Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/articles/containers-hypervisors-2019/ <comment><USER2> I've had this sneaking but hard to articulate suspicion that datacenters, bare metal servers, VMs, operating systems, containers, OS processes, language VMs, and threads are all really attempts to abstract the same thing.

You want to run business code in a way that's protected from other business code but also able to interact with other business code and data in a well defined way.

I also have this sneaking suspicion that new generations are re-inventing the wheel in a lot of ways. If you have minimal containers running on a hypervisor how is that different from processes running on an operating system? You have all these CPU provided virtualization instructions to protect guests from each other and the host from the guests but there's no reason those instructions couldn't have been developed to protect processes from each other. You have indirections to protect one guest from accessing another's storage but there's no reason processes couldn't have the same protections (and they do in many operating systems). Why container orchestration and overlay networks instead of OS scheduling and IPC?

I'm sure people in academic computer science have already published many a paper about this but it feels different seeing it from inside an IT organization where people don't seem to apply the lessons from older technologies to newer ones and we end up in this constant churn of reinvention which, as far as I can tell, is mostly a way for people, both in management and in the trenches, to keep their jobs, at least until you're "too old to learn new things" and pushed aside.

<comment><USER3> What I've always failed to Understand is how FreeBSD jails[0] never got very popular (discounting the fact that FreeBSD isn't very popular on the whole from what I can tell) but Docker is huge. I personally think jails are superior in implementation in that it requires no other abstractions on top of the OS.

The only thing I can surmise is that Docker might have a better secure default, but improvements to Jails could emulate that, and following best practices as well should. Beyond that I'm still baffled how this didn't take to the mainstream.

[0] [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/jails.html](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/jails.html)

<comment><USER4> This happened because docker, in addition to an isolation system, also bundled a user friendly interface to a per-app persistent filesystem. No matter how many people sing the praises of isolation and security to Docker, I will continue to suspect that almost all of its adopters use it because packaging software with dependencies is hard, poorly understood, terribly tooled (looking at you, Python), and even more poorly executed in the vast majority of projects and companies.

Docker gives you a very simple way to not think about that (at least until your massive container that bundles ancient versions of a dozen different CVE- filled libraries bites you in the ass down the road).

It's not novel. It's not even particularly elegant. But Docker users don't want elegance; most of them just don't want to think about how to configure a production environment to work like their development environment, so we get the old joke: "It works on my machine!" "Then we'll ship your machine"...and so we got docker.

<comment><USER5> > No matter how many people sing the praises of isolation and security to > Docker, I will continue to suspect that almost all of its adopters use it > because packaging software with dependencies is hard, poorly understood, > terribly tooled (looking at you, Python), and even more poorly executed in > the vast majority of projects and companies.

Here is a quote from Eberhard Wolff's _A Practical Guide to Continuous Delivery_:

"It is laborious to install a real application including all components. Of course, it is even more laborious to automate this process... When an installation crashes, it has to be restarted. In such a scenario the system is in a state where some parts have already been installed. Just to start the installation again can create problems. The script usually expects to find the system in a state without any installed software... This problems is also the reason why updates to a new software version are problematic. In such a case there is already an old version of the software installed on the system that has to be updated. This means that files might already be present and have to be overwritten. The script has to implement the necessary logic for this. In addition, superfluous elements that are not required anymore for the new version have to be deleted. If this does not happen, problems can arise with the new installation because old values might still be read out and used. However, it is very laborious to cover and automate all update paths that occur in practice."

If a self-professed expert that writes books on the subject does not realize that package managers exist, and proposes that the only alternatives for software installation are either hand-hacked shell scripts or Docker, what do you think the average developer knows?

<comment><USER6> To be fair to Wolff, it's not uncommon for deb and rpm packages of complex daemons (e.g. postgres) to include shell scripts - postinst, preinst, etc - that makes changes to the system, and which do have to be coded in such a way to handle re-execution after partial failure. Taking my /var/cache/apt/ directory as a (poor) sample, about 1/3 of packages had such scripts.

<comment><USER7> _that_ libc update spawned a wealth of dependency solutions. And 'dll hell' of course

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And let me state again for the record that all of these promises being made by container systems sound an awful lot like the promises I was offered by 'real' operating systems in the early nineties.

I think the only real difference is that there has been a sea change in public opinion on this kind of aggressive isolation by default being worthwhile.

But a hypervisor publishing a bunch of services that talk to the world and each other? Things are beginning to look a bit more like microkernels as time goes on.

<comment><USER9> > Things are beginning to look a bit more like microkernels as time goes on.

Hypervisors typically are microkernels. The very first "hypervisor" was L4 in fact, with L4Linux.

Also, you're right that virtualization and containers are fulfilling the promises of operating systems. The problem of earlier OSes is that they didn't take security seriously enough. Modern hypervisors aren't much better at isolation than real microkernels like L4, KeyKOS and EROS. They're better than containers though.

<comment><USER10> > Hypervisors typically are microkernels.

Except they have vastly different histories (look up IBM's VM) and uses and underlying technologies.

Here's a good post on the difference:

[https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/HypervisorVsMi...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/HypervisorVsMicrokernel)

> Microkernels are intended to create a minimal set of low-level operations > that would be used to build an operating system. While it's popular to slap > a monolithic kernel on top of your microkernel, this is not how microkernel > based OSes are supposed to be; a real microkernel OS should have lots of > separate pieces that used the microkernel services to work with each other. > Using a microkernel as not much more than an overgrown MMU and task > switching abstraction layer for someone's monolithic kernel is a cheap hack > driven by the needs of academic research, not how they are supposed to be.

> (There have been a few real microkernel OSes, such as QNX; Tanenbaum's Minix > is or was one as well.)

> By contrast, hypervisors virtualize and emulate hardware at various levels > of abstraction. This involves providing some of the same things that > microkernels do (eg memory isolation, scheduling), but people interact with > hypervisors in very different ways than they interact with microkernels. > Even with 'cooperative' hypervisors, where the guest OSes must be guest- > aware and make explicit calls to the hypervisor, the guests are far more > independent, self-contained, and isolated than they would be in a > microkernel. With typical 'hardware emulating' hypervisors this is even more > extremely so because much or all of the interaction with the hypervisor is > indirect, done by manipulating emulated hardware and then having the > hypervisor reverse engineer your manipulations. As a consequence, something > like guest to guest communication delays are likely to be several orders of > magnitude worse than IPC between processes in a microkernel.

<comment><USER11> >"Using a microkernel as not much more than an overgrown MMU and task switching abstraction layer for someone's monolithic kernel is a cheap hack driven by the needs of academic research, not how they are supposed to be."

I found this interesting. Can you or anyone else say what the context was where academic researchers have needed to do this? What problem was it solving for them in a cheap way?

<comment><USER12> There is a linked article on his blog [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/AcademicMicrok...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/AcademicMicrokernels) that expands on this. Specifically:

>the whole 'normal kernel on microkernel' idea of porting an existing OS kernel to live on top of your microkernel gives you at least the hope of creating a usable environment on your microkernel with a minimum amount of work (ie, without implementing all of a POSIX+ layer and TCP/IP networking and so on). Plus some grad student can probably get a paper out of it, which is a double win.

<comment><USER11> This is a great read. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Containers" is an unfortunate term, since it really better describes the container _image_ than an actual running process with API virtualisation.

I think VMs-as-containers is where we'll wind up. The container image has turned out to be the real thing of interest, the runtime is almost secondary. Virtual machine systems have closed the performance gap in a variety of ways.

For example: tearing out kernel checks for devices that will never be connected to the VM; taking advantage of hyper-privileged CPU instructions; being able to make and restore higher-fidelity checkpoints than an OS can for faster launches etc.

At which point the isolation benefits of VMs really begin to outweigh everything else. A hypervisor has a much smaller attack surface and has a much simpler role than a full monolithic OS kernel. It partitions the hardware and that's about it. It doesn't exist in a constant tension between kernel-as- resource-manager and kernel-as-service-provider.

<comment><USER14> This is kinda where VMware is going with project pacific & vSphere integrated containers; containers running as individual VMs on a hypervisor. I wonder if we will see others following the same pattern?

I'm not sure what the drawbacks might be though

<comment><USER13> I think yes. Red Hat and others are working on KubeVirt, plus I believe there are CRI implementations for gVisor and Firecracker.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which is in the middle of acquisition by VMware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm quite hopeful for the limited re-introduction of hypervisors to "containment", if only because I've become disappointed with the lack of power app authors have to specify fine-grained, strict security details. This is because most of the fun lockdown toys that linux has, selinux, seccomp et al aren't easily "stackable", and those toys have been used by the orchestrator to perform the containment. And that's great, but it means containers all end up with broad, generic policies (that only care about container breakout) which can't be further restricted by app/container authors.

My hope is that lightweight virtualisation will give back the ability for app authors to tighten their container's straight jackets. Personally I've got my eye on kata containers.

</comment><comment> denton-scratch I have a Xen hypervisor at home, running on a (well-configured) NUC. VMs boot in about 15 seconds. I'm patient!

I'm not doing devops stuff; I no longer code, so I don't need a testing pipeline.

I looked into containers based on LXC, when it was first introduced. I decided to stay away - I don't want to get tied into Poettering's code. Yeah, I'm running systemd on some of the VMs, but you don't really have much choice nowadays. I still use Debian, but I'm bitter about their adoption of systemd - and my hypervisor machine runs SysV Init, because I know how that works.

I never mixed it with Docker. From what I've been reading, Docker is already old-hat (it's only about 3 years old; how did that happen?) Kubernetes seems to be the thing nowadays. I don't even know how to pronounce "Kubernetes".

What was wrong with LXC? Like, LXC comes with the OS. Nothing to install. Why do people love these 3rd-party container engines?

And "wrappers"? what purpose is served by container wrappers?

Serious questions, I'm not trolling. Promise. I'm just a bit out-of-date.

<comment><USER16> Some of us have problems that are actually well solved by these tools and run on more sophisticated hardware than our home computer... It doesn't sound like you've hit that set of problems.

<comment> denton-scratch Yeah, thanks. It's a home computer because I don't work any more - I set-up and operated a continuous production VM pipeline on my boss's rack, back when I had a boss.

Docker had turned up; I evaluated it (quite briefly - I had work to do, and nobody had asked me to evaluate Docker). We had fairly specific requirements that I couldn't match to Docker.

I recall now that Kubernetes is principally a deployment system - sorry. Perhaps it is well-integrated with some container systems, such as Docker. Kubernetes didn't exist when I had a boss. I use Ansible.

I get that LXC is not very friendly. But it works OK, doesn't it? Just wrap a shiny skin around it. Don't re-invent the wheel; we already have enough wheel inventions.

I'm not by any means knowledgeable about containers; I evaluated LXC way back when, and decided that VMs were more secure. And never revisited that decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The Docker engine default seccomp profile blocks 44 system calls today, > leaving containers running in this default Docker engine configuration with > just around 300 syscalls available.

...preventing devs/ops people to run tools like iotop, unless extra capabilities are added.

I'm all in for containers, cgroups/namespaces but at the moment it's namespace isolation for the price of less features. Unless namespaces become first-class citizens in the Linux kernel, it will always be more efficient to just run on VMs or even Bare Metal. At least for non-planet scale workloads. :-)

<comment><USER15> > ...preventing devs/ops people to run tools like

This is because docker makes the fundamental mistake of conflating packaging with isolation. "Packaging" is achieved in docker by using the OS to do an amount of sandboxing and then letting the user perform whatever non- reproducible crap they like before balling the whole thing up and calling it a package.

If instead you make an app author actually figure out what their dependencies are and how to fetch/build them - in a system such as Nix, you not only get reproducible packages, you also get to decide to apply actual os-level isolation on a case by case basis - a developer doesn't necessarily need/want these barriers on their dev machine.

<comment><USER18> So a system like Android's? Honest question, I don't know of that's a good model to exist in general purpose Linux systems. There's also Fuchsia but I'm not sure if it's POSIX.

<comment><USER15> > So a system like Android's?

Not really, I'm essentially describing nix/guix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I see container systems, such as Docker, as a packaging system more than anything else.

<comment><USER8> A Turing complete, language agnostic one.

If you were trying to write one that wasn't container focused, how would that look?

<comment><USER5> [https://nixos.org/nix/](https://nixos.org/nix/)

[https://guix.gnu.org/](https://guix.gnu.org/)

Containers are a very poor substitute for package managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just waiting for the new re-discovery of hypervisors, but with better marketing names.

<comment><USER21> "Workload Orchestrators"

K8s can already do VMs with Kube-virt, so yeah.

<comment><USER22> K8S is unnecessarily complicated. I fully expect "serverless", warts and all, to take all comers. And, I get the irony. It's basically cgi-bin 2.0. It will win not because it is better, but because it is better "understood".

<comment><USER16> Serverless has been around now for several years and it hasn't taken off yet... definitely not to the same degree containers have.

I'm skeptical it will. To adopt serverless you need to be willing to rearchitect your product and retool your developers... that's expensive.

<comment><USER23> >(Serverless) I'm skeptical it will.

They'd get more uptake if it was easier I think. Not re-architect your product...but small things here and there.

I wanted to play with azure python functions but despite vs enterprise & lots of credits I can't. Without admin rights on local machine it's basically impossible. (Need VSCode & AZ toolkit)

(Unrelated - that kinda blew my mind - no you can't do that in the 2,000 USD VS enterprise...you need to use the free one)

<comment><USER24> > (Unrelated - that kinda blew my mind - no you can't do that in the 2,000 USD > VS enterprise...you need to use the free one)

I'm guessing this is because Microsoft wants it to be more accessible—they probably realize that there isn't much money to be made in $2,000 developer tools. Visual Studio was never a Python IDE; VS Code is much more language- agnostic.

<comment><USER23> Sure, but the whole "this feature is impossible in our 2000usd suit but its possible in our free one" doesn't seem strange to you?

If I'm buying the top end product I'm expecting full feature set, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The future is probably WASI: a sandboxed compile target with a capabilities based security model not owned by a single corporation. [https://wasi.dev](https://wasi.dev)

</comment><comment><USER26> Is there still any place in 2019 for "system containers" like LXC/LXD?

<comment><USER27> They are quite useful as "VMs at the speed of application containers".

When you use application containers, you tend to create a more complicated setup and lose visibility as to what's going on in the system.

Just like you use VMs on a baremetal server, you use system containers in a VM.

But I find more important to use LXD as a tool for software development and also for Linux desktop use.

If you want to setup nodejs or something similar, it makes sense to put it in a LXD container so that it does not mess up your host. Each step of the workflow (creation, deletion, etc) takes a few seconds or less.

You can also setup LXD containers to run GUI applications. It makes big sense if you want to run games (like Steam) so that your desktop does not get polluted with i386 packages. You can also use for development tools, such as those from JetBrains, Android Studio and more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Key point: AWS Firecracker does NOT run on AWS.

Unless you want to pay for bare metal instances.

AWS Firecracker DOES run on Google Cloud, Azure and Digital Ocean.

<comment><USER13> Firecracker is used as the runtime for Lambda, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> For the record, hypervisor were introduced almost before operating systems. In the begining it was just a switch to partition memmory and run multiple jobs on a big expensive machine.

So this is not the first time hypervisors are making a comeback.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wait....this isn't new - hypervisor-based container isolation has been in Windows Server since 2016 (it's called Hyper-V containers).

<comment><USER31> Did the Windows Server isolation bundle a slim kernel?

One of the core elements of this for the Serverless fast boot requirement is using a kernel that has legacy modules excised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So I read something succinct a while back - docker et al are distribution platforms not security platforms . They add "0" security against an adversary (think padlocks). How true is it ? And what high perf securely contained systems are there? OpenVZ?

<comment><USER33> The generic issue seems to be that stuff like containers can be escaped with pretty much any privilege escalation exploit ... and such exploits are reasonably common in the world of Linux.

<comment><USER32> So either take perf hit or don't expect isolation at all?

<comment><USER34> For completely untrusted workloads basically - yeah. For semi-trusted, there's lots of tech that provides reasonable, lightweight isolation. There's no reason why hardware vendors cant ship products that are both virtualizable with high performance and secure, so that may still come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been thinking about these problems for a while. Previously, I thought that the "put a VM on it" approach was the right one. In 2015, I wrote novm [1], which I think served as inspiration for some developments that followed. My thinking has changed over the years and I actually work on gVisor today (disclaimer!). I'd like to share some thoughts here.

Hypervisors never left. They are a fundamental building block for infrastructure and will continue to be.

The question is whether there will be a broad shift to start relying on hypervisors to isolate every individual application. In my opinion, just wrapping containers in VMs is not a solution. (Nor do I find it technologically interesting, but that's me.) I agree that the approach addresses some of the challenges of isolation, but is one step forward, two steps back in other ways.

Virtualizing at the hardware boundary lets you do some things very well. For example, device state is simple, and hardware support lets you track dirty memory passively and efficiently, so you can implement live migration for virtual machines much better than you could for processes. It can divide big machines into fungible, commodity sizes (allowing applications from having to care about NUMA, etc.). It lets you pass though and assign hardware devices. It gives you a strong security baseline.

But abstractions work best when they are faithful. Virtual machines operate on virtual CPUs, memory and devices, and operating systems work best when those abstractions behave like the real thing. That is, CPUs and memory are mostly available, and hardware acts like hardware (works independently, interactions don't stall).

Containers and applications operate on OS-level abstractions: threads, memory mappings, futexes, etc. These abstractions are the basis for container efficiency — not because startup time is fast, but because these abstractions allow for a lot of statistical multiplexing and over-subscription while still performing well. The abstractions provide a lot of visibility for the OS to make good choices with global information (e.g. informing the scheduler, reclaim policy, etc.).

A problem arises when you decide that you want to bind single applications to single VMs, and then run many VMs instead of many containers. Effectively, the abstractions that you expose are now CPUs and memory, and these just don't work as well for over-subscription and overall infrastructure efficiency. There's no shared scheduler or cooperative synchronization (e.g. in an OS, threads waking each other will be moved to the same core), there's no shared page cache, etc.

There are other problems too: virtualization gives you a very strong security baseline, but you have to start punching significant holes to get the container semantics you want. E.g. the cited virtfs is a great example: it's easy to reason about the state of a block device, but an effective FUSE api (and shared memory for metadata) is a much larger system surface. The hardware interface itself is not a silver bullet. Devices are still complex (escapes happen), and the last few years have taught us that even the hardware mechanisms can have flaws. For example, AFAIK Kata containers is still vulnerable to L1TF unless you're using instance-exclusive cpusets or have disabled hyper-threading. (Whereas native processes and containers are not vulnerable to this particular bug.)

The "put a VM on it" approach also may not have the standard image problems that plain hypervisors have, but you've got portability challenges. It seems non-ideal that a container isolation solution can run in infrastructure X and Y, but not in standard public clouds or your on-prem VMWare hosts, etc. (There might be specific technologies for each case, but that's rather the point.)

That's my 2c. I'm pretty optimistic that we can have strong isolation while still preserving the efficiency, portability and features of container-based infrastructure. I like a lot of these projects (especially the ones doing technologically interesting things, e.g. nabla, x-containers, virtfs, etc.) but I don't think the straight-up "put a VM on it" approach is going to get us there.

<comment><USER36> Hi, completely agree with all of this. In fact, we've been focusing on the problem you mention about needing FS holes for VMs to regain container semantics ([https://www.usenix.org/system/files/hotstorage19-paper- kolle...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/hotstorage19-paper-koller.pdf)). Just in case, these are some of the container semantics we care about: FS crash consistency, file sharing (write+write), and efficient use of memory due to having a single page cache. The key question is: what's the smallest hole we can poke (smaller than allowing every single FS operation in the host)?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Iconsink – Collection of Outline, Glyph and Color Icon (built with React) - <AUTHOR> https://www.iconsink.com/app/offer/HackerNews <comment><AUTHOR> Iconsink - Tool for designers to find and use icons they need for their project.

Available on Web and Desktop (Windows, Mac and Ubuntu) As a part of launch we are giving away 6 months subscription for free and 50% off if you opt for yearly subscription:

[https://www.iconsink.com/app/offer/HackerNews](https://www.iconsink.com/app/offer/HackerNews)

Tech Stack: React.Js & Laravel

And if you have any suggestions or feedback do comment them out.</comment>


Mean Stack – MongoDB: NodeOnFire (PostreSQL) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/martijndeh/fire

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious what you all have to say about this up and coming framework, personally I have been a bit put off by MongoDB in MEAN, but this looks amazing for building full stack javascript apps.</comment>


Show HN: Free Book about hiring and managing remote team - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/Goodbye-Office-Remotely-Business-Anywhere-ebook/dp/B075KQZM58/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I wrote this book based on interviews with entrepreneurs, representatives of freelance marketplaces (Upwork, Freelancer.com and others), 200+ publications.

The book has 4 sections: entrepreneurs working remotely, hiring and managing remote team, remote partners, finding and working with remote customers / clients.

Free promotion runs for 5 days and you may get it to your Kindle reader for free. Hope you will enjoy it!</comment>


Recovery of Lost Indigenous Languages by Optical Scanning of Old Wax Cylinders - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2018/06/optical-scanning-technology-lets-researchers-recover-lost-indigenous-languages-old-wax-cylinder-recordings.html <comment><USER2> "Due to the culturally sensitive material of the content on these cylinders, and out of respect for the contemporary descendants of many of the performers on the recordings, access to the majority of the audio being digitized is currently restricted."

I'd like to learn more about the cultures of the peoples in this country who came before me - but I am apparently not 'enlightened' enough to experience their words.

<comment><USER3> I had a Native American friend who asked me for help with digitizing cassette tapes of certain ceremonies. I transferred them, cleaned them up a bit, and burned audio cds for him.

I then deleted all my own copies as he requested. He asked that since the ceremonies were for his people that I not keep them for myself, and I respected that.

<comment><USER4> "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." \- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY57ErBkFFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY57ErBkFFE))

What was contained in those cermonies that you were not to know? What offense would he do to his people by sharing their wisdom with you? What didn't they want you to know?

The answer is "Probably nothing". But in that vast empty space, there's a few corners where someone is hiding something, and those corners are really terrible. Look at cults like Children of God [1] - These cults are still really common.

I'm certain you would have reported if you'd heard anything dangerous on those tapes. I'm certain that your friends motive for keeping them private were not threatening and entirely pure. Societal standards - Like rituals and ceremonies - Aren't private, though, and should never be subject to secrecy. They should be held up and celebrated. And if they shouldn't be held up and celebrated, they should probably be left in the past, and remembered as mistakes.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_International#The_F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_International#The_Family_of_Love_\(1978%E2%80%931981\))

<comment><USER5> Given the context, doesn't it feel a bit... tactless to talk about how Europeans in America used freedom of information to defeat other Europeans and succeeded in taking the continent for themselves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is sad that so much indigenous knowledge was lost.

One of the most infamous events in the Americas was when Roman Catholic Bishop Diego de Landa (1524 - 1579) burned thousands of Mayan codices, an event comparable to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. The motivation was the extermination of Mayan culture.

To put things in perspective, how would you feel if all works written in the English language were piled up and burned? One thing is to disagree with the content of whatever document, another thing is to permanently suppress it.

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

Likewise, a lot of artifacts from the first civilizations like Sumer were lost over the last couple of decades because of wars in the middle east resulting in museum sackings. The artifacts that were not destroyed, are probably now contaminated and proving their authenticity will be very hard.

Some people do not support the presence of ancient artifacts museums in foreign museums, but in retrospective, the more distributed and safer those artifacts are, the better.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was disappointed not to hear any audio from their proto-example, the 148 cylinders of Ishi's speech (in the Yahi language).

OTOH, the article did expand Ishi's story for me, if sadly, by pointing out that he was of mixed Indian blood - and so was not the last _Yahi_.

Maybe the most famous indian recordist was Frances Densmore, who made 2500 recordings of 'Chippewa' music. Today I searched in vain for 15 minutes to find a collection (more than a handful) of some of those recordings.

Once again, a glaring lack of appreciation for our own history. Which will probably be rewarded karmicly when our own, 'who cares' history is forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is any package available to do optical scanning of vinyl disk records? I've heard of it but never seen it done.

My parents have a bunch of rare 78s which I would like to be able to listen to, but am afraid to poke a needle into.</comment>


Ask HN:  How can we improve our website? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, my name is Weston and we've built a sports news site called http://swarmsports.com.  We're looking for feedback from the HN community in how we can grow our startup to make it successful.
We're showing users the most viral sports news articles every day.
Even if you're not a sports fan, any feedback is appreciated.
Thanks! <comment><USER3> Flipping throough it...

From using chrome on the desktop it seems like the nav part is responsive but the list isn't (the columns don't shrink accordingly nor the fonts reduce.)

I'd code it so on page 1/landing page you have the text "Viral Sports Articles" on a line below nav and remove that bit from the nav bar, on subsequent pages it doesn't need to be there. Loose the text on the logo if it doesn't have to be there so you can make the logo bigger at such a small scale.

Viral rank doesn't make much sense to me (thinking as Joe Sixpack here)... numbers don't have much meaning maybe a call it "buzz rank" or something and use color bar graphic, long and green for top, and the varying length/color according to whatever the rank metric is.

So description is your categories... Maybe logo/sport symbols to have a quick id?

Seems a little stuffy - all two colors... oh... bee colors... would have noticed that if the logo was bigger.

Maybe a bit more sporty? One of the funnest pictures I've ever saw for a team of programmers was for pro-line software [http://www.pcmuseum.ca/icons/ProLineteam.jpg](http://www.pcmuseum.ca/icons/ProLineteam.jpg) though it wasn't sports software, it was definitely a memorable picture. Kick up your about with "the SwarmSports Team" along with some sports analogies might add to the retention factor.

The blog header is really really nice compared - smiled when I saw it - <USER2> replicate it on the about and possibly on the first page of results. same with the social icons. Blog has no back to content menu...

Space is expensive on phones shorten the date to mm/dd or mm/dd/yy or something like "last Wed." then mm/dd after one week before...

I can't comment on how good the quality of CSS is and stuff, I'm still getting a hang of it myself. My project has some similarities to what you are doing - might check it out to give you some ideas: [http://www.doplaces.com](http://www.doplaces.com)

Hope that helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very, very helpful! Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hire a designer - the UI and UX could use some work. Here's some of the design feedback I'd give you:

\- You're not utilizing the whole width of the page, and the table looks pretty compressed, making it difficult to read.

\- You're also not using the whole height of the page. The pagination would be more useful if there was more content. It's silly to waste that much real estate.

\- The icons in the top right are too small and the third (mailing list) carries no meaning.

\- Your logo in the navbar is too small, or at least the text. You probably don't need the text in the logo if you've got the heading there.

\- Search is in a pretty unintuitive location - try putting it in the top right of the layout.

Edit: From a functional perspective, you've got duplicated stories on the home page currently. Same exact link, two different titles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you! This is very good feedback. :-)

I agree with everything you've said so far. Also, every once and a while a dupe article slips through (ex: same URL, different title like you saw). We do our best to keep an eye out in case something slips through our dupe- detectors.

Thanks again!

<comment><USER5> I'd just like to add that you should probably include some images in your site. It'd certainly spruce things up a bit. Check out the new Digg ([http://digg.com/](http://digg.com/)) for an example of a super slick news aggregator site that's very image-heavy.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're currently doing some testing using images. We're still very early in our product development.

The new Digg does look great and very slick!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My suggestions:

Using bootstrap or another UI Framework would surely improve many things, from the UX/UI side. At least it will help until a pro UX can work on it a lot more.

Bootstrapping also will make you code better since the foundation of the code is well done. It also works on mobile and it's easy to catch up as well to tell other developers to manage our codebase, bootstrap has good documentation online and you can do, practically, almost all kind of UI compositions with JS.

After that, I would follow Google Pagespeed recomendations to reach the 100 points and have something like my blog wich loads in 300ms-500ms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good feedback, we'll take a look at Google Pagespeeed. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: [http://swarmsports.com](http://swarmsports.com)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you use this app to stay active? - <AUTHOR> Walkix is a mobile app that forces you to walk instead of sitting still while watching Netflix. You have to keep walking to keep the show on (it pauses when you stop). It also keeps track the number of steps, calories burned, etc for you. <comment><USER2> No, such an app would be extremely unsafe. If I have to keep walking to keep the show playing, I'll lose myself in whatever I'm watching and settle into a status quo where I power-walk deliberately along but with increasing detachment from my environment as I focus more and more on my phone.

This type of situation nontrivially raises the chance of tragedy if I decided to use this app in urban areas.

That's how I see it. Maybe your app could catch on in Japan, which offers "texting lanes" (dedicated sections of road for phone users completely lost to their environments) in some areas.

The only way I could see such an app being useful is if you were able to usefully blend the rear camera with the video being played in a way that was nondistracting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight. I should have mentioned that this is designed to work with your TV in your living room. You'd power walk in the same spot.

<comment><USER2> Doh. Of course ._.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Funny we were talking about this yesterday.

My waifu was nagging me about the Z-Wave sensors I was putting up around the house so I turned the conversation around to "what is something useful we can do with these gadgets?"

One idea was the "fitness tracker with consequences". Didn't take your 10,000 steps today, well the refrigerator won't unlock until you do. Parents struggle with enforcing screen time limits on their children and some system where the child earns screen time by being active could be a good answer. The flaw I see in the scheme above is that you have to walk when you are enjoying your activity; if you could save up your steps to spend them later that would be better.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, I want to enjoy the show fully. For working out, I'd go to the gym. But this might work for those who have busier schedule.

</comment><comment><USER5> What if I dont watch netflix?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you watch anything on TV?</comment></comment>


I poured my blood, sweat and life savings into my restaurant. It ruined my life. - <AUTHOR> https://torontolife.com/food/restaurant-ruined-life/ <comment><USER3> The first big red flag for me (besides that the whole thing pretty obviously started as a mid life crisis) was how little time it sounds like he spent working at his friend's bar in the three months he needed to put in to qualify for the liquor license. How could he not take that seriously as an opportunity to learn about the industry? I would bet money that the answer is he was afraid to learn that running a restaurant is actual work, not an episode of chef's table.

His lack of preparation is mind boggling, but completely deliberate: the less he knew, the more room there was for fantasy. Beware working with people like this, who want to skip straight to the end.

<comment><USER4> Yea, it doesn't take long working a kitchen or bar to see how fast you can bleed money, employees, reputation—you really have to enjoy the work. You're going to to into debt, you're not going to get vacation, you'll have constant employee turnover and drama (mood issues? Drug issues? Both common in a kitchen.), you have to do shady shit to pass inspection (throw the food out and hit the lights to scare the mice, the inspector is in the lobby!), you're battling bitter customers who find your food fine but can't get your accent so they give you a two star yelp review and call you rude—it's fucking endless.

That said, the community is to die for. I can't recall ever being close to my coworkers in that way since moving into tech. Nothing tastes as sweet as a cigarette, liquor, and stories after your shift. Kind of necessary with the hours you work!

<comment><USER5> You won't go into debt if you have enough capitalization.

Of course, you almost never have enough capitalization.

<comment><USER4> Right, i should note that not all the things i've seen are smart.... avoiding going into personal debt is fairly straigtforward.

But, I frankly can't imagine a restaurant business not taking on some debt in some seasons, at least at first.

<comment><USER5> Whether you go in to debt or not is about how much money you start with. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A bit of advice from someone who was in the restaurant industry for 7 years. Don't start a restaurant especially if you work in tech. 80-100 hours a week for managers and owners is mandatory.

Tech is easy money compared to what it takes to create a profitable restaurant from scratch. The author made the same mistake I've seen people make before.

This guy did no research at all and sadly this is extremely common.

<comment><USER7> I've done both restaurants and tech. I had to think for a really long time which one to focus on. It just so happened that the startup hype kicked in around that time.

Tech is mentally exhausting. Really short but painful hours. Food & beverage is not exactly tiring, but the hours are very long. With tech consulting, you might be working 4-6 hours a day, with restaurants, expect around 14 hours/day. One involves a lot of slow, deep work, the other involves lots of rapid, shallow work.

With tech, you can get away with 0 employees, and everyone you hire is smarter than you. With restaurants, you regularly hire idiots who sleep while at work, don't show up, can't read simple instructions, steal from the charity jar. It's highly frustrating. It also drains a huge cut from your daily sales, which might seem like a lot until you look at profits.

It's really tempting to do a restaurant, because it's sort of "stable" source of income. But tech is much better and once you get tired of it all, you can just sell everything off at a higher price.

<comment><USER8> > With tech consulting, you might be working 4-6 hours a day

... huh? Which tech company is this?

<comment><USER9> Most software companies. And 4-6 hours is optimistic. Actual _productive_ time for most people is more around 3-4 hours per day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > At work, I had trouble concentrating on spreadsheets and instead found > myself scribbling menus on graph paper

Funnily enough, if he wanted to be successful, spreadsheets could've been the key to his success. He would've known his Cost of Goods Sold, he would've known his staffing costs, his rent, and how much money he had and could spend.

<comment><USER11> I know what you mean, but it's only part of it. Plenty of restaurants fail despite excellent bookkeeping. Personally I'd posit that the ability to create, measure, and manage operational processes is far more important, because operations are where the (often invisible) opportunity costs wreak havoc on restaurants.

<comment><USER10> The fact that he managed to run out of money before he even opened shows that he had no idea of the cost involved in opening and running a restaurant. He then reinforces this by telling us that he was selling his food too cheap, so he was running at a loss.

It seems like he actually did have his processes in order in the end, he got to a point where he was running a bit of a profit, and was on track, until he decided to close for a week, which managed to quickly suck his funds dry and plunge him back into debt. This could've been easily avoided.

Obviously that wasn't his only problem, but it's one of many. The fact that the restaurant succeeds today, without him, is interesting, because it sort of proves that he was the failing factor in the restaurant. Often it's external factors that doom a restaurant, poor location for instance.

<comment><USER12> > until he decided to close for a week

And it was the week before 'the slow season'? They came back to the start of a slow period. It's almost comical how little thought/planning he managed to put in to things, and after getting a 4 star review, and things picking up, he decides to close things down "for a week"? Closing down during a known 'slow period' \- that makes sense. I know seasonal/tourist places that do that. This was just... yet another misstep that, as you said, could easily have been avoided.

It became painful reading this. And it makes me think... this whole notion of '80% of restaurants fail' stuff is partially due to just really poor planning or non-critical thinking ability by people up front. Of course, more planning and analysis up front may just stop people from opening in the first place, which may bring the % rate of failures down, but the overall numbers would be lower too. It's hard not to read this and think "I'd be smarter than that - <USER2> wouldn't make those mistakes" (having worked in restaurants, I wouldn't make those mistakes - I'd likely make other ones!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > We had started with $60,000; after six weeks, we were down to $3,000, and > there was still so much to do.

I don't think he did nearly enough research into how much it costs to start a restaurant.

<comment><USER14> Approximately how much would you say it costs? Could he have gotten a small business loan?

<comment><USER15> An order of magnitude higher than 60k, if your goal is to compete in the market he was targeting. For 60k he could have opened a pizza or sandwich shop.

<comment><USER16> You'd have a hard time even opening a Subway with $60k

<comment><USER17> They recommend at least $30k in liquid assets, but I'm sure that depends on the market. $80-$310k minimum net worth. I agree with your statement, though this was interesting.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-costs-to-open-a- subwa...](http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-costs-to-open-a- subway-2015-3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having started a software business with too much optimism and too little business knowledge myself, and failed, I seriously have no idea how people start successful restaurants at all these days. No matter what mistakes he made, I feel for the guy, and the thousands of people every year trying to get a restaurant off the ground and ending up bankrupt. Aside from marketing, the initial costs of getting a SAAS business running are almost nothing; people / dev time is far and away the main cost usually. The economics and risks and up-front costs of opening even a small restaurant are staggering to me, I doubt I'd ever attempt it. But I'm glad some people do, and make it.

<comment><USER19> > Having started a software business with too much optimism and too little > business knowledge myself, and failed

I'd say trying in itself can be seen as a partial success, hope you didn't get too financially impacted.

Is there any books/resources you (or other HN readers who also started their businesses :)) wish you had read before starting? Or that you did read and consider essential?

<comment><USER18> Well I (and my family) was hugely financially impacted, as a result of my own choices, but I also had the best few years of my professional life. I made big mistakes, but I don't really have big regrets, if that makes sense, aside from losing angel investments and scaring my wife. I hope to do it again some day.

There are some great resources here and in books, but I can't think of anything I wish I'd have read earlier, and nothing I know of that would have changed my course. It might be out there, but I haven't read it yet. ;)

My team wasn't balanced enough, and we underestimated how much marketing we'd need. We were conflicted about raising VC money, so we wasted time dithering. We didn't figure out the right business strategy and our market until it was too late. All the books say to pay attention to this stuff, but none can really tell you how to do it in your case.

Great books I read include "Early Exits", "The Startup Owner's Manual", "Lean Startup", "Pitch Anything". I think I learned more about startups reading HN than in those books, but it's all good stuff. Seek out a wide variety of conflicting advice, find the best team, and go for it! ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I grew up working at a very successful family owned restaurant and landed in tech after college. The two can't be any different.

Owning a restaurant is a lifestyle in ways that working in tech never would be. There is no free time, there is never a day off, there is no exit in sight. It's 80-100 hours in per week, small margins, and frequent turnover.

Can it be profitable? Yes. But it requires as much, if not more domain expertise as anything else, including doing a startup. And, there are far fewer people out there talking about the valuable details of doing it correctly - very different from the startup world.

<comment><USER21> The reason people like me don't talk about the valuable details is, it has taken me 17 years to learn those details, and I sell that expertiese :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Between this article and the article on people too poor to retire, I sometimes think we should have classes on financial planning in high school. A lot of the mistakes he did came down to poor financial planning. He even gave a raise to his employees when he sold his home. As he describes it, there's no way he was counting, looking at his benefits, costs of goods, etc... Basic stuff but too many people seem to not know how to manage their money at all.

<comment><USER23> This isn't just lack of experience with financial planning. This is lack of common sense. You can't teach common sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds to me like he started his restaurant with way too little experience. He was an amateur cook who had never even worked in a restaurant. Even a bit of experience as a cook or waiter would have helped by giving him a sense of how things work. And ideally he would have had some experience on the management side too, maybe as an assistant manager.

</comment><comment><USER25> Running a restaurant is hard and unsurprisingly its even harder if you never have run one before. Staffing, food cost, vender management and health code malarky: these are some of the first things that make or break a restaurant. Then maybe location. Quality of food clearly doesn't make the list, at least not disconnected from price as Dominos, McDonalds and Starbucks succeed with high probability. Sad to see a vanity project eat up someones life.

<comment><USER26> A point that Gordon Ramsay makes is that consistency is more important than peak food quality for a restaurant. Occasionally serving bad food does way more harm than occasionally serving amazing food does good since many customers will not return after one bad experience and you won't establish regulars if your quality is not consistent.

What McDonalds and Starbucks do well is produce consistent (though not particularly high) quality at a price people are willing to pay and with staff who are not coming on board particularly well trained or talented. They also systematize / automate a lot of the other things you mention.

<comment><USER27> I'm taking (off topic) issue with the notion that Starbucks is not particularly high quality. Before Starbucks the options for coffee were almost universally limited to weak or burnt and stale bland Columbian beans. Starbucks is excellent at consistency (that was in the manual actually; I worked as a Starbucks barista for a year after college), to the extent that they replaced their skilled/training-required espresso machines with push button devices, but that does not diminish the overall more-than-acceptable quality.

<comment><USER28> Starbucks may be consistent at making coffee, but coffee elitists would claim that their coffee beans are over-roasted in order to hide the generally poor quality of the beans and used to burn out a lot of the flavors. If you buy a bag of coffee beans of freshly roasted coffee beans from a local coffee shop, and a bag from Starbucks, then make yourself a cup of coffee the difference is enormous. The predominant taste of the Starbucks coffee is bitterness, but the local coffee will taste fragrant.

Starbucks is much better than the average Folgers-type diner coffee (in that it's not both totally burnt and weak), which was the previous point of comparison for most Americans. At best, a cup of Starbucks is merely strong. However, it's not remotely as good as something from a coffeeshop which tailors the whole process to highlight the quality of the ingredients and attention to detail in the process.

Of course, I perhaps do not appreciate the challenges of managing a global supply chain and making it scale to the size of Starbucks, but I would agree with gp's assertion their coffee is not particularly high quality.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Starbucks-considered-bad-by- cof...](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Starbucks-considered-bad-by-coffee- purists-Why-do-people-hate-sneer-at-Starbucks)

<comment><USER29> Agreed. I don't have a sophisticated palate and even I can tell that Starbucks is inferior to competitors.

<comment><USER30> Agreed again. Starbucks coffee being over roasted is a common complaint, also I find the atmosphere unappealing usually. Most coffee shops I frequent have to hit the sweet spot of having decent coffee + price and being a pleasant place to work while having access to reliable wifi -- for me that turned out to be the local supermarket, I get real ambient noise as well without having music being blasted over speakers all the time. The trick I found is to look for places where people want to hold conversations in public; I often see Arab immigrants gathering to converse, local meetings proceeding, retirees conversing, and people conducting business at this location -- the defining feature is that nobody is really under the age of 30-35 usually if they use the venue for social functions. It changes from city to city, sometimes it's a local hipster cafe or a random 24h chain where interesting things happen outside the purview of what is mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > so I doled out $3,000 to hire a lawyer to oversee my incorporation. He later > told me that I could have done it myself online for a couple hundred bucks.

This guy is so raw that he is even missing basic stuff.

> We can barely afford the place, but I wanted my daughters to have their own > rooms

And he doesn't learn.

<comment><USER32> most lawyers don't charge 3k to incorporate. He got taken advantage of, plain and simple.

<comment><USER33> From the sounds of it, his lawyer gave him a bit more advice then just how to incorporate. I'm more surprised that he didn't give him the advice that the corporate veil will not shield him from outstanding sales tax receipts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> One thing that's interesting is that there's a factor a lot of people don't consider.

The more appealing a lifestyle seems, the more hard work probably has to go into it, because there's so much more competition.

For instance, in the story, he had a fantasy about having a hunting rifle next to the stove and going hunting whenever he damn felt like it. Who the heck doesn't want that?

Once he gets a taste of what it's like to peel several dozen potatoes, he doesn't take it to heart. He writes it off as an outlier. Anything cool takes a lot of effort, because so many other people want to do it also. But he still thought he could pull it off, because he "loved cooking". Does not matter. If you can't do the 1001 other things required to run a business, you're hosed.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've known two chefs who've gone on to start their own restaurants over the years, and the one thing they have in common (other than smoking) is they are REALLY highly strung. I don't just mean a little anxious/fidgety - they quite literally don't seem to be able to sit still even for a few seconds. Even little actions like pulling out a chair to sit down happens as fast as they're physically able to do it. Noisiest people I've ever known!

Neither of them have actually worked as a chef in years, and one of them hasn't set foot behind the counter at a restaurant since 2004. I can't even imagine the constant time pressure chefs, and undoubtedly restaurant owners must feel for this type of behavior to manifest and basically never go away.

<comment><USER36> You ever seen Gordon Ramsey when he's demonstrating or standing in place gesticulating, dude is like a jackrabbit on meth, he can't keep still.

<comment><USER35> Yes! That's pretty much what they're like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't want to sound mean, but... he has a well-thumbed copy of Kitchen Confidential and did this anyway? Because one of the things I remember most strongly from that are the stories about people who imagine fondly they'd like to own a restaurant, and it always ending in tears.

(Also I'm bemused as to why the opener suggests red tape was a problem.)

<comment><USER25> Seems like he kinda missed the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am surprised by the lack of up front number crunching that he did, seeing as his previous job was as an analyst.

</comment><comment><USER39> _My role was largely symbolic anyway, and after a few shifts stretched over a three-month period, I checked off that box._

I am reminded of a college class where everyone but me was solely concerned with getting a good grade and enthusiastically encouraging the professor to curve the grades and skip parts of the curriculum. I was the only one who expressed the concern that we might actually need to learn the course materials in order to actually be prepared for higher courses or even, god forbid, a _job_ at some point.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is really something everyone who opens a restaurant should be prepared for. An overwhelming majority of restaurants go out of business within a few years. It's a really difficult profession to be a part of, and if you want to be successful you've got to make some serious sacrifices--even then that might not be enough.

<comment><USER41> And yet it sounds as if his restaurant wasn't totally nonviable, he just didn't have nearly enough runway for all his first-time mistakes. He might even be successful next time with what he's learnt, if he had the stomach for another go … and another $200k starting capital …

<comment><USER42> Please do not encourage him. He lacks the proper budgeting skills. He starts thinking about expanding shuts down the place for a week and then everything falls apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Every so often one of these articles comes out about someone's dream restaurant or coffee shop that failed and I'm starting to think that maybe there are lots of just soft, naive people out there who just got by in life checking off the boxes and being responsible enough to get an easy office job (they're usually decent at writing a dramatic article though). Unless you get lucky making anything stick in the real world is very hard. Having succeeded and failed in business before most days I can't believe how easy my office job is.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think one issue with restaurants is they aren't usually conducive to an _MVP and iterate_ model. But that isn't always true. Velo Burrito started as delivery only two days a week,then turned into a restaurant.* I wonder if a template for how to do this more successfully could be developed.

* [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/07/this-tiny-bu...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/07/this-tiny-burrito-shop-has-legs.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> Pretty much every restaurant owner I know is in the same situation - maybe not quite as bad - but generally they have at least one total nightmare horror story about a restaurant they owned that burned down/got shut down/went bankrupt.

I find similarities to being a founder in a super risky high tech startup - but with higher possible payoff.

Yet, I don't hear a chorus of bar backs, dish washers, servers, hosts and chefs complaining about not having a life outside of the restaurant or needing "work-life balance." What gives?

<comment><USER45> The tech industry is basically printing money, so we workers can afford to be picky about the conditions we choose to work under.

Restaurants are ultra-competitive and have very thin margins, so people who work there can't.

<comment><USER33> Also, a lot of the people working these jobs have very few other options in life. Back-of-house food prep is one of the few industries that won't bat an eye at a felony on your resume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I like to visit local neighborhood restaurants to give these places hope because I hate seeing another retail location taken up by a franchise or worse of all - banks which are just basically dead space. To digress - they just opened another WF near me so there are now five total. Each is essentially a huge empty building with a huge empty parking lot. It's like the city decided they didn't want any useful commerce happening in this area and zoned it entirely for banks. Sad.

Meanwhile within walking distance there are like two restaurants and a coffee shop and I count myself lucky I even have that and visit all of them at frequently because I so treasure them. Even if their food isn't that amazing they at least somewhat contribute to the community of their surroundings.

</comment><comment><USER47> I've often wondered about the selection bias of the "80% of restaurants fail, they're the worst investment" because I had a suspicion that many people start restaurants thinking essentially, "My Mom's pasta sauce is so good, people say they would pay for it. I should open up a restaurant with her recipe." and then proceed to fall flat on their face.

Reading this article, I think I'm right. I wonder what the success rate is of a restaurant is when the owner has even a basic idea of how the various positions in a restaurant work and the important business metrics.

<comment><USER48> Yes, you're mostly correct. Most new restaurants fail because they don't handle the fundamentals properly.

To be fair, it's not that easy to learn all the fundamentals without doing the whole process and failing at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if some suffer from the same mistake people doing entrepreneur IT do. I fix computers at home, how hard can it be? I cook at home, how hard can it be?

<comment><USER50> Yep..

I ran a business out of high school / college summers networking up college kids in dorms. This was before computers came with ethernet cards by default and while dorms were being wired. My biggest mistake was not charging enough and not doing enough marketing. The university offered a similar service for 3x more than me.. I offered a flat rate including the card (which I got cheap.. easy drivers etc..) but I should have offered a choice of cards (fast, faster, fastest) and charged way more than I did as well as up sell (or sell an extended warranty or something...) It was a flash in the pan business only viable for 2-3 summers.

To follow up I also did computer IT consulting.. later and I still charged too little!! I guess one issue is that there is a ceiling on what you can charge (since you can just buy a new computer) unless it's in regard to recovering some important data... even then and nowadays you can just take the hard drive out and stick it in a usb enclosure, tell them to buy a new machine and call it a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> "What I lacked in experience I could make up for in enthusiasm."

So many startups are based on this very premise.

Reminds me of this poster: [https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/incompe...](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/incompetencedemotivator.jpeg?v=1403276021)

<comment><USER52> Or worse. See: "We have a great team, funding, want to start a startup, but have no idea what to do".

It would be like wanting to start a restaurant because you like to eat, but don't know how to cook or what kind of food you should focus on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I had a few more thoughts after thinking about this one for a bit. It's easy to laugh at the boneheaded mistakes, but can we say anything deeper about this?

The author's actions seem to be motivated by an almost childish level of over- enthusiasm. That the word childish occurs to me makes me wonder - are we making it too difficult for kids to try things? Not actually opening a restaurant, of course, but something moderately ambitions for their age. Big enough for them to fail badly at when they're insanely, blindly hopeful about it. It would be good in a way to experience that sort of failure at an age and life situation where you don't destroy your finances when you're 3/4 to retirement and with kids of your own to send to college. Maybe if he had experienced that, then he could chase after his next dream with a little more realism and self-control and a little less blind optimism.

</comment><comment><USER54> maybe start with a food truck? seems like a less risky way of getting into the business. if you are successful and make a name for yourself, you could parley that into a restaurant.

<comment><USER55> No kidding. When he learned (to his _surprise_ ) that he could barely afford a food truck already, that should have been a red flag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> You all would be surprised how many people will operate and act like him in worse ways. He's putting it in business, however it looks dumb for what he did, people gamble in casinos, what would you say to that? He had a dream, was dumb, reckless but attempt to fulfill it. Hard life lessons learn the hardest of ways

</comment><comment><USER57> Well, duh. This is such a cliche that it is a plot point on "Hawaii 5-0". Most new restaurants fail.

</comment><comment><USER58> I read the whole article end to end - this guy looks like he had a real interest into cooking, was willing to work hard and was able to contribute to the society in terms of a nice highly rated restaurant. It doesn't look like he wanted to draw millions of dollars from day 1 nor that he wanted his restaurant in the fanciest of the places. This should be a very normal thing to do and such people should succeed. Why is our modern day society arranged such that following this straightforward path doesn't help you make the ends meet?

Something is very very wrong.

<comment><USER59> If you read the whole article you'd see that it was perfectly possible to succeed, just that you cannot go in completely blind and just expect things to work by magic. Once a guy who had some experience in the restaurant business and wasn't completely naive about the whole process took over the place it started turning a profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> ive always liked the idea of automated restaurants. weve seen what automation has done for car production, so its interesting to imagine what an automated restaurant might be like. since the food is the product of very exact expenditures of energy, time and resources, you could forecast, resupply and otherwise manage your output and resource levels in a much more accurate way, for one.

and of course, you could make the food a lot faster i would imagine. and you could make it perfect every time. and you wouldnt have to pay people huge amounts of money to make it. i would also advocate for automating the delivery of the food to the table but that might be off putting to customers, so you could just build a system that would automate most of the mental load of managing tables and just use your human employees as meat puppets for the delivery software. perhaps something like google glass could be used. i bet you could reduce your serving staff very dramatically by doing that.

and as for ingredients, you could even grow some of them. ive seen videos about restaurants in new york that use roof top aquaponics systems to grow all their vegetables. whether on the roof or off site, one would need to run both production and processing and delivery in order for uniform quality to be achieved. the quality of the ingredients is supremely important -- i went to sauls in the bay area and their cheese burger literally gave me pause. if you want to know the difference between average ingredients and good ingredients, go try the cheese burger at sauls medium well.

even outside of automation, there are so many improvements to be made. i used to work in a restaurant and they would cook food on these large woks. i would guess more than a third of the energy from the flames below simply go around the wok and up out of the vent hood. automating the heating of the food would probably make it much easier to capture and use all of that thermal energy instead of half.

<comment><USER61> Perhaps it can't scale up enough to make automation economical because the customers have to be located nearby. You might make enough of a particular dish to satisfy the whole neighborhood in your delivery radius but still be too small a scale for robots to be cheaper than humans.

I suppose TV dinners are made like you say, but they can be frozen and transported to allow higher volume production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Seems like this was his life's dream to do, and he got to do it. So, I'm not sure it was entirely a bust. But certainly it was a very expensive dream to follow. And how many really ambitious people fail and fail again, before finally succeeding at something? It is a common story. Not that failure is any guarantee of success.

</comment><comment><USER63> Reminds me of this story (sadly similar)

[http://www.wweek.com/restaurants/2016/09/30/heres-what- happe...](http://www.wweek.com/restaurants/2016/09/30/heres-what-happened- when-i-opened-a-restaurant-in-portland/)

</comment><comment><USER64> This sounds like a lot of startups, insufficient market research, poor cost management, chasing hip trends...

</comment><comment><USER60> most of the time i read a story like this, the infamous statistic of 90 to 80 percent new establishments failing is referenced, and then the person goes on to explain how they barged into the business like a belligerent, drunken bull in a china shop. this guy did zero research. zero thought was put into the costs involved. i am frankly amazed that this guy made it as far as he did. i remember the last time a story like this was posted, the guy got fooled into paying to renovate the building he was renting. i have a feeling that most of these restaurants fail because they are started by complete idiots.

</comment><comment><USER65> Hard as it is to read it, I am glad that he wrote the article.

His journey is a cautionary tale on how difficult it is to start a new business (including tech startups). There's so much work to be done and a lot of them are non-glamorous.

</comment><comment><USER66> Peter Thiel uses restaurants as an example of a super competitive industry that you don't want to be in.

</comment><comment><USER67> FTFY: I poured my blood, sweat and life savings into a business I knew nothing about. It ruined my life.

</comment><comment><USER68> A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks here.;)

</comment><comment><USER69> > In 2011, I applied to operate a booth at the Toronto Underground Food Market > [...] my fingers cramping so severely from peeling 100 pounds of potatoes > that I almost called 911. [...] I lost money

So his first experience was extremely painful, almost landed you in the emergency room, and you lost money on it. What valuable lessons he learned going forward?

> I didn't care.

None.

> Eighty per cent of first-time restaurateurs fail. I knew this. Opening a > restaurant was the least sensible, dumbest thing I could do. My wife, > Dorothy, a daycare worker, was coasting toward the end of a maternity leave, > and we had two kids to feed.

It's so rare to see people _brag_ about being reckless, irresonsible, and wasteful of resources they cannot afford to waste.

> "Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked. "I don't think you know what > you're getting yourself into."

Friends who knew what they were talking about tried to warn him off.

> My shifts consisted of a few leisurely hours chopping veg and prepping salad > dressings.

Any opportunity for experience is to be strictly avoided. "The law says I need to know how a restaurant works? I know better!"

> My role was largely symbolic anyway

No it wasn't.

> As it turns out, no one invests in first-time restaurateurs, no matter how > mind-blowing they think their cooking is.

Man, I wonder why? More to the point, it's clear he never did.

> I realized it was far from the downtown foodie scene [...] Admittedly, I had > an ulterior motive: the place was a 10-minute walk from my house and close > to the girls' school

He purposefully chose a bad location, knowing it was a bad location, because it was convenient for him.

...I've got to stop reading, this is actually enraging me. It's so _dumb_ , and he seems so _proud_.

<comment><USER70> I think his behaviour is already well described by Carl Jung. His world view is skewed by mythology (like movies and hero worship) instead of by rational thought.

<comment><USER71> So was the world view of Richard Stallman in Richard Stallman's Sedentary, Physically-Debilitating Quest for the Gnolden Treasure.

I'm not saying that you imply his wasn't equally skewed. Just that when I read about Stallman or other people who rightly attract admiration this truism tends to be conspicuously absent. But the mythology is just as strong there too-- a rational person would not take years to find out from a specialist that their chronic hand pain was due to repetition caused by an unreasonable amount of typing[1].

[1] [https://stallman.org/stallman- computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

<comment><USER72> Plenty of us dorks complain about Stallman's worldview and philosophy. I won't complain about the contributions he's made to computing, or even the world in general, but striking it lucky doesn't make you philosophically pure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I could have saved him the trouble has he asked before doing this on quora. Seriously the culinary world is full of the worlds rejects. Junkies, alcoholics, thieves and the mentally unstable. I took a break from IT to pursue a culinary career. It was a great lesson in life. It taught me you don't get paid anything but slave wages even though you are working 15 hour days. Your body gets wrecked. You get no respect. You work with the people who couldn't get a job anywhere else for the worst reasons. It's repetitive AF. There are not a lot of good reasons to try and live that life. No matter what glitter and rainbows crap food tv makes it look like.</comment>


Talk about websites without improving their ranking - <AUTHOR> http://www.donotlink.com/

<comment><USER3> "Don't link to other sites or you'll improve their ranking. Link to mine instead" is pretty much what this site is saying.

This is why Google created rel="nofollow"[1] and if you are really worried about where you pass PageRank to it is a much better alternative than linking to some random 3rd party site while passing value back to them.

[1][https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en)

<comment><USER4> Since the Panda update everybody should be using rel="nofollow" on all outbound links, otherwise you risk getting knocked back to page 100 should any of the sites you ever link to trip a flag that leads google to classify them as a spammer.

<comment><USER5> Hence Google is probably going to end up ignoring nofollow

<comment><USER6> For what it's worth, there are many indications that using more than a few no- follow links on your website 1) hurts your SEO standing, and 2) still passes Link Juice to the external website (just slightly less than its do-follow counterpart).

This happened after Google discovered that people were abusing no-follow - <USER2> trying to hoard the website's weight and not sharing it with anybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fails to parse [http://io/](http://io/) as valid URL. Same with IDNs, [http://пример.испытание/](http://пример.испытание/). Okay, that's obscure cases, but when you're writing yet another link shortener you really should know quite a bit about URIs (and IRIs).

Practical problem is, service does not make distinction between http and https schemes - typing in [https://example.org/](https://example.org/) yields [http://www.donotlink.com/ZG](http://www.donotlink.com/ZG) which leads to [http://example.org/](http://example.org/).

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, that's the same like tinyurl or any other url-shortener, except that this page isn't advertised as such.

Why not using the nofollow attribute[1]? It exists for this specific use-case.

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

<comment><USER9> tinyurl and other shorteners generally use a 301 redirect, which often does pass 'link juice'.

nofollow is usually under the control of the webmaster. Which may or may not be the same as the content creator.

Think forums and blog comments, as poster you generally have no control if nofollow is added to links. Usually it should be, but no garentee.

Also think of sites like twitter, facebook and g+, again you can't ensure that nofollow is added. Similally when that content is then copied or syndicated. You can usually hope that the copier will perserve the link itself, but they may or may not choose to 'nofollow' the copied link.

And lastly, 'bad' bots, may well ignore the nofollow anyway. It would have to be broken/clever bot to get the destiniation from donotlink

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So what happens when this site gets popular and the owner decides to 'punk' all of the other sites by turning it into a content farm?

edit: or if they get hacked and the same happens

<comment><USER11> Hacked? More than likely they just drop the service in 10 months because they are a fly by night operation that lacks any plan? Then their domain gets picked up by a content farm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I prefer to let the search engines worry whether a link is supposed to pass link juice or not. I've already given Google my fair share of information these days anyway.

<comment><USER4> Google isn't worried about your site. They will drop your ranking if they think that is for the greater good. If you are going to link without nofollow then you are trusting every site you link to never do anything that even vaguely looks spammy or like paid linking. If you link to a site that pays for some links (according to google's spam algos) then you will get 'panda slapped' and recovering from that is very hard.

Always use nofollow.

<comment> grey-area It's amusing that Google is opposed to other people using paid links, when their main business is... paid links.

<comment><USER12> But then they can turn around and say "Go ahead, Ban Google.com from your search engine because we have paid links". DOH! Can't win =(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why doesn't it let me put donotlink.com in the box? Rather shitty of them.</comment>


The New Haxe Target: HashLink in depth, part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://haxe.org/blog/hashlink-indepth <comment><AUTHOR> I understand the advantage of the HashLink target is to provide the choice between a fast-to-compile target (HLVM) and a fast-to-run but slow to compile target (C). So you'd want to use the HL target for quick development iterations and the C target for final release

</comment><comment><USER2> This is interesting. I wasn't aware of Haxe until now.

So it's a runtime system, plus a collection of packages with a standard interface? I think this sounds like a good idea, and I believe I've heard that someone else is trying the same with Haskell, although I can't find the link right now. It makes a lot of sense to leverage the runtime system of GHC, and basically using it as an "embeddable JVM".

<comment><USER3> Haxe is actually a programming language[0], which can target JVM, CLR, C++, Flash, JS, and a number of other platforms. It has found some use in game development, but is still fairly niche. This is (I guess) a tech overview of a new platform designed for the purpose of being a Haxe target.

[0]: [http://haxe.org/](http://haxe.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Impressed with the project. Haxe keeps plugging along and (along with Dart) is one of best kept secrets in the app space.

<comment><USER5> Dart is such a great and modern language, it's a pitty it isn't more popular. I'd love to see Dart as a general purpose scripting language that's easily embeddable, like Lua.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome! Really nice what Nicolas and the whole community of Haxe contributors are doing to push language, eco system and targets.

Thanks to all of you involved for working on this!

> Just-In-Time compilation (actually Ahead-of-Time)

Also I do like paradoxes :)

</comment><comment><USER7> No need to point out that Haxe is written in Ocaml ;)</comment>


Show HN: Tool to combat eye fatigue - <AUTHOR> https://i202020.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> I like the concept, probably could be extended to other scenarios...every 30min stand up and stretch...every hour walk around the office...every 2 hours go outside.

Also in your links would like to see more scientific (although in layman's terms) references rather than other apps who do similar things.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure if there are any scientific material concerning the 20-20-20 thing, just some blog posts and a webMD page: [http://www.webmd.com/eye- health/computer-vision-syndrome?pag...](http://www.webmd.com/eye- health/computer-vision-syndrome?page=2) . Its just something to try, as taking eye breaks every now and then is probably good. But, thanks for the feedback!

For more general purpose break management tools, theres some pomodoro (not sure how scientific that is either) time/break managing tools online, but I might add some bars or user customizable bars if I get around to it. I usually try to stretch or take some deep breaths whenever my 20 minutes are up. For something like going outside, you could just add a weekday timer/reminder on your phone/watch at foo and bar times of day.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Super simple, but I could not find something that did this for me online. Making a system beep script would be great except I can't get any system beeping to work on my laptop with linux.

Suggestions or pull requests (style, functionality, or otherwise) welcome.

<comment><USER3> I've used a similar app that made a beep after a certain number of minutes, but I made a habit of ignoring it after a week.

Now I use Breaktime (only for OSX), which inserts itself in the _system tray_ part of the screen and displays a big overlay when "time's up". It is more effective because it forces me to get up.

You could build a browser notification that gets the focus of the user.</comment></comment>


NASA Is Giving Away Retro Space Travel Posters for Free - <AUTHOR> http://thescienceexplorer.com/universe/nasa-giving-away-retro-space-travel-posters-free-0 <comment><AUTHOR> "Imagination is our window into the future. At NASA/JPL we strive to be bold in advancing the edge of possibility so that someday, with the help of new generations of innovators and explorers, these visions of the future can become a reality. As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future." \- excerpt from the official home of the posters[1].

[1] [http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the- future/](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/)

</comment><comment><USER2> blogspam of:

[http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the- future/](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/)</comment>


New elephant study shows catastrophic decline in Africa - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/31/africa/great-elephant-census/index.html <comment><USER2> Idea : prosecute people buying ivory instead of chasing the trail of dead elephants. Unfortunately, people who purchase ivory have expensive taste and deep pockets.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do you use Twitter? - <AUTHOR> To those of you who use Twitter - what are some of the reasons you use it? <comment><USER2> I have a private Twitter account and use it as a personal diary of sorts. I see Twitter as a write-mostly device with some recall capability. There also happen to be 300-odd individuals who have read-only access to my diary. It's great to have them around, although my usage of Twitter is almost entirely not affected by my followers. On the other hand, the private nature of my account allows me to exercise tight control over who follows me. This lets me keep away the monster that is self-censorship.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't use twitter. I think twitter sucks.

</comment><comment><USER4> To reach many people.</comment>


The most American thing there is: eating alone - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/18/eating-alone-is-a-fact-of-modern-american-life/ <comment><USER2> I was just discussing how American culture is, on its surface, highly extroverted yet actually quite introverted. We value an extroverted personality, but then people generally go home to isolated suburban homes, eat alone quietly while watching TV, watch more TV then go to bed. Families can be extremely individualistic, meaning people hardly spend time with extended families.

When I was in southern Europe recently I couldn't help but notice how people would sit in restaurants or cafes and talk for hours. Honestly I have no idea how they can converse for so long and what they talk about.

Of course as I understand it the further north you go the more introverted and achievement-oriented the culture becomes, like America.

I don't mind it but of course I'm biased, I'm American and somewhat introverted. I like that I can be introverted and eat alone or watch a movie alone and nobody cares and when I feel like it I can be extroverted and chat up strangers or have some good office banter.

<comment><USER3> > _When I was in southern Europe recently I couldn 't help but notice how > people would sit in restaurants or cafes and talk for hours. Honestly I have > no idea how they can converse for so long and what they talk about._

As an American, this baffles and saddens me. Have you never had a close friend that you can just gab with for hours about shared interests, current events, and so on?

<comment><USER4> That might be possible on an occasional basis, but less so on a daily basis in a family situation.

My wife and I have a limit of one Work-Day Story each at the dinner table, because any more than that becomes boring for the other person. She really has no interest in the programmatic internals of insurance systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am an extremely social person, but nearly every weekday I eat lunch alone.

My main motivation is it's literally the only time during the week when I _can_ be alone, so I take advantage of that time. Most days I go for a 45 minute walk and listen to a podcast, then grab a sandwich or a salad and eat it back at my desk while browsing the web.

It really makes a huge difference in my day.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm an American crazy about food (and dining, alone or with others), and I found this one out the hard way.

Back in March I was growing crazy from New Hampshire's winter so I bought a ticket to Portugal. I learned the words for "thank you" and "sorry" and some menu-critical vocab and hopped on a plane to find a bit of sun, do some street photography, and try the food.

It was a big unintended consequence of having no one to go with. Dining alone at night simply _isn 't done_ there. At all. Only one restaurant I found had a bar counter, and it was a lunch place. There was no "eating at the bar" like I'd do anywhere in the US.

Every night I was the only person in each restaurant dining alone (for a week, no exceptions). In a city I found this really surprising. This makes it harder to meet people (no bar counter where you can talk to a bartender and other diners), which I think is too bad for solo travelers. It was a little alienating, I definitely felt like the oddball each night.

At Terra (fantastic veg-only place in Lisbon) one couple near me did say _Bon Appetit,_ seemingly out of pity that I had nobody else with me, which seemed nice of them.

The solo-dining culture must be a plus of traveling within the US, I'd think for some. At least I've met/talked to interesting people at a bar counter before in different places, even in my hometown.

</comment><comment><USER7> Love eating alone, me. In the UK I always feel a bit weird, but I love sitting on the bar of a American brunch place, drinking limitless coffee till i'm buzzed out of my tree, and eating on the counter. Also the US coffee shops are full of people working alone, reading, doing their thing. In Europe, people cling to each other like monkeys at dinner time, and I feel like a real freak, and bat away pitying glances for fun, so I much prefer the US way.

</comment><comment><USER8> This trend validates the appeal of Soylent, whose users views eating as a waste of time, rather than a social experience.

<comment><USER3> The Soylent founder that everyone thinks is crazy eats Soylent exclusively _at home_. He also talks about how much he enjoys eating out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recall a past article about Americans have a strong irrational aversion to eating alone. Generalizations are fun

<comment><USER10> Well, it's definitely a generalization, but I would say it's right for some Americans. I'll eat alone without hesitation, but many of my friends will not, and have a strong aversion to it. I think there's a point to be made that it isn't so much that we don't feel anxious about eating alone, but that no one in our shared culture thinks it's unusual to see an adult eating alone. By shared culture, I mean to acknowledge that there are several regional culture groups that could be described as distinct in the USA, and by unusual, I mean to say that it wouldn't be viewed as there being something off about the person. But I do think that the case can't be made that we, as a culture, enjoy eating alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's a big difference between work here and over in Italy - there, most everyone went out to eat together every day. I miss that a bit (although I'm really happy to be back in the US for other things).

</comment><comment><USER12> As a Canadian, I wonder if Canada is more like America or Europe in this regard. I suppose that it'll be an experiment the next time I go out to eat alone.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Author clearly hasn't travelled much. In Japan, many restaurants are geared entirely towards solo diners and drinkers.</comment>


SpaceX processing units, radiation-tolerant by design (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.aviationweek.com/Blogs.aspx?plckBlogId=Blog%3a04ce340e-4b63-4d23-9695-d49ab661f385&plckPostId=Blog%3a04ce340e-4b63-4d23-9695-d49ab661f385Post%3aa8b87703-93f9-4cdf-885f-9429605e14df <comment><USER2> _" The reason we have three is when operating in proximity of ISS, we have to always have two computer strings voting on something on critical actions. We have three so we can tolerate a failure and still have two voting on each other. And that has nothing to do with radiation, that has to do with ensuring that we're safe when we're flying our vehicle in the proximity of the space station._

 _I went into the lab earlier today, and we have 18 different processing units with computers in them. We have three main computers, but 18 units that have a computer of some kind, and all of them are triple computers – everything is three processors. "_

This detail so reminded me of Clarke's Rama series.

 _" And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain:

The Ramans do everything in threes."_

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this paragraph resume their philosophy:

> So building the computer for the Dragon isn't just about building the > computer for the Dragon, it's about building a whole suite of tools, > techniques, people and processes to then go to the next vehicle, and the > next vehicle. And our equipment crosses lines. Falcon designs go into > Dragon, we're currently retrofitting the Dragon design into the new Falcon, > so our designs constantly keep evolving, and that's why we don't want to get > into lines that have limited growth capacity.

Their approach is all about reusability, evovability and scalability. And I think using a maximum of common code between all the different systems will only make this code stronger. They seem to counterbalance the hardware faults and software dangerousness of C++ by implementing a generalized voting mechanism where all decisions must be validated by two different computers. In this area and at this scale it seems to me that it's disruptive.

<comment><USER4> > In this area and at this scale it seems to me that it's disruptive.

It seems disruptive because you have no background in aerospace. This is bog standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The last question and answer sum up SpaceX perfectly:

Q; So you're not breaking a mold here.

A: We're taking it to an extent previously not done, but we're operating in a well known set of techniques and capabilities.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand to what extent this hasn't been previously done. The design is pretty standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would have been interesting to hear more about their future road map since they are currently only doing low earth orbit but aim for Mars. The radiation environment is quite different of course.

Maybe certain fabrication technologies (geometry/SOI/packaging) will produce COTS semiconductors which can take a lot of total dose. I'm not sure of the status of this. Does anybody have any insights?

I would think that the biggest benefit of using COTS is performance and developer efficiency. It is certainly possible to run Linux on the available rad hard parts (PPC, SPARC, MIPS) but due to low usage the development environment will not be as good.

<comment><USER7> If they manage to depress the cost-to-orbit sufficiently, they'll maybe be able to take more shielding along. It might even be dual-use stuff like carefully placed water tanks or stacks of prefab building materials, which can then be used on the journey or at the destination.

On the hardening ICs specifically, I recall that SOI is potentially a better performing technology than bulk silicon wafers, the actual performance drop is due to much larger feature sizes to better handle low-energy rad strikes.

I suspect (but haven't looked in a long time) that the performance could be radically improved if they could develop the process to modern equivalents, but the economics just aren't there.

I was just wondering if it would be possible to use ECC on the core internals rather than just the RAM, and it looks like someone has considered it for the register file[1] I suppose it might be useful on the instruction pipeline as well, and other places.

Then again, it may be just easier all round to take the SpaceX current approach of many simple cores, and redundancy in software.

[1] [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4708869](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4708869)

<comment><USER6> The register file and cache is typically protected with some kind of ECC. The other parts of the CPU are protected by using rad hard flip flops (be it either TMR or other means).

But this is the road SpaceX is not taking ...

And all these techniques only protect against soft errors. I was more interested in how to mitigate against permanent errors (latchup) and tolerating high total dose when using commercial components. Will they do this by screening components which are manufactured using potential good fabrication process e.g. SOI.

<comment><USER8> It seems like if they can on average use smaller parts and more of them, then it just comes down to statistics - permanent chip damage isn't impossible in rad-hard electronics, just less likely.

I suspect it'll come down to a test though - at some SpaceX are going to launch an unmanned Dragon to Mars, and that will be more then anything a fascinating exercise in really understanding the deep space radiation environment, which we still do not know nearly enough about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This feels all too like a video game.

Radiation-hardened is a tank spec. Tons of health, tons of armor, but slow moving without a lot of DPS.

Radiation-tolerant is an assassin spec. Not a lot of health or armor, but has crazy health regen and a diverse skillset.</comment>