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Comment by morkalork | Hacker News Reader

I never knew there was such an industry surrounding IVF until researching it. It's wild how hush hush and not talked about it is while simultaneously common enough there's a whole medical tourism industry for it. You can have prescriptions sent to you in advance, get picked up by a driver at the airport and stay at an affiliated beach resort. They'll deliver prescriptions to your room so you don't need to go to pharmacy in a foreign country. Hell, some providers even include a working SIM card in the package.

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There's nothing quiet about it. There's a whole district near where I live dedicated to it, it's covered by my health insurance, I've contracted to an IVF company here to do ML for face matching, many of my friends have used it, it's well enough known that the acronym didn't need to be defined.

Pardon my ignorance, but they use ML to find sperm and egg donors that match similar facial features to the “parents”? Cause that is honesty pretty cool.

If you're talking about DNA, yes, but no. I've worked on that too and it's much harder. In the above instance we used photos of the donors and customers and the typical case was to get a close match for the partner who was shooting blanks in order to produce an offspring who ideally would look like both "parents".

That is really awesome, would you happen to know how effective the photo method is? As in, do the kids end up looking similar to their “parents”?

I couldn't imagine an ML project where you have to wait 10-15 years before finding out if the results were good enough!

It’s old knowledge that parents (more typically fathers) bond with newborns that look like them, so you could have results within a year and again within 5 when the child looks more like their adult selves

> I've contracted to an IVF company here to do ML for face matching

This is actually a good idea. I have a hard time believing it actually performs well though

I'm in Canada. It is a bit of an awkward topic, but turns out half of families I know had some sort of fertility treatment. Whether just some pills to help out with hormones or sperm count, or IUI, or IVF. It's covered by provincial insurance and is a medical procedure like any other.

As our fertility challenges increase (from biological issues like decrease in male sperm counts and fertility to social ones like longer student loans, getting together later, and strong emergence of non-cis-hetero families), it seems increasingly a must to preserve a modern society at least in the Interim. But yeah, people don't / didn't talk about it much. A lot of older generations or particularly zealously religious still don't - we like to find exciting ways to taboo and isolate each other :-/.

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