skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To give it the fairest possible test I will take your concerns to an optimistic extreme.

Given that I can set my thermostat back roughly part time, and most people work 40 hrs, and someone who can blow $300 on a thermostat probably works at least 60 hours, I will triple my theoretical savings to $36/year. Given a zero interest loan that would pay for itself in a "mere" nine years. Google products don't last nine years before being shut down but I will error on the side of optimism and assume this is an outlier. The problem is the 29.99% credit card to buy the $300 thermostat means it really costs $90/yr to buy one... and now we're saving $36/yr instead of $12, but its still an order of magnitude or so too little to run a profit before it requires replacement.

Still not seeing it.

The target audience is people who can't do math. Or like greenwashing. Or like showing off to other people that they can throw away $300 on a thermostat, or at least obtain a loan to do so. There's nothing particularly wrong with that as a market, either. I read an online article from three months ago that they were selling 40K/month and assuming they get a revenue of $100/unit (rest goes to retailer, warehouse, shipping, etc) thats a revenue of about $50M/yr which isn't bad. A 10% profit on revenue on electronics would be good, so lets say $5M profit per year. Well, I wouldn't pay about $4B today for $5M next year, but aside from that little issue...

I don't claim the product, in itself, is foolish at all. As a "hey look at how much money I have, err, had" $300 product, its probably a better long term investment than a $300 cellphone or a $300 computer video card or even a $300 giant TV. Some of the mathematical / economic rationalization is hilarious but that's orthogonal to the foolishness argument.
If a robber has a gun to my head...

This is the third time I've heard this comparison on HN, and it still confuses me. It is probably true that people in poor health are very interested in receiving health care, but that does not equate to being forced to use a particular provider, or to accepting service under onerous terms. The point of running health care like a normal business is that if one physician is overcharging or underdelivering you can just go to a different one. Maybe whatevsbro's experience doesn't match your own, but you can't dismiss it so glibly, and in that experience, patients in a "universal" system don't have the option of choosing.
Check out Alfred 2, Shortcat, Slate (https://github.com/lunixbochs/reslate). You don't need the mouse as much as you might think.
"To schedule an appointment with a dermatologist about her potentially pre-cancerous mole, click here."
Thank you for releasing this and making such a valuable tribute to the community. If more companies did that, hopefully we wouldn't make the very same mistakes over and over again.

By the way, what other startups have published such detailed postmortems, if any?
It compiles down to a nullable pointer if possible, and if not, it needs a tag, so yes, it's very minimal if any.
Elaine Wherry: Our Secret Weapon for Finding the Best Hires
So will they shut it down like they did when bought sparrow or bump?

I thought sparrow was great for iOS and OS X. Googles gmail app is not as stable.

Lately I've been concerned about google and privacy this make make me change my mind and just buy a competitors version of a "nest". The price is what has been keeping me away.
Then the absolute safest thing to do is never give any information to any third party for any reason.

Except that's impossible to actually implement, or manage, and makes your life so much harder for questionable benefit.
This appears to be the same as what was shown at AGDQ 2014 (Awesome Games Done Quick): http://gamesdonequick.com/

Here's their live run with them explaining what is happening: http://www.twitch.tv/speeddemosarchivesda/b/492923053?t=10h2...
Are you referring to “I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won”[1]?

If so, in that case the ISP altered DNS results to point to its own HTTP server and redirect to the real one with a modified URL. SSL would have helped a bit, but the first problem is that DNSSEC isn't more widespread.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6992897
Keep in mind $90m Accenture contract is only part of the annual cost - there are other contractors as well as the cost of HHS itself. While we don't have the Accenture contract terms the renewal cost is usually the same (or slightly higher for inflation). This contract is only about 1.5% of HHS's $7.5 billion technology budget.
Their current policy doesn't permit them to share personal information with other entities or even "affiliates". They would probably need your consent to change this.

They could merge Nest Labs, Inc. into another Google company, letting the surviving company use the information. The press release does not disclose the acquisition structure but their statements suggest the company will survive as a separate entity.
Make a medallion required for 30 days out of this month, 29 days out of next month, 28 days out of the next month, etc, until in 30 months, medallions are not required at all.
Sorry, I thought for those in the know, every point would be remarkably false.

1) http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/11/19/hell-freezes-over-th...

2) http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/09/13/motorola-droid-razr-...

3) https://www.abiresearch.com/press/googlemotorola-mobilitys-m...

4) http://www.anandtech.com/show/7586/motorola-moto-g-review/8
I think the biggest takeaway regardless of what their blog post say is that Privacy Policies can (and will) be changed down the line.
>I press command-option esc to Force Quit an app

why? command-Tab (switch between and show running apps) and command-Q (force quit)

also you can use command w to close a window if really really want to go that route
Those are great questions, I was wondering about the latter myself.
I mean this without any snark, but you can't really cash out without playing the game, and then meeting the requirements of the cash out agreement.

I'm sure it's in the agreement somewhere that Fadell must essentially assure existing Nest customers -- regardless of what's going to really happen.

From Fadell's post:

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 is a useless statement. Once Google owns it, they could perceive that "improving" your Nest experience is to hook it up to Google+, or insert/parse your Google Calendar for silly events, or serve you customized ads based on how frequently you move past the IR sensor, or the temps you prefer, or something silly like that.

Page can do whatever the hell he wants with Nest. And with him paying $3.2B for it, I imagine he has some ideas already.
I actually started something strikingly similar to this idea, techwurk.org. I plan on adding a job board as a feature. I'm a high school student, so I'm also wondering if anyone on HN knows any qualified people (preferably students) that would want to do basic tech work for charities. Thanks!
"subject to laws and pay sales tax" is a broad argument. Tourists and legal residents do the same, but have no representation.

Granted, that's a nit pick. What's much more serious is widespread (and horrible) practice of disenfranchising adults who have been convicted of a felony. There are some 6 million adult Americans citizens who have no representation in Congress.

And it disproportionally affects blacks. From a couple of years back: "In Virginia, 20 percent of blacks can't vote. In Florida, that number is 23 percent. ... (Kentucky, which is safely in Republican hands, is the only other state where 1 in 5 African Americans can't vote.)"

I see a bunch of difficulties with the proposal (if the parents are felons but the child is not, can the parents vote? if the parents are divorced, who gets to control the voting right? what of children in foster care? if the child is mentally disabled, with the cognitive state of a 1 year old, then can the parents still vote? Why is the scaling factor 1 instead of, say, 0.5?)

These can be worked out, and civil rights shouldn't be ignored just because "it's complicated." But the proposal's doesn't feel right. If a felon can be disenfranchised, then that felon no longer has representation. If representation is that important for a non-voting child, then surely it's that important for a non-voting adult. So shouldn't some other adult be able to vote on behalf of the felon?

BTW, you might be interested in Mark Twain's short story 'The Curious Republic of Gondour."

(Also, your 73 million number is a bit too high. I came up with 70 million, based on the census numbers minus the number of non-citizens living in the country, and adding the number of citizens living outside of the country, then scaling the sum by the percentage of people in the US who are under 18.)
This was actually done live with a real cartridge last week at AGDQ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioQmbEoYL0M
Yes, photos are no longer embedded in tweets.
Your post makes some weird assumptions and errors.

The UK system has competition. For example: an NHS trust might provide drug and alcohol services. When the contract is renewed a charity might win that contract.

Your post also makes the weird assumption that supplies (medication, medical devices, dressings etc, beds and sheets and food and everything) is all also owned and provided by the government. They are not, they are made and sold by private companies to other companies - some of those are private companies, some of them are foundation trusts.

Modern health provision is much much more complex than "the government does it".

You should investigate the NHS because it's fascinating,even for people ideologically opposed to this model of health care provision.
> You're talking theory (or more precisely, you're talking ideology).

Nope, I was talking about the way people work.

> The observed data is that the American system is over twice as expensive as the average of comparable countries

I didn't claim that the US healthcare system represents anything even remotely close to a free market. I was making a point about "public" vs "private" in general.
Thinking a bit further, but this is pure speculation (and quite over my level of insight into JS-engine-interna):

window.onerror gives you essentially a post mortem dump, as gives you the error message in the console (which now seems to be routed to the error-event). try-catch is essentially different in that it allows you to stay in the same execution context (call-stack, scope-chain, etc). It may well be that there is also a difference, when defining an error-eventListener inside a closure, as this would result in the same contextual necessities as a try-catch-clause (not in every aspect, but in some). Again, I would recommend some performance tests.
I'm sure it's in the agreement somewhere that Fadell must essentially assure existing Nest customers -- regardless of what's going to really happen.

And more importantly, reassure potential Nest customers that it's still a great idea to buy a Nest.
Stack Exchange has one database per-site, so Stack Overflow gets on, Super User gets one, Server Fault gets one, and so on. The schema for these is the same.

There are a few wrinkles. There is one "network wide" database which has things like login credentials, and aggregated data (mostly exposed through stackexchange.com user profiles, or APIs). Careers Stack Overflow, stackexchange.com, and Area 51 all have their own unique database schema.

All databases are MS SQL Server.
Hungry? Here, Have Some Chocolate Buttholes
I think xdg-open defers to gnome-open/kde-open/... depending on what DE is currently running. Not sure about that. Anyway, xdg-open should be installed anywhere where any kind of DE is installed.
The Social Network paid particular attention to this, to the point that they tracked down[0] the actual slides[1] Zuckerberg would have seen in his Harvard OS class for the scene in the classroom.

[0] http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-defense-of-mark-zu...
[1] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/course/cs161/notes/vm.pdf
Team management application use cases
> BIC - Bit Clear (immediate)

Ah, didn't catch that.
I started a project like this about 10 years ago, but then I discovered that you could just compile Lisp on your own workstation and upload it to prod with a .sh extension and no-one would actually check, they would just blindly run it. Not even the size was suspicious. Used the same trick abit later with OCaml and Haskell, you just compile them as whatever.py and no-one's any the wiser.
Visited a couple times already and the atmosphere is notably different from your run-of-the-mill establishment. It feels nothing like a coffee house though. Feels more like you're visiting your slightly quirky but absolutely delightful Russian aunty who has a penchant for antiquity.
If Apple bought Nest they would have killed the Android app.
How long until Ads start showing up on your thermostat? Or on your smartphone controller app - want to change the temperature, please watch these short commercials and then we'll allow you to change your temperature settings.

"Feeling a bit warm, Sally's Soda is just three blocks away".

"Target is having a 15% off on all winter coats and jackets".

This will NOT end well.
I wanted to like iTerm, but lack of restoring sessions (pwd, history) was a deal breaker.
This isn't just a healthcare thing. It's unfortunate that the fallout over healthcare.gov hasn't been more directed towards the problems with federal IT contracting in general rather than just this specific incident and "Obamacare."

It's a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. No matter the specific project, or what sort of healthcare system we're looking at, these sorts of problems affect them all. And they'll continue to do so long into the future unless something drastic changes in how federal IT contracting is handled.
3p a minute is the minimum suggested donation. £1.80 an hour is very reasonable. Ziferblat has found great success with this model in Russia. Here's hoping it sticks in the West.
There is so much more interesting content on so many other sites, that I really don't miss my deleted (a year ago)Facebook account.
It's probably more accurate to say that in the Enterprise most software is running on the JVM. But there are certain (large) internet companies that have significant system software running on the JVM (Google, Twitter).
I think the real problem with this sort of idea is that, in the end, you're just reinventing processes. There's already a way to write an isolated single purpose application and run it on a server: fork() and then exec().

If you want to bring the isolation level of that process down to just absolutely what it needs to run we've got things like jails and cgroups. You could probably run a Go app with no access to the filesystem since everything is linked in statically anyways.

I think it misses the reasons people are excited about virtualization. Reproducibility and uniformity of environment has a higher value than isolation to most software developers. The priorities may be inverted on the sysadmin side, but I don't think so far as to justify this kind of approach.
They have a widget on the Nest store (https://widgets.nest.com/en/calculator/widget) that estimates energy savings. According to that, a $250/year savings is possible in SF with electric heating and a house over 2000 square feet. Though, the range they provide probably means:

a) It is a historically cold year for a prolonged period of time

b) You set your heat to 80F all the time

With gas heating, it looks almost impossible to save $250... unless you're heating an NBA arena.
> Prefacing this with that I'm about as Libertarian as they come

Sweet. Are you ready to take the next, and final step? They say that the difference between a Libertarian and an Anarchist is roughly six months (paraphrased).

> In every aspect of healthcare in the US, I've been shocked at how long you're just expected to wait for absolutely everything.

Yeah, it's completely fucked. Finland's system is similar in the waiting sense, at least.

> In your scenario B), I'd expect to be able to book an appointment online, arrive two minutes before it's scheduled to start, and walk out fifteen minutes later with whatever result you were looking for 99% of the time.

Exactly.
Fair enough, I suppose. Why JavaScript?
Yeah that's where the +1 button is.
this is highly sensitive data, you can't treat it like a private business does, say like Target.

You're joking, right? Because the lack of care that was put into security is WIDELY documented. They couldn't even get internal signoffs on security and decided to launch anyway.

It's simple, really: the government doesn't care if they break their own laws. The laws are for everyone else.
Not entirely sure that's necessary when those who do it fail so hard, i.e. there's at least some feedback in the system. The other exchange example where this happened is Oregon, which isn't even pretending that their site works.
Yes. I'm not a huge fan of the product in general or the financial deal BUT I will say this aspect of the product is genius in that you want an auxiliary sensor aka the smoke detector right where people spend most of their time, bedrooms and offices and such. There are serious problems with the overall situation, but no sarcasm, the specific situation of this product pairing is a work of genius. I don't think that one idea makes up for the other problems, but credit it due them for this.
tl;dr It is not.
The Hangover Solution
You forget: the 10$/user to Amazon halves every 18 months. The $12 stays the same.
Don't get distracted by unimportant semantics.

OP could rephrase the point as "strong central leader with absolutist powers vs. democracy." The fact that some of your examples fall on somewhere on a linear scale between the two doesn't really detract from your ability to evaluate the point.
5 Reasons Why List-based Articles are so Popular
That is probably best acquisition outcome. Most companies buy something good then change it until it sucks.
Not every effing google product has ads in it. E.g. Drive.
Had Apple bought nest, you'd have to log into your icloud account to manage it, via your idevice, with no other management abilities available. Apple is absolutely horrible at playing well with others.
> At one level they are both 'friends' (as defined to be 'not unknown', 'not threat')

I only treat "Facebook friendship" as this type of connection. The difference between a "lifetime friend" and "a friendly person from the same train" is defined by the set of experiences you had together, not by the value of a 32-bit integer. Note, that neither the "real life", nor Facebook platform provides this kind of explicit "friendship value". I choose to use both platforms in the same way - let the "friendship level" be defined by what we talk about, what we do together and what we feel to each other.
I love stuff like this. It's been posted a few times here, but the Pokemon Yellow code execution is amazing to watch also:

http://tasvideos.org/3767S.html
Great note at end of the article. Requirements and direction couldn't be simpler!

“This is real simple,” Mr. Obama said, during a speech in Maryland on Sept. 26. “It’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans side by side the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak, same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on, and you start looking, and here are all the options.”
I saw the ecosia redirects popping up in some instances but couldn't figure out where they were coming from.

The extension is now uninstalled.
At Cognopolis there is the Holoteca, a collection of collections. They have many tecas with lots of stuff, from one of the largest comics collections to bugs and shells and thousands of dictionaries (and many other stuff)

I can connect you with them

Have a look
http://tedxavcataratas.com/2013/12/26/cognopolis-consciousne...
Unless they transmit that data in the clear between their servers.
Help reform copyright in the EU
I am not actually conflating them at all. However, Frameworks as implemented on iOS are at present dynamically loaded. As I said, there are technical ways to address that particular issue, some of which bring iOS Frameworks more in parity with OS X.
Future Of Electric Cars vs. Frigid NY Temps
Yes, now we can have even more relevant ads!!
There is a longer discussion on the site's comment section about the legality, and the short version is that she has legal access to the databases since she is a licensed private investigator, which apparently is very easy to get in Texas.
Very cool, does anyone know a way to set a visual indicator (diff cursor?) when in edit mode?
Amazon is a way of bootstrapping quickly. You pay a premium for not managing the physical assets yourself. But I'm not saying anything you or I don't already know.

Of course they could have stayed in the black by growing more slowly and managing costs better. I think that's obvious, and uninteresting. It seems clear to me that the guys at Everpix were making a somewhat desperate effort to get VC traction. IMO that's what led to their increased burn rate.

I don't think they didn't know they were burning their reserves, that their cost structure was unsustainable.

I feel we may be talking past one another.
How many product designers do they have?

Would seem to me that if you wanted to simply get at the product designers you could do that for less than 3.2b. The designers are good but they aren't that good. And throw enough money at people and loyalty goes out the window.
Few asteroids are worth mining, suggests Harvard study
That's true - modern scientists or geeks probably wouldn't stick a needle down the side of their eye to see what happened to their vision:

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/Footprints_of_the_Lion/...
Observation shows that the current American health care system is by far the most bureaucratic in the world. Any computer programmer should know that if you can take a many-to-many relationship and reduce it to a one-to-many, you've simplified the system.

Countries like Japan and Switzerland offer systems that rival the US system in every way and usually exceed it, for far less cost and bureaucracy.
Not everybody follows the details of OS version updates on Motorola phones.
It's currently a very niche market for techies, my prediction is that it will grow to include a broader slice of people who feel uncomfortable with giving one organization that much power.
Fedora 21 Linux Will Be Nameless
I think the best clients to focus on would be the visual effects artists themselves. It might be better done as a software package or library rather than a service.
Don't forget Translate. It actually early on was an out-of-house service, but they kept buying companies and hiring people to work on it, and it got massively better. (So a lot like Keyhole/Maps: they took something it would cost you thousands of dollars a month for (literally, for Keyhole access), made it free, and made it better.)
Facebook Acquires Branch to Build Out 'Conversations' Team
You don't put ads on sensors or detectors. That's just stupid. Especially when you put in all this effort to convince someone to pay $200 for it.

You use data to compose your internet shadow profile. Then you wait a bit for more MBA kids to crunch the spreadsheets that then figures out where you can be best distracted with an appropriately chosen ad.

And better yet, it's not even like the shadow profiles will ever disappear if Google goes kaput one day. Three other companies will be happy to take their place. Another dozen ad-tech companies after that.

This is where we are now. People being on the internet has ruined the internet. Complete ouroboros.