question to ask is how many people who would survive with ventilator die without it.

<comment><USER5> > because patient dying from COVID-19 almost always becomes critical before > dying

Actually I read the opposite. That the patients in ICU's are younger 40-70 with the bulk in their 60's, while those dying are mainly 75-100, mostly over 80 years old.

That is: many if not most of those who die never pass the ICU. Obviously people in ICU wards die too, a significant fraction. But the age of the group that die mostly (80+) means it's mostly non-ICU patients. Doctors know a 80 year old with some comorbidity isn't going to survive being tubed. By "survive" they mean survive for X months afterwards too (This number can be e.g. 6 or 12 months to use as a guideline for survivability, to consider ICU treatment).

<comment><USER6> This is what makes discussions on this subject infuriating. Most people only have access to the absolute death numbers, and yet try to draw conclusions from them.

If it is the case, as you say, that a significant fraction of young people need to go into intensive care to have a chance to recover, that makes this pandemic much worse than most people think.

I do know that the number of hospitalizations is high (and possibly should be higher still, if hospitals were not turning away patients)

<comment><USER7> Then here are the numbers: [https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/21173/hospitalization- icu...](https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/21173/hospitalization-icu- admission-and-fatality-rates-for-reported-coronavirus-cases/)

COVID-19 still requires very high hospitalization rates, even among young people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kudos to the MIT group, but I think the problem of ventilator shortages has nothing todo with technology (this is old, well understood tech), but the lack of leadership in mobilizing industrial production to supply this lifesaving equipment. Since the early days of this crisis this country should had mandated companies to produce record levels of ventilators, masks, vests, and other equipment that are now needed to save lives. On the contrary, the federal government is up to this point dilly-dallying about how to procure and produce ventilators, without a clear solution in sight.

<comment><USER9> How exactly do you mandate companies produce something which they don't even have the parts to make? The problem is not manufacturing capacity or will, it's that supply chains for medical devices are global and those supply chains have been broken. Increasing production of something like ventilators purely domestically requires increasing (or building from scratch) production of the components, which requires new or re-tooling, sourcing of raw materials, etc.

Yes, the current federal mismanagement of the whole crisis is awful, but even if everyone had acted quickly, there would still be shortages. Covid spreads faster than device production.

<comment><USER8> I can guarantee you that this country has the industrial capacity to produce any kind of parts, especially for a well known technology like ventilators. The fact is that they are not doing it because nobody alerted and told them to do so three months ago.

<comment><USER10> I'm not convinced that it would have been reasonable to do so three months ago. Three months ago there were rumors that there was something brewing in some part of China most people had never heard of.

I point this out to suggest that your expectation might be a little unfair. If such an order had gone out one month ago it would have been controversial. But if you want to say that the administration is a month behind in their reactions it would be more fair.

You seem to have observed that a giant beauracracy is reacting weeks behind a crisis and this seems to upset you.

<comment><USER11> 3 months ago 5K people were infected in a single day in China. The current administration was completely trained on how to handle a pandemic right after the inauguration. Unfortunately most of those folks have been fired and 3 months ago we were distracted by yet another scandal this time ending in Impeachment.

However 2 months ago this was the message from the White House: 'When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.'

That un-fucking-believable 'head in the sand' moment happened at peak infection in China; 80K people infected. This administration isn't a month behind; they simply don't deal with things unless they are forced to.

The US stockpiles ventilators for emergencies like this for a reason. Someone was asleep at the switch in our Federal Government and the reaction is to lie about how well they are doing and blame everyone else.

I'm fed up, aren't you?

<comment><USER10> 3 months ago the first four cases walked into a hospital in China.

I don't want to defend the current US political powers. I'm highly discouraged about a lot of things. But it doesn't help to make unfair accusations based on bad facts. If your criticisms are based on fiction they get tossed out.

Just rebase on truth and you might have some much more supportable criticism. There's plenty to legitimately criticize. When you drown out legitimate criticism with baseless criticism, the noise to signal suppresses real criticism. It is unclear whether this is intentional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _PLEASE, Let 's collect all Open-Source Ventilator projects in single article on Wikipeda!_[0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- source_ventilator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_ventilator)

<comment><USER13> And include data on which ones have been tested for safety.

<comment><USER14> What could do wrong if you use one that is not tested for safety?

<comment><USER15> Lung perforation. Inadequate ventilation. Aerosolization/Contamination. Suffocation. Death. You know, bad stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Jim- I wonder if it will actually get built and used due to the critical nature of the Medical Field, even amidst this emergency.

The good thing; at least you'll have a working Ventilator.

On the other, your life depends on this frankenstein'd together machine made with hospital spare parts.

<comment><USER16> It's not as bad as you think. The ventilator is only one part of the solution. There are also sensors for heart rate and oxygen consumption, maybe even CO2 (though that's expensive) and Human beings involved in monitoring everything.

First, most of these patients are probably not completely breathing-depressed to the point they don't breathe on their own at all. That extends the time necessary to fix anything.

If indeed one of these ventilators malfunctions, it is probably visible at once. In case of loss-of-function an operator can immediately grab the bag and resume ventilation. In other failures he can disconnect the device and reconnect a non-mechanized manual bag in seconds.

This can even be done by volunteers with minimal training, in such emergency situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> none of the hospitals in my area are accepting amateur-manufactured equipment or PPE, so I wonder a lot about these efforts.

I have a 3D printer, so I think I'm waiting until they get desperate.

<comment><USER18> In my area, they're burning through PPE like there's no tomorrow, and complaining about shortages. When the crisis really hits, that's when they'll need to go for amateur-made, reusing, and working naked.

The lack of foresight in this whole situation has been astounding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is a ventilator concept(with pressure booster double acting) that's fully mechanical and very simple that can be plugged into an air supply or water supply to power the ventilator. It sould easily be made and used anywhere in the world at home, ICUs and ambulances. The ventilator could operate without any power source at all. It can be powered by water (even by any tape) You can easily add adjusting stroke length & volume of breath, cadence, ratio of inhale/exhale, connecting many ventilators to one system etc.. Let me know and feel free to develop the idea further !

</comment><comment><USER20> Right now I'm doing a lot of research into GxP for a life sciences project I'm working on. Quoting something I found online...

 _" GxP is an acronym that refers to the regulations and guidelines applicable to life sciences organizations that make food and medical products such as drugs, medical devices, and medical software applications. The overall intent of GxP requirements is to ensure that food and medical products are safe for consumers and to ensure the integrity of data used to make product-related safety decisions."_

I would guess that the GxP mindset is lacking in a lot of these projects, and in truth it would be a burden to progress to be full in on it.

But that said, I do hope people who are doing these things are at least aware of the importance of data integrity and a very good log of their work. Don't just record what works, but also record what doesn't work. If a motor, or an Arduino, or any other part fails on you or you find that using a cheap one leads to issues, this is REALLY important to record and note for the record. This is especially true for anyone attempting to duplicate your work.

That said, it's worth noting that the site specifically states that...

 _" We are working to submit a specific variant of the MIT E-Vent design to the United States FDA for review under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) authority."_

and

 _" The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has declared liability immunity for medical countermeasures against COVID-19."_

</comment><comment><USER21> Please look up medically recommended air clearance methods. These have a long history of being used by people with serious lung issues to help keep them alive. One news video indicated that Italian doctors are using them before people are so bad as to need a ventilator, but they don't seem to be getting anywhere near as much press as the "ooh, shiny" solution of mechanical ventilators.

Edited for clarity.

<comment><USER22> Can you provide a link? I did a search for "medically recommended air clearance methods" and nothing stood out.

<comment><USER21> [https://www.cff.org/Life-With-CF/Treatments-and- Therapies/Ai...](https://www.cff.org/Life-With-CF/Treatments-and- Therapies/Airway-Clearance/)

<comment><USER22> Thanks. I'm not a doctor so I could be wrong (and happy to be corrected) but from my understanding the problem with those techniques in this situation is that they are for clearing mucus from the lungs (in the bronchi and broncioles) not from alveoli, because mucus isn't the type of fluid in the alveoli. Hence, they'd have little effect.

This video[1] goes into what happens when you have ARDS caused COVID and how it will be treated. It shows why machines like CPAP aren't appropriate too.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okg7uq_HrhQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okg7uq_HrhQ) How Coronavirus Kills: Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) & COVID-19 Treatment

<comment><USER21> A. One news video indicated Italian doctors are using airway clearance in less severe cases. Not all cases end up needing ventilators.

B. I know ways to also treat inflammation. I've left remarks about that various places, but a few people were following me around and harassing me on the excuse that I'm not a doctor, I'm just someone who lives with serious lung issues.

C. I originally brought this up because people were asking "What can be done at home?" They are de facto rationing health care because there aren't enough medical supplies to go around. So I talked about what I know about managing serious lung issues to say "If medical care is unavailable and you find yourself in serious respiratory distress, there are things you can do on your own." Because no one else was really offering up solutions.

D. I also spoke up to express my concerns that we are posting all these articles about homemade ventilators because ventilators are invasive and promote serious secondary infections that are more likely to be antibiotic resistant. I wish we were emphasizing other measures.

I have a form of cystic fibrosis. I deal daily with serious lung issues. This includes inflammation which is supposed to be chronic and progressive.

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ppul.24129](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ppul.24129)

I have, anecdotally, found that it is possible to reverse the inflammation. If you really want to see my previous remarks, there is a link in my profile. I'm disinclined to link it here because of people following me around and harassing me.

I am not interested in having this turn into endless drama. Rest assured, lung clearance is known to help improve lung function, even when there is chronic and irreversible lung inflammation. If you have no other options because the medical system is overwhelmed, it's worth knowing about.

Please note that I am absolutely not suggesting this as an alternative to seeking medical treatment if it is available. I'm only suggesting it as an option in cases where you simply cannot get medical care due to overwhelming demand and find yourself in respiratory distress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are a number of projects among recent ventilator threads, if anyone wants to compare:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Ventilator%20comments%3E3&sort=byDate&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER24> A condensed recent Twitter rant of mine regarding this influx of DIY ventilators based on bag-valve masks (BVMs):

There are quite a few BVM-based ventilators being designed right now. However, there are a lot of caveats I have become aware of. In short: ventilators for use in intensive care need to be safe and adjustable. Oh, and it is not clear whether ventilators actually change the outcome.

Lungs of COVID-19 patients are often damaged, and ventilation causes additional damage. As the patients' alveoli no longer capture enough O2, you need to increase air pressure to force more O2 into them. More pressure = more damage to alveoli, so you need to be very careful. So you need to be able to adjust the pressure curve very finely. None of the BVM solutions I have seen so far has such a feature. COVID-19 already causes severe lung damage in some people - you don't want to damage them even more due to wrong ventilation.

Unlike emergency care (where BVMs are usually used), intensive care of COVID19 patients needs to play the long game. AFAIK, patients need constant care, supervision and medication over a period of 10+ days. Any damage you cause to the lungs early on will make it harder later on.

But won't it be better to keep people alive with a simple ventilator even if they will suffer lung damage? Maybe not. I am aware of the gut-wrenching situation doctors face in Italy and elsewhere - deciding whom to connect to the few available ventilators. It seems (I'm not really sure about it yet) that ventilators just delay inevitable death by a few days in most cases. A study from Wuhan notes: _"32 patients required invasive mechanical ventilation, of whom 31 (97%) died."_ [1]

 _" Not everyone is a good fit for ICU. Even outside of COVID, if you are of a certain frailty and you have certain underlying conditions, your chances of making it off a ventilator when you are deathly sick is close to 0%."_ [2]

So the question is indeed whether one should really extend a patient's suffering for a few days or whether one should instead focus on making their last few days as comfortable as possible, and give them the chance to stay conscious and say goodbye to family.

Even if there is a subset of patients who might benefit from a BVM-based ventilator (and I am not sure about this), I would be very hesitant to rely on them. If a motor burns out, a tube gets loose, or a microcontroller goes crazy, the patient might choke, panic, even die. None of the DIY ventilators has gone through rigorous testing yet. None of the ones I have seen has backup mechanisms (spare motor, continuous surveillance of all parameters, fail-safe power supplies, etc.) I would not want to inflict them on dying patients - <USER2> caregivers.

This leads me to the most important point: the most severe bottleneck are qualified professionals. Should we really hand these people some DIY Arduino- based ventilators that might fail any moment, that lack important features, and that need additional training? A ventilator that malfunctions at the wrong time (or does not reliably function at all) will take away time and attention from exactly those people whom we really don't want to get distracted or burnt out.

There is a UK government guidance which gives a good overview of essential requirements for ventilators [3]. It states:

 _" A ventilator with lower specifications than this is likely to provide no clinical benefit and might lead to increased harm, which would be unacceptable for clinicians and would, therefore, not gain regulatory approval."_

Disclaimer: I'm no expert on medical tech or intensive care. I have just followed a few of those projects over the past weeks and read reports of experts. It could be that I am wrong and those projects will save many lives. There could also be use cases where DIY ventilators may help (e.g. in home care). But overall, I am rather skeptical and would rather suggest focusing on stuff that might be more useful.

[1] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067362...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673620305663?via%3Dihub)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fnl0n6/im_a_cr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fnl0n6/im_a_critical_care_doctor_working_in_a_uk_high/fla5579/)

[3] [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus- covid...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus- covid-19-ventilator-supply-specification/rapidly-manufactured-ventilator- system-specification)

<comment><USER25> Would you feel more accepting of these projects (the more-vetted ones at least) if hospitals start explicitly asking for any and all ventilator hardware?

<comment><USER24> Hmm, good question. Probably yes. After all, if medical professionals would see a benefit of simple devices, who am I to question them.

However, every single professional whom I've talked to, or whose comments I read, argued that well-trained professionals are the real bottleneck. None of them said they would try out a minimalist ventilator.

I can really understand the desire to do _something_ in order to help those who work on the frontline. However, all this effort and ingenuity would be better spent on other projects:

\- personal protective equipment (masks, face shields)

\- simple replacement parts

\- maybe some simple devices (e.g., CPAP, air filters)

<comment><USER25> I'm not surprised if you're right about that, but I would love to see some authoritative sources about specifically which DIY projects would be most effective.

I read some of your links from above, and I agree it's good to be skeptical. I'm basically waiting for hospitals to start announcing that DIY ventilators are the right move, but by the time that happens, it may be too late to start sourcing materials and get things built in time to make a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> zenit-mf-1 One idea that is keep coming to my mind. Why ventilator are built to be used by individual at once?

Sorry, I am not subject matter expert, but was wondering is there is way to design ventilator that can serve X patients?

</comment><comment><USER26> The real fallback for lack of ventilator machines is the use of the bag valve mask. This is a manually operated device, no motors or electronics.

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

I have to assume this is more reliable than whatever somebody hacked together in their garage. Your average builder may be able to make something that works OK in testing, but having it work 24/7 by people unfamiliar with its quirks is a different matter entirely.

The official word out of New York is that they are going to use bag valve masks when they run out of ventilators and train people how to squeeze the bag.

<comment><USER16> The proposed system uses exactly such a thing. But a mask doesn't work because you want to put pressure into the lungs, not inflate the cheeks. Masks only work temporarily to assist a patient that is still breathing relatively well on his own.

And there is nothing technically preventing the use of those bags right now. But you'd have to have one person standing beside each bed, 24 hours a day. Which means a hell of a lot of foot traffic, and those will get infected with a high probability. They also need to be trained to a minimal standard.

It's not practical.

<comment><USER27> Masks do and can increase pressure in lungs, the reason intubation is used is to provide fluid drainage, prevent choking. So that the critical patient does not drown. Other than that, they're equivalent. Cheeks can puff out only so far.

<comment><USER16> I have never used masks that way and I would worry about the fit. But it may be possible, temporarily, especially when you hold it down.

Procedurally most physicians seem to reach for the intubator as soon as there is any trouble breathing, even though that takes longer than putting on a mask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ventilators are at the bottom of the COVID-19 infection funnel. The cost- benefit is not as good as mechanisms higher up the funnel. I'd advocate narrowing the infection funnel at the top by adopting a universal mask protocol. [https://www.maskssavelives.org/](https://www.maskssavelives.org/)

<comment><USER29> USA can chew gum and walk at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> not seeing any value from MIT here other than an opportunity for them to ink a quick patent.

Heres something more feasible if you're looking to endorse or support an effort:

[https://opensourceventilator.ie/](https://opensourceventilator.ie/)

<comment><USER31> Students built this in 2010.</comment></comment>


Open source PowerPoint add-in for broadcasting presentations in a browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.slidetracker.org/

<comment><USER2> how is this different from the built-in feature PPT offers?

<comment><USER3> There is no sign-up (microsoft account or similar) necessary, the broadcast link is much shorter and easier to share, and it's open source :)</comment></comment>


Eliminating Robocalls - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-eliminating-robocalls <comment><USER2> I have had a Google Voice number since it was Grand Central.

It has gone on all of my business cards. It's at the bottom of every email. I put it on my website.

Google does an amazing, world class, mind blowing, job of filtering out robo calls. I get maybe one a week at most.

I get more calls direct to my cell number from random call bots that hit every number with mobile carriers than I do through my Google Voice number.

It's past time for Apple to integrate spam call filtering into iOS and Android users have no excuse for not using Google Voice.

<comment><USER3> I used Google voice for years while Google let it languish in relative obscurity.

Eventually after I realized it was silently dropping group messages because they were MMS and Google never worked on supporting MMS (images were dropped too back then) I left it for iOS and iMessage. Getting dropped from group chats meant people thought you were ignoring them and you'd miss invitations.

Google had a huge lead with voice that they wasted instead on Buzz, Allo, Talk, Hangouts which all were killed or are being killed - I wouldn't go back.

<comment><USER4> GV supports group chats/MMS now, however, you can't mute or leave a group chat, at least not with the iOS client. (Given my family's penchant for starting a group MMS for the most minor of occurrences, I'm not sure the group chat support is a blessing or a curse.)

<comment><USER5> I think that from a pure technical standpoint, you can't leave a MMS group any more than you can leave a reply-all email chain. "Leaving" a group usually just involves your phone dropping any texts it gets directed to that group.

(Obviously iMessage is different because it's not actually MMS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Getting STIR & SHAKEN implemented so we have proper trust of the caller ID is going to be a massive undertaking for the industry as a whole. T-Mobile and Verizon have implemented it in limited forms internally, but they have no interest in making their implementations interoperate, let alone work with the other RBOCs, CLECs and their resellers (Twilio in this case).

STIR/SHAKEN also can break call forwarding, as a forwarded call may get stripped of the forwarded from header by an intermediary carrier, resulting in an unvalidated caller ID getting passed, causing the call to not ring the destination.

Overall, the telcom industry is stuck in the past, with security being a joke. TLS Registration & SRTP are rarely used, most carriers sling calls bare over the internet hoping for the best.

<comment><USER7> The FCC has a page tracking the response by the major carriers[0].

Also, from what the FCC chair is saying, while nothing is forcing the carriers to play nicely, he is basically warning them if they don't work together to create/implement a spec to help with the problem, the FCC will force something (that probably won't be as easy to deal with). WSJ had a podcast interviewing him recently about it[1].

[0] [https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication](https://www.fcc.gov/call- authentication)

[1] (interview starts 23 minutes in) [http://www.wsj.com/podcasts/instant- message/20-tesla-got-a-b...](http://www.wsj.com/podcasts/instant- message/20-tesla-got-a-brand-new-car/6603B252-8C58-4CAF-A7A0-25FEE391B3EC)

<comment><USER8> > the FCC will force something (that probably won't be as easy to deal with)

After the net neutrality debacle, including the FBI investigation into public comment fraud [0], I'm writing off whatever "corporate difficulty" Ajit Pai is threatening as a snowball's chance in hell. As long as he's chair, that agency is squarely in the "regulatory capture" box.

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/fbi- investigatin...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/fbi- investigating-identity-theft-in-net-neutrality-comments-report-says/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm waaay past trusting that network. I tell companies to text or email me. And texting is also starting to get spammed out.

Right now, I can't even use apps like Hiya that implement prefix blocking. My method right now is to forward ALL calls to a google voice number, and those are transcribed or what-have-you. If you don't leave a message, I don't care about you.

We need a signal, at the highest of levels to basically make the decision on what's going to happen to the phone network, because honestly, a brand new system is what I expect at this point, not a patch.

<comment><USER3> Yes - a contact whitelist is all I want from iOS with two features: a button to temporarily allow all calls for 30min (for Uber/door dash) and the option to allow a second call to come through from an unknown number if it's within 2min of the first.

All other calls should go to voicemail by default.

The way Apple allows you to interact with CallKit makes this hard to implement because a blacklist of numbers is required and a blacklist of all numbers is huge.

<comment><USER10> Isn't this exact feature available via Do Not Disturb? I have DND on 24/7, and you can quickly turn it off for Lyft/etc if needed. If you make groups within your contacts you can even hone the whitelist and can fairly quickly mod it.

<comment><USER11> I have DnD constantly too and find it convenient.

<comment><USER12> Not just convenient. I've been in DND mode all day every day for months now, and I've witnessed a drastically improved overall quality of life. Mostly from the lack of texts and notifications, not just from the lack of phone calls. It has also resulted in my not being glued to my phone responding to everything. I can feel my mental health improving, and I don't think I could go back to non-DND.

<comment><USER13> I assume dnd is no notification or signal? I have had this since high school (15 years I guess)? At the time phones weren't allowed so every day my phone had to be on silent and I never turned it off. I started working and phones weren't allowed. Then college and phones weren't allowed. I don't even know what my ring tone is and I only assume my alert messages work because my phone can play music...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't get that many robocalls anymore after I signed up for [https://www.donotcall.gov/](https://www.donotcall.gov/) . I also make a point of reporting unwanted calls there too (I got two pretending to be from the IRS saying that I was about to be sued).

I know that people find it annoying to go through the process of reporting the call, but I consider it to be one of those things that fall under the "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" bucket.

It'd be nice if there were donotcall.gov apps for Android and iOS though.

<comment><USER15> It's great that the DNC has worked for you, unfortunately it's not much help for me since all my robocallers are criminals trying to steal from me. Naturally, people unafraid of being arrested for fraud are unafraid of DNC fines.

I've been on the DNC for years, and a couple years ago I decided to change my number, since my old one was getting 4-5 robocalls per day, always from different numbers.

<comment><USER14> That sounds horrible. I wonder if there is a way to surrender that number to the FBI, so that they could investigate further. Even one call every other day would be too much to report manually for me in terms of effort.

<comment><USER16> Because "that number" is generally fake.

Caller ID became meaningless once VOIP was allowed to spoof it. Can we build a new system atop ANI?

<comment><USER17> > Because "that number" is generally fake.

I'm not really convinced this is true, because there are numbers that are categorized as robocallers, and there are others that aren't. You'd think that if they were fake then they'd be random/uniform.

<comment><USER16> Robocalls I get typically assign a caller ID of my area code (and sometimes prefix) with random other digits.

Most 408-73x prefixes were originally specific to Sunnyvale CA and are therefore easy to distinguish.

<comment><USER17> Yeah but I'm not sure they're genuinely random. If you try Googling them you see that they're generally listed as robocallers. Whereas if you Google people you know, I don't think you'll see them being listed as robocallers (at least it hasn't been the case when I've tried). That suggests they don't just randomly pick numbers.

<comment><USER18> > If you try Googling them you see that they're generally listed as > robocallers.

I just did a quick check of the last 10 or so I received. None of them were listed as robocallers. They were all legit phone numbers of innocent people who live in my area.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for checking, I stand corrected then. Whenever I've tried they've usually been listed as robocallers so I guess it's just your luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Noah-Huppert I wrote a tool which uses Twilio to screen out robocalls: [https://github.com/noah-huppert/human-call-filter](https://github.com/noah- huppert/human-call-filter)

<comment><USER19> Ditto, except the one I wrote only works for landlines. [https://github.com/dgnorton/norobo](https://github.com/dgnorton/norobo)

<comment> Noah-Huppert Cool! Definitely very helpful. I still get tons of robo calls on the landline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I read a lot about the plague that robocalls are on international forums, especially from the U.S.

But I live in central Europe, Austria, and received only two SPAM calls in my whole life, both by what seemed to be actual human agents on the other side and hear from similar amounts from friends I've asked about the phenomena.

Can someone explain why it seems such hard to resolve problem elsewhere while it seems hardly a problem at all here? Is there a difference in infrastructure, a difference in legislature, ...?

<comment><USER21> The difference is regulation.

The US is firmly gripped by the belief that "regulation doesn't work", and keeps electing people who try to prove that true via incompetence, cronyism and ideological malice.

<comment><USER22> We have plenty of regulation and government attention on the issue, and I somehow doubt Congressional pockets are being lined by the campaign contributions from Big Spam.

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

<comment><USER23> Politicians are not being supported by the spammers themselves, but by the telecoms that do not want to make costly changes to their network to stop or enforce this problem.

This couldn't be more obvious in our fcc chair who is basically against any kind of government regulation.

<comment><USER18> And don't forget the little fact that the telecoms make money from providing service to the spammers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is why I leave my phone on silent 24/7 (no vibrate either). If someone from my Contacts calls me, then I see the missed call and know to call them back when I have time. However I live my life on my time, nothing is ever so important I have to drop whatever I am doing to pick up someone else's call right away. You might say, what if there was an emergency? Well how many times has someone called you about an emergency where you could actually do something about it? Maybe some have, but I bet most haven't.

<comment><USER25> What happens when one of your friends behaves in exactly the same way? Do the two of you ever manage to actually talk to each other?

<comment><USER26> Texting.

You send a text, receive a text or vice versa. Then you can actually arrange a call if you want to catch up. I have some friends call me, and I call them back. If they don't call me back they at least send me a message telling me when they can be free. I guess this is becoming a norm among most people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's 2019. Why has Apple/Android not added the ability to reject (or at least send directly to voice mail) all calls outside of contacts, and make this the default setting?

Seems like this would solve almost all of these problems.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18118664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18118664)

<comment><USER13> Have you checked lately? I can't speak for Apple but my Android (S7) and my wife's (unsure of the make) both have these types of options. My wife has all numbers not in her contacts go to voicemail. My phone just hangs up on any unknown number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interestingly, Robocall algorithms use phone numbers closer to my phone number (either real of fake) and since I live in different Area code, it is much easier to block the numbers.

Though it is not recommended to pick up the phone, I have had some success by picking up the phone, wasting the agent's time and letting them know that my car is real old and would not need extended warranty.

<comment><USER23> Same here, but unfortunately Apple provides no mechanism to do so. Even RoboKiller, a third party app, has limited success with neighborhood spoofing, as it's called.

I'm perfectly fine with blocking the entire NNN beginning prefix of my number but there appears to be no way to do it (they can only do NNN-NNNN). RoboKiller says it's a limitation in the iOS API they have access to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder why I'm not getting this barrage of robocalls. I live in Netherland, not the US, so presumably that's why, but are robocalls not a thing in Europe? Do we not have these kind of predatory companies? Do we have surprisingly effective legislation to stop robocalls?

The only phone spam I'm getting are people trying to sell me new energy contracts (that's something that happens when you have a company for some reason), and tons of British recruiters trying to get me to work in Belgium or Germany for some reason. Very rarely, I get a tech support call from Microsoft India. But always it's real people, not a robocall.

<comment><USER30> Yes, they are a thing in Europe too. It's not just to do with entering numbers in "sketchy" websites. It's who resold or leaked your details, what apps you have installed on your phone, or if you were just unlucky.

They are trying to get vaguely smart too - whereas before a number would call from quite far away, so you could assume it was a robocaller. Now, they can be close to your location, which is a bit spooky.

<comment><USER29> It's apparently easy to get my phone number from the Chamber of Commerce, which is where those energy peddlers get it. Seems like an easy source of phone numbers for robocallers too. And it's not like I'm very careful with my phone number; I've entered it on tons of websites.

Still no robocallers for me. Maybe European data protection measures do work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > By default, we bill by the minute, not the second, to deter short duration > calls and impair the economics of robocalls.

Do they really expect us to believe the reason they bill by the minute is to fight against robocalls?

</comment><comment><USER32> All I really want to do is allow calls through to my phone that are stored in my contacts. If they're not in my contacts, I'd prefer not to be notified and have it sent to voicemail.

<comment><USER33> One problem is they can easily spoof the number. I've received 2 calls from Bank of America's 800 number, that weren't actually from Bank of America (they were pretending there was a problem with my account...phishing for info...). They were in my address book, and showed up as such. You can't trust caller ID. They might not have your friends phone numbers, but you probably also have other major institutions that you trust in there as well.

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-you-shouldnt-answer- th...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-you-shouldnt-answer-the-phone- when-your-bank-calls-2017-03-30)

<comment><USER34> The fact that it is not perfect is pretty irrelevant to the need for this kind of basic functionality. I'm going to assume iPhone here because I'd be surprised if Android doesn't have this capability.

<comment><USER33> Andoird does. I think they added it in Lolipop about 5 years ago (only allowing calls/notifications from contacts). You have to set up do not disturb and then go and make exceptions for contacts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I just never answer calls or listen to voicemail anymore. I use WhatsApp etc. and give folks that ID. Maybe in a few years the phone companies will implement some of cool stuff mentioned in the article but until then phone calls from everyone are blacklisted.

</comment><comment><USER36> Great article, but I jumped there hoping that Twilio had a solution to offer. Not yet, it seems.

I've been pestered by Robocalls for the last few years. Lately, I did the mistake of shopping online for health insurance, and signing up with a provider (I ended up not purchasing it from them). Since then (three weeks ago), I've received ~20 calls per day, half of it from robots, half from humans.

These people should f*ing go to jail. All of them.

<comment><USER37> Jesus, 10 robocalls a day? I thought I was unlucky when I got 2 or 3 in one day. Did you end up using an automated answering service?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The death penalty for robocalls coming from inside the US, and drone strikes and extraordinary rendition for robocalls originating outside the US are out of the question, right?

But seriously, why is it so difficult to eliminate these robocalls. Each operation has to have employees, a call center (to handle the marks), payment processing, etc. It seems like a very easy target.

<comment><USER39> A lot of these robocall call centers are operating illegally in foreign countries that skirt their own laws, with export partners within the US that pop up and disappear quicker than the government can than they can be hunted. If you are interested there is a really good podcast by Reply All about tracking down one in person. Episode #102 and #103, some of their best stuff to be frank.

<comment><USER38> Just started the first one. Fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation.

[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long- distance](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long-distance)

[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/103-long-distance- part...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/103-long-distance-part-ii)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I disagree with the solution. A simple App that send to voicemail numbers not in my contacts will be far than enough. And it won't require to change the whole infrastructure!

<comment><USER41> You can already do this in iOS. Set your phone on Do Not Disturb and then in the iOS settings tell it to allow numbers in your contact list to get through even when DND is on.

I've done this for years and never get robocalls.

<comment><USER23> This also affects other notifications (sms, other app notifications) which might not work for most people.

Especially for people that are on PagerDuty, this solution just wont work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've never received a robocall and the whole thing seems dystopian. Is it something uniquely American? Is there EU legislation that prevents this, such as the "don't call me" register (bel me niet register)? I'm not on that, though. General anti-spam laws then? (Since it's unsolicited commercial communications directed at consumers). Genuinely curious what's different.

<comment> frosted-flakes Canada and the USA also have national Do Not Call laws, and telemarketers are not allowed to cold call numbers that are on the list (in Canada, there are certain exceptions such as local newspapers selling subscriptions, charities soliciting donations, and companies that do telephone surveys, e.g. Ipsos- Reid). It works, too, because I never, ever receive legit telemarketing calls.

But the DNC list doesn't do anything to stop phishing/scam calls because apparently criminals don't care about DNC laws (obviously). They always spoof local numbers, but never have a caller ID name. This means I can pretty safely ignore all calls without caller ID names, unless I'm expecting a call.

The problem is, these scammers spam voicemail inboxes too, and on my phone and carrier (Android on Koodo in Canada) _the only way_ to dismiss the "New Voicemail" notification is to call my voicemail number and listen to it. I don't care about voicemail, so I disabled it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Seems like this is much worse in the US - I've had the same number in the UK since 2000 and not had a robocall EVER. The occasional human spam call comes in (like once every two or three months) but I tend to just hang up and usually Google offers to block them (my Pixel 2 has the spam call blocker built in)

</comment><comment><USER44> If it is an area code outside of 4-5 I block it. If it isn't in my phonebook but in that range, I check the voicemail then 99 percent of the time I block it. Sometimes I answer and mess with the caller to waste their energy and ruin their numbers.

What irritates me is the spoofing of numbers. That should be a felony and charged in criminal court. They steal real people's numbers briefly in my experience. Either arrest and throw the person calling in prison or blacklist that Carrier.

And fine the carrier you use for allowing it to even happen.

EDIT: on a side note you are not able to block Texas and Florida. I could block those two entire states without worries and I'd receive a lot less calls.

</comment><comment><USER45> I have resorted to using DND mode as a whitelist. If a caller does not identify with a number in my contacts list, the phone doesn't ring. I feel whitelisting is the only thing that's going to stop the calls... extreme or not.

<comment><USER23> I would do this, but at least on iOS, this silences text messages and other app notifications, including other messengers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> BTW, in Russia labor is cheap so spam phone calls are usually done by people, not robots. I have to keep phone always in silent mode due to lots of such spam, sometimes 2-3 calls per day from different companies.

</comment><comment><USER47> As usual, it's not that complicated, and it's not that simple.

The simple solution would be for the network providers to validate the caller ID numbers for its subscribers, but that requires changes to punish the ones that don't do it.

I've worked with telephony for 15 years and I know the big providers do this for most common telecom protocols, but VoIP providers tend to be more lax. But that's where they shouldn't, and the ones that break this shouldn't be allowed on the network.

<comment><USER48> Yeah, but they can at least do the following things:

\- Don't connect calls coming from numbers they own that they have not assigned

\- Don't connect calls from a number to itself (my wife recently received a phone call from "herself". Then she received 20 more phone calls from irate people sure that she spammed them)

\- Don't connect calls where the calling number is coming from an invalid area code or LATA

\- Don't connect calls where the calling number is a string of only digits. There are no people or businesses with this type of name, most likely.

This would solve between 10-50% of the spam calls I get, I'm pretty sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I use Robokiller on iOS -- it screens the calls and answers spam with prerecorded scripts paced to match response times and then sends me the recording of the interaction.

<comment><USER50> What strikes me with robocalls that leave messages - they cut off by "talking" too early so I cannot identify who they are, yet if I answer, I get nothing but silence if I answer with "Hello? Hello?" Calm and slowly paced. That's my personal rule. I say hello slowly twice, and if theres silence, I hang up. Dont care if I start to hear a connection as I'm going to hang up. You called me, have someone on the line. My time is worth money to me. I am not amswering the phone to be put on hold for the next representative. Fuck off and call me when you have someone ready to talk to me.

<comment><USER49> I generally don't answer any number that's not in my contacts. If I don't know who it is they can leave a message or I'll look up the number and block it proactively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've solved the robocall problem personally, by simply not answering my phone.

I'll answer the call if I'm expecting one, if it's from someone who has texted me that they're going to call (this covers 99% of the legit calls I get), or if it's from one of a very tiny number of people who might call me due to an emergency.

Otherwise, it goes straight to voicemail and (thanks to Tasker) doesn't even make my phone ring.

</comment><comment><USER51> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACbgAD1oehQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACbgAD1oehQ)

> FCC Chairman Ajit Pai explains the importance of the FCC's proposed new > rules banning illegal spoofed text messages and international calls. The > proposed rules would enable the agency to address consumer concerns about > unwanted text messages and scam calls from overseas.

</comment><comment><USER52> Here's very simple idea for Apple:

Let only calls from known contacts ring, the rest auto-goes to voicemail.

Why is this so F __*ING hard for Apple to implement?

<comment><USER53> Because it's already there, it's called Do Not Disturb mode

<comment><USER52> This is not even close to what I described.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've actually blocked all telephone calls. This might be ill-advised, but I haven't been burned by it yet.

</comment><comment><USER55> I am guessing that the direction this is heading in is twilio somehow coming up with a solution that they can implement and sell to someone. Maybe the multi part blog post is part of the way to gather thoughts in order to learn more and incorporate ideas and reactions from people.

</comment><comment><USER56> Maybe there ought to be a robocall service for ~anonymously targeting the callback numbers provided in robocalls. Many years ago, I setup an autodialer to hit an 800 number provided by a persistent robocaller. And pretty soon, they stopped calling me.

</comment><comment><USER57> > By default, we bill by the minute, not the second, to deter short duration > calls and impair the economics of robocalls.

That sounds like marketing BS to me. Why can't they just create a one way fingerprint of the audio and block duplicates.

<comment><USER58> Because you need to pick up the phone in order to get any audio to make a fingerprint of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I wonder what % of robocalls are run on Twilio. My sense is a non- insignificant #

</comment><comment><USER60> I get none, our house has an asterisk box that does voicemail and provides individual VM for everyone at home - it means that anyone calling in has to dial a single digit extension, I haven't had a robocall in years

</comment><comment><USER61> "TrueCaller" App

<comment><USER62> TrueCaller seems to work great if you keep their spam list updated and allow them to screen your calls. I have no complaints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'd love to take the robo-callers on a long winding road to nowhere. Is there a conversational AI robo-answering app based on something like Google Duplex? If not, should I build one?

</comment><comment><USER64> I consider articles like this, which don't answer the point in the title, and then say you have to wait for Part 2 to presumably get the answer, no better than Robocalls and spam.

</comment><comment><USER65> The solution is to use a whitelist for phonecalls.

</comment><comment><USER66> Reply All (podcast) had a recent episode about the increase in robocalls. It's a fun listen. [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/135-the-robocall- conun...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/135-the-robocall- conundrum#episode-player) (The TLDR is a law changed.)

Also, I've had success running Calls Blacklist (app) on my android phone - it's set up so that it will block any call that's not from one of my contacts. I haven't had a spam call since I started using it.

</comment><comment><USER67> Is there a way to only let the phone ringing if it's a number which is in your address book?

<comment><USER68> In Android Pie, Do Not Disturb mode makes it so you are only notified of calls from your contacts. All other calls are received silently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I was hoping this would be a blog post on using Twillio to block robo callers.

</comment><comment><USER70> I've posted about this before. There is a solution to this.

Google "Robocalls Cash" and you'll see it has been featured in several news outlets.

[https://robocalls.cash/ref/keven/](https://robocalls.cash/ref/keven/)

</comment><comment><USER71> Great blog post, actually looking forward to the second part.

</comment><comment><USER72> Was there a reason the author redacted parts of the robocall phone numbers? They're robocalls, the numbers should be garbage by definition.

<comment><USER73> The point of the article is that the phone numbers that robocalls come from are trivially spoofed. So, it's plausible that these are real people's phones being spoofed, and it would be quite rude to them to publish their phone numbers in a way that could be read as indicating the number is a robot.

<comment><USER72> So it's preventing the equivalent of dialing random numbers and hoping it's a real person?

<comment><USER19> No. When you get a spam call, the caller ID is often not random. It's usually the number of some other person on the spam caller's list of people to call, often someone from your same area code. That way, you see a call from your area code and are more likely to answer it. If you get upset and call it back, you won't be calling the spammer. You'll be calling some other innocent victim of the spammer.

<comment><USER74> Most of the time the caller id shares the same area code and first 3 digits of the recipient's phone number. Many times the last 4 digits are the same just in a different order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Sounds like a technical solution for a problem that just needs regulation and laws. I'm in Germany. I _never_ had a ad/scam call on my cellphone number in basically 20 years. I get some kind of poll call every two months on my landline number. That's all.

<comment><USER76> Don't quote me on this, but I do believe there are regulations and laws preventing this - but just as the article states they are impossible to enforce given our current infrastructure. Fines are meaningless to a blackhat organization doing spoof calls over VoIP somewhere in India.

<comment><USER77> Last Week with John Oliver & Reply All both went into details with there most recent episodes, but something changed in federal policy with the Do Not Call list.</comment></comment></comment>


Want to pitch a VC while he cleans your house? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/05/want-to-pitch-a-vc-while-he-cleans-your-house-exec-and-shervin-pishevar-thought-so/

<comment><USER3> I have a hard time getting excited about this, like some others in this thread.

We blame the financial world (the suits) for not creating value - <USER2> rightfully so. But the San Francisco startup scene has just replaced finance with buzz. Who can come up with an even bigger Gimmick and attract some blogspam today...

Call me old fashioned, but what's wrong with focusing on customer value and quality.

<comment><USER4> Nothing's wrong with focusing on customer value and quality, but you also have to focus on customer acquisition. You don't have to either make a good product your customers like or do a publicity stunt to attract more customers. You can do both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This does a great job of helping the person getting cleaned (and pitching), Exec, AND raises Shervin's profile as an awesome, non-traditional-thinking investor. I wish I lived in San Francisco!

(although I'd definitely pre-clean...I think it would be kind of embarrassing to pitch to someone who is cleaning your dirty toilet or wharever.)

The really smart thing would be to have him clean your live/work office, since then he'd meet the team, see where you work, and be in a good place for a demo.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here "clean your house" is meant literally, but VCs coming into your house and "cleaning up" is a euphemism for those that have been through a VC-lead management team purge.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea from the Exec crew but I'm also impressed by the way that the TC reporters seem intent on actually trying out the products now. We did this with Anthnoy Ha for using Perfect Audience for retargeting too.

Admittedly in both these cases, the product was given to the folks for the review. But even with that, I would rather hear someone talk about the service than just describe it to me.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the inclusion of the VC in the marketing efforts. Helps him two ways: better understanding his current investment and hearing new pitches. It also helps the people pitching and definately helps the cleaning company get the word out.

Genius!

</comment><comment><USER9> No.</comment>


Firefox 4.0: New Design Changes Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/12/22/firefox-4-mockups/

<comment><USER2> Non-linkjacked: [http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/2009/12/21/windows- themeui-...](http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/2009/12/21/windows-themeui- update/) (which I submitted earlier: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007484>)

<comment><USER3> Mashable doesn't seem to enjoy giving others credit. The only link to the author is just a tiny link with the word "share". Even the name isn't mentioned. The original author deserves more than that.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry about that. I've added a [via] tag at the bottom and expanded the link text to make sure credit is given where it is due.

\- Ben (Co-Editor)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this. I was about to write a comment dissing Mashable for this.

Also, please consider doing it more often. Mashable rarely links to the original source (if at all), many times I have to Google to get more information; an extra step that can be easily avoided. Its in good form to link the original source.

<comment><USER4> We link regularly to the original source, I'm sorry if it's not as visible, but I assure you we do regularly. The exception are ones coming in the form of company announcements, but even then we often link back to their blog posts.

I'll try to make it more visible in the future.

<comment><USER5> OK, I should have said "from my experience". That was my experience most of the time when I was subscribed to mashable RSS, most of the time posts were deep linked to more mashable posts, instead of original source. It was a quite bit frustrating.

Anyways, I just checked the last couple of post you guys had they all seem to link to the source. The fact that you come here to reply to readers opinions, clearly means you guys care. That's good enough for me.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you remember in the comics of chrome, they said they were doing it to help other browsers. They also said they'd really like to have their ideas borrowed to make the web a better place.

<comment><USER7> which parts are so Chromish?

the new Firefox button comes from Microsoft Office.

the space between tabs comes from either Opera or Microsoft Office.

the tabs on top, which is only a possibility at this point, comes from Opera first, but was implemented by Google Chrome down the line.

the use of so much transparency in the menu may come from Microsoft Office or Chrome.

the non-flat buttons can come from Opera or Chrome.

the use of only three buttons on the left, however, comes from Chrome. it should be mentioned that Firefox is playing with the idea of getting rid of a refresh button on the left by building it into the location bar. [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/3.7_and_4.0_Theme_...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/3.7_and_4.0_Theme_and_UI_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback#Merging_Stop.2FRefresh.2FGo_Into_One_Button)

just want to give credit where credit is due.

<comment><USER5> Have you used chrome recently? While they might have borrowed ideas from other UI designs, never before did Firefox look more like chrome.

Not that its a bad thing. Throughout its history FF have taken design ideas from IE, Opera extensively. For all we know, FF most likely wouldn't even consider such a drastic UI change if chrome wasn't in the picture. FF UI changes has always been incremental and subtle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very Chromish. I'm glad they're not too proud to borrow good ideas when they see them. Now if they can just improve stability and speed I may switch back from Chromium.

<comment><USER9> The Firefox menu in the top-left corner looks remarkably similar to the O menu that's appeared in the latest Opera alpha (<http://goo.gl/Chfb>).

I like the way a lot of the cruft from 1990s Windows applications is starting to disappear from programmes that really don't need it like modern browsers.

<comment><USER10> Out of curiosity, why did you post a shortened link here instead of the canonical one? Does goo.gl give you some kind of clickthrough monitoring, or was there another reason?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This makes me very, very happy. I use Chrome on my netbook for two reasons: it's faster, and it takes up significantly less screen space. It's nice to see Firefox beginning to compete in at least one of those two areas.

<comment><USER12> If you need to maximize usable window space, try vimperator for Firefox. Works wonders on my netbook.

<comment><USER13> do you know of a way to set certain UI elements to load on every launch so that i don't have to type in 'set guioptions' every time i launch the browser?

<comment><USER12> create a ~/.vimperatorrc file with your specific settings

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this saving space? How is this Chrome-ish?

Chrome saved space by getting rid of the title bar (a bar that would just say "Chrome"). From these pictures, Firefox still has a whole bar that just says "Firefox." Why?

Mozilla, please allow us to place tabs on the Title bar!

And if you really want to blow Chrome out of the water, explore innovative vertical tab options. Tree style tabs is an immensely popular extension for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER15> All I ever wanted from Firefox 4.0 is the user interface latency (or rather, lack thereof) of Chromium and the process-per-tab / process-per-plugin model. The latter would probably help a lot with the former.

The screenshot mockups don't tell.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish they'd optimize for vertical space instead of eye candy. Most applications use way too much vertically stacked menubars, toolbars, bookmarks bars etc..., nibbling away precious display space from the document.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some of the sample back/forward button mockups are quite nice and subtle but the one they use in the final 4.0/3.5 comparison image is terribly chunky.

</comment><comment><USER18> For those people that said it was pointless for google to enter the browser market, here's why.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Chrome showcased multiple innovations in browser technology. Things like a single process per tab, a much tighter security model, and proof that javascript implementations could be much faster.

By doing this they have set trends in how browser technologies should progress and thus had an influence on their ability to implement "html 5" webapps in the future that work cross browser. It was much more than "check it out we put tabs in the title bar guys".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hey, that's just like Opera!

Again.</comment>


HEAD – A guide to <head> elements - <AUTHOR> https://htmlhead.dev/ <comment><USER2> DublinCore[1] is totally missing! It once was _the_ metadata standard, it's understood by archives and libraries (including Library of Congress) worldwide, macOS will automatically import them into spotlight, etc.

Instead we find many of those tags (title, description, author, etc.) hidden behind the namespace of some corporations.

[1] [https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/](https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/)

<comment><USER3> Are these corporate 'namespaces' themselves even a standard? Isn't the prefix in meta@name just an informal convention?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The above 2 meta tags _must_ come first in the <head> to consistently ensure > proper document rendering.

It looks like they don't follow their own advice:

      <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1.0">

<comment><USER5> Do what they say, not what they do!

maximum-scale has only three valid uses:

1\. extreme values, like 5.0, if a browser misdetects that zooming that far is useful when it isn't (rare)

2\. pure-app websites like maps or video games that have alternative scaling arrangements and browser pinch-zoom gets in the way.

3\. there is no number three, and the thing you are thinking of is incorrect.

maximum-scale is an automatic usability and accessibility fail otherwise, you are bad and should be made to feel bad if you use it.

<comment><USER6> I tried to order a house online last night and I got to the "enter your email address to get your free quote" and because I couldn't zoom out, I could not see the _Submit_ button.

OMG, I thought how much money is this company losing because their website _intentionally_ disables a built in feature!?

<comment><USER7> It didn't happen to be this site? [https://www.dwellito.com/modular- homes/cover](https://www.dwellito.com/modular-homes/cover) (example home)

Only asking because it's a friend's site and I helped him build the quote modal which you currently can't zoom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We need more single page references like this, IMO, for all sorts of random domains. Even something like a single-page reference for how Array.from works in JS, as an example. Even if it were standalone it could later be integrated into a broader reference work. In the meantime, a "arrayfrom.dev" page, although non-general, would fill a specific niche w/ a mnemonic URL (Array.from is just an example - no idea whether or not it would be considerable in this regard).

Other "pages" (as rough-sketch descriptions) I can imagine: colors.dev, cacheperf.dev, unicode.dev, rdf/microdata.dev, parsing.algorithms.dev, querystring.dev (a micro reference for sure).

Likewise, "micro" web tools which I'm sure exist as a concept I don't know already would be very convenient (xml->json converter, linters/viewers/auditors of all sorts).

<comment><USER5> Is mdn not satisfactory for that? searching 'mdn array.from' brings up a nice one-pager on that and it works for almost any web/js documentation.

<comment><USER9> Sarcasm detector broken?

<comment><USER5> maybe? I like htmlhead.dev and it actually is a fairly underdocumented corner

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Below are the essential elements for any web document (websites/apps)

> "...width=device-width, initial-scale=1..."

This is a surprising bit of opinionation to an otherwise decent presentation of head elements. Websites render quite nicely on modern phones without this line, but they generally render as if they are on a desktop browser. Using the above meta tag allows you easy access to modern approaches to mobile development.

<comment><USER11> I'm not an expert. But in my experience, that line has been the solution to 100% of any viewport issue I've ever had on mobile, and has made webpages "just work" and render how I'd expect them to on mobile, as opposed to weird issues with font size and scrolling.

I've never had that line do something I didn't want. Is there a reason mobile browsers don't automatically just do whatever that line does? Seems like the opt-in behavior should be "yes, render me like I'm a desktop site on a tiny monitor" rather than opt-out.

<comment><USER12> Legacy reasons. When the iPhone came out, "mobile only" sites were a wasteland of terrible UI and restricted features. iPhone OS wanted to serve full websites, and sometimes had to do weird things to beat the kind of stuff that sniffed for mobile devices, or to overcome the lack of a mouse on a desktop website.

If you look at the original iPhone demo in 2007[0], the original intent was to render full web pages on the screen and rely on the double-tap-to-zoom to read content.

The article that's generally credited with naming and mainstreaming Responsive Web Design[1] didn't come until 2010.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ?t=2502](https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ?t=2502)

[1]: [https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web- design/](https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/)

<comment><USER13> Completely off topic, but it's hilarious how slow the NY times website loads in that first video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14>
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Please no. IMO this makes most pages unusable on mobile. Most websites, e.g. news websites with long-form articles, shouldn't be using mobile pages / responsive design / zoomed-in layout at all. Web apps (Twitter, GMail), maybe. But most mobile pages are _far_ more unusable than desktop versions (looking at you, Facebook and Reddit).

<comment><USER11> We must have different devices. IMO most pages are unusable on mobile _without_ this. I wonder if it's the device, website content, or personal preference at play here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > <!-- Identify the software used to build the document (i.e. - WordPress, > Dreamweaver) --> <meta name="generator" content="program">

Is Dreamweaver still a thing? I haven't heard of it in years, many years.

<comment><USER16> I last touched it in 2012 - but apparently, yes, yes it is:

[https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/using/whats- new.html](https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/using/whats-new.html)

Although, it looks like their cumulative 2019 updates are limited to the following headlines between the two:

1) added support for HTML tag highlighting inside PHP code

2) bootstrap CSS support.

... I was surprised to see it was still alive.

<comment><USER17> I use Dreamweaver all the time. It's actually a full-blooded static site generator, two decades before that was trendy. And marketing can use the visual editor to make it a content management system.

<comment><USER18> I still use a copy because no editor has a built in sftp anymore. Sublime/vs code/phpstorm are great for git projects but for remote projects you don't want to work on locally dreamweaver can't be beat. The only problem is modern code has changed syntax so dreamweaver gives warnings for valid code. I wonder if anyone has updated these.

<comment><USER16> PHPStorm and all the JetBrains IDEs have the ability to edit files directly via SFTP AFAIK.

It's under Tools > Deployment

Source: I use it daily.

<comment><USER18> You can deploy through sftp but you still need save the files locally. I could accept that but then you generate a laravel db migration file or config file is created through a package that was installed remotely. So your local copy doesn't have the new file. So now you have to resync the repo. Resyncing the repo from the root directory brings in the vendor packages locally so a resync could take an hour. You need to go to subfolder by subfolder resyncing if you want to avoid that.

Dreamweaver is open-edit-push back. Perfect when you have to make a change to a site and don't want all of the fiies locally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why would <meta charset="utf-8"> be required if you can set it in the HTTP headers? I've also read that modern browsers (everything except IE) will look for a byte-order mark.

<comment><USER20> Quite a few of these can be set in the HTTP headers as well, but people editing templates don't always have access or know how to do it.

BTW; not all UTF-8 text has a byte-order mark, I would say most of them don't.

<comment><USER21> BOM is not valid in UTF-8 for one thing.

<comment><USER22> To be pedantic, the Unicode standard _disrecommends_ the use of a BOM in UTF-8-encoded documents rather than declaring it invalid.

<comment><USER21> It makes zero sense to specify a byte order for an encoding in which it is irrelevant. It only persists because of a lazy vendor that can't encode Unicode correctly.

<comment><USER23> It would have been nice if every well-encoded Unicode document started with BOM and every legacy doc did not, instead of having to guess whether a doc is more _likely_ UTF-8 or Latin-1.

<comment><USER24> Then concatenating to valid Unicode documents would no longer be valid Unicode. That is bad. And ASCII text would no longer be a valid UTF-8 encoded Unicode document. That is bad. And even when everything has finally switched to UTF-8 every tool ever will still need to handle the BOM. That is bad.

Guessing between valid UTF-8 and Latin-1 is only ever ambiguous when there are multiple non-ASCII characters in a row __and __all those sequences are made up of a lead byte with the correct number of trailing bytes. How often is that a problem for you in practice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Recommended Minimum" lists <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">. While it is indeed recommended, the site should say to actually try testing the website on a mobile device with this attribute before adding it - marking the website as mobile friendly when it's not is worse than not doing so.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is absolutely mortifying, how much metadata do pages have to share with browsers to do that one weirdly specific thing!?

<comment><USER27> What weirdly specific thing?

You don't have to put anything in a head tag, you don't even _need_ a head tag, but it's a good idea to have one and to at least add a charset meta tag. Everything is optional, though.

The entire point of it is for you to share metadata about your page with the browser.

<comment> munk-a My favorite weird thing that happens without certain <head> tags is the ten billion attempts to get a favicon. I don't know if browsers still try all those silly favicon requests if none is defined, but it was saddening to watch that grow to be wide spread previously.

<comment><USER28> Yes, they all still issue several favicon requests, so far as I'm aware. Having one, instead of returning a 404, can speed up the page load. Which makes 0 sense.

<comment><USER29> This is how I avoid this issue entirely:

        <link href=data:, rel=icon>

This is the smallest possible "null" favicon. It causes the browser to display nothing and ensures 0 HTTP requests for the favicon!

<comment><USER30> Does the browser display the generic "no favicon" icon, or is it just completely blank? I like the idea.

<comment><USER29> It's completely blank (tested in Firefox and Chromium).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Completely opt out of DNS prefetching by setting to "off"

Why is this included in these guidelines?

EDIT: See reply. Thanks!

<comment><USER32> That's not a recommendation, the site is just documenting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Missed the perfect headline: "A guide to giving head - all of the elements"

</comment><comment><USER34> Surprised all icons is only:

<!-- Icon in the highest resolution we need it for --> <link rel="icon" sizes="192x192" href="/path/to/icon.png">

<!-- Apple Touch Icon (reuse 192px icon.png) --> <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/path/to/apple-touch-icon.png">

I thought there was literally like a dozen different sizes and names to support all different Apple and Android devices.

<comment> why-oh-why You don't even need those. Safari will automatically look for a file on the root and so does Android.

Still, I know what you're talking about and it's awful how many "gurus" suggest all that noise.

<comment><USER35> Yes. See this comprehensive resource [0] or sieve trough those linked at the Head project [1] - there are still bunch of tags (especially if you cannot place images into the root path) and myriad of images with varying degree of importance. Even now most resources apparently slightly disagrees with each other.

[0] [https://realfavicongenerator.net/faq](https://realfavicongenerator.net/faq) [1] [https://htmlhead.dev/#icons](https://htmlhead.dev/#icons)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Question: how many of these are standardized? I'm not particularly interested in adding a bunch of specific, proprietary tags…

<comment><USER36> I'd go by W3 [https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_head.asp](https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_head.asp)

Then again were all slaves to the whims of Alphabet and Facebooks for traffic.

<comment><USER37> W3Schools is not W3C, and is frequently inaccurate.

<comment><USER38> Re: them being inaccurate: that was true many moons ago, but it seems they've cleaned up and are more accurate now IMHO.

<comment><USER37> They're less inaccurate than they used to be -- I'll give them that. But I still wouldn't rely on them as a source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is specifically elements which are allowed in the `head` element of the document.

I recently read somewhere that for backwards compatibility reasons no new element types can be added within `head`. This causes a lot of overloading on the existing ones for elements like <link />.

I don't have any supporting evidence though.

<comment><USER40> The HTML syntax lets you omit the </head> tag. Any start tag not in the finite list of elements will implicitly start the body and go there.

        <html>
        <head>
        <title>I am in the head</title>
        <foo>I am in the body!</foo>
        </head>   <- this is a parse error and is ignored

<comment><USER41> HTML even lets you omit the <html> and <head> tags, so the following is valid and equivalent:

        <title>I am in the head</title>
        <foo>I am in the body</foo>

I've described how this works for SGML here [1], but it also applies to HTML.

[1]: [http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html- tutorial.html](http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgml-html-tutorial.html) (see slides linked from TALK)

<comment><USER42> Screw it, let's abandon all markup and content: [https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/css-without- html](https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/css-without-html)

(Explanation: [https://css-tricks.com/using-css-without-html/](https://css- tricks.com/using-css-without-html/) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Fun fact: there's no way to do logical grouping for head elements. (eg no divs allowed)

<comment><USER44> Why would this be useful? Other than for human legibility, but I feel like that can be accomplished with line breaks and comments.

</comment></comment><comment> seph-reed Immediately found a bunch of elements I had never heard of. This is really neat.

<comment><USER45> Especially <base>

<comment> munk-a <base> was super nice in the old days when I worked with servers without subdomains for staging/testing, it made it pretty trivial to have domain.tld/website and domain.tld/testing/website ... granted, those were dark days and I'd never use that approach now, but it was appreciated.

<comment><USER46> Out of interest, what would you use instead these days?

<comment> munk-a Oh, usually <base> is still bound to the server root name, but in most cases an SPA or what-have-ye will be served off the base subdomain with client side routing hints - then everything can just be referenced using stripped down relative URLs.

Actually though, for the server-side processed stuff we are still using <base> to make sure that /fancy/bespoke/url/style URLs doesn't try to grab assets from /fancy/bespoke/url/style/styles/main.css - I guess it's less that I don't use it and more that now-a-days I rarely set it to anything other than domainname since I'll just materialize a new subdomain if I need to do something fancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Would love to see if/how these apply to html email/email-clients.

<comment><USER48> Email clients don't give a shit about your html. They will straight mess you up

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> ICBM tag with targeting coordinates hmm

<comment><USER50> They link to a helpful explanation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICBM_address](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICBM_address)

tl;dr you should not expect to actually be targeted with an ICBM unless you foolishily also include elevation information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Those dark grey on black comments are annoyingly hard to read. Web inspector to the rescue.

</comment><comment><USER52> Bit light on the use of the Hreflang

</comment><comment><USER53> Does anybody remember that funny thread where some dev here was saying "who calls it HTML5 anymore" as if everyone else was out of touch with stagnating irrelevant skills that would immediately throw red flags during a phone screen?

It just gave me a chuckle thinking about it

Thanks for the guide!

<comment><USER8> Uh... what do people call "it" now-a-days? Serious

<comment><USER8> I think people understood my comment neither correctly, and ,it seems, nor in the same way? Anyways, what I was asking was whether there exists a new name for html5? Have people dropped the 5? Comically, it was always a vague, tattered umbrella term from the get go (whenever used to refer to anything else than HTML5 the language/spec).

<comment><USER54> The spec which was once called HTML5 is just called HTML now. They dropped the version number since it is continuously updated rater than versioned.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are there so few features on Instagram's website? - <AUTHOR> I've posed this question to many people over the last couple years and I could sum up all the responses in a single sentence "They want you to use their app."<p>That much seems clear but the question still stands as I don't understand what benefit it is to Instagram to have users discouraged from using the browser interface. And why would they build a site at all if they didn't want people to use it? It does not seem that they lack any front-end web engineering talent as the current site has been executed well. The site just lacks a lot of the functionality of the mobile app. <comment><USER2> I have no affiliation with Instagram other than a user, but I believe the answer really is that simple, they want you to use their app. The purpose of Instagram is to capture moments in time via photos on your mobile device and share those photos with your friends and others. The app serves that function eloquently so what advantage does the website give them? Users aren't discouraged from using their site, but what Instagram does not want is users to upload hundreds of images at once from the albums stored on their home computer. Not having the ability via the website helps to prevent that user. In addition, outside of uploading and altering images the website really is not missing any other functionality compared to the app.

Why have a website at all you ask? My response would be why not have a website? It's a place for their business as a whole to have a web presence. Just because a product is mobile-centric, does not mean they can't have a website. I think their website is perfect for the product. It is minimal, you can search for users, see what others are posting, participate in the comments, and like photos. The only piece I do wish they would allow you to do is see who is following you and who you are following. But to be honest, I rarely use the site at all. In fact the only time I will find myself using the site is if I am on Facebook on my laptop and want to share a photo from Instagram to my FB friends. Other than that it is the app all the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> >The app serves that function eloquently so what advantage does the website give them?

The advantage a website gives them is more users using their product more often which means more money from their advertisements.

>Users aren't discouraged from using their site

My personal experience is that I am discouraged from using their site. When I want to tag a user in a comment, or see who has liked a photo or look through my list of followers I feel discouraged and I close the browser tab.

>what Instagram does not want is users to upload hundreds of images at once from the albums stored on their home computer.

This is easily avoidable by just using their current UX of uploading pictures in their mobile app. Namely, one at a time. Putting this into their website wouldn't allow users an easy way of uploading 100's of images at once.

>outside of uploading and altering images the website really is not missing any other functionality compared to the app.

There is a lot of missing functionality; tagging in comments, viewing the list of people that liked a photo, viewing the list of a user's followers or who they follow, messaging, sharing-editing-deleting photos you've posted, your notifications and your activity stream.

You say this:

>I think their website is perfect for the product

and also this:

>But to be honest, I rarely use the site at all.

My interpretation of this is that your opinion is the perfect web product for Instagram is one that people don't use. Which I guess brings us back to the beginning question. :)

<comment><USER2> > The advantage a website gives them is more users using their product more > often which means more money from their advertisements.

Not really. For example, Facebook has proven that more people are drawn to mobile. While they may gain some new users, it is going to be negligible to their current base. In addition, I would bet that those users find them and signup via the web will be users who do not use the app.

> My personal experience is that I am discouraged from using their site. When > I want to tag a user in a comment, or see who has liked a photo or look > through my list of followers I feel discouraged and I close the browser tab.

This may be your experience, but I would bet that you are a minority in the larger scheme of things.

> This is easily avoidable by just using their current UX of uploading > pictures in their mobile app. Namely, one at a time. Putting this into their > website wouldn't allow users an easy way of uploading 100's of images at > once.

True. But the desktop is not their focus.

> My interpretation of this is that your opinion is the perfect web product > for Instagram is one that people don't use. Which I guess brings us back to > the beginning question. :)

No, my interpretation is that Instagram was not built as a web product. It was built as a mobile product and the web is secondary to that. They are focused on building the best product to meet their demand, and unfortunately for you their demand is not on a browser-based solution.

Not to be rude but I think you are looking for a deeper reason why they don't have a web app, when in reality the reason is simple. Again, the purpose of Instagram was to capture photographic moments in time via your mobile device and share those moments with others. They built a successful product around that and to meet that need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sure - they could certainly make their website more feature-packed, but I think they're wisely focused where their audience is going.

[http://cdn1.tnwcdn.com/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/05/...](http://cdn1.tnwcdn.com/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/05/Share-of-time-spent-consuming-media-Mobile- Desktop_chartbuilder-1.png)

The vast majority of people's photos originate on mobile devices, and consumption of those photos is also trending dramatically upward while desktop consumption is trending down. I believe Facebook sees a future where all interaction is mobile, be that phones or tablets, and they don't want to waste resources building out something they know is destined to continue its decline in relevance.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying it's not that they want you to users to use their mobile app but the trend is towards mobile consumption so they don't want to spend as much of their resources on the web?

<comment><USER3> They want you to use the app ... for both publishing and consumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I forget where I heard this but one reason I heard was to discourage the posting of old pictures since chances are that pictures on your computer are older than those on your phone. When you use the app, you're most likely uploading pictures you recently took.

</comment><comment><USER5> When Kevin and Mike started Instagram, they were trying to solve 3 problems [1]:

1\. Mobile photos don't look great 2\. Uploads on mobile are slow 3\. Sharing to multiple services without having to think about which app in advance

Using their app was the way to solve these problems.

So now those problems are solved, and they've moved into related spaces. Layout, for example, came about because every other photo collage app either: (1) had a terrible user experience or (2) was plastered with ads (or both).

And remember that before Instagram, they built Burbn, where they learned how confusing feature overload was to consumers.

> While in San Francisco, Systrom and Mike Krieger built Burbn, a HTML 5 > check-in service, into a product that allowed users to do many things: check > in to locations, make plans (future check-ins), earn points for hanging out > with friends, post pictures, and much more. However, recalling their studies > in Mayfield Fellows Program, Krieger and Systrom identified that Burbn > contained too many features and the users did not want a complicated > product. [2]

More than anything else, I think this drove them to focus on simple but great UX and the app; and that's why they don't ship new experimental features as much as, say Snapchat.

The Instagram web app is decent today, but this has changed radically in the past year.

> "While Instagram.com is designed to be complementary to the mobile apps, > it's important to the global conversations that happen on Instagram," an > Instagram spokesperson said. [3]

In the time they idled on the desktop side, some good third party Instagram web viewers were created: Iconosquare, Websta (Webstagram), and INK361 to name a few. Their API access to Instagram was ad free.

But this all changed last week when Instagram announced killing off third party viewers, by stealthily burying the lede in the context of one app that was scraping passwords. [4][5] (They already have OAuth after all.)

So why all this backstory?

Because now they have 300M users they need to monetize.

They're not killing off "malicious apps"; they're reducing their competition to have more control over the user experience so they can recapture advertising money. Now the problems they're solving are for businesses to deliver relevant advertising to their user base [6]. When you're in the app, they control this whole experience (and the analytics around it). Less so on the wild wild web in the land of ad and tracking blockers. That said, with third-party web apps dying off, I think we'll see the desktop web app continue to grow and be invested in, though with ads.

P.S. I am a heavy Instagram user ([https://www.instagram.com/kicksopenminds/](https://www.instagram.com/kicksopenminds/)).

1: [http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2735](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2735)

2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Systrom#Burbn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Systrom#Burbn)

3: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/20/instagram-brings-search- to-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/20/instagram-brings-search-to-the-web/)

4: [http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/17/9751574/instagram-app- dev...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/17/9751574/instagram-app-developers- api-restrictions-security-privacy)

5: [http://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/17/instagram-new-api- change...](http://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/17/instagram-new-api-changes/)

6: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/thesba/2015/06/19/the- monetizati...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/thesba/2015/06/19/the-monetization- of-instagram/)</comment>


What Do You Do With the World's Fastest Internet Service? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/03/google_fiber_review_nobody_knows_what_to_do_with_the_world_s_fastest_internet.html

<comment><USER2> Nice conservative review of Google Fiber. Is hosting off of Google Fiber off- limits? This would be great for people who drive medium amounts of traffic but don't want to pay for hosting. Back up the server, maybe use a CDN for faraway places, and boom, done.

It seems like videos is what everyone is focusing on. Wouldn't something like OnLive have benefited from this, then? Low latency, high bandwidth. Heck, VNC servers would be a lot more pleasant to use too on Google Fiber.</comment>


Billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix, funding scientists to break us out - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/computer-simulation-world-matrix-scientists-elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-a7347526.html <comment><USER2> _Mr Musk spoke earlier this year about the fact that he believes that the chance that we are not living in a computer simulation is "one in billions". He said that he had come to that conclusion after a chat in a hot tub, where it was pointed out that computing technology has advanced so quickly that at some point in the future it will become indistinguishable from real life – and, if it does, there's no reason to think that it hasn't done already and that that's what we are currently living through._

The hubris of making such statement after a hot tub chat when no evidence exists is insane. In 1880, everyone with interest in Arctic exploration "knew" that the north pole was an open sea and would be balmy. I wonder what things we "know" today will be laughed at by our great grandchildren?

<comment><USER3> Generally agree, but I think that by 1880 the British had finally come to their senses and given up on Arctic exploration. Franklin's expedition [0] was 1845 - 1848 or so, and the subsequent extensive searches for him into the 1850s provided a lot more knowledge of the geography, but they seem to have also made everyone finally confront the futility of the task. The British Admiralty didn't fund another expedition until 1875-1876 when the Nares expedition to reach the North Pole failed [1], and the general conclusion was that there was no Open Polar Sea. They gave up on Arctic exploration after that.

So maybe shift 1880 back to 1840.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition)

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

EDIT: formatting

<comment><USER2> The Jeannete expedition of 1878 was the last expecting an open polar sea, at least according to Hampton Sides's book In the Kingdom of Ice. The expedition's captain met with world-renowned cartographer and open polar sea advocate August Petermann before leaving. While they were en route, it was discovered that the Kuroshio current was nowhere near as strong as anticipated.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the reference, I'll have to find a copy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He's not the only one. As I was driving home, alone, a few days ago, I heard my brother's voice say will you pick up some In N Out on the way home. Not one minute later, he calls me and asks for a double double meal. It most definitely was not deja vu, it was a bug in the simulation's audio streaming socket, a veritable glitch in the matrix!

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah but why would Musk want to discover that he isn't really a billionaire, but in fact an unconscious hairless dude living in a pod of goo and wired into a giant computer?

Anyways he better be careful or he'll be flushed into the vast waste pit for knowing too much.

Hey, maybe Musk think he's "The One!"

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe us living things are nodes in an artificial neural network? We as a network are reaching self-awareness. Holy shit.

<comment><USER7> All that to compute the question which answer is 42.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We almost certainly do, and I'm happy someone is finally solving this issue

</comment><comment><USER9> If there is something that is known to be true, but can't be computed, wouldn't that invalidate the simulation hypothesis?

</comment><comment><USER10> When will you NPCs wake up and realize all this is not for you?

Back to work!</comment>


Italian watchdog fines Apple & Samsung over updates used to slow down phones - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Where is the link? Should it be this one? [https://www.reuters.com/article/us- apple-samsung-italy-antit...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple- samsung-italy-antitrust/italian-watchdog-fines-apple-samsung-over-software- updates-idUSKCN1MY1CN)</comment>


U.S. Is the No. 2 Spanish-Speaking Country in the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/u-s-no-2-spanish-speaking-country-world-n383921

<comment><USER2> I thought this has been the case for over a decade?</comment>