skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>However, the answer, to my mind, is to do it properly rather than propose a wild experiment with hand-wavy arguments as to why it would be politically easier to do. Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?

Even when done properly, HSR has most of the limitations stated by Musk. And while it is possible that special interest groups would make the construction of Hyperloop more difficult than it is, I don't think that's an argument against giving it a try.
Wow...this is one of those rare intuitive insights that make you think "I'm not as smart as I thought"
So what you're saying is that you believe it's acceptable for Microsoft to use OS features to scrape arbitary interesting-to-third-parties data from the OS it's hosted on, and it's the user's fault for not encrypting it?
Common sense tends to prevail.

Are you hosting a personal file server that shifts ~20GB/month with the odd FTP connection, or a major website shifting 1TB/month with thousands of concurrent HTTP connections?
If not illegal, then why not policy? There's ways of carrot-and-sticking this to the correct course without having to make it outright illegal.

Where I live they tried to cut down on the number of plastic bags used by instituting a $0.05 fee for each one. It's not a tax, it's just a recommendation by the city to retailers that they charge that much for bags, nobody had to do it, but a lot did and for the most part it worked.

If your city went "tip-free", by the same token, with clear advertising and an explanation of the implications made through the media, that would be as good as making it illegal: It'd make it old-fashioned.
This is an argument about words, because words matter, dammit, and I refuse to pretend they don't.

The word used was control. The NSA does not control the Internet. The US has not commandeered the Internet - frankly, they've always had power over the Internet because it was invented and is still maintained in the US.

As for where concern begins, concern should never leave us. We should always be concerned. It is fundamentally different, however, to claim someone or something can monitor a thing vs. manipulate that thing. It is an entirely different scenario and set of conversations that get had when someone monitors something vs. when someone controls that something.
There is in fact a proposed passenger plus vehicle capsule:

The passenger plus vehicle version of the Hyperloop will depart as often as the passenger only version, but will accommodate 3 vehicles in addition to the passengers. [p12]

The passenger plus vehicle version of the Hyperloop capsule has an increased frontal area of 43 ft2 (4.0 m2
), not including any propulsion or suspension components. This accounts for enough width to fit a vehicle as large as the Tesla Model X. [p15]

Tubes would be bigger, and the system would cost more.
> What happens if a suicide bomber boards the Hyperloop?

What's the point? Bombing this system would be unspectacular, and thus probably unlikely. Terrorists are in it for the spectacle.
Headline: Musk reveals Hyperloop. Americans too fat and incontinent to use.
> But a filet mignon is expensive, tender, usually high quality cut of meat that isn't particularly tasty. It doesn't have much fat and isn't weight bearing which affects the taste.

Then why buy it? What do you gain by spending extra on it?
Is this true of Google fiber? Probably not, and that's the whole point.
If the pedants had their way, service providers would be banned from providing contended Internet connections with fair usage policies, and everyone would have to shell out for uncontended services.
I also come from an Economics background, and am now a software engineer/budding data scientist. As I've delved more into machine learning topics, I'm amazed (though not surprised!) at how both academic and industry economists are still mostly focused on running OLS/logit/probit regressions, and not other classification techniques. My undergraduate thesis did use some computational models that sought convergence for dynamic & stochastic conditions, but that was definitely not the norm.
I do not get this part. These are not advantages of tube v railway track, because a railway track can also be built above ground and can also be build from prefabbed sections. In fact I would think that building a railway track would be much cheaper than building an airtight tube.
I don't believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.

Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?

These are extremely important issues that advocates seem to be glossing over. Putting the guideway on pylons doesn't magically eliminate land issues, you will still have to deal with visual impacts, along with any number of anticipated and unanticipated problems.

Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles, build a 10-20 mile test section someplace and demonstrate that is analysis is sound.

(perhaps more in the future--why wouldn't California design with this goal [350 km/h] in mind?)

There are a variety of reasons, but one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour. When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves "build up" in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound, causing a ground-borne vibration equivalent of a "sonic boom" that can cause problems for wayside structures. I believe the French have started to experience this with some of their higher-speed TGV experiments and we don't have a good way to handle this yet.
Brazil's Ridiculous $80,000 Jeep Grand Cherokee
Question: if speeding up the ski lift cars makes the lines longer, why wouldn't slowing them down make the lines shorter?

These arguments always seem to presuppose that the status quo is optimal, and ignore the limiting cases.
21M Americans don't own a cellphone—and getting by just fine
Man, the long sad story of RIM/Blackberry. They should learn something from Samsung, and Samsung should heed the history of RIM.

Blackberry made good hardware with terrible, terrible software. Samsung, so far, has focused on hardware and left the software to other people. It has allowed Samsung to focus on their core expertise and grow fast.

However, there is always the rumor that Samsung is building Tizen internally. This, IMO, would be a huge mistake. Samsung should focus on phones and leave the software to other people (Android, Ubuntu).

Realistically, I think Blackberry could do the same if they focused on their hardware and the enterprise market. If there was a high-riser who was shooting for something in Blackberry, they should be talking to Canonical right now and focus on making Ubuntu enterprise ready on their hardware. They could dominate that market for years.
I immediately imagined drones in FTL. Some shoot lasers, others shoot beams, and a few can repair your own ship while orbiting around it.
$20 is the unsubsidized 20-year-amortized cost of building the thing, there would be additional costs to run it, not the least of which being insurance.
Really interesting proposal. How do you maintain the tube when something needs repair? You need to shut the whole system down, don't you?
So where is the 'loop'. Seems like this should be called 'hypertube'.
Yeah, aside from when /r/haskell gets relatively flooded by people who do not normally frequent the subreddit it is of exceptional quality and an example of a well-run community with one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the Internet.

Haskell having a high barrier to entry likely helps that along a great deal though.

Compare the quality in commentary on nontrivial subjects between /r/programming and /r/haskell for instance.

There will be an enormous amount of disinformation in the former, a state that is incredibly confusing for someone that lacks familiarity in the specific domain as discerning noise will not be easy.

On the other hand, /r/haskell largely in part does not comment as though they were an authority when they are not sufficiently competent to comment on a subject, so the signal remains high.

The subbreddit is fairly active given the niche current user base, and it is big enough that there are a decent amount of domain experts that comment.

The subreddit is also very polite.

I do not recall ever seeing a flame war break out there, which is notable compared to how often any discussion on the topic will break down into inanity, something which even occasionally happens here (such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6190005 from a couple of days ago).
Photocopying Michelle Obama's Diary, Just in Case
The tube is not nearly as wide or heavy as a traditional train, so I don't know that it's fair to say that you can just as easily put a train up on pylons as you could this tube.

It's interesting to think about, but also there are probably much higher costs associated with a completely untested system like this than estimated. I wouldn't be surprised if this system, if it actually worked at all, ended up being more expensive than a HSR proposal through California that actually made sense.
You need government backing to acquire the land.
The main reason why air travel continues to be the most practical, cost-effective means of high-speed transport is that the politics involved in connecting two points with a transit system are enough to make you lose faith in humanity.

Take for instance, the DC metro system. There is an expansion underway to extend the system west to Dulles Airport, about 30 miles or so from downtown DC. A huge project, no doubt, but it is about ten years behind schedule. What was a seemingly great idea (mass transit to a major airport and outlying regions of DC) was almost ruined by all the fighting.

This is for a project spanning 30 miles. Imagine the politics and fighting that occurs between politicians, contractors, lobbyists, and residents on a public works project that spans hundreds of miles between two of the most populous cities in the world.

A project this ambitious is only well-suited for a small, independent group of like-minded people, which unfortunately will never be possible with all the interests involved.
The distance between the pylons is small enough that adjacent pylons may be redundant. It's also a massive steel tube which would be pretty strong in itself compared to rails (or roads).
I love the fact that Musk is publishing this publicly preemptively blocking future patent claims on the basis of prior art.
Use the technology from Google Streetview to composite the views from cheap cameras mounted at 1/24 second intervals at the top to the tube. You use a cluster of these for a 360 view.
Well that's the point of a trade study: look at the cost/benefit of different gasses. Obviously one of the costs would be the increased engineering um...pressure put on the capsule design.

Your gut feeling is probably right, though, at least for this length of trip. The increased cost of a different tube gas probably won't outweigh the benefits of arriving 5-10 minutes earlier.

Now if there were a cross-continent Hyperloop system, then for segments of the trip it might be much better to have a different gas. But again, it might simply be better to invest in better vacuum pumps for certain legs of the journey to get lower drags and higher speeds.
It's of critical importance, actually. One person collects the data, "The man you're looking for is here." and another person decides what to do with that data. "We will kill him." or "We will capture him." or "We will kill him and anyone in the same room or building as him."

The NSA doesn't decide what to do, the other part of the government does. It's of absolutely critical importance to remember that when discussing the extent of what the NSA knows and does.
OK, so he says it's much cheaper than high-speed rail mostly because pylons require taking much less land through eminent domain. Can anyone explain to me then why high speed rail can't be built on pylons?
Does anybody else wonder how easily the rotor will slot into the stator at 700 MPH? It looks like pretty small tolerances. Maybe guide rails leading up to it?
The proposal calls for the line to built alongside I-5, which requires government involvement.
(Full disclosure: I'm a Google employee.) Personally I think Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a traitor. However, I consider the leaks to be insufficient evidence for the conclusions you're drawing from them. Here was Google CEO Larry Page's response:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html

What makes you believe one report over the other?
Wow, there's a Tagore St in Tel Aviv ?
And Facebook isn't showing unlisted numbers to the public.
Can you elevate rail as easily? We're talking a lot more weight being carried by the pillars in that case. Plus you don't get the same natural banking off the walls he talks about, which is relevant at these speeds. While rail could bank, you better be going at the right speed when doing so, too slow and you just fall laterally off the tracks.
All these buses analogy isn't exactly the same because they still have the option to stop somewhere, which give the passengers the assurance that if they can't hold it's not the end of the world. Taking that into consideration, I think it could solve most people's bathroom concern by adding bathroom stops to the loop, in the case of semi-emergency, ideally a pod should be able to make a stop upon request within 5-10 minutes without disrupting other pods.
Some financial incentive might be needed for encouraging people to hold longer but I do see legal risks in that approach.
Cars have windows and stuff.
N.Y. Subpoenas Bitcoin Firms in Probe on Criminal Risk
Who Would Buy BlackBerry?
I just brought up Michael Hastings' death in a conversation yesterday - I think that, more important than the death itself, the lesson to be learned from this incident is how many "non-tinfoil hat" types who would have just rolled their eyes before are now willing to entertain the notion that he was assassinated by our own govt.

Before, this would be the point where I say, "my guts tells me it was just.." Now, my gut tells me to just sit back and wait for what comes of it.

I've lost all trust of my govt. and believe them capable of pretty much anything. We're living "The Bourne Conspiracy" or whatever other movie you think is more apt.
It would be more interesting to see a company with the technical (and probably political) chops to pick it up. GE comes to mind because they have the industrial and scale out know how in multiple system areas needed for hyperloop. But maybe it would interfere to much with their air and train businesses. Then again, if you established yourself as being able to build all components of a hyperloop system, I imagine that could be a long lucrative business market...

The question for GE and other similar industry companies which have build-in capability to construct this is if they can lift themselves out of the comfort their existing markets.
Yes I expect every visible interior surface would have display capability. A popular mode would be the view outside the tube, which could be constructed from fixed external cameras, and wouldn't have to be precisely "live" anyway. Some masochists might prefer the view inside the tube, which could be prerecorded or even animated.
"Endless" literally means without an end. Servers are a very explicit end.
I think what sours people is that there's far less grey area in "is this a business" than "is this a server". Businesses are legally defined, registered with the government, and follow a series of rules and standards that often differ from those expected of an Average Joe.

Personally, I find it asinine that setting up my own personal cloud server on a premium internet service is a ToS violation.
I would read the pdf before commenting, this is a little more than some pictures.
You are not sold a truly unlimited connection, you do not pay anything approaching the cost of a truly unlimited connection, and Google do not provide you with a truly unlimited connection.

If you want a truly unlimited connection, buy a truly unlimited connection. They cost a lot of money.
> (+ 1
> (if (negative? (fahrenheit->kelvin (abs some-number)))
> "2"
> 2))

This is inconsistent code to being with, though. You can't guarantee it "never" reaches the first branch, as much as you can't guarantee there aren't bugs in the conversion function, or on the underlying interpreter, or that machine details wouldn't make a big enough number wrap around and return negative. All in all, an inconsistent code branch hanging around is a bug even if it compiles.

This is more an evidence that "if" is evil rather than an argument about typing, really.
The back button is, or at least should be, entirely reliable. It brings you to where you were previously. Almost everyone else gets that.

If you open a link on an email, hitting back brings you back to the message.
Weight of the rolling stock.
Regarding suicide bombers: all pods are equipped with emergency brakes, and wheels as a (slow) backup transportation method. Life support on each pod is powered by redundant batteries. Capsule depressurization can be dealt with airplane-style, with oxygen masks, or by doing an emergency repressurization of the whole tube.
Anyone in London looking for one? I may have a free one email me with your intentions.
Listen to AOL CEO Fire Employee on Conference Call with Co-Workers
VCs are a small world. And VCs need each other more than they need you (as an individual startup). Most entrepreneurs will climb that VC hill once or twice, ever. But VCs will partner together on deals for years, decades. So if your negotiations really have you pitting one VC against another, it's likely that you will lose, not them. After all, there are always other startups.
The years before 911 are worthless, considering technological developments since then.

And while I agree, the onus is on those spending the money, this isn't your typical experiment. The people spending the money don't get to play with the variables, as the variables include the lives of others. It's a very tough question, how and where scaling back on airport security can work, and the answer isn't simple.
I worry that the necessary straightness of the tube will be difficult to achieve. The pads float 0.5 to 1.3 mm from the inside of the tube, so deviations from straightness on that scale will cause the pads to crash. Any contact at 760 mph would probably damage the pad, plugging the air holes.
Yeah, the video was to marketing-y for me to trust putting money into noflo. I've lived in (and hated) dataflow programming languages in the past (notably labview).

There's some core features I need (notably being able to do diffs/merge) to trust a dataflow language. Noflo doesn't really clarify this in their video or website.
That's the estimated cost to build it. I'd guess double it for operating expenses - maintenance, security personnel, etc.
Gingerbread(2.3) on 512MB works fine.Yes 2.3 isn't the latest, but it offers much more than FxOS.

The price is the price at a Chinese webstore including shipping. Not sure about european custom fees, but wouldn't they apply to buying on ebay ?
> I'm not saying that this type of functionality is unprecedented. Google has long incorporated that kind of capability in Android and Google Instant search. But it's a new move for Microsoft.
As currently envisioned CA HSR is likely to be more expensive and slower than current air travel. This is before the virtually certain cost overruns. To be competitively priced it would require large subsidies but still would be no faster than alternatives.

That said like you I would love to see a superior alternative to the current situation but CA HSR is probably not it.

Edit: added some references

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_15746975

http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/08/01/3419259/high-speed-rail-...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-califor...
He doesn't properly address thermal expansion of the entire system. A long straight steel tube from SF to LA will expand a total of 300 meters over a 40C temperature change. Where does it go?
> If the California high speed rail project is completed (or even makes progress) it will likely stifle any similar projects for decades.

Building railroads (road networks, etc.) over non-trivial spans of land is practically impossible without active government support. Even if California doesn't build HSR, private efforts without government involvement would be pretty much impossible.
It wasn't too long ago that there were classic conspiracy theories about the NSA that would get you labeled as a crackpot which have recently been shown to be true.
Every situation is different, and the reasons for not sharing names change depending on the the stage of the discussions.
For example, if discussions are advanced enough to involve negotiations on valuation, in general, you want potential investors to compete, not collude.
Unless you know the parties involved well enough to know that they will not join forces to work against you in negotiating valuation and/or governance, it is not a good idea to share the names of other VCs you are talking to.
Facebook Acquires “Mobile Technologies”, Developer Of Speech Translation App
The long term looks better on WebGL. And it's safer to bet your business on an open platform.

Adobe actually announced that they would be charging royalties on 3d games developed with flash. They backed off after developers pushed back, but it really shows the danger of using an Adobe owned platform.
Well the pod might contain the steam initially, but I doubt it would be engineered to survive the increased heat and pressure for very long.

They're just gonna have to send in a crew of astronauts to chisel the freeze-dried human stew off the inside of the tube.
That cost is the infrastructure cost, amortized over a long time, not counting R&D, maintenance, marketing, ticketing, and various personnel costs, assuming it's near capacity.

Translation, it's going to cost more than $20.
I didn't execute it well, it looked bad but I was 15 or 16 back then.
Also, I'd like to offer some words of caution to those who want lots of "external" (i.e. not bash-native) data in their PS1 string. Running outside programs can be expensive. For personal workstation use, things like the above are great. However, if you administer a remote (perhaps resource-constrained) server and you find yourself trying to rescue it from swap-death (or a partially busted HDD), you may not want to be 1) forking subprocesses, 2) allocating file descriptors, and 3) doing disk IO every time you hit the enter key. Build responsible prompt strings everyone.
So one question that hasn't really been mentioned yet... What happens in the event of a fire?

Do you just keep going? Stop the Fire suppression systems?

Given any worst-case scenario.. how do you escape from the tunnel?
You're uninterested in a dialog, so I'm uninterested in being nice.
I would bet that almost all of the cost of Google Fiber is in the last mile; OTOH Google can probably buy bandwidth very cheap. It's probably still oversubscribed 100:1 or more.
Mini-assembler was in all II, II+ and //e. II had Integer Basic, II+ and //e had Applesoft. Can't remember which ones had SWEET16 though. May also be "all of them".

If all you want is LISP, burn it into an EPROM and replace the stock one.
> but why to ask California State for subsidy? Why not to build it using private funds?

Because you can't, in practice, acquire the rights of way necessary to build a substantial railroad/hyperloop/freeway or other major infrastructure project of that type without government (specifically, without use of eminent domain).
Well yes, and that's exactly what they did; Developed off machine and then ported over to the ][