skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
God damn it, Elon! It looks amazing but the logistics are just not adding up! 2-minute departure time scales? Good luck getting the future Hyperloop TSA to do that.

But, the numbers don't quite crunch for this to be a legitimate business (unless we are talking no returns for 25 years charging customers an average of 1500-3000 dollars per ride .. but the demand is not there for those prices).

Idea is awesome .. yes! Viable ... yes, yes!! A business ... idk. :(
They have tried to pay companies for apps, and they have in the past. It isn't enough. My company is an example, as are others.
> unsure if that is a constant or if that is simply right at the very beginning.

If the top speed is 700mph then you'd have 142 seconds of 0.5 g acceleration to get to top speed. How often you'd be accelerating or decelerating would depend on how many intermediate stations there are.
Can you point out what you're talking about? I've been responding a lot of places, and HN isn't exactly great about keeping track of conversations.
Taxi rides, flights, buses all have 30 min rides FREQUENTLY and no washroom facilities in those 30 min.
My argument for tipping:
Make somebody who is working feel special if they are making you feel special.

Disclosures:

I worked in the service industry for years while also holding an engineering internship and getting a EE degree. There were many people who were not my regulars that made me feel special on days where there wasn't much else to.
Eventually hits up against this problem:

http://books.google.com/books?id=DenWKRgqzWMC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA...
Exactly! That's an excellent example of how these kinds of tools are depriving designers of learning new techniques.
Seconded. The basic layout of $PS1 is straightforward enough, but it's the ugly colour escapes that always hurt maintainability of mine at least. :)
I'm pretty sure in this case they would let you go to the bathroom.
I wish they'd taken a middle path.

Having BASIC (or another language) built into the machine was a big plus and encouraged people to see continuity between the OS, the hardware and the code.

If that BASIC had to use built-in functions and data-types instead of simply POKE-ing and PEEKING-ing as a de facto interface with the underlying machine code, that would still have been hacker-friendly without being inflexible.

It was such a weird relationship between desktop machines and UNIXes back then. It's like the desktop designers had to re-learn the lessons of UNIX in the small. So much was forgotten.
Of course it is. If they know everything about me then they can coerce me. And if not me then other officials. How can you have a government where many people are subject to powerful coercion?
I have taken a 40min commuter bus everyday for nearly 2 years and I never had to get off early to use the bathroom.
Not really. There are similarities in the car's design, just as there are similarities among airplanes.

Aérotrain is a magnetic levitation train, Hyperloop does not use magnetic levitation. Read the PDF.
It should probably emit the example PS1 with single quotes instead of double quotes.

This:

export PS1="\h:\W\$(parse_git_branch) \u$ "

will execute parse_git_branch only once (at the time PS1 is set) but this:

export PS1='\h:\W\$(parse_git_branch) \u$ '

will execute it every time the prompt every time.
Since linguistic pet peeves seem to be okay here, let me just add mine: it's "toeing the line", not "towing the line". Think of a bunch of people lining up (for a military inspection, I think, but it could as easily be for a subway) with their toes on a line, so that they're all together in a row.
> I don't know how to improvise in conversations.

This is hard for everyone. It's why people make so many references to television, movies, music and sports in their small talk.
No different than planes.
As an aside, I would like to see trade studies done on filling the tube with other gasses whose speed of sound is much higher than air's, allowing the capsules to travel even faster before shocks begin to form.

I don't think this is a good idea for production use, because then you have to worry about air leaks to/from the passenger compartment.

As it is, you still have to guard against explosive decompression for the passengers.
Thanks for the information! It'd be great to chat some more about what you've found out.
Static typing is pro-human; I would call it even more humane than dynamic typing.

Vastly more type errors (i.e., conditions which cause the program not to hold the property checked by the type system) are caused by programmer error than by deliberate design; a strong, static type system, checked at compile time, helps ensure that a whole class of relatively weak but trivially easy to write bugs do not find their way into the finished program. The programmer hours saved in not having to worry that some little-exercised code path will attempt to add an integer to a string, nor to write exhaustive tests covering every possible code path to make sure no integers get added to strings, adds up significantly over the program's lifecycle, from initial development through maintenance and support.

Be kind to your programmers. Use a statically-typed language.
"Real" bandwidth that you're allowed to saturate costs an ISP about $1/Mbps/month, and that's not counting the cost of building the ISP's network itself which is probably much higher. Today's $50 broadband service is maybe backed by 1 Mbps of real bandwidth if you're lucky, but changing the advertising from "up to 15 Mbps" to "1 Mbps guaranteed" is commercial suicide.
Bruce Schneier fails to recognize the critical role security theater plays in keeping people safe. His arguments amount to, "people would be just as safe without it" but we have no evidence to that argument, as we have no "lab" with which to test the idea.

But you didn't do what I asked. Can you show me why you think what you said was relevant to today's global and technological landscape? What does the UK's hundreds-year old behavior regarding spying have to do with the NSA today?
Not that different from a commercial aircraft in that regard. Loss of pressurization is a serious emergency in both cases.
You're thinking city buses. I'm thinking long-haul busses (like greyhound in the US). Greyhound buses likely have facilities, what I'm actually talking about are the buses used a core parts of the transportation infrastructure all over South America. Many of these also have facilities but I've been on many where the bathroom isn't functioning or just plain isn't there. You can easily travel for 30 minutes to an hour without stopping.

We're largely (70%) talking about commuters here, they're taking this twice a day, most days out of the year. Again, I'm not sure why for 90%+ of people that this would be an issue.
Having done a fab sale, it is a balancing act; The supplier works w/ fab to negotiate a time frame when the items need to be en route to fab. You get payed well after the sale though. So in our case, we were selling designer t-shirts, but we weren't printing them, we chose a couple designs to sell at an "unlimited" capacity (artificially imposed by us on what we would think sell), and worked with our printer, so they could ensure us a couple day turn around.
The Surveillance Speech: A Low Point in Barack Obama's Presidency
I think this might be more like going to a buffet that advertises you can eat "Anything On The Cart™", and then tells you you can't eat the potatoes which are right there on the cart, in the same dish as every other thing you can eat.

Then you find out that there are potatoes in many of the dishes, though only one is all potato. Does the rule apply to those dishes? At what point does it become a potato dish? Remember, eat the wrong one and you might get kicked out.
It is not material that the actual kill is done by a different part of the government.
Citizens elect representatives who do the "spying back" on the NSA. If the citizenry didn't like what the representatives were doing, they'd elect different ones.

There will never be a "next" Stalin. We're past the days when such a person is possible.
The Xen folks have been using OCaml for years. I interviewed with them back in 2006 (ish) because I had some Ocaml experience & a bunch of their top developers had just quit to go form a database company (not that I knew that at the time).
Reading the entire PDF is highly recommended; it contains a surprising amount of answers already (including many to comments below).

I think, if anything, safety aspects haven't been sufficiently explored in the pdf. I'm quite happy to believe it's safer than other modes of transport, but I wouldn't be too quick to overstate it. Also, if anyone can explain what "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...
Eric Holder Owes the American People an Apology
There'll certainly be leaks, it's another question how much.
Perfect opportunity to let me Auth with GitHub wink wink
Can you please clarify why the high speed rail is likely to be a debacle ?

It seems pretty clear that California needs it and generally HSR is a pretty sensible infrastructure investment.
a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program
Well, there's a low grade vacuum outside so you probably don't want to.

It's a failure of the onboard steam tanks that scares me. ("The steam is stored onboard until reaching the station. Water and steam tanks are changed automatically at each stop")

I don't want to think about what the result of that would look like for the cleanup crew. Eeeewww.
Do you really want two garbage collectors running in one process? Isn't one already one too many? :)

Seriously, though, yeah, it's definitely debatable. If I had been loving writing my code in Haskell, the challenges of FFI probably wouldn't have been enough to sway me.
sbashyal pointed out in another thread that you can't use the restroom on a commercial airline during take-off or landing either, which I thought was a great point.
The paper discusses supplemental oxygen and emergency tube re-pressurization in the case of sudden evacuation of the atmosphere of a capsule.

It seems that detecting failures of this nature quickly would be the important thing. The fix looks to be relatively easy, though you would cause a major disruption to the whole Loop.
To clarify, the first visit is important for attracting the repeat customers. There's nothing wrong with treating repeat business better, but this naturally accrues as servers learn your name, favourite foods, etc. Tipping potentially complicates this process. For example, what if you tip exactly average? Now do you get better services as a repeat customer?

Finally, in the video linked elsewhere in this thread, Bruce McAdams talks about the effects tipping has on turnover among waitstaff (it increases it). This is probably detrimental to serving repeat business better.

Edit: For that matter, what if you're a repeat customer that tips lower than average? Now the interests of the owner and the waitstaff are at odds. The owner wants you to come back and spend more, but the waitstaff will treat you (relatively) poorly.
This is kind of a strawman, but if you were to use a similar pseudo-API, what would the imperative code look like?

Very fair point about efficiency; for all my love of the FP style, I'll never claim it to be faster or leaner w.r.t memory usage. I'd be curious to see if the simple parallelization made possible by the functional approach could close that performance gap, though.

...and I'm almost positive the difference is subjective. =) Reading over your website, it's clear that you are a very talented engineer, especially in areas where C++ shines. Given this plus your experience at Google developing Protobuf, I'd hazard a guess that you have a significant amount of experience writing OO or imperative code, and probably somewhat less writing in the functional style.
Thanks for sharing this with all of us outside the YC world! I've really appreciated the shower of wisdom in your recent burst of essays, and I'm sure others appreciate it too.
Disruptions: As New Targets for Hackers, Your Car and Your House
I was asking you to elaborate on why you think the storing of some of the communications of some Americans is a) blatantly unconstitutional and b) dangerous for our democracy. I'm also asking you why you think anyone who believes there are small changes we can make for the better is unamerican, or as you put it, "preserving privacy and democracy matters to you"?
I would simply charge per megabyte after some cap.

"You pay X/mo up to Y MB; after Y MB you pay Zc/MB." Set Z to be slightly more than what you pay.

I think most people understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Don't promise one; just promise an honest pricing scheme that lets you make reasonable amounts of money and gives your customers what they want.
but why to ask California State for subsidy? Why not to build it using private funds? I'd imagine that if this is economically sound idea there must be potential investors lining up to have their share in the Project? The estimated cost is $7B. Now, Musk just needs to make a few calls to his friends at Google, Amazon, etc. Can't these guys just form a company together just to build it?

Maybe I'm naive... or maybe Musk for all his genius is focused on the Government grants too much instead of being focused on the investors in the business world.

If this brings profit, everybody want to own piece of the pie, no?
Part of what has made Musk so special is that he gets things done. As they say, ideas are a dime a dozen - what matters is execution and Musk has proven time and again that he can nail execution.

It's the same reason that pg & YC say that they really care about the founding team and frequently encourage the founders to pivot far away from their original ideas.
Time is money too. The drive from SF to LA is about 5.5 hours (per Google Maps). 5.5 hours of stress and frustration, compared to 30-40 minutes of hyperloop...
"Advocates for static typing are anti-human, because they argue that the only programs we should allow to run are the ones that have been verified by machines! In contrast, the freedom fighters contra to these typing terrorists argue that humans can perform analysis and decision making as well!"

humans suck at verifying programs.

let's keep going with this, why do we only consider a program to be running when it's running on a machine!? humans can run programs as well!
No, they don't really offer poor service, but their tolerance for jackassery is a lot lower.

If you're rude to the owner, you're toast. "The customer is always right" does not apply. Maybe you're wrong, and they'll tell you to your face. "White wine? With your steak, sir?" can be absolutely dripping with disdain.

I think it's better that way. They can be more honest and not have to pretend they actually like you. The way they treat customers they don't know might border on hostile, but they will go to great lengths to accommodate their regulars.
It's too bad the tubes and trains can't be made transparent. Imagine the view!
Right, but that power is coming from somewhere, which costs something. Not a deal breaker, but saying "only 134hp" is sort of missing the point.
In Indonesia, parents may choose names whatever they like, practically without any restriction, for their newborn children.
I believe it means that the electrical components are not accessible from the ground where they might be vulnerable to vandals or animals.
>It's about a way of thinking, about a way of abstracting problems and creating generalized solutions, about recognizing patterns in a system and applying just enough force to overcome your issue in an elegant fashion. This mindset is important to cultivate, and carries over to solving other problems and enriching your life.

Sorry if it's off-topic, but what you're talking about here is exactly the skill I feel I was forced to develop in AP Chemistry in high school. I wish that course got some more recognition. It really isn't about chemistry; it's about problem solving.

Conjecturing models and then testing their implications to see if they fit or not. Constant iteration on our understanding of the atom based on experimental data. Logical, quantitative ways to reason from a set of observations to "name the mystery element."

People associate critical thinking with math, but at the high school level, I learned the most I've ever learned about how to think in AP Chem. Math was about following procedures - in Chem, especially the "marathon problems," you had to create the recipes for yourself by stringing together primitives in a logical way.

I'm biased by my own performance, but I'd like to see SAT Math replaced with AP Chem.
There are three options that make sense (though you don't necessarily want to offer all of them).

- X Mbps guaranteed, unmetered, do whatever you want (including servers). X here is not oversold: you need to have enough bandwidth for everyone to use the bandwidth you've sold them simultaneously.

- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, X TB/month (pay more if you use more), do whatever you want (including servers). Here, the minimum Mbps is the non-oversold level, and the burst takes advantage of available bandwidth that others aren't using. You need the transfer limit here to prevent a small handful of users saturating their ports and crowding out all other users; if they want to do that, they can pay for it.

- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, unmetered, best-effort based on the usage of other customers, ToS-limited to the types of activity that won't continuously saturate all available bandwidth (e.g. no continuous torrents beyond the minimum Mbps, no high-traffic servers). Here, you're not charging for additional bandwidth, but you're also telling people not to run anything that will saturate more than the amount you're guaranteeing them. Your remedy for users violating the ToS is to limit them to only the guaranteed bandwidth, effectively moving them to the first type of connection.

The first two options are standard with business-class Internet connections. The third option is what consumer Internet connections normally offer. You could offer a hybrid of the first and third options, where you can use X Mbps continuously for anything you want, but only burst to the full port speed intermittently.
because anybody who claims they think end users understand that any search phrase they type on their computer will end up being shared with advertisers and stored forever is a liar

Frankly, it's a good reason never to touch a msft product. At least google has the excuse they don't charge their users; I wonder why msft's is?
Where have I been hyperbolic? Show me literally one instance in our conversation where I've been hyperbolic, please.

What I'm asking is why you insist on assuming the US government is going to abuse all of the power it has. If that were true, wouldn't the US military be in charge? The idea that the US is absolutely and irrevocably corrupt is demonstrably false, and frankly I'm getting sick of the insinuation.
> until you think about it as 50% of your body weight tacked on

That's not how vectors work. It's only 11% extra weight. If its reasonably smooth, that's easy walking.
Makes sense, most of the volume in a rocket is a tube structure. I imagine that SpaceX has spent a lot of time evaluating ways to precisely and cost-effectively build tubes...
I think the logic actually goes "if you reject upfront all programs with a certain type of badness as well as some programs that falsely appear to have that type of badness, you will reduce the costs associated with bad programs by catching many of them sooner, at the cost of having to rewrite some already-good programs in less-simple ways to avoid the appearance of badness."
Actually, if you want to interpret "endless possibilities" literally, that still doesn't indicate you can use it however you wish. Sets can be infinite in size without containing everything there is.
BYOO (Bring Your Own Oxygen)
> as we have no "lab" with which to test the idea.

We have the years before 911. We have the various rail systems, which are vaguely similar to airliners.

And, really, the onus for providing proof of efficacy is on the people spending the money and adding time to everyone's travel.
The data is not sourced. Also, the title is bad and incendiary, and willingness to meet is not at all equatable to desirability.
I'm sure the seatbacks would all have some net connected display for movies or actual computing.
Why worry initially about a disorder that only affects 5–7% of people. Fix the transportation problem for a large majority of people first, anyone else still has existing transportation as an option.
It's a big self-contained pod, they'd just pull it off the line and bury the whole thing.
If the California high speed rail project is completed (or even makes progress) it will likely stifle any similar projects for decades. Competing against government projects is hard enough because the goverment has the incentive (from voters, contractors, workers, unions) to "succeed" regardless of costs and has access to vast resources thru taxation as well as control of the rules of the game (laws, regulation). Project with high fixed cost such as this would be impossible because of the huge financial risks. Once the government establishes its presence it will either be uneconomic (Amtrak) or illegal (US Post Office) to compete.
Possible Hints of Consciousness found after Death in Rats
> The best investors aren't influenced much by the opinion of other investors. It would only dilute their own judgment to average it together with other people's.

I don't know anything about startup investing. But I do know about machine learning. And you can often improve an ensemble predictor by adding (many) weaker features and averaging them with an already strong predictor.

One shouldn't confuse the prediction of an average predictor with the average of a bunch of predictions that come from a pool of on the whole mediocre predictors. Averaging is really a strong operation for prediction. Of course, it does help if the individual predictors are themselves independent or uncorrelated with each other, which I guess tends to be very untrue in a herd.
But there will be leaks. He himself said there would be leaks and he would use commercial pumps to continuously keep the vacuum.
Well, no, since the government has taken pains to say that they don't "collect it all." For instance, spam email. What they have done is say they need to collect what they think they need to collect. As the leaks have illustrated, this can indeed be expanded to "it all" if they want it.
Is there any information or policy on third-party integration / API? There are other tools for legal writing and research that could benefit from integration with Casetext.
I wouldn't be so fast to make that declaration. Elon Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX are pretty influential players right now, and I don't think anyone reading this white paper are anything less than wide eyed at the possibility that the future of travel is written right here and we could build it, for cheaper than the current slow expensive system.

Influential people and money people and politicians are all going to read this and say Sounds great. Elon Musk? I'm listening. 7 Billion? Go on. And scientists are going to chime in, and universities, and people always forget the global reactions. Momentum.

I'm going to keep my faith that this idea has legs.