skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently "dirty" power is a major trigger for the wired Nest Protect's false alarms. It's not surprising that your vacuum cleaner was enough to trigger this.

CloudFlare's CEO was ranting about his ~daily false alarms about 6 months ago: "dirty power common on PG&E SF causes small blips in light emitter. Nest interprets as smoke."

More detail here: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40eastdakota%20nest&src=typd
You don't get a second chance with a product like this.
Prophesied the death of a new Google product is becoming this generations equivalent of "First Post". :)
You are going to build your own smoke and fire detector and "do it right"?
Thank you, this is very helpful, thank you for the reading suggestion.

- The shares will be granted and fully vest at the same time, only if/when the business closes the VC round.

- Shares are for _past_ work. Yes, no need for them to vest over a period of time. That's what I was trying to convey by 'vested'. What's the best way to express the same and not leave room for doubt?

I simply do not have the option of getting shares now. The condition is clear, if/when the VC round closes. This is what I’m getting in writing: 1% post-money vested at the time of issue. Since I can’t get shares now, is there anything I can do to be protected against the scenario you described?
Yup. Similar to the mobile html5 app I am rescuing that ran smoothly in chrome om the developers desktops with 16 gb of ram and core i7 and what not but the complex animations are shockingly less smooth on the iPad 2. Weird
> have someone locked up based pretty much exclusively on them saying "You won't understand why, but he did really bad stuff. Trust us."

At best that might extend to his initial arrest but not to his subsequent imprisonment. That was the result of a criminal trial that showed he violated the EEA. Which was subsequently overturned on appeal, but only because of a "technicality" in the phrasing of the law which has subsequently been clarified to explicitly and unreservedly criminalize the actions that he took.
On the flip side, anyone who's in the social sciences can tell you that self-reporting is a terrible gauge.
Predicting Test Failures
I don't think it's just Nests, I bought a First Alert smoke alarm a year ago and it just recently started giving me random false alarms. Battery is fine but something is setting it off (not fire or smoke, and yes it has both atomic and photoelectric sensors). I went searching for a good smoke alarm without lots of false alarm complaints and unfortunately every smoke alarm on Amazon has complaints about false alarms.

I think in recent years manufacturers have become paranoid about missing an alarm and being sued so they probably default to fire the alarm if there's absolutely any potential reason, real or imagined, that a fire might be occuring.
I have now, but I don't expect it to be fixed.
I was coming to add this exact thought! A solution like the umbrella could be activated and easily deactivated at will, since it's a physical object that could change positions.

The other solutions, such as putting chemicals into the sky or sea, cannot be reversed. Better hope they work correctly the first time!
That's some harsh language directed at his coworkers...
That's not the point he was getting at.

Most people have no idea what VCS is. To a lay person, "a so called 'mercurial repository'" would sound far less sinister than "a so called 'subversion repository'". The reality is that the repo probably had little to do with subverting anything, and was just a convenient way to transfer code.

I have to admit, that line made me chuckle.
Comment-types I find odd in this thread (given this is HN):

1) People that only use one browser.

2) People that use Chrome over Chromium.

3) People that do not have one browser with js disabled.

4) People that have flash installed (there is some overlap with #1 here because Chrome bundles flash).

Everybody here should know better, IMO.
I concur regarding the film. It almost has an atmosphere of a dystopian sci-fi. Can't say whether that reflects poorly or not on the early stages of the IoT.
I like the design of the website and the concept of the app sounds great.

My only real criticism is I feel like the "what is glitchi" tab should give a better description of what glitchi is. Once I scrolled through the "how it works" tab I understood more fully, but was mildly annoyed at first that I didn't know what your app did right away.
Reminder: I need more sleep (and so do you)
Late night runs to a place called Taco John? Sounds like a post-alcohol food run. Maybe start there with the food waste issue :).
Why does a gizmodo writer only uses one browser? Anyway, is he sure he isn't installing a lot of addins? I don't have these problems. I think Chrome works well.
Simple and Efficient Purely Function Queues and Deques (1995) [pdf]
See also Emily Howell which is something else entirely.
Actually mine just runs on batteries. I think they have an optical sensor which can be triggered by dust. I was told by support that they used to recommend blowing the debris out, but it wasn't good for customer confidence.
There's an interesting (and impassioned) critique of this article at

http://www.angrymath.com/2015/02/yitang-zhang-article-in-new...
Free+H.264+Codec+Download+for+Playback
In my experience the first client has often come to me -- this is because I've always made interesting things on the web that attract attention.

The easiest sale to make, particularly if you lack sales skills and experience, is to have the fish jump into the pan for you. The trouble is that this doesn't happen enough to be sustainable.

When you have a mature sales process you have a process that is repeatable; you can write a playbook and hand it to a junior salesperson and they can do a lot of the work for you.

It can be a long way to go to get to that place so then you are doing "business development" which is an entirely different ball of wax.

The first sale is always diffealways come to me
> However if you remove the 7, then the number is divisible by 2, so the statement: "A prime from which you can remove numbers and still have a prime is a deletable prime" does not apply to 1987.

A deletable prime doesn't require that the deletion order start from the last digit; the deletion order for 1987 is:

1987 -> 197 -> either 19 or 17
Fun for interview questions: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok/blob/gh-pages/examples/str...
I might add that never alerting my phone was the worst thing simply because it was the only reason to buy a Protect. A regular smoke detector continues to detect smoke just fine.
"If Nest Protect detects emergency levels of smoke, it will sound an alarm that can’t be hushed, by regulation."

https://nest.com/support/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-...

(Yes, I know the smoke detection was a malfunction, but occasional malfunctions like that are a fact of life. My ire is directed at regulators forbidding users from silencing their own smoke detectors without physically incapacitating them -- what were they thinking!?)
I think it's an uncanny valley thing. When your computer says "Compiler Error 42", it's acting like a machine, which is fine. When it starts saying "Emergency: this alarm can't be hushed here," then it starts getting human.

I realize the Nest announcer might be a better GlaDOS than GlaDOS. (But not a better HAL than HAL.)
Nobody mentioning the fact that he works for Google which owns Nest?
> he chose tedious infrastructure code instead, to get a sense of what non-proprietary libraries that were used

That is a generous speculation regarding his motives. As GS notes in their response to Vanity Fair, "While some of those files included open source software, the Court determined that 'a substantially greater number of the uploaded files contained proprietary code.'" (emphasis mine)

But as far as whether what he did violated the spirit, and now letter of the law we have a conclusive answer direct from Congress: Yes, he did.
The problem is if you have too many false alarms people will rip the smoke detector down and disable it. There's a fine balance.
It can be hushed if you stuff it into a cooler, apparently.
Proposal for cryptographically secure opt-out from Firefox add-on DRM
This type of project requires a great deal of energy. Theoretically, increased utilization of our current energy sources might make these problems worse.
Where did you get "smoke and fire detector" from "rolling my own automation"? But I can just buy an off-the-shelf detector that actually gets its primary purpose right and hook into that.
As per twitter discussion problem seems to be with insufficiently filtered input power: https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/566075097568391168
Can't they just expose the parser as a library? Actually, it looks like they did, with the rustc crate.

Hand-writing a parser for some other language leads to madness - just ask the folks who've done SWIG, GDB, or most IDE syntax-checkers. You'll inevitably get some corner-cases wrong, or the language definition will change underneath you long after you've ceased to maintain the tool. Instead, the language should just expose its compiler front-end as a library, and then you can either serialize the AST to some common format for analysis outside the language or build your tools directly on top of that library.
Quota and Product Hunt are alternatives to LinkedIn?
These look amazing! Keep up the awesome work! I love CSS icons.
You might want to look through e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_re...
It's exactly like HAL, calmly telling the human that the thing they want to do is forbidden, without explaining why, how to seek an exemption, or what they should do next.
Finally I'll be able to call my car from my watch!
One notable change in today's market: Samsung flash memory cards are available at retail now under their own name.
Because Java is a language developed by adults.

Over the long term the Java team has been making hard decisions and doing the right thing. Some guys wrote a paper about how the Java memory model was bogus and not right for multithreaded programming and they fixed it. C++ got around to this ten years later. Thanks to the global interpreter lock and lots of old GNU libraries that will never be treadsafe you can't do anything with threads in Python, Ruby, Javascript or other common interpreted languages.

The JVM team sees many tough challenges ahead and they are doing the hard work to make real solutions.

The strength of the JVM is so great that it is the ideal target for languages like Scala and Clojure and Groovy so if you can't stand Java syntax you have great alternatives -- and you still have access to all the amazing open source libraries that exist in Java, including the ability to plug into and interoperate with anything on the planet.
"Can't be hushed here"

I've never used Nest Protect so I was curious about this. Why is it location-dependent? The Nest site has some info[0]:

Hushing works differently during an emergency. If Nest Protect detects emergency levels of smoke, it will sound an alarm that can’t be hushed, by regulation. However, you can hush the other Nest Protects in the house by pressing the button on the Nest Protect that detected the problem. So, when you press the Nest button on the Nest Protect in the bedroom, it will continue to alarm, but the Nest Protect in the living room will quiet down. We designed Nest Protect to hush this way so you can more easily communicate with other people in the house during an emergency while still being able to locate and address the source of the problem.

0: https://nest.com/support/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-...
As a matter of fact, I created a really simple react yeoman generator[0]. All other generators are pretty bloated with lots of stuff. Maybe that's ok for new applications, but I was just trying to learn react and they all were heavily bloated.

[0] https://github.com/luisrudge/generator-simple-react-browseri...
Could you perhaps explain what you found interesting? It's an angry screed very revealing of its author's personality, but not particularly insightful about the article.
They were thinking about protecting human life.

For example, people with cheapskate landlords who would be happy to leave a nonfunctional smoke detector that was muted installed rather than spend $20.
Isn't these days there's a lot of hype in programming languages (no matter what they are)?

I mean, people hyping Erlang and mentioned WhatsApp a lot but never actually bothered to check that Rick Reed is just plain smart and have strong theoretical knowledge and lots of practical experience in System level work (he did C++, as you mentioned, while working for Yahoo)?

Also, nobody knew how smart and knowledgeable the WhatsApp team w.r.t to full-stack (like literally Full-stack, FreeBSD kernel/driver, Storage knowledge, Networking stack/low-level code, up to Erlang VM tweaks/patches/fixes).

Facebook, on the other hand, had to re-write their Messenger to C++ due to "lack of Erlang expertise". Somehow that recruiting aspect of the argument is lost somewhere in my book...Facebook couldn't possibly failed to attract smart Erlang developers.

Whenever I see people using Ruby or Python writing just CRUD web-apps but getting praised as better programmers than their Java counter-part seems a bit sad/unfortunate to me.

Java does have tons of programmers ranging from incompetent up to very competent (http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html, lots of infrastructure component being written in Java: Hadoop, Cassandra, to name a view, Martin Fowler wrote the seminal Enterprise Application Architecture that most web-apps implement, LinkedIN build lots of infrastructure tools, NetFlix too).

I don't know...
I purchased a Nest thermostat and installed it as per the instructions. Set it to 69°F before going to sleep. I awoke at 3AM with the temperature at 83°F and no way to turn it off.

I had to rip it from the wall. It was one of the most frustrating technology experiences I've had in years, and I'll have to see something REALLY compelling if I'm ever to try home automation again.
To go off on a tangent, I (and I believe I'm not alone in this) have always been annoyed at date/time handling... the leading 0 in the date of the article made me consider yetanotherdateformat.

3 parts:

'left' delimiter 'right' (delimiter not allowed in 'left' or 'right')

'left' is machine readable date format in descending order of precedence e.g. ...000CCYYMMDD-hh:mm:ss.... in UTC.

'right' is 'Human and/or machine readable date format' - which is dependent on locale, and contains the fabulous mess we already have.

And the 'left' and 'right' parts should validate/reconcile each other, and if they don't - you go to 'hell'/'a re-education cent[er|re]' via a road paved with NAND gates or something.

The point being it should sort properly, resulting in a kind of lame yet highly useful self contained static hash table.

It's not preferred solution, but at least a step in the right direction in cleaning up the existing mess...?

I also acknowledge we could still end up at the equivalent of https://xkcd.com/927

Sorry for the ramble, maybe this is the final part of relieving stress from the fixing Y2K issues in COBOL and fighting with MM/DD parts of dates auto-magically swapping in early versions of Microsoft Office products... mumble, order of precedence... the USA is not the Cosmos ... mumble
Also, given their hiring practices which include aggressive recruiting of people in autonomous vehicles, this car, or later versions of it is going to have significant autonomy. I say this would be a GREAT step for Apple.
I have used that as a feature before applying to a job. I went to the profile of every employee of that firm, before sending my application.

My hope was that my name and face would seem familiar to the people interviewing me. I don't know if it paid off, but I ended up getting the job.
That's the point of his disclaimer:

> "Disclaimer: I am a Google employee. I paid for these myself. So I speak as myself.﻿"
There's a reason that smoke detectors operate the way they do. That reason is that people die when they don't.

The issue I have with the Nest smoke detector is that it is sold as a luxury consumer product. That puts it in the class of "the customer is always right" sales. The Venn diagram of that and things that are designed to save people's lives regardless of their tendency to statistically evaluate the risks and rewards of rare but deadly events inaccurately is disjoint.

If Nest did not comply with the regulations, they could not market their product as a smoke alarm.
Calling All Innovators: Apply to Serve as a Presidential Innovation Fellow
"Goldman could be lying, but so could the shop owner who claims you drove off without paying for your gasoline."

Indeed, but the difference is that the FBI (or police) will arrest whomever Goldman tells them to while completely ignoring the shopkeeper's complaints, possibly even going as far as to tell them not to waste their time.
He was asked in an interview not too long ago if he'd recommend to Apple that they get into the car business, and he said, "Yes, they should!" Odd response if he's expecting competition. I think an acquisition is much more likely, and it would also fall under the explanation of "we need a ton of money". I.e. we agreed to get bought by Apple because of their massive cash engine and operational expertise.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/1df875df-fb0c-4020-be...
HAL explains why: "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
You should ask him to get in touch. If something's broken, we want to know about it.
Usually the culprit for lots of false alarms is an ionizing in the kitchen and poor placement.
Or if you have it installed in your master bedroom, with an en-suite bathroom and a steamy shower. Nothing like having all your smoke alarms go off when you're in the shower! We contacted Nest. Their basic response: "Move the Nest Protect further away from the shower." Or, take the stupid thing off the ceiling and switch back to the previous smoke detector, which would detect smoke but was not fooled by water vapor.

Nest had marketed the device as a smoke alarm that you could silence -- because it would have a period where it would warn you that something was wrong before it triggered the alarm, and it would be possible to manually silence it -- but in my direct experience this period never happened. The Protects always went straight from "normal" to "ALARM" without any warning period. Of course the Protect unit in my kitchen never actually detected kitchen smoke, even when I once burned some food quite severely.

I also had a negative experience with the Nest thermostat. I'm still not sure if I had it wired wrong -- I don't believe so, because I had previously installed cheap-o Honeywell thermostats that worked flawlessly -- but one late spring night I turned on the air conditioner to lower the temperature a few degrees, and then went to bed.

I woke up a few hours later, drenched in sweat. Somehow the unit had commanded "EMER HEAT" on my heat pump instead of air conditioning. My bedroom was 91 degrees Fahrenheit! The target temp was 70F, which the unit was never reaching. But it wasn't smart enough to realize "Hey, my actions are just making the temperature INCREASE, I should stop and flag an error." Nest's response: "that's funny, it shouldn't have done that". I took the things off the wall the next day.

I am now very wary of "smart home" technology. I can't imagine the experience that a non-technically inclined user has...
It's a post critical of his employers product, and he clearly mentions he's part of Google -- what is there to mention?
I was a huge fan of the IDEA of the Nest Protect. The reality? Not so big a fan. I think they oversold it. It's still better than my old smoke detector in that the pre-alarm warning is fairly gentle, but I'm still getting on a chair to tap the "shut up" button. Wave-to-turn-off never worked for me even before they disabled it.

My brother bought one, while I was still in the honeymoon period of mine. His false alarmed constantly, and has since been removed.
Actually, people die when they incapacitate their smoke detectors because of false alarms that can't be silenced any other way.

Citation: http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/fire-saf... which says that 60% of people who died in a housefire were in a building that had no operating smoke alarms. A few more quotes:

"Surprisingly, the death rate was much higher in fires in which a smoke alarm was present but did not operate than it was in home fires with no smoke alarms at all."

"Smoke alarm failures usually result from missing, disconnected, or dead batteries. People are most likely to remove or disconnect batteries because of nuisance activations."
I think Tesla has already done a great job of making electric cars cool. They've gone from being dismissed as golf carts for kooks and granola-eaters to being derided as overpowered playthings for the rich. That's a huge change!
I'm on a Mac. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it was sacrificing my battery life on the altar of convenience.
An interview with VJ Satoshi: rendering 50,000 particles with Vuo
About 10% of the US has oil or propane heat, both of which require a tank. Where I live in the Northeast it is about 30%. I've never had to pay to have a tank installed, but the tank itself costs around $500.

I think if it were actually useful, it might happen. Fleets do it. But its clearly a choice, you can effectively work getting gas into whatever errands you are doing without much of a delay; and it doesn't need to be integrated into the facility you are going to. Having a gas station on the same road as a major shopping center or on the way to work is the norm where I live. Having some limited number of electric chargers at work is not.
The first thing a client will ask is "Can we have a minimum delay".
Rust goes a lot farther than academic languages that used regions like Cyclone or the ML Kit. In particular, Rust's regions are only used to enforce stack discipline, and the basic memory management is taken from C++. This way, we avoid the well-known limitations of "classical" region-based memory management.

Besides, consider the fact that we've written hundreds of thousands of code for working, non-toy projects in the language, including the Rust compiler, crates.io, Servo, etc.
Is there a link to the regulation that requires this? I was under the impression that most states require a hush/silence button on new smoke alarms. False alarms are inevitable and a hush button reduces the temptation to permanently disable the device.
Firefox on my PC seems to disagree with you. Try to use any site with a Flash video player since some of the recent updates and you're very likely to see a hang. I don't know whether the cause is Firefox or Flash, but the end result is still taking out the entire browser session, not just the tab with the Flash video.
Are Airbnb and Uber creating a new black economy?
I was thinking the same, the blogger appears to have a lot of things he's upset about and is taking them out on the article.
Ideas are Opportunities
Apple's domain expertise is design, supply chain management, and managing third party construction and assembly.
Nest pretty much says that you and I were doing it wrong.

It worked just fine for heat -- although I later found out that every time it turned on my heat pump it was activating the emergency heat. I tried finding a way to get the unit to be okay with ramping up the temperature over a longer period of time, but that setting was not exposed in their UI. All I wanted was to say "I don't really care what temperature the house is while I'm gone so long as it never goes below 55F or above 80F, but I want you to make sure that when I arrive home at 6PM the temperature has reached the point I set". But...alas, the unit never figured that out. The "learning mode" never actually did anything, no matter what I tried.

Fortunately I was able to get a full refund on the devices from Amazon.
Obsolete Software