Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/ <comment><USER2> As I was dissatisfied by their provided graphs, I made up my own using R & Kaplan Meier Survival tools to determine how long I could expect a hard drive to "survive".

[https://medium.com/@simonerni/dissecting-backblaze-hard- driv...](https://medium.com/@simonerni/dissecting-backblaze-hard-drive- stats-2017-17a90089a2e8)

</comment><comment><USER3> I love these posts - so much that when my laptop died for a few days, I immediately signed up for Backblaze backup when it came back to life.

<comment><USER4> Glad we could help!

<comment><USER5> Within the last month I had to do a full 2TB recovery using 50GB to 150GB recovery files.. truly a life saver!

I was able to completely start from scratch with a clean widnows install and a new HDD after one day my computer just straight up died (zero HDD activity at all).

So.. thanks!

<comment><USER6> how much time it took to download 2 TB

<comment><USER7> Blackblaze supports FedexNet. Latency is atrosious, but its bandwidth is hard to beat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody know why they still use so many Seagate and WD models when the HGST seem to have the better reliability?

Am I reading the stats wrong or are other factors involved like higher prices or so?

<comment><USER9> As well as the risk/cost calculation already mentioned, it makes sense to spread over multiple manufacturers to allow for sudden problems with the one that is currently most reliable. If HGST has a huge production problem now that doesn't make its effects known until silly high rates of failure occur a year down the line, backblaze and other large storage providers would have a sudden glut of replacements to manage (possibly pro-active replacements, or even worse the expense of bulking up their redundancy level at least temporarily to mitigate the extra risk). Spreading over multiple manufacturers limits the impact of situations like this.

<comment><USER10> It's also very beneficial to spread data across different drive manufacturers. If, for example, a particular HGST model starts to have massive failure problems in a year (massive at this scale would be like 20% failure rates), well, at least you still have a healthy population of Seagate/WD drives where the data on the HGST drives is also replicated to.

I wouldn't be remotely shocked if the Backblaze software takes drive model into account in data placement.

In addition to that, it makes sense from a purchasing perspective to spread your purchases around to many vendors. Make sure that Hitachi knows that they're not irreplaceable if they don't give you a good enough price you'll just buy more Seagate drives. Make Seagate always be worried that if you shifted enough purchasing to HGST they'll cut you a really good deal and potentially undercut Seagate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know they don't use SSD due to cost and it's probably excessive performance for their needs. But I wonder how their costs compare when you factor in the density and energy efficiencies. You could fit a lot of silicon in the space a storage post has for 45 3.5" drives. I found their 2014 blog post about a 500PB new datacenter, and their recent 2018 post is about crossing 500PB. So does storage per sqr/foot ever matter or is it just better to get another DC?

<comment><USER12> A spinning disk dissipates about 6W on average, for 100 000 disks that's 600kw. With an average of 0.12 USD paid for a kwh times 24 hours, their energy bill is less than 2000 USD a day. Their HDD cost based on the "81.76 — The number of hard drives that were installed each day in 2017." and we know they mostly now do 8TB at roughly 0.02 USD per GB according to [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per- gigabyte/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/) which is 13000 USD a day. That means even if we had SSDs at zero watts, they would need to be (13+2/13) ~ 15% more expensive than HDDs in order to break even but if you look at [https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard- drive/](https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/) you will see it's still about 8 times as expensive. Obviously there's some savings due to floor space but the savings are going to be really low there. And this is just the economics side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There a webinar link at the bottom, might be interesting

[https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14807/300531?utm_source=B...](https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14807/300531?utm_source=Backblaze- blog&utm_medium=brighttalk&utm_campaign=300531)

in case people didn't see

</comment><comment><USER14> Neat! One of the RAID mirror drives at home is showing some pre-failure signs, so I'm looking to insert a hot spare. I guess HGST or Toshiba is the way to go!

<comment><USER15> Not necessarily.

One nice thing about this report is they take into account the low statistics in some of their drive models and represent that as confidence intervals. If you look at the second table, 8TB HGST and 5TB Toshiba have a wide uncertainty due to them having tested fewer of these drives so far. Their data can not yet tell us if the AFR for these drives are significantly different from others.

They do have many of the smaller 4TB HGST and so have tight uncertainty on them and they are indeed low AFR. So if that size is suitable then it's a no brainer choice. But, if bigger capacities are needed and looking at the high confidence limit column, the 6TB and 8TB Seagate models are safer bets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems to be down... I suppose we are all jumping on it to see what to buy next :-)

<comment><USER4> Yev from Backblaze -> Heh, clear cache and try again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Since atYevP often comments on these posts here on HN, I thought I will use this opportunity to ask few questions about two of their products. And I am also asking because such questions usually get sidestepped elsewhere or maybe it just seems so :-)

Hi Yev,

1\. Months ago when CrashPlan shut its doors to individual customers you (and a founder) had mentioned you guys are planning on (possibly) changing the data deletion and version/data retention policy of BackBlaze to something less outrageous. Any update on that?

2\. Also, there have been mentions of letting users use the BackBlaze backup app (or some other app by BackBlaze) where they can set the destination/sink to a B2 account, set rules regarding what to backup, frequency, retention, pruning etc. Users will pay for what they use - essentially fixing many of the "point 1" complaints (mentioned above). Any updates on this either? (And no other integrated apps so far just don't cut it)

3\. Adding a proper restore interface to the standard backup app - with proper pause and resume of course, and with option of saving to a location specified by the user (you can actually just copy CrashPlan on this :P); and not just limiting users to the browser restore interface or shipping the hard disk.

Past threads:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125340)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15072866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15072866)

<comment><USER12> While you might have some legit grief with the service Backblaze provides, I would recommend toning the accusatory tone down by several notches. "questions sidestepped" "outrageous" etc. This is a courteous place.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps it would also be courteous to read balladeers comment more charitably, it hardly seems right to describe it as "accusatory" or to accuse him of presenting loaded questions.

He asked some perfectly reasonable questions for which he presumably was unable to get answers elsewhere, hence "sidestepped". Pointing out that he finds a policy "outrageous" is hardly rude.</comment></comment></comment>


Unikernels with OPS running is faster and more secure than Docker Containers - <AUTHOR> https://zeroequalsfalse.press/posts/unikernels-faster-than-docker-container#.XHlu7Kgcqc8.hackernews <comment><USER2> It looks cool. Will try it sometime.

Anyways, here are some better links which won't pressurize your eyes as much as the original article:

[https://nanovms.gitbook.io/ops/faq](https://nanovms.gitbook.io/ops/faq)

[https://nanovms.gitbook.io/ops/](https://nanovms.gitbook.io/ops/)

And, here: code examples: [https://nanovms.gitbook.io/ops/examples](https://nanovms.gitbook.io/ops/examples)</comment>


Why Chicago / Midwest Never Will (Nor Should) Become SV - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldbusinesschicago.com/techcluster

<comment><AUTHOR> Edit: I'm the co-author on this, and am happy to answer questions, since even in the report, we had to censor things for political reasons.

As someone trying to do a startup in the health-tech space, it's disappointing to see the "Me-Too" atmosphere in the Midwest. I wish I could find some technical people who felt the same way.</comment>


Facebook: We Are Not Building a Phone - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/09/19/facebook-we-are-not-building-a-phone/

<comment><USER2> Surprise no one is calling out TC on their BS, yet again.

Lets face it, TC is a tech tabloid and HN's fascination with TC (majority story makes FP) is akin to teenager's fascination with celebrity gossip magazine.

No substance, nothing insightful, just pure unadulterated BS. And HN is all over it, every-time.

<comment><USER3> I'm very confused about the hatred. TC has a very very good track record.

It's the only credible source of leaks that I pay attention to. They're actually on the pulse of the tech industry, unlike say Wired or Gizmodo or whatever, that don't really report anything original of worth.

<comment><USER2> > They're actually on the pulse of the tech industry, unlike say Wired or > Gizmodo or whatever, that don't really report anything original of worth.

I think you mean "startup news" (which is open to debate). AFA actual "Tech news" is concerned they regurgitate whatever link they stumbled upon on their RSS feed and rewrite the whole thing often without bothering to even cite original source.

It boggles my mind that anyone would even consider TC "pulse of tech industry".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From [http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-non-denial- denial-w...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-non-denial-denial-we- are-not-building-a-phone-2010-9)

 _"...no one actually thinks Facebook is building an ACTUAL phone, or that it's manufacturing anything.

What people are saying is that Facebook is doing some major work with Android software to make it a Facebook-flavored platform, so Facebook could have much more control over the mobile industry than it does today. This is probably being done entirely inside Facebook, without any help from Google, which is the enemy.

And I don't see any denial of that in Facebook's statement -- just that the company admitting that Facebook is "integrating deeply into existing platforms and operating systems," which is the story in the first place."_

So yeah, seems plausible that the PR spokesperson was just putting up interference.

<comment><USER5> I made a similar comment in the thread on the TC article, but Facebook did that last year. My Motorola Droid didn't have Facebook branding, but it was fully integrated with Facebook (even if it lacked a decent way to browse Facebook.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's what Apple said.

<comment><USER7> Did they?

<comment><USER8> Yes. And so did google.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706814>

<comment><USER9> I know Google did, e.g. here's a 2007 story on that: [http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/general/108490/google- denies-...](http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/general/108490/google-denies- reports-of-iphone-rival)

I can't find any explicit denials by Apple, though. Digging through some 2005-2006 news archives, I find Apple denying some specific rumors, but neither confirming nor denying whether they would come out with a phone in general.

<comment><USER10> They (Apple) were actually working on a phone in 2005 which they announced in September of that year - the first "iPhone" before the iPhone - <http://direct.motorola.com/hellomoto/rokr/>. Of course, that turned out to be a crapfest noone was happy about and Jobs couldn't help wincing even while presenting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Exploring and investigating are much different than building + launching a phone. This could be in early prototype/exploratory phases at Facebook. That doesn't mean they will go ahead and launch it to the public by any means.

</comment><comment><USER12> They may be or may not be.

However if Facebook perceive Google as their biggest competitor it would make sense for them to explore ways to have more control over how Android users access their services.

If Android does become the dominant smartphone platform, controlled by Google, then it could be used as an effective weapon against Facebook - or a way for Google to (finally) launch a successful social service. Its logical for Facebook to try and mitigate this business risk.

<comment><USER13> It makes sense for FB to want to control the distribution channels, and given their size and the importance of mobile, doing a FB phone is a plausible strategy. Considering the games that go on with some manufacturers (Apple) and the various carriers, FB should be concerned about its weak hold on the mobile channel.

Whether that means FB branded phones, deals with carriers for preferred placement or access, or something else is hard to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is just one thing to add to the list of stories TechCrunch has completely made up.

</comment><comment><USER15> mmm... next they will say that nobody wants to read books on a tablet...

</comment><comment><USER16> These are not the droids you are looking for...</comment>


Ask HN: How to market an iphone math game for kids of 2-7 - <AUTHOR>

We've published 11 apps on iTunes (http://BokanTech.com/iphone/), among them,
1). "Eye Test" & "Cute Math" featured on iTunes since Feb 3rd and Jan 29th respectively (less than 1% apps could be selected by Apples to be featured on iTunes)
2). "Galaxy Impact" once ranked No 10 on "Top Free Apps" in Game, and No 20 on "Top Free Apps" overall during Nov 2 - 9, 2008
3). "Eye Test" is currently ranked No 1 on "Top Paid Apps" in Medical
4). "Cute Math" is currently ranked No 3 on "Top Paid Apps" in Education (No 2 last week)
5). "Galaxy Impact II: Ignite" has been pirated on appulo.us one week after being published on iTunes.
All above is achieved without any marketing effort.
As result, we have not seen as strong income as there should be
Our team is very technical, innovative and artistic but very weak in marketing.
My question is, what's the right or best way to market our iphone game, particularly the kid game "Cute Math"?
Or is there any marketing guru willing to partner with us on this or help us partner with large organizations like Scholastic or EdHelper? Here's my email: firstname.lastname@example.com if you want to talk privately.
Thanks a lot in advance! <comment><USER2> Off-topic: How many 2-7 kids own a mobile phone in US?(Not iPhone)

I am not sure about in US. But, you are definitely targeting the wrong market in my country Malaysia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually this game is intended to be played by kids under watch of their parents or tutors. My personal experience and comments from current users show that a lot of kids just like it and it's hard for me to get my iPhone back once my kid start playing it. There's definitely a market for it, as we have seen thousands of downloads after "Cute Math" being featured on iTunes in less than one week. But the market might not be big, as you point out.</comment></comment>


Why no comments on job postings? - <AUTHOR>

Given that a lot of people know other developers, it would be great if we could add comments on HN job postings to recommend people. <comment><USER2> I suspect the reason there are no comments is that the listings appear as a service for YC companies. By the nature of comment threads, someone may moan about the company or the wording of its listing, or there will be some other random tangent, and it will distract from the desired candidate-finding benefit for the company.

Relaying names directly to the listing contact info, or relaying the listing to the candidate, is probably a better approach -- the fact that a specific person is available or being considered is often a matter deserving discretion.</comment>


How to make things happen - <AUTHOR> http://www.daed.com/ResearchToolbox.pdf

<comment><USER2> There's some really helpful stuff there -- thanks for posting!</comment>


Future world wheat crops threatened by Ug99 stem rust - <AUTHOR> http://www.farmandranchguide.com/articles/2008/03/13/ag_news/production_news/pro10.txt

<comment><AUTHOR> The way scientists currently combat rusts is they go down to northern Mexico each winter to survey the new strains each year so they can try to create pesticides and resistant wheat strains accordingly. The reason they go to Mexico is that the wheat grows there first, and then in Texas and the other border states when it gets a little warmer, and then finally you get the wheat crop in midwest and Canada. The spores are produced first in Mexico and then blow northwards and infect the new wheat in each climate region as it begins to grow. However, Ug99 is able to completely destroy 99% of the world's wheat population. If someone were to bring a single teaspoon of this stuff back from the middle east and put it in just the right field in northern Mexico then the potential exists to destroy a very large percentage of the north american wheat crop. Really scary stuff. It's been in the news this week because the Gates foundation just gave Cornell a 26 million dollar grant to work on the problem:

[http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/April08/wheat.rust.lm.ht...](http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/April08/wheat.rust.lm.html)</comment>


Netflix's Open Connect Appliances - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592590450 <comment><USER3> Isn't this just a CDN? ISPs quite happily host Akamai and Google nodes -- are they being paid for maintenance of those? Empirically, from an old job, the answer is _no_ (in fact, we had to petition for quite a while to get some Google boxen), but that's in a country at the tail end of a long, long pipe. Is it different in the US?

<comment><USER4> What this article is describing sounds like a colocation agreement which is a quite common service offered by ISPs and is typically paid for by a monthly rental fee calculated by storage size, dedicated bandwidth use and power consumption.

<comment><USER5> It's not the same. If I want Verizon to host my server, they have nothing to gain, but I do. So, yes, they should charge me. If instead they host a CDN server for a big content provider, they save money on routing content within their network.

<comment><USER6> That's not always the case though. Sometimes rack space is more valuable to ISPs than improving bandwidth efficiency via CDN co-location deals. It really depends how much space you've got to spare and who else wants it.

<comment><USER7> a friendly ISP always has rack space.. When you own a few data centers for yourself space is easy to come by.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could someone explain to me (it's been a long day, and I'm no storage expert!) how these are useful, wouldn't you need a whole bunch of these at each location they are to be installed?

Just basing this on my own experience I have 12 drives in RAID which have a fairly substantial sequential throughput. Start multiple streams of high bandwidth videos and the maximum throughput from the drives drops sharply due to the random reads.

I would have assumed that having even 100 people streaming from a single box would be an interesting challenge.

<comment><USER9> These things can pump out 12Gbit during peak viewing, which is enough for about 4,000 avg. 3 Mbit streams.

If they can cram in 256GB of DRAM, that's enough room for a 64MB buffer per stream, or about 170 seconds worth of streaming. Now you only need to be able to fill those buffers at a rate of about 24/second.

I'm assuming whatever file system is on the disks uses a massive block size, so the number of seeks you'd have to perform to pull 64MB off is probably pretty low. Eight? Sixteen? Even if it's the latter, that's only 384 seeks/second, which you could very plausibly do striped over only a half dozen disks, and the device presumably has many more.

<comment><USER10> > I'm assuming whatever file system is on the disks...

Netflix uses UFS+J on FreeBSD 10.

Here are some notes from their talk at NYCBSDCon 2014:

\- 400,000 stream files per appliance.

\- 5,000 - 25,000 client streams per appliance.

\- 300 - 500 streams coming off each disk all the time.

\- Attempt to buffer 1MB ahead, but caching is futile.

\- Result is completely random disk workload.

\- System becomes limited by disk latency and CPU load.

Video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5U4wr86L4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5U4wr86L4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone explain why an ISP would push back Netflix installing one of these boxes? Does the ISP want Netflix service congestion to better sell its own media assets/distribution (i.e. cable TV)?

<comment><USER12> Based on the blog posts by Level 3 -- how much internal capacity Comcast / Verizon say they have versus what Level 3 sees for utilization at their peering points with both ISPs -- I would have to assume "yes".

<comment><USER13> Can you please post a link? This sounds very interesting...

<comment><USER14> Here's a link to one of the blog posts: [http://blog.level3.com/global- connectivity/verizons-accident...](http://blog.level3.com/global- connectivity/verizons-accidental-mea-culpa/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd be interested to find out more of hardware details of these devices. 100+ TB of storage in a 4U is pretty respectable. From the images in the article, it looks like the drives are _not_ hot-swappable, so I'd guess Netflix is able to remotely track loss of redundancy and will just send out an entire replacement unit when needed.

For comparison, Supermicro makes one of the highest-density storage servers that I'm aware of[1]. 72 3.5" drives in 36 drive bays, so up to 288tB of raw storage, if you're brave enough to use 4tB drives.

[1] [http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-E1R72L2K.cfm)

<comment><USER16> > It looks like the drives are not hot-swappable,

That's correct.

> so I'd guess Netflix is able to remotely track loss of redundancy and will > just send out an entire replacement unit when needed.

Exactly. If a drive dies, the capacity of that box is just reduced. Once enough drives die, the box gets an RMA.

<comment><USER15> > Exactly. If a drive dies, the capacity of that box is just reduced.

So not even redundancy? Just cope with losing whatever media happened to be on the dead drive?

<comment><USER17> The box is effectively one giant cache. If you lose a drive you can get the movie back from the main distribution network.

The article also mentions the box stores multiple copies of done things for increased throughput on popular titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From my understanding, these boxes are basically local copies of the entire Netflix online catalog - a catalog that frequently changes. How do these ~15,000 machines pick up new content? I assume they synchronize with the Netflix mothership every once in a while.

My question (without any intent to trivialize what Netflix is doing) is, isn't that just a good-old caching system?

But it makes me wonder if it would be possible to create a distributed, localized caching system? For example, if I watch The Avengers, my machine could be configured to cache a part (or all) of the movie. The more people watch it, the more it is distributed. Since Netflix can correlate location data with what movies are watched, they can target certain areas to cache certain movies more aggressively. When the next person in my neighborhood watches The Avengers, they would pull part of the movie from me (maybe the beginning until the rest buffers) and cache another part of it themselves for the next person in line. That way all the people in my neighborhood or adjacent neighborhoods don't have to pull the entire movie across the internet every time - instead, we help each other watch movies with higher quality.

On second thought, this may not be cheap considering the amount of development that may be required (and, at the end of the day, someone has to pay for this storage - although Netflix could, for example, offer personal mini-caching boxes in exchange for a monthly discount), but it's fun to dream about a sanctioned, decentralized, peer-to-peer movie service.

<comment><USER19> So, Bittorrent ?

It _would_ be a perfect setup (much much better than sending the same stream through the same lines just because 2 persons are watching the same show)

The problem here is not technical (Bittorrent solves that) the problem is societal: for most of the content that is of interest to population, you are not allowed to redistribute it. So Netflix has to DRM-protect the content for everyone, meaning that the actual content that transits on the line has to be different, meaning that you can't redistribute it (since it's targeted to you, no one else could decode it).

If you want to see how much the technical side works, take a look at PopcornTime.

<comment><USER18> As I wrote that comment, BitTorrent came to mind with all the societal implications that carries (that's what I meant by "sanctioned" in the last sentence)

I haven't really explored PopCorn Time but I'll take a look.

With regards to DRM, the content must be de-protected before you watch it - <USER2> if Netflix installed a mini-box on my network, they could decrypt it to let me watch the show, and encrypt it to store on the device before it is sent to someone else. The key itself could be retrieved from the a centralized server.

If I think about it some more, there really is no need to keep an _entire_ Netflix catalog in every location. As I mentioned, they have usage data and a strong prediction system too, so predicting the next show that will be watched in an area and even when would be "straight-forward" (In quotes because it wouldn't be easy for me to do it, but I think it would be easy for Netflix).

Another thing Netflix could try is pre-fetching shows during off-hours. That would work well for binge show watchers, and reduce peak time traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If the ISPs are reclassified as common carriers, will they still be allowed to let Netflix install those boxes?

Presumably there is limited space in the ISP data center, so they cannot let everyone who wants to stick a box in there do so, so I'm wondering what methods a common carrier can use to decide which content providers can have access, and how this fundamentally differs from the "fast lanes" that common carrier status is supposed to prevent.

<comment><USER21> Maybe they can come up with a rule like the box must save 2 Gbps of peak hour bandwidth per U.

From the ISP's perspective they are hosting these boxes to save money, not improve performance. If performance happens to improve (ahem) that's a convenient side effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting to see some more details on the appliances. Isn't the argument primarily about peering, not open connect appliances, though?

<comment><USER21> It's all one discussion in my mind. There are three ways to get Netflix: boxes, peering, or transit (from cheapest to most expensive). If peering saves the ISP money and the boxes save even more money, why are some ISPs refusing to use them?

<comment><USER23> Because some ISPs are trying to maximize their revenue by charging Netflix directly.

There are a few other legitimate reasons as well. Some ISPs dislike hosting hardware that they don't own in their data centre. Or it may be that an ISP has contracts in place that commit the ISP to certain bandwidth costs, so removing Netflix traffic may not actually save them money.

<comment><USER24> Why shouldn't an ISP charge Netflix to host a box in their datacenter? I'd charge you a fee if you wanted to store your DVDs in my house, even if you let me watch them.

<comment><USER21> Because the box saves the ISP more money than its hosting costs.

<comment><USER25> On the other hand, if the ISP also runs a video service, they've got some very compelling reasons to do everything they can to not increase the quality of service for Netflix. They're green, and rectangular, and...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What stops an unscrupulous ISP from making a timely copy of all his favorite movies?

<comment><USER27> Same applies to all other CDNs that ISPs host?

Although this makes a fairly rich target of concentrated content ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Lot of mistakes in this article, afair it can't hold all the movies but just the most popular. [http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment- Guide.pd...](http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pdf)

" Each appliance stores a portion of the catalog, which in general is less than the complete content library for a given region. Popularity changes, new titles being added to the service, and re- encoded movies are all part of the up to 7.5TB of nightly updates each cache must download to remain current. We recommend setting up a download window during off-peak hours when there is sufficient free capacity."

<comment><USER29> "But wait, you say. That'd be all fine and dandy if Netflix was etched in stone, but it's not! They add and remove stuff all the time! That's right, which is why most OCAs take a 7.5TB update. Every. Freaking. Day.

"If you had to take a 7.5TB update on your home internet, you would be screwed. According to Ookla's Net Index, the average download speed in the United States is 18.6Mbps. So with an average connection, that 7.5TB would take you about 40 days to chew through.

"Fortunately, data centers tend to have a little more speed to work with. A firehose, compared to your bendy straw. So Netflix recommends a much shorter 10-hour span (from 2AM to noon, local time) where these boxes can soak up their updates with 1.2Gbps connections. That is to say, 'Google Fiber speeds.'"

Source: TFA.

<comment><USER30> I'm sure thought has been put into it. I just wonder why the OCAs aren't caches? I'd imagine a cache you be a lot more (mostly bandwidth) efficient for the ISPs and scale much better.

I request a stream. It's proxied through the device. It's not present on the device. So the device requests the 1080P from Netflix. It transcodes the stream it receives on-the-fly and sends me whatever quality I require while writing both the original and my lower-quality version to disk.

I mean maybe the limitation in that plan is the number of streams that could be transcoded simultaneously. So maybe instead the on-the-fly version isn't cached. Because I may need to switch quality on-the-fly. So maybe instead jobs are just queued up for the 5 or so formats required based on the 1080P download and they can process on spare transcoders opportunistically.

Just interesting to think through it as a programming problem. I'm sure the people working on this are very smart. It just seems really heavy on the bandwidth utilization as is.

<comment><USER31> I can think of reasons why a pure cache would impose costs that are too high -- namely, the device would then be writing during times of very read load.

But: I agree with your bigger point, that it's an interesting programming problem.

We're all familiar with CPU caches, so it's interesting mental exercise to think of this as the same system, but optimized for a different part of design space.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How We Could Write Better CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.colmtuite.com/we-all-eat-from-the-same-bowl

<comment><USER2> When you get to the level of abstraction demonstrated in the Facebook Margins example, you have so many classes for each element that you may as well go back to inline styles.

This also enables inconsistent UI in the front-end: some of my page-headers can have .mbl "Large bottom margins" and some could have .mbs "Small bottom margins".

<comment><USER3> You're right that this example is no more semantic than inline styles, but that's the extent of the similarities.

If you want to update all the large margins across the app, you can do that in one place. That wouldn't be possible using inline styles.

You can also enforce style guide standards. Only three margin sizes are allowed: small, medium, large. Inline styles obviously allow for much more variability.

<comment><USER4> > If you want to update all the large margins across the app, you can do that > in one place. That wouldn't be possible using inline styles.

Sure can, your pages are generated, generate the styles from config or constants. There, I fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Deeply nested CSS selectors in the source (like the ones in your MixPanel examples) are often a sign of CSS preprocessors in use. Using a tool like LESS or Stylus, MixPanel is probably including mixins in their styles that allow them the same modular flexibility you describe _without_ cluttering the HTML with confusing, non-semantic classes like "mrm".

Edit: your site's visual design is awesome, btw

<comment><USER6> This * 1000.

Just because the output isn't 100% optimal doesn't mean the input isn't sane, maintainable, or clean.

<comment><USER7> The same could be said of facebook. MRM means Margin Right Medium (it may be that originally it was "Margin-Right-Medium" but the compressor made the substitution to "MRM").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't completely agree with author's opinion.

I think the Facebook Way (tm) has its pros, but using page-level specificity is a great way to avoid specificity hell.

To be more specific, for a site with vastly different pages, it's best to have page or section level class that limits the scope of each css definition, so the person making change to one section of the site will not accidentally break other pages. Also, with little base style, there is less need to override styles with more specificity.

For such a site, CSS like this tend to be easier to maintain:

#home-page h2 { /* home page title styles _/ }

.news-item h3 { /_ news item title _/ }

#widget-page h2 { /_ widget page title _/ }

.widget-item h3 { /_ individual widget title */ }

<comment><USER9> I agree this is a better way to do things, but if we want to be page-specific, why not use separate style sheets? I know we are supposed minimize the number of http requests but is having 2 external style sheets (1 for global styles and 1 for page-specific styles) really too many? It will prevent parsing every style for the entire site on every page load whether the page needs it nor not, plus decrease collisions and other maintenance problems caused by too much CSS in one bucket.

<comment><USER10> I think you both have missed the point.

When you code CSS the "facebook way" :(, you don't have to worry about bleeding effects.

Want your h1 to have a margin of 35px or whatever? You give it the class large-margin or something. You don't have to worry about affecting other h1's, because they have the classes specific to the way they should be styled.

When you style in the way the root comment is suggesting, you do have to worry about bleeding styles, because selecting h1 tags in one section may also style an additional h1 tag you didn't mean to style.

The whole point is: don't select specific elements to style, rather, create classes of types of styles, and, when creating an element, select the classes of styles you want the elements to have. This way you don't worry about bleeding styles, each element has the classes representing how they are supposed to be styled, and you will never accidently over-select elements.

<comment><USER10> I see I slightly missed the root commenter's point myself.

There's a trade-off of consistency across your site. I personally think it's not a good design choice to encourage different pages to have different style sheets.

Anyways if you want more specific styles, don't create specific selectors, instead create more specifically named classes so you don't lose the positive properties of the facebook way (Can we please get a better name?).

<comment><USER8> My examples must be misleading, I'm not against creating classes.

All I'm trying to say, is that in some cases (i.e. when you only need a particular set of styles for a single page/section), limiting the scope of those style definition can help dealing with specificity hell / bleeding styles, and make the application more maintainable.

Obviously, this is a trade-off, a big one if you want your site to be consistent across pages. But there will be occasions where one or more page of a site/app is vastly different from other pages.

<comment><USER10> Selecting element types rather than creating new classes is what causes bleeding styles.

<comment><USER9> Until you get class-name collisions or your classes are applied to elements by other developers without you knowing. So you create more unique classes and every element ends up having 12 classes applied to it. Classes are no solution to bleeding styles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is a few years behind the latest best practice.

What this is is basically "Object Oriented CSS" that became popular years ago and was later refuted by many in the community for it's numerous downsides, namely in maintenance cost, code-clutter and slow performance on old browsers and mobile.

With a preprocessor like SASS you can have OO and have semantic class names. Take that margin example. You could define class names that add varying types of margins. But you don't use them in HTML. You create a semantic class for specific use cases that @extend's the margin class you need.

Now you have the best of both worlds. Less, semantic class names, with the flexibility and consistency of the OO style.

</comment><comment><USER12> while the mixpanel CSS is awful, the facebook CSS is not much better. any time you have to use a class that is descriptive of what the element should look like (for instance, .mas, which presumably stands for Margin All Small), you've tightly coupled the structure to the presentation and failed at CSS. While the article gets the idea mostly right, the counterexamples it uses are just as bad practice.

<comment><USER13> The Facebook CSS is so utterly specific that they may as well use style attributes directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think there's a big need for an agreed upon standard for writing CSS. There's a lot of beginner stuff out there, but what sorely lacks is an idiomatic way to write proper CSS. You should write base styles and extend them, but to what extent? How should you group the properties? Heck, how should you structure the whole thing?

We need this. I've been thinking the same thing as the author for quite some time, I'm glad someone has at least put the idea out there.

<comment><USER15> I think [http://smacss.com](http://smacss.com) is what you're looking for.

<comment><USER14> Thank you! I never heard of this, it's exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Endorsed! I am also a SMACSS fan. And I say "Keep the specificity minimum" as a mechanic to write more maintainable and scalable CSS. I also have another mechanic - "Don't nest CSS", and here's my explanation for why: [http://sriharisriraman.in/blog/2013/09/08/dont-nest- css/](http://sriharisriraman.in/blog/2013/09/08/dont-nest-css/)

<comment><USER16> Not to mention, nested is always slower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice article! One more important reason why to use class instead of tags: CSS rules are read from right to left. That means the browser will first gather all the h[1-6] and then it will filter the headers down with the other rules from there.

If your CSS rules are applied to classes, it will gather the classes first then filter it down (Resulting in a smaller set in the first place).

CSS processing will be much faster.

<comment><USER15> That is so true. Github had a lot of performance issues in their diff pages and they solved by using one-to-one mapping class-names and keeping the specificity as low as possible. Here's more on that: [https://speakerdeck.com/jonrohan/githubs-css- performance?sli...](https://speakerdeck.com/jonrohan/githubs-css- performance?slide=11)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I will not argue that the mixpanel css is pretty bad (specifically the duplication making it harder to maintain and increasing the code size), but that margin example from FB is just as awful.

I know that there's recently been a backlash against the entire idea of the "separation of concerns" \- but having your markup define your style margins is a bit insane. If suddenly you wanted 10px margins instead of 5 you have to grep your entire codebase for .m∗s (limiting the length of the string to 3 characters) and updating all those to .m∗m (or just defining both .m∗s and .m∗m to be 10px, which is just as dumb).

But, yes, most of the points in this article are somewhat accurate if not a bit outdated. Try not to use element selectors (and instead apply a class), avoid code duplication, write efficient selectors, etc.

(Note: asterisk changed to low asterisk and I hate markdown or whatever other text styling syntax HN is using).

<comment><USER10> Isn't what you're describing the easy way to change a site?

<comment><USER18> Normally, sites will have more views than they have CSS objects. So if you're doing OOCSS it would be easier to just update all the objects (css files) instead of updating all the views.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The way FB implements margins is terrible, there's nothing "semantic" about it - it's basically a single level of abstraction above whacking style tags onto elements directly.

</comment><comment><USER20> While I agree with the general idea behind the article (object orient your css), I think the second demonstration involving margins is an example of OOCSS gone wrong.

If you are injecting your markup elements with classes like "mbm mts mrl" (or padding, or anything else that is essentially just a css property), this is not much different than just inlining your styles. If you want this level of reusability in your css, use sass and create these as placeholders. From there give your dom element a some kind of class(es) that can extend several of these placeholder values.

Ian Storm had a very well written article that hits on this more: [http://ianstormtaylor.com/oocss-plus-sass-is-the-best-way- to...](http://ianstormtaylor.com/oocss-plus-sass-is-the-best-way-to-css/)

</comment><comment><USER21> It could be that Mixpanel is using something like LESS and nesting stuff for organization.

</comment><comment><USER22> CSS did not, could not, solve the problem of disorganized, inefficient document production, typography, layout, style management, etc.

Meaning, the Mixpanel abuse of styles is an old problem.

What CSS has over most all DTP and word processing apps is that CSS is declarative and explicit and discoverable. With CSS, styling is source code, and can be managed as such.

Or not, like Mixpanel apparently has done.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a bit confused. I'm not a CSS expert by any means, but aren't h tags supposed to represent hierarchy, and by styling them differently in different places (apart from, say, colors or something) largely breaking the information hierarchy? It was my understanding that well-styled pages set up headings properly so that styling one heading different ways didn't need to happen.

<comment><USER24> Yes and no. In HTML 5, the hierarchy can be much more local/contextualized than in previous versions, so an h2 in an article can be at quite a different level than an h2 in an aside or at the page level. While it _is_ possible to represent that hierarchy in CSS relative to the local context consistently across the entire page, it's not always desirable. On the other hand, arbitrary styling of headings does throw the baby out with the bath water; there should be a consistent and obvious visual hierarchy (corresponding with the semantic hierarchy) within each of the context types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't know, after dealing with hundreds of jsps and javascript files adding margins in all variety of ways when they should be a consistent size (that of course, has changed over time and not been changed everywhere) in an enterprise codebase I'll take the Facebook approach for margins any day over just directly modifying style properties..

</comment><comment><USER26> Was that Mixpanel css written by hand? Maybe it's just slightly inefficient css generated by sass/less/stylus.

</comment><comment><USER27> This post is a little over the top, the examples are both legible and work, there is no need to get dramatic over CSS.

</comment><comment><USER28> I find that following a prefix method works quite well for organizing a lot CSS. For example (using sass):

        .home-header-h1{
            font-size: 20pt;
            padding: 0px;
            margin: 0px;
            line-height: 1.3;
        }
        .home-header-h1-blue{
            @extend .home-header-h1;
            color: blue;
        }
        .home-header-h1-green{
            @extend .home-header-h1;
            color: green;
        }

This helps keep classes out of your HTML and avoids large amounts of nested CSS. Here's the compiled source:

        .home-header-h1, .home-header-h1-blue, .home-header-h1-green {
              font-size: 20pt;
              padding: 0px;
              margin: 0px;
              line-height: 1.3; }

        .home-header-h1-blue {
              color: blue; }

        .home-header-h1-green {
              color: green; }

<comment><USER29> But with classes with "green" and "blue" in the names, you're still mixing meaning and presentation and hurting maintainability. See: [http://thecodelesscode.com/case/95](http://thecodelesscode.com/case/95)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

Thanks for the feedback. A lot of people seem to be getting hung up on the sass thing. I'm all for sass, I don't think using 15 CSS classes for margins is the best way to handle this. I just wanted to use a watered down illustration for those who don't yet understand sass. Ideally, this should al be abstracted into variables/mixins/extends.

My main point though, is that I'd like to see us working together to decide what the best approach is, then apply that across the board. I don't see any reason for us to continue doing things slightly differently.

Whether you use CSS, SASS, LESS or any other preprocessor, we should be writing reusable CSS. At the moment, that is not happening across the web.

<comment><USER30> Extremely confused by the fact that there's no article navigation on your site. I just wanted to read more...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sorry mate. I just hacked it together. My CSS is horrendous too :)

I've two other articles: [http://www.colmtuite.com/three-reasons-why- wireframing-tools...](http://www.colmtuite.com/three-reasons-why-wireframing- tools-suck) [http://www.colmtuite.com/a-more-flexible-development- framewo...](http://www.colmtuite.com/a-more-flexible-development-framework)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The problem with the abstractions of Facebook is that you then need to always remember the "rules" of the website you're working on. If you're a Facebook software engineer adding a section to some docs somewhere, you have to thing "do we use .mbm or .mbl for our page headers? Damn, I'll check some other source".

The ideal CSS, in my opinion, is just the opposite. The developer writes Plain Old HTML and includes a stylesheet, and the new page looks instantly consistent with the rest of the website. That's how you enable anyone to work on the project. If a new UI is needed, the designers will change the css and instantly all pages will look good.

</comment><comment><USER4> > What if you want a h4 to look the same as a h3? What if you have two h3 tags > that you want to style differently?

Now you add customization classes to these special cases instead of shoving them every-fucking-where.

</comment><comment><USER32> In my opinion CSS is very object oriented and the cascading nature of it is very much like inheritance. The problem is that a lot of CSS folk don't come from a programming background, let alone an object oriented programming background so "thinking in objects" isn't something they've learned.

A good place to start doing well structured CSS is to separate the layout from the style. Doing this will give you a much better grip of your CSS and makes for easier future changes and adjustments.

</comment><comment><USER33> The author's wish is coming true. CSS techniques are already becoming unified through frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation.

<comment><USER15> It is not the frameworks that are bringing about the change. [http://oocss.org/](http://oocss.org/) and [http://smacss.com](http://smacss.com) are bringing about this change. Bootstrap's CSS techniques are written with a heavy bias on OOCSS, and by doing that it is setting a good example. I'll give you that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I recently started working on UI development. Some useful stuff I found:

      1. LESS - http://lesscss.org/
      2. LESS Elements - http://lesselements.com/
      3. Pure CSS - http://purecss.io/ [cool stuff, but not LESS.]</comment>


A Dude, it's like you read my mind - <AUTHOR> http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=30

<comment><USER2> "Newcomb's Problem, for those of you with social lives, is this."

I have no life and I didn't know what Newcomb's problem was. :(

</comment><comment><USER3> No need to read this article. I know that either you already did, or if you didn't, it doesn't really matter, unless, of course, you read it in the future, which may have been preordained.</comment>


The Guy Selling Wireless Tech to Steal Luxury Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kz48x/guy-selling-relay-attack-keyless-repeaters-to-steal-cars <comment><USER2> > "Honestly I can tell you that I have not stolen a car with technology," Evan > told Motherboard. "It's very easy to do but the way I see it: why would I > get my hands dirty when I can make money just selling the tools to other > people."

I know there's a fine line here and it probably varies by jurisdiction, but aren't there laws that depend on your intention? As in, if they guy would sell this with intentions of good use or even with no intentions at all, even if they knew there existed bad uses, it would be legal, but if they sell it with the intention that it would be given a bad use it would be illegal.

I mean, here they're saying that their intention is for buyers to use them to steal cars.

I'm ok with their ability to sell it. I'm not sure how I feel with the way they're openly admitting that they expect to make their money from people stealing cars.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good smart lightbulbs (was it Ikea?) nowadays have time-of-flight protection against remote attackers with high-gain antennas. You need to physically be within xx centimeters of the device, or else the signals take too long and are discarded. I can't believe car manufacturers haven't thought of that.

<comment><USER4> A good article from 2016 on the topic of such attacks: [https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special- interest/infk/inst-...](https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special- interest/infk/inst-infsec/system-security-group- dam/research/publications/pub2016/are_we_really_close.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Nice, very on topic! Seems the problem was solved in the "Time-of-flight (Short symbol IR-UWB)" protocol to defend against exactly the attacks that these devices use. Now the car manufacturers just have to use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The relay attack is pretty wild but it also sounds like all these years later all these cars are mostly using an ancient cipher.

The Cipher was broken so badly that as far back as 2005 it was published how to break it, and it has still never been changed.

If you have regular access to the car (parking garage) you can just break the cipher if you see it on more than one day... no need to relay at all, and no protections against the relay attack would stop it from working.

It's a 40-bit cipher but because of a weakness you can calculate down to 2^16 possible keys and then come back on another day and break it very quickly at which point you've essentially got your own key to the car.

</comment><comment><USER6> Car manufacturers seem have have had a pretty relaxed attitude to security for ever:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v1PRHTpK2c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v1PRHTpK2c)

</comment><comment><USER7> We stored our keys in Faraday cage pouches[0] to (hopefully) prevent this attack. Of course when you're out and about, bringing a Faraday pouch with you is a bit cumbersome.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HETGX00](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HETGX00)

</comment><comment><USER8> If he's selling the high end model for $12,000 how many cars would you need to steal? I can't imagine the value of stolen car is much considering most have gps tracking and serialized parts

<comment><USER9> I used to know a guy that stole many cars. We are not buddies any more for obvious reasons.

They would purchase "rollers" or "theft recovery" cars with clean titles. Roller = a car frame wit VIN and title, possibly blown engine, stripped interior if car was used to race etc. Theft Recovery = stripped car, no interior, engine etc.

Clean titles made it easy as no inspection was required.

He would steal the same car, transfer parts, discard the frame. You could easily make 15k+ on one car.

Others ship cars to other countries. Same goes for motorcycles.

<comment><USER10> I find that very hard to believe given how much work is involved in that

<comment><USER9> I don't know anyone making 14k cash in three weeks. Definitely worth it for someone uneducated that can earn max 50k.

<comment><USER10> A mechanic capable of swapping the entire power train in a car by themselves in 3 weeks can make way more than 50k/year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Luxury? Keyless entry and ignition is quickly becoming standard. My 2014 Mazda 6, and my 2018 VW Passat are not luxury cars.</comment>


FCC Plan for Orderly Shutdown December 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-plan-orderly-shutdown-december-2018 <comment><USER2> (...) Up to three (4) employees will be retained to provide oversight or conduct (...)

<comment><USER3> Yeah I saw that too...

Anyone have any idea how that works?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> tldr- FCC (and many other federal agencies?) will perform orderly shutdown on Jan 3 if congress does not do the needful - it seems to be a game of chicken between trump and democrats over funding the "mexican Wall".

It's amazing that this is barely news in the rest of the world - I know the xmas timing makes news coverage / consumption weird but I completely missed how serious this had got.

some background

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER5> I suspect a reason why its not that big news in the rest of the world is that this kind of stuff tend to happen. Germany was without a government for almost 6 months, Sweden is still without a government since 9th September last year, and I recall Iceland has a similar situation last election.

What seems more unique to the US situation is that the political turmoil could results in regular employees not getting paid. If we get to the point that people can't pay rent then I am sure it would quickly turn into emergency that international news agency will talk about nonstop until resolved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> list of govt shutdowns in the past

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_United_States)</comment>


Ember.js: An Antidote to Your Hype Fatigue - <AUTHOR> http://brewhouse.io/blog/2015/05/13/emberjs-an-antidote-to-your-hype-fatigue.html <comment><USER2> Completely and entirely agree! It's a non-contest that Ember is the best out of all of these js frameworks. Want to get serious work done AND be able to onboard new devs? Ember is the framework you want.

You wanted to read the README's of several different tools and glue them together? Sorry Ember isn't for you. Ember makes the dumb choices for you and let's you focus on your work.

Unfortunately I'm diving deep into Meteor these past couple of months, so I haven't used it since August but if you have an API and you want to build a client app, give Ember a shot. Meteor is also extremely cohesive and integrates stupidly well with React. (It'll ruin using React with other tools for you).</comment>


If Your Saltshaker Doesn't Have Bluetooth, Why Do You Even Use Salt? - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/05/if-your-saltshaker-doesnt-stream-music-you-should-feel-bad.html <comment><USER2> Shh. My new crowdsourced project is a saltshaker that uses RN/NN to determine the amount of salt required. It uses IoT cameras to determine your physiological and euphoric response to salting various forms of food, uploading the data the the cloud for analysis.

But it's not simply the _amount_ of salt. It's the grain size that should be appropriate to your meal, the music, your current emotional state and the importance of the occasion. So your shaker subscribes to a salt subscription in which we send you regular packets of salt, selected by our sodium sommelier, which are ground to perfection on a just-in-time bases before delivery to your plate.

Through a special deal with Task Rabbit, someone can come to your house to perform the refill.

<comment><USER3> We will deliver salt refills to your door every two weeks with an easy 9.99/mo subscription. Each bag is QR-coded so you know exactly where the salt comes from. We also only sources from local, organic, gluten-free farms. In the rare case of a salt recall, we can do that do.

Therefore, the salt shaker won't work without an internet connection.

<comment><USER4> Just wait until your users hack the bags, squeezing the salt out with the bare hands, the VCs won't like that.

<comment><USER2> I'm gonna hit this site with a DMCA complaint, claiming infringement by you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the show _Rick and Morty_ , Rick builds a robot to pass the butter. Not one to do anything halfway [until he gets bored], Rick uses an advanced AI to control the robot. When the AI inquires, "What is my purpose?" the answer is "You pass the butter."

That little robot is all of us. But at least a life dedicated to passing the butter is better than one devoted to just holding the salt.

<comment><USER6> robot's response "OH...MY...GOD..."

rick's response "Yeah, I know. Welcome to the club buddy."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> But does it interface with my smart toilet to adjust my electrolyte balance? Worth remembering the 1st smart device was arguably a coffeepot.

<comment><USER8> Given how many coffeepots are in American workplaces and how dangerous a dumb coffeepot can be, I would imagine there was a lot of economic pressure to make coffeepots smarter and safer.

<comment><USER9> I think parent comment was referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot) (1991)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's clearly not smart enough. It still requires manual shaking, and some level of thought process for the user to decide how much salt to put on the food. That should be automated. As an aside, it should post to the cook's Facebook wall that the prepared food was insufficiently salted, because who can pass up a chance for public internet shaming?

</comment><comment><USER11> Does it have a subscription that delivers specially packaged salt with QR-code on the packaging to know if the salt has gone bad?

Salt Rights Management, hah.

I suppose Nestlé and maybe Flint Water Company would like this model for water. "Due to scarcity, we have surge pricing for clean water at the moment. Please agree to get water dispensed."

</comment><comment><USER12> It should definitely use facial recognition to ensure no one uses more than their daily allowance of sodium.

</comment><comment><USER13> How do I check my salt consumption if I take my saltshaker out for picnic? It certainly needs a SIM card slot with a specific data plan (no more than $5,99/mo will be OK) with free download of the songs excerpts that will be played while shaking.

</comment><comment><USER14> This product is clearly completely and grossly inadequate due to its lack of Blockchain.</comment>


Space Farming: The Final Frontier - <AUTHOR> http://modernfarmer.com/2013/09/starship-salad-bar/

<comment><USER2> _The first batch of space-ready lettuce is something of a tease for the NASA crew — once harvested, it will be frozen and stored away for testing back on Earth. No one is allowed to eat anything before the plants are thoroughly vetted for cosmic microbes.

These space germs are often fairly benign, akin to the natural bacteria that build up in any moist root bank. Russian crews are allowed to consume vegetables grow on their side of the space station, but microbe standards are strict and unwavering on U.S. space missions._

That is the strangest part of the whole article. It's amazing how much science the USSR did on long term space habitation (including growing plants) that just gets ignored by NASA. Unfortunately I can't recall the title, but I read a book on the Soviet space program maybe 10 years ago that detailed all of the progress the USSR made prior to the US SkyLab program, and honestly they were 10-15 years ahead on that stuff compared to NASA.

<comment><USER3> Mary Roach had a bit in her book _Packing for Mars_ about the huge impact fresh food has on astronaut morale. She also included a great anecdote about how some early Russian cosmonauts ended up eating some onion bulbs that were meant for a zero-gravity plant growth experiment:

 _The diary of cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev includes a story about a batch of onion bulbs taken on board Salyut as part of an investigation of plant growth in zero gravity. "As we were unloading the resupply ship, we found some rye- bread and a knife. So we ate some bread. Then we saw the onion bulbs we were supposed to plant. We ate them right then and there, with bread and salt. They were delicious. Time went by and the biologists asked us, 'How are the onions?' "'They are growing,' we answered…. "'Do they have shoots?' Without any hesitation we replied that they even had shoots. There was great excitement at the communication station. Onions have never bloomed in space before! We asked to speak to the head biologist in private. 'For god's sake,' we told him, 'don't get upset, we ate your onions.'"_

<comment><USER4> Astronauts gone wild.

"I don't know about the onions, but the weed grows great up here! We grew enough up here to last for the next few missions!"

It's interesting to think how long these veggies could last within human civilization beyond Earth. How would our veggies evolve (only from genetic modification?) Would they be largely immune from disease in this environment? What would be the possibility of them hitting some sort of genetic dead end and us losing our entire supply? Could we create new types of veggies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've recently gotten interested in this and have built my own aeroponics tank from a cheap plastic storage box and an ultrasonic fogger (together below $15, but nutrient and pH/TDS meters add a bit more to it). It's a fun experiment and worth trying down here in the gravity trap too - you can grow vegetables in a rental apartment with no garden if you have access to some sunlight (and even if you don't, by way of artificial light).

This video gave me the idea and instructions: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjWLyA-w4Bo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjWLyA-w4Bo)

</comment><comment><USER6> >Leafy greens are ideal, ready to be consumed as soon as they're plucked [...] The most outlandish crops would be wheat and rice. [...P]lants that need processing make less attractive candidates for space travel.

Well, these "outlandish" cereal crops currently provide the bulk of calories for almost everyone on the planet. If you're serious about feeding astronauts in space, they are exactly the plants that you need to _start_ with. And don't tell me equipment to grind wheat or hull rice would be complicated, compared with other stuff that's in orbit already.

<comment><USER7> If you are serious about feeding astronauts in space, then you need to classify what gives the highest percentage edible matter in the whole plant and needs the least mass of things like water. Leafy plants with minimal root systems seem like a good start.

Grains have loads of stalk and root that you don't eat, tend to need a lot of water and need extra equipment in preparation and are often used as powders, which easily form combustible suspensions in low gravity.

<comment><USER6> >you need to classify what gives the highest percentage edible matter in the whole plant and needs the least mass of things like water

Maybe if you don't care about total area. Stalks and all, grains and tubers are the most efficient at transforming square footage of sunlight into edible calories; water would get completely recycled in any case.

<comment><USER8> Square footage of sunlight is not necessarily the limiting factor in space as it is on earth; (solar) energy for grow lights is cheap, pressurized volume is very very expensive. And even if water is recycled, tying a certain amount of it up in your food production system still has a cost.

<comment><USER9> Scaling to sustainable numbers though heat rejection will be a serious consideration. Plants essentially convert light to chemical energy that would then sustain the astronauts. The catch is plants aren't really that efficient. They're around 1% if I remember rightly. That means there would be 99 people worth of additional heat for each one you're feeding full time.

<comment><USER7> Trying to argue on the basis of photosynthesis being inefficient doesn't really help, I mean sure PV is more efficient in energy conversion, but you can't eat electricity. So given they'd be eating plants anyway, eating ones that have not been shot up the gravity well is probably more efficient.

<comment><USER9> My point was that for the current ISS, you're talking about designing, building, launching, and attaching more infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is everything always the final frontier? Its kind of depressing that they said that space is the FINAL frontier. Does that mean we have nothing to aspire to after that? Now apparently the new "final frontier" is lettuce.

<comment><USER11> i think the theory is that, "space" going on forever, it is one vast, unending frontier beyond which there can be no others. also (seriously) the phrase "final frontier" being alliterative gives it a lot of memetic staying power.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure back a few hundred years, sailors would have claimed that the other side of the ocean is the final frontier. Seems like just a way of looking at it to entice people into believing in a cause.

<comment><USER12> There was something on the other side of that ocean, though, besides more ocean.

<comment><USER10> Well we know that now, they wouldn't know whats behind the ocean back then. Remember the idea that the earth was flat?

At the moment we are at a point in time where we cant see the end of space but there might be another "ocean" at the end, who knows!

<comment><USER13> >Remember the idea that the earth was flat?

Actually this is a common misconception. Educated people have known the earth was spherical since the birth of astronomy.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> -1 for disabling pinchzoom for mobile devices. I wish there were a browser setting to disable the disabling of pinchzoom.

</comment><comment><USER15> How long before astronauts are blogging about how their space farm saves on transportation costs and stimulates their local economy?

</comment><comment><USER16> Saw something similar to this on BattleStar Galactica. It's amazing how every Sci-Fi I've watched is becoming more and more practical.

</comment><comment><USER17> would love to see this done in space: [http://www.biosphericproject.com/frontpage](http://www.biosphericproject.com/frontpage) (A biospheric greenhouse project in Salford/Manchester, UK.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of Silent Running.

</comment><comment><USER19> Oh good lord, just send a robot instead.</comment>


fstorm: [nodejs] fantastic fast and reliable filewriter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/leeluolee/fstorm

<comment><AUTHOR> just some trick, in fact, It also use builtin `fs.readFile` to write file</comment>


Raspberry Pi -- The New $35 Computer That Could Replace Your OPAC Terminals - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/02/hardware-2/what-to-do-with-a-raspberry-pi-the-new-35-computer-that-could-replace-your-opac-terminals/

<comment><USER2> A quote: "I can take the microSD card on which Raspbian is installed, copy the image and write it to another microSD card, boot another APC or Pi from that, _change the hostname_ , and I have another system with the software installed and ready to go." [emphasis added]

It would be better to assign names and addresses using each unit's unique and hardwired MAC, thus making installation and software rewriting a nearly automatic process.</comment>