Not Phillips hue related at all; it's like you have no idea how Philips hue works. It's a diy wifi bulb plain and simple.
I can see how people can get worked up over this. Here's what I replied over there:
Thanks for pointing that out. I agree that from a technical standpoint this is not the same as a Philips Hue bulb or light strip. If you look at it from a users point of view, all Philips Hue is a lamp that you control the Brightness and Hue of. This gives you that functionality. No Zigbee protocol. True, but in the context of HomeKit/HAP-NodeJS, does it matter how the bridge talks to the light? I might as well be using 433MHz transceivers, nRFs, or directly controlling the Raspberry Pi's GPIOs. For that matter, ZigBee would be doable too, but I don't know enough about the protocol to see it's benefits. No smart mesh network where each device extends your coverage. True, but a mesh network can be implemented with ESP8266. But if my whole house has WiFi, I don't see the point. No possible compatibility with either Phillips' Hue bridge, Hue remotes, or any other kind of Hue hardware (like Phillips' Hue+Ambilight TV's). Actually, using the Philips Hue shim in Homebridge, I believe it should be possible to make it compatible to Hue bridge. My motivation behind making this was to prove that with ESP8266 based projects, you don't need to have a clunky web UI or a custom app. This lamp can be controlled with any app that support HomeKit. Philips Hue was just the most similar commercial product I could think of. Btw, HAP-nodeJS can be completely eliminated here by using nRF51/52 BTLE chips. They can emulate the HomeKit API and control the NeoPixels both in one chip, so no bridge necessary!
Current IoT implementations all rely on a corporate link to their servers, which I heartily disagree with. You can see a lot more of my acerbic complaints on my blog crankylinuxuser.net as well as reddit /u/crankylinuxuser :)
People like us add to a growing force that says "We will not accept non-standards." I don't care of BigCo makes IoT gear: Just use MQTT/CoAP/AMQP or make doing so trivial. Don't make me use your garbage API on your servers.
IMHO it's just more catchy and click-baity title, that's all (and you can down-vote me for this, but I genuinely believe author's intention was to simply catch more attention with such title). We can not start calling every electric car 'Tesla clone', every smartphone 'iPhone clone' etc. To escalate this discussion more author, in a true click-baity fashion, could have added word 'hack' somewhere in the title.
Just to rant, but lately in HN you can see rather a lot of articles, whose titles do not represent the content correctly (hopefully, like in this case, HN thread name is more correct than the article's title), which catch your eye by using some trendy trademark or word (like 'hack').
All in all, titles and use of words is a delicate discussion, which can be seen in many threads of HN.
My thoughts on this: Seeing ESP8266 in the title itself implies DIY or Hack to me. Practically everything using ESP8266 out there is a DIY project as of today. When your see things like 'OTA firmware updates for ESP8266' or 'HTTPS server' using ESP8266, doesn't mean those are secure in anyway. I'm not really trying to attack the Philips Hue lineup here. My intention is to get people to stop making proof of concept DIY IOT experiments and show them that with the HomeKit API this can be actually useful at home. And if the words 'Philips Hue' help me get some attention to this matter, why not?