skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The gaps between each section of rail can be quite large.
Best comment on reddit so far "this is a pipe dream"

* I don't think the Hyperloop is viable and I hope they kill the $100B High Speed Rail (HSR) project before it ruins the SF Peninsula and budgets across the state.

* Setting aside the $100B HSR cost (yes, I know current estimates are $70B but it was sold at $10B and will easily exceed $100B if/when completed) the operating costs will have to be subsidized for every minute of its existence just like every other govt boondoggle. This is a white elephant and, in case you weren't paying attention, California and most cites are or soon will be bankrupt. We can't afford this, cut our losses now.

* If I was made Bay Area/CA public transportation csar (with suitable budget and dictatorial powers) my first step would be to extend BART through San Jose so it actually loops the bay and (finally) complete BART. (I am old enough to recall that that was the original design)

* I do think a high speed rail connection SF/LA is economically viable but would need to do research and crunch numbers while finishing BART. I would move the SJC airport south (with a BART extension) to Morgan Hill/South San Jose and build the connection from there to LA.

* From SJ to LA I would confiscate I5, leave two lanes for truckers and local traffic but build a high speed (300MPH) car/ferry train system so you could be blasted to LA in a little over an hour and have your car there when you arrive. Home by dinner.

* I would build a nuclear plant somewhere halfway between LA and SF on I5 so my trains would not have to use diesel fuel (too smoggy) or solar (too expensive).

Nothing here is any less fanciful than Musk's musings and far, far more practical.
Structural models are more 'insightful' than generative models in machine learning. Econ guys are more interested in Pr(y|x) than reproducing the data.

That being said, I really hope computational work gains more traction... this might be a marketing issue.
More sources for thoughts about designing descriptive but efficient language notation: brilliant! Upvotes all around! :)
Thats true. I hear you on the reporting. I have a bias because I am used to looking at tables of data maybe!
I'm sorry to be a downer, but there needs to be a reality check, because future open source projects can learn a thing or two from this.

This project is unlikely to be successfully funded. In fact, "unlikely" is a mild word for just how unlikely it is to succeed.

Problem #1 - No clear value demonstration to the end user. The video is... not very good. The primary reason it's not very good is because it's asking people to read. People react instinctively to faces, to the sound of a person's voice, and to feeling connected with them. It's no coincidence that virtually every successful Kickstarter campaign contains monologues by their campaign creators. Thus, while there may be a value proposition embedded somewhere in the video, it's probably lost on most people who watch it because they just aren't really identifying with what is being presented.

Problem #2 - a $25 minimum price point. The gamedev industry has repeatedly proven that by enabling people to contribute $5 and $10, you reap about 20-40% more income than you otherwise would have. This truth isn't restricted to the domain of gamedev. The evidence for this is that virtually every successful Kickstarter project has low-tier contribution levels, often contributing a significant amount to the bottom-line of projects that aren't going to deliver a tangible product. E.g. this may not be so important for projects like Soylent, where the end-user will receive something tangible, but it's pretty important for most projects that weren't set up with the goal of taking preorders.

Problem #3 - Too high of a threshold for funding. $50k is not reasonable when the value proposition is so unclear. I could see this project reaching $5k or maybe even $10k. But it's not reasonable to calculate how much it would cost you to work on it, and then use that as the funding goal. "What would the crowds be willing to pay?" takes priority over "How much would this cost me in terms of my time, and what is my time worth?"
Not too bad advice but the key lies somewhere else:

0. Stop chasing the one investor or selected perceived important people but rather get a sense who might be important

1. First and most important: ACHIEVE something, create something unique, build strong traction, DO something where others raise their eyebrows, get people impressed, everyone!

2. This is now what most people don't get: you do not network by just going to networking events or by mingling with other people, no: your achievements will be your networking vehicle -- you network by achieving stuff -- you don't have t ask for meetings anymore, people will approach you. Or you have just to talk about your achievements (to everyone) and the rest comes by itself. And when you want ask for a meeting, don't -- just tell your achievements and the other party will ask to grab a coffee together. So, create or work towards a situation where others approach you some day. Really, the key is to work on achievements and nothing else.

It's definitely not enough to tell the other party "in exchange [...] what we learned about" this and that, you have to achieve something, tell them where you succeeded! They don't want another boring conversation with a flimsy excuse. Imagine some developer who wants to work for your startup and approaches you and tells you about what he learned about some random technical topic -- this would lead to an awkward situation where you just want to escape the conversation with a needy guy. Instead imagine the same guy telling you that he build the first Sinatra-like framework for Openresty/Lua that blows Go and the JVM together and he would love to show it to you since you need some high performance web framework devs. Big difference.

Sidenote: everybody is important and will bring you one step further on your journey, not only VCs or angels. Most underrated target: other entrepreneurs, in particular those which are on the same level like you or a bit ahead because they are most willing to share thoughts or meet up and because they are your real peers (this is what I totally missed when I started).
I agree that RPC is not equivalent to a local call. However, it's still worthwhile to create an API where making an RPC is as easy as possible, probably by making it look very much like a local call, as Cap'n Proto aims to do.

Note that Cap'n Proto's RPC will support promise pipelining. This means that if one RPC returns a pointer to another interface, you can start making RPCs to the returned interface before the first RPC has actually returned. Basically you're saying to the server "When you finish this RPC, invoke this method on its result.". The hope is that this will make it possible to avoid a lot of round trips even when using a call-return-style interface, thus making it reasonably possible for clients to use the Cap'n Proto interface definition directly without the help of a fat client library. And that, in turn, gives you freedom to use any language that has Cap'n Proto bindings, rather than the specific languages the server chose to support.
Email Meta: Stupidly simple way to improve email
An alternative solution is to provide a list of matches and non-matches, and look for the shortest or simplest regex that separates the two.

(Finding the actual minimal regex, instead of just a reasonable guess, might be a computationally tough problem. I guess it's in coNP and might be in NP, too. An algorithm in P would be nice to find.)

Update: Finding any separating regex would be in P. A separating finite automaton is easy to find, and then you just convert that into a regex. Now, how do you find the minimal regex?
With a set of true and false inputs you could evolve a regex:

https://www.lri.fr/~hansen/proceedings/2012/GECCO/companion/...
He's using the same definition of "net neutrality" I was using...

What do you mean by it?
I'm with you that Musk seems to have ignored the human factor when estimating the cost or even the feasibility of the project.

But think about how many aspects of our lives it would revolutionize. Simple example: can you imagine what would happen to the SF real estate market if it suddenly had to compete with the LA real estate market? If talented people who live in LA could suddenly commute to and from companies in SF?

And that's just real estate.
Over time, likely all of them.
Well, is it cool?
Thanks for the comment. We do not have a video yet - but if you register for the trial and note that we had this back and forth - we could set up a brief demo for the team.
"[2] Founders are often surprised by this, but investors can get very emotional. Or rather indignant; that's the main emotion I've observed; but it is very common, to the point where it sometimes causes investors to act against their own interests. I know of one investor who invested in a startup at a $15 million valuation cap. Earlier he'd had an opportunity to invest at a $5 million cap, but he refused because a friend who invested earlier had been able to invest at a $3 million cap."

I'm not surprised, per se, but rather always amazed whenever I hear stories of rich people acting in ways inimical to their economic interests. One would think that an experienced (I guess) businessman, such as a VC, would be somewhat more rational than that. Then again, this is an article about 'Investor Herd Dynamics', so I suppose that should inform my opinions about human behaviour.
Amazon should build some narrow ones.
I never said "blue sky".

VCs won't
fund research if it's done, written
up, in a peer-reviewed journal of
original research, and implemented
in software written, tested, timed,
and documented. Period. No research,
of any form, any time, in any case,
period. Stop. End.

Instead, VCs, and their limited partners,
want to see 'traction' in the market.

If the traction is from some research,
then that's a net negative because
(1) it would be something it might be important
to evaluate,
more difficult to evaluate than
just routine software, (2) might make the
CEO more difficult to replace, (3)
would let the CEO have an easier time
telling the Board that they don't understand
the business.

Instead, VCs want a nice, simple, little
business, with traction significant and
growing like a weed, in a gigantic
market, that can become a company worth
$100 billion, that anyone, even a VC,
could understand, run by a CEO who
tends to drool a little and can
easily be talked into signing a bad
business deal.

"Blue sky" has nothing to do with
the situation.
I think I'm going to have to go over michaelochurch's article again on unions and bloc voting power, which are very relevant to these ideas:

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/statistics-co...
Are you sure? I imagine most trains these days are pretty tolerant of that, it could easily go unnoticed.
Dude. What are you on about?

At least in Germany WiFi sucks and is not available everywhere – and even if it is you have to be lucky and actually be in a train that supports it. In general seats are most definitely more comfortable in longer distance trains. Yeah, you can find a seat that’s less comfortable in a long distance train than in a regional train, sure, but that’s hardly the point, is it?!

And electrical outlets are getting more common, sure, but the vast majority of German regional trains does not have them and you can only be certain that there will one in a high speed train.
Yes, you have to be outside, but you wouldn't want to be, if you can avoid it.
430 km/h (Aerotrain) vs 1200 km/h (Hyperloop) is a big deal. That is possible with the tube design. Aerotrain operated on the "free air" and that was the reason to lose the competition with TGV.
2013 River Regatta
I thought of this general idea many years ago, but then decided it might be better to cut up the bottles, flatten the plastic and sew the flat pieces together to make panels to use in roofs and windows. Never got around to actually doing anything about it though.
Question for anyone who might know: does a judge sign off on what is redacted and the justification for doing so? Redacting names of investigators, etc. makes sense here, but when entire paragraphs are redacted, it makes you wonder if FOIA requests are really worthwhile?
Real world materials are rarely ideal black bodies (or ideal reflectors).
He nails the point, and then misses it himself:

the key to success is in cleverly selecting, finding, or creating a data source that answers a particular question

It's about asking the right question and then finding or generating the right data to answer that question. That's what makes it science.
Depends on how strong the tunnel is. Assuming your taking 3/4 atmospheric difference your starting at ~11 pounds per square inch add in a 3-5x safety factor and that tunnel would be one tough son of a bitch.

Not to mention it's got to be really close to a strait track so your more dealing with scraping forces than a direct strike.
There was a similar thread on this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6142978.

Let me add my thoughts:

1. In this current climate, your lack of a college degree will not affect your hiring chances. Blue chip tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook care slightly more, but even then, four years of quality work experience will actually, in my opinion, put you ahead. I get the feeling that when people on this thread talk about HR, they are talking about the job recruiting processes at other non Goog/Apple/Msft/Amz/Fb firms that are not as software-focused. Those firms in my experience are a lot more meritocratic. I didn't have a college education when my resume got through Apple's recruiter filter, and when I got an in-person interview with Amazon.

2. However, the current job climate in SV is quite unique. The job market is so hot that, as you can see in the linked thread, people with 1 year of experience can get 120k job offers as web/mobile developers (take into account that SV is very expensive to live in). The central question is: what is the job market going to look like in the future? If the market crashes in the next 2 years, not only will you have a hard time finding a job, but so will even those with CS degrees (by no means am I saying that those with CS degrees will be ahead in that case).

3. I think there is a good chance of you getting a summer internship in the coming summer. Do you have any family in the Bay Area that you could stay with? Make sure it is a paid internship - unpaid internships are generally correlated with low quality.

4. There are other non-tangible reasons to go to school: the social experience, meeting girls (or guys), etc. If you're a 18/19 year-old guy it can be quite hard to date in SV working at a startup, esp. since everyone your age is in school. It's for this reason that I chose to go to school.

5. Consider a compromise (see linked thread): Get a great internship over the summer, preferably with a well-known startup or tech company. Do well and ask for a full-time offer, which will allow you to bypass the normal interview process. Defer admission to UT Austin for 1 year (a so-called gap year, you'll have to look into their admissions policies more closely or contact the admissions office to see if that is allowed - also see what kind of deadline you have for declaring that you're deferring). Work for a year, and at the end of the year, evaluate this again.
We've had a course running for a couple of years now that seeks to addresses these issues, as well as the inherently collaborative nature of software engineering.

It's a second year course that in its first two iterations had approximately 70 students working on a common code-base: tinkering, extending, integrating their work, etc. This year we have 170 students. And we're on a path towards opening the course to the world.

(This also means that rather than have students work on small greenfield exercises, they're working on a project that in terms of numbers-of-programmers is possibly larger than some of them will work on in their first post-degree jobs.)

It's a follow-on to a more introductory programming course -- we expect students to come in to our course knowing the basic syntax of the language.

papers for those who might be interested:

Billingsley, W. & Steel, J. 2013. A comparison of two iterations of a software studio course based on continuous integration. ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITICSE). 213-218

Süß, J.G & Billingsley, W. 2012 Using continuous integration of code and content to teach software engineering with limited resources. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 1175-1184

(I also posted this as a comment on the article itself, so apologies if you see it in two places.)
That Satoshi reappeared, by an order of magnitude. It would be news either way, but people have been searching for him/her/whatever "Satoshi" is for years now.
I was thinking the same thing. Eat the up-front build costs, but assure yourself a persistently-functional loop. Probably the type of thing best determined as part of the review-process, and not listed a requirement in the technical draft.
This may be a naïve question, but what about telling it what words the pattern should not match?
To geek out for just a moment on the topic: we had two fix-a-flat substances that required two engineers to agree to use (mostly as a joke interlock - someone had to stop management from slathering it on everything). One was basically putty that you could smoosh over a leaky o-ring (clamp and all); with some work you could seal anything for a few days, but it made an awful mess and it was darn near guaranteed to destroy base pressures later. The other was a vial of clear stuff that was disturbingly like super glue, which would seal any micro leaks like a charm and would hold for a couple pumpdowns. At least, consistently until forgotten.

The machine was so big that it was easy to forget where it was, which o-ring had the clear super glue on it (after a few weeks it was covered in plant filth anyhow, the tags were lost, and too many of the seals had sharpie Xs on them to trust anyhow). It was MASH's meatball surgery, but with low energy plasma physics instead.

I ab-so-freaking-lutely guarantee they will use gorilla glue on the Hyperloop once leak failures become boring and routine. Or super glue. Or giant sheets of Kapton.
A complementary opportunity for Richard Branson (Space / Air / Ground)
Yes, rather than a line-source, you have multiple incoherent point sources, but those point sources are being excited along a line at a rate faster than the shear wave speed. So yes, it somewhat different, but also similar.

A test segment would go a long way to determining if/how much of a problem this might be in a hyperloop system.
>>I think tesla motors releasing an affordable car would benefit the world a lot more than the hyperloop.

Specifically, an affordable Tesla car could benefit the entire world, whereas the Hyperloop would (at least initially) only benefit people living in LA and SF.
Forget about an attack. The system would need to be robust against simple malfunctions which could also result in a massive pile-up.
Only 50-100? I would go as far as 200! :)
This is why the Dutch ISP XS4ALL rocks. Full IPv6 connection since like 2 years, opened port 25 outgoing, and they're totally cool about running any kind of server at home. On top of that you get a free shell server and thousands of wifi access points from them. Yeah it costs five more bucks a month, but I say it's totally worth it.
Except, I reject that there's a difference between my online life and my "real" life. You're thinking 20th century/pre-mostly always connected world.

I care deeply about friends and family that I cannot see on a daily basis because of distance and time. That doesn't make those bonds any less real or important and it doesn't mean that online socialization (jokes aside) is any less meaningful than "real life" (there are, in fact, scholarly research publications that support this and I could find them, but honestly, it's been a long day).

Moreover, frequency of interaction doesn't always reflect strength of social bond. I have friends I would kill for who I talk to once a month or less, simply due to schedule, new parenthood, etc. I think that's certainly the case for many adults.
I love all of these renderings showing transparent tubes. The tubes probably aren't going to be transparent. I'm not even sure who would want to look outside at that speed (besides me), so close to the ground.
Ubuntu Edge SmartPhone And Desktop Looking For Funding
> shouldn't be possible

It is restricted by the standard Bitcoin client implementation. Neither the transaction scripting language[0] nor the transaction[1] restricts it, so you would need to do it yourself or write a custom client to embed a message.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction#Output
I doubt very much developers interested in GNUStep are like your typical consumer/game player. They read.
> Problem #3 - Too high of a threshold for funding.

I looked at this and had the opposite reaction. $50K is between 50 and 75% of a full-time developer's salary in NYC for a single year (I believe it's similar in SF). Are we expected to believe that that's all it would take to get Cocoa libraries running seamlessly on GNU?

Granted, I've never dealt with Cocoa at all, so maybe I'm overestimating this, but it seems like a lot of work.

I mean, how can you take a 15-year, multi-person project, and then assume it's going to be completed with a single person-year[0]?

[0] I don't mean literally a single person - I'm referring to a person-year being a unit of "work" (ie, the theoretical work equivalent of one person for a year).
How is that any different than controlled dilution of a fiat currency, like the Federal Reserve does? The net result is the same.
If you pay attention to the graph, you'll see Apache and IIS's lines mirror each other since very long ago. The probable cause is large domain parking sites that switch between IIS and Apache depending on what kind of incentive Microsoft provides.

Active sites and busiest sites tell a different story of Apache losing space to nginx.
Did anybody ever see Discovery Channel's Extreme Engineering episode about a possible high speed train from London, UK to NYC, USA?

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/new-york-...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frYWTrEfPRs

This reminds me a lot of that, but without the vacuum tunnel... there was a proposal in 1960's apparently... so no so new after all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_tunnel
You mean they try to pay companies to develop apps for their platform and the companies refuse? Why would that be? Can you provide details about what happened with your company?
All those sound plausible (having never been to a favela), and if true I agree with you on almost all counts.

But it's still not a substitute for a light bulb unless it works in the dark.
> a theoretical maximum output of SLoC. If that's you're metric, I don't think it's a good one.

That's certainly not my metric and I definitely don't believe it's a good one.

My metric is readability. The ability to return to a piece of code 6 months down the road and be able to understand precisely what's happening.

> I have lots of challenges and bottlenecks. The time to type comments isn't one of them.

Oh, I know. It's very easy to add a comment that you think will help clarify things down the road, but instead, ends up being more cryptic than your code.

By definition, a comment is something short and half-thought out. It's a comment.

As I said in the post up above, stay away from comments. If you have to annotate, write documentation instead.
Australia needs to build this between Sydney and Melbourne. Plenty of sunlight to power it. Not much risk of earthquakes.

There is enough traffic to support it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_busiest_passenger_air_r...