Sugar industry withheld possible evidence of cancer link 50 years ago - <AUTHOR> https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/sugar-industry-withheld-possible-evidence-of-cancer-link-50-years-ago-researchers-say <comment><USER2> The whole phenomenon of sugar and fructose being added to virtually everything is beyond comprehension. There are so many people, fat and slim, saying they don't want to be fat, yet eating foods with added sugar every day. Why not just replace all the added sugar with erythritol, for example? The whole situation with sugar reminds me of the situation with opium in early 19th century China

<comment><USER3> The reason is that in the 1970s and 80s people started freaking out about fat. Everyone from the FDA to USDA to family doctor was telling people fat was bad.

So food producers started making fat-free versions of everything. Only problem is it tasted like shit. So what did they do? They added sugar. So now you have sugar added to everything from salad dressing to pasta sauce to bread and muffins. The latter probably had some all along but the fat free varieties had a lot more.

Edit: I'll add that saturated fat was considered especially evil, which begat trans-fats substituted everywhere. Turned out they were even worse.

Bottom line, eat minimally processed meats and plants and you can stop worrying about it.

<comment><USER4> There was no fat to remove from pasta sauce. Maybe they also figured out that sugar was addictive and added it everywhere to sell even more food with sugar?

<comment><USER5> You need to add sugar to contrast tomato acidity, it has nothing to do with sugar addiction. And it has been like this since forever, not only from the '70s. Source: even my grandmother added a pinch of sugar when cooking pasta sauce.

<comment><USER6> A very little bit of sugar that's in a pinch isn't any kind of a problem. Even a tbsp isn't that much. The problem is the massive amount they put in drinks of all types...and foods of all types. They even put it in bread for heck's sakes.

In terms of taking the edge off of tomato sauce, shredded carrots works pretty well. I don't use sugar in any of my cooking, and no one has noticed.

<comment><USER7> Sugar in bread is _so_ nasty to me. I can't stand to eat it, yet it's in almost every loaf on the shelf at a supermarket with 50 types.

<comment><USER8> Even without sugar, bread contains a lot of carbohydrates that break down right into sugar just by coming into contact with the spit in your mouth.

If you think that's not true, simply take a sugar-low bread (check the food label, don't just go for organic/whole-grain, those usually have more sugar) and taste it for a while in your mouth. You'll notice it starts to become sweeter in your mouth.

<comment><USER9> And that's actually not an issue. As you probably know, glucose is the fuel our bodies and brains run on, and while your body _can_ break down proteins to glucose in a pinch, it's not actually healthy (despite what proponents of ketosis diets will tell you). It's especially hard on the kidneys.

As long as you stick to proper bread without the crazy added sugar, and preferably whole grain (actual whole grain, not just marketing "whole grain"), it's not an issue. Unless you try to subsist on literally _only_ bread, of course.

<comment><USER8> I'm not talking about various proteins and rather about starch, which is a natural part of a good bread. The enzymes in your mouth and digestive system will break down starch to normal Glucose without a problem.

<comment><USER9> My point is that we need carbs, it is unhealthy to subsist on protein alone.

<comment><USER8> Obviously, yes. A balanced diet is always a better choice than any extreme diet. Like basically anything else too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Makes you wonder what we'll find out is being withheld right now, 50 years from now.

<comment><USER11> I sometimes wonder which materials I directly interact with on a regular basis that people in a few decades wouldn't touch for anything short of large amounts of money. History tells us there are probably a few. Guessing at least a couple are plastics or plastic additives/coatings of some kind. Maybe whatever they replaced BPA with. Possibly gasoline will qualify. Probably one or two things currently on/in our food.

<comment><USER12> Some years ago (and I mean decades) my teenage self read somewhere or heard someone talking of the unknown dangers of some gas being released by motherboards (think: silent killers).

<comment><USER13> That is usually flame retardant:

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

<comment><USER12> Thanks, that looks like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sugar is not far from being a drug in my opinion. It certainly feels addictive and has a definite impact on physical and mental state (especially true with respect to children). In that sense, it should undergo the same level of regulation...

<comment><USER15> I'm all for eating way less sugar, but you might as well say people are addicted to food. The body needs energy, of course providing it with energy alters its physical and mental state.

<comment><USER16> Totally agree that in current times food is an addiction. Since when do we need to eat 3 meals a day? At least 90 percent of modern humans history, we used hunting and gathering to survive. Only in the last 10 percent we have agriculture, and much much later, refrigerators, supermarkets and convenience stores. If we needed this much food our species wouldn't last a week before agriculture. Spoiler alert: we lasted 300,000 years.

<comment><USER17> Agreed - and it's been proven (citation needed) that a low calorie diet prolonges life.

But here we are, needing to consume more energy because we do things (good, bad, useless or wasteful) with our time (and these things aren't _directly_ looking for food.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently started the Whole 30 diet (paleo), and it's nearly impossible to avoid sugar, corn starch, and dextrose. Almost all fooeds seem to have one of those. Often for no reason: why put sugar in beans and bacon, or corn starch in turkey?

The amount of money I'm spending on food jumped by 3x. It seems accurate to say that if you're poor, you're almost forced to eat sugar for economic reasons.

<comment><USER19> >Almost all fooeds seem to have one of those

Almost all _prepared, packaged, or preserved_ foods have one of those.

The solution is actually pretty simple: eat meals made from base/raw ingredients only.

Beans, nuts, meats, vegetables, fruits, vegetable oils, spices... Endless varieties of stuff to cook with, combine, and eat alone. People just aren't used to eating this way, because prepackaged crap has been the norm for so long.

You are right that if you're poor, it's difficult to eat this way, though.

<comment><USER20> > prepackaged crap has been the norm for so long

> if you're poor, it's difficult to eat this way, though.

And it is difficult for some poor people to eat this way because their cultural poverty exacerbates or even causes their financial poverty. Their parents (if they were lucky enough to have two) didn't teach them to prepare basic meals, sharpen a knife, or care for a frying pan. Each of these skills is a barrier to entry, and they add up quickly for basic meals.

It's not the only major barrier, but I think that we have really pulled the rug out from the poorest by exchanging cultural norms for convenience and a net rise in costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 30–40 years later we might be saying the same thing about social media.

<comment><USER22> I wonder if people 80-100 years ago were as hysteric about radio and TV as we are today about social media.

<comment><USER23> They weren't. Television and especially radio were both cherished sources of reasonably reliable information in the beginning.

<comment><USER24> No, they weren't. They became, over time, accepted sources of _trusted_ and _emotionally engaging_ information, but IIRC studies many decades ago showed that—controlling for consumption of other news media like newspapers—increased consumption of news content from either or both broadcast media was associated with _decreased_ knowledge of current events. They were never sources of _reliable_ information (and, yes, from early on there were negative reactions against the mass acceptance, just as there are today for social media.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Happy Jax => Sugar Crisp => Super Sugar Crisp => Super Golden Crisp => Golden Crisp

But it's still "Sugar Crisp" in Canada, where Sugar Bear still says "Can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp"! Do they have better truth in advertising laws there or something?

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

At the 1904 World Fair, the Quaker Oats Company made a candy-coated puffed cereal, a wheat-based product similar to Cracker Jack's candy-coated popcorn. The product concept was re-introduced unsuccessfully in 1939 by another business as Ranger Joe, the first pre-sweetened, candy-coated breakfast cereal. Post Foods introduced their own version in 1948. The Post version was originally called Happy Jax, and was renamed to Sugar Crisp the next year. The name was later changed to Super Sugar Crisp, and in 1985, it was changed again to Super Golden Crisp. Finally, it was changed to Golden Crisp (during a time when many cereals dropped the word "Sugar" from their titles) in the American market.

In the early 1970s, there was a short-lived variation on the original Sugar Crisp, called Super Orange Crisp, which had orange-flavored O's in it.

The product is still sold as Sugar Crisp in Canada. In Canada, the box still displays the Sugar Bear mascot and the phrase "Can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp."

<comment><USER26> Breakfast cereal companies are borderline criminal. Most cereals are just straight sugar on some substrate.

Even most muesli/granola is loaded with sugar, whether cane sugar, honey, or dried fruit.

<comment><USER8> Depends on the cereal.

The corn flakes I usually eat for breakfast have basically 0 nutritional value, I think the entire 1kg box contains about 800kJ, no sugar and the rest of that is then mostly air or filler.

<comment><USER27> [https://www.kelloggs.com.au/en_AU/products/corn- flakes.html](https://www.kelloggs.com.au/en_AU/products/corn-flakes.html) This is the most popular in Australia and it has sugar and salt. Which one doesn't have sugar?

<comment><USER8> I just pick my local store's brand. It's got the consistency and taste of wet cardboard but it gets me through the morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Being overweight is a much stronger correlate to cancer and heart disease than "sugar".

And, despite what you might have read in the press, it's nowhere near a consensus that sugar is the primary cause of being overweight. You really think a 50-year-old study is the smoking gun that's going to usher in a consensus among nutrition scientists everywhere?

Personally, I buy Stephen Guyenet's theory that palatability is the driver of overweight. I think it's increasing palatability and falling food costs.

<comment><USER29> Sugar seems to pretty obviously make people overweight. Especially in liquid form. And if this is not a consensus, well, see the title of this post. This isn't a hard thing to test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting but not surprising. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, don't publish or cancel studies that show unfavorable results all the time and no one makes a fuss. Who knows the loss to the community and consumers at large in terms of knowledge and health?

Beyond that, the take away is yet again: If it's a shortcut or if it's delicious, it's bad for you. (gazes longingly at holiday cookies on desk)

<comment><USER9> I don't know, I certainly find chicken (with skin and bone, and no salt/sugar marinade, thank you!) with rice and plenty of veggies to be quite delicious. A lot more delicious than cookies, honestly.

I've been trying to live by the No S Diet for a while, and it seems to be working for me, I highly recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> When reading a book about Alan Turing, I came across a reference to "Natural Wonders, 1928" by Edwin Tenney Brewster (free in iBooks and on the web) - where he refers to Chapter 38: Of Sugar and other Poisons :=)

It's not surprising that after we made fat the demon, the supply change replaced fat with with sugar (at least in yogurts) and type 2 diabetes is now rampant.

:-)

</comment><comment><USER32> I started the keto diet with intermittent fasting about a month ago. Lost 13kg, doesn't have cravings anymore, doesn't feel hungry all the time, and it's easier now to consentrate, fall asleep and wake up.

Defenetly feels like carbohydrates/sugar is poison.

<comment><USER33> Keto diet is terrible for you. You are losing weight because you are sick. It's the refined carbs and sugar that are not good, you just need to get them from whole sources with the fiber and all.

<comment><USER34> > Keto diet is terrible for you.

Because?

<comment><USER35> In my online experience, 90% of people who straight up attack keto like this are vegans who want to keep propping up the dogma that 'animal products = bad for you'. They often also assume that keto = eating only meat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I consider sugar to be no different from cocaine (not that I ever tried), but we crave for it the same way people who consume that drug or any other, crave for. Sugar is everywhere, and it's our main source of energy, being that our body feels terrible when its levels are low, but as soon as you eat it feels wonderful. The same goes with cocaine.

<comment><USER36> It's a bit similar but I don't think it's good to make second-hand comparisons. Cravings are not a simple binary. Like, if you consume cocaine for pleasure then you can have a craving to keep doing more until you run out or its time to go home or whatever. But below a certain threshold the craving isn't that strong, so you could have a little bit and then get on with your day, much as you might have a cup of coffee in the morning but you don't necessarily want it round the clock.

<comment><USER16> I agree, although when it comes to sugar we way past that threshold, since most of us crave for food many times a day when glucose levels drops.

<comment><USER36> Ah sorry, I was thinking of craving in terms of 'you want it whether or not you actually need it' as happens in abuse and addiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why were they responsible for this information in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER38> There's a plethora of E-numbers which are a safe alternative [1] (according to the EU). I could quote them, but you might as well just click on the link instead.

They're supposedly easy to recognize as they're in the E95? and E96? range. Unfortunately the fear for E-numbers has caused manufacturers to stop mentioning them and instead naming the ingredients again.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number#E900.E2.80.93E999_.28...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number#E900.E2.80.93E999_.28glazing_agents.2C_gases_and_sweeteners.29)

</comment><comment><USER39> Has it actually been proven that natural fats are bad for you? I always thought fat is healthier than sugar. Both sugar and fat are required part of healthy diet but I'd rather eat some pork sausage than ice cream or chocolate. It seems much healthier to me but I could be totally wrong and this is just some irrational belief I hold.

<comment><USER9> Watch out for that sausage, it's very likely to have nitrite salts in it, as well as surprisingly high amounts of sodium and sugar.

<comment><USER39> Is salt unhealthy? I thought that is a myth too. I think salt is required part of healthy diet. In moderation of course.

Sugar? Hmm I didn't know there's much sugar in sausages. I mostly eat family made sausages and I don't think there's much sugar.

<comment><USER9> Salt isn't dangerous, as long as you get enough fluids, your kidneys are healthy and you don't overdo it. In other words yeah moderation is key, but sausages (and other cured meats) can have a surprising salt content.

Sugar routinely gets added to a lot of foodstuffs you wouldn't expect it in. But if you're primarily eating home-made sausages, you're probably not going to have any issues, they're mostly in processed and ready-made foods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am not sure, how appropriate this is, but a related question/poll:

there is the stereotype, that hackers/IT guys are in general fat/unhealthy.

But in my experience, this is not at all true. It might just be my circles of people (mostly germans around 30), but most of the IT guys I know, take good care of their body, eat healthy and do all kinds of sports. Even though some are now starting to get lazy, the overall picture for me is, that most are healthy, above average (compared to people of their age).

So I am curious, how the world is for other people here on HN?

<comment><USER41> People with higher education often take better care of their bodies. Here is my theory: A couple of decades ago, IT didn't require much education, because there weren't many schools doing IT. So many people without higher education worked in IT.

<comment><USER40> I would go more with, a lot of sad, fat kids at home, discovered the world of computers, where they could shine, because nobody cared how they looked in the real world, it only mattered what they could do. And this stereotype definitely still exists, I would be curious, how many of the HN crowd fit into it, but I can understand, that nobody wants to out himself like that.

edit: and I believe every fat person, knows and knew, that being fat is bad, but when you are sad and eating is your allmost only joy, what can you do? Starving and give up that little bit of happiness?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I don't really understand - what's the catch?

Some other day I've heard the news they were sponsoring research that fat makes you fat.

Capitalism baby - profit for shareholders - we need [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line) so that it is legally OK not to harm people.

</comment><comment><USER43> Count the isles in your supermarket, how many of them are nearly 100% dedicated to sugar and sugary products? Think back 30 years, is this the way you remember it? Saying diabetes and sugar aren't related while in America there is a massive influx of diabetes diagnoses is like saying your dog ate your homework.

</comment><comment><USER44> I find it hard to follow nutritional advise when there are so many charlatans taking advantage of women trying to lose weight without any health concern.

A Medicine degree shouldn't be necessary in order to eat well.

Any reliable source where I can learn the 'nutritional 101' in layman terms?

</comment><comment><USER45> Required viewing if you are interested in the Politics of Sugar. => [http://sugarcoateddoc.com](http://sugarcoateddoc.com)

Saw it on Netflix. Thought I saw it on youtube also for free, but can't seem to find the video.

<comment><USER46> Only available on Netflix US and Canada as well as a handful theater screenings. I've said it before but it almost seems as if those documentaries try to limit their audience. I can't count the number of times I stumbled upon interesting small, niche and independent documentaries only to find out that they are only screening in a few limited locations worldwide without any purchasing option in sight.

<comment><USER35> In that case, here's the hash of the torrent: 376C45CE22B1DDE014F8AF2809BF4ECC798B4C19

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The issue begins when you have the sugar industry funding the research

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe we should all just have some moderation.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if we will see a class action for everyone that has developed type 2 diabetes. There is a precedent.

</comment><comment><USER50> This doesn't surprise me at all.

It took almost 40 years to prove that smoking causes lung cancer.

Similarly, despite unambiguous scientific evidence, it still seems acceptable to deny that man-made CO2 release into the atmosphere causes global warming.

There's actually a good book covering these two instances and others: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"

<comment><USER51> Common factor: Money to be made.

Tobacco was the core of many states' economies, and still remains a massive industry which makes many people wealthy.

Dealing with CO2 emissions would have required dealing with fossil fuel use... and that's _tons_ of money and power in play there.

Sugar is, at the very least, another substance people crave, and has been making people rich for hundreds of years.

Delaying tactics are feasible when you have billions or trillions of dollars, control regulatory bodies, own politicians, scientists, and armies of lawyers. Delaying tactics on the orders of just a few decades means generations of VP's and C-levels getting unfathomably rich, as well as key shareholders. So... fuck the harm, delay, delay, delay.

The key is that you have to not give a shit about anyone other than yourself, or be genuinely deluded.

<comment><USER52> > The key is that you have to not give a shit about anyone other than yourself

This is actually quite difficult. Despite its shortcomings (and perhaps ironically) religion can be effective at convincing people to put others first but I would say the default behavior in most people is "I only care about myself and family first". This default behavior is exacerbated when people follow the influence of greed, lust, etc.

<comment><USER53> Its a double edge sword. Most religions require suspension of critical reasoning as well in order to "take on faith" that which cannot be proven (or is outright wrong).

The result is basically training people to be susceptible to propaganda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> When calories are controlled, there is no difference in health markers between a high sugar diet vs low.

</comment><comment><USER55> I wish someone could explain in detail what EXACTLY is meant by "sugar". It's become an overloaded term.

When we say sugar, do we JUST mean refined, processed, isolated sugars of the likes of candy bars, sodas, etc?

Or do we mean carbohydrates in general, which are broken down by enzymes in our saliva (amylase) into sugars?

If the latter then can we conclude carbohydrates in general are cancer causing? I'm no biologist, or medical professional, so this all gets really confusing when you start thinking beyond the simple "sugar is bad" assertion.

<comment><USER56> Of the people I know who have been on a sugar-free diet, all of them continued to eat carrots, even though carrots have an interesting amount of sugar.

[http://www.sugarstacks.com/carrots.htm](http://www.sugarstacks.com/carrots.htm)

So when people say they're on a sugar-free diet, I interpret that to mean they are avoiding refined sugars.

<comment><USER49> The total amount of sugar is less important than the glycemic load and the insulin response caused. Carrots are high in fibre.

"The glycemic index is a value assigned to foods based on how slowly or how quickly those foods cause increases in blood glucose levels" [1]

Coca Cola® (63) vs Carrots (39). Higher is worse.

[1] [https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and- conditions/glyce...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and- conditions/glycemic-index-and-glycemic-load-for-100-foods)

<comment><USER57> Coca Cola® (63) vs White Rice (72). Higher is worse. By using that logic, chicken nuggets and Pizza Hut beat plain potatoes. Clearly not a good recipe for a healthy diet.

<comment><USER49> Both pizza and chicken nuggets are higher in fat and protein so don't spike insulin or blood glucose levels. The preservatives and additives make the Pizza Hut pizza and frozen chicken nuggets unhealthy for other reasons.

If you were making your own baked chicken nuggets or pizza from quality ingredients then they are definitely healthier than potatoes or white rice, assuming the calorie intake was the same.

This is counter-intuitive to most people because of all the misinformation around the benefits of a low-fat diet [1].

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945404-the-obesity- cod...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945404-the-obesity-code)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Mobile phones companies will be next.

</comment><comment><USER59> Fruits and vegetables are full of sucrose, it is the most commonly occurring sugar in plants. If splitting more sucrose (or is fructose really the problem?) increases your chance of cancer, it means very little on its own. Would you get the same results if they matched the starches to the glucose equivalent, rather than the same mass?

Which is why I don't see why they would bother to suppress a result like this, but I guess the public interpretation would likely be the outrageous "specifically refined table sugar _gives you cancer_ ", so I can't exactly blame 'em for wanting to.

<comment><USER60> A 12 oz can of Coca Cola has _twice_ the sugar content of an apple, without the beneficial fiber or vitamins.

How many Americans are obese because they eat too many fruits and vegetables? An overwhelming majority are obese due to fast foods, soda, snacks, and sweets... costing taxpayers _millions_ of dollars while companies profit from the negative externality.

<comment><USER61> Where I come from, if a person buys and eats junk and gets obese, that's their own fault, not the fault of the person who sells junk, and certainly not the fault of taxpayers. Their additional costs should come out of their own pockets.

<comment><USER62> That's an extremely short sighted way to look at things, which gives a complete pass to a bunch of bad actors in the system.

Why is it always "personal responsibility", but never "corporate responsibility"?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Announcing Docker Machine, Swarm, and Compose for Orchestrating Distributed Apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.com/2014/12/announcing-docker-machine-swarm-and-compose-for-orchestrating-distributed-apps <comment><USER2> Hi all. A few clarifications.

\- The meme that we are adding more and more features into the docker binary is unfounded. Please, please, I ask that before repeating it you do your homework and ask for actual examples. For example 1.4 is coming out next week: it has 500+ commits and basically no new features. It's all bugfixes, refactoring and a general focus on quality. That's going to be the trend from now on

\- Swarm and Machine are separate binaries. They are not part of the core docker runtime. You can use them in a completely orthogonal way.

\- Swarm follows the "batteries included but removable" principle. We are not doing all things to all people! There is a default scheduling backend but we want to make it swappable. In fact we had Mesosphere on stage today as part of a partnership to make Mesos a first-class backend.

\- there is an ongoing proposal to merge compose into the docker binary. I want to let the design discussion play out, but at the moment I'm leaning towards keeping it separate. Now's the time to comment if you care about this - that's how open design works :)

Yes, our blog post is buzzwordy and enterprise-sounding. I am torn on this, on the one hand it helps make the project credible in IT departments which associates that kind of language with seriousness. We may find that strange but if it helps with the adoption of Docker, then it benefits every Docker user and that's ok with me. On the other hand, it is definitely not popular on HN and has the opposite connotation of dorky pencil holder suit douchiness. Being from that tribe I share that instinctive reaction. But I also realize it's mostly psychological. I care less about the specific choice of words than the substance. And the substance here is that we launched a lot of new stuff today, and put a lot of effort in keeping the focus on a small, reliable runtime, composable tools which do one thing well, pluggability, open APIs, and playing nice with the ecosystem. Basically everything the community has been worrying about recently.

<comment><USER3> I think the concern from third-parties is not so much about bloat or whether everything is bundled in the same binary but that by defining "the way" of doing things, you are taking the oxygen out of other ecosystem partners that have alternate approaches for doing so. You are making it pluggable but by having your official implementation it becomes the "de facto" standard.

By defining a standard way of orchestrating you make life easier for users that can deploy with confidence the same environment across multiple clouds, etc. BUT the tradeoff is that you alienate another set of parties (providers are commoditized, ecosystem partners offering alternate orchestration tools feel marginalized). Secondarily, there are concerns whether your approach is better than others and that is too early to tell.

I am curious to see how all this plays out, lots of things at stake here and a very thick fog of war :)

<comment><USER4> Anyone who has used Docker for more than a trivial app sees the need for orchestration. If the requirement is that obvious then it clearly needs to be part of the core.

<comment><USER5> Many many solutions have been meeting that need just fine and many new ones are still in the works. Adding a new solution will not help things.

<comment><USER4> Yeah it will.

At the moment I have to choose between multiple competing solutions. Competition is good when there are strong differentiating features.

In the "Orchestrate Docker" field the requirements are so clear after using it for your first project that it isn't at all clear what benefit competition, or solutions outside of the core Docker product suite gives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the community really ought to take a good minute to consider, beyond technical reasons, whether it really makes sense to so tightly tie the future of computing to a single for-profit company's quickly enlarging platform.

Someone below compared this to systemd - it's really more like your entire containerization operating system. And since you run everything via containers, it effectively is your operating system/platform.

So, clearly they (and CoreOS, etc.) will want to monetize their container operating system/platforms. But is it really a good idea to build the entire industry's concept and implementation of containers themselves on the back of a single company's implementation, when we know a healthy ecosystem would see a number of companies with competing implementations of container OS with varying degrees of compatibility, and hopefully eventually open standards.

I really am beginning to see the CoreOS guys point here - if Docker could have just stuck to running containers and doing that awesome, there would have been space for other companies to build out the ecosystem around that shared interoperable container format. But if Docker is now set on tightly bundling a toolchain for the container operating system around their format, suddenly it looks a lot more like they took a Microsoft embrace-extend-extinguish approach to LXC.

And thus the need for Rocket.

<comment><USER7> > it looks a lot more like they took a Microsoft embrace-extend-extinguish > approach to LXC

That's overstating things slightly, since it appears no Docker employee has ever contributed a single line of code to the LXC implementation itself (that would be hard work, rather than bikeshedding userspace tools, after all). The kernel tree contains only one reference to a Docker bug, fixed by a Red Hat employee, while the LXC tree contains a single reference to a Docker bug, fixed by a Canonical employee who looks to be one of the LXC maintainers.

The reality is replacing Docker isn't all that hard, as we're now seeing with Rocket. The kernel interfaces aren't tied to it (hell, its clear from Git logs the LXC devs are barely even aware of it).

edit: It's simpler to look at Docker and Rocket for what they both are: commercial plays built on the work of others. That work hasn't magically disappeared somewhere, it still exists and is in use (albeit by a slightly less PR/buzz-aware side of the community).

A vendor-independent implementation of containers already exists, as it did long before Docker did. If people are serious about seeing the "container ecosystem" flourish, they should be contributing cash, employment offers, or employee time to the real people and projects doing the work (as opposed to publishing upset blog posts and writing fashionable Go code)

<comment><USER8> > _it appears no Docker employee has ever contributed a single line of code to > the LXC implementation itself (that would be hard work, rather than > bikeshedding userspace tools, after all)_

You keep using this word, bikeshedding. I don't think it means what you think it means.

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding)

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bikeshedding](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bikeshedding)

TL;DR; it's about discussing/debating trivial details instead of the important characteristics of a system, not about working on easy stuff vs more hard programs.

<comment><USER9> > while neglecting the design of the power plant itself

I think what hosay123 is trying to say is that LXC is the power plant and the tooling around it is Docker, which runs in userspace. Note I'm not trying to say that, I'm just saying things.

<comment><USER8> That's what I got from his comment too.

But the first difference (with bikeshedding) is that bikeshedding is not "doing the tooling around the power plant instead of the plant itself" but spending time discussing and designing some insignificant detail instead of the power plant.

(That is: bikeshedding is getting lost in DEBATING the easy and incosequential details of an implemntation).

Docker is neither "lost in discussion" (they're building things, and a lot, and fast), nor a trivial detail (that would be e.g. LXC code's tabs vs spaces convention etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a little bit afraid about the fragmentation occurring in the container world right now. I felt like in the beginning I could rely on Docker being focused on containers and really making that a stable building block and utilise tools around that provided by industry leaders. Now Docker have thrown their own hat in the ring, creating a monopoly for themselves. Do you choose docker and their whole ecosystem? Do you pick something else off the shelve? How about Amazon ECS container service, CoreOS with their array of tools.

I don't feel like I can depend on any of these things, so I stick with the absolute bare minimum of what will build me a container. Which of these technologies will stay? Which will go? What will change as time passes? What will be deprecated?

In all honesty with Kubernetes talking about supporting Rocket and probably any other container technology that creeps up in the next few years, I'm leaning towards using that as the point of stability which I can deploy anywhere and know that I get the exact same API. Google, the leader in cluster management writing open source orchestration technology, think that's where I'll keep my focus.

<comment><USER11> My bet is on Redhat's project atomic, which uses Kubernetes under the hood and will eventually support Mesos for scheduling (via kubernetes).

<comment><USER10> I think what Redhat is doing with Atomic and OpenShift is really great. They are building some awesome stuff around Kubernetes however I feel like that is going to be entirely geared towards the enterprise space. Much like OpenStack it's very complicated and the barrier to entry is still quite high. When I looked at the docs I immediately had to go look at reference info for all this new terminology they had introduced. They'd basically ignored what had come out of industry usage and naming. But in saying that, I do hope they cause massive shifts in the enterprise game.

I have quite a bit of experience in the microservice and cluster management space and have started to prototype something much more accessible to the masses. I'll know within the space of 6-8 weeks whether it's actually going to work or not but nonetheless we need people who understand and use these technologies on a day to day basis in the general tech space.

<comment><USER12> The next generation of OpenShift is largely hypothetical at the moment.

Cloud Foundry already has a container-based PaaS and it's only getting better. And it's not tied to a single vendor.

Disclaimer: I'm biased as hell, I work on CF for my dayjob.

<comment><USER13> The current version of OpenShift (2.X) is essentially Linux container based (selinux, cgroups, kernel namespaces). OpenShift 2.X has been running in production for years now (openshift.com). The reason something like Docker wasn't used is because nothing existed, so Red Hat had to invent something. From an app perspective it's fairly good for what it does.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the correction, I was wrong. I do note that Warden uses a lot of the same primitives (as do several projects building on the facilities that arose or were repurposed for Linux-VServer, OpenVZ, LXC etc etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wonderful. We just containerized all of our apps and are in the process of choosing our approach for running and deploying them in a cluster.

Now what?

Flynn? Deis? Kubernetes? Mesos? Shipyard? Pure Fig instead? CoreOS, Serf, Maestro? Rather stay on AWS with Elastic Beanstalk or the new docker service?

Welcome to the party, Swarm and Compose. By now we are not even sure anymore if Docker itself is still the way to go, now that Rocket and LXD have arrived. I don't even have the time to compare all these options, respectively get a deeper look into architectural considerations.

What to decide by? Company backing? Because it's good or bad? Github stars? Deis for self-announcing it's 1.0, even if it's based on pre1.0 components or Flynn for being honest they're still in beta?

Honestly, I've rarely been as tired of new technologies as I have been by now. I could roll a dice as well. If you have a good and reasonable choice for me, let me know (I'm actually serious)

<comment><USER15> I'd invite you to check out [http://tutum.co](http://tutum.co) , but then again, I'm one of the cofounders, so I'm 100% biased. Take my invitation with a grain of salt. Feedback welcomed. Cheers,

<comment><USER16> Was reading this earlier and saw your comment. A few hours later while Googling you came up number one in results =D Giving it a shot now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The 2 examples in Docker Swarm were Redis and MySQL.

From the announcement: "Docker Swarm provides high-availability and failover. Docker Swarm continuously health-checks the Docker daemon's hosts and, should one suffer an outage, automatically rebalances by moving and re-starting the Docker containers from the failed host to a new one.".

Does anyone know how they'll handle the data? Both Redis and MySQL have various ways to deal with high availability e.g. Redis Sentinel, MySQL master / slave or MySQL multi master with Galera.

<comment><USER18> I'd like to see a reasonable answer to this. Because up until now, I've been using data-only containers to mount directories into these app containers (i.e. Redis and PostgreSQL). The fail over handling has been horrendous for me, because there's no easy way to migrate the data across machines, unless you setup multiple hot slaves or something. And this happens often with CoreOS updates on the alpha channel.

Ultimately, I gave up and created a separate Ubuntu VM to run as an NFS server. Every CoreOS instance mounts it, and then my data-only containers now map back to the NFS mount. This way, when CoreOS moves the Redis or PostgreSQL containers, it has the data available to it.

It's not my favourite setup, but it's worked well-enough this past week that I haven't had to manually correct things while on vacation.

I'm hopeful that someone smarter/more experienced can share a better solution.

<comment><USER19> Mounting your database storage volume via NFS seems like a surefire way to cause yourself pain down the road. You might want to review the following (old but still relevant) article to understand some of the pitfalls:

[http://www.time- travellers.org/shane/papers/NFS_considered_h...](http://www.time- travellers.org/shane/papers/NFS_considered_harmful.html)

The tl;dr basically boils down to the fact that PostgreSQL and MySQL (or really any good database engine running on *NIX systems) make very strong assumptions about the POSIX-ness of their underlying filesystem: flock() is fast, sync() calls actually mean data has hit disk, etc.

Docker/CoreOS/etc. aren't a replacement for a good SAN or other reliable storage. If you value your data I'd suggest keeping your core database(s) on dedicated machines/VMs (ideally SSD-equipped and UPS-backed). If managing those is too much work, consider a managed cloud database; DynamoDB and RDS can stand in for Redis and Postgres, respectively.

<comment><USER20> So much this. RDS is a great solution to this problem which hasn't been solved yet. Basically zero maintenance.

<comment><USER18> My immediate problem is that my software is running on a dedicated server hosted on-site; I have Internet access, but everything is hosted and run on a single massive VMWare ESXi server. I don't have the benefit of cloud-based services like RDS. I could modify my architecture to utilize that instead, and that's something I've thought about doing.

As it stands, the VM server is UPS-backed, but does not run on SSDs. There is no SAN. If I were to fix the existing implementation, I would: a) Add a secondary VM server as a redundant backup. b) Add a SAN

However, I don't think I can justify the capital expenditures for that. So what I'll likely do is replace the NFS server with a dedicated PostgreSQL server (VM), and perhaps start thinking about moving the majority of the infrastructure out of the building and into the cloud to take advantage of things like RDS. The latter is even more important for scalability as we add more customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this sheds a little more light on the reasons CoreOS decided to start building the Rocket container runtime[1], and not tie it's destiny to being paired with Docker.

[1] [https://coreos.com/blog/rocket/](https://coreos.com/blog/rocket/)

</comment><comment><USER22> GitHub repo for Machine: [https://github.com/docker/machine](https://github.com/docker/machine)

GitHub repo for Swarm: [https://github.com/docker/swarm](https://github.com/docker/swarm)

Compose is still being designed in the open. If you want to have a say about how it works, check out the proposal: [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9459](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9459)

</comment><comment><USER23> Talking about Docker as we are

Does any one agree it's still too hard for dumb dumb developers like me? I'm on windows (boo hiss) so in the past I've tried to use boot2docker, but you can't just point your webserver container at a place on your local file system and say serve that please

You have to bring in some crazy storage file container which will serve it all via samba or something and then you need to figure out linking those containers together and then how the hell do you tell a web server "hey you, document root is over here on another container"

At this point I'm usually like fuck it we'll use some bad idea .exe web stack and develop as normal I like the idea of containers, quicker smaller than vms, nice file system history going on but in practice it isn't easy enough in my opinion

<comment><USER24> Completely agree. You can do something like this:

1\. Statically compile your application so that it can run standalone. For ruby, python or java that means including the interpreter and any dynamic libraries. Hard at first, but once you have a build setup it's pretty straightforward

2\. Bundle your application with its assets in a zip file or tarball

3\. Make it so that your application has a well defined set of resources it uses that are isolated from other applications. For example with a database you might have a `your-app\data` folder where it stores the actual database. Also make sure you are careful with ports

4\. Pass around configuration via environment variables that you hand to your application (ie: DATABASE_HOST=127.0.0.1)

With a setup like that you can build a sensible stack that runs anywhere. You don't need containers:

1\. You don't need the protection: just don't write processes which clobber other processes. It's not that hard.

2\. The reuse mechanism seems cool, but it comes with baggage. Which version of ubuntu are you starting with? Does it include the latest updates to shared libraries? If it does how do you know that your application will still run down the road? And if it doesn't, how are you keeping on top of security updates?

3\. Containers, as envisioned by docker, are way overkill. Why do you need an entire ubuntu to run a simple web app?

<comment><USER25> In regards to (3), you don't... people have made functional containers with the scratch or busybox images that are less than 10mb in size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe I'm just thick in the head, but one of the thing that continues to disappoint me about Docker is the size of the binaries. Wouldn't it be good if we could build the container a single time, and then ship that top-level changeset around? For example. If I build a 200mb binary on top of `ubuntu:latest` I would like to be able to just ship that 200mb around, instead of 200mb + ubuntu:latest (another ~167mb?). If you colocate many services in a single machine (say 10-12) the network of grabbing those tarballs makes Docker less appealing.

edit: Also, its inefficient to build this Dockerfile every single time on every single host, which is why I'm talking about shipping tars. You could have 30 hosts with these 12 containers running on each one.

Any plans on dealing with something like this in the future?

<comment><USER27> The idea is that you build the image and push it to a registry. The service hosts then only pull the layers they don't already have.

In practice, running a private registry is a pain (last I checked the official Docker image for it crashed on startup). I like what Rocket is doing here with filesets and plain old URLs.

<comment><USER28> Specifically about filesets - take a look at the docker import command.

It will take an arbitrary rootfs (tar file) and turn it in to a docker image.

<comment><USER29> I've been down this path, far down this path.

Docker can import arbitrary layers from a tar file either via the command line or the api. The problem is there is no official way of getting a set of arbitrary layers.

That might not seem like a big deal, but when your image has something heavy like mono or java and pushes upwards of a gig or more running on a relatively puny cloud instance with poor I/O that adds up.

If you want to have a much more efficient workflow, you have to roll this yourself like we did by going direct to the file system (at least for export). This is a messy pain in the ass and I would not expect most people to do it.

I would be very happy if Docker stopped trying to shove the registry down our throats and gave us a model where we could substitute our own push/pull code that better utilized our existing infrastructure.

This is a case where Docker feels more monolithic than it needs to be and I would be happier if it was broken up into a set of smaller more independent tools (e.g. docker, docker-push, and docker-pull).

<comment><USER28> Would it surprise you to know we completely agree in theory that push and pull should not be reliant or used at all with the registry if a user so chooses? But what we do care about is when you docker pull or docker push you have a set of assumptions that are always true?

Leading questions, I know, but I couldn't agree with you more and I know I'm not alone.

If you don't know the truth - open source works a lot like other software projects. You gather feedback in as many different forums as possible make a guess at how to solve that, work with your developer communities and vested parties to come up with a solution iterate a bunch of times and hopefully get something out in users hands that doesn't completely suck.

So the question is - Who's going to work on what and in what order? The feedback is important and with enough it would get higher on the list. But someone has to make it happen. Or make a proposal on how it would work. That would be truly welcome. Let me know how I personally, and we collectively, can help.

<comment><USER29> Trust me, I know how it works. I had a pull request to do at least one part of this but it was never accepted. I'm not bitter about it, I don't care, it wasn't right for Docker at the time. We had to get something done to meet our commitments so we hacked it and moved on. Agreement in "theory" doesn't help when you have real commitments and limited resources.

> So the question is - Who's going to work on what and in what order? The > feedback is important and with enough it would get higher on the list. But > someone has to make it happen. Or make a proposal on how it would work. That > would be truly welcome. Let me know how I personally, and we collectively, > can help.

The community clearly desires a more stable and pluggable core, doesn't like the registry workflow, and desires a daemonless mode. If the discussion over the last few days hasn't woken the Docker team up to that fact, then I don't know what to say.

The new features are big and flashy so they get the big announcements, however, you should not be surprised that when a new announcement is dropped the community collectively responds "what about x y and z?"

I think a Roadmap to 2.0 is what is missing and would give the community the confidence that is currently lacking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm excited to see Docker continue to progress so quickly, but I'll admit to being more and more confused over how many components and services you have to contend with now. I'm sure I could sort out all of these names if I spent more time playing, but it's getting a little confusing to me.

There's a lot to be said for making something only do one thing and doing it well, but it starts getting tough to keep track of when you've got a bunch of somethings.

<comment><USER31> > confused over how many components and services you have to contend with now

You don't have to. It really depends on what you're trying to do. Using Docker alone, you'll be able to build and run containers, link them together to build a "stack" etc.

If you want to make building a stack (a group of containers that together form your application) easier, you can use an orchestration tool to automate this, for example, Fig, Crane, or now Compose. Or, create a bash script to do this; it's up to you.

If you want to build a cluster (run your containers distributed over several servers), you _can_ do that with docker alone, but it will get hard to manage. You can build a tool for that (making use of the Docker API), or use an existing tool, like Flocker, Shipyard or now Swarm.

So if all you need is running a few containers on a single host, Docker alone may be enough for you, in that case you can safely ignore the other stuff for now.

<comment><USER30> > So if all you need is running a few containers on a single host, Docker > alone may be enough for you, in that case you can safely ignore the other > stuff for now.

I should have clarified on that earlier, but I'm interested in Docker for the more clustered approach. I don't really want to re-invent any wheels if I can't help it, so I'd be using existing tech.

Just in your reply, you mentioned:

* Fig * Crane * Compose * Flocker * Shipyard * Swarm

Whew. That's kind of what I'm chaffing on. I could learn all of this, but it's a lot harder to casually understand how it all would potentially fit together.

<comment><USER32> > Whew. That's kind of what I'm chaffing on. I could learn all of this, but > it's a lot harder to casually understand how it all would potentially fit > together.

This is part of what the things mentioned in the announcement should help with. There's a clear need for clustering and linking, and so lots of people have built different tools to solve it. That's grand, but it's incredibly confusing coming into it. Particularly since tools vary from production ready to beta to "not actually implemented yet".

The aim here is to still allow people to come up with all kinds of different approaches but to have a set of components that work and are supported by docker. So that you can just get it and it works, and _then_ start swapping bits in and out for the new hotness or some ultra-performant component/etc.

<comment><USER30> To clarify, I'm not asking for a monolithic stack. I like the modularity. It's just getting confusing to those that don't look at this stuff every day. It's more of an ergonomic issue than an approach issue.

There could be some simple solutions to this, mostly centering around education and the promotion of the most popular components. I don't have answers, here, but figured I'd share that it's getting a little confusing in case someone had ideas.

<comment><USER32> I think what I said came across wrong, sorry.

I fully agree, I find the whole ecosystem really confusing. Every time I look at it there's some new combination of things, but then one turns out to be alpha/beta ...

What I hope is that the production of these new docker 'blessed' tools will allow me to go to their homepage and see a series of "getting started" tutorials and easily installable tools so I can at least get going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These aren't new projects... just rebranded versions of half-baked feature proposals that I thought were still being reviewed/discussed. I guess somewhere a decision was made to move forward regardless of community concerns?

Baking these features into Docker is the beginning of the end of Docker's Enterprise story. Moving forward with these proposals guarantees the rise of Rocket and other Enterprise focused containers. Docker is forking its own community here.

<comment><USER22> Both Machine and Swarm are not baked into Docker – they are separate projects and binaries:

[https://github.com/docker/machine](https://github.com/docker/machine)

[https://github.com/docker/swarm](https://github.com/docker/swarm)

Compose is still in the design proposal stage. We want to hear whether you think it should be built into Docker or not: [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9459](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9459)

<comment><USER5> Docker Machine looks to be a revision/rebrand of your docker hosts proposal made in the last 1-2 days or so. Very confusing.

The proposal discussion: [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8681](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8681)

Rename "docker hosts" to "docker machines": [https://github.com/bfirsh/docker/commit/e6abec4033f48d1cad31...](https://github.com/bfirsh/docker/commit/e6abec4033f48d1cad31380f3c94da137b64ae74)

2 days ago, from you:

      I have now rebased the host management branch on top of #8265 and squashed it:
      https://github.com/bfirsh/docker/compare/host-management
      Any pull requests should now be based on top of that. The driver interface hasn't changed, so it should be a trivial matter to rebase any existing pull requests. The main thing which has changed is that drivers are expected to set up identity auth for communication with the host. See this commit for an example of how to do so.
      The old branch is here for reference.
      Full update and preview builds coming soon."

1 day ago, a message from tianon, core Docker maintainer:

      Has there been any progress on splitting the actual driver implementations out of the core binary?

And now this. Color me confused.

<comment><USER33> The proposal was made in October, no? The only thing that happened 2 days ago was renaming it to "docker machines".

So unless I misread the thread, your timeline is a bit off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm excited to watch this battle between CoreOS and Docker heat up. I recently took a CoreOS/Docker-based system into production on AWS and there are definitely still some missing pieces. Swarm appears to be a slightly higher- level version of fleetd. Compose is something CoreOS is missing though.

<comment><USER35> Compose seems to be coming straight out of Kubenetes' pod design, which the CoreOS people have quite a stake in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They sound like a closed-source vendor at this point. I'm surprised to see an open-source project mention "ecosystem partners":

      Each one is implemented with a "batteries included, but
      removable" approach which, thanks to our orchestration
      APIs, means they may be swapped-out for alternative
      implementations from ecosystem partners designed for
      particular use cases.

So if I have a startup working on an orchestration solution, what is the process to become an approved 'ecosystem partner'. Do I need to sign a NDA and pay for an approval process to get my stuff merged in?

<comment><USER36> Why would you have to sign a NDA to create an open source ecosystem around an open source project with an Apache 2.0 license?

<comment><USER5> Not sure. Never heard of an official partnership program either, so I'm interested to know details about how this partnership program works. Could be innocent, but something about it smells like a OSS shakedown to me.

Just 'cause it's open-source doesn't mean there aren't any politics involved in what gets merged or not.

An example:

lmctfy support was added by the Google GCE team a long long time ago and I attended a meetup where the GCE team submitted the pull request right there... it was never merged. Languished for months without any public review comments from Docker maintainers.

I'd never seen anything like this before. Here we have Google engineers integrating their work with Docker on their own time and being completely ignored. Embarrassing is a nice way to put it.

There may have been outside discussions and real issues that made merging a _bad_ idea, but as an OSS project I expect those discussions to happen in the pull request, not in some business meeting. I'm sure any technical issues would have been addressed if there had been any. I'm also sure that the GCE team would have been more than happy to maintain their driver. Politics and open-source are a happy mix.

sources:

      https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/4891
      https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/4874

<comment><USER28> > There may have been outside discussions and real issues that made merging a > bad idea

Yeah, and Eric Brewer got on stage at DockerCon June and stated that pretty publicly. So your instinct was right.

<comment><USER5> Part of the problem here could definitely be communication. For whatever reason, it's been incredibly hard to follow what is going on with the Docker project. Keeping info in one place would definitely help.

I'm not able to find any details that support what you're saying. It seems that in June Eric Brewer was still publicly asking for libcontainer to merge in LMCTFY support.

I definitely could be wrong, but looking at this screenshot from Eric's June talk it looks like they were still trying to get it merged:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4DKb51CYAA687s.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4DKb51CYAA687s.jpg:large)

In June, Eric Brewer posted this:

      We've released an open-source tool called cAdvisor that
      enables fine-grain statistics on resource usage for containers.
      It tracks both instantaneous and historical stats for a wide
      variety of resources, handles nested containers, and supports
      both LMCTFY and Docker's libcontainer. It's written in Go with
      the hope that we can move some of these tools into libcontainer
      directly if people find them useful (as we have).

[http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/06/an-update- on...](http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/06/an-update-on-container- support-on-google-cloud-platform.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can anyone who understands this better than I do explain whether this replaces Fig, and if so, which parts of it?

<comment><USER38> Yes, and all of it. It's largely the same thing, in Docker core.

That's just Compose, though. The other two are completely different beasts.

<comment><USER22> It's also worth pointing out that Compose is a proposal for a new feature to Docker. If you don't think the design is right, make your voice heard. :)

[https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9459](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9459)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> With this amount of buzz words needed to install and run an app I see a bright future for Go and its "all compiled in one, web-server included, ready to go" executable structure. I mean sure: you get automation and repeatability of installs but at what cost? You have to maintain all the buzz-word hoops that your app needs to be wrapped into - requiring what amounts to a full new job in medium sized software company. And you still need the sysadmin to actually make the servers work.

</comment><comment><USER35> Pretty amazing. Is there anything the docker binary doesn't do now? The comparisons with systemd (I like systemd) are becoming more apt.

<comment><USER40> swarm and machine are separate binaries. Compose is still a proposal.

EDIT -- link to compose proposal [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9459](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9459)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Mesos 0.20.0 adds the support for launching tasks that contains Docker images, with also a subset of Docker options supported while we plan on adding more in the future.

Users can either launch a Docker image as a Task, or as an Executor. The Docker Containerizer is translating Task/Executor Launch and Destroy calls to Docker CLI commands.

</comment><comment><USER42> I haven't been reading Docker related news lately. Is there anything I should know if I already have my own working continuous deployment system made with Ansible, Jenkins and Docker? For example, it seems like I don't need Docker Machine if I already have my own Ansible recipes for provisioning.

<comment><USER28> If it's already working and you're happy, awesome. Machine is just a convenient way to provision new Docker hosts, in a separate project/binary.

If that is being filled by Ansible for you today, fantastic !

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Begun, these docker wars have.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is all cool, but I really am I excited for better ARM support one day...

<comment><USER45> The Raspberry Pi installation you get at Resin.io uses Docker on ARM and it works great! We also cross-compile containers in the cloud. Docker for ARM standalone is now available in several Linux Distro repos, Arch Linux is one I am aware of.

What other parts would you like to see?

<comment><USER44> have used the resin.io docker images on arch on my pi. What I would love is a raspbian version as its just a super popular distro on raspi. I know its a bit of gridlock right now. It seems that its going into the jesse version of debian but the raspbian release of jesse isn't out the last time a checked (a couple weeks ago). I did try out lessbian - awesome name - on raspi and I am not recalling specifically why it didn't work out for me. I had some issue with the filesystem dependencies not being there and getting them was a pretty large undertaking (so much so that it would have been just as easy to do it on raspbian). Would love to contrib myself but right now i'm swamped and don't really have much expertise in either docker or arm. At least my experience should bring some clarity/insight into what I encountered.

<comment><USER45> Hey there. When we did Docker-on-ARM, we asked people to push their rpi- compatible containers to the Docker index with the rpi- prefix. Since then there have been many containers published, including several flavours of rpi- raspbian. There's nothing to stop you from packaging up your favourite distro and posting it on the Docker index.

[https://registry.hub.docker.com/search?q=rpi-](https://registry.hub.docker.com/search?q=rpi-)

<comment><USER44> totally, I think the painful part is prepping the underlying os with the filesystem dependencies as it requires modding the kernel? I could be way off though</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Accounted for 40% of Silicon Valley's Profits in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.iblogapple.com/2016/04/24/apple-accounted-40-percent-silicon-valley-profits-in-2015-ranks-first-sv150-list/ <comment><USER2> Not sure about the source, but I would believe it. I wonder what the statistic is for all startup companies combined

<comment><USER3> Since they looked at the top 150 _public_ companies, the revenues are most likely sourced by company's' annual or quarterly filings.</comment></comment>


Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared bankrupt - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/mars-one-bankrupt-1.5014522 <comment><USER2> One indication that no one is even remotely ready to think seriously about colonizing Mars (including Space X): There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that. A self-sustaining colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that was able to get by with _no_ outside help for a few years would be about 1% as hard as colonizing Mars, and yet no one has done it, and no one AFAIK is planning to do it. This to me is the smoking gun that no one is really taking Mars colonization seriously. Everyone is caught up in the sexiness and glamour and no one wants to get down in the dirt and solve the really hard problems of how humans are actually going to survive when they are totally isolated from civilization for years.

Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project. That was not isolated nor self- sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/mars- sim...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/mars-simulation- hi-seas-nasa-hawaii/553532/)

That's actually not even the sort of thing I'm talking about. Forget simulating Mars. I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of _Earth_ without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints. Until we can do _that_ , Mars is hopeless.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure we've managed to colonize a tract of uninhabited land at least a couple of times throughout history.

Maybe we could better spend our time working on the things we _haven 't_ figured out.

<comment><USER2> > I'm pretty sure we've managed to colonize a tract of uninhabited land at > least a couple of times throughout history.

Without a connection to existing civilization, and without a source of easily accessible water provided by nature? No, we have never done that.

<comment><USER4> What about the ISS? The water they consume is recycled and is clearly not provided by nature.

<comment><USER2> The ISS is very closely connected to civilization. It has real-time comms, and in an emergency a spacecraft can reach it in about six hours, or return an astronaut back to earth in less time than that. The longest it has ever gone between resupply missions is four months. The shortest time between resupply missions to Mars is two years.

<comment><USER3> > The shortest time between resupply missions to Mars is two years.

You aren't going to be sending only one ship at a time. You will be staggering shipments, with 3-4 ships in transit at a time. You could make the time between resupplies as short as you want.

<comment><USER2> You don't understand the orbital mechanics of getting to Mars. Getting to Mars only takes eight months, but you have to launch when Earth and Mars are in a particular configuration relative to each other, and that configuration only happens every two (Earth) years. You can launch as many ships as you like during those windows, but you can't stagger them.

<comment><USER3> I do understand the orbital mechanics of getting to Mars. It's the same as the orbital mechanics of getting to anywhere.

I assume you're talking about the Hohmann transfer [0], which is the most efficient path a ship could take. We're not optimizing for efficiency here, we're optimizing for delivery. You should also realize that while there is a specific moment of peak efficiency in launch times, you have a window on the order of months before a Hohmann transfer becomes less efficient than other methods. Once every 2 years sounds less drastic when it's 6 months out of those 2 years.

All that being said, the Hohmann transfer is a lot sketchier in practice than one would think. Neither Mars nor Earth has a perfectly circular orbit. It's often easier just to take the old-fashioned route.

Take a look at this chart [1] for an idea of the spread of trip length vs launch time.

[0] [http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space- images/charts/hohm...](http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space- images/charts/hohmann-transfer-orbit.html)

[1] [https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/images/porkchop_lg.gif](https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/images/porkchop_lg.gif)

<comment><USER2> > I do understand the orbital mechanics of getting to Mars. It's the same as > the orbital mechanics of getting to anywhere.

Then you don't understand the economics. Or maybe it's something else you don't understand, but you are clearly missing _something_. The orbital mechanics of getting to any target in the solar system are unique to that target. Designing orbital trajectories is a profession unto itself.

Yes, it is theoretically possible to have staggered deliveries so that spacecraft arrive at Mars on a schedule other than every two years. But think about it: how would this help? The schedule on which the supply craft _arrive_ doesn't matter. What matters is the _latency_ between when a need manifests itself and when it can be fulfilled. Fundamental physics lets you get to Mars in a matter of days if you could accelerate and decelerate the entire time at 1-G. But you can't, not because orbital mechanics forbids it, but because technology and economics and the rocket equation forbids it.

The one thing you're going to need to optimize for more than anything else is kilogram delivered per dollar spent. That means being as efficient as you possibly can because launch costs are ridiculously high even with reusable boosters. That means using Hohmann orbits, and that means eight month transfer times with launch windows every two years. Yes, those windows are fairly broad, but that doesn't matter. You're still going to have to wait for periods of time measured in months and years for your Amazon order to be fulfilled on Mars.

<comment><USER3> Orbital mechanics is orbital mechanics. The math doesn't change just because it's Mars and not some random object in the Kuiper belt.

> But think about it: how would this help? The schedule on which the supply > craft arrive doesn't matter. What matters is the latency between when a need > manifests itself and when it can be fulfilled.

Think about this: You're no longer disagreeing with my premise, and are now moving goalposts. My premise remains true, so your accusation that I don't understand the orbital mechanics involved here is unfounded and unwarranted. A little deconstructive to meaningful conversation, which you seem keen on having with people.

> Fundamental physics lets you get to Mars in a matter of days if you could > accelerate and decelerate the entire time at 1-G

It's also a bit deconstructive to talk about extremities. Keeping the discussion within rational limits helps us tackle this realistically and collaboratively.

Now this discussion has shifted to latency vs regularity and yeah, it will take some planning ahead to smooth things out, and everything must come in triplicate in case the replacement breaks while you'r installing it. But that's entirely feasible and the only barrier is money. So what we need to focus on with regards to the great Nevada desert is things like terraforming. Sustainability is no problem if you have a water source and a climate something can grow in.

<comment><USER2> > The math doesn't change just because it's Mars and not some random object in > the Kuiper belt.

That depends on what you consider "the math." In principle, it's all F=ma. In practice it's a good deal more complicated than that. There's a reason people make careers out of designing orbital trajectories.

> the only barrier is money

Well, yeah, the only barrier was only ever money. But that's a pretty big barrier right now.

> what we need to focus on with regards to the great Nevada desert is things > like terraforming

Yes, terraforming is one way to solve the problem of sustainability. But I don't think we're any closer to being able to have a serious discussion of terraforming than we are about having a self-sustaining settlement without terraforming first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, that's no surprise. Their plan was essentially to hold a televised execution while lacking the budget to build the scaffold.

Here's a technical assessment of the viability of their plan: [https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2014/01/18/ask- etha...](https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2014/01/18/ask-ethan-20-is- the-mars-one-crew-doomed)

<comment><USER6> I think calling it a televised execution is quite an oversimplification. Mars One was deeply flawed, but the basic concept of a one way colonization mission to Mars isn't insane. A one-way mission is legitimately simpler from a technical perspective, and there are obviously plenty of people who would be happy to go. If it were done well, with a high probability of survival and prosperity (and really, only in that case), I would be fascinated to watch.

Not to mention, even if the initial mission were one-way, it's entirely possible that return trips could be possible within the lifetimes of the initial colonists. And besides, everyone dies; I can see why someone might choose a life of adventure (and pain, toil, monotony, etc.) on Mars over a life of relative comfort on Earth, even if I wouldn't make the same choice.

<comment><USER7> > would be fascinated to watch

I'd expect it to get boring quick, just like watching rocket launches. New exciting images can only happen every so often. You probably want some drama or tension for better ratings. That's a pretty big mismatch of incentives combined with tricky power dynamic. I'd stay away from that unless that reality show is just a small side venture. And no way it could ever significantly finance a mars base in the first place.

<comment><USER8> About as fascinating to watch as media produced on the ISS. So after the initial hype, not mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know that for everyone here, it was obvious from the start that Mars One was never going to fly. What really gets my goat is the utter gullibility of the media. Here are a few of the articles from The Guardian:

22 Apr 2013: Life on Mars to become a reality in 2023, Dutch firm claims

19 Jan 2014: Why we want to spend the rest of our lives on Mars

9 Feb 2015: Mars One mission: a one-way trip to the red planet in 2024

17 Feb 2015: Mars One shortlist: the top 10 hopefuls

19 Feb 2015: Why I want to be a passenger on Mars One

30 May 2015: Can Mars One colonise the red planet?

It was always complete bullshit, anyone with a smidge of technical or scientific background said so repeatedly, so why they did write about it so many times? Yes, I know the proximate reasons – Mars One had a good PR agency, The Guardian wants clicks, etc. But The Guardian is meant to be a good, trustworthy news source, and here they were giving credibility to what I can only describe as a scam artist, or at best, a completely deluded entrepreneur.

It should never have gotten as far as it did, and I blame the media for this.

<comment><USER10> In fairness to the Guardian they were skeptical:

"how can you not be suspicious of a bloke who has no rockets or spacesuits but says he's off to Mars soon"

and it's quite an interesting story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find it amazing that, even though Mars One looked so sketchy since the beginning, still 200,000 people applied for their program. That means that still many people dream about exploring space. If a solid project was launched, probably hundreds of millions of people would apply to travel and settle down on another planet. It makes me very hopeful.

Until a few years ago, medias were always very negative and described space exploration as a waste of money. But, it is getting a bit better. This may be thanks to Space X, the new race to the Moon (China), the landings on a comet (Europe) and an asteroid (Japan), the Indian mission on Mars, and so on.

Now, the project of replacing the ISS (end scheduled in 2020) with a permanent base on the Moon sounds more plausible (Moon Village).

<comment><USER12> There's a big difference though between wanting to go and actually being capable and qualified.

The first several waves will need to be the absolute best of us to have a chance of establishing a permanent settlement.

<comment><USER13> One only needs to look at the death records for New England in the early period to realize that's not the case. An 90% mortality within a year is no stop for colonization if there is enough political will for it.

<comment><USER14> Ya I'd definitely go. I have military experience, flight experience, and I am educated, but definitely not in the top percentages that astronauts are in. Even if there was a 90% chance of death the first few years, I'd 100% go. I'd get on a rocket to Mars now, knowing there's not support structure at the destination, and I'm sure I'd cry and be freaked out, but I would definitely get on that rocket. I hope one day I can.

<comment><USER15> I wonder if someone wanting to go despite a 90% death rate should be disqualified on psychological grounds?

Sort of like the old joke that "I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member".

<comment><USER16> There are missions well above 90% death rate which are very valid. Kamikaze attacks on wars. Chernobyl water release. And so on. You wouldn't apply the same psychological tests on those volunteers as you would on a ISS mission. You'd just thank them as they go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My friend "applied," knowing full well it was a scam. He said that he regretted nothing, as it allowed him to fantasize about the journey more concretely. So perhaps it served the same function as pornography.

<comment><USER18> I think it is more similar to lottery than pornography in that it enable people to fantasize about the future.

<comment><USER19> Shirley Jackson's Lottery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Instead of offering dumb 1-way trips to Mars why not create round trips to the Moon and back? You can see Earth from the surface of the moon, see the lunar lander, drive a lunar rover, bounce around for a bit then hop in your module and head back home and live the rest of your life with a new perspective. More interesting than Mars, and doesn't take months to get there.

<comment><USER21> Not as simple as you would think. Mars has atmosphere for capture braking, for parachute landings. The moon requires lots of powered deltav to get onto the surface from low earth orbit, more so than mars iirc.

<comment><USER22> Are you suggesting that going to Mars is easier than going to the moon?

<comment><USER23> In terms of delta-V, Deimos is about as far as the surface of the moon. In terms of travel time, it's a hundred times farther away. For humans that is a crippling difference, but for rovers not so much.

Mars is not Deimos of course. My point is merely that from a delta-V perspective, the solar system suddenly looks very different.

<comment><USER21> Downvoted by people who know nothing about space physics. Deimos is indeed just about the same distance as the moon in terms of energy required. With one exception. When approaching a multi-body system there are gravity-boost options for slowing a spacecraft. Not an option when aproaching the moon.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I'm a bit surprised to get downvoted for posting an interesting and unexpected truth. I'd love to hear what kind of reasoning the downvoters have for this.

I'm personally quite fascinated by Deimos. It's far away and yet relatively easy to reach. Some people believe there might be quite a bit of water on Deimos. Put together, that might make it an interesting option for a base, for refuelling, if nothing else. Especially once Mars gets a colony and we start mining asteroids, I wouldn't be surprised if Deimos turns out to be a nice central point between the three.

Or not. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I find this a fascinating subject.

<comment><USER21> It is a tuesday. HN is full of millenials who think they know everything. Id bet most of the haters in this thread had to google "deltaV". The smart people show up on the weekends. Im only here because im visiting family and work doesnt have my cell number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looked like a con job from the start. I can only hope some creditors get their money back, and that those responsible get punished accordingly.

<comment><USER25> Yep, and as often happens when a scam involves science or tech, many journalists helped out by promoting their ridiculous claims without due challenge or skepticism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The writing has been on the wall for a while now.

Even Gerard 't Hooft, famous physics nobel prize winner and one of the ambassadors of Mars One said the schedule and budget were off by a factor of 10. [1]

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/23/mars-one- pla...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/23/mars-one-plan- colonise-red-planet-unrealistic-leading-supporter)

</comment><comment><USER27> It's not a legitimate airline unless it's been bankrupt at least twice. ;-)

<comment><USER28> But this is a noairline not an airline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Much too ambitious, especially with massive organizations (such as NASA) being unable to with much larger budgets and experience. Called it as a non-starter from the get-go. Good thing too, probably would have blown up on the pad and never left earth.

I think they could have got quite a bit of funding from crowd sourcing with lower ambitions, such as having a crowd-sourced satellite to go to Mars to conduct research. They could pay some external company to do a lot of the engineering and just act as a middle-man.

Like the cube sats, offer to take other people's research/commercial projects all the way to Mars and you have yourself a semi-viable investment project. For the backers, allow them time on the satellite, name stuff, something on the satellite that stores something personal to them (perhaps digitally and transmitting it back to earth with a massive time delay) - I think people would be interested.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yet someone got paid and declared mission accomplished. Hilarious unless you were an investor. Maybe the engineers that worked at the company wrote really productive code in a really productive language. And the company offered amenities and benefits that were unlike anything else.

<comment><USER31> What engineers? AFAICR the team was six marketers... because it was a marketing stunt/scam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's like Fyre Festival, but in spaaaaace.

</comment><comment><USER33> Based on the AMAs the founder gave on Reddit, it looked like a scam to be honest.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/uta10/iama_founder_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/uta10/iama_founder_of_mars_one_settling_humans_on_mars/?sort=qa)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1tw2fy/i_am_bas_lansd...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1tw2fy/i_am_bas_lansdorp_cofounder_of_marsone_mankinds/?sort=qa)

</comment><comment><USER34> A lot of people who were looking forward to dying in space are going to be disappointed.

<comment><USER35> But to be honest, it sounds much more exciting to die in space than to die in a hospital.

<comment><USER36> If your goal is to die while having fun -- there are much cheaper alternatives available right here on Earth.

<comment><USER35> I didn't write fun, I wrote excitement. Taking drugs is fun, adventures are exciting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Bas Lansdorp was one of the supervisors for my BSc graduation group project at TU Delft. I had some interesting interactions with him and a few others affiliated with Mars One back then, before Mars One was on the table.

I think the whole Mars One story will make it into a Hollywood script, because there's been more drama than most good movies I've watched in recent times.

There are thoughts about the project that I'd rather not share publicly, especially since I also know one of the main authors of the MIT study that became the focus of a lot of the critique about the feasibility/viability of the entire project.

Safe to say, Mars exploration is hyper-complex because of complexity in a whole host of dimensions, not just technical/scientific. Mars One exemplifies that.

I'm involved in Mars analog simulations missions through the Austrian Space Forum [1], so I've got a pretty good reading of the complexity that goes into planning & operational excellence.

If I had to sum up the whole Mars One journey in one word, it would be: underestimation.

[1] [https://oewf.org](https://oewf.org)

<comment><USER38> The idea is so absurd I really hope it's a comedy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Personally, I'm waiting for the "put rocket boosters on Mars and fling it into Venus, re-enacting the impact that created the Moon and altering Venus's orbit to be approximately opposite of Earth's (but still safely far away), thus creating Earth-2" mission.

</comment><comment><USER40> I look forward to the Netflix documentary.

<comment><USER6> Mars One: The Greatest One-Way Trip to Mars that Never Happened

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> So many comments here are really depressing and lack a sense of adventure and romance. Yes, Mars One did not have a sound plan, but it inspired a certain kind of person who wants a grand adventure with impact. Mars to Stay is a legitimate idea and makes a lot of sense for colonization: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay)

The Mars One idea of turning the colonists life into a reality TV show would be the first reality TV show I'd ever want to watch and would make a fantastic documentary.

So, while Mars One was severely flawed, I think the Mars to Stay philosophy makes a lot of sense if we want to colonize Mars.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uqKGREZs6-w](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uqKGREZs6-w)

<comment><USER42> > So many comments here are really depressing and lack a sense of adventure > and romance.

(Since you are not replying to any specific such posts, I assume you are referring to those who point out that this was expected because Mars One was clearly not viable.)

Adventure and romance are good, and can be communicated through fiction, sky castle thinktanks, forums for interested people, etc. Pretending to actually _do_ it is not necessary.

Lying to people and siphoning money out of crowdfunding can not be excused by "at least they made it sound fun". That's what _all_ fraudsters do - they sell a dream and remove your money.

<comment><USER41> As I pointed out in my comment, Mars One didn't have a sound plan. Like most others following the effort, I thought it was a scam meant to enrich Bas Lansdorp. That they are a scam isn't news: everyone knew this. I'd guess that most of the donors even knew this.

That said, I think the idea of a one-way Mars colonization mission has a lot of merit, as long as there is some chance of survival. "Mars to Stay" as a one-way trip is something that has many proponents, most famously Buzz Aldrin. The one good thing about Mars One is that they got people talking about this proposition and doing a deeper analysis of how it could be achieved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't know much about this subject so excuse a naive question: why Mars and why not the asteroid belts where I have read that there are raw materials and large amounts of ice? Is it because of negative health effects living in zero gravity and/or problems creating artificial gravity with rotation?

</comment><comment><USER44> Great podcast about this, although I'm halfway spoiling it by telling you it's about Mars One.

[http://loveandradio.org/2014/05/hostile- planet/](http://loveandradio.org/2014/05/hostile-planet/)

</comment><comment><USER45> I, for one, am shocked that these guys couldn't crowdfund their way to Mars. After all, it only cost NASA (frantically punching numbers into a 4-function desk calculator) $315bn to get to the Moon in current dollars. I mean, that's only 77x total funds raised on Kickstarter to date. Perhaps they should have added the Kupier Belt as a stretch goal?

<comment><USER46> While I agree with your point on this, just to play devil's advocate I have to point out that a lot has changed since the 1960's. We have designed more efficient rockets, we have much better computer guidance systems, we have much lighter-weight synthetic materials that could save on fuel, etc. Conceivably if we were to go to the Moon today, it would be substantially cheaper.

That said, I did feel like this project was overly ambitious. Even with my previous points, rockets are expensive, and space R&D is pricey.

<comment><USER47> _Conceivably if we were to go to the Moon today, it would be substantially cheaper._

This seems contrary to experience. In constant dollars, a jetliner today is 5-10X the price of a jetliner of the 1960s. Mass transit rail miles are >10X. The solutions may be better, but they don't seem to be cheaper.

Launch costs do seem to have fallen quite a bit in very recent history though. So maybe?

<comment><USER48> Jet technology is much more complex to meet environmental, safety and efficiency goals. Fuel was much cheaper in the 1960's, I wonder what the cost of a jet is in terms of it's operating life?

Rail and other ground works have got much more expensive as labour costs (in the developed world) have risen. I expect that rail costs in China are not 10x? I would be interested to know !

In term of moonshots I think that safety and risk would mean that a modern mission would be much more expensive than Apollo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams What would concern me is if they did managed to get people to Mars, then went bankrupt, leaving no new supplies being sent across.

</comment><comment><USER49> Nobody wanted 1-way trips to Mars? Shocking.

<comment><USER50> Apparently a good number did! Which baffles me... why would you want that? Sounds like a very odd death trap with no resources, economy, services, entrertainnent, ability to travel, etc etc.

<comment><USER51> Why would you want a one-way trip out of a uterus onto this planet called Earth? It's ultimately a death trap. Oh, has resources, economy, services, entertainment and travel: for a privileged minority.

<comment><USER52> Earth is a death-trap since no one lives forever, some people just like the chance of doing something more substantial than working a 9-5 job every day and then dying on the same planet they were born on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Does anyone remember Dennis Tito's Inspiration Mars Foundation?

</comment><comment><USER54> Even extraordinarily exorbitant fads finally fade.

</comment><comment> ng-user This reminds me of the Fyre documentary.

</comment><comment><USER55> Just to go out on a limb here, I am guessing that the "one way" bit put a bit of a kink in their marketing efforts...

</comment><comment><USER56> Perhaps the point of this was to build a database of people who are demonstrably gullible, to be targets of future scams.

</comment><comment><USER57> How did I not see this coming

</comment><comment><USER58> Fraud

</comment><comment><USER59> just Yesterday I commented on another article here about space colonialization being alchemy of our times and I got downvoted. And Today this...

<comment><USER52> But unlike alchemy, space colonization is actually technologically possible, it's just prohibitively expensive and would likely take global cooperation to make it possible -- which won't happen without some clear extinction threat to Earth and given the response to the threat of global climate change, I'm skeptical that enough people would believe scientists claiming that we're a decade from a life-ending asteroid strike.

<comment><USER47> Alchemy is certainly possible with today's technology, and has been done:

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

It's not cost effective, but it is cheaper than space colonization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> There can't be a Mars colony without a legal code for Mars. Shanghai in the 1930's is the existing framework. It didn't work then, and it won't work now.

See, marslegalcode.org.

</comment><comment><USER61> Gosh, what a surprise. I'm sure this saga will convince the general public of the need to be more sceptical about pie-in-the-sky bullshit in the future, and nobody will ever fall for pseudo-scientific scams again.

Now, if you'll excuse me I'm just going to go for a quick jaunt on the Hyperloop.

</comment><comment><USER62> As long as everybody is investing their time, money and health as free choice I think it's a good thing and we should support them.

Of course it's a pipe dream. Of course people will dump sh*tloads of money for no results. Of course people will die if they really start doing stuff like this. But is there really a way to achieve such kind of goal without such sacrifices?

<comment><USER63> By that logic, we should celebrate Madoff for sacrificing other people's money. I don't think it's unreasonable for society to set limits on the scams and cons businesses are allowed to be based on.

<comment><USER62> Let's say you are right. Then we should discuss why Mars One is a scam and SpaceX isn't. And just saying "SpaceX has succeeded until now" is not really cutting it. Being a billionaire and probably having quite some parental and silicon valley network to make use of, Musk simply also had much better odds. But this is not something you or I couldn't have guessed when Mars One started. It's quite obvious.

So from what I can see you can't say one is a scam and the other isn't. Both are a gamble and the one succeeded until now while the other hasn't. A scam is, when they didn't even try to do anything. Or when they used the money to buy yachts instead of financing space base science. Is there something like this? If they sold a pipe dream and worked hard to try to make it become reality, imho, it's not enough to call it a scam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm surprised at the negativity on this on a startup accelerator's site where "a small chance of success" \- Gimli style - means game on.

At my org, we've had one of these round 3 candidates give a talk about it and the interview and training process they went through seemed like no joke. It seemed to me that if you were to start a company with the final selectees, it would be hard to fail.

<comment><USER65> I think there are a lot of people on here who think that "conquering space" is a giant distraction from the many very real problems that exist here on Earth that can actually be solved by self-sustaining businesses.

<comment><USER66> I think such thinking is very short-sighted. Space exploration is necessary. It satisfies human curiosity, a very innate need among humans, one of the reasons why our species has been very successful so far.

That there are real problems that exist here on the Earth somehow does not preclude space exploration. Space exploration and solving problems on the Earth are not mutually exclusive activities. They can both be done in parallel and sometimes one helps the other and vice versa.

<comment><USER67> On the other hand, any argument which proposes that we should explore space _because_ we are unable to solve problems on Earth is entirely foolhardy and fantastical.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


BMW executive says electric cars will always cost more than conventional cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/motoring/motoring-news/the-reason-why-electric-cars-will-always-be-expensive/news-story/8f8d81ac872578ad665a264c91b17505 <comment><USER2> If I were BMW, I wouldn't let that executive anywhere near electric car development projects. Ingrained biases have a way of getting traction while making choices during development.

Edit: Oh he's the exec (board member!?) in charge of development.. probably some miscommunication, but now there seems like multiple things of off there.</comment>