Coffee wars: South Korea's cafe boom nears saturation point - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-coffee-idUSKCN0X12GF?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews <comment><USER3> The gas station near my house in Toronto got a "Costa" coffee machine which makes a better latte than the coffee shop next door to it. It has a touch screen and can make anything from americano, cappuccino, hot chocolate, drip coffee, etc. It also has the same cane sugar offered at Starbucks.

The price was also 30%+ cheaper than the coffeeshop and it was ready relatively fast.

The machine also plays music and ambient coffeeshop sounds when it's making the coffee. Nice UX touch.

It's pretty amazing that availability of quality coffee is becoming so widespread now. If more of these machines start spreading it's going to add ever more competition to small coffeeshops.

<comment><USER4> One day coffee shops should just have machines like that, but still look inviting and warm, artwork on the walls, earthy color schemes.

Heck might even have a "barrista", but they just press the button on the machine. But then machine automatically drops a cup and makes your drink.

You order by voice or even better via an app on your phone, ahead of time, as you get closer to the store it starts to make it so when you step in, it is ready.

I wouldn't be upset a bit if the barrista got paid the same, and instead spent more time interacting with customers, or picking music, and kicking out people who have camped there for the last 5 hours after buying a $2 cookie.

But to be serious, I don't understand why coffee making still needs a human for measuring, timing and mixing things. Just guessing that a machine will be more consistent with all the variables (temperature, water, coffee, milk mixture etc), and will be more efficient as well.

<comment><USER5> Starbucks already tried that, from [https://consumerist.com/2007/06/22/confessions-of-a- starbuck...](https://consumerist.com/2007/06/22/confessions-of-a-starbucks- barista/)

> A few years ago, Starbucks made the jump to automatic espresso machines. > Standard procedure for pulling a shot of espresso requires grinding into the > portafilter, tamping it down, locking it into the espresso machine, and > pressing the button to start the water. The Starbucks machine does all of > this with the touch of one button – it also stores the coffee grounds as > compressed pucks in a drawer that needs to be emptied only twice a day. This > saves a lot of time for baristas, especially when there's a long line. The > shots themselves are very good for an automatic machine. But these machines > cost about ten thousand dollars apiece compared to about three thousand for > a quality manual commercial grade espresso machine. That's a lot of money to > recoup at about two dollars for a double shot. Not to mention that Starbucks > also pays its employees a higher wage than most coffee shops because they > don't make as much tips working at Starbucks. The cost of operating a > Starbucks is astronomical. But the quality is there.

And then [http://www.idea-sandbox.com/blog/solving-starbucks- problems-...](http://www.idea-sandbox.com/blog/solving-starbucks- problems-1-loss-of-theatre/) :

> When we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in > terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked > the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre that was in > play with the use of the La Marzocco* machines. This specific decision > became even more damaging when the height of the machines, which are now in > thousands of stores, blocked the visual sight line the customer previously > had to watch the drink being made, and for the intimate experience with the > barista.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! Real quick, what happened? Did they end the project? Seems to me at least 1 employee could be replaced by such a machine, the machine costs ten thousand once (+ maintenance and replacement), the employee costs tens of thousands every year. (i.e. you make about $9-10 at Starbucks as a Barista, but it costs Starbucks at least $12, that's $25k per year per FTE). I don't see how they brought up cost. Although I'm not surprised people don't want to order at a mini factory haha, at least not yet.

<comment><USER5> I'm guessing they didn't replace them after wearing out, and didn't put them in new stores. I don't think it actually saved much labor, a partner is still needed to man the bar, there was more work to do than just drawing shots. Also, people were part of the Starbucks experience, it wasn't just a coffee factory.

Now if someone invented an automatic frapiccino machine, I'm sure many Starbucks partners would be begging for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A quote from The Atlantic article on Gangnam Style

"In the song, the narrator says he's looking for a classy lady who can afford a relaxing cup of coffee and he's a real man who downs the boiling hot coffee in one go. And I think some of you may be wondering why he's making such a big deal out of coffee, but it's not just your ordinary coffee; it's gotta be a cup of Starbucks coffee if you will. In Korea, there's a joke poking fun at women who eat 2,000-won (about $2) ramyeon (Korean style ramen) for lunch and then unstintingly spend over 6,000 won (about $5.30) on Starbucks coffee. Actually, the word Doenjangnyeo ("Soybean paste girl/woman") or Doenjang girl/woman was created to mock women who spend more than they can afford. Such crazes were believed to be inspired by HBO's "Sex and the City" in which the designer stuff-obsessed women frequently meet together to talk over brunch or coffee. "

</comment><comment><USER8> Posting from a cafe (Ediya's flagship store) in South Korea: This article completely misses the point. Cafes in South Korea aren't about coffee so much as having a space to be in. Most of the young generation either live with their family or in very small spaces. The coffee is notoriously bad at almost every one of the coffee shops. However, they do offer free wifi and couches so you'll see them packed with everything from businessmen to students.

While 'good coffee' is a marketing point that some newer cafes are using to differentiate themselves from the competition, it has never been the point of cafes here.

You can find good coffee in Seoul, but you really have to search for it. I recommend The Pancake Epidemic ([http://www.thepancakeepidemic.com](http://www.thepancakeepidemic.com)). I am not affiliated.

<comment> atom-morgan This was by far the biggest disappointment when I went to Korea a few years ago. The shops looked amazing and the coffee tasted like mud. And it was expensive!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A little off-topic and probably totally unrelated, but hearing about South Korea and an oversaturation of coffee shops in the same sentence/headline made me immediately think of my many workdays spent at Think Coffee in Greenwich Village...every once in awhile, a mob of Asian tourists would come in and take pictures as if it were Times Square, and I just chalked it up to the stereotype of Asian tourist groups being overly enthusiastic about taking photos of everything...but it turns out Think Coffee really was a destination for South Korean tourists, as I found out later from this NYT article:

[http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/a-coffee- shop-a...](http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/a-coffee-shop-as-seen- on-tv-becomes-a-must-see-for-south-koreans/)

I don't understand Korean, but the reality show that visited Think Coffee looks hilarious. But what's even funnier to me is the mystique that New York has...such that something as mundane as ordering an espresso drink could have global entertainment value...when it's done at a Manhattan coffee shop.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing the article and story!

I've spent a lot of time in that coffee shop (mostly studying for exams), but always just ascribed the tourists to the standard NYC backdrop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Visited Seoul a month ago and there are indeed a crazy number of coffee shops. Quite expensive and very chain-dominated: Starbucks and various clones, I assume because of the prestige factor of being American (completely the opposite to where I'm from, where Starbucks is regarded as undrinkable watery garbage). You have to look a lot harder to find a non-chain shop.

<comment><USER12> There are many, but they don't stand out and are out of the way. And it's impossible to tell which ones are good without trying.

Regular ice americano was $4.50-$5.00 there, more than double what I pay in the states. I do ok here in the states riding the healthcare IT gravy choo choo train, and I don't know if i'd ever pay that much for a cup here.

So I was shocked at the number of people that paid $4-$5 for a cup of coffee there.

<comment><USER5> In Switzerland, I paid > 10 CHF for a drink and a croissant at Starbucks (and that was...8 years ago).

<comment> david-given These days in Zürich you'll pay 5 to 7 francs for a coffee and probably 3 to 4 francs for a gipfel, so that's still pretty much dead on.

Although that is at a real café, not a Starbucks. I haven't been into one for a couple of years so YMMV.

<comment><USER5> Real European cafes don't seem to believe in plushy comfy chairs...it is one American cultural innovation that I'm greatly addicted to (but I'm also a seattlite).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Singapore is pretty coffee crazy as well, having their local variant, "Kopi" \- which is pretty horrid unless you drink it with sweetened condensed milk or carnation milk+sugar. My Condo, international plaza in the Central Business District, has no less than seven coffee shops on the first floor (one, "Joe and Dough", just opened last week. Their "Western Style" Americano, at SG$4.50 was foul to the point of being undrinkable).

They all over charge for a drip coffee (Typically SG$4.00 - SG$5.00), make you wait way too long, and honestly aren't delivering a particularly impressive product (even the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf coffee is meh.)

Ironically - I leave the building every day to walk to McDonalds, which, for SG$2.70 has an absolutely _excellent_ cup of coffee, and, even better, as soon as they see me walking towards the door they are pouring it and have it ready for me.

<comment><USER14> How's life as a tech guy in Singapore? I'm thinking of relocating there.

(I've lived in Hong Kong and China, so I'm not an Asia noob, but Singapore seemed better as a long-term place to settle).

<comment><USER13> I came here directly from the valley after 16+ years. It's a super safe, clean place to live with almost unlimited (and awesome) places to eat, and tons of stuff to do outside (if you don't mind a little bit of heat), along with super cheap transportation (taxis, MRT, and Buses). Housing is pretty expensive - though you can find some reasonable places - keeping in mind that the locals have never heard of CraigsList, so if you look for a place there, it's targeted at ExPats (PropertyGuru is a more common tool for locals, in much the same way Burpple is superior to yelp). Owning a car is pretty pricey as you would have to pay $60K or so for a "Certificate of Entitlement" just for the _right_ to purchase a car.

But, you asked, as a "Tech Guy" \- and, with the exception of SimLim Towers/Squares (which are awesome electronics outlets - even better than Frys) - I feel a little out of the stream of things here, in ways I never did back in the valley. I used to go out all the time and hang out with colleagues who had worked for startups Two, Three, four generations back and were at yet a new startup, building new technology.

That sort of liquidity and networking doesn't seem to be happening here in Singapore (that I've discovered, perhaps there are niches - I know that there is an Ubisoft office here). So, that's the challenge - I know 500+ people back in Silicon Valley that I've worked with through one startup after another - and I know maybe 5 people here in Singapore 3 years later. It's not like you go to work for a company here that starts with 6 people, and grows to 600 in five years (which I've done a couple times now in the valley) - <USER2> if you are working for a branch of a company based out of somewhere else.

Taxes are great though.

<comment><USER15> Is it the same case at Ayer Rajah? The last time I checked it's more vibrant compared to 2 years ago. Where are you working at?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since this is HN I'll venture to ask a slightly off topic question: Has anyone here build their own coffee maker and would like to share the story? I own a mid range (800 Euro) machine but am growing a bit tired of having only one bean slot. The price jump up to multi slot seems a bit excessive and it would be an interesting project to DIY. I'd also love the option to access and reprogram the machine in fun ways. It's one of the few use cases for IoT that could interest me...link the maker with an alarm clock (or maybe a sensor in the shower) and have a freshly brewed cup ready just in time in the morning.

It seems like a fairly complex project to my not very electronics oriented brain. The chances of me ever building one are slim but I'd really enjoy reading about a project or two (I found a couple but they weren't tinkery enough for my liking).

<comment><USER17> By "coffee maker" do you mean coffee roaster? Espresso machine? Little cheapo drip coffeepot?...

What does "one bean slot" mean?

What type of coffee do you like? In general, if you're making coffee for 1–3 people, I'd recommend a french press, a pour-over dripper, or an Aeropress. All three are simple objects without motors or electronics. Next step is to get a nice burr grinder. Hand-crank ones can be kind of annoying to use, an electric one will put you back about $200.

An espresso machine with reasonable quality is going to cost a lot more than any of those.

I don't think there's too much value in adding DIY electronics to a device which brews coffee; you could build something gimmicky, but you probably won't end up with a better cup of coffee. A coffee roaster on the other hand could be pretty interesting to customize.

<comment><USER16> I think it translates to fully automated coffee machine. Grinder+brewing department+UI. Something like a Bosch VeroSelection. They usually have some settings for the grinder and you can select different kinds/sizes of coffee. And that's the problem. There's one container for the beans but you can theoretically select coffee or espresso. What I was talking about was the need for one container for regular coffee beans and one for espresso beans (or just different roast would be nice as well). I agree that everything else would mostly be gimmicky (even though regulating pressure, water temperature etc. in a more open format would be great) but it would be gimmicks I enjoy like remotely starting it from an app if I enter certain GPS coordinates around a certain time (off from work) or when the shower stops in the morning. I'd probably also get a kick out of statistics and graphs of coffee consumption.

p.s.: I do own an Aeropress (+hand-crank burr grinder) and use it but the machine is quicker in the morning where I'm notoriously late no matter when I get up. It's mostly a matter of convenience as the quality is better when I use the Aeropress (but the machine is good enough given great beans of course). I love the control you have with an Aeropress+grinder and that's a good reason to build a DIY machine as the typical ones you get don't allow you to control nearly enough stuff. I also enjoy the process of making the coffee but sometimes I want that tiny extra bit of convenience (even willing to trade it for slightly less good coffee)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just got back from Vietnam (Hanoi and Saigon) and the amount of coffee storefronts/cafes is nuts.

It seems every other store is a cafe.

Highland coffee is the 'Starbucks' of Vietnam

<comment><USER19> As someone who works out of coffee shops quite a bit, Saigon was amazing (same with Chiang Mai in Thailand).

Amazing coffee, cheap wifi, good food and no one cares if you camp out a bit.

I was there for a week on a "workcation" and spent about 10 days bouncing from shop to shop without hitting up the same one twice. 10/10\. Would go again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In my place (Seoul, Korea), there are many many and many coffee shop (aka cafe) without having individuality. Furthermore franchise brand like Starbucks beat personal cafes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does Seoul have more coffee shops than Seattle?

<comment><USER22> The article says yes</comment></comment>


The History of Vanilla - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2014/10/23/plain-vanilla/ <comment><USER3> Interesting that vanilla and cocoa cone from the americas but are primarily produced elsewhere (mostly Africa (c) and Asia (v))

Vanilla is more subtle and less overpowering. Chocolate is "decadent". It's good on occasion, but too much too often and it over satiates whereas vanilla can keep on going, less filling, more aromatic, more nuanced, more delicate.

<comment><USER4> More than once I've been made fun of while ordering Vanilla ice cream. People think it's boring but I love it:)

<comment><USER5> What's your favorite brand of vanilla ice cream?

<comment><USER6> My local Amish community has an annual fundraising auction day thing for their school. Dunno what the ice cream they make would be branded, but THAT STUFF.

There's no substitute for real, unsanitary, dairy. There's just good reasons not to do a lot of it, like crack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The final paragraphs of the article launch unexpectedly into a cursory attack on a Friends Of Earth campaign which is centered on the GMO aspect of new vanillin synthesis and the marketting of GMO products as natural. The author takes the opportunity to characterise FOEs position roughly without mentioning GMOs at all, introducing it as "downright dumb".

Friends of the Earth are quite fanatical about actual natural food and conditions, whether that be a good or bad approach in these times. National geographic under ownership of the Murdochs seems free to pick and omit information for its advertisers fanaticisms.

<comment><USER8> The author doesn't mention GMOs because they don't matter. The end product is the same.

<comment><USER7> That is a valid argument, but FOE campaining doesnt just mention GM - <USER2> centers itself on it. Omitting that is CLEARLY not valid reporting of their campaign, its partial gossip.</comment></comment></comment>


Every Black Hole Contains Another Universe? - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100409-black-holes-alternate-universe-multiverse-einstein-wormholes/ <comment><USER2> It is worth noting that the estimated mass of the universe is the same as the mass of a black hole whose event horizon has the radius of the visible universe.

This coincidence is rather striking and has been the subject of much speculation, though nobody has been able to make anything useful come out of it. If this theory manages to predict this relation within the created universe, that would be evidence for the theory.

<comment><USER3> This is interesting news, but not very surprising strangely enough.

If you assume that the next approximation to Newton's gravity equations are similar to Maxwell's equations (thereby introducing a secondary field analogous to B, the magnetic field) then you can do back of the envelope calculations that get you interesting results including this one - i.e. our universe's radius is of the order of Schwarzchild's radius of a black hole of the mass we estimate, together with the acceleration equivalences under that condition. By that I mean - the two situations of you accelerating w.r.t the rest of the universe and the rest of the universe accelerating w.r.t. to you are physically indistinguishable. You can get that for rotation (in which case the B analog gives you Coriolis force) and for linear acceleration as well. I think in these limiting calculations you get some constant factors wrong (like the Newtonian escape velocity calculation) but the order turns out ok.

This "analog of B" is called the "gravitomagnetic field" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitomagnetism>) and NASA's GP-A and GP-B probes (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Probe_B>) are for measuring this effect near earth.

<comment><USER2> For another direction in which speculation has gone see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The idea that black hole formation might also be universe formation is quite old; I don't know what the new contribution of Poplowski's work is. (For the avoidance of doubt, I simply mean "I don't know" and _not_ , e.g., "I suspect there is none".)

Lee Smolin made an ingenious observation: if that's so, and if it happens that in the "daughter" universe the constants of nature are slightly (and variably) different from those in the "parent", then we have exactly the setup required for Darwinian evolution, and we should expect universes to be selected for black hole fecundity. (And if that's correlated with, e.g., the viability of stars, then perhaps it explains "fine tuning", in so far as that actually exists.) Smolin wrote a book about this, called "The life of the cosmos", but I haven't read it so can't recommend or disrecommend it.

<comment><USER5> They mention in the article that Poplowski's contribution is providing a new mathematical model for this old idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this not a Turtles all the way down theory. We are in a Black hole which is inside a Black Hole?

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down>

<comment><USER7> I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with a Turtles all the way down theory, as long as it is supported by facts.

<comment><USER6> Totally agree there is nothing wrong about it been Turtles all the way down, but it would mean that "a little old lady at the back of the room" in 1927 came up with a ground breaking theory :)

<comment><USER8> Do "turtles all the way down" collapse into a black hole?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I missing something, or did Red Dwarf not already predict this in 1991??

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Hole_%28Red_Dwarf%29>

<comment><USER10> Disney, 1979: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is the black whole compressing space? So basically it makes things so small to us it's practically another universe? Then considering things can become infinitely large we are just part of another bigger universe.

Anyways I always thought that parallel universes could not interact with each other (since, if I understand correctly, the parallel universes in the many worlds theory cannot interact with each other) so describing the black holes as containing another _universe_ seems misleading.

<comment><USER12> In these matters, the human concepts of size and space breaks down and are as good as meaningless, so it's counterproductive to think of other universes as smaller or bigger. They just _are_. :)

The many worlds theory and its parallel universes is unrelated to this, so its rule of no interaction does no apply.

<comment><USER11> > In these matters, the human concepts of size and space breaks down and are > as good as meaningless, so it's counterproductive to think of other > universes as smaller or bigger. They just are. :)

But what if it is the best way of describing it? How else could you explain it in the event we discover that we can keep on finding smaller and smaller particles?

> The many worlds theory and its parallel universes is unrelated to this, so > its rule of no interaction does no apply.

Yea, but I like to think of all these _universes_ as still part of our universe, since we would be able to interact with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "If future experiments reveal that our universe appears to rotate in a preferred direction, it would be indirect evidence supporting his wormhole theory, Poplawski said."

I was wondering, If the universe is our only point of reference, and everything in it is (at a whole) rotating at the same speed and in the same direction, how we could tell?

<comment><USER14> Rotation requires acceleration, since your direction is changing, so you can tell by the forces upon you.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_force>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If we are within a black hole, should we not see matter pouring in ?

Or would it be too slow for us to notice?

<comment><USER16> As the article states, this might be observed in the form of the big bang and/or gamma ray bursts.

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen A recursive universe then?

So, if a universe is big enough for black holes, it might have black holes in it, but if it isn't, it's just a regular-old stars and planets universe. And then, any black hole it might have has a reduced universe inside it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like that this article is filed under _Daily News_.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is something Carl Sagan said matter-of-factly near the start of his series _COSMOS_. "We live inside a Black Hole."

</comment><comment><USER19> Oh that is recursion!

<comment><USER16> This just in: scientists discover the fate of our universe will be a stack overflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If this is true, is the LHC creating universes?

<comment><USER21> That last a fraction of a second.

<comment><USER22> They seem to us to last a fraction of a second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> By definition there is only one universe.

<comment><USER7> But what about by ontology?

<comment><USER24> All that we see or seem. Is but a dream within a dream.

EA Poe

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Also what happens to this "universe" when the black hole dissipates due to Hawkins Radiation?

<comment><USER14> I thought it was weird that Stephen Hawking wasn't mentioned at all in an article about black holes. But to be fair, I don't think we have any evidence of Hawking Radiation either.

<comment><USER26> I rather think that there is such evidence (<edit>mostly indirect though</edit>). Plus - if folks start creating mini-black holes under experimental conditions then we are all in trouble if entropy does not kick in and cause them to evaporate in pretty short order.

<comment><USER14> Well I admit I'm mostly a "Wikipedia physicist", and the lengthy article there says that the effect has not been observed. If you find such a citation, might I suggest that you add a link? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Real Hackers" generate black holes, constructing them in turn to generate sub-Universes, causing a Universal exception, which can be used as a buffer overflow exploit in the Laws of Physics. Basically, if you can figure out how to do this, you'll be Neo.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there a big number of employees in small companies - <AUTHOR> As a freelance web developer i've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and made their vision come true by creating their product. Some were simple but others weren't. But i always firmly believed that i could keep most of them floating in my own if it were my company. But sometimes i'd read an article about a small web app that has 50 employees behind it, and just wander to myself "but why though?". A developer to handle the coding, a designer to handle the UI/UX an SEO and marketing expert are more than enough to run a web application business until it grow beyond 10.000 users, in which case each of those 3 could hire four under him to keep the ship flowing etc. I know that i'm probably wrong since almost all web related companies have a big number of employees, at least more than i deem enough. So can anyone explain to me why a company would need that much working force? <comment><USER2> _Somebody_ has to make the pizza and latte runs.</comment>


Advanced Python Features - <AUTHOR> https://tech.io/playgrounds/500/advanced-python-features <comment><USER2> Home-brewed context managers are new to me: I had only encountered using them in the standard "with open(...) as f:" case. Can someone who has used them before point out a use case for writing your own?

</comment><comment><USER3> I get a text blank page when trying to read on the phone.</comment>


10 Myths About Docker That Stop Developers Cold - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/derickbailey/10-myths-about-docker-that-stop-developers-cold <comment><USER2> These all feel pretty dead-on to me. One thing that I think Docker has struggled with is successfully mapping the mental model of working with VMs to working with containers. I doubt I'm alone in having tried and failed to wrap my head around the concepts.

Is there any comprehensive guide on "this is how you do X with VMs, and here is how you do the same thing with containers"? Or are the use cases sufficiently disjunct that this wouldn't even be a reasonable thing?

<comment><USER3> It depends. Maybe you know the "pet vs. cattle" analogy; VMs are used on both sides of the spectrum, whereas containers are squarely on the "cattle" side of things.

VMs are often used in a pet-style workflow, where an individual VM is long- lived and serviced (e.g. you install security or feature updates and maybe reboot it once in a while). So the VM is a "pet" that you give a name and care for.

You can also deal with VMs in the "cattle" manner: When the VM is having trouble, you just kill it and spin up a new one. (Only when problems cannot be solved by this do you start investigating more closely.) When you want to apply a package update or new configuration, you build a new VM image, spin up the new VM with the new image, and kill the old one when the new one is up and running. That approach requires that you can spin VMs up and down within very short notice, so you would see that approach more often in cloud environments vs. traditional hosting environments (where you, as the customer, book each VM individually, e.g. via a ticket).

And the whole toolchain around containers is manufactured around this cattle- like workflow, since containers are easier (and quicker) to launch than a VM, and can be thrown away more quickly as well.

So if you're managing your VMs with a cattle-like workflow, it should be possible to map the tasks that you're doing there to Docker commands (or, more likely, Kubernetes commands etc.). But if you're working in a pet-like workflow, that's not going to map as easily.

Note: All of this is about VMs/containers in production. During development, different tools may be used (in the same way that, for instance, you wouldn't use Vagrant to manage production VMs). I'm skeptical if there's enough of a unified approach that you could make a guide like "command X maps to command Y". (For example, I develop applications that are packaged in Docker for shipping to prod, but I don't use Docker at all during development.) If in doubt, I would look at the program in question, and see if it has instructions around how to use the Docker image in development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I can't see anything in this container

This is only a myth because of the full os base images - which not every container has. And frequently, the more minimal base images are missing a lot of useful tooling, so it's still an issue.

> Docker hardly works on macOS and Windows

Docker for mac is still not very reliable. Shared volumes (related to IDE and DB "myths") frequently get "stuck", it still occasionally consumes a full core of CPU, and finding a shared port (say, for remote debugging) is still a pain.

It's a useful tool, but for reliable development I still prefer a normal local environment; going back to Docker when I'm done developing and am ready to do a release.

<comment><USER3> > And frequently, the more minimal base images are missing a lot of useful > tooling, so it's still an issue.

Oh yeah, I know that problem. This happened to me a while ago:

Me: "Hm, that container is having trouble."

      $ kubectl logs my-container-24fa8
      ERROR: cannot connect to theotherthing.example.corp:443

Me: "Let's see if DNS is working from the container."

      $ kubectl exec -ti my-container-24fa8 bash
      kubectl: bash: command not found
      $ kubectl exec -ti my-container-24fa8 sh
      sh$ dig A theotherthing.example.corp
      sh: dig: command not found
      sh$ host theotherthing.example.corp
      sh: host: command not found
      sh$ nslookup theotherthing.example.corp
      sh: nslookup: command not found
      sh$ ls /bin /usr/bin
      ...
      ...
      sh$ openssl s_client -connect theotherthing.example.corp:443

But I still build my containers on an Alpine base, because the datacenter on the literal other side of the planet has such a shitty link that if the image is 100 MB (rather than 10 MB), it will take multiple minutes to download it on all nodes, even though we have a Squid proxy in place for that in every DC.</comment></comment>


Need for Speeders Puts Tiny Florida City on Brink of Erasure - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/us/need-for-speeders-puts-tiny-florida-city-on-brink-of-erasure.html?hp

<comment><USER2> A friend commented on Facebook as I posted another story about this town in Florida, "Strongly supports sending all traffic fines to help repay the federal deficit. End of corrupt traffic stops."

The CNN story

[http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/09/us/hampton-florida- corrupt...](http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/09/us/hampton-florida-corruption/)

gives a lot of details of the history of the town that gains most of its revenues from traffic stops, with a lot of on-the-ground reporting about local conditions.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Even State Representative Charles E. Van Zant Sr., who represents Hampton and spearheaded the audit, got a speeding ticket here in 2011. (He said his speeding ticket — which he paid — had nothing to do with ordering the audit.)"

I'm not sure his statement is quite true.

I'm still convinced that no money from speeding tickets or fines should go to the city's budget, and I am more and more sure that city cops shouldn't be allowed to ticket anyone on a highway, even it goes through their town. The temptation to pull this stunt is too much.

</comment><comment><USER4> I went to school in Florida a while back. The nearby city of Waldo was then notorious for being funded by speed traps. It went as far as people making T-Shirts saying "Don't speed in Waldo" and the AAA buying a billboard on both sides of the town warning about it. Maybe they need to rework the law so that traffic fines go to the state instead of the city.

<comment><USER5> Waldo, Lawtey, and Hampton are the speed traps along that stretch of road between Gainesville and Jacksonville. There was a big uproar to take those signs down a few years back. The signs actually slowed people down... which I THOUGHT was the safe thing to do. But apparently, nobody really wanted to keep children that had wandered off the Super Wal-mart parking lot to be safe. They wanted a bigger fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess we're a _bit_ less vindictive in Missouri. We didn't dissolve Macks Creek, we just redirected traffic fines to the local school district and let it wither away.

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

</comment><comment><USER7> If anyone had actually challenged a speeding ticket, the scam might have been caught earlier. I doubt anyone there had any training or probably even understood calibration. But people generally just pay it and move on.

<comment><USER8> It's even worse than that. I once got pulled over in a small town for a rolling stop, and the officer basically said that I had two options — either he could write me three tickets — one for running a stop sign, one for disregarding a mechanical signal (flashing red light), and one for speeding ("nearly 25" in a 20, he claimed) — that added up to nearly $400 in fines and several points on my license, or else I could agree, right then and there, to show up in person at the county courthouse within 30 days and pay a $100 "fee", that "wasn't a fine", so, while it couldn't be contested, it also wouldn't show up on my driving record.

In other words, if I was willing and able to show up in court, I may as well just agree to pay the $100, because, bullshit speeding ticket aside and regardless of the truth of the matter * , it's sort of pointless to argue in court that, in spite of the officer's testimony, I did, in fact, come to a complete stop — the only way I could have avoided >$100 in fines is if the officer hadn't testified at all, which, without familiarity with the particular jurisdiction or considerable research, isn't a very safe bet, and certainly not one I was willing to make on the side of the road at 3:00am with no time to think it over.

* Truth be told, I may well have roll-stopped, as I was making a right turn at a four-way stop with no other traffic and perfect visibility in a 20MPH zone at 3:00am, and I probably was driving 25 in a 20 at some point, because I don't regularly calibrate my speedometer or watch my speed _that_ closely, and it was one of those small towns where the speed limit drops from 55 to 20 in the course of a few blocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It sounds very likely that this town will go the way of New Rome, Ohio: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio)

<comment><USER10> Thats the best one yet. Its true, you cant make that stuff up!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Extremely small jurisdictions (populations of fewer than 1,000) that are incorporated as cities are _highly entertaining_...They get all the minimum level of bureaucracy and powers of big cities, but not necessarily the qualified people to fill the elected or hired positions.

At the Sacramento newspaper that I used to work at, we had a river city of about 750 residents that often merited a reporter or two to cover the flurry of governmental activity (and grand jury investigations) that came out of there. One of the ongoing situations was that, as a city, it had its own police chief, which meant that it could dispense conceal-carry-weapon permits -- to basically anyone in the entire county. So the city could fund a substantial amount of its yearly budget by just selling permits to people who couldn't get them from bigger cities who were more reluctant about CCW applications.

<comment><USER11> Where I live there are tons of small 600-1000 person cities, there is even a nearby county where the largest city (the county seat) is ~3,000 people. They all seem operate without issue. I think you are just biased living in an area with much larger metro areas. One small city near me has been stable at around 600 since the 1860's...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true...the area I was talking about was Sacramento County:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_County,_California#I...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_County,_California#Incorporated_places)

Isleton, the city of under 1,000, is one of seven cities in the county, the next smallest of which is 60,000+. It is about 1.5 magnitudes smaller than each of its neighbors, which means some of its professional staff (such as the manager) are likely to not live in the community and will have a different dynamic.

(I'm also from a rural state where the average city/town is probably about < 2,000.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is ridiculous. It's like something out of Smokey and The Bandit, or The Dukes of Hazard, or maybe Super Troopers. (meow)</comment>


America: Too Stupid To Cook - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ruhlman.com/2010/01/america-too-stupid-to-cook.html

<comment><USER2> Meh. People aren't afraid to cook. There's a whole _industry_ centered around convincing people that cooking is easy and fun.

Many people just aren't _interested_ in cooking, out of laziness, busyness, and/or simple disinterest. I like cooking now and then, but some people don't find it enjoyable to do, and that's no crime.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you read his post closely? On closer examination, the whole industry seems to be centered around convincing people that there are thousands of modern shortcuts people can take to get complicated-sounding recipes executed in less than 30 minutes. The industry is simultaneously complicating cooking and dumbing down cooks.

<comment><USER3> As a sidenote, his book "Ratio" he mentions is exactly the opposite and has a nice methodological way of explaining cooking which gives a lot of insight into how everything works as opposed to blindly following recipes. Great for engineers and tinkerers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love to cook, make my own stock, roast my own chicken, etc. But articles like this always rub me the wrong way. I imagine the all the articles I don't read that are about me:

America: Too Stupid To Change Its Own Oil

America: Too Dumb To Paint A Room

There's only so many hours in a day, and we all have different priorities. A rotisserie chicken is nice for people who don't work from home, don't want to eat at 9pm, and don't want to pick up KFC. Get over yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> End of the article (read all of it): yeah sometimes cooking is a pain in the ass, last night I got Chipotle for the kids so I could play an extra game of pool.

The title is _sarcastic_. It's making fun of the notion that America would think it is too stupid to stick a chicken in the oven for an hour and then put it on a platter.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I got there.

The problem with his premise that lots of cooking is just as simple as the "convenience" option is that it assumes away the time involved in obtaining the knowledge of how to roast a chicken or bake a cake.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rest of the end of the article (read all of it): turn oven to 450, salt chicken, stick lemon in hole (note: optional), put chicken in oven, wait one hour, rest off heat 15 minutes. How long did that take you to read? That's the amount of time he assumed away.

(You don't _really_ have to make yourself a drink or go have sex during the hour the chicken is roasting. The chicken will taste better if you are slightly buzzed and freshly laid, but it will still taste pretty good if you aren't.)

<comment><USER4> Again, I read it. Again, I am the sort of person who would read an article about how to roast a chicken.

Time spent reading his roast chicken recipe: 10 seconds

Time spent reading cookbooks/articles/magazines/blogs so that I knew that roasting a chicken is easy and good and so that I knew that Ruhlman's blog or book might be a good place to find out how to do it: 8 years

Like the apocryphal story about the itemized index: <http://www.ruqus.com/the- red-x>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't just throw a chicken in the oven, unless there's a chicken in the fridge. Can't always have them in the fridge - they go bad in 2-3 days. Don't have the family together reliably enough, half of them will go bad. Freeze them? Add 15 minutes to defrost, up the mess factor by X2, include shopping and freezing the chickens, dividing the chicken into portions, repackaging the leftovers, remembering to reheat the leftovers, time spent cleaning the fridge of month-old disgusting forgotten leftovers. Doesn't Stoeffers have a chicken TV dinner? Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER6> In the US Gordon Ramsey is mostly known (unfortunately) for his vapid Hell's Kitchen show. But when I was working for home for a while I got hooked on his show "the F word" (BBC America). Part of that show is about how people no longer cook anymore and he takes it upon himself to get people cooking at home. Tons of simple home cooked "fast food" recipes. Really interesting show too. He takes home different livestock (Turkeys, pigs) raises them in his backyard with his kids and slaughters them at the end of the season for a holiday meal. He's of the opinion if he and his family is going to eat them they're damn well going to know where they come from. It sounds a bit more graphic then it is. Great show.

Also a plug for my favorite simple roast chicken is the SF based Zuni Cafe's (you can do it with or without the bread stuffing)

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4401342>

<comment><USER7> "In the US Gordon Ramsey is mostly known (unfortunately) for his vapid Hell's Kitchen show. "

But I _like_ that show!

OK, I agree it's heavy on the vapid drama side. Still, it's oddly entertaining, and it got me somewhat interested in cooking.

One big complaint I have with Hell's Kitchen is that it fails to show enough about the food and cooking techniques. I bet lots more people could be tricked into cooking if such a show would mix in a bit of how-to and here's-why with the yelling and blustering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Of the top five books on the NYTimes advice and how-to bestseller list, half are about cooking"

There are 2.5 books? Lord knows I've read novels with gratuitous cooking scenes, but I wonder whether that's what he means. One should also consider that cookbooks are a handy gift--about the right cost and heft.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Worth it for "The World's Most Difficult Roast Chicken Recipe" alone (step 6 [of 8] of which is "have sex").

<comment><USER9> With the chicken ? Man, that's sick.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean "delicious".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My dad was a chef, so I'm used to cooking. I've taught several friends how to cook. Universally, the feedback is "I didn't know cooking was this easy." It really doesn't take much more than 15 minutes and basic literacy to make dinner for yourself, plus it's cheaper and healthier.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not really cheaper unless you make an effort to be cheaper (by making rice-and-beans style food, or by being careful with portions and leftovers). It definitely tastes better and it's probably healthier.

<comment><USER11> Most of the ostensible value of prepared food is made possible through the false economy of massive public subsidies for the commodity crops that make up the bulk of manufactured food products.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which has absolutely nothing to do with your monthly food budget.

<comment><USER11> Where do you think the money to pay for those subsidies comes from? (Note: the response "my grandchildren" is technically correct but misses the point.)

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of things are "cheaper" if by "cheaper" you mean "supports a political viewpoint that asserts that things will be cheaper in some abstract future where a critical mass of people adopt that viewpoint" instead of "cheaper". In reality, when you cook, you're either (a) paying _much_ more for food by buying local, humane, or organic, or (b) partaking in the same factory system that McDonalds does.

In fact, McDonalds and Chipotle are doing much more to promote sustainability than the _typical_ home cook is.

<comment><USER11> I'm not talking about some magical hippie love future in which everyone chooses to go local, organic and vegan. I'm talking about material, measurable public subsidies to specific agricultural practices that allow companies to sell their products at far below the cost of production and hence distort the market for those products.

<comment><AUTHOR> About which the only influence you have vis a vis _eating_ is to avoid the foods that are a part of that system; I was careful to say "organic, local, _or_ humane" (not vegan) to provide as many non-Food-Inc. options as possible.

I don't see what your point has to do with the cost of cooking in vs. cooking out. At least 'kingkongrevenge has a meal plan to offer us. =)

<comment><USER11> Again, to clarify: I'm not talking about conventional factory farming vs. organic/local farming; I'm not referring to the economies of scale realized by industrialized farming practices.

I'm talking about massive, direct economic subsidies for _the kinds of crops that tend to go into prepared foods_ vs. the comparative absence of massive, direct economic subsidies for the kinds of crops that tend to be the ingredients of home cooked meals. (The actual ingredients of home-cooked meals vs. their prepared equivalents are rarely even remotely similar.)

I hope what this has to do with the cost of cooking ingredients vs. eating prepared food is self-evident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> blog.ruhlman.com: too stupid to scale?

<comment><USER12> The problem with most blogs is they don't use static page caching. I'm willing to bet this person didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like cooking something great, especially when I have people over or just when I feel like eating something really good but I hate everyday cooking. It's so boring. The processed foods you can just throw in the oven for 30-40 mins are getting so good nowadays that the reason I don't cook that much is that it's just so much easier not to. Why spend hours to prepare a chicken pot pie when you can just buy a frozen one for 8$? Same goes for shepherd's pie and any number of others.

<comment><USER14> _I feel like eating something really good but I hate everyday cooking_

Me too, but thats why god (or somebody godlike) invented freezers. The secret to eating good food every day if you don't like to spend time cooking is just to make stuff in big batches and preserve it.

Today for instance I spent 30 minutes or so making possibly the most delicious stew man has ever tasted. I made enough for eight servings and am freezing most of it. It would have taken me almost as long just to make one serving.

People make plenty of excuses about why they can't cook but it's rarely true.

<comment><USER13> I do that a lot too. I have a lot of spicy chili in my freezer along with a batch of rigatoni that I use mostly for lunches.

I also have a lot of small portions of meat (french steak, pork chops, etc) that I just fry up with potatoes or occasionally bake in a shake'n'bakeish spice mix.

I do cook a lot but I eat a lot of the prepared stuff too, just because it's good and it's easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You find more of the problem when you read the comments on the post. What America lacks are curious learners, what it has plenty of are 'experts' and fearful novices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which means you should love Ruhlman; his current major book is an anticookbook, containing the ratio kernels of important recipes (X:Y fat/meat = sausage; X:Y:Z flour/butter/salt = cookie) from which you can just improvise your own dishes.

His blog is also excellent. For instance, duck confit from his blog: take 2 duck legs, salt them, stick 'em in ziploc bags overnight, rinse them, cook them for long time in a pot of olive oil, cool and store. Missing from that recipe: $40 worth of duck fat, complicated curing recipe, ceramic crock stored under basement stairs.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Has anyone bought/used Ruhlman's "Ratio" iPhone app? <http://blog.ruhlman.com/ratio-app>

<comment><AUTHOR> I used it a bit over Chistmas, and I recommend it if you _don't_ own the Ratio book, but the book is more useful than the iPhone app. The Achilles Heel of the concept is that it is so effective that you can mostly memorize it, and a single index card is a decent replacement for the app.

The one caveat in favor of the app is, at least twice I've totally fucked up cookies by spacing out on math when scaling them up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Conversation with Engineers about 10 yrs ago: Me: Nobody knows how to cook anymore. Don: Yeah, my Grandmother was a great cook. She really knew how to microwave a baked potato! Me: {jaw drops, dumb silence}

</comment><comment><USER16> Too lazy to clean, as I don't have a dishwasher.

Cooking seems fun. I'd like to learn it, and will once I live (a) within walking (or driving, outside of NYC) distance of a grocery store and (b) in an apartment with a dishwasher. Unfortunately, these are not to be taken for granted in NYC. Half the buildings don't even have laundry (I'm not joking).

<comment><USER17> Is washing dishes by hand really that hard?

<comment><USER18> It certainly is when you're washing for more than one other person (e.g., children or guests).</comment></comment></comment>