skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
well, the healthcare.gov project being the spearhead of the most important policy push by the current President and his party - i'd guess that it is actually the most efficient (less than half a billion) and successful (developed in 2 years, fixed in 3 months) one among myriad of government projects and budget sinks, most of which isn't auditable and hasn't been in years (for example, see Pentagon budget audit (i.e. lack of it))
I do not think you know what "acronym" means.
It depends on how "embedded" embedded means to you. I've talked to some people who call a CPE Linux/Atom box embedded and I know some people who don't consider anything with an OS embedded. I won't even touch that argument. :)

But I used MMU-less uClinux as an example because it breaks a lot of assumptions that are made in a lot of code. No dynamic linking(which if I remember go doesn't support by default, or does it even support at all? I haven't written any in a year or two), no protected memory, and no real fork (vfork instead) crosses a lot of code off the list on what you can run. I don't know if go can support it, but I know that the current offical toolchains don't. There may be a feature go has that prevents them running on a platform like this, but it won't be GC. There are some GC'd languages that will run on this platform.

C is great in that is makes very few assumptions and if written carefully can be extremely portable. The base language doesn't even assume there is an OS present. I've only run into one platform that had very little C support. It was a small 8 bit uC that had a very strange execution stack that made C as everyone uses it hard to efficiently implement.
"but in much of the country people pay many hundreds of dollars every month during the winter or summer. If a smarter thermostat saves 10% of that"

Not mathematically / thermodynamically possible, sorry. I live in a cooler area but not the real cold areas up north. During the recent polar vortex, which momentarily was centered over my house (and I'm not kidding) we got down to -15. (70 - -15) = delta t of 85 degrees. Lets say the magic machine dropped the temp by 5 degrees during the entire event 24x7 to save me energy. Why I'd pay $300 to simply permanently turn a thermostat down and leave it down is a mystery, but stick with me. That would mean a theoretical delta T of a "mere" 80 degrees. That means a maximum theoretical energy savings of (1-80/85)100 = 5%. Not 10%. No, I'm not setting my thermostat back 24x7. No, I don't live in a cold area like the folks up north where it was -30, in fact right now its somewhat above freezing outside. I just don't see it mathematically.

True, the weather is not always that bad. Right now its about 35. So 70-35 = 35 degree delta T, and dropping 5 degrees temporarily when unoccupied could save as much as (1-30/35)100 = 14 % if the weather was like this all the time and my house was perma-unoccupied. However, out of 168 hours in a week, my house is unoccupied for 18 hours. The rest of the time is filled by work at home, strange overlapping shifts, etc. So my house can only set back 10% of the time, so I only get 10% of the theoretical maximum savings, or a whopping .... 1%.

Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties, but we like it, keeps the riff raff away. So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039.

Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops.

I would come out ahead both in comfort and financially by purchasing a kerosene heater and $300 of kerosene. Or better yet, even more insulation, or newer windows or whatever.

The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.
To my humble knowledge this (interpreter mode) also applies to FF (which would be handled in the case of this application by the error-event anyway). I would consider it at least as a "legacy behavior". I think there is no JIT with try-blocks with any JS-engine.

I would suggest to do some speed tests with and without this wrapper.

Generally I would recommend to use a try-block only for some very small portions of code, if at all ... don't use them as a general tool ...

----

Some references:

* "In particular, the optimizing compiler [V8] currently bails out on functions with try {} catch {} blocks!"

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/v8/

* JIT, try, catch, see the "Browserscope" at end of page (mind the extreme performance gain for normal functions without try-catch with Chrome 31/32 -- yes, named functions are still the speediest):

http://jsperf.com/try-catch-jit/2
getline() works for (single) character delimited reads and lets you use a std::string. The latter is reason enough to use it: it means you don't have to worry about manual dynamic memory allocation and have zero risk of overflows.

In any case, the C++ equivalent to fgets is sgetn on the underlying streambuf or filebuf - http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/io/basic_streambuf/sgetn . I'd use this before I used fgets, if for no other reason than I then don't have to remember to call fclose()

The fact that you haven't used one of the most trivial functions in the standard library because of a slight performance penalty 15 years ago is worrying.
> I wrote it this way because the systems people I talk to are skeptical at times that a compiler knows best.

Well, the best way to combat that would be demonstrate that cool things can be done safely in Rust, but that probably requires a lot more than fits in your introduction.

I think you could allay that fear by addressing it directly, rather than saying that Rust's secret sauce is unsafety.
Have to say I like the idea a lot. It seems kind of inexpensive too. Even a little too inexpensive to be lucrative?
From what I read 6p/min, they shouldn't serve beer. ;)
I wonder if right way of doing this would be to crowdsource it like robotics/technology challenges with very large bounty? On another note, Obama administration should have assembled team of developers from challenge.gov with track record/history etc.
Well content ID is one thing that was unneeded and harmful. Also this video is not available in your country. So not that long. Circa 2007 maybe?
I see more and more static methods and classes last 2 years maybe. It's probably more about the stateless design and less side effects, but it definitely helps garbage collection if you avoid classes at session scope or smaller. In OOP there is another pattern that helps - object pools, but it's a lot of work to get it to work correctly and it's not as efficient.
FWIW, after evaluating many solutions, I'm switching my DNS from zerigo to DNS.he.net - free, featureful, and backed by a company I believe will be around.
My goal is to do this eventually. I live within walking distance to a small air strip at a mountain resort, and my office is within walking distance to a local air park. I wouldn't have to use a car at all.

I telecommute most days, but it is two hours by car through DC traffic when I do visit the office.
That sounds a bit hyperbolic. I think you're overreacting. The difference between this and long-polling in terms of hardware required is pretty minimal. I run a web stats service that has to deal with similar kinds of data -- millions of sites "pinging" it with a new page view to record constantly -- with one crappy server. Nest doesn't even have to record anything in response to those pings, unlike my server, just compare to some in-memory table of which devices have commands waiting for them, so most connections can be immediately disposed of.

Given the setup, network and power requirements Nest operates under, this may well be the most efficient way it can be done. Or maybe it does do some kind of long-polling and the descriptions online are inaccurate. Either way, I doubt there's anything "absurdly wasteful" going on here. Poll vs push isn't melting polar ice caps.
Everyone who's complaining about how much Nests costs have obviously not graduated from college tastes into the world of interior decorating. There is a huge market for nice looking stuff to go in your house. Not everyone buys Ikea for their whole lives. Maybe they host parties, run in upper middle class social circles, etc.

There's $10K kitchen ranges out there, $50 beer mugs. etc. Design can carry premiums in this market, and Nest is trying to be the best looking thermostat in the industry. It doesn't matter if you can hack one for $40. It's a wealthy couple who doesn't hack who just want nice stuff in their house that works. And if you think that's weird, just recognize it's your taste, not reality. Why does West Elm exist if there's Ikea.
I'm really surprised. I thought Nest was Tony Fadell's vehicle to make it back into Apple.

I am going to sit here with a bemused expression on my face thinking of Tony Fadell at data driven Google. I put it 6 months before he is out of there.
It's a very interesting analysis, but you're applying brick-and-mortar / bootstrap business logic to a an early stage VC backed consumer business where 101 economics don't fully apply. Not a single investor, VC or advisor cared about that "marginal loss" (which is "easily" fixable through infrastructure). If that was the case, the vast majority of consumer startups wouldn't be around in the valley (let's not even talk about the ones having zero revenues resulting in an infinite marginal loss).

I provided some extra context and counter-points here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7053473.
The only possible way this acquisition make sense is that Nest has some truly amazing product in the pipeline. It is impossible to justify 3.2 Billion for a team or thermostats. My guess is they wanted to get acquired because some future product make sense to have Google's brand and go to market ability.
He's using dual multitab to connect 8 controllers and then programming game through control ports, more here http://hackaday.com/2014/01/10/teaching-mario-to-play-pong-a...
As long as Texas has a troglodyte in the governors mansion, it deserves the terrible reputation it has earned for itself.
Actually C was the fastest, by a fairly wide margin, however hat doesn't matter much since you can make the C++ faster and you can make C go just as slow as the input buffered C. There are still lots of people who think that speed is solely a function of programing language with very little impact from program design. Like I said I like to bring this out when showing newer developers that no matter what language you pick you need to be aware of what is going on in the background and most importantly you should test you code before trying to assume what parts are fast and what parts are slow.
Google Voice is effectively a dead product, isn't it? Doesn't seem that favorable to me.
Is that a joke? Firmware update on a Thermostat?
Sarcasm aside? I think the case could be made that those products have grown in public perception, but also suffered at the same time very definitely because of Google influence. Take the second comment ever by one of the YouTube founders? https://www.youtube.com/user/jawed/ for a quick example
You sound exactly like my economics professor. :D I like your report too.
Yes really great app.
You can also set goals like 'code at least 4hrs a day' and will be notified if you succeeded in, with your weekly summary.
This is known as "rhetoric". The art of making a point. For sure the zeroes are being written out in full to make the number look more impressive. And the cents are given for exactly the same reason! What else would they be there for?! Writing out large numbers in full is a valid tactic to make a point, just as is hiding all those zeroes away behind an abbreviation.
Page 53 has an ad from Paul Lutus (lutusp @ HN occasionally) for TransForth: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-08/1981_08_BYT...
That is a circular argument based on terms that will be null and void once the ink is dried on this. Does anyone believe that google just wanted a spiffy thermostat and smoke detector business for around 70x earnings? Please, Nest. Your customers are more sophisticated than that.
Y!?

Oh, not Y! (although some have speculated that Mayer move was a reverse-acquisition)
> So this NSA dictionary should be on the table in front of any Senator, doing their job, in these meetings. I highly doubt it is relevant what I think, but the only way out of this mess is a total dox'ing of the agency, and a replacement with something else

You're overlooking the fact that the senators aren't against whatever the NSA is doing. Most of them anyway, and the rest are kept in check or neutralized. But you're right about everything else you said. The senators' (and congressmen's) job is not to serve the people - they're serving the corporations that bought them, and some shadowy figures behind the scenes. Of course, they're in the game to climb higher in the hierarchy of power themselves, so.. all is well from their point of view.
I live in England. I can get an appointment with a family doctor at my surgery within 24 hours and with the doctor of my choice almost always within 48 hours. There are peoblems with people mis-using a&e services, but i know that I still get excellent treatment there. I get a choice of hospitals for elective surgeries.

Some services are really struggling: drug and alcohol rehab; a&e; mental health services; especially mental health services for young people. But on the whole it it pretty good.
Yes, but it's generally expected that if you do things the "usual way" in both Python and in C++, the C++ will always be faster.
Productivity, by Ron Conway
I've no idea. I'm just saying it's a trade-off, and possibly not aligned with their desired strategy.
Rust uses the `Option` type for that (name taken from Scala and ML, it's called `Maybe` in Haskell).

http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/option/index.html

What's neat is that if you stuff a pointer inside an `Option`, then not only is it guaranteed to be memory-safe but it also compiles down to a plain old nullable pointer at runtime, so there's no extra overhead while still retaining safety.
B is not at all a fair description. If a robber has a gun to my head, any transaction is far from voluntary, because there is a risk of death otherwise. If I were to have a terminal illness, any transaction would be far from voluntary, because there is a risk of death otherwise.

A) Healthcare is negotiated by individuals, fearful for their lives, and with no other options.
B) Healthcare is negotiated by bulk, by experts with the authority to set minimum standards of care.

Which one will be better quality? Suppose you're running a car repair shop, but your "customers" will starve to death if they can't drive to the closest grocery store 100 miles away. Are you motivated to: 1) provide permanent service that won't break down again, 2) avoid gouging customers, 3) maintain high standards?

The obvious answers are: No, No, and No, and that's exactly what happens with everything that's run by any corporation, because it's always a contract between an amoral company and an individual responsibilities.

It's rather unsurprising, then, that the USA's healthcare system is of poor quality, and that people can easily be driven into bankruptcy by medical costs.
yeah, cwebp, works on jpeg effectively, gifs and pngs (pngs with a 30% lossless savings, much more if lossy), does some tricks pngs don't..
You do know that many locales invert the meaning of the comma and period in that scenario, right?

Right?
The price that Nest charged for this as an independent company trying to make a profit may be very different from the price Google charges for it.
Oh, I agree with you — I perhaps should have written something like “*nix workstation software” rather than “X Window software”. I do use a separate Meta as well, and try to avoid programs that can't be configured to use it (GNOME-aligned ones being the most common).

And hey, as far as ‘really shitty reimplementations of Growl’ go, even Apple has one now.
Yes, but Apple's market not Google's...
We can figure out what to eat. But it takes time.
Imagine that you want to personalize your diet. Take certain ammounts of protein, calories, fat, etc...
It would take lots of time if you would prepare a weekly plan for yourself.
Thats a good Idea.

But I do feel what you'r expressing, like we need an app to do everything.

But I much rather live with these little apps and have lots of good information than to live completly oblivious to everything like my grandads (kind'of. I still have my hippie moments).
Has google hired a lot of MBA's recently, because it look an awful lot like they are trying to cross-pollinate their main business lines, to improve vertical integration and uptake.
There is more to food than nutrition.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Besides the fact that Nest is a great product (But so are Triscuits), why would Google buy them?
The Nest _does_ know when you are home. If Google starts to use Nest data to target adds at me, I'm going to rip it out, set it on fire, and mail it to Larry.
Will Nest customer data be shared with Google?
Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest’s products and services. We’ve always taken privacy seriously and this will not change.

This phrasing is pretty ambiguous/vague if you ask me. "Taking privacy seriously" will not change-- though I'm sure few behemoth Internet companies, including Google, would say that they don't take privacy seriously.

I think the best summary of Nest's answer is: Yes, we will share customer data with Google. But we'll take it seriously.
I wonder if they also fired the government people that insisted that the site had to use a weird proprietary XML database called MarkLogic, which apparently was one of the reasons for the concurrency problems. (As described here http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/tension-and-wo...)

A SQL server, probably Oracle, should almost always be the answer for a large bureaucratic product like this.
Maybe a topic for MythBusters? :)
You're right, it is an odd conclusion, but lots of folks think that way. That's why Negitivefrags needs to dissuade inexperienced folks of that notion.
>Sometimes I think about creating an organization that's sole purpose would be to enter bids in on government tech contracts with upper and lower cost estimates. It wouldn't actually do any of the work (to maintain neutrality), but at least put in a reasonable set of figures for how much a project should cost. Or maybe just a company that reviews proposals for local/state/federal government agencies to ensure they aren't being ripped off.

so one more consulting participant and review layer to dig teeth into government money without actually delivering on the project? And with the best intentions like everybody else :)
but in Internet land most systems software runs on the JVM, and is written in Java

[[Citation needed]].

The Internet land I've lived in mostly lives in C with a smattering of non-JVM scripting languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, etc) on top.
Where are all the Renaissance men?
A friend is currently working for an intrusive home management solution that certain telecoms are to unleash on the unsuspecting Germans. All internet of things stuff, all remote. It will be sold with internet subscription. The root capabilities will be in telco and not the home owner.

I am willing to bet a lot that Nest have either something similar or that google wants to spearhead this market and are scrambling with whatever the cost the know how.
This was addressed by one of the founders here [1]. Basically, his argument was that their cost structure was not fixed, and if they could have gone on for a bit longer then they would have been able to turn it into a marginal profit. If true, then maybe they just couldn't pull it off fast enough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7043555
No Spy agreement with Germany increasingly unlikely
Its interesting to me that months after the NSA leaks with unabating pressure from abroad and the US public including several senators, the current administration still did not feel the need to distance itself from the NSA and take back some its rights/limit the gray areas within which it can continue its mass surveilance program.
> In all probability no-one in Ireland or Britain was ever Celtic

Eh, no, that's ridiculously overstated.
> There's very little C++ in Rust anymore.

I think we've now got none, except for LLVM in the compiler, which means any binaries built using the stdlib don't need any C++ libraries (to be clear, libraries without the stdlib have never needed any).
Agreed, this was the reason for me to learn my first emacs shortcuts. Also, the option+click thing doesn't work in iTerm, so unfortunately it doesn't help me but -side note- it's amazing that after years of using OS X I can still discover small productivity features like this, and I think it stands for the thoughtfulness of the people behind it.
Google to buy Nest for $3.2B US
It's kept working for the last 3 years being awesome... Doesn't seem that dead to me.
Bah. This is a government worker talking about his job in a quasi-official capacity, not "those who oppose us." I should know as much about what he's doing at work as my company should know what I'm doing at my job.
Plus they're benchmarking C# against Python. Python is generally 50-100x slower than C++, while C# is <2x slower. (based on computer languages shootout)
Yeah, the other answers were straightforward, and then this one was like "how can we make it sound like the answer is no when it is clearly yes?"
You're trolling, right?

Please?
I used that indirection to turn the heat up for my cat while on vacation, knowing that a big ice storm was coming. Couldn't do that if it only worked on the LAN.
2 pounds of gasoline is about 1/3 of a gallon. So a charitable 20 miles of car range.

3 hours on a bike at a somewhat moderate pace isn't going to be more than 2000 kcal. Of course, animal fat is like 10 times less efficient than directly eating the vegetable calories.

I guess an electric car that recycles well might end up beating the bicycle though.
YouTube was fine when Google wrote checks and got out of the way. Now Larry and co. have their hands all over it and YT is slowly going to shit... from the G+ spam to the annotation spam and of course you need to sign in to keep them turned off (lol maybe!), to "hey let's make you rebuffer the whole video you just watched" to just horrid performance drops in general to "hey we found a way to make YT comments even worse".

I can't feel that we'd be much better off if MS had decided to lose billions on YouTube along with Bing and Google had pressed ahead with Google Video as a legitimate competitor.
Bingo.

Given how bad the system still is (e.g. 5% error rate in sending info to insurers http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/09/a... and also see his very high signal to noise ratio blog: http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/), and how much of it is left to be done (paying insurers, change in status updates, etc. etc. etc.) this is not just cheap, but some are suspecting that when Accenture fully takes over, right at the end of the spring enrollment period, they'll just throw much or most of the existing system away and start with what they did for California, which isn't hardly as bad.
I think you are missing the bigger picture here.

It's not about the thermostat its about the ecosystem its part of.

And I did write "every" :)
Google with (new) data sources in my house: hmm.