191–200 of 279 posts
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I am working on a project to define phrases in English like "close, but no cigar". Here's the page for this phrase: http://jargonism.com/words/437 I would be interested to hear feedback from HN on what would be useful on the word page, in addition to a definition and an example?
That's cool. If you could add this, I always like to know the origin of the phrase.
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I am working on a project to define phrases in English like "close, but no cigar". Here's the page for this phrase: http://jargonism.com/words/437 I would be interested to hear feedback from HN on what would be useful on the word page, in addition to a definition and an example?
That's cool. If you could add this, I always like to know the origin of the phrase.
> From the practice of giving cigars as prizes at carnivals in the US in the 19th century; this phrase would be said to those who failed to win a prize.
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Its not his fault that everybody else makes electric cars that suck in comparison. There will be a time of reckoning for Elon, but this is not it.
That's just your opinion. By and large the BMW i3/i8 has received wide praise amongst motoring reviewers and has seen strong sales.
The sales of BMW's EV's are strong because of the brand, not because they are excellent electric cars.
Don't get me wrong, it is awesome that more players are entering the market. But for a little while longer, Elon can keep sniggering in his corner.
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> I'm not saying he can do no wrong, but I'm just flabbergasted that there are still so many armchair critics and naysayers when it comes to Elon Musk. That's why you're a fanboy. Nobody is perfect, and Elon Musk likes to make fun of the competition quite publicly when they have an issue, while ignoring his project's own failures. It is hard to even discuss the man on HN as anything that could even be taken as critic…
Not sure what you're saying reflects reality. When Orbital Science's rocket recently exploded, Elon's words were nothing but polite: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/527247155954610176 And his comment on their rocket being the butt of a joke, using engines literally made in the 1960s and stored in Siberia were true. It is upsetting, but still not as surprising that they suffered catastrophic failure having such an…
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The entire purpose of the design is explicitly to keep the tolerance for leaks at a level where, to quote the whitepaper "standard commercial pumps could easily overcome an air leak and the transport pods could handle variable air density" Section 4.5.4 otherwise covers this, and does point out that for large leaks, braking would be required, but smaller leaks are intended to be dealt with as part of regular maintena…
Gas and oil pipelines typically use expansion loops to handle thermal expansion/contraction by flexing the pipe: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/PipelineExpansionLoop/ Because the hyperloop cars are discrete (as opposed to the continuous flow in a pipeline), I'd expect them to cause a lot of stress on the pipeline walls if they had to run around the bends in an expansion loop.
Could an aeronautics person kindly explain why it's so hard to get this thing to land as it's supposed to? I'm not being judgmental at all here; I am saying that as a software engineer with no aeronautics experience, I simply don't understand the problem. Assuming all of the sensors indicating tilt, altitude, etc. are accurate, the software portion coordinating where and how much thrust needs to deployed to keep it l…
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Cheaper to use drones / cruise missiles / HE carried by a flock of small robot helicoptors; many simpler schemes that are less traceable, unless developing a reputation is your intent. There are uncountable ways to kill people without needing to invoke Hollywood class exotica. [NB: I thought about not posting this, because people who are paid to not have a sense of humor about these things almost certainly read HN, b…
Hard to make any of those work across intercontinental differences. Drones, cruise missiles and small robot helicopters need to be launched from a location relatively close to the target.
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His theatrics aside, he wants to make electric cars viable and take us to mars. Even if he ultimately fails, if he makes everyone else rise up to compete with him, we as humanity win.
Tesla didn't start the electric car resurgence nor is it likely to take us to Mars. The way I see it Elon is rising up to those around him not the other way around.
Without SpaceX it's likely the business would have muddled along without putting any effort into reducing costs for decades.
Cool video! Just what we've been waiting to see. I wonder what actually exploded there? Part of the argument for why the landing was supposed to be relatively safe was that the stage would be mostly empty of fuel by the time that it landed, so there wouldn't be much to explode if something went wrong. So is that an explosion of the remaining fuel in the rocket, or something on deck?
Not easy to do with Vine's crappy interface but if you step through it and stop you will see that the rocket is decelerating and when it gets close to the platform it adds thrust which then increases its pitch over (which would be expected without anything on the top to control pitch) and then it increases thrust still more (presumably to right itself) but the back end of the stage is already below deck level at that…
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The best historical example is the British East India Company whose private army conquered India and ruled it for about 100 years. Another example is the United Fruit Company in South America that bought local armies to crush rebellions. Since the US government has become so corrupt American companies have found it easy to use the power of the US government to coerce other countries, for example for intellectual prop…
Any good references on BEIC and its army?