skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After you raise the first million dollars, the company is at least a million dollars more valuable, because it's the same company as before, plus it has a million dollars in the bank.

This seems a bit specious. Sure, the lower bound on the pre-money valuation for investor #2 should be the post-money valuation for investor #1, not the pre-money valuation for investor #1; but the valuation per share won't necessarily be any different.
I think it's interesting to devote so much space in the introduction to hypothetical supersonic air travel. Might this be what Musk actually intends to do next?
p8952 You're absolutely right. Our end game is to compete with 1&1. But to get there we need developers to help end users get their sites online. As Barley becomes a more well-rounded product we hope to bridge out of the developer market and go straight to small businesses.

Do you think we'd be better off allowing Developers to use this free and only pay for their customer's sites? Or only if our app were open source it'd be appealing?
The key advantages of a tube vs. a railway track are that it can be built above
the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are
dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder.

Did anyone else read this and imagine laser beams fired by satellites?
Like the author, I have an Economics background but have gotten into programming as I graduated from working on Excel. Economics has suffered because of a lack of good data - this is why so many explanations by economists begin with assumptions. I'm hopeful that the data sets now available will improve economic models and that people working in the public sector will put them to good use.
OTOH, any of the good family tree sites will hide full names of living people from public view.
I imagined so too, but what were they basing this match on? The people they were suggesting did not, or at least should not, have had this particular email address since it was created after I had worked with them. They only ever emailed (for group meetups/drinks) on my "personal" email address.

Now I can recommendations for other people in the same company, previous colleagues who were at the same company at the same time, "friends of friends" and all that makes sense. But creepy as you say. Maybe the guys who wrote the algorithm now work for the NSA...
So, it's a two-lane highway where the cars are 5 miles apart? How many people will be able to use this thing?
It is also cross-posted on Tesla

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop
Well -- the new Macbook Air IMHO took a lot of wind out of the sails of such an idea. If I got an Air that I can leave the power cable at home because it will legitimately go all day... why would I even consider such a goofball setup?
One of the few times I've read the word 'pylon' without being concerned with some video game.
Why would you assume that Thoreau, Gandhi and King would be against my position?

Individuals banding together for civil disobedience is completely different from commercial entities banding together. Hoping for commercial entities to break laws because you hope to happen to benefit from this rule breaking in this particular instance seems to be ill advised from my perspective.
The Firefox browser on Android does have copy/paste and this is relevant because Mozilla wants to make Firefox a portable mobile platform for apps, so it is safe to assume that FxOS should have feature parity with the Firefox Android soon.
Don't be hyperbolic, it also incentivizes good service to anyone that the server recognizes... I typically receive mediocre to poor service when I am dining alone until the staff learn that I tip well.
"VCs will sometimes ask which other VCs you're talking to, but you should never tell them."

Why not? (Unless I missed it, the article doesn't explicitly say.)
10 minutes is perfect. I do not want to wait another half hour when I need my check. <5 minutes though is extremely annoying.
It's on the Tesla site as well. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop
This is not good.

I mean why should a smart search engine like Google limit a TLD to a particular region. Especially since squatters buy good .com domains and charge premium prices. They of all people should know the difficulties of finding relevant domains.
ET3 - The Hyperloop Competitor
I am skeptical of the proposed cost were someone to actually build this. Sure, the cost of materials, labor, engineering, etc. is probably accurate, but something like this has never been built before. What about the cost of research and testing? Not to mention there doesn't currently exist an industry of contractors to build most of the parts of this system, which is not true in the case of traditional high speed rails. Citing the cost to build something like the Hyperloop as the entire cost of developing it seems a bit disingenuous.

Not that it still wouldn't be comparable to the cost of a high speed rail system.
The value and utility of such a service will be so significant that it will trump most individual's concerns about privacy. Facebook has lead a successful charge in this direction for the last 9 years.
Great documentary called Kumaré Gets into this. He creates his own philosophy and identity. Great watch!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865425/
How can service members see the upside of any sales without tips? Bar has a big night and does $20K? Sorry, here is your $20/hr instead of your $500 in tips. Can any bartenders comment?
So who wants to start a company? I'll uh...come up with the business plan.

Seriously though, this would be an incredible project to work on. I wonder, outside of Elon Musk, who would take on the challenge?
The pumped air is also used to create an air cushion around the pod to keep it suspended at high speeds. Also, solar panels line the top of the tube so that it is self powering.
By the time I've posted both the Businessweek link and the comment the SpaceX.com page was a mere placeholder. A few minutes later their site cache cleared.

Context is everything. ;)

In any case, I've deleted the comment you were referring as it's not relevant anymore.
And apparently the City of London only found out about the tracking from the news[1]. Powerful people don't like surprises like that.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/12/spy_bins_scrapped_fr...
That capsule (http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2013-08-12/0812_Hyperloop_605.jpg) looks like a claustrophobic's nightmare.

Otherwise very, very cool.
> To take a simple example from Python, there are plenty of cases where you want a function to return either a string, say, or None, depending on whether it is able to find a string meeting some set of criteria, and you can't use the empty string as your "not found" value because empty strings are semantically significant for your application.

Static typing is not a problem here. Static type with an inadequate type system is a problem here,
Why HybridConf?
From the PDF:

"Feedback would be most welcome
–
please send to
hyper
loop@spacex.com
or
hyperloop@teslamotors.com
. I would like to thank
my excellent compadres at both companies for their help in putting this
together."
It says right at the beginning that the first section is an overview while the second section is more technical...
Why not just have progressively increasing prices based on bandwidth usage (and probably factoring in an increase for peak hour usage)?

Your first off-peak gig per month costs X USD whether you use it in one day or 28, et cetera.
So, we have "light shed" on the current "debacle" and neither system gets built. That's a win? HSR was first commerically available in 1964. Yes, it got really expensive waiting 50 years. I imagine it'll be even more expensive in another 20-30. California is going to get even more crowded.
I like how the head of the project called him to make sure he knows it's not the absolute slowest or most expensive per mile only nearly so.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. This TOS would comfort me if I were specifically interested in running a Minecraft server, but not much else.
I think that Facebook has a social duty to set the bar in terms of what is acceptable to do with this wealth of user data. Never before has there been one place that has so much detailed information about so many people - with great power comes great responsibility. The rules are still being refined. Things get tried - some work, some don't - then from this, lessons are learnt.
No toilet, and no way to get off, or even really stand up? I know some personal jets lack such facilities, but they're not exactly open to the public. At least on BART you can move away from the crazy...
Fair point. I just want y'all to make money so just throwing ideas out there! :) Good luck on y'alls journey!

btw I need to learn the lingo, bc I didn't actually mean clerks, I meant the lawyers you were referring to...I think clerk may mean low wage unskilled worker.
In terms of frameworks, no, nothing competes with Rails because Rails is simply too big an ecosystem to compete with on even terms for a relatively niche language. Chicago Boss is pretty nice, with a very friendly community, though. It's worth a look.
It seems like the earliest investor in a multi-party round invariably gets shortchanged in the literal dollar value of the deal. If committed investors raise the valuation of a startup, would it make sense for a startup to offer a slightly-sweetened valuation for the first investor to commit?

I understand that no one likes to have the price raised on them later, but perhaps the underlying truth of increasing valuations could be restated in a different way so it seems more like a discount to the first-in vs a price-hike to the last in.
Jerry Brown: Build this tube!
"Hyperloop Passenger Capsule
The maximum width is 4.43 ft (1.35 m) and maximum height is 6.11 ft (1.10 m). With rounded corners, this is equivalent to a 15 ft2 (1.4 m2) frontal area, not including any propulsion or suspension components."

At a first look I didn't get that the proposed passenger capsule would be so small. That's pretty cramped.

Edit: Isn't the the ft to m conversion for the height wrong?
Does it support multiple pods in the tube at once?
Both would have been ideal - Ideally the webpage would have been a public-perception-focused with simple explanations (syringes with compressors!) and the concept sketches front-and-center, with a link for a more technically oriented whitepaper. That would have taken a lot more time though - the linked pdf is still impressive.
A few bits of good advice, but he demonstrates clearly why he needed to hire an editor.

Also he is wrong about the lack of serious editing by professional editors. I've always gotten great editing from my book publishers.
Why Agendaless Consulting Doesn't Accept Contracts With Patent Indemnification
> Theorems and conclude that in every logic there are statements which are true, but not provable, or provable, but not true. And this is the ultimate problem with type systems: in their quest to reject "bad" programs, they must reject "good" programs as well because they cannot prove their "goodness".

This really is a gross misuse of Gödel's theorem. Taken to it's logical end his argument is that any field that has logical foundations should value human judgement over rigor and proof because of incompleteness. Should we just throw out all of mathematics as well because there are true but unprovable theorems?
Every publicly traded company is always up for sale.
Have you considered adding Scala? You're already running jvms for Java, and you could do incremental compilation with SBT to keep everything responsive.
The first few pages are an explanation in layman's terms.
How long would it take to get from San Fran to LA?

Edit: nevermind, it is about 30 minutes
Given the sort of heavy infrastructure required and their related permits, I'd assume that whoever actually starts an effort to build a HL-like system, will have local politicians on board.
what happens when you develop unexpected gastric issues mid-30 minute journey?
You don't need exception notification dashboards
Windows phone pretty much competes against everything from feature phones to high end devices and the user experience is pretty much the same. The Lumias have damn good hardware as well.

You can get a Lumia 520 in the UK for £79 and it gives a better experience than an android for twice the amount or any Asha feature phone.
But most statically typed languages let you represent that kind of code. C++ and Java have null. Haskell has Maybe. 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.
> the chess example where 3,000 hours get some people to masters status but 25,000 is not enough for others

There are so many factors at play. One important one is environment...e.g. if your parents are chess masters and you've grown up watching them play, that's not being included as part of the 3,000 hours...and it should be, because the one with 10,000 hours might not have such an advantage.
Mono is pretty much ostracized from the open source community along with many open source C# projects. Remember the whole ordeal about including Mono in Ubuntu?
I think this video makes several compelling arguments against tipping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2C4n4eMQ

The most important bit of research he relates has nothing to do with the servers, but with the customers - an individual customer will tip about the same regardless of service. This means that the incentive for waitstaff is not to serve everyone better in hopes of better tips, but to compete for the perceived highest value customers (white business men) and provide them with the best service. I don't have links to studies but this confirms what I've heard from friends in the restaurant industry - the strategy is to serve those with the highest expected tip better.

At this point the disconnect should be obvious. A customer who tips well but doesn't fall into the "expected good tipper" category will not get good service so how is the system "incentivizing good service" in a general sense?
Show HN: LightningDrive - Map WebDAV sites to a network drive in Windows
This is such a cool concept. I was so hoping he would build this.
Yes but they need to be 5 miles apart so they would board approximately every 30 seconds and carry 28 people each.
Public officials are frequent recipients of bribes, but there are many classic examples of bribes that went to other parties. For instance the Pakistan cricket spot-fixing scandal of 2010 involved athletes taking bribes from bookmakers to underperform.

In the case of tipping, it has been pointed out that a demonstrated willingness to tip results in the server putting your interests above those of the other customers in the restaurant. How is this any different than bribing in effect?
Not building the HSR that is envisioned is the win.
You've never used Android 4.3 on 512 MB of RAM, right? I have and it is unusable. The base OS and the base apps, like the stock Android browser do run, but nothing is left for other apps. A minimum of 1024MB is needed.

Also that phone is $100 in the US. To get the price in EU or most other markets multiply with an amount between 1.5 and 2
The timing in the video doesn't indicate the car's speed at the time of impact because that calculation assumes his speed was constant. If he was accelerating or decelerating all those calculations are invalid.
Not really. It's a valid welding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_welding), but I imagine it might be quite a task to scale it up to pipes as large as would be needed for this project.
From the report: "...with capsules departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28 people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be transported each year on Hyperloop."
Interesting, it should actually build with ffmpeg 1.2 correctly (as a matter of fact I have been using it until 2 days ago).

If you can reproduce it, I'd love a bug report.
> tracked, in minute detail, and stored indefinitely.

Don't forget being analyzed and profiled. When I get arrested for conducting my life in a way that is more than 2 standard deviations outside the norm by some metric the government has deemed critical, it's on all your heads!
That's an argument in favor of a useful HSR system. But politics have resulted California's HSR system being deliberately pessimized; it may do more harm than good to the HSR cause, right?
Claustrophobes will not be eager to travel in this fashion.
This could be considered a "next generation train". Elon Musk as we know likes to consider things from "first principles". It looks like here, he has taken the first principles of high-speed "rail" travel on land, and come up with this.

I think our children might enjoy using it ;-)
Thought this was amazing: $20 for a one-way, 35 minute trip from SF to LA.
The bigger point though is that college isn't all mental. If you went through college hunched over a desk studying, and doing nothing else, then sure, you can replicate that at home.
Strange PDF title -- "Falcon 9v1.1 - Reentry Nozzle Study" -- is there some design reuse or just document reuse?
Travelling in any kind of tunnel is no more claustrophobic than this is it?
Yes, a pod would depart every 2 minutes or less, which puts about 23 miles between them.
Very cool!

Feature suggestion: It would be great to be able to change the colors of the individual components a la https://github.com/twolfson/sexy-bash-prompt
When I was a kid I had a similar idea, a low pressure elevated concrete tube transport system. In my idea cars would get rails underneath them and freely enter/exit the tube at some key points. The cars would get a compressor to help keep the not-so-large pressure differential at bay; all inspired by evacuated tube documentaries.

In other words, this has been proposed several times before. However, there are some key innovations here - namely the compressor/nozzle pair and the air suspension system - which may indeed change the game and make this viable.
Yes, but no discussion of how you'd bring the system down if one broke down mid-trip or how you'd bring it back up. The individual cars only carry power to maintain speed, no to accelerate, so if they have to stop because something goes wrong, a whole bunch of people are stuck in the middle of nowhere without a toilet (or air?)
Looking at Brand Impact of a major hosting outage
But that's at a pressure of 100Pa (1/1000 atm). How much power does it take to maintain a vacuum of 1/1000atm in a tube hundreds of miles long? It seems this point is skipped over in the whitepaper, so perhaps its negligible.

Edit: yes I was referring to the power to sustain a vacuum in a leaky system, of course no power is required to maintain a vacuum in a perfectly sealed system :)
Switching Season Report, 2013 Edition
Elon Musk unveils 'Hyperloop' idea
Well the pod has compressor - so it literally can hit the fan :)

The only thing I really dislike so far is the battery pack in the pod. I would have wanted to see something more elegant instead. And this way we halve the weight of the pod.
Except most type systems can deal with that -- if you truly believe that mixing types isn't foolish in a particular case, just tell the compiler that you're doing it intentionally. The OP's example is trivially solved by using the Either type within the if statement to denote that the expression intentionally returns two different types. The compiler will then check for you that you actually deal with both cases. Better yet, one of the type constructors for Either is traditionally reserved as an error case, so it again correctly flags the code as always branching in the same direction barring an exceptional case.

Your Python example is a canonical use case for the Maybe/Option type. You either provide "Just" a value, or you provide "Nothing".

The point is, a type system of sufficient power can express your program just fine so long as you declare to the type checker that you're not just making a silly mistake. And let's be honest, we all make tons of those mistakes. Who wants them hiding for some unknown duration to crop up at the most unfortunate time. I'd rather know asap that my program has a problem.
It's interesting that the biggest line item in the costing is not the tube, nor the capsules, nor the vacuum pumps, nor the solar panels, nor the land, but the concrete pylons that support the tube - about two-fifths of the total. The pylons are planned to be 30m apart, making for about 25000 of them.
Hyperloop Alpha
What happens currently on a high-speed rail system? I suppose there's a lavatory in the HSR (e.g.: France's TGV).
I'm wondering... If someone requests his data of facebook without him having a facebook account.

Facebook has to give him all the information they have about him, right?

So, i have facebook :-S, who will request their data.

PS. I see a class action lawsuit coming up:)
Ah – a turboprop tubular-ground-effect vehicle.
> 4.5.6. Human Related Incidents
Hyperloop would feature the same high level of security used at airports. However, the regular departure of Hyperloop capsules would result in a steadier and faster flow of passengers through security screening compared to airports.

Ugh. That only seems feasible if back-scatter scanners are the only option (but would you still have to take your belt off and put all metal in a little bowl?).
Apple aerial map photos blocked over Oslo in Norway
Some interesting tidbits:

The total trip time is approximately half an hour, with capsules
departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28
people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be
transported each year on Hyperloop. The total cost of Hyperloop in this
analysis is under $6 billion USD. Amortizing this capital cost over 20 years and
adding daily operational costs gives a total of about $20 USD (in current year
dollars) plus operating costs per one-way ticket on the passenger Hyperloop.

For aerodynamic efficiency, the velocity of a capsule in the Hyperloop is
- typically: 300 mph (480 kph) where local geography necessitates a tube bend radii
< 1.0 mile (1.6 km)
- 760 mph (1,220 kph) where local geography allows a tube bend > 3.0
miles (4.8 km) or where local geography permits a straight tube.
Statically typed mainstream languages would not allow you to do that, but languages with algebraic type systems, like Haskell, Scala and Rust, do. This is also how they get around not having null pointers. You just define a type that can be either a string, or the symbol "None". Or any other symbol that might be more fitting for the situation.
The issue here is the(perhaps intentionally) vague definition of "server". What about the folks in the middle ground? Who want to run a home VPN, who want to use their NAS remotely, or who want to run their own "cloud"? The ISPs could define the term more verbosely and lock out people actually abusing home connections while simultaneously not screwing the people legitimately looking to use their home connection for anything but web browsing.
Each chair is actually a toilet. Problem solved.
I think he should start a ticket pre-sale on kickstarter and see if he can be the first person to reach $6 billion for a project.
I'd always wondered if anyone could upstage PG on HN. Apparently, Elon Musk can.
Uhg, the point is these are all multi-billion dollar businesses that use open source in one way or another. The problem is the open source (hacker news) community pretty much auto-ignores/dislikes anything connected with Microsoft. It's juvenile.
If this is going to be running above ground, how do they purpose to find space to even build this?

http://mappery.com/maps/Los-Angeles-California-Transportatio...

My only guess would be to build it vertically. . which is were everything is going anyways, right?