skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's the job of the buyer (the gov in this case to find out what is reasonable). Companies, just like individuals, should be able to bid whatever they like. If you are looking to have software built and one person quotes $200/hr and someone else quotes $75/hr, you can't go saying $200/hr is unreasonable. The developers can quote whatever they think their time is worth, it doesn't mean you use that particular developer/provider.
> It obviously has some impact somewhere, otherwise nobody would lose time creating it.

Its impact is in the government's ability to rule people by fear, once they decide to flip the switch of outright totalitarianism. That's the real purpose of the all-encompassing surveillance. It's not about catching "terrorists", it's about keeping the general populace in check.
Jumpers and the Software-Defined Localhost
That is actually a very good point. With all the lamenting of Google Reader sunsetting, positive externalities are ignored. And they are plentiful: multiple startups have springed up to compete for new audience, established companies like Feedly have experienced an influx of users and the landscape generally became much more competitive.
Google Says It Will Buy Nest Labs For $3.2B
(GC<T> still uses @ internally; i.e. it's reference counting and not garbage collection too. This will be fixed.)
If your basis for arguing is cost, then you're not making a very good argument. The American system costs roughly twice what other civilized nations pay for health care per capita, and we have around 15% of the country not covered at all. Per capita cost is about 2.5 times that of Finland, and about twice that of Finland as a percentage of GDP. See charts here:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how...

The "choice" argument is also suspect, on a deep level. Americans are often trapped in jobs they hate, for fear of losing their health insurance if they quit or take another job. Worse, it hampers small businesses, that find it nearly impossible to provide insurance for their employees. Meanwhile, employees have little or no choice about the insurance plans they get.

The current American system is an expensive, incompetent failure. The ACA was designed to try to fix some of the gross problems (lack of coverage for 15% of the population, mostly), but protect the core design of employer-provided private insurance. That's why the software failed. It's incredibly complex, and that complexity drives costs.
I fear Google+ integration coming soon.
I didn't quite read a lot of skepticism about it being "eventually profitable". Rather there was more hand-waving about "not being a $100M - $1B" business, which is something else altogether.
(Sort of depressing IMHO; does every new web business need to be Facebook-scale these days to be worthwhile?)
I don't know if you have these in the US but there are social enterprise programmes in the UK.

One example would be training for people who have been out of work for more than 6 months. The training os how to dress and wrote a resume and apply for jobs.

These are put out to tender.

There are companies that are very good at making a bid and giving the presentation and winning the contract. But then their expertise drops away and they are hopeless and actually providing the scheme they just got awarded.

You comment made me think that a decent spreadsheet could optimise a companies ability to make the perfect bid. You then either sell that software or win lots of bids.
Also, Slate is extremely flexible: https://github.com/jigish/slate/blob/master/README.md
Dev Done Wrong - An Interview With Gabriel Hurley
"Embryonic breathing" is a specific term badly translated from a Chinese technical jargon.

I'm sure you mean well in educating people about scientific facts, but we're not discussing anything in the scientific literature.
Haha remove bureaucracy when universal healthcare would be a bigger project. I doubt it.
For now.

I think about the Flip Video -- a reasonably-priced, small video recorder that could capture up to 2 hours of HD video. It was purchased by Cisco in 2009, and the product line was killed 23 months later. This was before a large number of consumers had quality smartphone cameras.

Google had a good reason to drop $3.2B on Nest. Providing useful products that consumers love is not it.
This is some pretty interesting stuff. I've been working on something similar in my spare time. The cost of running everything through a proxy can be mitigated by having the proxy do other smart things like load balancing and/or autoscaling.
I'd NEVER get rid of my old Bytes, Creative Computing and Dr Dobbs. That's MY youth. Spending time at The Computer Store in Bryn Mawr, PA playing with their Processor Technology SOL-20 and wishing I could afford one.

I still play with a SOL-20 emulator sometimes.
Other "internet of things", "quantified life" or whatever failed buzzword you want to call it, has similar or identical EULA. The only thing they take seriously is astroturfing to reduce the blowback from this policy.

Serious? Serious money. 3.5 billion? insane.
One thing I wish I had called out more clearly in my post ("See it in action") was the fact that the "feature" would re-enable itself after every update of the extension, which seemed to be quite frequently.

It's a shame; it really was a feature-packed, helpful extension.
A new decentralized system for funding scientific research
"Technically they could have, but do they have any history of doing that?"

Before they started giving Windows releases cute names, Microsoft used to have version numbers like "Windows 3.1", "Windows NT 3.51", etc.
Hm. I thought that talking about building ARC and discussing its implementation was something cool that directly addresses it. What would you like to see?
Not just GDP but also nation-altering events such as warfare. I recommend "A Distant Mirror" by Barbara Tuchman if you haven't already read it, as it's a wonderful book (medieval history, but it still applies here).

Tuchman mentions our modern bewilderment at the insanely rash and reactionary decisions that were often taken by nobility in those times - declarations of war, terrible combat strategy and so forth, and which affected so many lives (mostly those of the poor). She goes on to speculate that these decisions make sense in the context of near-permanent drunkenness.
The problem here isn't with "government," but with the failed ERP-style methodology of development that federal and local governments, along with very large corporations use to develop technology. Hewlett Packard, Hershey, along with a string of other large corporations have lost billions in value from these kinds of integrations. Hershey even missed Halloween one year because of a failed integration.

And while Silicon Valley and the startup community has largely moved away from this methodology, large bureaucracies, ever afraid of risk, seem drawn to them. But as far as I can tell, this idea that "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" is a function of marketing, not of a track record of success (IBM's latest for the feds: http://sam.gov. $171 Million).

What we can do to solve this problem isn't to scoff and laugh at government. While some want larger or smaller government, we all should want it to do what it is doing affordably.

The opportunity for smart technologists to take on the idea of working with government commercially is the next step in the Civic Hacking movement. I hope those invited to go to their next hackathon for the city or invited to give their free advice and labor to the city out of a sense of civic duty, begin to ask the question: why are you asking me for stuff for free with one hand, whilst handing out million dollar contracts with the other. How can you fix procurement in a way that allows me to compete for the serious work, so that I can save you from this mess?
The 60 million dollar joke.
I'm sorry but I am imagining the whole article without reading it, and thinking of all the platitudes and assurances about things that they really have no control over... How about an honest acquisition blog post? "We are cashing out. We hope that they won't flush us down the drain. We are part of Google's unstoppable march towards tracking and logging all human activity as we approach the technological singularity, which Google is quickly approaching, if the NSA do not beat them to it." How about something like that for a change?

Edit: Ok, I read it. Yes, it was the blog post I was imagining.
On the face, appears to be a huge valuation for an overpriced thermostat and smoke alarm. But combined with their recent robotic acquisitions I wonder if this signals a move beyond the smart phone, and smart car, to the smart home? If Google engineers want to build the Star Trek computer, surely they want to build the Jetsons home.
> Nest has a realistic potential to be in "every" home if not the actual hardware then the underlying intelligence.

I really don't think so. Many homes haven't even upgraded to a $20 programmable thermostat, let alone a $200 nest.
The target audience of the Nest is someone who leaves their thermostat on the same temperature setting all the time, whose house is empty a significant portion of the time, and who doesn't have the knowledge or desire to buy a manually programmable thermostat. You don't sound like you are in that audience, but that doesn't mean the audience doesn't exist or that the product is foolish.
Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures (SIGGRAPH)
Google acquired Nest for $3.2B
FYI, "In other news ..." is a trope that indicates a sarcastic comment to follow, typically an observation of an obvious consequence of the prior observation. The sarcasm is in that it is presented as non-obvious (i.e. news).
I'm surprised Philip Greenspun is acting so naive here. "If it works, why will it take $90 million to keep it running?" This from a computer scientist? Software is never "done", and maintenance on existing computer systems is quite often far more expensive than the initial development. Do you want it to keep updated with correct information about the various plans that are available? To keep up with new tweaks to the regulations? To address new bugs that come up when it's annual renewal time? To stay secure over time? All of these things require a lot of work. And how about fixing the bugs that still remain? Or improving the system?

Yes, government projects of this sort are inevitably going to cost far more than a startup company, and mistakes will be made. But $90 million out of the federal budget isn't even worth blinking at. The Defense Department spends that much in about an hour and a half.

But if you really want to save money in this area, you should argue for eliminating the exchanges and healthcare.gov altogether. Just sign everyone up for Medicare. Save a few hundred billion over the next few years give or take.
> If your basis for arguing is cost, then you're not making a very good argument.

It's not. It's that any service that's run with money that's just confiscated from other people will be poor quality, because there's no motivation to provide good quality, because you don't actually have customers.

You get to choose between an Android phone or an iPhone, for example. Imagine you were forced to only buy Android phones. Do you think they'd be good quality?
One can object to Google's Plussification of everything, but it's not like the quality of Youtube comments have been harmed. (In fact these XKCD comics may be obsolete now: https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+comments+site%3Axkcd... ) And Youtube overall has done quite well.

Android would have gone nowhere without being acquired, since OEMs and carriers wouldn't talk to such a small company.
Reading and Parsing External Data in R
It would be a fun list. Humidifiers have always annoyed me.
Um, have you seen the thermostat in question? It has a user interface on it. Why wouldn't it support software updates?
Fine, change "100-meter olympic dash" to "professional athlete in the USA". Sample size is sufficient (NBA+NFL+NHL+MLB comprise of 3000+ players), athletes hold a much higher position in society than computer scientists, and quality is easy to determine (# of wins, points, rebounds, interceptions, etc). Number of japanese trans-men in pro-sports in the US: 0, afaik. We need to tackle this issue as a nation, immediately.
cmd option mouse-drag: blockwise selection
Wish I had known that when I was actually in high school. I could probably have passed one or more of the history tests.
Hammerspace: Persistent, Concurrent off-heap Storage
Hardware talent.
"After college, it becomes socially unacceptable to initiate conversation with a person you don't know."

I don't think this is actually true. My girlfriend will chat up basically anyone she meets - she'll talk to the guy making her burrito in Spanish, crack jokes with the checkout cashier, introduce my slam-poet friend to her CFO's teenage daughter who wants to get involved in the arts scene, cold-call alumni from her school asking for career advice, respond to cold-calls from people asking for career advice, and randomly strike up a conversation with a stranger on a street corner. Occasionally it leads to some awkwardness, like on Halloween when she asked the guy behind us if he was Sheldon Cooper for Halloween (he wasn't wearing a costume). But most people are very glad to be treated like a human being and talked to directly.

I think that what happens is there's a selection effect at work. People don't try to maintain a conversation with other people who don't want to be talked to - that's rude. And so if you believe that most people don't want to be talked to, you'll give off "I don't intend to talk" signals, which will ensure that most people don't try to talk to you.
nice idea but ugly sintax :S
Its amazing to me that the second announcement after the acquision is all about how Google won't be privvy to your data.

Seems to me that Google has completely lost control of the narrative.

A few years ago people would be talking about how great this kind of integration would be in their lives, now its just Google+ jokes.
Whoa! I actually like this better than setting vi mode on terminal.
An interesting question is whether Google will keep it a luxury product.
That fails to make the first choice any less arbitrary - the choice was made to line up with existing sea charts - which of course used the Greenwich as 0 - but Greenwich as 0 was an arbitrary choice in the first place - not all arbitrary choices are bad ones, that was the crux of my argument in the first place.
I find it difficult to judge the quality of the database given what we've learned, especially since the initial provisioning was entirely inadequate for any database; about when that article was written it was moved off government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) shared VM infrastructure to 12 dedicated servers.

However, there's absolutely no doubt the contractors weren't familiar with it and its paradigm. A SQL RDBMS, which pretty much everyone is familiar with, would have been a much less risky bet. But the CMS had had success with the XML database, and since they arrogated to themselves the roles of general contractor and system integrator (and in fact were "fired" about the time that article was written), the consulting companies had no choice but to use it.

See my other comment where people are suspecting Accenture might just throw away a lot of the current system and replace it with what they did for California.

EDITED: to make more clear the distinction between the unit of the Federal government CMS and CGI Federal, the fired contractor.
Oh great.

You have set a temperature of 65°F. Share your climate preferences your Google+ circles?
I did make exactly that misreading; sorry!
I would like to know more about this as well.

It sounds like they are all SQL Server instances. However, he made it seem like they are reproducing the schema once per site? I.e., a separate database per site rather than sharding the shared data to multiple hosts per site. Did I hear this right in the question/answer portion?
When do we start getting ads on the Thermostat? Or ads on our browser asking us why we are spending so much time at home?
A large number of Google acquisitions involve Google making a product free that before cost money. </done-defending-google>
You're misinformed.

Nest can hold a set temperature like any other thermostat. It'll do so better than any other thermostat, in fact, by learning the efficiency of your heater and A/C so that it doesn't overshoot your targets, and takes into account whether the thermostat is in direct sunlight part of the day, and airflow in your house.

It can also be told to hold a temperature forever, to hold a threshold forever (cool if it gets above 75, heat if it gets below 60), you can set a detailed schedule manually, you can tell it to hold a temperature until a certain time, or you can tell it to just kick on the fan for the next X minutes without changing the temperature then turn back off.

Turning on/off auto-schedule is one click if you want that feature, like all its other learning features. I've never run into any kind of bug with mine. You can change the temperature it's holding at from your iPhone or desktop from anywhere, along with all its other settings.

http://i.imgur.com/3gRj67L.png

http://i.imgur.com/VNwz1ZF.png
I hate to reply to a reply, but if you'd like an example of saving 10% energy in a really cold area where bills are really high, lets take my sister, a 40hr a week worker where it got down to -30 during the recent cold snap. Now 70 - -30 = 100 degree delta T. Now the simple way to save 10% would be to permanently set the thermostat to 60F. But thats a bit chilly.

So she works 40 hrs a week which works out to 25% of the time. So we can just turn the thermostat down 4 times as far for a quarter the time. So... She leaves for work and the thermostat drops to 70-40=30. Which is unfortunately below freezing so all her plumbing pipes burst. But at least she saved 10% on her heating. Also she owns an indoor cat and at 30F she'd turn into a frozen cat-sicle.

So she pays $300 for a thermostat that can't save her 10% on her bill unless she destroys all her plumbing flooding her house and killing her cat. I'm not seeing this as a great selling point.

So, no, cold parts of the country are precisely the locations where you can't achieve great heating savings because its mathematically impossible because its so cold outside. Maybe a 20000 sq foot mcmansion on the coast in florida, it might work there. But not where its cold.
> Will Nest customer data be shared with Google?

Of course it will. If Google owns Nest, then Nest's data is their data. It doesn't have to be "shared" with them, they bought it.
SSL requires additional CPU resources, and is often coupled with hardware acceleration. All of this equates to higher hosting costs.
well, it's one thing to feel insecure knowing that people know where you are (cellphone/mic/GPS). But if you're attacked/ambushed/blackmailed/kidnapped, you can always fight for yourself, scream to attract attention, etc.

It's another thing to feel insecure knowing that people know when your home is unoccupied. Just wait until the next big data breach happens.

It's especially interesting b/c not only is this a "when are they not home" detector, but the "they" is an indicator for "wealthy enough to afford nice things."
You use the Option type. Option can either be None or Some(T). I think Rust optimizes this to (non)null, so there is very little, if any, overhead compared to the equivelent C++ code.
>imagine if Google's database of Nest info got leaked.

Don't see how the acquisition changed the value of that data. Do you really think Nest has better data security than Google?
Seems like the quintessential dark pattern is to have a "feature" like this enabled by default. Further, I discovered that the feature would re-enable on a regular cadence - perhaps every time the extension was updated.
Full-packet-capture society - and how to avoid it
Speed is of course relative. Interpreted BASIC is faster than working things out by hand. For something critical, Assembly Language was always available.

On a TRS-80 Model 1, compiling means the compiler, the input and the output have to live in 4k of ram (or 16k in the later versions).

Considering that the Level I TinyBasic interpreter lived on a 4kB ROM; Level II lived on a 12kB ROM; and Mass storage for most early machines was audio tape - not only slow but also notoriously prone to not loading files correctly, the compiling code would have been great for masochists, not so good for people who were just trying to get something done.

And that's before considering the complexities of tuning a compiler to optimize code.
If they're being acquired it's now Google's data. So the question "Will Nest customer data be shared with Google?" is asking "Will Google share Google's new customer information with Google?"

The absurdity of the question should answer itself.

There will probably be a new customer agreement once the whole thing is finalized.
> Suppose you're running a car repair shop, but your "customers" are just forced to come to you and pay for your services. Are you motivated to: 1) provide them with good service, 2) keep your costs low, 3) maintain high standards?

Suppose this car repair shop is allowed to keep the true cost of your service a secret - what's an itemized receipt.

Suppose it's not the car's owner that's paying for it, it's an insurance company, but instead of there being a free market of insurance companies, there's only a couple of them, and they're the ones building car repair shops.

Suppose running a car repair shop is surrounded by untold layers of red tape, since if your car dies, you're not allowed to get another one, so few people are able start their own.

Suppose your car has non-standard parts, and you can't simply buy a replacement OEM part that will work.

Suppose your car came from the factory with several design problems it's simply impossible to permanently fix.

Suppose car repair shops had a history of gouging people so badly that the gut-wrenching stories of people dying penniless from cancer caused people to call their congressman such that they demanded a change to the existing car-repair system...

I could go on, but health care isn't car repair.
They sold a million Nests??
You may have noticed the Western world's economies swirling down the toilet, yes? Enjoy it while it lasts. But don't think it's going to "work" for ever.
Jim Beam Being Acquired by Japan's Suntory for $13B
Well I was going to buy one ... forget it. In fact if I had access to VC I'd want to build a competitor. Sure you're competing with Google. But being the second acquisition by someone else is still not a bad bet.
Yes indeed, and many don't realize that C streams are also buffered and can also be tuned:

http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Buffering-...

http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Controllin...

there are also threading issues:

http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Streams-an...

glibc even lets you implement custom streams (FILE* handles that will work with fgets etc. but call your own source and sink to do i/o)
I don't know, it might be nudging you to being oblivious in a different direction. Encapsulation is generally about ignorance, and if you have a robot designing your macro-nutrient intake for you, then you can wind up oblivious to what is actually in your food.
Do other large tech companies not realize what Google's up to, are they unable to try to compete, or do they just not care?