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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited that Elon is taking steps to make this happen.

Is it a good idea? will it work? will it be as cheap as his team estimated? will it be safe? Will people want to ride it? Will terrorists blow it up? Will earthquakes tear it apart? Will it make enough solar power to be self-sustaining?

Nobody knows for certain the answers to those and ten million other questions.

Elon is forging ahead to find out - rather that sitting around nay-saying.

Bravo. I wish there were more people in the world like this.

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There's a phrase at one of Chicago's hackerspaces (and probably at many others): Just Fucking Do It.

Talk is cheap. Implementation is hard (and more interesting); JFDI.

Naysayers will naysay, but a thing that's done is more powerful than "Oh, well, you can't do that because"; JFDI.

It also extends to telling people they don't need permission. If it won't be costly (in time or money) for other people to undo, you don't need to ask -- JFDI.

Hyperloop seems really weird, but arguing with Elon Musk forging ahead is weirder.

JFDI - I like that a lot. Thanks.

I'm going to add more JFDI to my life.

Can we call the conscious cultivation of this attitude the JFDI Mind Trick? :)

Just Effin Do It?

Extend it to how you interact with other people and it'll do weird (good) things.

It's really easy to tell other people that they're doing something wrong, or that they should do something you want. If you expect them to say JFDI back, you'll start out with the opinion that their time is worth quite a bit.

I agree with the sentiment, but in this case only someone with pockets as deep as Elon's can afford to JFDI.

Of course. But if Elon Musk paid for a proposal and then said "Wellllll, someone else should build the prototype", he'd get a "JFDI".

There's another related one: Get Shit Done (GSD).

I suppose you could combine them to Just Fucking Get Shit Done JFGSD

> There's a phrase at one of Chicago's hackerspaces

Pumping Station One [+]

[+] http://pumpingstationone.org/

"Fuck it. Ship it." -- Betaworks

Variations on a theme.

http://www.startupvitamins.com/products/startup-poster-fuck-...

ps1?

It is cheap because it doesn't account for the hard part of building HSR: buying land, clearing legal hurdles, and indemnizing landowners. I would be happy to see Elon Musk come with a solution for that. We could use some creativity here.

Right now it's politically, legally, and technologically uncertain. The first two are affected greatly by the last one, so I think this is the correct order of operations.

> It is cheap because it doesn't account for the hard part of building HSR: buying land, clearing legal hurdles, and indemnizing landowners.

Also, because the termini proposed are not particularly close to the urban centers it is supposed to connect, avoiding the expense of connecting from where people actually are to where people are actually likely to want to go.

Of course, that also limits its utility for its intended purpose.

I don't see how terrorists are any more of a threat than they are to any other rail line. Air flowing into the hyperloop due to a tunnel breach can be detected and signal all cars to stop automatically.

I am almost universally opposed to the position that you would do something great, but are too afraid of terrorists, so I agree with your sentiment. That said, the faster you are going the harder it is to stop. I would much rather be in a conventional train heading towards a break in the tracks than in a hyperloop heading towards a break.

I'm sure that emergency friction braking could be implemented along with other aerodynamic measures to brake the pods at a rate probably only limited by the human occupants.

More importantly, (never say never, but...) this will not actually be a high-value target for terrorism; the individual pods don't hold enough people to make for a significant death toll, the tube itself being of a uniform construction would be relatively easy to repair, and the system itself doesn't really hold any political or cultural significance of note.

Keep in mind that it would have to compete with far more valuable targets as well - the ever-popular White House, Pentagon, various national airlines as well as soft but high profile targets like shopping malls, stadiums, movie theaters.

The risk of terrorism for this mode of transportation is actually less than many others.

My understanding was that in a pressure failure, the pod could stop too fast...

Isn't the Hyperloop built with a low-pressure vacuum? Wouldn't a break in that vacuum cause the pods to slow down/stop?

The pods weigh something like 0.0X% as much as a train, so stopping them may in fact be far easier due to their tiny mass, regardless of their crazy velocity.

Stopping distance scales with v^2 (unfortunately)

Isn't Hyperloop a fail-safe design? If you blow a hole in it, the whole thing will start pressurizing and the air friction would slow things down fast (AFAIR pods ain't that aerodynamic, so as long as you shut down that powered air intake in front, it they'll be as aerodynamic as bricks).

Perhaps the opposite in fact. Modern high-speed rail is a concentrated, semi-fragile target. 200-300mph with 150-200 passengers - a particularly bad combination if you're talking about a terrorist target.

From what I understand of Musk's hyperloop approach, the pods will each carry relatively small numbers of passengers. In theory it should be much, much more difficult for a terrorist to kill a lot of passengers this way.

I agree. Terrorism is a ridiculously stupid argument to not do something.

It's not like building skyscrapers and apartment complexes has ceased because of 9/11.

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