Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Boring Company FAQ

boringcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 472 posts

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#251

Post by ferongr »

Animats wrote: post #61

So, the key ideas are: - Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines. - Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. - Do cutting and tunnel ring…

>he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors.

From where?

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#252

Post by IshKebab »

erentz wrote: post #74
Animats wrote: post #61

So, the key ideas are: - Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines. - Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. - Do cutting and tunnel ring…

Yeah this is all very odd and everyone is lapping it up. He claims to want to reduce tunneling costs by a factor of 10, but starts by quoting a very high benchmark of $1 billion per mile which is quite easy to beat. Then he reduces diameters to something much smaller than all the expensive mega projects, into the range of something where technology is well established and costs are already 1/10th of his quoted $1 bil…

> but starts by quoting a very high benchmark of $1 billion per mile which is quite easy to beat

Now I know why big companies do those reading comprehension tests...

He didn't say that was a benchmark at all. He explicitly said that was one of the highest costs for tunnels.

> with some projects costing as much as $1 billion per mile

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#253

Post by simooooo »

discodave wrote: post #48

The old strategy of hiding your outlandish claim in an assertion in the first sentence! "To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D" The word "must" is a very strong one here, there are other options: * Reduce the amount of travel that people need to do (remote work, online shopping). * Reduce the density of cities (enabled by remote work or longer commutes with better internet access). * Incre…

My exact first thought also... Closed the link after that :)

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#254

Post by danielbarla »

Confusion wrote: post #203
josephg wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then we should ask why don't we do that anyway? Sure. Why didn't we have electric cars before tesla? Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets? Alan Kay said something[1] recently that has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. He said that many people think darwinian processes (like the economy) optimize. "One my degrees is in molecular biology, and I can tell you, any biologist w…

I think both the 'people' Kay refers to and Kay himself are right. It just depends on the scale you're looking at. Darwinian processes are near-perfectly optimized ... for an extremely local maximum. Once there, they fail to make jumps to much better nearby maxima. If you look at a somewhat larger scale, where there are better maxima available, then the correct conclusion is that they are absolutely not optimized.

That's a nice way to put it. My personal opinion is that Darwinian processes are certainly optimization algorithms, they are just not necessarily optimizing for the same thing as what we might think. As an example, survival is a long-term game. I'm sure there were more aggressive adaptation strategies that went for the local minima and succeeded in the short term, only to be surpassed by the more "patient" algorithms.

There's a huge difference between "exploit in the now" and "exploit, but still be viable in a billion+ years".

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#255

Post by schiffern »

jlebrech wrote: post #245
factsaresacred wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything about Musk's idea seems absolutely terrible. Depends what his goal is. Currently getting from A to B in a car at a certain time involves traffic jams. If his goal is to get from A to B most efficiently in a car then it's one of the best ideas. If his goal is get people from A to B via any mode of transport, perhaps trains. But he owns a car company, so that's not exactly in his interest. Also with cars i…

there's nothing stopping a specially sized bus from using the system or cyclists (if they adapt it right.)

The video on their homepage shows a cyclist on a "minibus" pod at 0:45. https://i.imgur.com/2QkC5YK.png

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#256

Post by TeMPOraL »

dagenleg wrote: post #246
prawn wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got confidence in them too. I think internet commenters are far too quick to overlook the fact that Musk is not going to push forward a venture like this without loads of research from a team of really smart people. It's not like it's just the one Elon with a fantasy about tunnels. It'd start with a bunch of talented people brainstorming and then, early in the process, they'd surely be speaking with really knowl…

Yes, smart people are magic. Doesn't matter how much sense the idea itself makes, one only needs to ship it off to those 'motivated talented people', they will figure everything out.

Indeed they are. As any experience with anything remotely more complicated than building a cube out of Lego bricks should tell you. For any practical problem there are many ways to address it that may not seem obvious in the first five seconds of looking at it.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#257

Post by TeMPOraL »

a_d wrote: post #182
Animats wrote: post #61

So, the key ideas are: - Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines. - Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. - Do cutting and tunnel ring…

Maybe the explanation for glossing over some of the obvious hindrances (that you and several other commenters wisely point out) is that these projects are not conceived out of an organic need or to problem-solve issues - even though they are projected as such...but, these are projects that are born out of some (unpublished) masterplan/roadmap for learning to establish a colony on Mars. Just learning how to build tunn…

Yeah; come to think of it, any reasonable project of bootstrapping a viable Mars colony with present-era tech would have to involve tunnelling, as it offers many benefits at the cost of only shipping construction equipment and delivering electricity. I could totally believe Elon has Mars in mind with this project.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#258

Post by TorKlingberg »

nihonde wrote: post #85
zild3d wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If NYC didn't have a third dimension for transportation (subway and trains), no amount of busses and bikes would fix the soul-destroying traffic. The listed alternatives are all nice, but none of them allow you to move at 125+ mph. We should be able to get to our destination faster, not just with a bit less soul-destruction. Remote work is of course not for every or even most professions, and I don't see why it would…

Tokyo is a much bigger city. They solved the problem by building elevated toll highways. Much simpler solution than digging new holes everywhere and keeping those silly carts running.

Tokyo also have subways and trains absolutely everywhere, and most people use them. You only drive in Tokyo if you have a good reason to.

Also people have to accept having a highway right next to their window: https://thumb1.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/141562...

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#259

Post by TeMPOraL »

ferongr wrote: post #251
Animats wrote: post #61

So, the key ideas are: - Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines. - Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. - Do cutting and tunnel ring…

>he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. From where?

Tesla, obviously.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#260

Post by mnw21cam »

falsedan wrote: post #223
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans are adverse to change I don't get it, where does that come from anyway? I mean America's mostly a country of immigrants; most inhabitants' forefathers, only a couple generations ago, abandoned everything they know to build up a new life. If that's not change, then IDK what is. I think that at one point it's not about what they want - having the option even to drive anywhere is a luxury a lot of people don…

> I don't get it, where does that come from anyway? Let's: * replace tipping with a minimum wage which helping working people get out of poverty * make checks obsolete * etc. > Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube The what now? I think you'll find it's actually called le Métropolitain

> * make checks obsolete

Uh? What? Please explain - are you expecting everything to go fine the first time, because in the history of the world, that almost never happens.

Post reply on HN