Domes are overrated - <AUTHOR> https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very-over-rated/ <comment><USER2> Some people wonder why we should go to Mars. There's not much to profit by going there. In terms of mining, not much is useful there, plus asteroids are easier to mine.

The benefit is that a colony on Mars would be an engine of innovation. People keep pointing out that NASA has produced hundreds of useful innovations (like space blankets). Imagine how many innovations would a colony of 500 people come up with when stranded there for months and years. It's not that we send them there with only sticks and stone tools, they'll have the most advanced technology we can fit them with, but they'll still find themselves in thousands of situations where their tools will be puny compared to their problems.

Some in this thread mention boring machines. Well, just after a boring machine cuts a few meters of tunnel, someone lines that tunnel with some concrete elements. Where's the concrete coming from on Mars? Oh, I guess they can make it locally. Great, where are the components coming from? I guess you can mine them locally, but you'd need to bore some tunnels for that. A bit of a chicken and egg. What if the concrete does not set exactly like on Earth, because, you know, there's not enough humidity in their air (and there's not enough air either).

These guys will face millions of problems. And they'll have no choice but solve them.

It's going to be awesome.

<comment><USER3> Why not create a colony on the Moon then? Much faster, cheaper and easier to reach, etc, etc

<comment><USER4> While I like the moon for those reasons, it has the downside of 14-day-long night and wild surface temperature variation.

While solar + batteries will last an Earth night or a Mars night, for something with a big enough population to be called a "colony" rather than a "base", you suddenly find you need either a nuclear reactor, or some very big orbital mirrors, or a circumlunar powergrid.

None of these options are impossible, but they might make people prefer Mars.

<comment><USER5> There are places on the moon where there is quasi permanent sublight. These places also have some ice and are perfect for a moon base project.

 _Although not "eternal" in the original sense, they are sunlit for extended periods, well beyond the typical lunar day-night cycle.

What is the significance of such features? Permanently lit areas of the Moon are important for future habitation and use of the Moon for two principal reasons. First, these sunlit areas are prime locations for the establishment of solar photovoltaic arrays. The constant sunlight here means continuous generation of electrical power using solar panels. This solves one of the most difficult problems of lunar habitation, survival during the 354-hour lunar night. Prior to the discovery of the quasi-permanently lit areas, we imagined that the only feasible power source to survive this long night was nuclear reactors. Such a power system does not exist and would require several tens of billions of dollars to develop. So sunlit zones allow us to go to the Moon and stay there without this expense and technology development.

The second advantage of a sunlit area is that it is thermally benign. The surface temperatures at the lunar equator and mid-latitudes depend almost entirely upon incident solar illumination and range from less than -150° to over 100° C, a 250° temperature-swing over the course of a day. In contrast, the surface temperature of these quasi-permanent lit areas is nearly constant – a nice, toasty -50° ± 10° C. This simplifies the thermal design of surface habitats and equipment and greatly relieves the energy required for thermal control at an outpost.

The sunlit areas of the poles occur in close proximity to high concentrations of water ice and other volatiles at the poles of the Moon. Their presence indicates the lunar poles are the best places we have found off-planet for human habitation. Constant sunlight, benign temperatures, near the water and a great view – that's prime real estate._

[]: [https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/new-light-on-the- lu...](https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/new-light-on-the-lunar- poles-156800678/)

https

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I believe this post ignores the implications of increased surface level radiation (Mars does not have a protective magnetosphere). See the two articles I link below.

A structure like this might make sense for a shorter mission - but considering the thought experiment asks what structure would be suitable for a long term Musk-style settlement I don't think thin ETFE would be enough.

At least part of the radiation risk is temporary solar events, so perhaps you could use a slightly hardened version of ETFE as the author suggests but keep all human activity near regularly placed deep shelters to retreat to when radiation spikes are detected?

[https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/The_radiation_showstopper_for_Mars_exploration)

[https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad- mars.html](https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html)

<comment><USER7> The article's author points out that normal radiation on Mars is about the same as background radiation in Ramsar, Iran. Residents there have normal lifespans and cancer rates. Solar storms are a problem but fortunately, they give you enough warning to take shelter.

[https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/omg-space- is-f...](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/omg-space-is-full-of- radiation-and-why-im-not-worried/)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for this interesting link - I take back my criticism of the article! Based on your comment and that of t3hz0r it sounds like the martian colonists would be fine with this setup, as long as they mainly worked and lived in shielded habitats within the ETFE covered areas and also had underground shelters for emergency radiation protection.

<comment><USER8> I'll just point out that a Boring Co machine will fit inside a Starship.

Underground may be the only way to live, given that radiation dosage is cumulative, 24/7, it may not be possible to live on the surface at all in inflated domes. Maybe they're better suited for equipment storage and agriculture.

<comment><USER9> Why bother going then? I mean you can live underground on Earth much more easily.

<comment><USER10> Because it's there. Some people like living in unusual places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought going underground was the way to go. I wasn't imagining a "pressurized tunnel" but rather a pressurized underground complex filled with tunnels and rooms (minecraft).

But maybe pressurizing an underground complex with walls made out of ...Mars is more difficult than building something on the surface?

Going underground seemed like it had limitless room for easy expansion.

I like the authors suggestion and it does sound better than a dome but living underground seems safer to me.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it is curious that natural land features are not exploited more. You can put that city wherever you want on Mars.

Cover a canyon (walls for free). Use lava tubes. Or search for any peculiar geological feature that is amendable. I don't get why the assumption is a completely flat, desert surface.

<comment><USER13> Expandability. If you need more space in any direction, all you need to do is put up a few (high-tech) tarps, instead of excavating rock.

Cities on Earth are generally not being in canyons either, even though that would give you "walls for free" as well.

<comment><USER14> Keeping air in and radiation out aren't concerns on Earth, so other factors prevail in deciding where to build a settlement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > It turns out that the main advantage of domes – no internal supports – > becomes a major liability on Mars. While rigid geodesic domes on Earth are > compressive structures, on Mars, a pressurized dome actually supports its > own weight and then some. As a result, the structure is under tension and > the dome is attempting to tear itself out of the ground. Since lifting force > scales with area, while anchoring force scales with circumference, domes on > Mars can't be much wider than about 150 feet, and even then would require > extensive foundation engineering.

<comment><USER16> Does it need to be more extensive than "make the very bottom ridge of the dome wider than the dome itself (some kind of "lip") and place it into the groove carved in the rock?

<comment><USER17> Yes... Remember that there's 1 bar of atmosphere in there. 150 feet (45m) makes for a circle of 140m circumference but 1600m^2 area. Since 1 bar ~= 100_000Pa, each of that square meters has 100KN of upwards force on it, for a sum of 160MN distributed over 140m of circumference or ~1MN per meter. So assuming the mass of the dome is negligible, we're talking about the equivalent strength of holding on to a mass of about 100 metric tons (compared to Earth gravity) per meter of dome. Ie. the amount of support you need per meter is the amount that you would need on Earth to hold up 100 metric tons against gravity. That's about a Boeing 737. Per meter.

<comment><USER16> Steel cable with a diameter of 1inch has a breaking strength of 47 tonnes. Give it a safety margin and assume it can hold 10 tonnes. So you need 10 cables per meter. So I assume in case the "lip" being just a sheet of steel it can be way thinner than 25mm.

[https://imgur.com/a/h92bLIp](https://imgur.com/a/h92bLIp)

<comment><USER17> Sure but you need to be sure that the thing you're attaching it to can hold the weight. Ie. if the martian floor was the ceiling, you'd have to be able to hang a plane off that attachment point without it ripping out.

In other words, your lip needs to be distributing force onto a sufficient volume of ground to make up 100_000 metric tons of martian soil, per meter of circumference.

<comment><USER16> Actually I think just making the underground part cone-shaped would be much better and simpler solution than that lip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would suggest a refinement. The author proposes that the vertical cables be anchored in the ground with driven piles. This ought to work, but it's ignoring a detail: the Martian surface is presumably permeable enough to air that the bottom of the structure would need to be lined. If the bottom were strong enough (e.g. the same material as the top), then the cables could be anchored to the bottom material. No piles needed. The resulting structure would look very much like an air mattress sitting on the ground, and air mattresses don't need to be staked down.

<comment><USER19> The bottom will have to be lined anyway, because the Martian soil contains a high fraction of toxic perchlorates.

This is also bad news for trying to establish any sort of agriculture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very interesting read.

Just curious though -- I'd always assumed domes were just a fun sci-fi illustration/trope because they look cool -- not that they were necessarily taken seriously by engineers.

Is the author just responding to that sci-fi concept (same thing as, spaceships don't make a whoosh sound in space), or are there more serious Mars plans that have genuinely proposed domes? I feel like the author isn't quite clear who he's responding to.

Still interesting either way.

</comment><comment><USER21> OK. Let's assume the technology works out, and that this is realistic:

> the Mars city will need teams of specialists

> On Mars, SpaceX hopes to get by with "only" a million people and a lot of > manufacturing automation

> What is the per capita area requirement on Mars? In a future post I'll > estimate this more rigorously but I believe it's on the order of 10,000 sqft

How do you bootstrap to get there?

> If a Mars base is doubling its population every launch window, then the > 5000->10000 person increment

So, let's say you are such a specialist. What would entice you to sign up for one of the first flights?

Given the disadvantages (a return flight will be years out, if ever in your lifetime, and those in the first 10 or so flights will have to trust that 200-ish further flights will follow) I doubt 'fame' and 'adventure' will cut it (possibly for some people, but try finding 25,000 or so for those first flights, with the restriction on getting a good mix of expertises and a good psychological mix)

I can think of:

\- coercion by your government

\- Earth being wasted enough to make Mars look enticing.

\- lots of unmanned flights, to ensure that the first flights going there have an escape vehicle, if needed.

<comment><USER22> Assuming my family is grown (and thus my direct life responsibilities fully attended), I'd sign up.

Recall the older generation that cleaned up at Fukushima.[0] These are folks that knew their activities would be uncomfortable, may cause their death, but ultimately was absolutely vital to the benefit of all mankind.

This view on life is not constrained to a single culture or background. Self- sacrifice in such a way is often considered the highest pinnacle of morality -- even under the auspices of selfish genes since the act does not directly benefit descendants. Planting trees in your later years that the fruit may be enjoyed generations after.

You may ask if I have any special skills. I do, but suppose I don't. In such a place you will need grunts. And I'd be happy to join in to build humanity's insurance policy to be a bit broader.

[0] [http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/japan.nuclear.su...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/japan.nuclear.suicide/index.html)

<comment><USER23> Pretty sure they'd want people in the prime of their life, not people with grown children.

<comment><USER22> All depends on the cost-benefit evaluation at the margin. To fill the resource, the prime candidates may be too few to recruit, and the people with grown children still relatively young and healthy available to make the trip and contribute sufficiently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What happens when the tent loses pressure? Wouldn't you then need fallback supports with compressive strength? Although assuming the force exerted by pressure is at least twice that of gravity (so that pressure minus gravity is still greater than gravity by itself) the requirements for the fallback supports probably don't have to hold as much load.

<comment><USER25> The whole thing would collapse. However, given a big enough scale, it would take a long time even if there was what we would think is a big hole in it. But even then, they'd have to have a number of contingency plans; a supply of compressed air that can be manually released in case of a power outage for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand the dedication of resources to solving problems on Mars when we have plenty of unsolved problems that affect people that are alive today and suffering. Maybe they don't have the allure of private profit but I think it would be much more valuable to figure out how to grow and distribute food in food insecure places than to figure out how to grow and distribute food on Mars in addition to figuring out how to get there in the first place.

<comment><USER27> India's space program is a huge point of pride for their country (and rightfully so).

They have problems to solve. It doesn't mean that it's wrong to spend a (relatively) tiny amount of money to give people something to aspire to, and to take pride in accomplishing together. We can do two things at once.

You're only focus on the space program because it's technically similar to food insecurity. But you're ignoring the 50% of the economy which is focused on -- let's be honest -- irrelevant shit. Incredible sums of money (and time and effort) go towards entertainment (hollywood), fashion, jewelry, vacations, and other luxuries.

If you want to divert more resources towards solving world hunger, take it from Hollywood. You don't need to strip bare a source of inspiration that unites people and moves humanity forward.

<comment><USER26> It's valid to spend money on entertainment as an individual and all economies in the world have significant portions of the productivity of their population going towards "irrelevant shit". India spending money on a space program seems like an insignificant amount of money to me compared to their total population and is likely not enough money to solve their food problems. We agree on this part. I spend money on vapid shit every day and so do millions of other people. They're not bad.

But, total resources for a Mars colonization effort seems like an order of magnitude more expensive than a simple space program for the benefit of an order of magnitude fewer people. In addition, the capital that is contributing to these efforts (ie Bezos and Musk money) is much more concentrated and can be mobilized in a much more precise manner. I don't see Mars colonization as a source of inspiration outside of these SV types, and that's not a significant enough population for me to find this justifiable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Starship is cool but it ain't magic. They haven't changed the rocket equation. It's still going to be extraordinarily expensive to ship stuff to mars.

<comment><USER29> You're gonna have to provide a bit more context for that challenge, considering all the information already available about it. Which figure do you think is wrong?

<comment><USER28> The completely absurd suggestion that we're going to be shipping millions of tons of cargo to mars in this century, let alone this decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A bit off topic but:

It takes billions of dollars and many years just to construct things like subway systems in developed countries.

The only way I see a mars mission happening is launching remote controlled equipment over the course of decades to the red planet and building and preparing everything as much as possible before so much as the first human arrives. I don't see any other way it happens with how expensive and risk averse we are as a society these days.

And even then, the likely scenario is sending and constructing return vehicles for a very short human mission.

And that's all assuming we figure out how to get people from here to there in a space ship for so many weeks in the first place!

Maybe I'm just more pessimistic than the average HN user when it comes to sci fi stuff like this, I don't know. I just can't see humans investing the money to get over all these hurdles for a colony that we don't even know could work out currently-- we can't even make self sustaining habitats here on earth!

<comment><USER14> > _It takes billions of dollars and many years just to construct things like > subway systems in developed countries._

Much, if not most, of that being spent on lawsuits, as people block construction projects, hoping to extract maximum value for themselves now that they know the society needs their permission.

Having this in mind, I wouldn't be surprised if building infrastructure on Moon or Mars ended up being cheaper than in the US - there are no land owners up there just yet.

<comment><USER31> Do you have a source for your claim that much/most of subway construction cost is lawsuits? I haven't seen that one before.

<comment><USER32> I'm pretty sure it's not true as most subway systems outside of the US (where we are not as lawsuit-happy) still cost billions of dollars and takes many years to construct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is cool. Reading about the engineering challenges of a dome reminds me of _Brunelleschi 's Dome_.

Does anyone else have good examples of popular scifi tropes which have formed an engineering zeitgeist, but which are realistically very suboptimal?

</comment><comment><USER34> > It's a pitiless frozen vacuum. The Earth's south pole in the middle of > winter is closer to a beach in Hawaii than the nicest place on Mars on the > nicest day of the year.

Wow, on the surface pictures made by the rover, it looks like a hot desert. I understand that the lack of water causes this drastic difference in appearance, but never would have imagined the difference to be so big.

<comment><USER35> It's the near-vacuum, plus the radiation environment, mostly. Temperatures on Mars can rise above freezing in the tropics, on a particularly warm summer day, but the average temperature on the planet is several tens of degrees C on the negative side. The author's point is, I believe, that even in the southern polar night a human being can survive, for a while, with stone age technology. Whereas if the atmosphere around you isn't breathable there's not much you can do without (literally) space age gear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The common conceit I see in these designs is trying to use a single pressure vessel instead of nested ones. Humans only need a couple PSI to avoid physical damage to skin and eyes, and if you just leave most of the nitrogen out if the air you can drop the pressure significantly, still breathe, and not set things on fire (flammability is tied to oxygen partial pressure). But even then, a single fault in the system leaks all your air out and everyone dies.

Space habitats so far look more like submarines. It's a bunch of tubes with bulkheads. But they don't scale, and some of the biggest ones so far are in fact inflatables.

If you nested inflatable structures, the forces on them are due to the pressures between the layers. You could run an outer chamber that requires a respirator, an inner one for living space, and a third for medical. An alarm system in each layer could begin capturing atmosphere in the event of a breach, with emergency venting for over pressure. You would only risk half of your air to a single failure.

The Eden project uses hexagons panels that resemble a blister on bubble wrap. No accuse angles there. And why can't you cable a dome down the same as this design?

The idea of a dome is volume. If you aren't going to build upward in the dome, why bother? Building upward avoids interfacing with the envelope.

If you could work out how to construct a dome over the top of an existing dome, you wouldn't even have to move. Just deconstruct the inner dome and begin expanding outward.

<comment><USER29> This is all covered in the last third of the essay, including nested structures, depressurization and the proposed structure has much, much higher volume than a dome.

<comment><USER36> Does he though? Felt like a throwaway sentence to me.

Also, his idea about hanging buildings from the wires is bunk. If you hang your buildings from the tensile structure that is buoyed by air and you have a rupture, now your buildings are going to collapse. Likely onto other buildings. Since his design has no compressive strength at all there is no way to address that issue.

[edit] what makes it more bunk is that in order to have tall structures, the entire habitat has to be the same height as the structure, instead of placing them near apex of a hemispherical structure. So he's just doubled the volume versus a sphere. Also if you make a bubble structure that tall you have to handle the pressure on the walls. I don't see where he mentions walls at all except when talking about how dome walls suck. Not as much as trying to pressurize a rectangular pressure vessel! The only place his solution shines is in 'doming' a valley or a canyon, where a dome has a host of other problems he hasn't even covered.

I can't remember if the bubbles on the Eden domes contribute strength to the structure, but I expect you could design them to do so. Then the structure begins to more resemble a bouncy castle (like the ISS inflatable hab unit).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is very similar to an idea I've had about terrestrial weather protection. I wanted to use square ETFE pillows filled with hydrogen and tethered down to make a flat roof over an area. Flamability is a concern, so testing is required. I think it will be fine if I fully surround each hydrogen filled pillow with nitrogen filled ones.

</comment><comment><USER38> Buckminster Fuller would be so disappointed.

<comment><USER39> And that makes Walther Bauersfeld doubly disappointed:

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

<comment><USER38> For all practical purposes, the sky over Mars is its own planetarium. Until light pollution reaches Earth level, that is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> You smell humidified latex and vinyl.

You see a canopy flowing as-far-as-your-eye-can-see over a vast red desert oasis.

The oasis sprawls out to form lakes, ponds, and streams and slowly terraforms the landscape.

An autmosphere grows using natural systems like trees, shrubs, vines, and prairy.

</comment><comment><USER41> You could use nuclear weapons to dig a bunch of upside-down domes into the ground and seal the tops. It would only take a couple of years for radioactivity to reduce to the point they could be inhabited without protective clothing.

</comment><comment><USER42> Bubbles!

you get the advantage of just having to ship an inflatable skin and then you just dig out a hole some fraction of sphere, put the bubble in and then fill the dirt back inside the bubble, now it's pressure supported and anchored.

</comment><comment><USER43> As an aside - in the Kim Stanley Robinson Red/Green/Blue Mars series, the tents are supported, rather than solely relying on pressure. This includes the use of aerogels (or "airgels") for the struts.

</comment><comment><USER44> Casey is also quite active on Twitter, been following him for a while. Well worth a follow: [https://twitter.com/CJHandmer](https://twitter.com/CJHandmer)

</comment><comment><USER45> Question: if we build such a structure and make really high, like 200m or more, would the denser atmosphere provide significant protection against the more nasty solar radiation?

</comment><comment><USER46> Won't any plastic surface on Mars collect dust and thus become opaque over time?

This was too a problem on a mars rover solar panel, can't remember which one.

</comment><comment><USER47> I didn't see addressed in the article, what about the ground? What keeps air from leaking out through porous sand and rock?

<comment><USER48> I would guess by coating the floors/ground with sealing coating (and walls and ceilings if you're underground).

It might need to be nice and thick to withstand wear, but maybe not that thick depending on how tough the sealant is, how regular the surfaces and how well maintained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> How do you contain failures to the roof, or fix them?

Given that a tear would result in catastrophic depressurisation.

<comment><USER50> ya, you'd need multiples of these anyway, just for the redundancy. That said, it's fairly straightforward to put up separate walls that seal different compartments. The rectangular shape makes expansion and inter-zone connections a lot easier. Many air mattresses use similar techniques, and most inflatable watercraft have that redundancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I find the popular colonialist view of space travel problematic, because if it comes to fruition, then that means that earthlings couldn't figure out how to take care of themselves. I don't see our salvation in the destructive exploitation of other worlds.

<comment><USER52> Orbital manufacturing will pay enormous technological dividends and _help_ take care of Earth.

If you step out of the parochial world where we happen to live on this planet, the fact that every one of our manufacturing processes is built around an ambient acceleration of 10 m/s^2 is weird and limiting. Beyond the freedom from gravity, orbital manufacturing provides for absolutely perfect vibration isolation (see LISA mission for an example).

Made in Space Fiber / FOMS is just the tip of the iceberg. Semiconductor fabs are going up there sooner or later.

<comment><USER51> Are the energy savings really enough to justify sending stuff up and bringing it back down?

<comment><USER52> It's not about energy, it's about processes that literally don't work on Earth.

See Made in Space fiber[0] for an early example - they're producing best-in- class optical fibers which can't be made on Earth because convection introduces crystalline impurities. Their value per kg is attractive enough to make this a profitable business with today's launch costs.

As launch costs drop and people explore this space we're going to discover a _lot_ of such problems.

Solutions / mixtures essentially don't separate in micro-g so you can grow much better crystals, smelt very high entropy alloys, do all sorts of awesome tissue engineering, etc.

The vibration isolation thing is also a huge force multiplier for all this. Ultra-precision manufacturing is a game of complete and total process control. Right now we spend absurd sums on isolation systems to block vibrations from the truck driving by half a mile away. In orbit you just make sure anything with moving parts is on a separate free body from your isolated component and they fly in formation. The LISA mission is doing this to position ultra- perfect reference objects and detect gravitational waves with baselines measured in thousands of kilometers.

[0]: [https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber- opt...](https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-optics/)

<comment><USER51> I like this stuff. Materials engineering is cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> But what if someone stabs your fabric!? We could never have teenagers on Mars. You would never be able to find all the holes.

<comment><USER54> Except at the edges, the fabric could fly at 100+ feet.

I want try this here to see how feasible it is for co trolled environmental spaces.

<comment><USER53> Well, yes. But there's still a ton of edges. My initial comment was flippant, but the problem was serious. If it breaks, how would you find out?

<comment><USER55> Release a bunch of balloons into the air. They'd float to the leak.

If you want to get fancy, coat them with a glue that bonds to the ceiling material, and they'd fix the leak too! At least temporarily. My first thought was that they'd clog the hole automatically even without glue, but I think the pressure differential would just squeeze them through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Remind me again, why is terraforming bad?

<comment><USER57> Assume it was feasible to create a breathable atmosphere on Mars - that you could just melt the polar ice like in Total Recall, and boom, instant blue skies. Ignore the radiation Mars has been bathed in over the aeons, the toxicity of the soil, the low light levels which might make photosynthesis (and, thus, an ecosystem) impossible, and the lack of a magnetic field to shield the planet from solar winds[0]. How would you keep the necessary amount of atmosphere _on the planet_ given its small size and gravity relative to Earth?

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Challenge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Challenges_and_limitations)

<comment><USER56> So, it's not that it's bad, it's that it's a hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py air bed mars here I come

</comment><comment><USER58> The author should read the mars trilogy. Its omission here is glaring.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why did the author go to all the trouble to write this when within their own argument it's obvious that it's impossible for humans to survive and flourish without Earth?

</comment><comment><USER60> The way I would do it is send a lot of self replicating terraforming robots. That requires relatively little cargo - the only components that cannot be manifactured on mars directly are smd and processors.

<comment><USER61> I have a Nobel prize and a billion dollars of VC money right here in my back pocket. All you've got to do is demonstrate your design for a self replicating general purpose constructor robot. Actually anybody's demonstrable design will do, and I'll give you a sweet cut of the VC money.

<comment><USER62> As reductive as "just send self-replicating robots" is, it's still potentially easier than a self-sustaining human civilization like the article is talking about. Both require building the entire set of infrastructure to build industrial infrastructure and computers. The robot approach requires that every single factory and excavator is automated* - a huge feat. The human approach requires every piece of infrastructure the robot one does, plus the infrastructure to make pressurized domes, oxygen, food, heating, etc, etc, and also requires shipping large numbers of humans through the vacuum of space - also a huge feat. I don't think it's a given that either approach is easier.

* At least, automated enough that it's not bottlenecked by humans operating robot arms at a 30 minute feedback delay.

<comment><USER63> I mean, the humans are just our best existing implementation of self replicating constructors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> So the solution is to tie the dome down at more points.

Sounds like a distinction without (much) difference.

<comment><USER65> I think the point is, if you need to tie it down anyway, why limit yourself to the dome shape.

<comment><USER53> I guess it's still a dome, just a huge one!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Have the man studied engineering? I don't feel so. Too much drama for a trivial issue.

Point one, if a dome is in tension, you have not put enough weight.

Point two, tents are more manufacturable and robust for as long as cost is concerned.

Point three, massive human space colonisation will only happen long, long after we will get manufacturing automation, automated resource extraction, automated farming, and power production to "sci-fi" levels and above.

We are not even 1% done on that, and that's the biggest point. Without getting to at least 1% on that scale, the talk about even ~100 people research outposts in space are pointless.

Adding to that, once humanity will reach that level, the entire idea of going to space for something we don't get on earth will look silly.

Once we get robots to the point where one can get a skyscraper constructed with a single mouse click, it will likely wouldn't matter much more if that skyscraper will also have to be airtight and have life support installed.

</comment><comment><USER67> > In an open system, an effectively infinite supply of natural raw materials > can be used, and wasted, as needed. The Mars city solves this problem by > building on the surface of a planet that is made of all the raw materials it > could need.

It makes me sad to think that exploration and settlement of the solar system would take with it this kind of thinking, which is dangerously close to rendering the Earth uninhabitable.

The Earth (and Mars...) are, in some sense, closed systems, in that exploitation of resources has a hard limit beyond which we're looking at biosphere collapse, or just plain resource exhaustion.

Maybe we could use space exploration to come up with a different way, and then roll that back into how we live here on Earth.

<comment><USER68> I think a lot of those concerns disappear once you leave Earth. What makes our planet precious is how uncommon it is. The universe is incredibly vast, yet we have not observed life on any planet but our own. So to me whatever the cost is to a planet like Mars of putting life on its surface, that cost is well worth it (the planet certainly doesn't mind). The only ones who might be offended by this idea are us Terrans.

<comment><USER69> We haven't tried that much planets yet, tbh.</comment></comment></comment>


The Rise of German Board Games - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/german-board-games-catan/550826/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I love playing board games with my kids, gets them away from anything digital: nintendo's, ipads or tv stuff.

And hey having a 8 year old thinking about his Stratego setup, is a good thing!

<comment><USER3> For me, it's always a challenge to play board games with my kids.

They are now 8, 6 and 4, and none of them wants to lose. It always ends up with someone crying, sometimes with all of them crying (including the winner).

For other parents who have the same issue: I was able to "fix" this situation by declaring the winner as the person who is able to take defeat without crying. After that I mostly can declare all of them winners. Sometimes I'm able to end the game nicely like that.

Just saying that playing a board game with small kids is not always as easy as your imagine it to be.

EDIT: One more thing: there are some nice co-op games for kids, and with those I never have a problem. A real recommendation!

<comment><USER2> Hah! Definitely have the same problem, there's always someone crying.

Which are some of those co-op games?

<comment><USER4> Forbidden Island, Castle Panic, Forbidden Desert, and Pandemic, from less to more complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, I had no idea Phil Eklund was such a superstar! I met him waaaay back in 1990 when he still lived in Tucson and would bring his whacky home made games to the "Historical Games Society" club at the U of A. Way to go Phil!

<comment><USER6> I know Phil Eklund primarily from hard-core science simulations such as _High Frontier_ and _Biosgenesis_. I do know him, but I wouldn't rank him among game design superstars such as Uwe Rosenberg or Reiner Knizia. His games are not exactly mainstream.

Speaking of which, this article suggests that boardgames are niche, but games like _Siedler von Catan_ , _Agricola_ , or the many, many games by Reiner Knizia, are absolutely mainstream. At least in Europe. I spent 1997 giving everybody _Siedler von Catan_ for their birthday (and later the Dutch translation), so I would hope everybody vaguely interested in boardgames has it by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know it's not the main thrust of the article but to note: monopoly is supposed to end with one winner by a landslide because it was created as a critique of capitalism without land value tax. The original game had two sets of rules, one that was sustainable and one based on the current insanity you can find outside your window.

</comment><comment><USER8> Since the article mentions Monopoly in passing: it is NOT fine for children; it was created to teach about inequality; it is a horrible game even for children (or especially for children).

If you are forced to play it, use this [https://imgur.com/gallery/vX3zm](https://imgur.com/gallery/vX3zm) tactic, it won't happen again.

<comment><USER9> It was created to teach about the downside of capitalism. I don't see what's so terrible about that. Capitalism isn't perfect nor the Devil.

When people don't actually play by the rules it turns into a mess.

<comment><USER10> It would be an okay game if it taught about the "X of Y" in which X is anything and Y is anything. But really it's just a game of "who can roll the dice best?" where the players influence the outcome of the game as much as in Candyland. (Of course, the players do have to play "correctly", which means "purchase everything you land on".)

<comment><USER9> > But really it's just a game of "who can roll the dice best?" where the > players influence the outcome of the game as much as in Candyland.

That's mostly true, but deciding what to buy, how to bid, and negotiating for properties are all important parts of the game.

Part of the purpose of the game is showing how capitalism is unfair because it exploits people by randomness of birth and circumstances rather than their ability to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/ins...](http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/insert_main_wide_image/public/boardgame.jpg) is a humorfilled flowchart. Might help you pick your next game?

<comment><USER12> According to that image, Candy Land is only appropriate for "Girly Girls Only". That's humor for a 10 year old, maybe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clearly the author has never played Settlers of Catan, it does not make friends.

Hence the memes: [https://imgur.com/a/tUGcn](https://imgur.com/a/tUGcn)

<comment><USER14> Have you ever played Diplomacy? It makes Catan look like a picnic.

[https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/11/diplomacy-the-most- evi...](https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/11/diplomacy-the-most-evil-board- game-ever-made/)

<comment><USER15> Can confirm that a game of Diplomacy will take a group of happy friends and turn them into scheming backstabbers who will never trust one another ever again for the rest of their lives.

<comment><USER16> Some people can deal with that. I played Diplomacy with my whole group at work and everything is fine.

I wonder if that is a learned skill or a personality trait? In the former case, it might be valuable to teach it.

<comment><USER17> His response seems like hyperbole to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> andrey-p It feels weird to say there's no conflict in Eurogames.

Power Grid is pretty relentless and brutal - there's no violent aspect to it, but you can mess your opponents pretty badly, and it still hurts.

The only time I've managed to get my girlfriend to swear at me was when I stole the line she was clearly trying to build in Ticket to Ride.

<comment><USER18> Agreed - kind of - since even in Carcassonne (Original and South Seas edition) there are opportunities to 'steal' someone else's farming/fishing territory, which inevitably prompts my wife to call me a "meanie". But I still concur with the overall principle, that opportunities for attack/conflict in these games tend to be indirect and somewhat secondary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _" Menschärgeredichnicht"_ anyone?

<comment><USER20> Try "Tac" for a new/spiced-up version of the game. It's really fun.

<comment><USER21> IS that this: [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17991/tac](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17991/tac)?

<comment><USER20> Yes! It's _really_ good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Decent article, except for lumping the excellent board game of Scrabble with Monopoly

<comment><USER23> Monopoly is a perfectly fine game. The problem is no one bothers to actually play it by the rules (auctions, no dumb house rules like fines go to free parking).

<comment><USER24> I don't think that's the problem! It's (as noted in many online articles) the last 2/3 of every game is the richest person getting more and more so, until too long later they win. Kind of a drag for everyone else. (p.s. I play it by the rules.)

<comment><USER25> That was kind of by design to illustrate the evils of capitalism and advocate for a land value tax. Bit of a pity it didn't work. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Magie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Magie))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bomben Auf England, classic. [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23577/bomben-auf- england](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23577/bomben-auf-england)

<comment><USER25> Made in my family's games factory that one. Although it wasn't under our control at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How do you copyright game ideas? Say one has a game idea, pretty worked out. What would be next best steps to take, without being copied/stolen in the process?

Unlike startups, with boardgames ideas matter much more than execution. Copyright is the only protection for successful games from being duplicated, since materials are so cheap.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow, this explains so well why I despise Eurogames. Instead of eliminating opponents, everybody plays until the end after some arbitrary score limit is reached (or turn limit or whatever).

I play Dominion or Catan and I'm working away and suddenly somebody says "game over! I won!" and I'm thinking, well that was a waste of time. I'm resentful and frustrated - what did I do all that for if it ends at such a meaningless point?

<comment><USER29> At least with Dominion, I'd say that predicting when the game is ending and adjusting your play is an important part of the game.

And unless it's really one-sided (which sucks, and maybe there is an argument that Dominion lends itself to develop one-sided games without recovery) or whoever you are playing against is keeping mental count of everyone's point (which wouldn't be impossible, but I've never met someone actually bothering to do it) they won't be able to say "I won" before everyone has counted out their points.

<comment><USER30> When I play I always count victory points - how do you know what to do if you don't know how many points people have or how close the game is to ending?

Adjusting your play during the course of the game as the game gets closer to ending is a crucial part of the game. If you're surprised when the game ends you weren't paying enough attention!

<comment><USER28> Exactly. I was paying attention to people at the table, to activity, to eating and drinking and socializing. You know, what you do while 'playing a game'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fun article about a topic I'm somewhat familiar with (am German and in board game circles). However I am really not sure if it fits the aggregator.</comment>


Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/11/artificial-intelligence-singularity-theory

<comment><AUTHOR> I liked this quote from the article: \</comment><comment> When Diamandis was telling me about all the large old companies and organizations that are doomed because of their leaders' "human inability to understand exponentials," I realized it was the first time outside of science fiction that I've encountered human as a pejorative.</comment>


NSA says "indiscriminate" Facebook hacking allegations "are simply false" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/nsa-says-indiscriminate-facebook-hacking-allegations-are-simply-false/ <comment><USER2> The NSA is no longer a credible source.

</comment><comment><USER3> So. Many. Weasel words.</comment>


Transatomic Power Inc. - Safer, Cleaner, Cheaper Atomic Energy - <AUTHOR> http://futureenergy.ultralightstartups.com/campaign/detail/848

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what's the differentiating factor about this company. They give no information about the company, even on their homepage. How can they manage to employ everyone on the team page without a product to sell? Do they have investors? It certainly seems they have the technical credentials, including metallurgy (the main problem IMO). What's their plan to be approved by the NRC? Or are they trying to sell directly to the military (which doesn't need NRC approval)? And the biggest issue - "In our reactor these byproducts are removed or converted". How? After studying this process intently independently, separation of the waste stream is the hardest thing to do cheaply (unless you use a storage tank to wait until Xe gas is created, and take that out).

I'm sorry for all the questions. I would love to work at this company, and I plan to work in this field eventually. I definitely believe salt based reactors are the way forward due to their passive fail safe technologies. But they need to address the problems in a concrete manner - there are a lot of naysayers out there. If they acknowledge and discuss, even vaguely, the materials used and the separation of the products, I will have much greater confidence in this company.

Also, check out FLiBe that does almost the same thing.</comment>


Self-driving cars in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://janhuenermann.com/projects/learning-to-drive <comment><USER2> Having had to code this problem for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, it's fun to see this.

First, we tried Craig Reynolds' flocking system. That's a repulsive field approach. It just won't work in a narrow space. We tried a system where there's a target projected in front of the vehicle, and repulsion fields from the object act on that. The vehicle then chases the target. This was a little better, but not much.

We ended up using a system where we computed a clear path ahead of the vehicle composed of two arcs, which could have opposite curvature. We always kept enough clear path ahead for the stopping distance of the vehicle, or we'd slow down. Arcs were tested against the map by brute force, then tweaked a bit for maximum obstacle clearance. The minimum turning radius increased with speed and decreased with vehicle tilt (this was for off-road operation), so the system wouldn't generate a path that would roll the vehicle.

(Our biggest headache at the event wasn't obstacle avoidance, it was that we took DARPA's prescribed GPS boundary limits as hard boundaries. The GPS positions were not accurate enough for that. After a very frustrating first run, where we could barely make it through narrow gates because the GPS boundaries and the real world obstacles were misaligned, we allowed 1 meter outside the boundary limits, and performance improved.)

<comment><USER3> Which team did you work on?

<comment><USER2> Overbot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know anything about neural networks or what type of work went into this, but it seems pretty easy to break.

The reversing is undeveloped and collision-detection is too basic (it looks like you're using a really small number of sensors). A car can get wedged between an angular object easily (and most times does).

As well, it seems like cars travel a set path and if gets obstructed, they get stuck trying to ram through it.

<comment><USER5> Confirmed, building autonomous systems is not easy.

I need to quit iOS dev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My instinctive reaction when looking at the title, was, "oh, another js car learning thing, can I be bothered....?" but it's actually pretty fun. Because it's 2D it's approachable for someone like be who knows a (tiny) bit about it.

More explanations here [http://lab.janhuenermann.de/article/learning-to- drive](http://lab.janhuenermann.de/article/learning-to-drive)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a great demo. But I would caution you to provide something in the initial writeup introduction that the concepts presented aren't for beginners in machine learning, and that you don't intend the following writeup to be a tutorial or anything like that.

I only say this because as I was reading it, I was looking at it from that standpoint, because on initial review, with the 2D nature and the "cartoonish" graphics (nothing wrong with that - in fact, it makes it very approachable), there is a subtle expectation that this demo might be for beginners in the field.

I continued reading, and as I read the technical background, it became quickly apparent that this was not using a simple multi-layer backprop ANN, but something seemingly more advanced, with little to go on to understand how it worked. There is enough there that an interested learner could research the topic, but I think a beginner to the topic would quickly become overwhelmed, because none of the various jargon and other terms ("hyper-parameters? what the hell are those?", I can hear such a newbie exclaiming) have been defined.

I don't believe you ever intended this to be understood or used as an introduction or a beginner's tutorial to machine learning, but because it appears like it could be, mentioning that it isn't at the beginning might be appropriate.

Furthermore, this could be an opportunity for you or someone else to create an approachable series of interactive "run-in-the-browser" javascript machine learning tutorials, starting with the basics, and culminating in something like this. Such a series would need to be planned well, and first defined what should be shown and in what order (ie - Do you discuss basics of linear algebra or probability? Do you incorporate classic ML techniques in the series along with neural networks?). Hmm - now that I think about it, I can actually envision a whole sequence of series of lessons, building from the bottom ("What is a vector?") on up...

Ultimately - I found this demo fascinating and interesting. Thank you for sharing it!

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate the time you took to write this! Btw. being fairly new to sites like Hacker News and Reddit, I'm actually amazed by how nice this community is.

You are right, the write-up isn't meant for newbies to the topic. I'll definitely think about updating the intro to reflect that.

Regarding the ML series: aren't there already quite a few introductory series into the topic, which can be referred to? Because the text I wrote on the project page wasn't intended to be a guide of how to build a project like this, but rather to give a glimpse of how such an algorithm might work. But anyway I must say that I really like your concept of an interactive tutorial series. Maybe I'll write a guide to a project like this in the future; would also contribute if someone else does (to anyone out there).

<comment><USER9> Welcome! I find that the HN community is generally very nice to people showcasing stuff they're worked on. Occasionally the community can be harsh, but in my experience this is usually because 1) there are some serious issues with a project (so harsh, but true), or 2) the creator of said project gets defensive or combative when presented with feedback.

I definitely hope you stick around and keep posting interesting stuff you're working on. It's one of the main reasons I'm a regular visitor, and it inspires me to keep tinkering with my own projects!

> Regarding the ML series: aren't there already quite a few introductory > series into the topic, which can be referred to?

I agree with the earlier poster that upon seeing what you did I kind of expected a tutorial explaining how to get there. I don't think you'd have to provide such a tutorial, of course, but I think setting expectations and ideally even linking to good 'introductory series into the topic' would be very much appreciated.

Personally I like to be presented with some end result that might take quite a bit of work to recreate. Being frustrated upon realizing that there's quite a bit of work ahead works well for me. But I especially love it when I'm given some gentle pointers towards next steps, so for me at least adding such pointers would make your article/demo even better.

For example: I had been interested in this 'lisp' thing for a while. I'd read a few short articles explaining the basics and why lisp is cool and so on, but I never dove in.

Then, one day, I read an article that presented some (relatively) idiomatic code in js/python/ruby/I don't remember, and a much shorter equivalent in, iirc, Clojure. The latter made no sense to me, but I was so curious about what was going on, that I continued reading the rather long article.

After finally vaguely understanding what the Clojure code was doing, I was so excited that I immediately went on and spent a few weeks tinkering with Clojure. Somehow, for me, it took a `look at what you'll eventually be able to do` type article to tickle me in the right way to actually sit down and bother learning clojure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is really cool. Kind of similar (but more advanced) than the "robots" a lot of schools make first year computer science students program.

I don't think it really approaches self driving cars though until there are lanes, stop signs, and other road obstacles.

Edit: They crashed into each other head first. They eventually sorted it out.

</comment><comment><USER11> Man, all this 17 year old's project are kind of interesting and well executed. Clearly a smart individual with a bright future!

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool demo! The sadist in me immediately began drawing obstacles at most places so the cars got pretty much stuck :)

Reminds me of a child hood car I had which would bump against a wall, climb it slightly and then use the gravity to drop down and turn.

</comment><comment><USER13> I played around with it and created an oval track, but the car isn't learning it very well. Every loop around it gets caught on this one part, but it has plenty of room. The other car got stuck completely and can't move (I guess there is no reverse). I let it run for about 20 minutes but will let it go longer and see what happens.

[http://pasteboard.co/DpvfypZ6B.png](http://pasteboard.co/DpvfypZ6B.png)

<comment><USER14> I found that there is reverse, it just takes a while sometimes.

That said, they like to try and crash their way through... [https://www.dropbox.com/s/rh76osvip4zavv4/2017-02-27%2016.10...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/rh76osvip4zavv4/2017-02-27%2016.10.07.gif?dl=0)

<comment><USER13> I have been running it 2+ hours so far and the one is still stuck and the other still hits the side on every loop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is super awesome! I had a lot of fun with this, and the visualization was simple and enjoyable to follow along.

I think I found a small bug: cars don't seem to have much ability to estimate the size of a gap between obstacles, so they'll attempt to squeeze through gaps that are too small for them.

</comment><comment><USER16> Loved it. Was watching the cars take different paths around the blobs and when they are about to collide.

</comment><comment><USER17> Really cool demo!

I just have to ask if someone knows: Is there any benefit to doing this in WebGL? Does that enable you to use the GPU for other calculations than the graphical ones? (I really don't know anything about GPUs, so sorry if that's a naive question).

<comment><USER18> Yep, you can implement your calculations as shaders, which I bet is really useful for matrix multiplication and doing stuff in parallel. That and better graphics performance.

For example, you can't match the performance of this Game of Life implementation with Canvas2d. [http://glslsandbox.com/e#207.3](http://glslsandbox.com/e#207.3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The map doesn't change on page reload, and I'm guessing you didn't change it while training. Doesn't that mean these cars are trained only for this map?

Surprisingly, they seem to successfully avoid user-added obstacles.

<comment><USER8> Hi, I'm the creator of the project.

That's a good question. While training I have changed the obstacles, which means the cars can adapt to any map. The map you see on the published page is just there on page reload to make it easier for everyone to actually see the cars in action.

-Jan

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great, and timely, as I'm making basically this in meatspace (an RC car with distance sensors in front). It'll be very useful to see how the ML part can work.

</comment><comment><USER21> What's the easiest way to delete the objects in the pre-made map so that I can play with a map of my own?

</comment><comment><USER22> How do you remove obstacles that are there (either the default ones or new ones)?

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool demo, I would like to see different applications for AI not only self driving cars.

</comment><comment><USER24> It needs more realism, for example by incorporating a minimum braking distance (better: maximum deceleration), and a maximum acceleration.

Also, the cars need to learn to drive on one side of the road.

Also, it would be nice if people could upload their own javascript to the environment (i.e., like JSFiddle but with car-simulating capabilities).

</comment><comment><USER25> It needs documentation so that a fool like myself can use it.

</comment><comment><USER26> i wish my roomba could do this!</comment>


Ask HN:  Please Review My Site - <AUTHOR>

Hello Hackers!  I'm new to the HN community and the startup world and just about to launch my site and v1.0 of an HTML5 application I call Taank It! I did a pre-release marketing campaign through Sonicbids.com and I have a few hundred artists interested in signing up. As the only (non-technical) member of my team I could use a little outside perspective before I started my marketing campaign.
http://fishtaank.com
Fishtaank.com and the Taank IT! application were designed to help bands and fans distribute and discover music utilizing the web and mobile technology.  As a website, Fishtaank.com is a cross between myspace and facebook.  As an application, the Taank IT! technology provides a tool that allows users to collect and view media found across the web ( similar in nature to watchlater.com and radbox.com but designed for music) Basic Fishtaank accounts are free.  Bands, blogs and record labels can add a Taank It! button to their site if they Go Pro.
I'm currently using the Soundcloud API to stream music so no streaming on any Apple device. In time I will add music uploads and an API for Fishtaank but for now this will work.
There are a few other known bugs but I'm really interested in some feedback on the overall concept, general presentation and any initial impressions one gets when they first visit the site.
The Taank It! feature was just added and requires older accounts to enable this feature.  The Beerfarmer and fishtaank profiles are my test accounts so they work.
http://fishtaank.com/profile/Beerfarmer http://fishtaank.com/profile/fishtaank
Visit this page to install Taank it!  Also, as a listener, you do not need to create a fishtaank account to use the Taank It! application:
http://fishtaank.com/page/view/about-us#features
Any suggestions and/or feedback would be much appreciated.
Next up: Starting Development of Mobile Application for Taank It!
Dave <comment><USER2> The big rotating picture banner is way too much. Who are these people? Immedite turn off from the site. Use this space to tell me (simply) why I would want to use this.

Overall you're trying to accomplish WAY too much with your first release. Compete with Myspace + Facebook? "Music discovery and distribution platform"? Purchasing? Artist profiles? Album of the week? Some kind of thing I'm supposed to download and install? "Taank it?" Sign up for a newsletter? AHHHH! Just give me a single, simple reason to use this site. Do exactly one thing really well, and go from there.

Site design / browser compatability wise: <http://i.imgur.com/FYWTP.png>

I like the domain though. The logo looks cool, but it's too small to see. Simplify and go with an art-direction / metephors based on that little fish in the taank.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I've considered making the Taank It! page the homepage to help clarify things a little. The grey boxes in the image above should be photos of the featured bands with links to the profiles. I'll work on clarifying things.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://fishtaank.com></comment>


Ask HN: How much is too much? - <AUTHOR> I'm a cofounder in a small Canadian-based startup.  We think we're on to something big, but we're pretty much out of cash and need a couple more months to get to revenue.
As luck would have it, we have been approached by an angel investor who's willing to give us the injection we need, but at no small cost.  Since this is an anonymous disclosure, I'll just open up and give some numbers.
The investor is successfully running his own large company and has no burning need to see a monetary return on his investment.  He's openly stated that he is more interested in vicariously living the startup life through us, and is also excited about exploring a new space from the same level as the founders.  He runs a large company and pines for the days of a young, scrappy, agile startup.
To that end, he has asked for an equal stake in the company and a directorship.  The valuation on the table is quite low ($750k) and our lawyers have expressed their opinions that the money proffered is insufficient considering the equity and role he would get in return.
The founders are now faced with a difficult choice.  Do we accept the investment and bring on a new partner so we can carry on with our current burn, or do we roll the dice and tighten our belts even further, try to survive two more months, and hope that revenue is right around the corner, or that we find a more suitable investor for our company?
The latter (finding a new investor) would be a more realistic pursuit if it weren't for the fact that December is probably the worst time of year to go shopping for money.  If we belt-tighten and buy a flat of ramen noodles, we'll buy ourselves a month, two at best.
No one said startups would be easy, but as this is my first one, I feel that I have no frame of reference for "what is fair" in a situation like this.
Advice is welcome and appreciated.  Thanks HN. <comment><USER2> The quick answer if that if you are going to sell 1/3 of your company for two months of ramen noodles then you don't really think much of it. Already I can tell this guy is not an angel, he smells blood. Plus he's running his company full-time but wants to be a one third partner? When? on weekends?

You said you would give numbers but then don't. How much money do you need to survive two months? or is it not two months? If the valuation is 750K and he is getting 1/3 the company, is he giving you 250k cash? are you burning 125k per month? what is your monthly nut personal and company?

Anyway, it is super obvious you are _not_ comfortable with this guy and don't trust him, but you are thinking of making him an equal partner? Big Mistake.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes. My apologies.

Our current burn rate is about $20k a month, which includes modest founder salaries (not quite enough to pay the bills, but it helps).

Most of our burn is actually for third-party data providers, which are essential to our business at this time.

We do think we're close to revenue, but it may be a few months longer before we're actually cashflow positive.

I'll be honest -- there's a divorce between our heads and our guts at this time. From a business perspective, it makes sense to keep the lights on and see where this thing goes. If we walk away from this deal, we put the company in serious jeopardy unless we can find an accelerated path to revenue. So the head says yes, but the gut says no.

<comment><USER3> Follow your gut, for real.

Shop around for a better deal.

Also remember, your "we just need a few months" is probably off. You'll likely need more than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> space-monkey If you're just burning living expense, you could find some short term part- time consulting work. This would slow you down a bit, but if you believe you'll be either cash-flow positive or able to get a much higher valuation after another couple of months of work, it may be worth it.

Also, would you hire this guy to be your first employee? Would you have founded the company with him in the first place? He's basically asking to be in at that level, so if he's not the right person, there's more to be worried about than the valuation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Given that this angel wants an equal stake and directorship, and has said that he wants to live the start-up life vicariously through you I would expect him to be quite hands on in his role with your company. Expect him to try to make a lot of decisions about how the company should be run. So, don't bring him on unless you would also be comfortable having him as a co-founder.

I would recommend trying to stick it out. If you want inspiration, watch Brian Chesky's talk at Start-up School. AirBnB went through exactly what you are going through, and in the end it worked out for them.

<http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383>

Good luck!

<comment><USER5> Thanks for posting the link LeBlanc.I had not seen that. Very inspiring.

-Pete

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the $750K for the equal stake the result of negotiations and that is the final offer? If it isn't, what's stopping you from making a counter-offer at terms you deem suitable? Since you appear to be able to survive at ramen level, $750K sounds like more than you need so you could try accepting a lesser amount while giving up less of a stake.

Also, one thing to consider is that with that amount of cash, you have a bird in the hand. Holding out for the two in the bush (revenue just around the corner) may not be the best bet. What if you're six months away from revenue? 9 months?

It's your first startup and $750K is pretty good validation that someone thinks your idea is worthwhile. If things really take off, your valuation will go up and the equity you do have will be worth more -- see the Khan Academy Venture Capital video series.

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't give away half of your company for two months of work. Pick up some consulting work pronto. Sell your car. Try to get up-front payments from future clients.

Anecdotal stories of people securing funding in one day over lunch are true, but not the norm. Usually fundraising is a six month full-time process. If you're on the precipice right now and truly feel (and I think you _have_ to truly feel it!) that revenue is right around the corner, then stick to that path for at least a couple of months. You can always get jobs and pursue funding at that point.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not enough info here to give much concrete advice, but if it's helpful to talk to a fellow Canadian who's been through all of this, feel free to ping me privately with more details (email@example.com).

</comment><comment><USER9> I remember an MIT (Sloan business school) professor giving a presentation and warning the attendees not to take money from those who were giving you just enough to fail. It sounds like you're in a hard place and, as such, the investor is going to get more than the money is probably worth. It also sounds like you've already come to the conclusion that this isn't a great deal.

It's a little hard to judge. Are you on to something big like Twitter or Groupon where you'll be a commonly-known-name or more on to something big like many startups that produce nice products, but aren't going to change the world. For example, Tarsnap is one of my favorite things, but it won't become a household name. Likewise, how close are you to having a product that you could show off, having users, etc? If you're closer to launching, you might be able to launch or private beta Gmail style and get better terms from potential investors who see a product.

The impression I get is that you've already put a lot of work into this and you're coming up just a tad short. You're negotiating from a place of necessity and that isn't a good place to be.

The investor doesn't sound like a friend-type, but rather someone looking to control. If you aren't ready now, will you be ready when that investors investment runs out? Maybe you're 75% there and will be 95% there when the investment runs out? Just in time for the investor to swoop in and take the company from you when you need more money? I'm not saying this will be the case, but if you're going to be giving up that much, you should be absolutely sure that you can launch within the time the investment will give you.

</comment><comment><USER10> Never give away control of your company for money. If the investor had your vision he would have built it without you. What is going to happen is you are going to fight over the direction of the company until it ultimately fails. The is especially true in equal partnerships. Disagreement quickly leads to stalemate.

The amount of money and valuation are extremely low. Show him examples of funded companies in your space (see CrunchBase) and talk about typical startup valuations based on your space and how far along you are (maybe $1M to $5M). Offer him an investment opportunity of a maximum of 20% of the company for the money he is putting in. That should bring your valuation to roughly $1.5M which is still fairly low and keep you in control of the company for this round and the next.

</comment><comment><USER11> 50% of zero is less than 30% of something. If you go under, your valuation will be 0!

<comment><USER12> This doesn't say anything about whether to take this guy's money. They can still get money from banks, friends, other angel's or get this guy to reduce his terms. Right now, this guy wants to know what are his options.

<comment><USER11> I am suggesting that an "Avoid the worst" strategy may be superior to "pursue the best" strategy because the absolute value of "the worst" is far inferior to the margin between this (suboptimal) option that he has and an optimal option that we may only imagine.

<comment><USER10> The only problem with this strategy is that 30% may leave you with nothing as the majority owner drives the company into the ground or fires you prior to vesting. You would be in a worse situation than 0 because you would have invested your time and energy. As entrepreneurs, we all know how demanding a start-up is. To be swindled is just not an acceptable result of effort.

Edit: spelling

<comment><USER11> Right, i wouldnt give up control until i exited. i assumed two founders bringing in an investor who would take 1/3, so the two colluding founders would still have control.

<comment><USER10> I think the op mentioned that the investor wants a majority stake. Otherwise, I agree assuming that you know your co-founder well enough that s/he dose not collude with the investor to oust you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like a bad deal to me (and the directorship would be a non-starter) - but I don't know what you're building. You need to figure out fast whether this investor's valuation is disappointing but accurate, or just artificially low. The only way to do that is to take it to the market.

First, send me an e-mail (see my profile). One of my own angel investors is Canadian and so is most of his portfolio. I'll happily make an introduction.

Second, AngelList (angel.co). A great way to get in front of a whole lot of angels at once. AngelList also has a decent number of Canadian participants - listed at angel.co/canada. If AngelList itself doesn't work for you, you can always get in touch with them individually.

</comment><comment><USER14> I believe you might be underestimating the time it takes to become profitable. You say you're burning 20K per month, that is one hell of an operating budget if you're basically two guys with almost no customers. You said you started a new campaign but results are trickling in slowly, which is normal. It will take time to build a brand and a customer base. Banking on revenue being "just around the corner" is likely to get you into trouble. You're only allowed to give a concrete time frame for profitability if you already have a graph with a growth curve on it that will cross the red line with a decent amount of confidence at a predetermined point in the future. If you're pretty much at zero revenue right now, you cannot draw this line because you don't know the growth factor yet. Sure, a few companies do take off like rockets, but these are outliers that cannot be used to actually make plans for the future.

Sorry to be a party pooper on two accounts, but I don't think this angel guy is going to solve your problems either. One can already sense the tension between you and him, imagine what it's going to be like once he takes over the operation. And when he discovers that this 20K/month hole cannot be plugged, he'll be very pissed and you might suddenly find yourself fighting on more than one front just to make it through somehow.

I don't want to be just negative, but it's hard to give advice without knowing all the facts. In your place I'd probably look into these things:

Can the money drain be reduced to a fraction of what it is now? If that leads to a reduction in service quality, you need to ask yourself if the majority of the expense is actually going into the core offering that customers want from you? Can the scope of this thing be reduced somehow? What do customers actually need from you (concentrate on one core expectation if possible). Can you find money elsewhere, for example by making a business plan and presenting to a VC? Take a very critical look at your revenue expectations: are there any hard numbers you can work with and plan for? Can you partner up with a company in some form of mutually beneficial agreement, possibly reducing your expenses or at least to help you get in contact with a pre-existing customer base?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the candid thoughts, Udo.

Some brief comments on your response:

\- Unfortunately, we have some business-critical costs we incur, so can't do a full slashing. However, we're confident that a couple key vendors that our business relies on will defer payment for a couple months, representing a 50% reduction to burn. We could probably also reduce general costs by 10-20% as well with some real belt-tightening.

\- You're probably right about the revenue projections, but we do have our reasons to be optimistic. At minimum, some quick revenues will help make us that much more compelling to other investors if we chose to walk from this deal and throw a hail mary trying to land another investor in the 2 months we'd have to put a deal together.

\- We're placing a lot of resources in quickly brokering a distribution deal with a marquee brand in our space. We're extremely confident that we will have something in place in the next two months if our progress thus far is any indication. Landing any of these deals would likely solve our immediate-term money woes, at least enough to stop the hemorrhage.

The question basically comes down to:

Do we take a deal on the table knowing that it will give us 10 months of certain life even though it doesn't feel right in the gut and doesn't even look that good on paper by most measures? Or do we roll the dice, go into bleed mode, and try and land something in the 60 days we'd have to do it (starting Monday), knowing that it's a horrible time of year to get anybody's attention?

Thanks again for the thoughtful response, Udo.

<comment><USER14> You should probably take what I write with a grain of salt, because I have seen so much stuff go wrong over the time, I tend to be overly cautious.

My (admittedly somewhat unqualified) advice would be:

\- Go ahead and slash costs by as much as you can. And then some. If vendors simply defer payment instead of waiving/reducing it, things can get _very_ dangerous, so make sure you incorporate a limited liability company as a shield if you haven't already done so. And it wouldn't hurt to talk to some lawyers.

\- If your gut tells you not to partner up with this guy (and essentially give him your company in the process): don't do it! If it feels bad now, it will only get worse! Look for a real VC and/or possibly a bank deal. Maybe you can set up something with those partners who already operate in this space?

\- If you currently have no customers, maybe it's worth considering to hold off on buying these external services until you really need them. This may or may not be applicable to your situation, I don't know. But if the only reason for using these vendors right now is to give realistic demos and to have infrastructure in place just-in-case, it might be worth putting it on hold until you launch for real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On the basis that he's putting in $250k cash at a post money valuation of $750k:

What really determines whether this is fair is down to what a 'home run' would look like.

If you are getting some traction towards a possible goal of $xx million a year if all of your ducks line up, then $500k pre money sounds low.

But if you're not going for such a big win, $750k post money for a company with that kind of burn rate sounds reasonable to me. Putting $250k cash into a company with no revenues is an incredibly risky thing to do, and he quite possibly well deserves a third of your company for taking that risk.

So much of this comes down to market opportunity and how impressive your traction is.

</comment><comment><USER16> Do you like the investor? Would you want him to be involved even if you didn't need the money? If so, do your best negotiating and take the money. If not, either do consulting work or get jobs and work nights and weekends.

Giving significant equity to someone you don't want to work with will most likely ruin the company.

</comment><comment><USER17> What exactly does he define "vicariously living the startup life" as ? It seems that the answer to this might give you a lot more insight.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, we've been wondering that ourselves. :)

We've already gone through the DD process with him and his lawyer, and a new shareholder's agreement has been drafted. It has verbiage in it that basically allows him to come on as a voting shareholder, with the ability to ascend to a director once he feels "he is ready".

His readiness is mostly contingent on industry knowledge. We're in a space that is largely unknown to him, and he wants to take the time to bring himself up to speed before taking a more active role in the company.

One of the reasons we're feeling trepidatious is that we haven't spoken to the man since August, save two email. The rest of our interactions have been with his lawyer, who, while civil, has been a bit onerous to work with.

We're just not sure if this is an indication of how our relationship will work going forward, or if this is merely a difficult courtship period that could result in a truly beneficial working relationship down the road.

<comment><USER18> It sounds like you already know the answer.

My 2 cents is to back yourselves for another month or two, keeping it lean. Use the time to improve the viability of the business, but also to shop for other offers. A bit of competition will increase that valuation and let you assess the quality of advice and commitment you'll get.

Alternatively sell him 15% of the company at the valuation he is offering now, and use that money to keep going until the next round at a higher valuation based on more mature business results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Shop around. You have an offer from someone (that you probably shouldn't take though.) Now go talk to others.</comment>


Ask HN: Opening a company - <AUTHOR>

So I've got a ridiculously simple idea which I think is pretty good. That is, it is something I'd pay to use and people I've asked would pay to use too. It's a subscription-based service where I will be able to charge $10 to $25 monthly per user.
I have taken the time to write the code for it and it seems to work very nicely. I could only work on it on weekends since I have a day job which I like very much. But quite surprisingly, despite having worked on it for only 10 hours so far, I think it's already good enough to try it with a group of friends.
Also, despite having what I think is a strong business model, I'm not willing to take any investment money whatsover, so if I do manage to launch it, I'll pay for hosting and everything myself. Now the question: I'm a Brazilian citizen living in Brazil, and one of the things I think I'll need is to actually be able to found a company in the US or UK, so I can have a business bank account there, so I can have the website take international credit cards via Authorize.net or something.
Does anyone have experience with that? Requirements? Fees? How hard could that be? My guess is that I'll need to hire some professional assistance, I just have no idea where to look. <comment><USER2> Surely you can take international credit cards with a Brazilian merchant account? If authorize.net don't allow that, there are many other similar providers which can help.

Setting up a merchant account is a major pain in the ass (and slow) even if you _are_ based in the UK... I imagine it'd be even harder if you're not, and really, it's not worth the hassle unless there's really no other way to take CC payments.

</comment><comment><USER3> The answer is probably yes, and you give no clues as to what you're doing (understandably) but do you need CCs? Might it not be possible just to use PayPal? Since you hold the service, if someone doesn't pay you can email a reminder, give them 2 weeks' grace, then simply pull their plug.

Credit card payments can be a complete pain. In the UK it's very common to set up Direct Debits, which have all sorts of guarantees to make them attractive.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried a local payment gateways that accept international Credit cards?

That might be easier. From my experience in India - most payment gateways suck real bad and at some point you will need to contact them for support.

It surely makes it easier to get support locally than overseas esp. with all the timezn diffs.</comment>


The psychiatrist will see you online now - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/health/virtual-therapy-psychiatry-coronavirus.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Treatment Outcomes in Depression: Comparison of Remote Treatment Through Telepsychiatry to In-Person Treatment (August 1, 2020)

[https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.1...](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.161.8.1471)</comment>


Western Union Gets A Patent On An Exchange For 'Alternative Currencies' - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140507/06444527148/western-union-gets-patent-exchange-alternative-currencies.shtml

<comment><USER2> Can anyone explain how this is not an "obvious" idea so would not be eligible for a patent.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seriously boggles the mind as to how Western Union got it approved, with all the current opprobrium around patents.</comment></comment>