skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Location is a primary reason why Musk can claim Hyperloop will be cheaper than high speed rail. As the paper correctly points out, right-of-way acquisition is very expensive. Bypassing major population centers is an easy way out of using eminent domain or expensive tunneling to build the system. The HSR project is required by Proposition 1A to pass through several population centers in the state and have a couple dozen stops. Notably, Hyperloop proposes to bypass all of the SF peninsula, San Jose, and Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield. HSR was politically viable because these regions were included in the project. Furthermore, the route and station map appears to hint that Hyperloop's stations are positioned away from city centers. For example, the "San Francisco" station appears to be located in the East Bay and the "Los Angeles" station is closer to Burbank. This is quite significant from an urban planning perspective as it means that short haul transit or car trips have to be accommodated for a majority of those people who want to use the system. It also adds to the total travel time needed to get from door to door for a greater number of people than does HSR.

I'm not saying that Hyperloop is an inherently flawed project or that HSR is the perfect solution to the state's long-haul transportation needs. I just think that Musk is oversimplifying the situation.
"For those who don't know the lingo, "rolling stock" just means "all the vehicles on the train."

Does he say this explicitly? (Sorry if I missed it.) Why can't you make a train car just as light as these cars, and also skip the weight of the tube?
The single biggest piece of evidence is that the engine and drive shaft were blown 200' away from the rest of the wreck. That seems like quite a big explosion, based on my extensive viewing of Mythbusters.

I doubt any witnesses saw much beyond the fireballs (which would have ruined their night vision), so whether the car was thrown up or not is unlikely to have been noted.
Can't you just do a quick search with "label:unread" in the search box?
That's what I have been using to filter unread message. Not as convenient as a dedicated button, but still does the job !
> There will never be a "next" Stalin.

I find that somewhat naive, especially when Putin is enjoying wide popularity. (Not because he has anything resembling Stalin's track record of evil, but rather to demonstrate that many in the public still desire a powerful unitary executive.) There is an instinct in the human animal that craves charismatic, authoritarian power when times are tough.

But even if you're correct, I'm honestly more concerned about institutions than individuals. Institutions, whether "public" or "private", have a tendency to converge towards the survival of the institution as their only goal, and in some ways take on a life of their own; replacing any one employee or leader doesn't necessarily change the overall momentum and internal culture. This is my middle-of-the-road estimation of the danger, nestled between the unlikely extremes of "100% selfless heroes guarding us while we sleep" and "shadow government quietly pulling the strings of the world".

In other words, I'm much more nervous about "Brazil" than "1984".

See also: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...

> If the citizenry didn't like what the representatives were doing, they'd elect different ones.

We're working on that.
Um, pressure your representative to support this idea instead of a high-speed rail system?
I'm really impressed to see the entire thing out in the public. They showed the designs, proposed routes, stress analysis, cost analysis... It's quire clear that this isn't just some "Hey I thought of an idea", they really put a lot of work into this.

I was worried this was going to be some pie-in-the-sky idea that was nebulous on a lot of basic details with quite a bit of "we can figure that out later".
And you would consider monitoring your business personal use?
Can you elevate rail as easily?

The short answer is, "yes." I've ridden on it. The slightly longer answer (as another commenter has pointed out) is that it depends on the weight of the train versus the weight of the hyperloop. I see no fundamental reason to assume that the hyperloop is lighter than the train. It could be so, but then, we could make smaller and lighter trains, too (light rail).

Plus you don't get the same natural banking off the walls he talks about, which is relevant at these speeds. While rail could bank, you better be going at the right speed when doing so, too slow and you just fall laterally off the tracks.

This is a problem even when you are at grade. The solution is known: tilt-trains. The track is banked such that the train will not fall over if it has to stop on the curve. The passenger cabin then tilts with respect to the wheels so that it always feels like the floor is "down" regardless of the speed that the train goes around the curve. The radius of curve sets the maximum speed the train can travel around it.
It means more than it should. I do not wish Facebook to start correlating me with others when I quite explicitly wish them not to.
You just define a type that can be either a string, or the symbol "None"

And as long as I know in advance that that's the type mix I want, and as long as it never changes, that works. But one doesn't always know in advance, and the type spec you need often changes.

Also, the example I gave was easy because the mix was between built-in types. What about if I want to mix custom-defined type A from package P1, custom-defined type B from package P2, and custom-defined type C from package P3? And suppose I have a number of different such mixes needed for different places in my program?

If all of the types I'm mixing are duck-type compatible, Python lets me just mix them, no further action required. With static typing, I need to declare a new mixed type for each mix, and keep each declaration up to date. That looks like a programming and maintenance nightmare to me for a non-trivial program. But of course it depends on what kind of programming you are doing; there are probably plenty of applications where this kind of issue wouldn't arise.
I have an econ/finance degree and also worked for several years in finance. Then I quit my job and learned how to code. Now I have a web app with a paying and growing customer base. Knowing how to program will give you special powers when combined with your econ background. Congrats!
not more valuable - the more expensive it is.

The market cap is the sticker price - how much it will cost to buy all the shares.

The cash the company has on hand is like a mail-in-rebate. After you've bought the company, you'll get that cash back, so you consider that rebate value against the sticker price when evaluating the price you're actually going to have to pay.

Debt is like an extra cost you also have to take on when you purchase the company - like a delivery charge. So you need to add that on to the sticker price to evaluate the true cost.

Since the true price is market cap + debt - cash, and the debt and cash are somewhat fixed, it should come as no surprise that the market cap, via the share price, adjusts itself such that the true price reflects the company's value more accurately than the market cap does.

So it's the other way round: the more debt a company of a given value has, the lower its market cap will be. Which makes more sense.
Daily chart: Browse beaten (on web browser trends)
Could anyone just build this? We don't know because it's never been done before
If someone shot the tube with a medium sized gun, would the impact cause an internal defect on the order of 0.5mm?
Financial incentive? You're traveling at 700mph through a partially evacuated, elevated tube in order to get to work. That isn't incentive enough?
Elon, meet VacTrain
They don't support bones yet, so this is probably straight transforms. We need bones and skeletal deformations.
The hop between two major cities where I live (~800km apart) takes around 50 minutes on a plane. For 15 minutes you can't get up, and for the remainder low altitudes keep the seatbelt sign on due to turbulence.

For the advantage of a short journey people will put up with it, especially if it can get you to the centre of the city rather than an airport on the outskirts.
Every important person in BitCoin just got subpoenaed by NY financial regulators
> especially during the nineties

That was 20 years ago!
If not using the bathroom for an hour is an issue you should see a doctor. Not only are there good treatments to alleviate this, but it may be an indication of a serious medical problem. Get it fixed then enjoy life including perhaps the Hyperloop.
I also enjoyed that the vehicle carrying option could hold larger vehicles "like the Tesla Model X".
That fly past a metre from your face at 1,000 km/h!
It was approved by a ballot measure, so in this case it may be the "idiocy" (or will) of the voter.

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...
Genetic Algorithm for Bin Packing Problem
>In a perfect market the company's new valuation is obviously 1.1 million dollars.

Why? It is still 1 million dollars. The only difference is that the owner now owns 0.9M$ worth of company shares and 0.1M$ cash.
If you're actually trying to rescue a server, you can just do "export PS1='#'" once to disable it for the current session.
It doesn't prevent you from writing the code, but rather requires you to be explicit about what values a variable can take, which is the purpose of having a type system at all.

It's the purpose of having a static type system, yes. But the drawback is that you have to be explicit; you don't have a choice. There are situations where that is indeed a drawback; see my other posts in this thread.
Yes, a good lecturer knows (hopefully) how to realize that you're spending too much time on irrelevant topics, or that you won't get to all of the material you've planned to cover unless you move ahead. But it can sometimes be difficult to handle such people.
Sounds to me like their marketing just need to be more clear. I don't think it is reasonable to say things like "personal use can easily saturate a 1gb connection" like I see in the comments here.

C'mon, if you're saturating a 1gb connection for a large percentage of the day, you're doing something other than what most would consider "personal use". I think they need to define "personal use", i.e., "typical household use, browsing the internet, watching the occasional streaming video", certainly not "downloading huge torrents at all times and monitoring the cameras at your small business."

I would kill for access to G Fiber.
You're only there for 30 minutes though. Honestly, I've spent a longer time with less space on the DC metro in rush hour.
I'm not clear on a few things here:

>Michael Krikorian observes that Hastings' car was going at least twice as fast as the other cars in the video.

Does that tell us anything without knowing how fast the other cars were going? For instance, could they have been slowing for a light as the article suggests?

>He estimated that the car was traveling at least 80 mph.

Not sure why some dude looking and estimating (i.e. "eyewitness") is more reliable than calculations based on time/distance caught on video? Granted he could have been slowing down or speeding up, but that could be so with the eyeballed account or the video. So, still not sure why this "eyewitness" estimate has more weight than the video in your mind?

>And the video from Loudlabs' clearly shows Hastings' car speeding through a red light prior to the crash.

Speed could have changed between then and the accident a couple minutes later, right?

>And the expert noted that a bomb would blow the car and engine upwards and not forwards.

Why couldn't it be both? In fact, even if the engine were blown upward, wouldn't it still have inertia from the car's forward momentum, thus also continue traveling forward?
Steel tube is inherently far more structurally stable than rail. This should make elevation easier/cheaper.

Edit: apparently, the weight of the train/car/etc matters more.
Wow this is great, props for making the first drag-n-drop $PS1 generator
To put the the 7 billion cost in perspective...that's approximately the cost to build the new segment of the Bay Bridge.
Dumpster divers find MMJ and throw away, turning trash into trash
Given ADA, would it be even legal for the California government to build this instead of a classic HSR? It's not even about claustrophobics, people in wheelchairs couldn't be serviced at all and obese people would be trouble too.
> I also don't know why I should desire to work at company $q which is has a completely incompetent hiring department.

Then you should not try getting a job at all, since many companies have similarly incompetent HR departments, which gather background information on you that you might not otherwise wish for them to use when weighing your application.
It seems like all "code exercise" sites like this have the same annoying problems which I'll generally describe as lack of attention to detail in the exercise descriptions.

Take their Fibonacci exercise as an example. In the first section they say, "The first line of the input will be an integer N (1 <= N <= 100)" which specifies how many test cases follow. Then in the next section they say, "The first line of the input will be an integer N (1 <= N <= 10000), specifying the number of test cases"

So besides the fact that they aren't even consistent in specifying the expected range of N it isn't even clear why you would need to specify the number of test cases in the first place vs just reading one from each line until EOF. That makes you think maybe they want you to put in some basic error checking which again since they aren't consistent with N turns into a trial and error exercise if it even matters at all.

There is also no indication about the version of interpreters or compilers being used to check the submissions. If I choose to write my solution in python is that python 2 or 3?

Combine all that with an implied scoring system based on speed or number of tries and you have to wonder if this is really measuring anything relevant or if it is just filtering for people who's default assumptions happen to be the same as the person who wrote the lame exercise description.
$6B buys a lot. If your day job is getting people to Mars, a system like this is a relaxing side project.
Elon Musk will 'probably' build Hyperloop prototype
But why make it a traditional train? Just build a lightweight train if it gets you all of the hyperloop's cost advantages without the additional costs and complexity of a tube?
You're right when it comes to the investigation. If the DOJ finds that this parallel construction is illegal, then I would accept it as such. My gut says they won't (because of the example I gave), but I accept the possibility that I could be wrong.

I still stand by what I said regarding the lack of "snatchings". If a parallel chain of evidence can be constructed that leads to an arrest, that's not "because of" the NSA's monitoring programs. That's because there is a valid reason to investigate this person. The lynchpin is not the NSA's tip, it's the ability to find evidence against a person that is obtained according to the law. A "snatching" would be attributed to the NSA if the only evidence were to have been obtained through the collection of "information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking". And that's clearly got no evidence to support it.
>Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow.

This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work.

And nothing stops the person who only wants email while 50% of the other users want to participate in some kind of P2P holographic video chat system from subscribing to the 10Mbps package rather than the 1000Mbps package and paying correspondingly less.
Oh the irony if you try to access the bbc link http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130812-planes-that-can-pic... from the UK :

«BBC Future (international version)
We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. »
I thought the money goes to the company, not the original owner. I think this is what pg suggested in the article.
Odd that Web API was chosen over servicestack.net given 'Messaging-based web services' has been the fundamental concept behind servicestack.net for several years which has always promoted a message-based design as a first-class concept where all its features are built around message-based DTOs to take advantage of the benefits of messaging: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages...

The pipeline described in the article is very similar to ServiceStack's request pipeline (https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Order-of-O...) where Global, Service and Action Request and Response Filters allows composition of custom logic to be selectively applied at different levels of granularity and priorities.

ServiceStack's message-based design is what allows it to provide .NET's most succinct, end-to-end typed API without any code-gen or post-build steps. You're able to re-use the code-first DTO's services were defined with, as-is, inside clients. This has many benefits, message-based DTO designs are more resilient, and support the natural evolution of services. It's inherently simpler with less friction as client and server call-sites have symmetrical parity as the same DTO the client sends is transparently hydrated into services on the server.

Message-based design's are also inherently more re-usable as they encapsulate services in their most re-usable form, which is what allows the same service in ServiceStack to be called via HTML/Web, REST, SOAP, MQ endpoints in JSON, XML, SOAP 1.1/2, HTML, CSV, JSV, MessagePack and Protocol Buffers formats with no effort.
Request HN: Tell us what to build. Or hire us. (Group of Stanford Students)
Summer internships are coming to an end.

Me and a group of friends, all Computer Science students at Stanford, are ready to build something.

Technologies we work with: iOS, JavaScript, Rails, Django.

What we do: Frontend and Backend. We aren't photoshop wizards, but we can design a nice looking interface - we focus more on the UX than graphic design.

------

If there's an interesting project posted in this thread that seems cool, we will build it and report back to Hacker News.

------

Also - we have some extra bandwidth - if you want to hire us to build your MVP, email mvp@alumni.stanford.edu with a rough project outline and a budget (we specialize in iOS and single page JavaScript applications).
Wireless power transfer would likely significantly complicate the design and construction of the tube itself, which as it stands can be just a dumb hollow cylinder on a stick for the vast majority of its length.

Perhaps the redundant vacuum pumps are spaced frequently enough that the power transfer problem would be easy, but I doubt it.
3 Life Lessons I'm Still Working On
> "Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system." is meant to mean in §4.5.6 I'd be grateful...

You don't have to worry about cows wandering into oncoming vehicles like you do with cars and trains. It's also harder for non-determined people with malicious intent to interfere with operations.

A determined attacker can, of course, scale pylons. But you don't have to worry about stuff like kids lobbing bricks from overpasses, or people pushing others onto subway tracks.
Dont bother Steve. You are right. I have the EXACT same issue. I had a very early account. I added a dot between my first/last name @gmail and sure enough, I seem to get maybe 10-15% emails from the other person with the email as mine w/o the dot.

I've search and searched and Google will just keep denying this is a bug. It worries me b/c my doppelganger uses the same email to sign in to FB, so sometimes I receive his FB stuff too. The only way is to ask a Gmail engineer from the early days.

My gut feeling is - at some point the dot did make a difference, then it was decided that it didn't, but some accounts were "grandfathered" in. However, in practical terms you will see someone else's emails and chances are they are looking at yours too. Stupid gmail. This has NEVER happened to me in Hotmail. Any HN member that can contact a flesh & blood person managing Gmail may shed some light in here.
> When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves "build up" in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound...

Putting the railway or tubes on pylons would give you an opportunity to dampen or otherwise transform those vibrations wouldn't they?
I would dedicate 6-10 years getting something like this off the ground. Unfortunately I don't think anyone without the political and financial connections could pull this off. Musk could probably do it because of Musk Mania. But few others.
I hate to be a party pooper, but I see some economic issues.

My takeaway is that while the 7 billion fixed costs will be low, the operating costs are going to be huge.

Battery packs and solar cells will need replacement. Large maintenance teams will be needed with immediate response times to fix issues such as complete seal blowouts, etc.

I think the first few years will be great! But in my opinion maintaining this system over the long term will be very, very expensive compared to slower rail.

I'm still optimistic that most of these and other issues will be worked out in the long term.

EDIT: Did he post what this tube will be made out of? How will he prevent solar degradation?
Isn't that the case with planes also? As far as I know, at 35,000 feet altitude you'd die, too, if cabin pressure drops and the plane's life support system fails. And I don't recall ever hearing of an air plane accident that involved suffocation.
The paper describes having a telescoping section on each end to accommodate thermal expansion, but the previous commenter is stating that it is likely this telescoping method will not be sufficient, as the variation in length of the structure will cause significant bending of the pylons themselves. Between the ends, there is no mechanism to allow for thermal expansion, which will either cause massive axial stress on the steel tube, bending of the pylons, or both. The shock absobers will not have sufficient travel to address this, (100s of meters); axial bearings on the tube may be required.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUia8HnNZrM&t=10s
If you pay $70/month for a gigabit connection, you have the right to saturate that connection 24/7/365.
Or then the m to ft conversion is wrong.