skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Biography Of An Artifact
Teaching with artifacts in elementary education can bring history alive for students. They can learn a lot just from the artifact’s biography. Start with simple questions like: What is this? Who made it? How? Then what happened? A single artifact can pass through many cultures through trade, and the biography of the artifact itself becomes one of the primary tools for teaching about other cultures. As students learn how to use artifacts in the classroom, they begin to differentiate between what they observe and what they infer about an object. Students build stories about the artifact through observations and speculations. The next layer of inquiry is proving the stories with other primary and secondary sources.
Nothing will ever be the same again #HolyWow
If an article gets deleted, it's gone.
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Is it known how much equity Faddell had? Is he a billionaire now?
I doubt Tony Fadell wants Jony Ive to tell him what to do.
> StackOverflow employees work from home.

Many do, but they have a fairly large office in NYC and a smaller one in London.
The Canadian startup scene to me is something where you get an interesting flavor for every city. I'm based in Montreal, and you definitely get a social enterprise and creative view that might be different compared to other ecosystems. The startup scene can only benefit from more money and resources flowing into areas where different perspectives and innovations can thrive.
Visual Map of All Stack Exchange Sites
"Fast updates"? "Wonderful skin of Android"? Yes, that's sarcasm. MotoBlur was a prime example of egregious and UX-destroying vendor meddling with Android.
I built BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com) to simplify all of this, while bringing benefits such as atomic deploys, built-in form processing, automatic gzipping, bundling and minification of your assets and perfect cache headers.

We have a comparison with S3 here: https://www.bitballoon.com/blog/2013/12/03/bitballoon-amazon...
And you're familiar with the economics of Snapchat, how, exactly? Among other things, I'd expect Snapchat's marginal costs to be much lower than Everpix's.

<opinion rel="armchair">Just looking at the two products, I think Snapchat's #1 business priority should be getting as big as possible as fast as possible, whereas I think Everpix's #1 business priority should've been to make the unit economics work.</opinion>
I am studying economics atm, could you please provide a citation or an example of an industry that competition for mostly-inelastic price-sensitive demand drives prices down to break-even?
7 reasons to create visual content
Why it's import to create interactive content for your website ?
So equivalent to Control.Lens.(&)
> To my knowledge it has no such thing

How does this work then?

"Auto-Away saves energy by reducing heating and cooling in empty homes. Instead of having to turn the thermostat down every time you leave the house (and back up when you return), the Nest Learning Thermostat turns itself down automatically when it senses that you’re away."

http://support.nest.com/article/What-is-Auto-Away
Auugh.. thanks for the heads up. I can cross a new Tivo off the list of things I want, then. Part of the reason I bought that device was to skip ads...
I'm saying that if you're near the top of the food chain at Nest, 2014 is probably going to be the start of many good years financially.

As for the product? Google's Reader product comes to mind.
Or Esc.
The impact may not be much though. People have wasted much time, money and effort on endeavors based on faulty premises just because they never took the time to evaluate their situation.
Can't wait to need a Google+ account to change the temperature in my house.
One thing I did when trying to come up with a "What features of language X help safety" article for ATS was to work through a simple example from unsafe, to safer, to safe. This is one such article I did:

http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2012/08/30/safer-handling-of-c-memo...

I think something similar for Rust would make for a great article subject too.
I don't really see what they have access to privacy-wise that is any more intrusive than a smart-phone with a microphone and a GPS chip.

And if the NSA can target a huge company like Google, I bet Nest was child's play to infiltrate.
I'd say that is true if you're truly talking about "friends," but since "friends" on most social sites actually means an acquaintance, it's much less interesting.
I'm trying to think of a tech acquisition that was favorable, or at the very least not unfavorable for the consumer.

It seems like tech (maybe all) acquisitions almost always favor the buyer and not the consumer.

Does anybody have any good examples?
The Nest contains some sensors (not 100% sure what type, a microphone and some type of motion sensor would be my guess though) used to determine whether you're home or not for their auto-away feature, so they get a little more than just your temperature preferences.
"Improving our products and services" is standard legalese for "to implement whatever new feature we want".
I don't like the aesthetics, no. From a engineering perspective, it is not much of an achievement of R&D, imo. They probably paid more for their Photoshoppers.
It isn't factually dishonest, because it is an accurate number, and anyone can make sense of it.

I say it is intellectually dishonest because it reads to me as a clear attempt to make the number appear more impressive.

Borrowing from Wikipedia, "intellectual honesty":

Facts are presented in an unbiased manner, and not twisted to give misleading impressions

It would still be accurate to say it was a $3,200,000,000.000,000,000,000 valuation, but I hope you will agree this is misrepresenting information.
Doesn't Google have a sort of "index" and "search engine" of billions of photos with captions, link headings, title text, alternate text, and so on?

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=lug+nut

You're telling me it only works one way, from text to images, and doesn't work the other way? But Google already lets you upload an image to search...

http://www.google.com/imghp

In any case, Google can simply say "I think it's a lug nut. Do you agree Y/N?" And in effect, play 20 questions with its entire userbase. In very short order it would be capable of identifying anything.
I still have nightmares involving aquafish.h
That's what I thought. Sounds like an awful lot of tough work for a measly $10K.

You could do pretty much the same thing with a law degree and earn a ton more.
I was hoping Honeywell would buy them an experience a bit (at the division level) of a NeXT-Apple replay. I really am not sure about buying one given the implications of the data from this device being given to advertisers or used in advertising analytics.
Newton has been romanticized a bit by the math/science community.

The man was amazing, but thinking of him in our context of modern science/geekery is misleading.
Do they own patents or something?

Because with a $10 android chip, any Chinese plant could churn out Nest clones in a few months.
Well then, you're going to LOVE it once it's tied to your Google+ account! ;)
"You might be interested in: Fire Damage Repair - Specialists In Cleaning Fire Damage‎"

Why might I be interes... OH MY GOD!!
There's something on the fringe of MLP fandom that is often used to discredit MLP fandom. It is really something that ought not to be brought up here, but since I think someone will, I'll try to make an oblique reference to it: Rule 34.

For mainstream fans it's really quite simple. Some extremely talented adults made a children's show. People of all ages enjoy and appreciate their work.
It's a dumb question. There is no such thing as "shared with Google" if Nest is wholly owned by Google. Nest data is Google data.
The same rules apply to Snapchat, but keep in mind the cost per user for Snapchat are minimal. A few photos kept around for a temporary period. If they have a reasonable amount of smarts, the cost for doing that, especially at the scales they can now purchase, will be negligible. The revenues they can get from each user in terms of advertising is highly likely to sustain them, and their large user base means a large revenue base.

Thus, in their specific case, it's hard to make the case that it's a bubble. And if they are bleeding users away from Facebook, then FB will pay a premium to stop that bleeding. Thus the FB offer is not unreasonable, no matter how ridiculous it looks on the surface.

Now, if their user growth slowed for some reason, then yes they will be kicking themselves for not taking said offer. It has happened before - e.g. Friendster, etc. But those are usually self-inflicted wounds. Assuming their investors keep them from such moves, there is a good chance they can be a large sustainable company.
Nest has a motion sensor, which appears to be a passive infrared light sensor. It's behind the grill hidden in the bottom 1/4 of the device below the screen. It uses this for the Auto-Away feature for example.
This all breaks down to one thing. The government can detain you indefinitely and is equipped to kill you. No private enterprise can do either of these things legally.

The government holds deadly force. Private enterprise is going to do some horrifying things with your data, but barring a cyperpunk dystopia, it lacks the capability to end your life.
Woohoo, I look forward to it disheartening into Mountain View and only being used to control the HVAC at HQ and be shown off to board members on their quarterly tours.
Wow. This weekend I was talking about Nest with my dad and I said Google will end up buying them. Interesting to see that it's an all cash transaction. I guess all cash makes the deal cheaper for Google.
It's About the Guarantees: Supervisors on erlang
Android, Inc., also acquired by Google, seemed to work out well for the consumer, I would say.
User community as testers presents some interesting pros and cons.

Pros:

* Tests are self-updating. Add a new feature: tests come in for free. Change a feature: tests automatically update. Fail to document a change: tests fail.

* Tests are unusually thorough

* Eventually consistent testing. If nobody ever complains, it probably wasn't a bug worth fixing.

Cons:

* Tests cannot be run offline. Feature must be committed and deployed before tests can be run.

* Potentially large quantity of false positives (bad bug reports)

* Potentially large quantity of false negatives (nobody notices particular bug, release considered good)

* Does not work for non-user-visible features

So basically you trade the reliability of your tests for a substantial build/release speedup. Some users experience each bug, but they are the users who are actively using the meta-community and have signed up to experience more bugs. Still, lack of pre-release unit testing must radically increase the importance of VERY careful code reviews.

Not the decision I would have made, but definitely has the sorts of advantages that a small team of engineers drool would drool over.
You're being sarcastic right? Sorry if it's a dumb question.
Why I’ve opted-out of care.data
Instead of giving up altogether, I suggest a different approach: choose your enemies and compartmentalize your personal data.

Stuff related to your personal life and your feelings? You probably can't keep it from the NSA, but you can keep some of it from Google and Facebook. Super secret work stuff (think airplane parts, not stealth mobile app startups)? Cryptography and all kinds of misdirection to throw off spies.

When Google knows a lot about me, it knows what cuisines I like, so when I search for "restaurant" it can return search results for restaurants I might like... except I could have searched for "<cuisine> restaurant in <place>" and the results would be good enough.

Current returns are too marginal and my own judgement is often better; future hypothetical returns may be matched by improvements that don't require so many privacy invasions — specialized search engines, for instance.
The point I was trying to make was that when it comes to security, privacy etc there isn't as much debate and media interest as I think should be in India.

In this case there were concerns voiced that the Election commission neither consulted all the stake holders nor consulted political parties to discuss this. And, of course with the revelations of US agencies indulging in widespread spying and intelligence gathering, sharing vital data pertaining to Indians citizens to a foreign company was perceived as a security risk.

I did not imply that there is a conspiracy. I just think when there are concerns about security and privacy, as in this case, there should be a louder discussion.
Sounded odd to me so I checked it out.

HoT only appears to have the rights to certain Honeywell products and not the thermostats:

http://www.kaz.com/kaz/honeywell/

Edit: "Honeywell" that you are referring to has a market cap of almost 70 billion:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=hon&ql=1
Charter Makes $61.3 Billion Offer to Acquire Time Warner Cable
An idealized dynamic strong typed language can actually give you the guarantee that all statically valid programs give you well-defined runtime behavior. This is a huge advantage over weakly typed languages that you also get out of the idealized static typed language.

The issue is, outside of languages with very baroque type systems or monstrosities like Java's sandbox, static typing often winds up decaying into weak typing, which offer much weaker behavior guarantees than real-world dynamic languages.
"That's your girlfriend Ally, wearing a ghost costume. You almost got it past me, but the guy across the street watched her put on her costume with his Google Glasses and a pair of binoculars. Buy binoculars at Amazon, click here. Buy window curtains at Walmart, click here."
The price makes me choke as well. But I think Nest's real value is as a market distruptor, the evidence being Honeywell's lawsuit and furious attempts to update their own products with comparable features.
Twitter: We're now rolling out a refreshed look and feel
Cut and paste from the nest website:

"Activity sensors

Nest’s activity sensors have a 150° wide-angle view. That range enables Nest to activate Auto-Away in 90% of homes."

Don't know if its just a 0-D light level sensor or a PIR motion detector or a camera. But it does have a 150 degree FoV which vaguely implied optics.

It has certain architectural implications, my thermostat is on a lightly traveled inside hallway between sleeping and living quarters, so I'll never be able to use a nest; it would consider the house unoccupied pretty much all the time other than bedtime and wakeup time. I guess there are people with thermostats installed in their kitchen and/or living room and/or home office?
> Nest really isn't great for that either, aside from what I'd call an adaptive timer based on how you adjust it.

What about the auto-away feature?
You're absolutely right about being able to MITM the HTTP piece and replace the content. That's true for any mixed content site. In this case though I disagree that having the HTTPS link to S3 is entirely useless. It's used specifically for an SSL link to download our GPG key, that additionally is available on a number of key servers and indexed by search engines like that too[1]. In that usage it's one of many ways of getting that key and, like all GPG keys, should really be verified before use anyway. For just about anything else though I agree that mixed content is a very bad idea.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=jackdb+gpg
An atomic increment is still significantly more expensive than a normal one.
...although many high-volume operations that are based inside of residential properties tend to use illegal/'off the grid' (so to speak) electrical connections...
Everything I just said is the exact opposite of reality, so yes.
Yup. Whoever is in charge of the Xperia platform needs to start making notebooks.
What's the end-result of that patchwork replacement in terms of stability and design consistency?
Using new apps are a great way to learn, design/product, and trends. Every startup is trying really hard to create something new, or some unique problem they see in the world. Not trying them out feels like a huge mistake as a product builder today
I made the money back heating my house in the bay area in 5 months. The Nest is just much better at using energy efficiently.
How many bugs in total? And, memory safety that Rust would've protected against?
The tricky part is getting it on the shelves at Home Depot or Lowes.

Nest threw a lot of money at Home Depot, if the dedicated end caps I've seen for the last couple of years are any indication.
what a great way to force g+ on users even more. "too cold and want to increase your temperature? add 3 friends to your circles!"
Yeah, so the syntax for managed references was removed, yet some of it lingers in the docs. I'll make a note to clean that up.

The official tutorial is really bad but at least has a large bulk of information. I'd love to re-write it, but I haven't had the time.

(And it was more reference counted than actually garbage collected: now we have Rc<T> and Gc<T> for both strategies.)
'High-profile' Google+ users will get better, more private email settings
>> "future hypothetical returns may be matched by improvements that don't require so many privacy invasions"

My approach is based on thinking ahead and of the future benefits I might get from Google knowing my private information (Glass, Google Now etc). I never thought that "future hypothetical returns may be matched by improvements that don't require so many privacy invasions". You've gave me something to think about!
For me Foursquare is a good measure if someone is a friend or not. Too bad most of my friends aren't on it.

Wasn't Path's idea to be a network only used with friends? again, too bad none of my friends are on it.
Whoops, thanks. Fixed
Law enforcement constantly uses that excuse "we can't be bothered with that, we need to focus on the big stuff".

Except the big stuff never happens because they typically have big lawyers and bigger payoffs to politicians.
Google should have negotiated for a $3.141 billion price.
Nice acquisition, but $3.2 bn?? Really? Just unbelievable.
This acquisition makes me a little bit nervous, but I have to point out that the database can be stolen or leaked no matter who is responsible for it.
I mostly agree with you, with the exception of Final Cut Pro... Its keyboard layout to OSX's is like Finnish to Samoan.
What exactly are you wishing for here? That the government be prevented from accessing information on you under all circumstances? To my knowledge, a subpoena is usually pretty reasonable circumstances, and it was subpoenas specifically that we were discussing. If you feel otherwise, I would like to hear more.
smart phone > smart car > smart house > ... ? ... > smart human

I for one see great areas of improvement and possibilities inside the common house. Not that I'd wire up every appliance with a Wi-Fi sensor, but some data can be useful, if only for safety (falling asleep with the oven on: here a sensor could cut the power at a certain condition, or trigger the fire alarm, or ring up the firefighters).

Or you left the house and realise you left some of the lights on, just tell the in-car console to open the domotics app, and tell it to shut the lights off.

And the smart fridge, if RFIDs or its successor ever become cheap enough to be able to be printed on a milk carton, you could have your fridge's contents with you wherever you go, just open the app, look what's about to go off, or have it remind you to get extra supplies when you're near a point of interest.

If they'll let me I'll hook up a Nagios server to my coffee machine.
Supreme Court to Tackle Big Questions in Patent and Copyright Law
It's the highlights I take issue with.
Why use dynamic libraries if you don't need to save storage space or RAM?

We have moved beyond the era of scarcity and even on desktop platforms, lots of people are including static libraries so that they are not dependent on the upstream developers' idea of what is needed. So much of this code is open source that it makes sense to build your own static library, and maybe leave out cruft that you don't need.

Sure it would be nice to have a choice, but static libraries are not evil.
Writing code on paper was a practice I initially resented when taking CS courses at University. However, it made me a better programmer, because it forced me to think about design and data structures first, then about the code.

Let me be clear: I think it's a great way to test students as long as the graders/instructors aren't overly anal about syntax or even API correctness. I was lucky to have teachers who were okay with unbalanced parentheses, made-up API functions, and in upper-division classes, pseudo code was even acceptable (data structures). (However most CS classes will be biased towards imperative programming over functional programming).

To use a cooking analogy, if you have to think about how you are cutting the fish, you won't be able to think about how you are going to prepare or cook the fish. Writing code on paper forced me to think about design first; that is, it enabled me to think about what I was going to do with the fish.
Starring The Computer
Google Buys Nest for $3.2 Billion in Cash
I forget the exact number, but it was at least 20. And I believe they concluded that, yes, Rust would have caught them. I'll need to ask pcwalton to be sure though.
As a Nest owner this creeps me out.

Google should NOT have always-on sensors of any type.
You are correct. I edited my post and actually found a good blog post on the subject.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-i...
Absolutely this, yes. Projects need an initial strong voice to set the voice and direction. Once a community forms around that and starts reinforcing that identity the leaders can move into more of a passive maintainer role.
Imagine the value Google will be able to provide advertisers correlating regional temperature preferences/settings and purchasing habits / levels. Homes that set their thermostat to 72 degrees during the winter months in the Midwest = Lexus ads or tropical vacation ads, 64 to 72 degrees = Toyota ads, less than 64 = [some brand or store] ads for bed comforters.

ADD: And then in summer months... setting at 72 or less = Mercedes ads, 72 - 77 = mid income ads, > 77 = Fans and air conditioner ads.
This is an old discussion, but I actually have this thread bookmarked so I can show young programmers the dangers of assuming that if you write in C++ it will be faster then everything else out there.
They failed with Google Video. Well, they manage to build the second biggest video sharing site, with millions of users. But nevertheless they had to buy YouTube and merge it.
I don't see the YouTube acquisition as being harmful.

Pixar is still making (some) good movies under Disney.

I'm sure there are more examples.
Transparency Is Fundamental to Good Copyright Policy
You don't want your G+ friends automatically notified when you burn dinner? Or will it be targeted ads for delivery pizza?
This price should be worth a system instead of a product or a series of products. If they can create a complete system for home management, that will make more sense.
Honeywell sued them. Google must have enough defensive patents to use against Honeywell to make them go away. Terrible, of course, but that's the way the world works.
The HTC One S (released at the same time as the One X) didn't get anything past Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. I've taken my money elsewhere.
this made me laugh out loud.
Thanks for your kind review. The standard one makes the codebase some spagetti and I've decided to improve the default client. It already uses the original one at background, just covers it. You can still use the standard one, but you also can use this one at the same time; It makes your code more readable. I think. Thanks for your comment :)