skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same situation. I have two Nest thermostats and I love them, but there's no way I'm going to drop close to a thousand dollars on replacing all my current (functional) smoke alarms. The price point is just wrong -- I hope they adjust it down the road apiece. I'd rather spend them money replacing lightbulbs with LED.
Just like other fire alarms, except it's toasted.
That's amateur hour paranoia. They can crank up the thermostat to roast you alive and then turn off the heater if a fire breaks out.
No surprise there...

Knowing a lot about genomic animal breeding made me wonder how people can be so sure about genetic basis of intelligence, while we understand neither intelligence nor the genetic basis behind it. For that matter, even plain body height in humans is barely understood...
Is more dangerous the perception of freedom than the understanding of limits.

The best dictators spread the freedom mantra and the more gullible believe it.
Music will never die, and music is a form of mating display, so being a musician is good from a mating standpoint--it gets you laid. But the economics if the business have always been poor since the dawn of recorded music. If recorded music went away completely musicians would make a lot more from live shows.
Back in the real world, however, we can't use the ideal solution every time because of browser support. Thus, the easiest, most flexible option is CSS.
It actually helps if those eyeballs are sad and lonely, since sad and lonely people frequently buy stuff in the hopes that it will either make them less sad and less lonely, or make it easier for them to cope with their sad loneliness.
There is a great deal of anarchist and libertarian communist literature critiquing the modern concept of work, notably Russian anarchist Kropotkin's book 'the conquest of bread' originally written in around 1906.
http://libcom.org/library/the-conquest-of-bread-peter-kropot...
I'm so frustrated by these chromebooks.

On one hand, the form factor and aesthetics are great. The price/power engineering is great. The mission/concept is fantastic.

On the other hand, we've learned something from Android/IOS. We need apps and they do not necessarily lead to a computer that cannot be managed by a below average user. Even the average 'your mother' has some needs that aren't well met by this machine. Skype. Fill out this (Word) form and email it back to me.

I really want android/ios-like (ideally iOS simplicity with chromebook prices/hardware) computers to come out and solve computing for the many many people poorly served by cheap clunky windows laptops.
So con men who do nothing but run sham businesses and live off invested money have nothing to fear?

There must obviously be some sort of redress in the case of ouright fraud. But then, how do you distinguish malice from incompetence?

That's how the SEC got started...
To be honest they also look kind of cool, while average smoke detectors don't. I imagine this being a big factor, since you're going to have one of these on the ceiling in every room.
As eastern philosophers say: The only time that matters is Now. Now is the only time you can ever use.

I agree with other comments this is a terrible idea.
You're saying that my assumption is "Majority of the fat people are fat because of intake of food and not because of actual health problems." In this context, yes, that is exactly what my Bayesian priors (so to say) assume but it's not relevant to the point I'm trying to make. I've read things that seem to support this many times over the years so obviously that is what I would assume. If I am wrong, would you kindly care to educate me.

Actually no, don't. Because that is not the point. The point is (like I said in other comments) my gut feeling suggests that we as a society are moving towards optimizing for edge cases and that's not a good thing. (Immediate examples that come to mind are parent fearing children going out and playing, security theatre, crime television, crazy safety labels etc.)
Then by the same token you should have no problem using "gay" as a general derogatory term. You happened to not address that point. If you can't see why using gay both as the label for male homosexuals and for bad stuff, then it is not strange that you can't see why using gender neutral pronouns are important.

Language shapes thoughts. Correct language makes correct thoughts, incorrect language incorrect thoughts. Which is why most people still have problems with riddles like these http://www.somethinkodd.com/oddthinking/2005/06/21/the-docto....
This. As much as I like Google, I've griped before that the Chromebook is a tempting but raw deal for a power user.

[1] You get a pretty locked down laptop that you have to boot into developer mode to do anything useful (which adds an additional 5-second boot time)
[2] I'm a happy camper at setting up dual-boot systems with Windows laptops, but crouton sounds like a pain to me.
[3] Limited disk space: I would think we would need at least a 64 GB or 128 GB SSD to do anything useful.

Note that I'm only speaking as a power-user. IMHO, the Chromebook is actually a great laptop for the older generation and people who use web-based products all the time ... but I do wish Google had put in some more though on how to make it useful for power users who need the Linux utilities as well as Eclipse, Thunderbird, and other X-based applications etc.

I really hate having to buy a good laptop that has Windows pre-installed and having to wipe it out just to install Ubuntu/variants, but it still is my only choice at this point. (Yes, I realize there are companies that produce pre-installed Linux laptops, but their build quality doesn't compare to the HP/Dell/Asus/Samsung kind.)
Huh? It's a web browser. Anyone can "host their own server backends" to whatever extent they desire.
WebRTC, Plugin-Free Real Time Communication for the Internet
The irony of only having time to read a Cliff's Notes version of a book called "How To Be Idle" is truly sublime.
Usually smoke detectors are a 1 in each room (and 1 in the main hallway) thing nowadays.

And as for the hunt for the low battery it is a problem (though usually only one week a year if you install the same smoke detector in all rooms at the same time. And it is hard to find because it emits a high chirp every 30-60 seconds but that chirp echoes throughout the house and is hard to pinpoint (especially if you do have 1 in each room).

But I agree loud and sensitive better than the alternative and you can avoid accidental set offs by not having one located near the kitchen stove, though most of the time bad smoke detector locations are in apartments where you wouldn't have a choice to move them anyway.
Hardwired smoke alarms have been required on new construction in the US since the 1989 NEC. It usually takes a few years for cities and states to adopt the newest NEC revision. However, by now, all states have adopted at least 1989.

Hardwired alarms are also required for major renovations. However, you basically have to take it down to the studs before this requirement is triggered.
The Acer C720 actually looks quite nice although AFAICT you still can't wipe and install your own OS? You have to use the same methods as we currently have like crouton.
It is not, if you frame it like that. But my parent claimed implicitly that the w3c needs to see the web as a pure presentational layer. I have nothing against graphical layers, but a semantic web should stay priority #1 if you ask me.

Also: A lot of the shiny new web apps developed during the last few years are unusable with screen readers and/or on low end devices. As long as we can have graceful degradation, i have nothing against more graphical aspects.
For all the hype it gets about being an ideal 'developer' machine, the screen resolution makes me laugh the most.
Is anyone else annoyed, perhaps irrationally, by titles containing 'no one (else) knows why'? This has been used so abusively in the past that I think my tolerance for it lowered quite a bit.

The cause for the meltdown seems somewhat clear from the article itself, the electrical system hasn't been designed properly and while the exact specific problem hasn't been found, I wouldn't say it's quite 'no one knows why'.
"While standing around at the back of morning assembly Higgs noticed a name that appeared more than once on the school's honours board. Higgs wondered who PAM Dirac was and read up on the former pupil. He learned that Paul Dirac was a founding father of quantum theory, and the closest Britain had to an Einstein. Through Dirac, Higgs came to relish the arcane world of theoretical physics."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/02/peter-higgs-p...
I've found that right combination of display: inline-block, position: relative, positioning and margins will get it where you need every time.
Sure, they could have been prevented. By spending more money. Isn't that always the answer?

Creating a website that can handle, well, nearly the entire country, out of the gate, is not trivial. (Facebook etc got to scale up to that level, they didn't need to do it out of the gate). But it also can be done.

How? Well, you hire real experts in doing this sort of thing. And you give them enough calendar time, and enough billable hours, to do it right. And you don't give them your own 'business requirements' which contradict their expertise on what's neccesary to make it work.

Obviously the government did not do one or more of those things, right?

(I will confess that my opinion is not high of the likely expertise level of typical IT government contracting firms.).
To be fair, every server logs an IP with every request anyway.
> My only disappointment: It does not report back temperature to the Nest thermostat.

Yet. I'd suspect this'll come eventually.
Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?
Is this product z-wave compatible?
Music as we know it? What does that even mean? Really I dont understand what you are getting at? This isnt snark I really want you to explain.

Perhaps you mean the phenomenon of popular artists that are so big that they are household names across all demographics across the globe/nation. If so then your probably right. Probably we will see less new justin timberlakes/drakes/britney spears level superstars, and more local/regional/niche stars.

as far as the investment, really labels/mangement companies will continue to invest in whatever makes them money... the size of the investments will probably diminish, but realistically the breakdown of record label investment is 90% marketing/promotion. And realistically if your projected to sell 50% less you should cut your marketing budget appropriately, that has very little to do with the music as an art form at all.
Empirically, I know 3 people who use a cracked-glass phone right now.
It sounds like you know what you are talking about, but I'm confused as to which portion of this product you are unhappy with. Is it the "wave to disable" feature? If so, I tend to agree -- that seems like a bad idea (it simply is too easy to dismiss something that could be worse than you think). But I assume that other smoke alarms have this feature too in button form (I don't know, I haven't had a false alarm in years)?
Looks like an unbiased source.
Hey, you're not alone :)
JetBrains Newsletter - October Edition
Open source is brutal: an interview with Google's Chris DiBona
For all practical purposes, "intelligence is largely not heritable" is actually closer to the truth than the opposite.

As long as you can't tie intelligence to particular genes, as long as you can't tell what amount of intelligence in an individual is inherited, and how much isn't, there is no use for this in education, politics or social welfare.

What I see the argument being used for, mostly, is to justify racism and entitlement issues in wealthy people...
I prefer that there be competition between a variety choices for OS and platforms. I don't wish for any of them to go away.
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* Extend, develop, and maintain code for registrar web * application
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* Write, unit test, debug, and troubleshoot critical software applications
* Resolve issues with speed and quality
* Maintain a high level of awesomeness at all times.

You can check out the full job listing on our site: http://www.name.com/blog/general/2013/06/we-want-you-to-work...
I guess I was saying that the rarity of this happening in the real world makes good statistics difficult (which are essential in biological systems,) and of course intervening to force better statistics is a rather horrific proposition.

Thank you for the links though, I'll have a read!
I don't know about everywhere, but where I live (Oregon), many of the new homes have detectors that are not only wired for power (with battery backup), but also wired together such that an alarm at one will fire all of them. The devices seem to be mostly ordinary smoke detectors except for that connection.
A bunch of other better articles on it have been posted to HN, but not upvoted enough to make the front page. I too find this surprising, this sort of highly visible large scale web app rollout failure seems like a topic HN would like.

Not sure why this one finally made it, heh.
Have you tried pushing the "test" button while it's going off? On mine it's "test/silence" and works exactly as you describe. This is a very common feature and in some places is actually required by building code.

It's unsafe to encourage people to pull the battery during a false alarm.
I live alone. I stress out about something happening when I am not at home. Yes, I will be safe if there is a fire when I am gone, but I would love to know if my house is about to burn down. This will help alleviate some of that stress.
Do we even have a working definition for intelligence at this point that can't have holes poked in it from every direction?
ElementaryOS Luna Test Drive
> Is hardwired power required for new construction?

Yes [0], although this is obviously country specific.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Installation_and...
I have that on a shelf somewhere, but I don't think I persevered to the end. I'll have another look, thanks!
> Sure, you can replace all your batteries really easily. But do you KNOW that the alarm is going to work?

Sure. Push the button labeled "Test." (Cover your ears -- you should still be able to hear it.)

Seeing the green glow on the Nest doesn't tell you that it'll wake you up when it goes off. So you have to test it anyway. Which makes it no better than a regular detector, from the assurance perspective.
I wonder if they could use the motion sensor to alert people of a low battery. I'd much rather hear a chirp every time that I walk by than while I'm half way through a good night's sleep.
I think I could do about 80% of my online life with something like a Chromebook (I'm also looking forward to seeing what the ASUS T100 is all about). I just want something light to take with me for some note taking, email, watching videos, surfing the web. Mostly what I'd use a tablet for, except I need a keyboard to effectively communicate on the web. Some remoting to servers, etc....

I have a full 15" MBPRo, and it'd be nice to not lug that around on the weekends and such.

But then again, maybe we just get a Surface Pro 2 (or similar) and replace everything.

So many choices with how to manage your technology lifestyle now.
I think (just like the thermostat). This is a trojan horse. Nest trying to get a sensors into your home. Specifically presence sensor in every single room of the house. This will be their foundation for a vastly improved home control UI. They will take the lessons they learned with the learning thermostat temperature control and use that for the rest of your home, with the input being location, number of people, etc...

At least that is what I would do if I were Nest :-)
They are owned by Twitter. It's basically a spyware approach - Twitter wants to be able to track users across apps, but there are no cookies or tracking pixels in the mobile app ecosystem.

Instead, they get developers to bundle this SDK into their apps, which subsequently reports back to Twitter, enabling Twitter to track users across the app ecosystem.

I think you're correct to be concerned about how they make money, because the answer is unfortunately by spying on your users.
$82 probably buys you ONE hour of police officer time, but three hours of private security officer time.

No unions, no pensions, no politics, blah blah.
If you want to know, remotely, if your house is burning down, you can spend $450 a year for a monitoring service and who knows how much for a system that dials them in case of alerts, or you can buy Nest.

I see this as priced against monitoring services and systems that phone them.

Compared to those, this is cheap.
It varies by state, but in Maryland, new construction requires it, and older houses are required to install detectors with sealed-in, long-life batteries or AC detectors by 2018:

http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2013RS/fnotes/bil_0009/sb0969.pdf
It looks cold in that lab. Cold fusion?
Creating a Generic Type Converter for C#
You can actually replace 1 Macbook Air with 4 Chromebooks

But more generally, most of the things most people do on a laptop can be (or are) done in the browser. You can even do image and video editing in the browser nowadays, as well as programming.
Honest question:
taking customers' billing information with the promise of a product at a later date without they actually knowing that you don't even having the product. (more importantly when customers' are made to think the product exists: http://publicbeta.co/library/)

Is it even legal?
For $80 more, I'd still likely consider the Asus T100 instead for my lightweight computing needs.
Have you ever taken them completely off the ceiling or just opened the battery cover? My house has 120v/9v detectors and when I was installing fire alarms in new construction, all residential multifamily and hotels had 120v smoke detectors in the units which are interconnected. They also have 9v batteries for backup. Marriott hotels actually specify 24v system smoke detectors tied into the main alarm system. I know Home Depot sells battery only detectors but those are generally for retrofit applications. A contractor will likely have to install 120v in anything new being built.
Just what the world needs, a bunch more crap adds popping up.
The problem is, you don't have any assurance of getting anything.

My condition for kickstarters is some kind of open sourcing clause, so that even if the creator fails, you are still assured of some kind of partially finished product.
You don't need to hack into sites for that—you can simply connect to a torrent and see the IPs that are uploading to you. This has been a very effective strategy in Germany, where ISPs will happily identify their users by IP, and courts will accept these IPs as proving the identity of the uploader.
Square Wallet Killer
Sure, but it's not too difficult to run out of the materials necessary to usefully collect those energy sources.
The SQL example should probably be expanded with encoding. It is quite common to see HTML encoded strings in databases. Which is problematic if you want to present the data in a non-HTML context such as a CSV-file.

The text also doesn't explicitly about which direction the dependencies should go. Though the diagram hints at some asymmetry, I am not sure whether this is intentional. For instance I try to make my HTML oblivious to both CSS and JS. But they of course know about the structure of the HTML, to respectively present and manipulate the content.
I find it funny that this was downvoted into oblivion. It's valid advice, especially considering this person is young and needs guidance/advice for best practices.
Damn physical product startups are getting REALLY good at landing pages these days.
Please explain what exactly musicians need significant investment money for? Studio time is a small fraction of what it used to be and simply practicing as a band is really cheap. You can argue that advertizing is still expencive but quality band can get the word out far more cheaply now than they used to.

The real issue for most band is there is a huge catalog of great music out there so standing out is simply harder now than ever before.
For a middle class person, they are probably better off saving their money rather than funding life extension research. Having money enough to get good health care in their old age will extend their life more than adding a few dollars to research they would barely speed up thanks to the small amount. Heck, the money might even be needed to buy application of the results of the research. If you are rich, OK, fire away at funding life extension research.
When I hear arguments like "I'd pay one hundred extra dollars just to not hear that chirp at 6AM", I think we all know who the target audience for this product is. The average joe doesn't have $120 per smoke detector to casually shell out. It would be nice if the Internet of Things movement started moving toward things that everyone can enjoy, rather than just making toys for rich startup guys. (Grand Street, I'm looking at you.)
Residential Roofing: Fall Inspection of Your Roof Shingles | LGC Roofing Blog
> Probably we will see less new justin timberlakes/drakes/britney spears level superstars, and more local/regional/niche stars.

This is being parroted around here for a while, but that does not make it more true. Big artists are less affected than small labels. See also: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/20/business/fi-cotown-i...
See Section 216 of the Patriot Act, which throws in the ability to get "pen register" information (metadata) from Internet communications.

http://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/subs/add_myths.htm#s216

Yet another reason to repeal the "Patriot" Act.
One example for the trouble with genetics in intelligence is the issue of Malaria: If a child gets Malaria, it will have a lower intelligence quotient. Resistance/resilience of Malaria sure has genetic factors. Would those factors show up in genetic studies about intelligence? Betcha.

Should we accept this variance in IQ as genetic and unavoidable? Or should we just buckle down, eradicate Malaria and stop worrying about these factors?
The graph doesn't mention whether it's adjusted for inflation. If it isn't then the trend is actually downward. $50K 1998 corresponds to $69K 2011.

http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
I noted this deeper, but will post it up here:

I don't see this as priced against a $20 smoke alarm. I see this as priced against a smoke system that phones a monitoring service so your home is protected while you are away. These systems are easily $60 - $100 per unit plus the base station plus a recurring fee ($45/month in my area).

Nest pricing is far cheaper than the combination of these, while giving you active remote monitoring peace of mind.
Three interesting things here:

1) Revenue from recording IS dropping. Some of that is people consuming it differently (hence the uptick in mobile / internet), some may be piracy, some may be disinterest / people preferring to spend money elsewhere.

2) How the music industry has closed the gap - the biggest increase is in money from concerts, which makes sense - if the record companies are scared, rightly or wrongly, of piracy, focus on something you can't pirate - the live experience.

3) What does this mean for books, movies and other media in the move to digital? In particular books don't have a concert equivalent to pick up the slack. Yes authors tour but they're not going to make money out of it the way a band does. Will they see a similar drop off and if so how will they fill it?