Why doesn't anyone weep for Docker? - <AUTHOR> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-doesnt-anyone-weep-for-docker/ <comment><USER2> There's this prevalent false position that Kubernetes is successful because of Google.

Yeah, Kubernetes initially learned a ton because of Borg and Google's deep investment into containers dating back a very long time. But, arguably, Kubernetes is successful because Google Let It Go. Its a true open source project, with governance by a wide number of industry advocates, underneath the Linux Foundation.

By comparison, Docker is a VC-backed profit-minded startup. Of course it was going to lose this race, for the same reason Windows isn't the dominant OS in the cloud.

Fundamentally: You can't build a hyperscale startup based on a technology. It doesn't appear to work anymore. The best case is the Docker/Kubernetes or Oracle/Postgres/MySQL case: someone else does it, maybe better, open sources it, community forms around it, you're toast. The worst case is the MongoDB/AWS or Elastic/AWS case; a cloud provider copies you, probably does it worse, but its cheaper and more integrated with the cloud, so they still win.

Docker was doomed; they could have been a very nice business, but the issue is taking on huge valuations and capital, scaling like mad, and then finding out you have no ground underneath your feet to support that valuation.

<comment><USER3> Parenthetically, Linux being an open source reincarnation of Solaris seems also an example, no?

<comment><USER4> It would surprise me if Linus even knew about Solaris when he worked on the first release of Linux.

Solaris' first release was in June 1992, with first use of the name in marketing materials in September 1991 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)#His...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_\(operating_system\)#History))

Linus' famous message was from the same time (September 17, 1991)

Calling Linux an open source version of Minix is more appropriate, but it still wouldn't be a good example of this.

Minix isn't dead. It moved to a BSD license, and is deployed in millions of hundreds of millions of Intel CPUs ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardwa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardware))

<comment><USER5> I think that, once you're going that far back in history, it's pretty critical to keep track of the GNU/Linux distinction. Linus just wrote a kernel. And then the GNU userland, which had already been in development since the mid 80s, but was still somewhat lacking a workable kernel, was adopted as the official userland to use with the Linux kernel.

And at roughly the same time, IIRC, when Sun decided to migrate their Unix from a BSD flavor to a SysV flavor, which came to be called Solaris, they also used some GNU bits. Which might explain some similarities between the two.

<comment><USER6> Is this Richard Stallman? ;)

<comment><USER7> No, he wouldn't have called it GNU/Linux: [https://www.sudosatirical.com/articles/richard-stallman- inte...](https://www.sudosatirical.com/articles/richard-stallman-interjects- local-mans-funeral/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article seems to be arguing that Docker's primary downfall was being hostile to its open source community. Without having an opinion on whether that's true, I suspect the core issue was not that but their business model and execution.

Before Kubernetes was the dominant container tech, they were pushing Swarm but I remember being confused about where Docker "standalone" stopped and where Swarm began. Perhaps it would have been better as a separate tool with a more clear open core model?

Then there was Docker Hub, whose UI was never great and which always seemed light on features.

I don't recall seeing any kind of container introspection tool from them for a while either, despite others coming out.

Meanwhile, they represented a threat to the cloud providers if you could truly run anything in a container on any cloud. But the cloud providers all neutralized that threat by the classic "commoditizing the complement" strategy where the Docker cluster and registry tech were all either open source or commoditized.

Once Kubernetes emerged as the winner and de-valued Swarm while the cloud providers all offered their own Kubernetes and Docker registry offerings, I'm not sure how much more profit there was for Docker to claim.

Honestly, startups are hard. Sometimes really hard. It's hard to know if a different team would have gotten different results in this space.

<comment><USER9> Totally agree with your first paragraph. Regarding execution, I'm not sure what Docker could have done differently that did not lead to the outcome we have today. I don't think that playing nice with other opensource devs would have made a difference (as the article claims).

Also .. the K was hardened at Google is BS. The ideas, maybe. But I am quite skeptical about the amount of prod internal google code went into early K (pls don't point at the Borg paper .. I'm talking about actual working code). I recall doing a deep comparison of swarm vs K circa 2015 and Swarm was clearly superior in both design and implementation. Today, K is better and has an ecosystem .. maybe the issue isn't that core Docker containers played nice with opensource .. rather .. swarm should have focused much more on playing well with others.

One point of contrast is Hashicorp .. they are in the workload orchestration and mgmt space and seem to be doing really well. Kudos to them!

<comment><USER10> Kubernetes (from open sourcing to about 1.3 or 1.4) is a second system mostly written by senior engineers (from several companies) with deep experience in the problem domain and strong architectural guidance, and a willingness to stop at "just good enough" and then let stuff mature. Kube was mostly "done" from a design perspective in early 2015.

Swarm was 2-3 people in the early days, without as much strong opinionation about what exactly they were building, which meant while it was a tighter, simpler system, it couldn't evolve as easily.

I'm obviously biased - I was the first non googler to have commit on the repo. But it's much easier to build something when you know upfront exactly what it looks like and you have a set of committed and experienced engineers with good leadership.

<comment><USER11> > I'm obviously biased - I was the first non googler to have commit on the > repo.

How well was your PR received?

<comment> forgot-my-pw Looks to be successful in general: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pulls?q=is%3Apr+aut...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Asmarterclayton)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My experience agrees with this.

I'm a huge fan of Docker, I've actively taken part since the early days, attending meetups and using it actively day to day.

Unfortunately, when I brought several issues to GitHub, or +1'd other people's issues that were affecting the usability within our company, the attitude was very much "f* you and your problems" because Docker want things to be one way and that's how it'll be.

There were issues raised 4+ years ago and are still open, for solutions to problems that would have mooted a need for us to use something like K8s (which doesn't work anyway for our requirements).

I believe Docker locking the community out of valuable features had also done harm and (possibly) failed to be the monitiser they'd hoped for.

After so long, I no longer go to Docker to solve problems that could be solved in Docker (secrets anyone? without the "hacks"), and just look towards the other tools solving the problems.

I'll continue to use Docker, but I don't consider it a friend.

<comment><USER13> I wonder how much of that attitude was caused by an overstretched team with no effective scaling mechanism in place. No, "open source" does not automatically mean "scalable team". Part of Kubernetes success is its ability to scale up the community, empowering multiple entities to meaningfully contribute.

<comment><USER14> At the same time, I gather it's really, really hard to write software that satisfies a lot of use cases across a lot of businesses without having to be somewhat opinionated.

<comment><USER13> True! Another part of Kubernetes success is the fact that it's core architecture is sound, scalable for both workloads and features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem i have with cubernetes is the following: I as a small developer and small server owner don't have the ressources to even get started. The first thing i see at cubernetes is a cluster. Why a cluster. Do i need to cluster my Raspberry pi's to get something out of it? Do i need to buy 3 servers just to run 5 containers?

In docker its easy. Download Docker. Start container. Install container manager like platformio. Done.

But true to the article. Docker seems very hostile towards the community and towards getting revenue. If i think about Kubernetes and Revenue i hear IBM, Red Hat. And i am too cheap of a person and too small of a customer to ever need those guys. So i will still keep using Docker.

And because i know more about Docker i will probably try to use it at work as well. Easy as that.

But i am open to suggestions.

<comment><USER16> > as a small developer

Do you need kubernetes?

I know the hype cycle is mad for copying big tech, but if stackoverflow can operate on a couple of IIS instances I'd argue that you almost never need kubernetes.

<comment><USER17> For me containerization was always about deterministic environments and ease of deployment instead of performance and clustering. But even with these advantages I am currently not using any solution for that.

For cloud services this is probably a good idea, even for users to a degree if the provider doesn't already give you a fitting box.

But otherwise it is not a must have in my opinion. Maybe that is a mistake and the apps I develop today are not going to work in 10 years. Well, worst case: I have to be paid again.

<comment><USER18> > For me containerization was always about deterministic environments and ease > of deployment instead of performance and clustering. But even with these > advantages I am currently not using any solution for that.

You can get 99% of the way using a stable distribution and a configuration management system (ansible, chef and the like). It's much much simpler than running an orchestration service. I feel most people don't need containers and orchestration, just config management running redundant system designs.

<comment><USER19> To be honest I only very recently got to know ansible and related techs so I maybe missing an opportunity to learn something. Even so I think you are forgetting the DEV part. With ansible and chef you can make a deployment to the real infra. With containers you can have infra locally in your DEV environment and have clean slates. The similitude of the DEV environment and the production are crucial for devops. There is nothing more annoying for developers than having something work locally and then needing some weird quirk for the production/ci. A lot of political infighting and hate for devops. I saw this being a tech lead for build system in a fortune 500 company. Ah they have redhat based distro. Ultra stable! Problem is nothing from outside the company works out of the box, leading to blessed machines. A disaster that lead to so much unofficial workarounds that it is not funny. Lol the kernel is so old it cannot run docker:) Ubuntu is better but ultra stable machines will tend to massive customizations that are very hard to keep when you finally want to upgrade. It was very common to reach End of Life of LTS distros, and then have the server upgrade being a nightmare due to the long evolution that happened in the mean time.

<comment><USER20> > With containers you can have infra locally in your DEV environment and have > clean slates.

True, but you can do that with plain system containers such as with lxd, rather than having that bundled with the huge paradigm shift that Docker comes with.

<comment><USER19> My experience with lxd is very limited. Actually I worked with liblxc which is the underlying paradigm, and i kind of disagree with you. The paradigm of lxd is much more foreign to me than docker. I am pretty familiar with my application and the distro of the container in a user perspective. I am definitely very insecure about cgroups and kernel namespaces. In the end my application is connected with my business/work orders. Kernel minutiae is not and the technical skill requirements is much higher. That will put a higher price tag on my team's human resources.

<comment><USER20> > The paradigm of lxd is much more foreign to me than docker.

The paradigm of lxd is pretty much exactly the same as the paradigm of a regular distribution installed on bare metal or inside a VM. If you can operate a regularly installed distribution, then you can operate inside a lxd container. The commands to create and destroy lxd containers are trivial ("lxc launch ubuntu:bionic" for example).

> Kernel minutiae is not and the technical skill requirements is much higher.

I'm not sure why you think you need to know kernel minutiae, cgroups or kernel namespaces. Operating lxd needs none of that.

> I am pretty familiar with my application and the distro of the container in > a user perspective.

That's all you need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can anyone offer a good guide to DevOps for people who don't directly use these tools but work with engineers who do and would like to learn more? The whole ecosystem of servers, cloud infrastructure (and all of the different offerings there), Docker, Kubernetes, CICD tools etc is a bit overwhelming to get into.

<comment><USER22> Sure. None of the things you mentioned are DevOps.

DevOps is two things:

1\. Applying the methods of modern software development (version control, automation, DSLs...) to operations (provisioning, config, deployment, monitoring, backups...).

2\. Reducing silo barriers between devs and ops groups so that everyone is working together as a team, rather than blaming each other for poor communication and the resulting messes.

Then there are all the DevOps hijacking attempts, such as equating it to Agile or Scrum or XP, or insisting that it's a way to stop paying for expensive operations experts by making devs do it, or a way to stop paying for expensive devs by making ops do it, or a way to stop paying for expensive hardware by paying Amazon/Google/$CLOUD to do it.

No matter what your software-as-a-service company actually does, it will need to execute certain things:

\- have computers to run software

\- have computers to develop software

\- have computers to run infrastructure support

You can outsource various aspects of these things to different degrees. Anywhere you need computers, you have a choice of buying computers (and figuring out where to put them and how to run them and maintain them), or leasing computers (just a financing distinction), or renting existing computers (dedicated machines at a datacenter) or renting time on someone else's infrastructure. If you rent time, you can do so via virtual machines (which pretend to be whole servers) or containers (which pretend to be application deployments) or "serverless", which is actually a small auto- scaled container.

Docker is a management scheme for containers. VMWare provides management schemes for virtual machines. Kubernetes is an extensive management scheme for virtual machines or containers.

A continuous integration tool is, essentially, a program that notes that you have committed changes to your version control system and tries to build the resulting program. A continuous deployment system takes the CI's program and tries to put it into production (or, if you're sensible, into a QA deployment first).

<comment><USER23> At last, someone who gets it. Absolutely nailed it. Great answer. I never log into my HN account anymore, but for this response I just had to say: yes. Well said.

When you boil the Cloud, DevOps, CloudOps, SecOps, *Ops, CI, CD, Containers, VMs, and all the other technologies we've devised over the past ten years, you always end up at the basic building blocks.

You eventually come to the conclusion that all we're really doing with all these new tools is adding software layers on top of those building blocks in an attempt to make them easier and faster to consume.

And how have we done overall?

Not bad, if you ask me. Some solutions are overkill for most people (K8s is an example of over kill for a start up and even an SME.) But Terraform, Ansible and GitLab (CI) are something I'm currently developing a highly opinionated video training course on because I believe they strike the right balance of improving on prior experiences without taking the absolute piss.

<comment><USER24> I am a developer, who also dealt with ops in a small business context. I agree with Ansible striking a good balance between prior experience and the future of automating server configuration.

I did a write-up on how I used it on my blog: [link redacted]

The workflow worked really well, provisioning Vagrant servers in staging and Digital Ocean droplets in production.

<comment><USER25> Thanks, I appreciated this blog post - I've struggled to get started with Ansible before, and this was just what I needed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe this isn't quite the perspective the article's taking—but damn near no one visibly wept for LXC when Docker stomped all over it in terms of "what people think containers just Are". And now the news asks why I don't weep for them? Live by the stomp, die by the stomp.

<comment><USER27> I weep for Solaris Zones and FreeBSD Jails. Granted I don't really have much experience of them, I do have some experience of containers on Linux via Docker but also in constructing a minimal container runtime in C (not OCI compatible or anything), but my point is there was a lot of work in this area before Docker and especially in the case of Zones, freely available today in illumos distributions, are completely overlooked. I mean I could be completely missing something here, but Joyent for example seem to have made some really good innovations with Manta, i.e. spinning up containers to run UNIX pipeline equivalent jobs directly in the cloud on the data, but as with illumos vs Linux, Zones vs Docker and Joyent vs AWS/GCP/Azure, it seems to me a david vs goliath kind of battle, even if the tech is better.

<comment><USER28> As do I. Solaris in general and Zones in particular are so much better. There just wasn't an ecosystem around it. Solaris was too late to make the shift to open source. It might not matter; had they done so "in time" it might have killed them anyway!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't get why k8s is the dominant scheduler. If you have a 3 ~ 6 person platform team that can set one up, or build a secure terraform of CFN codebase to establish an AWS/EKS system, they can be nice. But I've also worked at DCOS/marathon shops where it worked just as well.

The trouble with all these schedulers is they can't go from just one node (where scheduling and processes run on the same node .. and minikube is a hack; not a production system) to 100. You can't just setup a small k8s, and then add a node, and another node, and scale up. You go from a single docker system, to a big managed k8s system.

There needs to be more competition. It's the same deal with the dominance of systemd as the only system layer. Only the small startups seem to be using more lightweight stuff like Nomad, k3s, RancherOS (Rancher is mostly going the managed k8s solution anyway; even though they have their own k3s implementation).

A running k8s system can be okay, but there is a lot of room for improvement (in terms of making it simpler). Both DCOS and k8s seem to waste a lot of resources. Docker could have competed in this space, but everyone complained about all the bugs in Swarm and it never really went anywhere.

I did a writeup on container orchestration systems late last year:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship- wit...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-with-docker- and-container-orchestration-systems/)

</comment><comment><USER30> For a very long time there was a gaping security hole in Docker: anyone who could run a container could mount anything on the underlying host as root. This says to me that Docker (the company) don't really consider any use cases beyond "fooling around on a personal laptop". Meanwhile other container projects took seriously from day 1 that they would need to run in production.

Docker (the company) certainly helped to raise the profile of containerisation but they invented very little of it and did a poor job of implementing what they did do. Good riddance to them.

<comment><USER31> A couple of things :-

You can still mount filesystems as root from a container, _if_ you have Docker command rights. In Docker's security model access to run docker commands on a given host == root, that's a design choice AFAIK, not an oversight.

It's perfectly possible to mitigate that issue, by restricting who can run containers and also ensuring that all containers specify and use a non-root user account (or enable user namespaces at the Docker daemon level)

Also, many early stage technologies don't prioritise security . For example, for several early releases of Kubernetes all you needed was remote access to a single port (10250/TCP) and you could get root access to the underlying host without any authentication...

<comment><USER32> If you run in your container as a non-root user, it makes working with volumes a pain. Who knows what the container user UID will map to on the host and whether this host user, if any, will have permissions to access files in the volume.

Otherwise you can hard code a UID when creating the user in the Dockerfile but that means your containers aren't generally portable.

In the end, the path of least resistance is to run as root within the container and simply accept the security implications if using volumes.

<comment><USER33> In the Dockerfile, get UID and GID as ARGs, and make sure those variables are available in your host environment. Then when creating the user in Dockerfile, use that UID and GID. Volumes will work like a charm.

That's what I am doing for local development setups with Docker.

See [https://github.com/a2way-com/template-docker- laravel/blob/ma...](https://github.com/a2way-com/template-docker- laravel/blob/master/Dockerfile) and its README.

<comment><USER34> That means your docker file is portable, but your images are not, which is what your parent is referring to. It's a friggin mess. It's still the same as when I started using docker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> In my experience having worked at two developer tools companies where we wanted to partner and co-market products, Docker would never pick up the phone. There was definitely a "we don't need you attitude" whenever I approached them and I had the same experience repeated to me by friends at other companies trying to do the same thing.

<comment><USER36> This is the core reason why they are where they are.

They acted like you were bothering them and in fairness you probably were. Even today they wouldn't pick up.

When you start believing the hype reality becomes distorted.

<comment><USER35> The kind of activities we were approaching about were for integrations, conferences, blog posts and webinars - great methods to get leads and remain in the zeitgeist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Google doesn't actually use Kubernetes much, so the "operation hardened internally" argument isn't valid.

<comment><USER38> This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's fire and motion piece ([https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and- motion/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/)). To paraphrase a little bit:

> Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The > firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. ... The > companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea > leaves to figure out the future direction of Google. People get worried > about kubernetes and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for > kubernetes because they think they have to. Google is shooting at you, and > it's just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can't

<comment><USER39> Felt the same about Polymer. Starry eyed devs open a pre-webpack build terminal, import the if (no else!) and for keywords, build dom nodes manually and tolerate a terrible debugging experience. Youtube loads a few seconds slower in Firefox, since it gets served a polyfil of a runtime and a slower build; Chrome had a head start with a native runtime. Sites built by starry eyed developers simply break on Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think the reason they failed is that they tried to make a platform for micro services but micro services is an anti pattern, people really just wanted containerisation.

</comment><comment><USER41> Companies don't have feelings. The only ones weeping are the VCs that invested into Docker :-D

Docker played its role and introduced the majority developers to containerization. This is a major success for the industry.

</comment><comment><USER42> Whenever the topic of building online open source communities comes up I feel compelled to share the work of the great Pieter Hintjens, the guy who wrote zero MQ. He wrote a book about this topic which I thought was quite good: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30121783-social- architec...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30121783-social-architecture)

<comment><USER43> Pieter was an outstanding writer. Everything I've read from him was top notch, from his ZeroMQ guide to the last blog posts explaining how he was dealing with the unthinkable process of getting his affairs in order because he know he'd die soon. I'll definitely add this to my reading list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I also feel sorry for Docker, in a way. Was it their arrogance, or just incompetence?

The came up with this amazing tool, that lot of companies started using, but they did not have a business strategy on how to make money in a long term. They tried to keep up (Docker Swarm, Docker Hub Premium, Tutum, Moby, Docker Community vs Docker Enterprise etc). But at the end they just seem like they don't really know how to approach it.

<comment><USER33> What did Moby try to do anyway?

<comment><USER45> A rebrand that made things more confusing.

<comment><USER33> Is it dead now? It's still in GitHub, so as Docker.

<comment><USER45> AFAIK it's a different name for the same Docker.

<comment><USER33> Hmm hmm...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> No, nobody weeps for Docker. But, everybody cheers for `docker`.

</comment><comment><USER47> I jumped on the container bandwagon late and immediately fell in love with Docker. It built on my existing skill set so I was quickly able to get something up and running.

Then I started tinkering with Docker Compose and for a while things were great. But after a while I started running into issues. Compose felt artificially crippled. No secrets? No health checks? Pushing me towards Docker Swarm?

Eventually I just sucked it up and switched to Kubernetes even though I think it's overkill for my applications.

<comment><USER48> My thoughts exactly. You cannot scale Docker. You can to a point, but there's always k8s looming ahead of you, saying, "sooner or later you will have to learn __me __instead ". So most people learn it sooner than later to migrate to it while their workloads are still small. Of course, they often don't grow large enough for the benefits of k8s to kick in, but that's another story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Weep? Docker's downfall? What happened?

As far as I can tell, everybody and his grandmother is using Docker. Why should we weep about it?

<comment><USER50> 'Everybody' is using docker the software, 'nobody' is using (ie paying) Docker the company. The article makes it clear they're talking about the company.

<comment><USER33> My small company pays for private image storage there.

We actually used Google Cloud Platform's Docker Image hosting service, and that was expensive.

Yay!?

What else can we pay them for? All the stuff we need are available from them for free, except private storage. If they had a container hosting solution, we'd pay for it.

<comment><USER51> yeh we pay them like $15/month for Hub/Cloud/Private Image Storage/whatever it's called this week.

It actually seems quite cheap...we have something like 2TB of tags up there, and they don't charge for network I/O. I did feel slightly bad when a hidden crash looping pod set to always download lay undiscovered for a month...that's a LOT of I/O.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What's interesting, to me, about Docker as a company perhaps not doing well is how that'll impact Microsoft.

Microsoft have done a _load_ of work on getting containers running well on Windows servers and that work relies on Docker EE as the container runtime engine (you get a free Docker EE license to run on Windows servers AFAIK)

If Docker get bought up (by someone other than Microsoft), then that would seem to possibly place Microsoft's container efforts at risk...

<comment><USER52> Microsoft has already heavily invested in getting Kubernetes running on Windows as a fist-class citizen: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/windowsconta...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/windowscontainers/kubernetes/getting-started-kubernetes- windows)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The only thing Docker is now useful for is Docker Desktop. Unlike other desktop container software, it actually works on locked down machines in enterprise environments.

K8s can run on any CRI-compatible runtime, and IBM/RedHat don't even want you to install Docker on RHEL8.

<comment><USER31> Whilst k8s can run on any CRI compliant runtime, I've never actually seen a prod. deployment use anything other than Docker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> K8s is a "datacenter operating system", just like VMWare's own VSphere, or Mesos, Mosix, etc. These solutions also compete for mindshare with mainframe solutions like IBM's; and with "control planes" like OpenStack, Canonical's Landscape, or (I think?) Microsoft's System Center. This space is very, very profitable.

None of this applies to Docker itself. Docker is "just" a virtualization technology. Sure, Docker Swarm _exists_ , but at this point it's mostly used as a shimming UI for connecting the Docker client and daemon to the abstractions mentioned above, not a clustering solution in its own right. Swarm lost in the DCOS market. And the market for pure virtualization solutions isn't anywhere near the market for DCOSes.

<comment><USER54> Doesn't K8s typically run on virtual machines? In which case it's K8s + VMs to get to the "datacenter operating system" model?

<comment><USER55> It can run on VMs but doesn't have to. There are many bare metal k8s users out there doing some really neat things with the stack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A little OT, but is there anything remotely competitive with k8s these days? By "competitive", I mean: good feature set, thriving community, active development.

I still use Docker Swarm for small scale stuff, and am pretty happy with it - it's simple, easy to use and doesn't eat resources. But it very much feels like Docker have given up on it.

I'm particularly interested to know if there is anything _simpler_ than k8s that's competitive?

</comment><comment><USER56> For the same reason that no one weeps for a company that markets hammers even if it invented a new way to hold a hammer and raised lots of money because of it. We do not care about hammers, we just use them when we need to hit something. Our customers do not care about hammers either, they care about the result that we deliver.

</comment><comment><USER57> Docker sold its soul for money at the cost of its core product. The second you take as much money as they did so you can have your luxury box at AT&T or whatever else I'm going to find it increasingly hard to sympathize with your future mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER58> I regret the time and money I spent thinking about learning Docker. I'm sure containers solve somebody's problems, but it's not any problems that I have.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's minor and maybe I'm being petty, but my sympathy for Docker ended the moment they forced you to register an account and log in to download Docker CE.

</comment><comment><USER60> The first and only experience I had with Docker as a company was requiring me to sign up to download their mac osx client. They seem to have since changed that policy but it really made me resent them, and made them feel pretty unfriendly.

<comment><USER61> Are you sure they changed it? [https://github.com/docker/docker.github.io/issues/6910](https://github.com/docker/docker.github.io/issues/6910)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> >Kubernetes "was operation hardened internally at Google

Is this true? Isn't kubernetes "based" on work done at google but also a complete rewrite.

</comment><comment><USER63> [https://i.imgflip.com/24ac74.jpg](https://i.imgflip.com/24ac74.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER64> Why cry at all? Isn't this the point of open source?

Can't the same be said for Git? Linux? Python? (That they didn't make the creator billions, and the creator is fine with that)

</comment><comment><USER65> This article is real rich coming from a guy who works at AWS. The amount of absurd hubris and doublespeak entering this community unchecked is shocking to me.

</comment><comment><USER66> Ugh, Google in the middle, please change the following URL:

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=0ahUKEwiS...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=0ahUKEwiShovJrrvkAhU8FzQIHe7GCHEQzPwBCAM&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techrepublic.com%2Farticle%2Fwhy- doesnt-anyone-weep-for- docker%2F&psig=AOvVaw3uqDkT8mg8UfnHaiOmd7aL&ust=1567830683958295)

..to:

[https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-doesnt-anyone- weep-...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-doesnt-anyone-weep-for- docker/)

EDIT: The article itself is quite interesting, on the rise of Kubernetes, its adoption by VMWare, and the reason why Docker failed to capture market value as much as it could have.

<comment><USER67> Yes, it would be smart for HN to reject links that are google search engine tracking links.</comment></comment>


Persuasion: A Free Society Is Worth Fighting For - <AUTHOR> https://www.persuasion.community/ <comment><USER2> I've personally found that once I'm comfortable with something, I don't care for the freedom for something else. If I have a car I like, I don't care for the freedom to get another car. Freedom is really only useful to those for whom the status quo is unbearable, in one way or another.

How much we push for a free society is a measure of empathy for fellow citizens who haven't "made it", and it's healthy long-term planning in a world where the only constant is change and where the status quo stops working for all of us at one point or another.

It's easy to succumb to comfort and think freedom isn't worth it, which is probably why wealthier societies populated with generations that have only known peace begin to rot from the inside out and why civilization ebbs and flows in cycles (bad times -> strong people -> good times -> weak people).

</comment><comment><USER3> _> So please join our community if you, too, share our founding values:_

 _\- We seek to build a free society in which all individuals get to pursue a meaningful life irrespective of who they are._

 _\- We believe in the importance of the social practice of persuasion, and are determined to defend free speech and free inquiry against all its enemies._

 _\- We seek to persuade, rather than to mock or troll, those who disagree with us._

 _A free society is worth fighting for. And the best time to start is now._

Am I missing something, or is a publication called _Persuasion_ not speaking out against _coercion_ , which is its opposite? It seems to be fighting for some ill-defined "free society" with specifics in freedom of speech and inquiry.

Farther up the About page:

 _> The primary threat to liberal democracy is posed by the populist right._

Ah, got it.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's no information on this website about what it is other than a newsletter by someone named Yascha Mounk. When I skip past the pay wall it's still all about Yascha Mounk. There's no way I'm giving them money.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's pretty disappointing how cynical everyone is on here. I signed up for the free tier. They have some interesting people on their board of advisors. I don't agree with them all but that's the point.

<comment><USER6> Cynical compared to what?

"Caveat Emptor" is old as dirt. "Trust but verify" is a bit newer, but similar. Stergeons Law still holds. Caution is the watchword for intelligent people against a tide of garbage that's become the internet.

> They have some interesting people on their board of advisors.

How could anyone know that? Know them? Expecting strangers to research a huge list of names is unreasonable.

<comment><USER5> So wait until they publish something and judge that.

<comment><USER6> I guess it's the chicken/egg problem of bootstrapping anything.

<comment><USER5> I would have thought the audience here would have more empathy for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really seems interesting. But how much is it per month? I'm not going to sign up for a free trial if I don't know what the is price after the trial is over.

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://www.persuasion.community/p/about-persuasion- redefini...](https://www.persuasion.community/p/about-persuasion-redefining- liberalism) seems to have a better description of their ideology than the /about page.

Essentially, their argument is that the populist right is the biggest threat to Liberal Democracy since WW2, but also that the left are not providing a reasoned defense.

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps you can spell out what political stance this community is for. I'm guessing libertarian?

"The term free society is used frequently by American libertarian theorists to denote a society in which their ideal political, legal and economic aims are in effect."[1]

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

</comment><comment><USER10> Join the revolution comrade!*

* 14 Day Free Trial. Then only $100 a year to learn how we can subvert capitalism

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't like the dark pattern at the beginning where it collects your email. Also the first page doesn't seem compelling. The blogpost should be the first page and the email collection should be at the bottom so I know what this is all about.

<comment><USER12> That's how every substack works, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A slash screen begging for my email address then a list of people's pictures.

[https://www.persuasion.community/about](https://www.persuasion.community/about)

Might be a better splash screen.

A list of people that's supposedly compelling and not linked to anything about them?

"A free society is worth fighting for"? And it's a forum? Who are we going to fight, each other?

I'm not sold.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is really odd to see something have 19 points in only 17 minutes. I visit new often and that's anomalous behavior even for really popular posts.

<comment><USER14> The votes look legit to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am glad more and more people are acknowledging the problems of cancel culture and the growing divisiveness of our society, but I totally got lost in their terminology:

>The primary threat to liberal democracy is posed by the populist right.

I though the term "liberal" refers to doctrine that puts the individual's feelings above many other things, and is used by the cancel culture supporters to justify the silencing of their critics. Wasn't the term for emphasizing free speech and the right to express your opinion "libertarian", not "liberal" and is considered to more right-leaning than the classical liberal school, since it recognizes less central control.

So are they trying to pin the recent outrage culture on the republicans (that at least to me, appear to be strongly against it), or am tripping here?

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems interesting. Excited to see if they can succeed at their goal of persuasion.

It's getting to the point where there's nowhere to hide for people too cowardly to speak their minds; there is no hobby, no workplace, no community in North America where you can escape the cultural revolution and be left alone. Every retreat is an assault, each capitulation is friendly fire.

It is time to fight with your words, and fight to win, so you don't have to do the other thing.</comment>


Zuckerberg Dismisses Fact-Checking - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/zuckerberg-dismisses-fact-checking-after-bragging-about-fact-checking/ <comment><USER2> > "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of > everything that people say online,"

No platform really _wants_ to be the arbiter of truth. The problem is, if you punt on that entirely you're 4chan or some other cesspool.

Anyway, Zuck is being pretty disingenuous here, though, because Facebook _does_ have community standards... they just don't apply to politicians and other influential people. Facebook wants to give them free reign but control regular people.

Pretty dystopian, IMO, though hopefully more people will recognize this and drop Facebook.

<comment><USER3> The sad truth is: anything that goes against the MSM's agenda is generally better covered on 4chan/alternate cesspool.

<comment><USER4> Example link?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sorry to hear about the death of Mr Zuckerberg yesterday.

Sources:

[https://www.theshovel.com.au/2020/05/28/mark-zuckerberg- dead...](https://www.theshovel.com.au/2020/05/28/mark-zuckerberg-dead- at-36-says-social-media-fact-check/)

[https://technology.inquirer.net/55533/facebook- accidentally-...](https://technology.inquirer.net/55533/facebook-accidentally- declares-its-founder-mark-zuckerberg-dead)

[https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-headlines-mark- zuckerbe...](https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-headlines-mark-zuckerberg- satire-test-facebook-policies-2020-5?r=US&IR=T)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the idea of fact-checking in theory, but in practice the epistemology gets pretty messy.

Donald Trump says "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S manufacturing non-competitive." I think global warming is a fact but it's become so politicized that certain people don't consider it a fact.

I think everything lies on a relative scale of fact to "alternative fact", and it's probably less controversial for private companies to be conservative in their censorship. How do you properly refute someones conspiracy theory anyways?

<comment><USER7> >> "How do you properly refute someones conspiracy theory anyways"

As usual, with actual facts, based on hard reality and hundreds of years of scientific method.

Or recognize and point out, that it is so detached from such reality that, as physicists often note about the nutters writing in: "it isn't even wrong".

Of course, that doesn't often work for those deeply embedded in conspiracy theory, or actively spreading dezinformatsiya. You can't convince them, but you can point out for others who are not all the way into nutter-land, that maybe they shouldn't keep going down that path.

Currently the recommendation engines actively push people to extreme views. Zuckerberg had research brought to him showing that Facebook exposed users to more and more extreme views, and that 30% of people joining extreme groups did it by FB's reccmendation. He said he never wanted to hear about it again [1]

It is not only fact checking. If you say fact checking is problematic, they could at least not actively encourage falsehoods and extremes.

These platforms' tolerance and indeed active spreading of alternative facts, desinformatsiya, outright lies, and extreme conspiracy theories is actively undermining democracy worldwide. They may be profitable for a time, but the externalized damage is insane.

Let the downvote brigades get to work.

[1][https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-reportedly-brushed- as...](https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-reportedly-brushed- aside-202137623.html)

<comment><USER8> You should really go watch the flat earth documentary "Behind The Curve". The reaction of flat earthers to their experiment failing to support the flat earth theory resulted in them deciding they needed to do a different experiment.

The reality is that conspiracy theories are far more about socialization and communities than they are about facts.

<comment><USER9> exactly. convincing someone that conspiracy theories are probably not true is way harder than teaching them about scientific method

<comment><USER10> Convincing someone to not start believing a conspiracy theory is easier, which is the point of these efforts. I point out conspiracy theories when I see them, not for the benefit of the conspiracy theorist who spouted them but for the benefit of the person who reads those conspiracy theories and the debunking later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This statement could very well be the result of a business decision rather than one based on principles or ethics.

<comment><USER12> As if anything else was possible from such a source.</comment></comment>


Japan plans new coal powerplants - <AUTHOR> https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/japan-is-building-coal-fired-power-plants-despite-its-paris-accord-commitment/ <comment><USER2> This is so unfortunate. I really hope political opinion slowly changes and people get a clearer idea about the risks vs benefits of latest nuclear tech.

Or will other countries wait till China shows them the way ? I have heard that German end users already pay one of the highest electricity rates in EU.

My understanding is that we need 1 good baseload alternative to wind & solar (even with storage) for events where extended blackouts due to weather events are expected.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good news for Australia. I once flew from Sydney to Tokyo and the person sitting next to me turned out to be the negotiator for coal prices and volumes from Australia to Japan. He was a government employee and it made for a very interesting flight.

If they build these new powerplants in the right location, they can externalize polution. Would be nice if costs of such polution had to be paid by the same country/region, to disincentivize new coal use.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Japan is second to China in financing coal plants in developing nations.

It's hard enough for me to consider China a developing nation these days, but Japan?

<comment><USER5> I assume that means providing financing _to_ developing nations for the construction of coal plants.

<comment><USER4> Yes. You're completely right - I'm unsure how I missed that wholly-obvious interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Im surprised they didn't go for a renewables + storage approach. Partly as they'll have to import coal (avoiding imports was why they went nuclear to start with I think) and partly because they have pretty abundant opportunities for offshore wind and wave/tidal power...

</comment><comment><USER7> The united states shut down 50 coal power plants since Trump took office.

[https://phys.org/news/2019-05-coal-power- trump.html](https://phys.org/news/2019-05-coal-power-trump.html)

What isn't the rest of the world doing its part to address climate change?</comment>


A springboard launcher for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/sespringboard

<comment><USER2> I can't help but feel that emulating the iOS springboard in an app is simply confusing for the end user. Even I sometimes get confused by them, a common case being hitting the home button when reorganising icons and being unexpectedly sent to the home screen. There's a host of other ways to give the user access to a series of views that work way better than this particular solution.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It is true that it might be confusing for the end user but it is a nice alternative to classic Tabs. Especially useful if you need to have more than 4-5 view controllers in your stack. On the other hand, the project can also lead to something like the latest LinkedIn app has. Just check it on the App Store. <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/linkedin/id288429040?mt=8>

</comment><comment><USER3> While I don't have much use for SESpringBoard, this is the first I've heard of Cocoa Controls. Very cool site.

<comment><USER4> There have been a few submissions from cocoa controls lately. It is definitely an awesome site and I recommend checking out more of the libraries on it.

As for SESpringBoard it doesn't seem nearly as useful as some of the other libraries on cocoa controls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please don't use that. It's confusing and spits in the face of iOS UI conventions.</comment>


Finland set to become first country to ban coal use for energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2113827-finland-set-to-become-first-country-to-ban-coal-use-for-energy/ <comment><USER2> Meanwhile, the new US president plans to create jobs with "clean coal"[0] (in a contest of oxymorons that one would win) and also "relax" environmental restrictions choosing Myron Ebell, a climate change denier as the head of EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) [1]

But it's the democratically elected president, so we must only watch as he destroys the world for at least 4 years for the sake of new jobs; we all know there is nothing more important for our future than creating jobs.

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/energy- environme...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/energy- environment/wp/2016/11/22/trump-wants-to-lift-restrictions-on-clean-coal- whatever-that-is/)

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/2016/11/09/trump-victory-reverses-u-s-energy-and-environmental- priorities/)

<comment><USER3> The current US President pushed clean coal too: [https://www.grist.org/climate-energy/how-obama-went-from- coa...](https://www.grist.org/climate-energy/how-obama-went-from-coals-top- cheerleader-to-its-no-1-enemy) (until he didn't). During the third debate against Romney they fought over who could be more pro coal.

The clean coal issue is bigger than one person. Coal isn't just an energy source, it's a way of life for a significant chunk of the country. Not just jobs, but something the whole economic infrastructure is built around. Appalachia without coal is Silicon Valley without computers.

<comment><USER4> That's true, but sort of misses the point. Most regions have a dominant industry, and these industries change over time. Silicon Valley, to take your example, used to produce actual silicon devices. Los Angeles used to be a major petroleum exporter. Those jobs left, but no one cared.

People argue over "appalachia" and make false promises about coal (coal is dying whether anyone wants it or not -- other sources are simply cheaper now) because it workers a swing demographic in presidential elections.

<comment><USER3> People shouldn't make false promises about industries that are not (and should not) come back. My point is that there is a huge incentive to do so, and Trump doing it isn't some dramatic change from what's come before.

<comment><USER2> Let me guess, you also think that putting a global warming denier as the head of EPA is also not a "dramatic change"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In 2015, Finnish electricity production was as follows [1]:

      - 33.7% nuclear
      - 16.6% fossil fuels
      - 44.9% renewables
      - 4.4% peat

Wikipedia says that all the fossil fuels are imported (except peat) but does not cite a source. With a fifth nuclear reactor under construction (Olkiluoto 3), the import of fossil fuels would probably diminish at some point anyway.

The renewable electricity production mostly comprises hydropower (25.1%) and wood-based energy (about 15%). Solar power is not an option--during winter, every Friday is black Friday here. Wind power would hardly be profitable without the feed-in tariff [2].

Given the ecological issues with hydropower, the limited nature of wood-based power and how inapplicable solar and wind power are here, I personally consider nuclear power to be the most environmentally friendly option if we're to produce more electricity.

[1] [http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__ene__s...](http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__ene__salatuo/030_salatuo_tau_103.px/)

[2] [https://www.energiavirasto.fi/web/energy-authority/feed- in-t...](https://www.energiavirasto.fi/web/energy-authority/feed-in-tariff)

<comment><USER6> > Solar power is not an option--during winter, every Friday is black Friday > here

Isn't total "total daylight time per year" constant across the earth?

<comment><USER7> > Isn't total "total daylight time per year" constant across the earth?

More or less (depending on how you measure).

Issues:

1) Storage. If you live at lat 65 you need extreme amounts of heat and lighting in winter, and you need almost no heat and lighting in summer. Massive seasonal energy storage solutions such as aquifers do exist but they are expensive. This is why hydro is so good - it's both renewable AND is perfect for seasonal storage.

2) Incidence. Total daylight that has a good incidence for catching isn't constant across the earth. A lot of the "extra" sunlight that northern finland gets in the summer is in the wee hours of the night. It's not exactly scorching from zenith then. When the sun sits ON the horizon for a few hours, even a small hill on the horizon will ruin your solar power.

<comment><USER8> I would also hazard a guess that the closer to the horizon the Sun is located, the more atmosphere it needs to cross to reach you (because of the lower angle) which results in higher absorption rate before it reaches you (simply said, it's a bit darker the closer you get to the poles). I'm mostly guessing though, so please correct me.

ps: I remember seeing the sun in northern Norway at midnight in the summer long time ago when I was visiting. Was just a little bit brighter than the moon usually is.

pps: This is the same effect as what the sun looks like just before sunset around the rest of the world.

<comment><USER7> > Was just a little bit brighter than the moon usually is.

I think that the difference between the minimum brightness of the sun (at the horizon) and the full moon is still a factor over 100.000 :)

Eyes are remarkably nonlinear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article paints it as if we're replacing it all with wind power. Actually we have quite big nuclear power plant projects underway. Still, sunsetting coal power is a great target and can't come fast enough.

<comment> david-given Also, it's important to remember the electricity is a small proportion of total energy use, which is dominated by heating and transport; heating's usually gas or heavy fuel oil, transport is usually petrol or diesel. And by 'dominated', I mean about 2/3 of all energy use goes towards it.

Yes, migrating to electric heating and transport is possible. Over-unity fuel pumps are teh awesome, and electric transport is almost workable (but not quite yet for anything more than short distances); but we're still going to be talking about a massive _increase_ in electricity consumption, and most countries' electrical grids can't handle that.

So, I agree with you --- coal is foul stuff, it needs to die, this is an all senses a good thing; but it's still just a small step on the path to getting off fossil fuels.

<comment><USER10> >electric transport is almost workable (but not quite yet for anything more than short distances)

You mean in use in every single country for trains since the 60s ?

<comment><USER11> As a Swede I was shocked when I moved to Scotland and found out that they have a lot of diesel trains.

<comment><USER12> Sweden has a whole bunch of not-yet-electrified lines - just not where most people are: [http://www.jarnvag.net/component/customproperties/tag?cp[omr...](http://www.jarnvag.net/component/customproperties/tag?cp\[omrade\]\[0\]=gotaland&cp\[omrade\]\[1\]=svealand&cp\[omrade\]\[2\]=norrland&cp\[omrade\]\[3\]=&cp\[sparvidd\]\[0\]=1435_mm&cp\[sparvidd\]\[1\]=891_mm&cp\[sparvidd\]\[2\]=600_mm&cp\[sparvidd\]\[3\]=&cp\[trafik\]\[0\]=persontrafik&cp\[trafik\]\[1\]=godstrafik&cp\[trafik\]\[2\]=&cp\[elektrifierad\]\[0\]=oelektrifierad&cp\[elektrifierad\]\[1\]=&cp\[bind_to_category\]=content:26,content:31,content:36)

<comment><USER11> Yeah I probably have some confirmation bias having travelled mainly inside the Stockholm/Sörmland region and from Stockholm to Gothenburg. I was very surprised to see that Edinburgh to Glasgow is not electrified for example.

<comment><USER13> Work to electrify Edinburgh to Glasgow is already in progress. Electric trains will be running by 2017.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does Finland have a lot of coal anyway? It's easy to ban something you don't really have. Also easy for a rich country to ban coal use, but you can't expect poorer countries to do the same, especially if by coal is how rich countries built their industries. And now they are being told to get rid of coal and replace them with wind or solar power, usually conveniently offered by foreign companies.

<comment> Tuna-Fish We have none whatsoever. Geologically, Finland rests on the Baltic shield which consists of very old rock, and it's top has been scoured clean of any newer rock by successive ice ages. If you dig down 50cm from the surface soil on which I'm standing right now, you get to granite baserock that is almost two billion years old.

Rock this old does not have any fossil fuel deposits, since the first such deposits were formed some ~360M years ago.

The closest thing Finland has to fossil fuels are peat bogs. And those are currently rated "slowly renewable" by both the Finnish state and the EU. This is half true -- they do replenish, but only at a rate of millimeters per year. Typically, it would take some 4000 years for a harvested peat bog to return to it's original thickness.

<comment> bjelkeman-again IMO peat really should be classified as a fossile fuel.

<comment><USER15> That is a good suggestion, it sort of implies it's almost a fossil even though it was likely a typo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A coal ban by 2030 would not make Finland the first country to do so. France is closing all coal-fired plants by 2023, and the UK by 2025.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/09/britains...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/09/britains- last-coal-power-plants-to-close-by-2025)

<comment><USER16> Iceland already uses no coal for electricity...

From googling around it sounds like there are a number of others too, though most of those that don't burn coal seem to burn a lot of oil instead. Iceland just uses hydro power and geothermal energy, though.

<comment><USER13> Electricity grids in countries like Norway and New Zealand run almost entirely on renewables. In fact, in Norway it's something like 99%. But of course, what those countries have in common is relatively small populations with lots of natural resources to draw on.

France is over 75% nuclear with another 20% being met by renewables.

The UK reached 46% from nuclear & renewables in 2015, with most of the rest being met from gas turbines.

<comment><USER17> I think all the electricity production in Sweden is either Hydro or Nuclear (+ token amounts of wind), but our hydro also acts as a buffer to Denmark's wind power, so sometimes we get Danish coal power imports instead to make up for it...

<comment> bjelkeman-again Sweden in 2014 produced about 64 TWh (42%) from large hydro and 62 TWh (41%) from nuclear. The rest came from wind 12 TWh (7.9%) and from other 13 TWh (8.5%), other being mostly biofuel and waste.

[https://bjelkeman.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/sustainable- energ...](https://bjelkeman.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/sustainable-energy-the- growth-of-wind-power-in-sweden-par/)

The electricity use is only 123 TWh of a total energy use of 379 TWh (2011). Of which 127 TWh is still coal and oil products. So still a lot of work to be done, primarily in transport.

[https://bjelkeman.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/sustainable- energ...](https://bjelkeman.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/sustainable-energy-a- swedish-energy-balance-sheet-part-2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Meanwhile, that same new energy strategy announced by the government also effectively halts wind power construction until an "inpartial", "objective", "thorough", etc. study investigating why wind power causes people to become sick is done. Also, bats. Yes. One of the parties in the current government is a "conservative populist" party where party representatives have been claiming that wind power causes bats to explode. Yes, really.

 _EDIT_ : Slightly less inflammatory..

<comment><USER19> Wind power isn't doing very well here in Finland though. It is 100% propped up by subsidies. The government will pay them 85,30 €/MWh for the electricity generated by wind power even though the market price is somewhere around 30 €/MWh so they basically get more from subsidies then from the electricity they actually sell. The current projection is that with the current subsidies wind power will have cost the tax payer around 3 billion euros by 2030.

Though the True Finns have a very wrong approach to this (trying to ban building wind power because it causes "harm" to people and other unscientific bullshit) instead of just dismantling the harmful subsidies (or at least lowering them to something sensible). Or the most sensible approach of taxing the things we don't want (polluting energy. coal etc.) and let the free markets sort the rest out.

<comment><USER20> The (spot)-market price on Nordpool is mostly related to variable costs, and doesn't really cover construction and other fixed costs.

That energy generators need a higer price than spot-price doesn't really warrant calling it "subsidies".

In Denmark land-wind is the cheapest (LCOE) energy.

<comment><USER19> Ok but why are we building nuclear power with 100% private money and subsidise wind? It literally makes no sense. The system should work the other way. Tax what we don't want and let the free markets work the rest out. Now we are grossly propping up a form of electricity that doesn't work very well here in Finland.

If we can do multi billion euro nuclear power projects with private money in other energy production ways why can't the wind?

As a side note the guaranteed price ends after 12 years. Do you know what happened when the first wind company that got to that 12 years did? It went bankrupt the same day. There is literally no way they can compete with the other wind power companies that get the subsidy. Basically we are going to get a nice "start wind power company" -> "take subsidies for 12 years" -> "go bankrupt" -> "start a new one" loop.

<comment><USER20> Finland doesn't guarantee prices for nuclear for some period? That sounds unlikely. The Hinkley Point plant in the UK was recently guaranteed a very high "strike price" to get it built

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

And those "subsidies" are free market! In Denmark power generators submit competing bids on the lowest required guaranteed price when building new wind power.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horns_Rev#Horns_Rev_3_offshore...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horns_Rev#Horns_Rev_3_offshore_wind_farm)

<comment><USER19> No we don't. The heavy industrial corporations and some of the larger energy corps got together and formed a company called TVO. TVO got a few billion euros of loan and started to build nuclear plants (the current one under construction is Olkiluoto Unit 3). Only subsidy I know of is for the insurance in case of a nuclear accident. Though TVO already owns Olkiluoto 1 and 2. As I understand the third reactor on the same site doesn't have any effect on the insurance.

The nuclear plants in Finland are built for a real need (cheaper electricity) without any viable alternatives if we want to limit reliance to other countries (ask the east block countries how fun it is to rely on Russian gas for your electricity/heating during the winter). In some countries you would probably use coal or gas but as Finland doesn't have any of those (literally 0 natural gas, oil or coal reserves) we have had to rely on nuclear (for which we have fuels to burn in the bedrock). We have already built dams pretty much everywhere we can so hydro cannot be expanded in any meaningful way. Solar and wind just don't work as baseline power for heavy industry in Finland (at least not yet. The battery technology just isn't there). Solar is useless during the winter and wind has too much variance.

Also due to the delays in construction of the new reactor (thanks Areva and Siemens) we have been very close to actually running out of power (with the connections to Sweden and Russia maxed out) and have had to resort to reserve gas power plants with MWh prices in the hundreds of euros as most plans for the grid have included the new reactor being done in time.

In Finland the subsidies for wind power is just flat selling price into the grid. You can take subsidy on building too but then you cannot get the one for selling electricity (which is much better with the current prices)

<comment><USER20> Well, I looked up "Mankala model", so for TVO and Olkiluoto the investors and the consumers are largely the same - which means that the investors/consumers will just directly over-pay for the electricity, by having a larger total cost (mostly the capital costs) than what they could have paid by buying the electricity on Nordpool. Or conversely, they will never recoup their investment if they just sell the energy on Nordpool.

<comment><USER19> Them overpaying doesn't always happen (They don't use the Mankala model for the fun of it. It adds risk due to the capital investment but has been worth it over the long term up to date at least). As I understand both Olkiluoto 1 and 2 have been cheaper then buying from Nordpool to the owners (one of the reasons they wanted the third one). They of course also sell any energy they don't use into Nordpool. These are mostly private companies. They wouldn't do it if there is no profit in it. Why take risks of billions of euros if they stand to gain nothing?

In Finland 40% of energy produced is done under the Mankala model. Out of wind energy the percentage is 57% (so over the average).

Also one of the reason why the price in Finnish Nordpool has been so high lately is the delays in Olkiluoto 3. The actual estimated cost of production (so cost of running) is 3€/MWh. With the price in Nordpool around 30 to 50 €/MWh they stand to make 25 to 45 €/MWh of profit. If they can offload a good chunk of the capital costs of building the reactors to the people buying from Nordpool and get their own power needs at a very big discount (basically the 3€/MWh + (whatever their share of the capital costs is - money made out of selling into the grid) it is profitable to the owners even if the plant itself didn't make money directly.

<comment><USER20> Well, the Mankala model is not a problem.

And most likely Olkiluoto 3 had a reasonable business case before the cost overruns. So the question is more or less: is the real price of nuclear the price that was hoped for Olkiluoto 3 or the actual price that will be paid? (maybe mostly by Areva and not TVO). The "strike price" of Hinkley makes me think that it is probably the latter.

And while the trends look favorable for solar and wind, they seem less favorable for Nuclear - cf.

Historical summary of EIA's LCOE projections (2010–2016) - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The question is what happens to _all_ the central power plants once the cost of transmission is more expensive than the cost of generation of solar power.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM&feature=youtu.be&t=10m48s)

<comment><USER19> Cost of transmission already more then the cost of power in many places in Finland. Though I think that is mostly due to the subsidies in generation side being much larger then transmission.

For example for me transmission is 0.022€/kWh while power itself costs 0.03€/kWh. This is with a 2 year contact. With 1 year contract it would be closer 0.04€/kWh

This is with 1x25A (quite common for apartments/flats) connection. The transmission fees go up in some networks if you have more (like the very common 3x25A for houses)

I happen to live in one of the cities where the city still owns the company that owns the networks so I have one of the cheapest transmission fees in the country. For example my parents who live ~50km away from me have to pay 0.0398€/kWh for transmission. They used to have it cheaper then I did but the network was bought by a foreign owned company (Caruna) which is now pumping out the legal maximum amount of profit from transmissions (it is regulated) by gaming the system by taking stupid loans (paying multiple times market rate in interest) from their parent company to make the company never make profit (price hikes are partly connected to profits)

Privatisation of the electric grid (the transmission part) is just plain stupid. It is a natural monopoly as nobody is going to build a second grid where an existing one already is available and I really don't believe capitalism is any good in that situation. The solution for power generation here in Finland is good as you can buy your electricity from anyone but you still have to use the local grid and thus pay to the local (monopoly) power grid company for transmission. This is one of the things where I think we have failed here in Finland big time. Should have just kept the network public and outsourced the maintenance and building to private companies trough competitive tendering.

edit: And solar is just plain stupid in Finland. Basically for half the year it is between ok and great. For the other half it is somewhere between bad and 0 electricity generation. And the time when you get 0 energy from your solar panels is the time when it is the coldest and need the most energy. So building solar here just leads to having to build double energy production and hikes the price of electricity up for no good reason.

<comment><USER22> Some thoughts about recent developments which may change your mind about solar panels being useless in Finland ...

Hydrogen production is now possible with renewable energy. There are some trains going into service in a few days in Germany that use Hydrogen instead of diesel. I also saw many hydrogen Toyota cars whilst in Japan. The technology is here, and works.

The break through in Hydrogen production happened in 2014. Just after which the hydrogen train started being designed. Only Toyota have been able to make the technology work in a cost effective way for smaller vehicles as far as I know. However, it's a simpler thing to do with larger vehicles like buses and trains.

Also, directly using the energy for things like Aluminium smelting does not require batteries. This is already happening in Germany. Even if it only works for half the year, the energy savings are massive. Without needing batteries, solar power is hell cheap.

When you can convert all the wasted extra power from renewables into Hydrogen, you can use that energy to power much of the transport and heating. This may make it cost effective to install the solar for summer months, but still have all the extra power generation ability for when solar is not producing. This is because now using excess power is now profitable, and it doesn't have to be thrown away.

I'll also note that the energy revolution 2 in Germany has produced massive savings in energy use. Apparently every euro of energy saved is worth three- five euros of cheaper energy generation. These energy analytics systems are now starting to be sold world wide.

I think there's still 20 years whilst existing infrastructure is being replaced, but we are already at the point alternatives are significantly cheaper. Even if we don't assume technology gets better every day.

Even in countries where the government is owned by the coal industry (Australia) coal mines are being closed down to be replaced by cheaper alternatives. Much of the world is without electricity, and they can get electricity for a much smaller investment with renewables, as renewables scale. Coal, nuclear and other older technologies don't scale down to the low end. At the high end they now can't compete on cost (even ignoring health and other pollution costs they don't get charged for in many places).

<comment><USER22> Editing the comment doesn't work for some reason.

s/coal mines/coal plants/g

Also I meant to make a point about how renewables have access to a much larger market than fossil fuels. Because big funds are divesting, because countries are banning them. There is a bigger market on the demand side for renewables because of the scaling. The market is also a lot bigger on the supply side because less capital is needed to supply renewable power.

Also the big advanced tech countries (Germany, China, Japan) are switching off producing fossil fuel using technology. Which will result in the prices for this type of technology increasing, and more advancements going into renewables.

<comment><USER19> Problem with the "would be cheap for half the year" is that you would still have the capital costs of building the grid for 2x (actually you would need 4x the grid as the energy usage during winter is roughly 2x of the amount in summer in Finland) the use as you want to run your factory during the winter too. Even if solar is cheap I doubt it is that cheap to offset a capital cost like that.

Most of central Europe is a quite useless comparison for a place like Finland for energy production. The weather is just very different. ~2 hours of sunlight and -30 weather isn't that rare even in Helsinki (which is quite a bit father south then a good chunk of the country). Pretty much whole of Finland is outside of the "makes sense to build solar here" zone. I don't see that many people building big solar plants in Alaska so why would you in Finland (roughly the same latitude)

Australia has mostly been digging coal for export. It is quite natural that they would close mines if the demand internationally (mainly in Asia) goes down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Canada also announced this same goal: [https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/11/21/federal- governme...](https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/11/21/federal-government- to-phase-out-coal-by-2030.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> I only hear good things about the nordic countries and that news just tops it.

Lately I've been researching Tesla's solar roofs but it seems to me that it will be a difficult thing to pull off in UK due to building control and all kinds of other arcane systems that prevent use of modern building practices.

<comment><USER25> This is akin to saying

"The USA bans all burning of moon rocks for power"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's ok, as they can afford building new nuclear reactors ([1]).

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

</comment><comment><USER27> Which nation will be the first to mandate citizens walking around with one hand tied behind their backs? Literally, rather than just as a metaphor.</comment>


PNG and Hidden Pixels - <AUTHOR> https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/894-PNG-and-Hidden-Pixels.html <comment><USER3> I wrote something similar but for the ZIP format, called Pure, to detect hidden buffer bleeds outside and between and within structures, amongst other anomalies. It's also amazing what you can do with a ZIP file.

Pure: [https://github.com/ronomon/pure](https://github.com/ronomon/pure)

The goal of Pure is to reduce the attack surface available for zero-days by doing the simple yet critical buffer bounds checks that most end-user application software will not, and to do this for more and more popular file formats.

The vision is that one day you can deploy Pure at your email server and get much stronger guarantees on the safety of email attachments that you open... as well as on the attachments you send out... for example that your billing software is not leaking the contents of sensitive server memory into XLSX reports that you are mass mailing to clients (Pure actually found two cases of prominent investment firms that were doing just this).

It's like type checking or linting but for everyday file formats.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very nitpicky, but does adding extra data at the bottom of the image count as steganography? I've always thought of steganography as something that is very hard to detect, like changing the LSB of each pixel to a part of your message.

<comment><USER5> _does adding extra data at the bottom of the image count as steganography_

"steganography" is simply the act of hiding messages, so I don't see why this wouldn't count.

What term for hiding information outside of the bounds of the image would you propose instead?

<comment><USER6> I'd say communicating outside normal means would be "using a covert channel", and reserve "steganography" for such communication as has been whitened to resemble noise[1].

Obviously tastes may differ, so someone else might call the former "steganography" and distinguish the latter as "deniable steganography", or at least "near-noise steganography".

(with a little information theory, one can even communicate reliably via sub- noise steganography)

cryptography vs. steganography?

[1] compare Bacon (1605): [https://archive.org/details/advancementofl00baco/page/256/mo...](https://archive.org/details/advancementofl00baco/page/256/mode/2up?q=biliteral)

"... a method of expressing and signifying one's mind to any distance by objects that are either visible or audible — provided only the objects are but capable of two differences ..."

<comment><USER5> _I 'd say communicating outside normal means would be "using a covert channel", and reserve "steganography" for such communication which has been whitened to resemble noise[1]._

Ah. I think I see where the confusion is coming from. You're saying this isn't steganography because the information isn't _hidden_ in the image data. It's there in the 'plaintext'. I thought this is steganography because the image is hidden in the _file_ data by exploiting the fact that PNG renderers don't display it.

I'm going to change my mind and say that your definition is actually better than mine. The information itself _isn 't_ hidden. You don't need a trick, or a key, or any special knowledge to view it. The fact that common PNG libraries don't display it isn't really enough to say that it's enciphered at all - <USER2> can't really say a message is definitely hidden if you assume something about the PNG library the attacker is using to view it. I don't know what the right term is, but it probably isn't steganography.

<comment><USER6> security per obscurity? (skotadigraphy?)

<comment><USER7> More "security by hoping they don't look". And in fact, the suggested uses of overlong PNG chunks in the linked article aren't particularly secure ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really like the explanation of the png file format. I'm not sure I'll ever use this knowledge, but I was happy to learn it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I actually developed a game which used this trick for an Easter egg. I added in a texture for the Companion Cube from Portal, and set the alpha to 1. In game, however, I loaded the textures with only a single bit of alpha, which meant that the alpha of 1 was the same as 255. Not entirely invisible, but was fun to do!

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember there was a similar trick that hides data in GZip streams in its FCOMMENT block.

Could something similar be done with DEFLATE? Allocate some unused Huffman table? Put stuff in reserved bits?

<comment><USER11> Specifically with PNG it has a concept of "private" chunks which you can use to store arbitrary data. Conforming decoders will ignore these chunks, and may or may not drop them if the file is modified. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#%22C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#%22Chunks%22_within_the_file)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The pico8 console stores the entire game in a png file in its data area.

<comment><USER13> Doesn't it store it in the low bits of visible picture?

That's what I do for my own virtual console project. While the methods listed in this article are pretty neat, once you go browser based you are limited to what the browser gives you access to. The only alternative is doing a request for the file and doing the entire file format decoding in JavaScript. If you go that far then you might as well use a zTXt or custom chunk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200901074527/https://www.hacke...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200901074527/https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/894-PNG- and-Hidden-Pixels.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> You can do something similar with video too --- the width and height are padded to macroblock boundaries (usually 16 pixels) so there's plenty of space for extra data at the right and bottom.

In the analog realm, something similar was used to add closed captioning to the video signal: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIA-608](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIA-608)

</comment><comment><USER16> Column padding can be done with .ico files, too. For 16 and 256 color images each line of data must be a multiple of 4 bytes. And since 16 and 256 color images are required to be included in ico images, the low color resolution does not even raise suspicion.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Back in the day" there was an image board where people uploaded JPGs that actually were zip archives when you renamed the extension. People would post music albums like that where the image was the cover art.

<comment><USER16> This is one of my favorite presentations ever:

[https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_5930_-_en_- _saal_6_-_201412291...](https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_5930_-_en_- _saal_6_-_201412291400_-_funky_file_formats_-_ange_albertini#t=1966)

Ange Albertini shows how a file can be a multiple files in different formats at the same time. Amazing stuff.

<comment><USER18> I ran into a very annoying case of this in the wild: a USB hard drive "pre- formatted for Windows and Mac".

Specifically, the entire disk was pre-formatted as both NTFS and HFS+.

The trick: as shipped, LBA 0 contained an MBR pointing to an NTFS-formatted partition _spanning the free space of an empty HFS+ volume_ whose (slightly larger) partition was defined by an Apple Partition Map in LBA 1.

So Windows would read the MBR and find the NTFS volume, Mac OS would read the APM and find the HFS+ volume, and all was right with the world.

Right, that is, until you plugged the disk into a Mac after writing to it in Windows, because the simple act of auto-mounting the "empty" HFS+ volume caused OS X to fill enough of the volume's "free" space to corrupt the colocated NTFS filesystem beyond repair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what does hiding information in images have to do with CTF-style challenges? Does that term not refer to "break into server X and retrieve file Y" sorts of tasks?

<comment><USER20> CTF games come in two styles (attack and defense i.e. PvP, and jeopardy i.e. PvE), and within the jeopardy class there are many categories, one or which can be steganography, file formats, and related challenges.

(Source: I run a CTF, have written over 100 challenges, and the JPEG padding trick was one of them years ago)

<comment><USER19> Ah, I had thought they were exclusively about security/penetration/etc. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>