[zachlatta]

Some of you might be interested in The Hacker Zephyr, a cross-country train hackathon with 42 teenagers from across the world.

We worked with Amtrak and an amazing team of train enthusiasts to get 3 vintage train cars on The California Zephyr’s route across the US. We started in Vermont and ended in Los Angeles, traveling 3,502 miles over 10 days.

Short documentary: https://youtu.be/2BID8_pGuqA

Planning documents and finances are open source at https://github.com/hackclub/the-hacker-zephyr

[QuarterReptile]

You always have a sense of a ton of money sloshing around in these sorts of things; in college we used to get symphony orchestras to fly our group out to collaborate on performances. But, it's a different matter to see it enumerated.

For anyone not wanting to read through, I found ~$160,000 in private train car payments, and somewhere around $40,000 in fees and tickets to Amtrak.

[bombcar]

That’s $5k per kid or $500/day per kid. Not bad at all considering.

[pooper]

I always get the feeling that I am not good with big numbers.

Like a public library spending USD 50k+ per month(?) to Oracle seems outrageous to me but I guess it isn't so outrageous given the annual budget is over USD 100M?

[bombcar]

Here's my trick - convert the number to $ per family per year.

So for a public library, you'd take 50k and multiply by 12 and get 600k/yr. Then you'd find the number of families served by the library, and divide that out. 600 families? That's 1k per family per year, too much. 6000 families? 100 per family per year, still high but not insane. 60000 families? Now we're down to $10. And if it were Chicago with 1 million families (or households which can be an easier number to find) we're at 60 cents per. Not bad.

You can do similar things at state and national levels to get a ballpark feeling. Student loan forgiveness will cost $400 billion over 30 years, let's say. There are about 122 million households, so forgiveness costs $3300 per household over 30 years, or $110 a year. At this point you can decide how much it's worth worrying about.

[moooo99]

I always feel like Software licenses are a different beast. For example, 300k in Windows license costs might not be mulch out of a 50M budget, but it is much when you think about the fact that these costs could also be zero.

[differentview97]

How exactly could these costs be 0?

[dmos62]

Use free software?

[tucnak]

There is KDE.

[chiph]

With Starlinks new in-motion service you could have really great connectivity on those trips.

[Wowfunhappy]

Wouldn't normal cell service suffice as well? Unlike in an RV, you'd presumably never be too far from civilization.

[naturalauction]

I haven't taken this route specifically, but a lot of Amtrak routes don't follow roads and don't have great cell service.

[bombcar]

Almost all long distance Amtrak routes deviate quite far from civilization. Once you’re out of the cities and away from a highway you get cell pockets.

[walrus01]

If you can afford a private rail car I'm sure you can also afford a peplink router with dual wan interface, and one of the two way going to starlink, the other to a cradlepoint LTE modem and antenna system for T-Mobile or Verizon.

[thepasswordis]

This seems unbelievably expensive. How is this funded?

[zachlatta]

We had a very generous group of donors make this once-in-a-lifetime event possible and entirely free for every teenager on board.

The team also really made it happen. It was incredibly difficult to organize, and every person involved went far above and beyond any normal expectation to make the Zephyr so special.

[smohnot]

This is super cool. I took a quick look but couldn't see how it was funded... how was it?

[club_tropical]

Insanely cool.