skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not disagreeing with you (that a lot of people go with what's trendy or what they already know), but I wouldn't put Gilad Bracha in the list of knowledgeable people. I've seen the talk you are linking to and it's not very impressive... he sounds mostly whiny to me. In his own blog, when he writes about about functional programming or type theory, he gets called out by the people who really know about it.
I think folks are too focused here on Google caring about the temperature in your house. I suspect Nest's hw/sw/design chops will come in very handy when putting together say the experience of a self driving car?
With all the data google already has on me, as a new homeowner, I think I'm terrified of buying this product. What kind of profile would this allow Google to build on individuals?
Here's a Google spreadsheet for those of us without an xlsx viewer installed:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApVHgXTTTuMfdEF...
I'm not really worried about subpoena of my data- if the courts want it, they will get it. I'd be more concerned about what private companies are going to do with it. I know the gov't is the big bogeyman in most people's minds, but sometimes I swear private corps. have even less accountability than the gov't.
So you are saying that Google bought the Nest guys, not the Nest product?
You also get Tony Fadell, which is pretty damn huge. It’s almost like acquiring a Forstall company.
For once I can understand the pricing and think its in fact cheap.

1) Nest has a realistic potential to be in "every" home if not the actual hardware then the underlying intelligence.

2) Nest has a business model that works. People are paing for it and they love it.

3) Combining Google data with Nest access points I can only imagine the awesome things they can come up with and improve. Perhaps the first glimpse at an intelligent grid system.

4) 3.2 is a steal and given that its cash its a good sale.
Nest really isn't great for that either, aside from what I'd call an adaptive timer based on how you adjust it.

But if you have access to someone's live power usage, you probably have a good idea of their schedule. On top of that, your phone makes a much better tracker than your thermostat.
I think that's totally true. It's not just so much because of Mozilla, but also because Rust is probably closer to C++ than Java...

The official tutorial contains much of that information.
Heal Yourself With Gofhttp://strategicfence.com/fences/other-products/
El Paso TX churches believe that if you receive God as the guiding force in your life you can gain His healing powers. Unwavering faith in Him will no doubt heal those that ask for it, but it may not be in the way you expected. Churches in El Paso TX know the strength of God; He has a plan for everyone, but understand that healing may not always take the form you would expect.

God knows what your needs are even if you may not, sermons are presented at churches in El Paso explaining this truth. Open your heart to God at EL Paso churches and receive His healing powers.
I would have been a Nest customer, now I won't be. Oh well.
The next and obvious step for Nest is home security devices. They clearly have a fairly capable design team, and have already achieved surprising namespace for home electronic devices.

Google does not base their future on ads. They deal in technology and connectivity, and the automation of the home entirely fits within that vision.
Helen of Troy which owns Kaz, which owns Honeywell (one of the largest businesses specific to Nest's thermostat space) has a market cap of $1.7bil - http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=HELE - that's why this sounds crazy.

On the flip side, P&G is a $217bil business - so, not that crazy how big the market is and can be.

EDIT: As larrys points out, Honeywell is a $70bil biz.
> Paste and match style (incredibly useful) is "alt-shift-
> command-v" i.e. four keys . . . Four is too many. Three
> is too many for such an important function.

I've literally never heard of this functionality before, in any application, on any platform.
> How can you know which phone to pick that should get updates for at least 2 years if not longer?

Pretty much impossible to predict. The safest bet is to either buy a Nexus phone (Nexus 4, 5, etc.) or maybe the GPE of a phone (S3, One, Moto X). Google stopped supporting the Galaxy Nexus so people were a bit miffed about that.

The good thing with Android is that even if your manufacturer/carrier decides to stop supporting your phone, you still have the opportunity to flash an updated ROM via third-party developers. Granted the performance probably won't be the best but at least you still have the option as opposed to iOS.
The effect of alcohol consumption in GDP is not a trivial thing to study. AFAIK, research has shown only slight affects on GDP. Take for example this study on "The societal cost of alcohol consumption" in Sweden, which showed only around 1% change in GDP:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18043953

I rather suspect that correlating caffeine to GDP would be even more difficult. Either way, the article doesn't even try to support these assertions factually. Which is OK -- it's a well-written article on an interesting subject. It's just good to keep in mind that some of the material is highly speculative.
The only ones I think you can bet on these days are the Google Play edition phones or even more so the Nexus line.

I've been using android for a while now but with the need for everyone to have their own UI on android and the lack of carrier updates I think if I can't get a Nexus phone for my next phone (would be a carrier issue) then I would probably go back to iOS.
Excellent. Thank you.

It's hard to have a beginner's mindset after you've done something for a year.
Damn, I really liked my Nest.
Exactly. I don't care if the government knows when I'm home (they can already figure that out), but imagine if Google's database of Nest info got leaked.

Burglars could look at the database and say "Oh hey, look, no one's home right now."
[7]. Millions of page views and just 25 servers for whole infrastructure, which includes everything including load balancing, cache, dbs' etc. etc.

Seems very very optimized and cost effective. Its brilliant.
I think there a lot of things to bash Google on, but the outcome of Motorola is not one of them. The G and X look like great phones and they were all pieces of shit before.
I'm happy for Nest but sad for myself, given the smoke detector was my Christmas gift last year.

Previously I would look to YouTube as an acquisition done right. But after the kerfuffle around G+ integration, I no longer feel that way.

If I have to sign in with my G+ account to manage my smoke alarm, it's going directly into the rubbish bin.

If Apple had bought Nest, on the other hand, I'd feel very differently.
The Moto X and G are a really GOOD value...
I know it's become a trope to suggest Nexus devices for people worrying about OS upgrades, but any Google Play Edition phone should prevent you from having to worry about that. The issue is that most customers don't really care about OS upgrades, and until that changes, companies will have no reason to change.
> I personally have only ever written unsafe when wrapping something with FFI.

Is discussion of unsafe in an introduction article esoterica?

By the way, loved the proposal video [1] you did on docs for rust: it's a pretty solid proposal for any language.

[1] https://air.mozilla.org/rust-meetup-december-2013/
tl;dr: playing with the query string lets you see profiles of users three degrees away (which is, apparently, not normally permitted)
I'm not worried about a shutdown as much as I am worried about it going into maintenance mode like Google Voice.
Blinking ads on your thermostat? Web ads targeted at people with high energy usage? Converting all nest.com users to G+? Who knows ...
Impressive write up. I agree your reasoning almost 100% but not with a few hypothesis you make and that changes the overall conclusion:

1) IMO you can't apply such "idealized" reasoning to an early stage consumer startup: the vast majority run at a loss. It's expected and as a matter of fact not a single investor had problems with our financials. For better or worse, Everpix was on the VC track, not the bootstrap track.

2) You're essentially assuming that infrastructure costs are set in stone. I addressed this point in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7043555.

3) You're assuming photo collection sizes are also constant, which is not the case: early adopters will have more photos than mass consumers. For instance IIRC average subscriber had 15K photos, while we would expect the average consumer to have 5-10K. This gets compounded with infrastructure cost savings.

4) You're assuming the only revenue stream are subscriptions. We had concrete plans post Series A of printing based monetization leveraging the uniqueness of our photo platform.

So what you demonstrated is that, assuming some hypotheses, it would be really difficult to run profitably such a business on AWS. Again, I agree with you: none of the large players do it on AWS (I know for a fact and that savings would be 3X-8X), and our #1 engineering goal post Series A would been to get off AWS (since we would have had the capital and resources to do so).

I would however counter that using a different set of hypotheses, more appropriate to such a business, combined with our "track record" of driving infrastructure costs down, we would have fixed that marginal loss short-term. I am actually 99% sure of that but of course I cannot prove it :)

On a side note, some questions which IMO are more critical to address are for instance what's the total size of the market or how much does it cost to acquire customers at scale? Now these are externalities you cannot "change" contrary to infrastructure costs. So if these don't work out, then your business can absolutely not be viable. I would love to read blog posts as detailed as yours on such topics.

Thanks again for writing this insightful post!

PS 1: About infrastructure costs, I shared some extra context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041640

PS 2: About the team size, Android & Windows were actually outsourced to contractors. Regarding the rest, we're going to have to disagree that a quality and complex product like Everpix can be built with a smaller or less experience team in such a time frame (for instance, you're ignoring the science part and I assure you no junior iOS dev can built highly responsive and dynamic apps displaying 20,000 photos) ;)
What are the current SEO problems?
Isn't Google Play only for Google's own software? It sounds like this strategy ensures that only Google can deliver the "latest and greatest," by limiting new capabilities to Google software and not making them available to any app developers.
I encounter that too. I started writing Self code in a text editor and loading it in the REPL. Some of the code shipped with Self is like this (The Mango parser code for example).

Once I was more familiar I started learning the GUI environment. It took me a while to work out how the object transporter worked to export code back to text files but once I got that Self became a lot more friendly to use.
FYI Google Ventures participated in 2 of Nest's funding rounds, including leading their series C last year.

I can't say exactly if/how this affects the acquisition but it does feel like some of the money is just traveling in a circle.
from http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/google-just-bought-connecte...

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.
-----
is it just me or is that a non denial?
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Only users who use their real name on G+ are allowed to change the temperature
TCA: Fox Chairman Kevin Reilly Says Network Is Abandoning Pilot Season
Note given appropriate `MyLinqExt.Scan` and `MyLinqExt.Pairwise`, you could write this in C# just as concisely.
Exactly a phone with an S4 pro for $180?!?! A complete rip-off I tell you.
Now you can +1 your temperature!
Reddit, Mozilla, EFF to hold day of protest, activism in memory of Aaron Swartz
It's awesome for the folks at Nest, but the first thought through my head was this : I am so starting a smart lawn sprinkler controller company!
Unsure. I think it's really important that people know the rules _can_ be broken if you think you know better than the compiler.

Thanks. :)
Does that mean you place no value on aesthetics or industrial design of a beautiful device? Don't get me wrong, I agree that it's overpriced, but I do at least place some value on a well-made device.
New Twitter Design?
What should really scare you is the pathetic performance of Android. Apps like chrome and acrobat reader are a joke! Stay with iOS or do as myself and get a Surface 2, it's much better in performance than any Android tablet, including the overrated and buggy Nexus 7 2013.
Rubbish, imo. We can't agree on the why of past crashes, let alone make good predictions about future ones. How can such a prediction ever be proved right or wrong?
Meh. Writing code in pencil was annoying, but I was perfectly well able to finish all the exam questions in the allotted time, despite having the world's worst handwriting, and not having actually taken the course.
Organising a massive photo collection
Do you use more or less energy than your friends in your circles? Gamification?

For a couple decades demand shedding devices have been offered for A/C and electric water heaters where you get a microscopic credit to your bill and the electric co can use a stereotypically totally rube goldberg contraption (remember, these systems have been around for decades) to remotely shed some peak load for a couple hours at a time. I could see something like $5 credit on google play or free google music streaming if you sign up for a load shedding program that uses the nest. And occasionally your thermostat drops by 5 degrees for a couple hours even when it "shouldn't".
I'm not too familiar with the turmoil of internal Wikipedia politics; how/what sort of content is irreversibly destroyed given that Wikipedia pages have public versioning/history?
Number of Japanese trans-men in the 100-meter olympic dash: 0. I think I need a million-dollar grant to raise awareness of this issue.
Do you think Google doesn't already know who is in the "frozen North"? How could knowing how long your furnace runs add any value, at all, for you as an advertising target, if we must always go with that utterly simplistic analysis?

Further people keep repeatedly claiming that the Nest device has some sort of presence detection. To my knowledge it has no such thing -- it simply allows you to program it by daily overrides instead of actively turning it on or off. Though of course many people eventually just end up setting it to a static temperature.

There is no amazing in-house intelligence gathering platform here.
It just means that the privacy policy will be revised.
What People Ought To Know About a Struggling Startup
It's an attempt to get in on the internet of things, which is predicted to be the next megatrend.
That had to have been a big headache for them: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/12/2942861/nest-answers-paten...
Well the Google services are the "Core" services that you care about. Email, Browser, Google Now (all of the alert/notifications piece etc) Maps etc. So on an Android device once a month it seems like one of your major core apps is getting a meaningful overhaul. vs the Apple model where once a year or so you get a deluge of new goodies. And naturally other apps are always updating.
Yep. Think of it as 3.2 instagrams.
Realistically Nest is a luxury product and the rest is just rationalization. But luxury gadgets is a legitimate market.
Exactly, and of course this leads me to wondering about computer architectures that "require" unsafe things in their kernels, versus things like Multics where the OS and hardware co-operated at some level to make things safe. Lots of interesting questions.
Excellent high-quality analysis. Not having a solid grasp of marginal costs is unfortunately quite a common affliction of many startups. I would go so far as to say having a good grasp is a source of strategic advantage. That is to say, if you can deliver the same service at significantly less that your competition, then you increase the chances of owning the market. Ask Walmart.

And I completely agree with your analysis of personnel costs. It was bloated. In this day and age, with fractional cost labor, it was unforgivable.
"I think this analysis is flawed."

I didn't see much in the way of analysis, just raw data and some highlights.
Let's hope you're being ironic :)
> You know that the idea for Uber came from the founder's experience trying to get a taxi in Paris, right?

Actually that link says the complete opposite. It says that while in Paris, the founder were talking about their (bad) experience of getting a taxi in San Francisco.

> Garrett Camp and I were hanging out in Paris for a week at Loic and Geraldine LeMeur’s LeWeb conference. Amongst the amazing food, the copious amounts of wine and inevitable nightlife crawls there were all kinds of discussions about what’s next. Garrett had sold StumbleUpon to Ebay and had been doing “hard time” at a big company. I had just completed my tour with Akamai after selling Red Swoosh to them in 2007.
>
> Jamming on ideas, rapping on what’s next is what entrepreneurs do. Garrett and I would get some good music, good drinks and jam until 5am. Garrett’s big idea was cracking the horrible taxi problem in San Francisco — getting stranded on the streets of San Francisco is familiar territory for any San Franciscan.
It would make it really easy for the DEA to figure out who the home pot growers are. Yeah you can look at utility bills in isolation but that generates a lot of false positives: people might just like to keep their house cold or warm (depending on the climate).

But once you correlate house size (via the property appraiser's website, public records) with house temperate (which the NSA gets from Google and supplies to the DEA) and electricity usage (utility companies roll right over for these requests) it'll be much easier to put together a pool of target-rich "suspects" who need to be "investigated" to generate probable cause.

Just one of the ways the data rich future just might subjugate us all!
Yep. Here's the ad sales page which goes through all the various options, including showing ads on the pause screen and including ads when you delete a show and in the menu that lists your episodes of a show. It's gross.

http://www.tivo.com/tivoadvertising/

(Your ad blocker may stop that page from working properly.)
For the lazy:

$ echo "alias o='xdg-open'" >> ~/.bashrc
is it just me or is that a non denial?

Is it ever. The new owners of Nest can just roll out updates to every Nest app that require an agreement to a new TOS. I expect to see it within 18 months.

Shame too, I was already on the fence about buying a Nest, I guess I've got a new microcontroler project to work on.
? Only if you're incapable of telling the difference between commas and periods, I suppose.
I would hope that on Hacker News it could be recognized that computer science has a bit of a higher position in society than the 100-meter Olympic dash.

Not to mention the relative sample sizes involved, or the methods by which quality is determined.

Basically, this comparison is nonsensical.
the parent comment was sarcasm.

I immediately thought 'google will tie this into your google phone for you. That could be pretty nice.'
I must still be old school at age 33. Anything less then a suit and tie is unacceptable.
pspb is clearly making an ill-advised attempt at sarcasm.
Integration with Google Now would seem like the logical next step.
Imagine how much worse it was when it was in C++! ;)
I don't think that a 24/7 network connection of a customer that just paid $249 for a thermostat is that much of an monetization issue for a company like Google. (for comparison: more than 1 billion Android devices are currently connected to their servers 24/7/365)
Funnily, I see at being closer to Scala than either C++ or Java. I think it all comes down to background.

The official tutorial isn't very good on issues of memory management. The first mention of managed references (I assume that means GCed) is in an example in section 11. Nowhere does it actually explain what managed means (and if I missed it, I blame the tutorial for not making it explicit enough!)
I think the added transparency in Fobo's pricing is a great feature.

Ebay's recent change to a flat-rate system was horrible for occasional sellers. Until late 2012 or early 2013, the fee for computers and tablets was only 4% fee, making a total of 7% after Paypal.

What some don't realize is that these rates are still available--for $16/month. When selling a computer or tablet for anything over $270, it's actually less costly to pay for an Ebay Store account for a month and pay a total fee of 7% + $16 rather than 13%. It's an easy option, but it's not at all obvious to those who aren't in-the-know. I'd be curious to know how many people sell computers on Ebay for >$1000 and pay the full 10% fee--I would expect it's a small number.

So if you weren't familiar with Ebay but a friend gave you the tip to sell your $1000 computer with an Ebay Store, you'd end up with $64 more dollars from your sale than you would with Fobo--$914 instead of $850.

I appreciate that Fobo makes understanding costs easier, but that's not very helpful when those easy-to-understand costs are still higher than the extortionate, only-paid-by-those-who-didn't-read-their-selling-options costs from Ebay. I think a more competitive pricing strategy would reflect the true base price on eBay, plus a small premium for the convenience of not having to research it.

Perhaps there's justification for that level of a premium, and Ebay's choice to horribly obfuscate pricing has made it seem even more reasonable to those who aren't familiar with Ebay's pricing. However, I still don't think that makes Fobo particularly cost-competitive or a particularly good value unless the service can bring a huge audience to the auction.
PNG is practically made for gradients. I can't find the file, but there's an image of every single color that PNG can support in the full opacity range, and the whole file was like 32k after pngcrush.

If I understand correctly, this tool is basically intelligently selecting a palette (which was a historically supported feature of the PNG format) and then using that on the image. Has anyone tested to see if pngcrush can shrink the filesize even further?

To the creator: have you considered supporting more than an 8-bit palette? Like, a 2-bit palette or other that happens to be better for this particular image?
"To change the temperature of your master bedroom, please create a google+ account."
Politics, bureaucracy, mismanagement-- this policy has been a failure.

Time to join the 21st century and push for universal healthcare.
Yeah, and like Android and Youtube. Sarcasm aside, Google has actually done pretty well with acquisitions compared to other companies. (Say ones that begin with "M" or "Y").

You can see the list in wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
I thought "Good for the Nest gu...HOLY CRAP GOOGLE PAID $3.2 BILLION FOR A THERMOSTAT COMPANY"