181–190 of 517 posts
Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting t…
Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting t…
It's a good thought experiment, and not without precedent.. however the main problem holding high-speed rail back in the United States is that freight trains have priority over passenger trains. Without changing this, high-speed rail in the US will never be a reality without building an entirely separate rail network.
Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting t…
It wasn't entirely novel, but he gave the idea legitimacy beyond the normal fantastic imaginary future one is wont to see from time to time.
So I don't think this was an attempt to head the tech off at the pass or some alternate reality like that.
I think it was genuine and continues to be.
Imagine if half of these commenters were around when the Wright brothers were pioneering aviation?
This kind of skepticism would have been perfectly acceptable had the Wright Brothers wrote three pages of guesswork and napkin math instead of actually building a plane.
Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting t…
Practically anything could be "a clever political ploy", but where's the evidence for this? Any in the absence of such evidence, why speculate?
Just as a thought experiment, could HN user daemin's comments be part of a clever ploy to invent a fake persona to distract from a SECRET AGENDA? ;)
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He's worth $5 billion. He's a high-school drop-out dyslexic that started from nothing. He built a successful airline and record label, along with countless successful branded companies whose success partially rides on the vast effort he has put into building his own well-known brand - a substantial feat unto itself. Yes, golly gee, what HAS he done.
While what he has done should be commended, I don't think it's fair to say that he "started from nothing". His own mother was an entrepreneur, obviously not as successful as him but come on, he went to a "prep school" for goodness sake[1]. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson#Early_life
His early business successes were built from nothing. They weren't seeded with millions of dollars. They weren't inherited. He rolled one success into another.
This obnoxious notion, so common on HN, that someone has to crawl out of a ditch with not a penny to their name, or they're not self-made or deserving of any credit for their own success, needs to stop. It eliminates nearly every possible success story that could exist (which is of course the whole point). It's nothing more than a base envious desire to drag someone down because they've been successful.
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I'm not saying the hyperloop is a good or bad idea, but any suggestion that it would be cheaper than the equivalent HSR seems utterly insane. How could it possibly be cheaper? You have the same ROW requirements, exponentially more expensive track, and the overhead of the fact that it's brand new technology. The fact that the vehicle itself might be cheaper than an HSR train after the tech scales up is almost an after…
The track should be cheaper because hyperloop has (almost) no impact on existing infrastructures. Expropriation costs for train are huge.
Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting t…
Of all the problems facing construction of "viable high speed rail" in the US (they already exist in many other places), I don't think Hyperloop competition is among ... the top 50. Practically anything could be "a clever political ploy", but where's the evidence for this? Any in the absence of such evidence, why speculate? Just as a thought experiment, could HN user daemin's comments be part of a clever ploy to inve…
Something I wrote a while ago.... w/ back of the napkin calculations....... Why I wouldn’t invest a money into Hyperloop - Stabilizing a single fault line risk pylon is more than $250K. - How many million are needed for vacuum pumps to evacuate 100+ million cubic feet of of pipe to 100 Pa? - Hot air discharge needs to go somewhere. For every 1 bar pressure, you need ~200 to ~400 cubic meters of volume which is larger…
When Musk first said that an LA SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which still hasn’t arrived. It’s a cool idea and I do want to see more prototypes and feasibility studies, but people need to get off the hype train (no pun intended) and be realistic about the cost.
I don't think above ground is economically and technically feasible, there are just too many unanswered issue that almost no one has answer to. Not to mention it will be very very expensive and time consuming.
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> This sounds like such an insane proposition relative to the Dropbox we know today. Does it? If you used WebDAV then you can mount a share in Windows or Linux even over the Internet, and windows at least is good at caching it while you're offline for short periods. For someone who has their own always-on Apache it seems like this would replicate most of the use cases for Dropbox. I think the point that's being misse…
> For someone who has their own always-on Apache I’m just guessing on numbers, but that probably describes <1% of the population. Most people think Apache is a word used only to describe helicopters.
I admit that it's just a guess, but it does seem likely.
Again, not a major point.