skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles

Musk has already given more than enough for the world and done more than enough. Somebody should do it, but we should not expect him to do it.
>From a (former) network engineer's standpoint: people who are upset that they can't keep their $50/month 20Mbps connection at line rate 24/7 make me think of people who want to fill shopping bags at a buffet.

Some people have bigger [data] appetites than others. Would you be in favor of a rule against fat people or really wired skinny people? And the shopping bag analogy is rather broken: if you were paying for 24/7 access to a buffet it wouldn't matter if you walked out with extra food to eat yourself.

(I'm ignoring any kind of food/bandwidth resale, I don't object to that being outlawed by the TOS.)
I think it's actually more useful to think in terms of "2 minutes between them", as opposed to "23 miles".

2 minutes is all you have - to detect the situation, make a decision, then stop.
You can write perfectly performant apps in most languages. The problem is often the communities that surround them. Node.js has some nice advantages but I wouldn't compare by performance next to C# and Java. I'd compare on community, language philosophy and typical code quality. Java and C# and the median developer level are awful.
Alright, safe for the fact that this may still turn out to be an impossible technology after all for something we're all missing and also for Musk being off by an order of magnitude (which I don't see to be that plausible).

Even if you worst-case Musks plan and best-case the traditional concept * , you end up in about the same cost bracket. Just that in the one case you get incredible space tech and in the other, you get a boring train that isn't even as great as it could be with 20 years old tech.

As for the "Future Work" section - I don't really see how they could explode the budget. Only two points (station design and comparison with traditional Maglev) seem concerned with R&D work - for station design, you're not really looking for any breakthroughs, just packaging and mentioning Maglev seems more like a "just make sure" point that isn't really about physical cost at all.

* This part is highly unlikely - government issued endeavors like a long distance train routes have a pathological tendency to run over budget (a few billion here and there, who's going to notice?!). Of course, the same applies to Musks concept, but starting at an order of magnitude lower means that the kind of petty "I'm going to carve a piece from that cake, too" budget overruns should be well within range.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash
Interesting. We haven't implemented third-party integration, but we'll definitely think about it. Feel free to contact us if you have particular suggestions.
When you reduce a person down to a scalar, you're inevitably losing most of the signal in the different variables which go into that calculation. I am extremely skeptical that it's possible to come up with a model which makes that scalar useful to a hiring manager across a pool of candidates, even if you're some kind of data-science messiah. My .02 is that applicant scoring this way is inherently broken from a signal to noise perspective. (In fact, I bet if you just took GPA as the ranking metric, its performance would be superior as it's more competitive/harder to game, despite GPA being widely acknowledged as a subpar hiring metric - at least in my experience.)
If you read the article, this main issue is that they omit the definition of a 'server'.
Nice!

I'd love to see support for the terminal window title here, too. Add an additional container for the titlebar contents, and prefix \[\e]0;$titlebar_contents\a\] to the prompt when TERM is xterm, rxvt, or screen*.

Also, colors should be draggable into the prompt, since they can change between different parts of the prompt.

"Last command error when not successful" is nice as well; just add this to your prompt (includes color and whitespace):

$(e="$?";[ "$e" -ne 0 ] && echo -n "\[\e[01;31m\]($e) ")

On my system, I also have some extra logic to only show the username and hostname if either $SSH_CONNECTION is set or the username is not my usual username (usually because it's either root, some user I've sudoed to, or an unusual username because I'm on a system with mandated username conventions). Thus, on my personal system, my initial prompt is "~$ ", taking up very little room. Unfortunately "not my usual username" isn't portable to different users (though you could check for the presence of SUDO_USER), but checking SSH_CONNECTION is.
He makes a point that by building on pylons he specifically doesn't need to do any of that.
Same here.

There are a bunch of investors out there that I know, like, and trust.

Also slightly less importantly, there are investors I don't necessarily trust.

The composition of the syndicate is an important signal.
Each passenger gets an Oculus Rift headset and can choose their virtual route.
This Documentary was awesome to say the least. With many human mental shortcomings on display.
But just to clarify, Tagore was not such a "Guru". He was a poet, philosopher, artist and a true genius of our times. Despite his looks he wasn't a religious "guru"
Please make your pages load faster. A 1.1MB header image which blocks other assets from loading doesn't do well for you.
Those numbers still seem absurd to me. $120 billion? France built the entire TGV network, about 2,000 km (1250 miles, ~2x the length of LA-SF, including numerous stations in urban areas) for around $20-30 billion. Maybe the U.S. should borrow some management practices from inefficient socialist "old Europe".
Certainly, but most math proofs aren't "rigorous proofs" by any stretch.
> I rather give a Cessna to 1M people so they can fly anywhere without restriction.

"What could possibly go wrong..."
Let the tech workers test it out on their SF-Silicon Valley commutes first. Maybe Elon's musk will help convince all the millionaire tech NIMBYs that own the peninsula.
I believe that was the entire point of it. Keeping invention a personal use secret just wasn't cutting it.

Patents are good. Patent abuse is not. They need to be better regulated.
Let's put that on a bumper sticker :)
you speak as though it needs to be run as a charity to be a game changer. I only mention that price point because that is just underneath the cost of flying, and that's how economics works. The operator will likely want to make as much profit as it can, while still sucking customers away from the airports. In the beginning, the operator will likely charge MORE than the airplanes, because the customer will be liable to be ok with a "novelty" premium, and it's in the interest of the operator to amortize the costs as quickly as possible to secure itself against (unforseeable) price competitions or unpredicted costs.

At the price point I suggest, the operator is STILL effectively going to be making 150% margins, so there is a lot of room to lower the cost, but that just isn't going to happen unless there is a competitive pressure to keep lowering the price.

If that's not "social justice" enough for you, then consider that at least the thing is going to be run nearly 100% if not better than 100% renewable.
There is nothing inherently wrong with metaphysics.

And this debate is some seriously good metaphysics. To me this is the kind of writing that is going to keep me busy for quite a while.
Fair points but the author of the article, Kimberly Dvorak, appears convinced that Hastings' was murdered. It seems she found someone to support a theory that his car was travelling 35MPH. I think you can deduce from him speeding through the red light, the lack of brake lights in the 2nd video, the witness who said the car was travelling 100MPH, and the nature of the impact that he was in fact driving very fast.

If the video evidence was so clear that he was travelling 35MPH, I'm sure other people would be supporting this claim which would easily confirm a bomb was used.
> It's mind boggling to me that the California HSR isn't being built from DC to Boston instead.

Upgraded high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor (where the US's only existing HSR is located) is being planned. [1] California HSR being built in California doesn't preclude HSR from being built/upgraded in other parts of the US.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_S...
Creating a WiX installer for a .NET Web Project
It might be more conspiratorial if the US government hadn't already assassinated no less than 4 American citizens which it immediately covered up and systematically lied about the age and combatant status of said individuals in order to calm the outrage.
Bill Gates has more important things to spend his money on than moving rich americans from somewhere in America to somewhere else in America.
Usually there is some kind of sandboxing in place. That way you can limit what the code is allowed to execute. For e.g. in PHP you would probably use Runkit[1] for this.

1. http://php.net/manual/en/book.runkit.php
Sale and leaseback is a long-established capital allocation tool. The value it provides is short-term liquidity; another way to think about this is the opportunity cost of illiquidity. There's nothing nefarious about it.
Sorry if you perceived that as "nasty".

The motor that it carries with it is about 146 horsepower. That's less than a Kawasaki Ninja street bike.

The General Electric E60 locomotives currently in use on Amtrak crank out 6,250 hp (4,660 kW) and weigh 423,000 lb (192,000 kilograms).

The weight of the tube doesn't really enter into it.
This is correct. However, it is difficult to prove that A and B (or perhaps every wallet in some long chain) are owned by the same person, especially if everyone has a large number of wallets and doesn't reuse them when they are empty.

Let's say the blockcoin shows a transfer of 1 BTC to a new wallet A, and then to a new wallet B, and then from B to a wallet owned by a registered BTC-USD exchange C; to comply with government regulations and protect themselves against fraud, C checks the ID of the owner of the wallet B. A government can now determine the identity of B (and might even force C to provide the information on all transactions in real time, so they know who B is even without an investigation), but they cannot automatically infer the identity of A. There are two possibilities: Perhaps A is owned by a different person, who earned BitCoin for doing some work, and then purchased another service from B. Or perhaps A and B are owned by the same person.

In reality, this might not be the only piece of information available, and governments will probably want to use statistical techniques to estimate the probability that a particular address is owned by a particular person, combining all evidence. They will likely take into account all points where money comes into or leaves a wallet with known identity (e.g. in USD -> BTC transactions or BTC -> USD transactions), and the structure of the network between those transactions. For example, suppose wallet A, B, and C are known to be owned by the same person, and someone moves money from all those wallets into wallet D. Then governments will probably infer that D is owned, with high probability, by the same person as wallet D (because multiple low probability pieces of evidence can combine to give a higher probability). Of course, the transactions are not independent, because the owner of A, B, and C might just be a regular customer of D - timing evidence might be taken into account, along with other evidence about the identity of D (for example, does D only receive money from the owner of A, B, and C, or from other sources? Where does the money go after that)?
Unless you are otherwise incapacitated due to whatever is causing the emergency in the first place.
I actually really like this analogy :)

I'll add that anyone who expects the product "inside the box" to be exactly what they see "on the box" is going to have a bad time.
Not only that, but they would also use a lot of technology that Tesla/SpaceX now has a lot of experience in: battery, eletric engines and turbines, the metal for the ski pads, etc. There's a reason why he is making the plan completely free: he has a lot to benefit if this ever really happens.

I would love to see this happen though, and to see Elon become a trillionaire.
Yes, the bacteria infect the apical meristem during embryo development and are included in all cell types and tissues of the mature plant simply by being present at all subsequent cell divisions. It's explained a bit in the patent [1], but there is other data scattered around the literature too.

1. http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US20090106865
I don't think you have an accurate picture of how the nuts and bolts work for networking and the internet. You seem to think of your connection as (1Gbps -> Internet) when in reality there are several switches/routers in between you and your ending destination each with significantly less bandwidth than the total number of customers they serve. Bandwidth is oversold by an extremely large margin (rightly so). If you saturate your connection it has downstream effects that can degrade service for other users.
Could someone buy land in the potential path of this hyperloop then block access or sell the rights or land to make a profit?
Not sure why you think there would be more passengers on LA-SF versus SaoPaolo-Rio: Greater populations, shorter distances and lower costs ($17 vs 68 billion). Brazilians may be poorer today but they are catching up fast.

Sure there will be private contractors but is there really any private interest in building and/or operating high speed rail in CA? Perhaps Hyperloop will change things but so far it has been government led and financed.
I couldn't find the aquaduct on google maps, but I do see lots of "brown" land, so I guess it's not as heavily farmed as I thought. Not enough water presumably?
The reason San Francisco built 269 units in 2011 was not bureaucracy, but that we were at the tail end of a real estate crash. More than 4000 units were started in 2012, and a further 30,000 have been approved. Source: http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/san-francis...
lots and lots of hills and farms between SP/RJ , while in California most of the highway already in place is mostly a straight flat line.
If you want to believe that Google built a multi-terabit network that's 99% idle, go ahead.
Nothing stops you from create hundreds or even millions of bitcoin addresses, which can act as "accounts."

Edit: A bitcoin address is a 160-bit number. That number is associated with a public and private key. The only way you can spend bitcoins stored in an address is if you know the private key of that address.

For more information, this video gives a fairly in depth explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx9zgZCMqXE
The TSA phased out all the X-ray backscatter machines due to radiation concerns. All the scanners at airports use millimeter wave radar now. Still the same privacy concerns, but no ionizing radiation and thus no possible health concerns.
I converted the PDF to a rough markdown:
https://github.com/pooyak/hyperloop/blob/master/document/hyp...
Needs more clean up, but still easier to work on.
Or maybe - just maybe - without the Government he would have to spend more time and effort to persuade private investors and companies to help him. I think by choosing the Government he choose the path of the least resistance. I don't blame him, just saying, that for the rich getting the money from the Government might be much easier than getting it from the markets. Which would be just another example of why the Government should stay away from the economy.
> The article goes on to say that Acela gets 3 million riders in the very dense east coast NY/Washington corridor but in less-dense California they were projecting a ridership around 10x of Acela's (!).

And...so? California has dense areas in the north and south and a big (relatively) empty gap between them. California HSR is designed to connect those dense areas. The overall density of the state (or the corridor) is pretty much a side issue.
I live in los angeles and the proposed price is cheaper than taking a cab from the LAX to my place (4 miles). So no, this is not to help rich americans.
Most fascinating likely medium-term event: The hyperloop will be built outside the US, most likely in China, after changes and development that help China claim it as primarily Chinese in design.
Americans seem to be the most worried about suicide bombings out of anybody else, yet America has probably seen the least suicide bombings per capita of any country in the world.

Not that I approve of many of the things we do to "prevent" them, but...

Perhaps worrying about preventing certain things sometimes actually helps reduce them?
Agreed, I haven't used Macaw but have seen some demonstrations. I did recently use a trial of http://webflow.com/ and although it's a great tool I found it pretty slow and inefficient compared with hand coding. Maybe this is how the next generation will design websites but for me wysiwyg editors never sit right.
I agree to some extent.

However, CA-HSR chose the nearly the most complex and expensive route possible (even though they don't have a funding source), so we shouldn't make a direct cost comparison with Musk's route down I-5. HSR would also be much cheaper on the mostly unpopulated I-5 corridor. Also, the right-of-ways that Musk proposes to get into SF and LA are sketchy.

(Silicon Valley business interests wanted the HSR stations in San Jose & Mountain View, and apparently quite interested in using lower-cost areas such as Fresno for back-office activities. So while they will be impressed by Hyperloop's techno-wizardry, they may actually prefer the HSR project.)
From a technical point of view, they are not centralized. Gmail is a massively decentralized system in itself, a feature partially enabled by emails flexibility. Even if gmail would go down, (other) emails would still continue flowing. And when gmail would come back online, most messages would find their destination due the store-and-forward nature of email.

The fact that even you mention several providers shows that federation does work.

Currently the major pain point in the architecture of email arises when people bind their online identities to singular email providers, even when email has nice facilities of not doing so by having a domain independent from the mail provider and setting appropriate MX records.
There's two big problems with that: 1.) Consumers like the amount they pay to be predictable - they will pay more to avoid surprises. Your scheme sets them up for surprise bills. 2.) There is a material cost for every customer who is surprised and then calls your CSRs to complain. That cost can be more than your entire per-customer profit for one (or several) months. (This is also why cell phone companies love to move to flat rate billing where they don't have to argue about bills as much.)
There are actually some serious efforts in place to get sanity back into urban planning, but (predictably I suppose) this is regarded as an attack on freedom and the lawsuits have already begun to fly.
Here's a story about an FBI FOIA document that included the language, "planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary." The plotters names are redacted but seems rather disturbing-

http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/06/27/fbi-document-deleted-plots-...
I think it's fair that he said that. A vacuum tube has as little air as possible to help things move. His paper explicitly says it is more cost effective to have some air and his capsule design depends on air as a levitation cushion. If he had said it was a vacuum tube, no one could have guessed the levitation method.
In general, most of those things vary massively between classes of trains, and there's no simple low-speed/high-speed distinction. Seat width varies massively between body shell designs, softness often depends on how long since the last refurbishment more than anything else, number of tables and luggage space are often based on the target market for the class, electrical outlets are more and more common (even on commuter trains), WiFi is something I'd expect on most inter-city trains, and on-train restaurants (sadly) are dying out though have historically been common on all inter-city trains.

Smoothness is mostly due to track quality, and is a practical result of design for high-speed running.
Isn't topcoder still the king of this kind of thing. I don't think they particularly market it as being geared at hiring but companies definitely hire from there (I know UBS likes to) and your score does reflect on your ability, at least as far as being able to code competitively.

Edit: hyborg beat me to it :)
I don't know any sysadmins who even have degrees, let alone in computer science.

And I think you're short-changing the math side of it. Want to figure out who to suggest friends to each other in a social app? That's an influence graph over email addresses, game theory and linear algebra. Need to draw a best-fit curve over a graph of data? That's linear algebra and geometry. Need to be able to draw things on a map? That's more linear algebra and some multivariable calculus.

Writing just basic CRUD apps for corporate clients? They're likely eventually going to want metrics on their data, and that's going to be statistics. They'll probably be terrible at math, too. You'll need to hold their hands and tell them what they want, because the stuff they suggest will be either worthless, meaningless, or impossible to determine with the current data set.

Need to explain to a client why you need to take a week to implement a specific path finding algorithm rather than "just brute-forcing it" now (whoever the hell taught them the phrase brute-force should be shot)? You better have such a good grasp of CS that you can teach it better than it was taught to you, because if your experience was anything like mine, regurgitating what they gave us on Big-O notation is not going to cut it.

Think you can get by using other people's code doing all this? Good luck. More often, I've found the shit people post online is full of logic errors. You at least need to know the math well enough to evaluate the results of the code.

There has not been a single project I have ever done that would not have benefited from me knowing more math. The more math I learn, the more I can't believe I did without it before.
You're overstating it. Debugging Haskell code is definitely harder than in other languages.

But it's far from impossible (I use Debug.Trace successfully), and you do it far less often.

So debugging takes 5 times more effort but needs to be done 15 times less than in other languages.

At least that's the deal I'm getting and I don't usually find myself debugging much so it's not a grave concern.

I'd say lack of non nullability or pattern matching are worse show stoppers.
He really doesn't say "don't comment good code".

Reading page 141, he generally recommends that everyone should comment their code for non-trivial programs. Also, "One thing we will _not_ do is make pronouncements about how many comments a program should have."
Jeff Bezos on Amazon, Entrepreneurship, and Selling Books Online (1998)
This is why I don't believe in BTC for the long term. It's not anywhere near anonymous.

Those saying BTC has no inherent value (as opposed to gold, for example) are completely overlooking the fact that BTC is the only kind of exchange that can be used for illicit activities in a relatively untraceable manner (good luck buying stuff on SR using gold).

Unfortunately, BTC is traceable if governments decide to spend the resources monitoring transactions, and I suspect this would be the primary motivator in the demise of BTC and a replacement with a more anonymous currency - the other motivator being that there's a huge financial upside for being an inventor or early adopter of a successful cryptocurrency, as BTC shown us.