We're hearing about troubles at Nest
businessinsider.com
We're hearing about troubles at Nest
1–10 of 267 posts
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#2I remember when Nest hired a VP of security after I reported 768-bit DHE on one of their servers to Google security.
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#3I bought a Nest thermostat and I've been extremely unimpressed with it. It's not just the bugs that will have you wake up in the middle of the night in a freezing home. Even when it works as intended, the product is poorly thought out.
- Instead of trying to learn when to apply heat and when not to, which depends on many contextual factors, it seems to be targeting learning a calendar. A calendar does not fully capture the knowledge about your schedule that a thermostat could gain.
- It would be trivial for the thermostat to figure out if your phone is connected to your home network, indicating that you might be home and don't want to be cold. AFAIK, it doesn't bother doing that. I live on a different floor from my thermostat, and thus it often concludes that I'm away.
I don't get it... Google clearly has more than enough in house talent to get those things right. Why aren't they? Why don't they seem to care?
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#4The past few days when I walk by my nest thermostat in the morning I've seen an error saying that it isn't connected to my wireless network. When in fact it is connected, and can be reached through the nest app on my phone.
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#5I bought a Nest thermostat and I've been extremely unimpressed with it. It's not just the bugs that will have you wake up in the middle of the night in a freezing home. Even when it works as intended, the product is poorly thought out. - Instead of trying to learn when to apply heat and when not to, which depends on many contextual factors, it seems to be targeting learning a calendar. A calendar does not fully captu…
I've started using IFTTT to work around some of this. For example, I have it set home/away based on an IFTTT geofence.
Unfortunately, IFTTT doesn't do home/away yet, but you can write your own trivial "app" to do it simply by registering as a dev and using the Maker channel in IFTTT.
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#6> Three former Nest employees independently brought up this same anecdote when describing how Nest had an internal culture where it was "always crunch time" because of unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure.
Oh man, that sounds familiar...
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#7I have Nest thermostat and a Nest camera. Thermostat is in the hallway and regularly thinks nobody is home. Camera knows I'm home because of movement (or I should be able to show it how to tell). But the Camera doesn't talk to the thermostat.
You create a dependency when devices connect to the Internet and you may give up some privacy. In return I assume you'd get some intelligence and integration.
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#8I have a nest and it is a real piece of shit. I usually don't curse on HN but I can barely contain my hate for this product.
My absolutely ugly, crappy old thermostat with a needle on it works WAY better than the nest (thankfully we have it upstairs where we sleep). When it's cold, we turn that needle up, and we get warm.
With the nest, which is downstairs, when we're cold, we turn the nest up, we get weird "+2 hour" things, and nothing happens. The heater doesn't come on, we're freezing and the thing has a mind of its own. I have taken photos where I've set the thermostat at 90 degrees, the room is at about 60 degrees, and the Nest hasn't turned the heating unit on.
This is a the worst kind of sin of user experience, when a user feels like the machine controls them, and not the other way round.
As big a nerd as I am, and loved that the Nest shook up the thermostat industry, I absolutely regret buying a Nest. I wanted to love this product, but it fails spectacularly at the ONE thing it's supposed to do, which is to let us set a comfortable temperature for our house.
Because of this experience, I absolutely avoid their smoke detectors (I was ready to buy three of them before buying the thermostat). I've told family and friends to stay away as well.
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#9> Three former Nest employees independently brought up this same anecdote when describing how Nest had an internal culture where it was "always crunch time" because of unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure. Oh man, that sounds familiar...
"unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure" describes basically our entire industry....not to imply that we should accept this as the "norm"...but kinda funny the way they put it.
Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest
#10I have Nest thermostat and a Nest camera. Thermostat is in the hallway and regularly thinks nobody is home. Camera knows I'm home because of movement (or I should be able to show it how to tell). But the Camera doesn't talk to the thermostat. You create a dependency when devices connect to the Internet and you may give up some privacy. In return I assume you'd get some intelligence and integration.
My #1 issue my Nest is that my house is always freezing in the winter because it always thinks I'm not home as I might be home but not necessarily walk in front of the thermostat routinely. Hence it switches to "Auto Away" mode.
It would be nice if the Nest app I had on my phone could identify that I'm home (i.e. am I connected to my home WiFi network, or check my location via GPS) and then communicate that to my thermostat.