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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Nest has been so terribly mismanaged seemingly from the beginning of the acquisition; has there been any management level change to compensate for the poor execution?

I really like the look of the Nest thermometer, but I definitely don't want Google in control of anything in my house, or listening to anything in my house, with how the manage this stuff.

If I do automate anything, I will be going with Home Assistant, even though I kind of despise home rolling these sorts of things. I don't trust any of the major players, and their recent behavior and lack of care for the user makes me nervous for the future of tech.

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The economic incentives for home automation are aligned to send them the way of the SpyTV fiasco [0]. Whatever brand you choose, it will spy on you sooner or later. Our speech is no longer private within the confines or our own homes. Soon, our heart beats too will become game for the creeps of the world [1].

This needs to stop. We need laws to keep internet-connected devices from spying on us in our own homes. We need an option to purchase internet-free devices. We need legislation now, as the wireless internet of things [5G] is coming online and the last drop of control we had, to not give the wifi password to the spy devices, will be taken away from us.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/your-tv-is-probably-tracking-you...

[1] https://atap.google.com/soli/

Just buy Zigbee and ZWave based home automation products. People are hyperfocused on Wifi products that end up spying on you because that's all they know. Zigbee and Zwave products have no capability to connect to the internet. They must go to a zigbee/zwave router of some sorts. There's a few vendors selling them that definitely aren't Amazon or Google and some that even run entirely internal to your network and some that are cloud based.

Granted I don't know a ton about Zigbee other than it's the approved wireless standard for BACnet, but I'm glad to see comments like this. It's seemed silly to me that all of this home automation stuff gets marketed as new and revolutionary when it's just balkanized and proprietary implementations of technology that's been in commercial buildings for decades. BACnet seems to have become the defacto standard in serious building automation. It's ridiculous that this home automation market seems to ignore a tried and true open standard for all this proprietary nonsense.

I don’t see how buying other products will help stop privacy abuses.

Great point. We need to make spying costly though a 2 pronged strategy:

* Develop technology that makes it expensive to spy.

* Pass legislation that makes it expensive to spy.

Bad actors will be still spying, but hopefully we can economically contain the spy activity to high profile targets, instead of mass deploy it for everyone.

What about rejecting this inane trend toward home automation entirely?

In most homes you can realize 99% of the energy savings and convenience of a Nest thermostat with an $50 7-day programmable box. Set it up and forget it entirely; it should just blend into the background. I can't think of a situation it hasn't "handled" for me - my house is a reasonable temperature day and night, my gas bills are within the expected range. If perhaps I spend an hour cold or nobody enjoys an hour of produced warmth due to a routine change, it's not a big deal.

I cannot imagine wanting to check my thermostat remotely, or have it connect to the Internet, or _track my presence_ and presumably report it to third party data gathering monstrosities. To give up such a huge piece of information (to yet another company, assuming all the phone-related companies already know this...) without any real "payment" for it besides a self-adjusting thermostat strikes me as pretty mad - especially when I can't see any real reason why such a device even needs to be on the Internet at all to accomplish that.

Internet connected lightbulbs? Smart locks? Solutions waiting for problems, most of them badly built, insecure, and probably spying on you in multiple ways. More expensive than they should be, never really providing you much beyond the sort of creature comforts that a more capable person can safely disdain as being for the overly soft and comfortable set.

That said, I concur that using a local bus like this makes the most sense if you must do this, but consider what you're spending your money and your time on. I think a lot of this stems from some latent desire to simulate the James Bond / Ladies Man 70's vibe with the remote control that dims the lights, puts the Barry White on, and converts the couch into a bed. It's cheesy and your guests aren't as impressed as you think they are.

It's not unreasonable to want various subsystems of the house to work cooperatively, or even to have some internet connectivity (although I personally would avoid products that use it).

E.g. having your security system (my smart home implementation would include a data diode so the home automation cannot effect the house's security posture) notify the HVAC controller that no one's home so it can turn off the air conditioning, and have the HVAC controller manage the motorized blinds / curtains / etc. so that whichever side of the house is currently facing the sun has the blinds half or fully closed to control the temperature passively. And to know that I usually get home at a certain time (I'm not overly comfortable with GPS tracking options) and start managing house temperature again ~20m before I get home so it's comfortable when I arrive.

I'd like my house to automatically close all of my blinds and turn on the interior lighting at sundown each day (not at a fixed time each day as simple controllers do - I want it referring to a pre-computed almanac or dynamically figuring out when the individual sun up / down times for each day are. Maybe integrated with a solar panel system so it can detect when energy output starts to ramp up and use that as the sunup/down times, although that doesn't account for cloud cover).

Imagine having a garden irrigation controller that polls rain radar data from the local weather bureau and uses it (along with a local weather station) to decide whether to hold off on watering the plants, in case it rains. And using the local weather station to decide how much (if any) watering is needed.

I don't want a smart home that does "ladies man" type stuff as you describe - I want a smart home that actively makes my life easier, by taking care of the little things that only cost a few minutes each day to do (watering the lawn, closing blinds, ...) but waste a lot of time in aggregate.

> E.g. having your security system (my smart home implementation would include a data diode so the home automation cannot effect the house's security posture) notify the HVAC controller that no one's home so it can turn off the air conditioning

Or you could press a button on your way out of the house, and not have to have an array of finicky sensors and interacting components make these decisions for you. Like, seriously, a solution waiting for a problem

>and have the HVAC controller manage the motorized blinds / curtains / etc. so that whichever side of the house is currently facing the sun has the blinds half or fully closed to control the temperature passively.

You have _motorized blinds_? Seriously, how big is your house that this isn't just a two-minute thing you do to go and close the blinds? Alternately, how lazy do you have to be for this to be something you'd invest thousands of dollars into? Can't even fathom how motorized blinds will hold up to a decade of children abusing them... though, most of the bugmen I've seen who get seriously into home automation are childless.

> And to know that I usually get home at a certain time (I'm not overly comfortable with GPS tracking options) and start managing house temperature again ~20m before I get home so it's comfortable when I arrive.

That's what my $50 programmable thermostat does. Do you really get home at totally different times every single day, to the point where no 7-day timer routine is sufficient? To the point where (well, not you, but others) consider the idea of letting a bunch of random companies GPS-track them for this purpose? Mindblowing.

> I'd like my house to automatically close all of my blinds and turn on the interior lighting at sundown each day

Or you could just turn on a light when you need it. Is the wall such a long walk away? Seriously. You'd invest hundreds into each lightswitch so you can control it from your phone, only for it to not work the moment you want to show it off to someone... versus just using the simple, economical, $2 lightswitch that has become a complete commodity item available everywhere and easily designed to last for a hundred years?

Talk about a sustainability nightmare.

> Imagine having a garden irrigation controller that polls rain radar data from the local weather bureau and uses it (along with a local weather station) to decide whether to hold off on watering the plants, in case it rains. And using the local weather station to decide how much (if any) watering is needed.

Imagine missing the point of gardening to the extent that you automate the whole thing instead of actually taking the time to do it, and reaping the psychological benefits of doing so.

> I want a smart home that actively makes my life easier,

It honestly doesn't sound like your life started "harder" if this is the kind of thing you think makes it easier.

>Or you could press a button on your way out of the house, and not have to have an array of finicky sensors and interacting components make these decisions for you.

To clarify: I wouldn't be using the security sensors (PIR or whatnot) to control HVAC - I'd like to have the security system send a simple "system armed" message to the smarthome controller.

>Seriously, how big is your house that this isn't just a two-minute thing you do to go and close the blinds? Alternately, how lazy do you have to be for this to be something you'd invest thousands of dollars into?

Two minutes a day over the course of a year is ~12 hours of your life wasted. Not big, but annoying enough that I'd like to automate it.

>Or you could just turn on a light when you need it. Is the wall such a long walk away? Seriously. You'd invest hundreds into each lightswitch so you can control it from your phone, only for it to not work the moment you want to show it off to someone

Again, none of this is neccesary. It's purely a convenience thing. It would be nice to e.g. turn off my room light from bed without getting up to do so. That said, while it's certainly not cheap home automation with Z-wave or isteon is getting more affordable as time goes by, and you don't have to upgrade your entire house in one pass.

>Imagine missing the point of gardening to the extent that you automate the whole thing instead of actually taking the time to do it, and reaping the psychological benefits of doing so.

I'm not talking about fully automating the weeding etc., but being able to go away for a couple of weeks and know that the garden is watering itself is good for peace of mind. I don't garden for relaxation, I'm more concerned about making sure my lawn and trees don't die.

My current lawn watering setup involves a bunch of manual intervention to move drip hoses around and such, and in the Australian summer you often have to water the garden every day or two to prevent damage. Plus there are some awkward spots where I have to bucket water and have been meaning to put in a proper irrigation system.

>It honestly doesn't sound like your life started "harder" if this is the kind of thing you think makes it easier.

This is fair and I freely admit this is all about convenience, not neccesity.

You don't see any benefit in being able to remotely access your thermostat or anything else in your house?

Since my place is not zoned ideally, it is very common to change the thermostat multiple times a day. Also, it is nice to not have to leave the AC running if we leave and forget to adjust it.

As for lights, the same applies, especially with kids. Being able to turn off all the lights at night with one button, rather than going through the house to turn everything off right before bed when you are tired or right before leaving when you are late is a nice and commonly used benefit.

> You don't see any benefit in being able to remotely access your thermostat or anything else in your house?

Not really. Maybe security cameras if I lived somewhere shady enough to need them.

> eing able to turn off all the lights at night with one button, rather than going through the house to turn everything off right before bed when you are tired or right before leaving when you are late is a nice and commonly used benefit.

I've got kids. I would like to think they've made me _less_ lazy.

I use the turning-off-the-lights patrol to ensure that windows are closed, taps are off, appliances are off, fridge is shut properly, and so forth.

Granted I don’t have kids, but my experience with families who have kids and home automation is that you have to be better at Internet security than your kids or they end up controlling everything in ways you don’t really want.

And then there’s the vulnerabilities: if you can remotely control your home, who else can?

I am not a security expert. My hobby is playing computer games about spaceships. I don’t get a thrill or a sense of satisfaction from finding and closing security holes in my personal networks.

From my perspective the best place for home automation devices is as napkin sketches on the design room floor.

Thank god someone else actually agreed with me on this, I thought I was just tilting at windmills here

> Soon, our heart beats too will become game for the creeps of the world [1].

Isn't it too late for that? Every $15 heart rate monitoring fitness band is already doing that, along with Wear OS watches.

opt-in vs. opt-amish.

99% of the population doesn't wear fitness bands and doesn't need one. Most those that do have a fitness band don't wear it at all times.

With SOLI, everyone that is in the neighborhood of a SOLI-enabled device, that is a mobile phone, or, soon, a SpyNEST heating control, or SpyTV, or SpyFridge, or a SpyCar, will have their heartbeats monitored 24/7.

Changing the world from monitoring 1% of the population to monitoring 99% of the population. That's the story of Google/SiliconValley, from NielsenRatings-to-GoogleAnalytics, all the way to Fitbit-to-SOLI.

Management at big companies like Google is about protecting your $1M+ paycheck a year and not about innovation. You don’t rock the boat and you don’t stick your neck out. These companies are not hungry, they are simply greedy.

You're underestimating the complexity of the game. It's not certain that not sticking your neck out protects your paycheck or the company's profits. Some other company or employee may be willing to take more risk and succeed.

https://www.cio.com/article/2379013/satya-nadella-to-succeed...

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-android/

This. Any company pass a certain size has a legion of upper, and middle manglers whose sole responsibility is risk management, and paramount to anything is the risk to the personal wealth and progression of said manager. There is very little incentive to 'innovate'.

The beautiful thing about this is that any half-bright kid could come along and kick these executives to the curb. There is zero technical barrier to entry in home automation products; the technology is dead simple. The only problem is that you cannot get conventional VCs to fund it because the only way to achieve high-growth and a rapid 10x exit is to spy on people. But if capital were available for moderate-growth, sustaining companies, privacy-respecting HA would be an easy market to penetrate.

> But if capital were available for moderate-growth, sustaining companies, privacy-respecting HA would be an easy market to penetrate.

There is, you’ve described a small business loan. The problem is that you can’t be entering a new field. No investor wants to give money for a high risk, low return investment.

I suspect that google bought nest as a beachhead for creating a "house platform"

Having google in your house means that it makes sense for an en user to have an android phone, a google account. If you make the walled garden nice enough, you'll never want to leave.

Or if you make people invest enough in it, its to expensive or painful to leave.

As HA requires a bit of work to setup, its always going to be for tinkerers (unless its packaged and supported by a third party)

Google should have bought Wyze or Iris by Lowes, the Nest Protect offerings are very underwhelming (no motion detectors, the door sensors don't double as temperature sensors like most Z-Wave sensors).

This kind of sounds like what governments do. Or civilization in general.

Its helpful to approach https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ as you would a moderately complex home entertainment system, with a smart tv, a apple tv, a blueray player, playstation, a recorder all managed via a AVR with a 'smart' remote. You are going to spend a few hours setting it up in the beginning.

It’s a real shame we didn’t get to see Dropcam reach it’s potential.

Many years later, I’m still angry that Google took my functioning service, subtracted features from it, and replaced it with their seemingly always half-broken one. RIP Dropcam.

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