61–70 of 267 posts
I 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"…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me more vulnerable to risk and gives me less control over my life. Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?
You're considering only one dimension. Consider: When you are in a new city, when are you more likely to learn the city inside-out, when you don't have Google Maps, or when you do?
(Disclaimer: I usually don't)
Inevitablities from the Internet of things: Software glitches, personal data sold or served to the government, personal data stolen by a foreign government, hackers that freeze your house or crank up the heater till it breaks, hackers that spy on your kids with the cameras you installed, automated customer support lines. For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me mo…
I 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me more vulnerable to risk and gives me less control over my life. Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?
You're considering only one dimension. Consider: When you are in a new city, when are you more likely to learn the city inside-out, when you don't have Google Maps, or when you do?
Last time I was in DC for a conference in Foggy Bottom I got a recommendation for a pizza shop a few blocks from my hotel. &pizza, not bad.
Next day I went to that general area and browsed around looking for a bar. Because I didn't just look up bars on Yelp I was able to distinguish the character of the places I walked around, like the feel of a neighborhood that primarily houses GWU students, and another that is for unreasonably wealthy urban homeowners.
tl;dr I get what I want from a maps app when I know what I want. If I don't know what I want, I go out and learn by experience.
Inevitablities from the Internet of things: Software glitches, personal data sold or served to the government, personal data stolen by a foreign government, hackers that freeze your house or crank up the heater till it breaks, hackers that spy on your kids with the cameras you installed, automated customer support lines. For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me mo…
Did Socrates actually say that or was it just something Plato had him say in his book?
I 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"…
The Nest thermostat is a dream compared to the smoke detector. The smoke detector goes off all the time -- without rhyme or reason. With a normal detector, you can just pull the battery if it refuses to shut off. With Nest, you actually need a screw driver to open the battery compartment to turn it off. So, when it decides to wake up the entire house at 3am (yes, the entire house, since they all go off in unison) you…
I worked there. It was literally the worst experience of my career - and I have worked at all of the hardest charging blue chips and two successful startups - so it is not about high expectations - but abuse. I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there. I have a distance from it now -- and a way better job. It mad…
I worked there. It was literally the worst experience of my career - and I have worked at all of the hardest charging blue chips and two successful startups - so it is not about high expectations - but abuse. I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there. I have a distance from it now -- and a way better job. It mad…