skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People have largely missed the salient points of Elon's proposal:

1) If America cannot understand the potential and purpose of innovative technology, it is doomed to slide into socio-economic, scientific, and technological poverty. The point is that building a slow and expensive HSR is stupid, and people have approved it solely because they are, similarly, too stupid to envision what is possible. The primary point of building the Hyperloop is not to move people physically, but to move them intellectually.

2) the Hyperloop, as designed by Elon, has zero emissions. We should do it for that reason alone, otherwise we are genuinely too stupid to exist, which fact says more about us than any debate. If we do not begin building zero-emissions systems, the debate will not matter because we will be gone.

3) Capacity problems are not an issue. Elon has intelligently anticipated a diminishing requirement to physically move people because of the improvement of telepresence technology. If you still need to travel as much as you did ten years ago, you are an idiot. This trend will only increase. Elon is too savvy to mention this explicitly, but he no doubt understands that the need to move people physically is declining. The HSR will be mostly empty if it opens in 2024 with the capacity required in 2014.

4) Our entrenched institutions have failed us, not because of anything specific that they have done wrong, but simply because they are entrenched. We should build the Hyperloop for no other reason than a little revolution being a good thing, now and again.
And in the 2 years since this was published, this has turned out to be completely spot-on...OH WAIT. it hasn't at all.

Modern political discourse: Everything is a war on something.

This kind of language radicalizes people from the outset, and prevents a discussion from actually happening.

How about instead of calling it the "War on General Purpose Computing," "the War on Christmas," the "War on Women," the "War on Guns", heck, even the "War on Drugs," and the "War on Terror" - we take a step back, take a breather, and talk reasonably and calmly about the actual issues here?

Because that wouldn't grab headlines.
Especially when you start using argument tactics like belittling.
I think all of us here at HN can agree with the wisdom of Mr Schneier's words.

The problem is how to somehow transmit said wisdom into the brains of those 99.9% of the population who do not read HN or Bruce Schneier or otherwise think deeply on these matters.
One could argue that this is due to the effectiveness of surveillance state.
I don't think it's that. People like to think that they are special, because there is a certain pain in acknowledging that one's whole existence is unimportant and mundane. So we imagine some bad guy is out there trying to blow us up.

Dying from too many cheeseburgers is totally unsexy, and as a bonus implies that there may be consequences to doing what we want all the time. Booooooriiiing.
Most of the "terror" I've seen in the US in the past 12 years comes from the government and the media scaring the hell out of people.
I haven't tried it for any of the other browsers yet, however, I did give them all a look and this is how the current situation appeared to me as well.
Economy: Spend a lot of money via
TARP I and TARP II and otherwise let
Bernanke handle it.

There is one view that the US went from
The Great Depression to a hot economy,
with 2-3 jobs for everyone who could work,
in just 90 days after people started
shooting at us. We spent huge bucks,
and nearly everything that the bucks
bought was junk on a battlefield in
a few weeks or sold for war surplus.
Still, the spending, even on stuff that
was just junk, got us out of The Great
Depression.

My view is that mostly the extra spending
was just wasted, but, as for the WWII
example, have to believe that even wasted
such spending can get us out of a great
depression. So, I'm not totally against
the spending. But the waste was still
a black mark. We didn't have just to
waste so much of the money.

OBL? Fine. But bringing in Hollywood
to make a movie and letting out
secret information on Navy Seal tactics
was not good. I credit the Navy
Seals and the DoD. Even if a president
doesn't do anything, there still is the
rest of the government, and sometimes
it does things. So, can credit Obama
for not messing up a good effort
across the Potomac River in that five
sided funny farm.

US out of Iraq? Another post in this
thread says that that was just the
schedule anyway.

I can't claim that Obama never does
anything. Still, I see a difference:
It appears to me that he has the strategy
I tried to describe, on a lot of headline
issues, pass out a lot of
platitudes but actually do something
on only a small fraction of those.
Otherwise do relatively little and, thus,
don't get blamed for failures.

It's all on a continuum and not
0 or 1. It just looks to me like
he talks the talk without walking the
walk, or some such, more than other
presidents since, say, FDR.

Maybe it's good pragmatic leadership,
and if so most of the blame is on the
mainstream media and the voters. US
voters are awash in power, can shake DC
just by pulling some levers behind a
curtain, and with the Internet are awash
in information. If Obama gets away with
what the OP described, then the voters
get what they deserve.
On point 2: if you get jammed in a tube you're going to stop in a much shorter distance than if you're freewheeling on a road.
The opposite arrow of causation is bigger.

Wealthy individuals make a choice over the long term to either draw income from their business to spend on luxury, or leave it in the business to grow. Depressed people choose the former, optimistic & energetic people choose the latter. Thus high 'emotional well-being' causes lower incomes.
Raw speed is obviously valuable, but it will always have to be balanced against construction/operation cost and passenger capacity.
Isn't that $20 estimate prima facie incredible? It's based on the capex costs of the system but not opex, right? It presumes that once you build the system, it runs itself for free.
http://westerneducation.org/games/play/Challenge_SAT_Vocab_Q...

The desktop version doesn't require a login.
Is it really useful to whine about this? A word gets adopted to describe something that would need a sentence, that's fine even if the word has other meanings and gets distorted. It's like AJAX ten years ago when people bitched that you were using JSON instead of XML.
They're partying/sleeping.
It's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb
Android phones are not locked down, at least not nearly to the same degree as iOS devices. I can pretty much do anything I want with my phone.

As long as i can still buy a general-purpose computer for $200 that can do/run anything I want, or pay for processor cycles like a utility like I can with AWS, this will seem like computing purist's paranoia. It's a lot like Stallman's regular speechifying, when it strikes me that while he's not completely wrong, he's not really right either.
To which the government responds, "See, the War on Terror is working!"

If you likewise point out that psychoactive drug usage has remained flat since the 50's, they say, "See, no increase! The War on Drugs is working!"

The real problem is that legislators aren't bound by silly things like logic, or the scientific method, or burden of proof.
It's like calling the specific desktop computer "a CPU." Some people do this too. It's just wrong. If I plug the pieces together in a workable machine it doesn't mean I've made a CPU, even if I've painted the box myself.

Note the name is Ubuntu, not "Ubuntu OS." Debian and not "Debian OS."

I wouldn't have problem if the product is just named "Elementary" and described as a Linux based OS distribution, once they have a release policy (before it's just a Linux based release). Having OS in the name means a new OS, and it simply and plainly isn't.
It will not get you to SF from LA in 30 minutes. You have to get to Sylmar, which is a hike, then get through a security checkpoint; when you get to the other side, you have to drive from Hayward to San Francisco.

HSR plans get around this by terminating in the middle of major metro areas, which they can do because they get to reuse existing rail lines.
I don't know why killing OBL is considered a big win, it's not in my opinion. It took so over 10 years, many human lives, run down the US economy from a surplus, American citizens are giving up on some basic freedoms, people are paranoid with fear, got the ugly side out in form of G-bay, torture etc and more over recently, US is loosing credibility e.g. I saw a cloud services website recently being discussed on HN and they mentioned ...We are serious about security, we do not have servers in US... on their website (paraphrasing), it's bad if not being associated with US is one of your business's selling point. I don't know why killing OBL is considered an achievement, but people don't seem to notice at what cost it came. And, the worst part, it was one attack, and the rest US did to themselves. I wish US was a little more resilient.
Regarding the banking crisis, they way I see it they did well to maintain status quo and in my opinion they only setup themselves for the next big fall because the same people are responsible for the same banks are probably doing the same thing again.
Pulling out of Iraq, it's probably debatable again, because I was for pulling out of Iraq but the current state of Iraq, July being the bloodiest month ever of more than 1000 people killed in July alone, I wouldn't use this as something exemplary for someone's achievements.
where is this launched? not seeing any data for san diego...
Terrorism is an industry with thousands and thousands of people (TSA employees, military industrial contractors, drone pilots, policy makers) that get paid as long as there is terrorism.

While their superficial mission is to "eliminate" terrorism. The incentives are quite the opposite. 1) Will not happen from above. There won't be a White House policy to as a war on Fear of Terrorism. It will have to come from the citizens.
Ask HN: Can you please help me with this?
I have to submit an assignment based on response of a survey. THis is a very small 8 question survey and would not take more then 3-4 minutes. Could you please help me to fill this? Here is the link -

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9RNMBRN

Thanks.
Oh come on. This is such a corporate PR stand. The guy had taken the perfect step by posting the exploit on Mark's wall. He tried twice with best way available to him to report the bug. Is Facebook saying he should have adhered to a particular way for doing a service to them? Good luck in making him paint in the bad light. Next person will simply upload the video on Youtube and won't even bother reporting anything.
He hasn't taken time away from his car company to do this.
How so? The page looks like HTML5 to me. If the title were "Device Mockups Using Only HTML5," then your point would be slightly more valid, although it has become quite common to use "HTML5" to refer to all client-side technologies in the modern web stack.
What I don't fully understand is how this is any better than conventional HSR. What are the advantages? Cost, but that remains to be seen. Absolute speed, which yes, but where are the time estimates from Hayward to the Transbay Terminal in SF, and from Sylmar to Union Station in LA?

This whole thing reads to me as purest wind.

EDIT: At least on a conventional train, I can ride from somewhere that's not at one of the endpoints to somewhere else that isn't; and, of course, I can go to the bathroom.
Sure we know what causes cancer, uncontrolled growth of a mutated cell!

I see where you're coming from, but the differences between pneumonia and cancer aren't as great as you think.

If you have pneumonia, they give you an antibiotic. They can test for the presence of the pathogen, but they can't ever say you are "cured". Take c. difficile infections. They treat the symptoms, but you can "relapse".

In cancer you can test for the presence of the mutated cells (minimum residual disease). Often what they'll do is count the mutated cells from a biopsy, and with this current treatment, the number of remaining cells is less than the lower limit of detection.

Of course, this is only true in the liquid cancers. Solid tumor cancers don't work the same way.
Thanks for the points man! I'd love to hear your ideas for improving it.
To address the braking concern: the author of the article says that the Hyperloop stops and starts at 0.5g, which would make it take 60 seconds to stop. That's not entirely true. 0.5g is the acceleration that the pods would experience under normal circumstances.

Everyone reading this (unless they're on the ISS or flying a plane in a sine curve) is presently experiencing 1G, give or take a tiny bit. 2G is felt by lots of people on a day-to-day basis during normal activities. Some rollercoasters get up to 4.5G. Astronauts train at very high G. If there's a catastrophic failure, the hyperloop could slow down at much higher Gs (some informal calculations says between 5 and 6 Gs wouldn't be unreasonable). If 0.5G is 60 seconds, 5G is well under ten seconds. Pods spaced 30 seconds apart would have plenty of time to stop.

Some might say, "But 4+ Gs can cause an untrained person to black out!" Yeah, and you're on a hyperloop traveling 750+MPH that's just experienced catastrophic failure. And the scenario that is being explored involves either the tube in front of you having been obliterated, the pod in front of yours having come to a complete halt instantly, or someone dropped a blue shell.

To address the pod loading/unloading issue: stations are not located along the main track, they happen at branches. Proper timing means that branched stations can be bypassed, allowing pods to bypass the station ("nonstop" pods, if you will) without shortening or lengthening delays for pods at the station. This means that when a station diverts a pod, it creates a 60 second gap instead of two 30 second gaps. Another station further down the line could then fill that gap with a train that had arrived earlier.

This means that pods could load/unload much more slowly than if they were forced to arrive/depart in the order that they passed through the vicinity of a station. And pods that are not stopping at a station would experience no delay.

Main stations ("terminal stations") could have a buffer of pods. If it takes granny five minutes to get off the pod, who cares? Just put a different pod in the queue for departure. Order shouldn't matter, you're at the end of the line. Ever been on MUNI and seen the inbound trains show up on the outbound tracks in a different order? Exactly.

To address the time comparison between the hyperloop and HSR: this is completely speculative, but it's doubtful that the HSR could achieve its proposed time of 2:48. The author talks about this like it's a hard fact. I'd be surprised if HSR could hit three hours, or even four. Has this guy ridden on Caltrain? The sheer number of delays is startling.

Hyperloop, OTOH, is decidedly much more reliable since the tube is sealed. Nothing can get in the way of the tube, cars can't collide with pods, it doesn't matter what the weather is, etc. Even if the Hyperloop doesn't meet its 30-40 minute target, I think it would be much more reliable than HSR, and there's room for it to improve as well as the technology improves.
The planned 0.2 release is delayed due to little public interest in Clank. -clank blog

Is user interest enough for the OP, or are you looking for other contributors?
The Pirate Party's manifesto (https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/media/uploads/Manifesto2012.p...) specifically addresses privacy. On p.25 it says:

We feel that citizens' right to private and confidential communication is vital, but at present it is not respected. We will forbid third parties from intercepting or monitoring communication traffic (i.e. telephone calls, post, Internet traffic, defend the right of citizens to expose emails) and require specific warrants to be issued by a court before the police are allowed to monitor communications traffic.
See also this exemplary example of persistence and passion:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/with-z...
I've read that story a dozen times. There must be some template out there, you just have to find one of those miracle cures and interview the well meaning, eloquent and chatismatic serial killer who promotes his snake oil to desperate people.

But for heavens sake, don't ruin your hit piece with basic background checks.
I really like the HN simplicity, and is pretty easy to augment it with extensions.
Your might find it worth reading back-to-back biographies of the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. The Vanderbilts' wealth created generations of horror. The Rockefellers did much better: generally functional families and several descendants making solid contributions to the world. It's clear enough from the books where the difference comes from. If you raise your kids right, inheritance is not a bad thing.

http://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Children-Fall-House-Vanderbil...

http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller-Sr/dp/1470...
Hangout Programmer - A hangout about programming taught for teens by a teen
I would say Jiro Dreams of Sushi while not really a documentary, more of a biography, will make you re-evaluate (if only temporarily) your life.
>The hyperloop is actually something worth having as it will get you from SF to LA in 30 mins. Even if it costs more and takes less people than HSR, it's still far better than HSR for actually getting you between the two cities in the kind of time people would like.

Not necessarily. It depends on demand.

Think of travel time as latency, and volume as bandwidth. If the system is unsaturated, then the 30 minute travel time is great. You show up, get on, and ~30 minutes later you're at your destination.

But if the system is saturated (which seems likely at $20/ticket), then latency becomes more or less irrelevant because you're limited by bandwidth. Sure, once you get on the car, you'll arrive in half an hour. But you will have to wait in line, and that wait will be determined by the volume limitations of the hyperloop. If the hyperloop attempts to serve the same demand as the proposed HSR, a passenger's total travel time will be four times as long.

The solution is to charge more for a ticket. The actual price needs to be calculated in terms of a point where you don't end up with more than 3000 passengers per hour (at which point you break even).

However, even if you do that, it doesn't as effectively solve other problems that the HSR will help with, like total car traffic.
I suspect the root of it is that drugs make individuals respect authority less, so naturally to protect it's power government opposes the use of drugs. Rationalization takes care of the rest(play up the negative aspects of drug usage, downplay the positive aspects of usage and legalization).
It is interesting to consider the media bias towards 'bad' news. For some reason breaking stories always seem to be something negative. Whether it's terrorism, kidnapping, ponzi schemes, car crashes, you name it, but why do some negative stories run more than others?

At some point media organizations found that people would rather watch a train wreck than the launch of a new high speed rail.

http://www.essex.ac.uk/government/epop/papers/panel7/p7_soro... - Concludes there is a psychophysiological evidence that negative news is more arousing.

I suppose it follows that media concerning terrorism is probably more arousing than people being crushed by couches, and makes much better TV. And our perception of our reality is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to.

A great example of this would be the coverage of the fertilizer plant that blew up in Texas verses the Boston marathon bombings. These happened within days of each other. Which one did you hear about more? Which one killed more people?
Yeah, that's where the Apple's Retina Display shines.
That's not true. There was a very easy way to find and demonstrate this bug without violating the TOS. The TOS clearly says, you can't target someone with your hack without their permission.

The hacker could have created two accounts he owned and controlled, who are not Facebook friends. He could have used one to post to the other's wall. Viola, bug proven and bounty collected.
Thanks for such an insightful and supportive comment :)

I think you're right that the free design / pay to get made model does to some degree undervalue the design. It only really fitted for us because we a) had the designs and b) wanted to explore the local making proposition.

With other designers and ranges, we see a model where designers can name their price for the use of their design / IP. In fact, with the current OpenDesk system, a design fee is already included in the price to "get it made".

We're also interested in designers controlling their distribution: the territories they want to sell to, with a price breakdown they control.
If you try to buy an iPad at the Apple Store, the Specialist you buy it from will ask you about your intended usage and make it very clear that it's not a general purpose computer, and that you probably need a computer if you don't already have one.
Always keep in mind that the government's cheapest manipulation strategy is fear (it always works):

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/constitutional-expert...

And for some more numbers that we should talk to our family and friends about:

> You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack

taken from: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...

Conclusion: Terrorism is actually not a problem, but they want us to believe that.
I'd prefer to keep it simple.
Yes, I don't know why Haskell or a Python interpreter (coming from their own free software teams) are not available.
It seems really low, but I don't really know what to dispute among p. 56 estimates. Energy comes from solar panels. It doesn't seem to factor in maintenance. Even if the cost turns out to be double and we factor in a 20% profit margin, it would still be much cheaper (and possibly faster) than a HSR ticket.
Warren Buffet explains why you can't beat the market
It's much, much, more important for a party that cares about digital rights to fight the 2014 European election than the 2015 general election, for two reasons:

1. the Euro election is fought using PR, meaning it's possible to actually win seats

2. a lot of the relevant issues are decided at Brussels as much as at Westminster.
I don't see how being confined to a subset of programming is a good thing. To always depend on what features your overseers are willing to make available to you.

So what if a locked down phone can run JavaScript? I can do a ToDo-list app?
A history of (muted) violence: The present and future of Adults Only games
>>> If Facebook does pay you for the bug, it is just setting a bad example and will be encouraging similar behaviour.

I strongly disagree.

Despite not following the process by the book, I think it is clear that he attempted to act in good faith and had trouble with language/cultural issues. It's not like he posted porn or something on Zuckerberg's profile.

I think that going out of their way to stiff this guy out of a few bucks makes it all the more likely that any future vulnerabilities that are discovered by foreigners will just be sold to spammers/hackers. And this makes the internet a worse place.

Facebook saved a few bucks but just lost a big PR war here that Facebook will reward you for disclosing vulnerabilities.

Facebook should have paid the guy and used this event as a reminder about the best practices and procedures to follow.
Citation for this debunking?