skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People made electric cars before Tesla and they'll make cars after. People made rockets before SpaceX and they'll make them after.

He's cut component costs on the Tesla by maybe 70%. On the SpaceX project it's more like 80% compared to the highest cost competitor. Both of these are huge achievements.

The problem with tunnels is they're not cars, not rockets, not anything like he's ever done before. If he had a functioning Hyperloop system, if he'd proven he can build out infrastructure on a geographic scale and not just product from a factory I'd be more likely to agree with you.

This is a bad idea, a bad project, and a total waste of time.
I'm not so sure that's an appropriate heuristic here. The problems they faced were partly a result of scale[1]. Most companies with scaling problems of the same magnitude as Uber have engineers competent enough to correctly handle the issues they cited as reasons for switching. Honestly, there are hugely people at any number of Postgres consultancies that could have helped them setup logical replication - since they complained about it being difficult to do - which seems like it would have solved many of their issues. I'd like to believe Uber had the resources to do this, if they had cared to.

[1] For example, write amplification.
I absolutely love all things hot. I am especially fond of a growing number of hot sauces I can find that don't come with 10% of your daily sodium allowance in a single serving.
Some people work that way. Other people do a more in-depth evaluation. The first group tends to end up with MySQL, the second with PostgreSQL. I'm painting with a broad brush here, there are situations where it might make more sense to use MySQL.

It would be hard to argue that PostgreSQL is not successful. MySQL has a larger market share, but the PostgreSQL project is alive and thriving.
> Contrary to popular belief, commercial aircraft are not glorified busses.

In what way are they not?
This is the kind of idea you come up with when you spend too long inhaling exhaust fumes on the 405.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/25/local/la-me-ln-elon-...
But you do! You are saying and itterating exactly how he feels when it comes to quality. You can't define what he's talking about in his book. He can't define quality. They're very similar concepts, not exact, but they provide the same feeling.

How would you define quality?
What they don't show you is the dome keeping the air in, as this is the future society which Elon Musk will build on the moon.
Every time he's making the marker disappear he's making small movements with lots of energy in them - he's clearly throwing the marker, and he's throwing the marker so that it's path is obscured by his hands. I'm speculating that it lands inside his vest. That must have taken an insane amount of practice.

He's also moving a card from one side of his body to another. Later he's moving a card back the other way. My bet is that his vest has some sort of mechanism for moving cards. He moves very awkwardly while doing it, so he's certainly doing some complicated procedure we can't see. He could of course be throwing the card, deflecting it with the insides of his hands or otherwise creating a very curved path, but that's just barely plausible.

Anyway, this guy's Dex score is insane.
As pointed out above, they also use a different definition of "collect". In real terms, they collect everything, but they only claim to collect it when they access it on their own storage systems. It is utmost dishonesty, both by the government and this terrible excuse for a newspaper printing their lies.
You know, we have something like that and it's called Metro.
I thought this was satire until I came to the comments.
Nihilism is never a good look.
Actually he has 3... Rocketry is a pretty impractical mode of transportation as well.
You say that like it's impossible, but drones have a very particular pitch. If the Navy has sonar capable of finding submarines thousands of miles away in a very noisy ocean, there's technology that can do this.

Maybe it's not inexpensive, but it's at least proven to exist.
I feel like everything Elon Musk undertakes with his companies is just one huge Mars Beta Test.

- SpaceX:
Obvious, got to get to space somehow
- Tesla:
Build cars/machines to run on something
that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil
- Gigafactory:
How to build batteries 101
- Solar roof:
While Earths environment may not be as
harsh as Mars you still learn something, and improve
solar panel production in the process
- Boring:
May not make too much sense on Earth with
existing infrastructure, but undereart..undermars?
transportation is protected from the environment/sand
stroms/whathaveyou.

I also don't know about the mineral composition of Mars and what boring does to the usability of those, but this may be a 2 birds one stone: Bore underground network and get required materials to build out mars base.

How to go to Mars and stay there:

1. Figure out what you need
2. Build it
3. ???
4. Mars

Where 3. is use it, refine it, perfect it, like landing a rocket on a automated barge in the middle of the sea.

Or he just hates LA traffic.
Consistency of acceleration/deceleration/top-speed, I'd guess.
Actually I believe part of the thinking behind this is that hyperloops underground would be easier to route and maintain especially under cities.
Not only the drilling, but the shoring up and walling of the tunnel. Also, people tend to be opposed to "move fast and break things" if they're likely to get buried under them.
Profits are a trailing indicator.

BlackBerry's highest profits were 2 years after the iPhone came out and the same year Android came out.
As a college student, the old Yik Yak will be missed. I wish they would just change it back to what it originally was; it was very entertaining and useful that way. It's a testament to the dark side of VC's influence that this company was forced to kill their app in an ill-advised pivot just because the current model wasn't monetizing quickly enough.
Hilariously so even. This is basically a subway system, except you have to provide your own seats. All this is succeeding in doing is making Musk look hilariously out of touch.
Being prepared to talk is important. Knowing when to shut up is equally important.

Recently interviewed a candidate who seemed promising, until they started to rant. I didn't want to interrupt them because I was hoping there was a point to be made at the end of the rant ... but in the end it was just 5+ minutes worth of "my current job isn't fair and everything sucks and everyone who is better than me really sucks too".

Didn't hire.
Though it looks like they're still rubber-wheeled with a guide-rail down the centre rather than steel-wheel on a pair of running rails.
Bitcoin tumblers obfuscate the trail
I think he's gone one step too far on this project. Concrete is something that's necessarily expensive to produce, there's inescapable costs in the production cycle, so while he could probably make it 80% cheaper, he can't make it 99.9% cheaper.
"The Grimdark Slotcar Company"
It solves the last mile problem -- same problem we have fiber installation. You can build fast transport hubs but you can't get right from door to door.
The whole thing is sufficiently bizarre that I just have to assume it's an excuse to develop something more useful.

If that something is cheap autonomous mining that can be sent to Mars to build a colony before anyone arrives, or a sneaky way to make very large underground nuclear bunkers that always have a surprisingly large number of random ordinary people in them, or just that Elon knows about a major valuable mineral deposit that nobody else is aware if yet, great. But if this really is just some self-driving pods that attach to your car and take you around at relatively high speeds, I don't see the "while underground" doing much for the congestion.
If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly
better to drop a full subway network.

Like Hyperloop?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14181195
Only 4% of humans live in America. The other 96% deserve human rights, too.
> Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.

It would be interesting to learn details: How often? Who is making how much? And in what circumstances does it tend to work and not work?
Do you have any references to recommend on this subject?
It's the sort of thing a guy who owns a car company would do, not someone who's actually trying to solve a transportation problem.
"renewable energy and storage are shaping up to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the coming decades."

If they actually become cheaper, there won't be any government action necessary to make people adopt them.
Same. Recently I've been on a kick for New Orleans style vinegar/habanero sauce. I'm growing my own habaneros now, it's super simple to make. Plus I have a bunch of old bottles that I saved to fill with my own hot sauce.
Until you remove the "they" by fully automating the system.
Can't you open a dispute and get the money back?
It does seem odd that an absolute would depend on something subjective... existential crises ensues
If you start the tunnel down far enough, you could be below anything that could be hit. Would that make it less expensive?
So it's roll-on roll-off rail, with one car per train rather than running on a schedule. Loading and unloading is also parallelized through elevators (though it'd likely be far better to build a ramp down to a station. Basically it'd be an underground angled parking lot, except the parking spots can put themselves on rails and go somewhere else.)
By the time we've learned how to live on a planet as inhospitable as Mars, maybe we'll know how to make a home on Earth.
I just ordered the new Acer Predator gaming laptop and monitor (total $4200, Newegg). Curved 30" UHD NVidia G-Sync display with eye-tracking. Laptop sports NVidia GTX 1080 with 8GB video ram. Shooting for smooth 60fps 4K real-time rendering.

After that, next on the wish list would be: HTC Vive, GoPro 5 Hero, a large format (55"+) OLED UHD display, and perhaps the companion Predator gaming tablet (8", HD). Also need software: Abode Creative Cloud, Autodesk 3DS Max. And if there is anything left: Anki's Cozmo Robot for giggles.
I'm saying they are responsible for the messaging and pushing this as some kind of evil plot. The Antminer firmware is opensource and has been on GitHub for anyone to inspect for quite sometime.
Somehow I think Elon, who's a pretty smart guy, has run out of challenges and is now resorting to trying crazier and crazier things.

Next up: Elon's Space Elevator! Elon's Fusion Reactor! Elon's Teleporter!
Then in other words, how it's known today is uncertain. "Almost certainly" isn't the same as "certainly." Subtle, but huge and important difference that coders should know.
You're thinking of Visual Studio Code, an open source code editor. Visual Studio is Microsoft's whole IDE.
Same, I did accounts for a government department once.

But it is amazing how bad some private companies accounts are. We ended up effectively advising them on their accounts receivable.

The thing about this particular scam is the size; no-one goes hunting for POs and invoices for $100m. (or everyone assumes someone else has). It's the success of the big lie.
I always thought "emoticon" is the most generic word that includes everything from ":)" to the shrug to unicode emoji.
Musk could also be bullshitting to help get funding to create a boring machine that is just twice as good as what we have now. That would be a very profitable company and would reduce subway costs, etc.

Musk's a sales technique to promise the moon (Mars really) and then use the cash to build a revolutionary but realistic company.

SpaceX isn't going to colonize mars, but its putting satellites in orbit.
Are there new apps in the space Yik Yak used to occupy? I would have imagined that void would have been quickly filled by a newcomer.
I used to ride one to my old job, yes. There aren't many accessible paths to the new one though. It was nice to get outside and be able to have that though.
The issue with Tokyo is that the density supports metro expansions.
As a counter-point: do some research into Seattle's absolute disaster with tunnelling the last few years. Yes, there are some details of the situation that are specific to Seattle, but it just goes to show that even nowadays, tunnelling isn't as easy as we think it is.
This is to subways like hyperloop is to high-speed rail. A stupid overelaboration of an existing, proven idea.
Musk launches companies like designers post on Dribbble.

Too bad that only a small % of them really get developed - really love his creative consistency though.
Pretty sure that's a cutaway view.
In general, with current systems, it's all a partitioning problem. Speed-up is a trade-off between granularity of the compute kernel placed on a resource, the communication between said resources, latency at each level of the memory hierarchy (cache line utilization and reuse have a direct impact on this), and also (eek) protocol overheads between all the abstraction layers. Current systems are largely built around single CPU abstractions pasted on to make them multi-CPU abstractions. Working with accelerators, RDMA, etc. is quite a challenge both for the programmer manually making things work and for systems developers beating the abstractions into submission.
Err, the same emails that only a few years back they claimed they weren't 'collecting' anyway?[0] Totally believable. Yeah, totally — and I'm the King of England.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/phew-it-was-just-metadata-not-...
Given the time, cost, and complexity of Boston's big dig[1]; I'd be very surprised if there's a way to do this practically.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
This seems pretty similar to Musk looking at everyone throwing away rockets and deciding to do something about it, however if you look at Seattle's big dig the cost of the machine was only 80 million out of 4.2 billion. He's going to have to find significant price reductions beyond just reusing a boring machine.
gondolas and busses
That would be amazing! I wonder if car manufacturers wouldn't oppose it through some sneaky moves though...
I don't expect the Gardiner will ever be buried but I really wish the vote to tear it down and widen Lakeshore had won. I've read that the backfill land that makes up that whole area south of Front street would make it a lot more expensive than normal tunneling.

I use to live at 18 Harbor about 3 stories up from it and while the drone just became white noise the motorcycles at night were awful. Though that spot also had the horns from ACC spoiling the hockey games on TV(you knew a goal was coming) and the noise from concerts was often loud enough to clearly hear the singers words. Before that I lived at 33 Bay st in the same complex and you didn't hear a thing but I was 30 stories higher.
What? You could put trains on those tracks.

I think it's neat. I like London, but it'd be sweet to have my car while I was there.
This New AI Trained Using an iPad Shows Google’s AI Is Damn Slow
Chinese Offer to Eat Denmark’s Oyster Problem
Your point is a good one. I think "unfortunate but game-theoretically predictable" would have conveyed it with less confusion.
> you first quoted 80% and chided me for not reading the article linked to because it supposedly implied/had it in there.

Sorry, I assumed that 80% and 86% were close enough that a reasonable reader would be able to see that I had mis-remembered the second significant figure for statistics I heard a while ago.

My apologies.

> easy test: would you continue to work on linux with the same pace/effort if your company stopped paying you for it? yes/no?

Yes (though my work is not generally kernel work, I would still continue to contribute to the free software projects I currently work on at the same pace).

> if you answer yes then i also expect you to pay them back any past salaries you cheated out of them ;).

... why? An employer pays you to solve technical problems that rise from their business. That doesn't mean that as an individual I wouldn't work on similar problems anyway, it just means that I get paid to work on specific problems rather than whatever I find important.

Effectively an employer pays you to change your priorities to match your employer's priorities. How much your priorities actually changed is not relevant.

Let me ask you a question. If one of your customers found a security issue in grsecurity or found that one of the features of grsecurity was broken, would you prioritise fixing it over whatever interesting feature you were working on "in your spare time"? If yes, then congratulations you're paid to develop grsecurity. If no, then I wouldn't pay you for support because I would have gained very little for my support contract.

> in our case, it's not 'some time' but 'all the time'.

You can continue to claim that, and I will continue to call bullshit. While you might be able to argue semantics and say "technically we never were paid for any particular features" I find such discussion disingenuous.

> puts the original statement into a very different light:

That statement doesn't say "developed for free" it says "provided for free". If it said "developed for free" I wouldn't agree with it. But by the same token I don't agree that there isn't a significant proportion of development that is not paid, and I don't lend credence to hypothetical predictions about how Linux would be developed without anyone being paid.

Despite what you say, Linux was developed for free for the first year or so and was mostly developed for free for several more years.
This assumes that a company's ultimate goal is growth. For a large, publicly traded company like the article is talking about, this is probably true. But many companies I do business with on a day to day basis (local stores, contractors, etc.) have not interest in growth. Automation is a way of reducing workforce and costs.
Yeah I get that, but why is that happening?
saying smartos gives you persistent storage is like saying docker gives you persistent storage because you can use

docker run .... -v /storage:/storage myapp

That's not what people are talking about. If you run a container on smartos and the physical machine it is running on blows up, what happens to your persistent storage?
Oh jeez I wish someone could just invent some kind of underground mass transportation system able to efficiently transport lots of people from place to place in built up metropolitan areas. That'd be awesome. We could call it a 'Metro' or something.
You make it sound like all that's down there is uniform layers of perfectly intact rock just waiting to be bored.

No, it's a hellacious mess of rocks of different types, of muck of all kinds, of brittle, water-filled pockets of who knows what, and every inch you dig you find out there's another problem up ahead.

In the case of Seattle they planned, they surveyed, they did test drilling, and they plotted a course that should have avoided everything, yet they still managed to slam into a steel pole that shouldn't have been there. It set their project back months, the machine was trashed and had to be dug up and fixed.

Plus, these tunnels are only part of the package. You need those surface access lifts, and those may well be the most logistically complicated of the whole system. To make this accessible you'll need hundreds of them, potentially thousands, and each one is a mega-project unto itself if you've sunk the tunnel down deep enough to avoid all those hazards you're now digging straight through.

The deeper you go, the more those lift stations cost. The shallower you go the more you'll come into conflict with infrastructure. There's no easy win here.
> the major world religions are particularly good at creating community

It seems the word "religion" is even often defined by this behavior, given that the major religions all have very different beliefs. Of the big four (demographically), one believes in many gods, another believes in no God, another in one God, and the other in one God with a Son. Of course there's many differences within each big religion, e.g. Catholism vs. evangelical, Theravada vs. Mahayana. But how is a strict Theravada Buddhist really different to an atheist who practises meditation? Your statement is a tautology, the same as "the major community-creators in the world are particularly good at creating community."
Since this is a thread about Elon Musk, transportation infrastructure, public transportation, and urban design, and because HN has a sort of affinity for the Robert Moses story (The Power Broker was one of 'aaronsw's favorite books), this seems like a particularly on-point Twitter thread to read after the video:

https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832

You might not agree with all/any of it but I think it's hard to say this isn't thought-provoking.
I agree that video goes WAY too far. The tunnels in that video are absurd. I give way better odds of him actually sending people to Mars than building that absurd tunnel system.

But he might succeed at something somewhere in between the tunnel he is boring in his parking lot and the video.

Context: I lived in Boston during much of the Big Dig. Large tunnel projects scare the heck out of me as a tax payer.
I've seen unbelievable messes developed as sprawling stored procedures. And, no unit tests, since no one ever wants to test database logic, they just assume it's gold.
This is not boring at all. Finally someone found a way to monetize tunnels.

Someone is pointing to problems that seem obvious, I can see a lot too, but they've solved monetization.
>But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen.

Well, unless you count damage to whatever happens to be in the way of the tunnel and buildings on top of tunnel. This might be more of a problem in Europe than in the U.S. though.
We'll have to look seriously at living underground on mars. It won't protect us from solar rays on the surface. One of the cheaper ways to protect yourself is to put a layer of rock inbetween you and the sun.
Simple Python interface to NASA datasets
AFAIK, in many major cities, a major part of the cost of tunnelling is the fact we simply don't know where hundred-year old utilities are.

And, hell, the fact that many cities aren't built on rock (e.g., London, Berlin, Moscow), so even if you can bore through solid rock you're probably not actually that well off: can you also bore through clay and gravel?
Hyperloop is a 'stupid overelaboration of an existing, proven idea'? I was not aware we had so many proven 600mph high speed rails.
It seems to me that there may be room for disruption. Currently every TBM (tunnel boring machine) is completely bespoke and is used for exactly one project and is then dismantled/recycled. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. I imagine there are relatively few manufacturers out there building TBMs.

Actually in some ways it bears a resemblance to the spaceflight industry (expensive, custom-made, few players). Coincidence?
Loose dirt off of the coast of SF? That doesn't work so well in an earthquake. Lookup "liquefaction".
Trillions of dollars sounds much - unless you consider that just Apple alone is worth 3/4 of a trillion dollars.

And in reality, you need to consider the costs we are paying for energy already. How much is spent on coal and oil? How much do the various power plants cost? A large part of the western power infrastructure is at an age, were plants have to be replaced anyway soon. The additional cost for "clean" energy is surprisingly low, if not already negative.
You put a version key & number in the model blob metadata itself.