Costly IRS 1099 Mandate Slipped into Health Bill - <AUTHOR> http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/04/26/costly-irs-mandate-slipped-into-health-bill/ <comment><USER2> Bad as this provision is in itself, even worse is the broader idea that such items should be "slipped in" to omnibus statutes that are so indecipherable that no reasonable legislator or member of the public can know all that is in it before it becomes law. It is indecent that such items should pass and get signed into law without meaningful debate as to their implications and without any form of public scrutiny whatever. In the meantime, we the taxpayers are stuck with the consequences.

<comment><USER3> It is amazing to me how many critical aspects of an open democracy are dependent on rules of house/congress/parliament.

This sort of unrelated/obfuscated clause insertion and the 60-vote requirement to defeat a filibuster are two prime examples.

Will there have to be constitutional amendments saying1) bills must be clear and address only one topic, and 2) simple majorities shall always rule, expect in pre-specified cases, and no parliamentary rules shall override simple majority in letter or in spirit.

<comment><USER4> So Congress can't be trusted to pass simple bills, but they should be trusted to amend the Constitution?

<comment><USER5> My goodness, could you imagine it? The entire Bill of Rights would fit in the preamble of Amendment 28... quite possibly the entire Constitution as amended. (Because we all know Congress isn't _serious_ about something unless it produces a bill measured in thousands of pages... and stop questioning their wisdom in creating such bills, you ignorant plebes.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rule #1 from history class: only trust the primary source. And since none of the main articles about this issue seem to be quoting the primary source in full, here you go:

      SEC. 9006. EXPANSION OF INFORMATION REPORTING REQUIREMENTS.

          (a) In General.--Section 6041 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986
      is amended by adding at the end the following new subsections:
          ``(h) Application to Corporations.--Notwithstanding any regulation
      prescribed by the Secretary before the date of the enactment of this
      subsection, for purposes of this section the term `person' includes any
      corporation that is not an organization exempt from tax under section
      501(a).
          ``(i) Regulations.--The Secretary may prescribe such regulations
      and other guidance as may be appropriate or necessary to carry out the
      purposes of this section, including rules to prevent duplicative
      reporting of transactions.''.
          (b) Payments for Property and Other Gross Proceeds.--Subsection (a)
      of section 6041 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended--
                  (1) by inserting ``amounts in consideration for property,''
              after ``wages,'',
                  (2) by inserting ``gross proceeds,'' after ``emoluments, or
              other'', and
                  (3) by inserting ``gross proceeds,'' after ``setting forth
              the amount of such''.
          (c) Effective Date.--The amendments made by this section shall
      apply to payments made after December 31, 2011.

From the full text of the bill at [http://www.gpo.gov:80/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr3590PP/html/BILLS...](http://www.gpo.gov:80/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr3590PP/html/BILLS-111hr3590PP.htm)

<comment><USER7> In this case, the primary source appears to be indecipherable to anyone except for a lawyer who already understands section 6041 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and all of the amendments that have been applied to it since it was enacted, so I'm not sure what good you're doing by quoting it.

Maybe we should try to have them put the statutes into git so we don't need to waste lots of time looking at the diffs.

<comment><USER6> _In this case, the primary source appears to be indecipherable to anyone except for a lawyer who already understands section 6041 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and all of the amendments that have been applied to it since it was enacted, so I'm not sure what good you're doing by quoting it._

Most open source code is indecipherable to anyone but a programmer, but seeing it can at least provide some reassurance. Most political and legal processes are indecipherable or opaque to the general population, yet _attempting_ to understand them is a positive thing.

Having the primary source to hand is useful to ensure that you're not having the wool pulled over your eyes by a biased secondary reporter. A news site could easily misinterpret legalese.

Cato is hardly the National Enquirer, but even so, they only cite a) a tax research paper that costs $75 to obtain, b) a tax CPA whose words are not reproduced anywhere else, and c) the venerable "Air Conditioner Contractors of America." There aren't enough references to primary sources to rule out a less-than-sincere attempt at shaping public opinion (not that that is necessary the case, just that it _could_ be).

There's a lot to be said for trusting news sources in order to save time, but taking a look at the primary source yourself in many instances can prove illuminating, and is certainly a responsibility for anyone who's going to proceed to get upset/angry or campaign against whatever the news/article is covering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flip back through the pages of history: during the few hundred years that the Roman Empire was collapsing, the tax collectors became so violent and generally oderous that in some cases Romans living on the geographic fringes of the Empire welcomed invaders because a change of government looked good to them.

I expect the same to happen in the USA. Local governments and the federal government need money to operate on. In the best case scenario, two things would happen: drastically reducing government spending on the military and not-so-essential social services, and, slightly raising taxes. Neither of these reasonable things will get done.

<comment><USER9> There were also related exactions like forcing people to continue the carrer of their father, because of course that type of job was heavily taxed.

This is also thought to be the start of European feudalism. As things broke down and Rome's ability to enforce its will waned, becoming the vassal of a local boss was a way to escape this mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is like a high-res Sarbanes-Oxley.

Can anyone figure out who inserted this clause?

<comment><USER11> It was introduced in Senate amendment 2786: [http://www.govtrack.us/congress/amendment.xpd?session=111...](http://www.govtrack.us/congress/amendment.xpd?session=111&amdt=s2786)

It's huge so it's hard to tell who was specifically responsible, but it was sponsored by Sen. Reid and cosponsored by Senators Dodd, Baucus, and Harkin

<comment><USER12> Dodd really needs to have a heart attack, he has been trying to kill startups for the past two years.

I wonder who lines his pockets? Anybody know?

<comment><USER13> opensecrets.org, it isn't hard to find out.

[http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N0000...](http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00000581&cycle=Career)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This won't last. One truth of politics is that pissing off a few people is easy, pissing off everyone is hard. (That's how the rich and youth end up getting screwed all the time). If you force this on literally every single company and contractor in the country you will be losing a lot of campaign donations in the next cycle. If it comes into effect as described it will be modified/repealed within a year.

<comment><USER15> No law gets repealed. They'll just pass a new law that changes the previous one. It's sort of like CSS for Congress... cascading legislature...

<comment><USER16> Worse, it's like diffs for congress without any version control:

"Title Blah Section BlahdyBlah(c)(4) shall be amended as follows: by striking 'shall not' and replacing it with 'may, phase of the moon permitting', and by striking 'foobars' and replacing it with 'all foobars, foreign and domestic, and any bazes and quuxes appertaining thereto'."

The language of the Constitution and its amendments is wonderfully tacit and accessible. Why can't statute law be so? Oh, right, because then it would obviate many uses for lawyers. Can't have that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And it's not just for $600 or larger transactions, it's an accumulation of said transactions for a tax year. This is going to be a paperwork nightmare.

<comment><USER18> Maybe it's intended as a subsidy for the Postal Service.

<comment><USER7> It's intended as a subsidy for accountants and tax lawyers. Congress is the biggest example of regulatory capture anywhere: the lawyers always win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hate to be a wag, but the news today about government intervention in small businesses has gone into turbo mode.

Is now the time we get out the pitchforks and torches and go up to the castle? Or should we wait a while longer?

<comment><USER20> I know you are joking and this is something I think about. I heard about a protest at JP Morgan where people where chanting and wanted to deliver a letter to the CEO.

However, I really hope it isn't a violent incident. We don't need a war here anymore than we need a war in the middle east. Civil wars are bloody and costly and horrible.

My suggestion: Vote out all incumbents.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. I promise to only carry a torch and take notes of anybody I see with a pitchfork. :)

I read an analysis once that said that the problem wasn't that representatives weren't responding to the people's wishes, it was that the mob basically ruled. This is why you have governments making more promises than they can pay for and the continuous search for the current Dr. Frankenstein to go storm his castle.

Not sure of the veracity of that analysis, but I found it both counter- intuitive and interesting.

We're technical guys. We should know complex systems. We should know how people design and interact with complex systems.

I believe our system of government is becoming legacy code. That's not by any means to call for violence. I simply mean that the system has become too complex for most practitioners to understand, too complex to micro-manage, too complex to be able to design results by committee, and too complex to be able to maintain effectively.

Beats me where you go from there, but after seeing a dozen failed complex computer systems, I know a failed system that is spinning off into complexity land when I see one.

I also agree. Vote them all out. Enact term limits now, before we start a new generation of Earls and Dukes -- professional politicians with a lifer mentality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know anything about this mandate, and when I tried to google for more information I could only find citations on right-wing blogs. Nothing in any news source, nothing from an independent source, nothing.

Before everyone gets up-in-arms about this, it might be wise to at least try to seek out some real citations. The Cato study may be correct, but it's impossible to tell from the linked story.

<comment><USER22> [http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3590/text?version=enr&...](http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3590/text?version=enr&nid=t0:enr:12100)

The first blockquote from Thomson-Reuters Ria refers to the reconciliation bill section that I linked to via OpenCongress. For tax purposes, RIA is a very good source and is certainly independent. Unfortunately, it appears like you can't read the report for free. However, reading the bill text it does look like the they are saying 1099's are no longer for wages alone.

(Bias note: I once worked for Cato.)

<comment><USER21> Awesome, thank you.

That looks like it's a pretty good starting point. I just get nervous when I see articles talking about the impacts of a bill and their only sources are other articles talking about the impacts of a bill, and not the bill itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> <http://www.theapchannel.com/accounts-payable/node/522>

From above:

Although these changes were passed in the new health bill, they are not new ideas. The White House and Congress have been trying to require corporate reporting for years. The measure was included in budget proposals issued by Presidents Bush and Obama.

"This has bipartisan support," says Doug Rogers, director of consulting services at IRSConsulting. "It was never a matter of if, but when."

</comment><comment><USER24> If Cato's interpretation is accurate, this will likely be repealed. The IRS doesn't have the capabilities to process that many 1099s.

</comment><comment><USER25> _which an information return to IRS will be required if the $600 aggregate payment threshold is met in a tax year for any one payee_

What was the minimum amount to be exceeded where a 1099 was needed before this law passed? I've received 1099s for work done around $2000 in 1 year.

<comment><USER26> The dollar amount didn't change. What changed is that now corporations need to be sent 1099's, while before they didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can you imagine how many 1099s a company like Amazon would have to respond to under this system?

<comment><USER28> Or Home Depot, or the grocery store, or your favorite restaurant, or...

I understand that the law applies to corporations, but if you take your company out to lunch once a week a handful of times on company money, assuming your company has 10 people or more and your restaurant is ten dollars per plate, you'll have to file a 1099 if you go there for more than six weeks. Or if you buy more than $600 worth of equipment in a year from Wal-Mart or Home Depot or anything like that, you'll have to file a 1099 for them, too.

That's how I understand it anyway. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Time to get rid of all federal taxes except a national sales tax. Our Rube Goldberg tax system has got to be the single biggest drag on economy. Imagine the money that goes into complying with taxes doing something constructive.

<comment><USER30> People just don't seem to get it: We have a byzantine tax code to made people do X instead of Y and to not do Z in favor of Q.

Congress wants to do these things, and the tax code is the easiest way to do them. Congress will STILL want to do these things even if you do fair tax.

If the fair taxers get their way, we'll likely end up with income AND vat 10 years down the line. Ech.

And you realize: Fair Tax would ALSO cover all investments? Buy a house: 40% to the governement. Buy stocks: 40% to the governemnt, etc.

<comment><USER31> Neither of those claims is true.

The current Fair Tax legislation is tied, not merely to abolishing income taxes, but also to repealing the 16th amendment. Last I read about it, it would not go into effect, even if it passed, until Congress _lost all ability to levy income tax at all._

And FairTax has a pretty narrow conception of what constitutes consumption. Certainly not stocks, as you suggest. Investments in general are excluded. And any used items--used homes in your example--are excluded.

[http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_basics...](http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_basics_thumbnail)

<comment><USER9> This may be true, but how sure are you that the proponents of the FairTax will keep control of the process to ensure that outcome?

The income tax gives politicians tremendous power over the entire above ground economy and almost all the population, why would they give that up?

Since when have tax reforms in the West resulted in a wholesale _replacement_ of one type of tax by another, instead of a layering? If you could point to a few exceptions I'd be interested.

<comment><USER31> It's not a question of history, but of the way the bill is written. In stark contrast to the law that is the topic of this thread, the bill has been online to view for _years_ , and even has a summary in plain english: [http://www.fairtax.org/PDF/PlainEnglishSummary_TheFairTaxAct...](http://www.fairtax.org/PDF/PlainEnglishSummary_TheFairTaxAct2007.pdf)

How do I know the income tax will really be gone? Section I of the bill abolishes all income, estate, payroll and gift taxes, repealing sections A, B, and C of the Internal Revenue Code in their entirety. Sec 301 disbands and defunds the IRS, and requires that all its records be destroyed in a year. And sec 401 contains a sunset clause that negates the whole thing (both the sales tax and the abolishment of the income tax) if the 16th amendment to the constitution is not repealed within seven years. Thereafter, any attempt by congress to bring back an income tax would be, not merely unpopular, but actually _unconstitutional_. And they'd have to build up the infrastructure from scratch.

These guys are deadly serious.

Why would politicians give up power like that? Not sure. But there are a lot of them who say they'd be willing to: <http://www.fairtax.org/cgi- bin/scorecard.cgi>

Whether or not you think the Fair Tax is a good idea (and obviously I do), it's a model for how law ought to be made. In public, with a lot of visibility and discussion up front, a lot of time for question and answer, the full technical details exposed. The bill is not a tangled mess of amendments, but a well thought out and cohesive whole.

<comment><USER9> Ummm, what magic set of legislative rules would allow this bill to get a single up or down, no amendments, vote?

There's also the inconvenient fact that no Congress can tie the hands of a future Congress.

The only way to accomplish this in our system would be to get a single amendment to the Constitution that would simultaneously repeal the 16th Amendment and replace it with the FairTax, and then get 3/4ths of the states to ratify it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If the federal government were to aggressively enforce this it would amount to a default ban on cash transactions between businesses.

<comment><USER9> How so? This provision requires the reporting of a payment; it doesn't say anything about the instrument(s) used to make that payment.

<comment><USER32> It simply comes down to convenience. It may not be technically illegal to make cash payments for services or goods, but this would mean that you have to track all such payments and who the payee was, in case you paid more than $600 to a given entity. At which point there's enough paperwork already that cutting a check, or authorizing a funds transfer is easier.

So while it wouldn't necessarily make cash transactions illegal, it would make them stand out more and be scrutinized more carefully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Will I really have to submit a 1099 to the IRS for my phone bills, electric bills, rent, etc.? I have a feeling someone misread this.

<comment><USER34> That was my thought too. If I buy a car, do I have to send the dealership a 1099? Worse yet, if I spend $601 on gas at the same gas station in $30 chunks, do I have to keep track of the receipts at the end of the year and send them a 1099? What if it's at three different gas stations all owned by the same company. How do I know? Ask for their EIN every time I pay? This would be a complete disaster. Surely this isn't what the bill actually requires?

<comment><USER9> Only if it's a company car.

And, yeah, this would get into quite a mess. If your company was large enough and paying for the gas, they'd pretty much have make you use a card that would allow them to consolidate the payments with all the other company cars to know if they have to send 1099s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What are the penalties of non-compliance? If you just don't bother with the 1099's, what happens? Fines? More taxes? That's really what we need to know. If there are no penalties, there is no law.

<comment><USER35> <http://www.accountingpartners.com/fines.shtml>

Quick google says minimum of $50/per, max of $250k per business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> we need to redesign the mess that is our federal government.

it is careening towards disaster and the fools in Congress just want to rev the engine.

</comment><comment><USER37> Hopefully this means Apple and AdMob will finally have to send me a 1099 for my iPhone app payments. I'm really sick of gathering the numbers by hand, reporting them as individual income, and then praying I don't get audited and have to provide copies of... CSV files from iTunes Connect that aren't even in local currencies?

</comment><comment><USER38> Could we maybe have a less partisan analysis? I mean, FTA (no joke):

 _For what purpose? So the spendthrift Congress can shake a few extra bucks out of private industry? The business sector is the generator of America's high living standards, but most federal legislators just see it as a kitty to be raided or a cow to be milked dry._

</comment><comment><USER39> Sounds like a business idea, for doing e-taxes and e-payments, in the making.

</comment><comment><USER40> Was it a slipup? Or will it just force more people to form corporations?

<comment><USER9> Won't make a difference, I gather. E.g. previously if you were a business and paid rent to a landlord who was a individual (e.g. he reported that income on his individual income tax forms) you'd have to file a 1099. Now, in all cases, you'll have to file the 1099 (well, unless the rent is less than $600 per year).

<comment><USER40> What I mean is that in most cases, corporations do not have to receive a 1099-MISC from you, no matter how much you pay them. see <http://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1099msc/ar02.html>

<comment><USER26> And this law changes that, so now corporations need to be sent 1099's as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> When is this effective?

<comment><USER11> All payments after Dec 31, 2011. FWIW, there's already a bill in the House to repeal this section (introduced the same day the article was posted it seems): <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.5141>:

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm having a hard time believing this is true. The language in the bill itself is totally indecipherable (to me), but the only people claiming it would be a huge burden have a clear ideological or political bias.

</comment><comment><USER43> This may have been slipped in as a precursor to instituting a VAT.

<comment><USER44> As in "see, look! VAT is _waaaaay_ simpler than this tax system.

argh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> How could this possibly have not been noticed before?

<comment><USER46> Thousands of pages of barely parsable legalese, constantly changing in different places to keep different politicians on board, the final copy rammed through before the ink dried, what could possibly go wrong? From an engineering perspective the health bill was a QA nightmare.

<comment><USER47> Don't pretty much _all_ bills work this way? Was the healthcare bill really so different to the norm?

<comment><USER46> Not at all. This bill is notable for its complexity, scope and unpopularity. Day by day people disliked it more and more and everyone involved wanted to get it off the TV as soon as possible. When a bill is more popular there is less thrashing. People don't need to desperately alter things to appease individual politicians. Each of those patches is essentially a hack to cover one corner case. This bill is full of them. Popularity equates to a more stable code base. Politicians are also more productive when doing something popular. They are less likely to "grab what they can" and more likely to contribute to the bill's success and thus their re-election.

We've all been there... A few nights before a release we realize we have an unmaintainable mess and the deadline needs to be pushed so we can go back to square one. This is what happens when you release anyways.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Firefox Test Pilot - <AUTHOR> https://testpilot.firefox.com/ <comment><USER3> Very excited to see this launch! The Internet Archive has been working with browsers to check (opt-in) the Wayback Machine whenever endusers click on a dead link. We're in the queue for the next round of Test Pilot tests!

<comment><USER4> There's an existing add-on that (kind of) does this. It checks Google Cache and Internet Archive, among others.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect- pag...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, there are a bunch of plugins which kind of do this. We're hoping to get this into all browsers, and only offer to take the end-user to the Wayback if we actually have a good capture of the URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks neat because it allows people to try new features without risking stability in a beta or nightly environment.

It also doesn't hold Mozilla accountable to get these new features into Firefox's core without proving that they are viable and popular.

I'm impressed.

<comment><USER6> FWIW, we're also working to make these things remove themselves cleanly - <USER2> if you uninstall the initial Test Pilot add-on, it pulls out all the experimental add-ons along with it and disables any metrics we might have enabled along with it. Bug reports very welcome if this doesn't work as expected

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly all I want from Firefox is better stability and performance - I don't care about almost anything else barring security. Firefox has become so unstable and slow (on OSX at least) that many people I know - myself included have switched to chromium. We don't want to use it but we have to because of all the crashes and massive slowdowns during long running sessions or when many tabs are open. This goes for stable, dev edition and nightly. It really saddens me and I'm sure others because of the great work that Mozilla does especially with regards to transparency, privacy and security.

Edit: I'm also in two minds about the plugin systems between the two browsers. The idea of all JavaScript plugins scares me to death, there really are no good download managers for chromium / chrome, on the other hand Firefox plugins I rely on like Evernote web clipper keep breaking and don't even work on dev/nightly when enforcing the new plugin system.

<comment><USER8> Test Pilot isn't happening at the cost of stability and performance improvements. It's a complementary program that helps us ship better features through data-driven iteration.

I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while you're at it, and let us know what you think.

<comment><USER9> They "are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance", but I've heard this before and somehow we got to where we are today.

Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens?

Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they __were __trying to use it. I stuck it out longer than most. Having 512 MB of RAM and dozens of tabs is my use case.

<comment><USER10> I have 12GB of RAM and probably ~120 tabs open at any given time. This used to be fine, but it seems Firefox is just getting worse over time, the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

<comment><USER11> >the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

Oh god I thought I was alone on this. I've been talking to various Firefox users and nobody was able to relate with me. I usually keep Firefox open 24/7 with around 20-30 tabs open (~6 or so pinned). Every time I am typing (like in a hangout popup window or in a HN comment) Firefox is micro-stuttering and freezing and it eats away some of the words I am typing and it becomes very frustrating. I ended up typing comments in vim and then copypasting because it was faster. It feels like typing in an SSH connection with high-latency.

Also when scrolling long pages (like reddit threads) the "view" takes a while to update so I end up scrolling down to a totally grey page which then updates with content over and over again. And don't make me talk about twitter taking ages and setting my CPU to 100% (one core) with loud as hell fan every time I click on "show 50 new tweets"...

I have 16GB of RAM and a 2-years old top-of-the-line (back then) i7 CPU on a laptop, I shouldn't be having these issues...

<comment><USER12> Yes, I have the same problems. Last time I looked into these pauses, those were mostly GC pauses. At first you feel like moving on a bumpy road with micro-freezes and frame drops - that's incremental GC, and then you meet a concrete wall - that's non-incremental GC kicks-in, sometimes in multi-second territory. It got better in the last few releases, to be fair, but still far away from other browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the "Tab Center" feature a prototype for an official version of tree-style tabs, perhaps? I've seen that Servo/browser.html was experimenting with tabs- on-the-side, I'd love to see this graduate to more than just an experiment.

<comment><USER14> Potentially!

The simple story is that the current tabbing model in was designed to save you from needing half a dozen browser window open. It just doesn't scale well past a dozen tabs or so, and we know that some users have dozens or even hundreds open at the same time. Tab Center is taking a fresh look at the problem with that in mind.

<comment><USER15> The whole problem of a tab UI for power users with hundreds or even thousands of open tabs (like me) is mindblowingly daunting. I don't know that tabs on the side is the solution. For a long time I'd been using Tab Groups but I've been frustrated with its limitations.

Ideally, I think I'd like something similar to the spatial system of the Classic Mac OS Finder, which I coincidentally expounded upon recently in another thread[0]. Tab Groups goes part of the way there with its spatial organizational system but it lacks the hierarchy and persistence of those Classic folders and desktop.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664984)

<comment><USER16> Did you try tree style tabs?

It solves the problem for me using a combination of auto indentation and auto collapsing of inactive tab trees.

<comment><USER15> My issue with systems like this is that they consume valuable horizontal real estate. Like most people, I use a widescreen monitor. To take full advantage of this, I use a tiling window manager (Xmonad) and typically use two browser windows side-by-side, akin to a full two-page broadsheet newspaper. Putting a tab bar on the side of each window would consume nearly 1/3 of the screen and generally get in the way of the content.

<comment><USER3> The Tab Center in test flight mostly collapses the side tab bar unless you hover over it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not entirely sure why this requires a Firefox account. It appears possible to install the mentioned add-ons manually:

Tab Center appears to be available from [http://people.mozilla.org/~bwinton/TabCenter/](http://people.mozilla.org/~bwinton/TabCenter/)

Universal search: (edit: link here was incorrect)

Activity streams: [https://moz-activity- streams.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/latest.ht...](https://moz-activity- streams.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/latest.html)

<comment><USER8> Hey, that's actually the wrong link for the search add-on.

What you've downloaded is a deprecated earlier prototype that may not work at all--you're looking at the wrong github repo. (I just took down the built add- on, so other people don't make the same mistake.)

Test Pilot is about reconnecting desktop Firefox with its community; it's about more than just whatever add-ons are available today. We have feedback forms now, we'll have Discourse user forums integrated soon, and I hope we can eventually start building ideas that come from the community, with the help of the community. You should give it a try :-)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the heads-up regarding that link, I've edited the post just to try and prevent any confusion.

I can totally understand wanting more community involvement in the feedback process and with this context, the account requirement makes a lot more sense. Thanks for explaining some of that reasoning. I only wish this was documented a bit better on the site - I guess it just appeared a little unwelcoming to me with the sign-in requirement at first.

Now that I've actually tried it, the site itself is very slick and the experiments I've played with look pretty interesting. I look forward to seeing how things develop.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for editing your post :-)

I agree, it's tough to understand much about the project based on the testpilot.firefox.com landing page. That page is tightly focused around the 'sign up' call to action.

You can get more context from hanging around in IRC, or poking around in the wiki or bug trackers. You can even join our team meetings if you want; they're public. Pretty much everything is linked from our main wiki page: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While this isn't integrated into the Test Pilot site UX for the time being, we have Discourse forums set up for all of the experiments in Test Pilot.* If you'd like to register questions or feedback ton Discourse, team members and community moderators will be monitoring the forum.

[https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/test- pilot](https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/test-pilot)

*Yes, you'll need to sign in with Persona ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> Why do we encourage users to override security protections? I click "get started now", and am presented with a warning message reminiscent of an ssl cert error. In general when users see the "this site is trying to install software" warning message I hope they become suspicious and do something else (certainly not override the warning dialog). I am not entirely sure why that should not be the case now. I am inclined to think that mozilla is an organization with "good" technology and principles. But if that is the case why cant they get the left hand to talk to the right hand and install test pilot in a manner that does not teach users that its okay to override the security warning dialogs?

<comment><USER8> Are you talking about the doorhanger that appears when you try to install the add-on?

Firefox always shows a warning doorhanger if an add-on is installed from a website other than addons.mozilla.org.

What you're seeing is a Mozilla web property following the same rules as every other website. Nothing to worry about.

<comment><USER20> What is a doorhanger?

<comment><USER14> A doorhanger is a term for this sort of warning notification: [http://i.imgur.com/huWjWjq.png](http://i.imgur.com/huWjWjq.png)

As 6a68 mentioned, Firefox presents this doorhanger whenever any site other than addons.mozilla.org attempts to install an add-on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My first thought was the Clint Eastwood film

<comment><USER22> LOL - me too! I thought someone had built a flyable Mig-31 Firefox and were looking for someone to fly it... [http://archive.is/ZqD9a](http://archive.is/ZqD9a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What a curious page; just blank-white in Firefox 46.0 on Linux with this output in the console:

"You have google analytics blocked. We understand. Take a look at our privacy policy to see how we handle your data."

<comment><USER8> You need to have JavaScript enabled to use the site

<comment><USER24> That may be, but the error is still terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very nice! So far I'm liking this quite a bit, especially Tab Center.

On that note, one usability suggestion: having the tab sidebar run all the way to the top of the window means that the years (decades?) of muscle memory I've built up telling me to mouse to the top left of the window to hit the Back button now results in me hitting the New Tab button. It'd be better if the awesomebar area spanned the complete width of the window, and the tab center column started at the same height as the content area.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting that these changes are installed via an add-on instead of through a different browser entirely.

<comment><USER6> That's because a) we want to make it easier for folks to try these features out without switching to another release channel, and b) we want to get feedback on how they work in the browser that folks normally use day-to-day

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have to say I love the concept, and I'm very happy with my brand new tabs on the side.

That said I did find a bug and I have some performance problems to report, but it's not clear to me where I can report a bug for a particular experiment.

It looks like the feedback button wants me to fill out a whole satisfaction survey, and "File in issue" takes me to the test pilot github, which seems to be about the Test Pilot program in general.

Is there a better place to report bugs?

<comment><USER8> Hey there!

Our wiki has a list of bug trackers: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot#Found_a_bug.3F](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot#Found_a_bug.3F)

You can also talk with us in #testpilot on Mozilla IRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> if the drone fox needs a dome, he probably also needs rockets to replace the propellers

<comment><USER8> pull requests welcome: [https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot](https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a step in the right direction. No more should crap like Pocket land in FF without warning. Making new features, which might be controversial, go through a "preview" stage like this, should help restore a lot of faith in the development process, and show that Mozilla is again focusing on the browser rather than random me-too projects following the latest web-fad.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I can't speak for everyone, but I think Test Pilot is in part a reaction to the Pocket thing. Even among Mozilla employees, there were folks who thought it was a great addition and there were folks who thought it was a huge mistake.

Either way, it was a surprise, and not entirely pleasant. Test Pilot will hopefully be a way to reduce surprises of this nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Firefox was once working on improving the Bookmarks Manager. I recall lengthy articles detailing the extensive study and research (sorry, do not have the link handy. No pun intended). Whatever happened to that project?

All the more power to introducing improvements to the Browser, but above does not give me confidence in signing up.

</comment><comment><USER31> White screen in Chrome 43: TypeError: Array.from is not a function

<comment><USER32> Do you have a reason to run an old Chrome version like that? Just curious.

<comment><USER31> Corporate version... have to imagine I'm not alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There is no link to the Test Pilot plugin, and it's not available in the store.

I'd like to help, but you need to make it easy :(

<comment><USER8> The Test Pilot website explains that you install the add-on after creating an account and signing in.

It's actually super easy, give it a try :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was almost going to pass this up based on the HN discussion _and_ the initial CTA[1] on the page. I'm still not sure this answers any of the many frustrations, and hopes, I have for browser development,[2][3] but it's of possible interest.

For the love of all that's holy: _Put a compelling argument for a CTA on the page BEFORE the CTA._

And ... put a compelling argument there _regardless_. This lacks both.

The features mentioned, _especially_ tabs management, strike me as useful. Tabs are a mistake. That's not _my_ opinion, that's Adam Stiles' view -- _and he invented them._ Content management is a _huge_ problem.

 _Web design isn 't the solution, it's the problem._ My standing recommendation now is that Pocket add a Web Intent to its Android app. If I could use it rather than Firefox or Chrome for browsing, I'd be vastly happier.

Streams, search, bookmarks, content, organisation, reputation (of authors, sites, publishers), fact-checking, influence-registries (Nature just had an item on this IIRC) are all other areas of issue.

 _Paying content providers_ is a concern. I'm notafan of micropayments, but building the system into the browser is one option. Broadband or content taxes with usage monitoring similar to music's mechanicals is another. Browsers could play a role in both.

I'm also not a fan of having to register for stuff. But might regardless.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. Call to action.

2\. Among my longer rants, with a future roadmap: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/?ref=search_posts)

3\. Specific to Firefox: [https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/VX64KGmi...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/VX64KGmikfg)

<comment><USER35> Somewhat an aside, but Sticky Reader View would be a great Test Pilot experiment.

<comment><USER34> Good suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great, now can we have ubiquity back?

</comment><comment><USER37> Mozilla, please implement HTML5 input types.

Thanks, frontend web developers.

<comment><USER8> You'll be happy to know that somebody recently started working on the date/time input types bug: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320)

If you have a bugzilla account, you can CC yourself on the bug to catch future updates :-)

<comment><USER38> Fine print: CCing a bug doesn't mean it will be addressed in a timely manner, it may take 10 years[1] but in the meantime you'll receive 2,147,483,647 mails of other people "me too"-ing and discussing about the bug.

[1] Not exaggerating: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936)

<comment><USER13> Having a ten year-old bug isn't a mark of shame, if anything it's laudable when a project doesn't take the easy way out by silently closing ancient bugs like most projects do. Bugs should be fixed according to importance and priority, not simply according to age.

<comment><USER38> The problem is that "importance and priority" are pretty much subjective terms, for example, for many people Hello or Pocket were everything but a priority.

<comment><USER13> The solution is that it's an open source project. If you disagree with the priorities of the other developers, then you are empowered to take the initiative.

<comment><USER39> Okay, I would like to remove Hello and Pocket from Firefox. Do you think Mozilla will merge my pull request that I am empowered to initiate?

<comment><USER13> As though I said anything about merging into upstream, or about Hello/Pocket, or about "open source" meaning "dictating development with random patches". :P But sure, if there were a ten year-old bug about removing them, then I would certainly expect them to welcome such a patch.

<comment><USER39> I guess we're not understanding each other. My point is that Mozilla's development of Firefox is no longer user-driven. Instead it's about what Mozilla thinks users should want, and they can take it or leave it, and if it helps Mozilla make money, users should want it.

Despite vocal and repeated requests and complaints, Mozilla refuses to back down and remove things that users did not ask for and do not want; instead Mozilla does things like sneak Pocket support in in a point-release without any advance warning or any chance for the community to give feedback. And note that Pocket has had a fully functional Firefox extension ever since it was Read-It-Later--there was absolutely no technical reason to build in support for Pocket and deprecate the extension.

Mozilla has never been forthcoming about the real reason for doing this. In fact, the few Mozillians who have spoken about it seem to have had no idea why it happened, either.

Instead all we get is vague "people want to save things, this makes it easier for people to save things" statements. Well, people want to use Facebook, too: where is the built-in Facebook plugin? Where's the built-in Netflix extension? Amazon shopping support? etc. Clearly the decision to build in new Pocket code had nothing to do with a principled policy of making things easier for users.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Mozilla cut a deal and is getting money for it. And if that is the case, what is to stop them from doing the same for anything else? What if Microsoft cuts a deal to build in Bing support? etc.

<comment><USER13>
      > where is the built-in Facebook plugin?

Years ago Facebook Messenger was actually built into Firefox. I remember using it myself, but have no idea what's become of that effort since then. See [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under- th...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood- facebook-messenger-for-firefox/10151175913223920/)

      > Where's the built-in Netflix extension?

Users demanding Netflix support is literally the reason why Mozilla was strongarmed into adding support for EME, despite trying to hold out against it for so long.

      > Amazon shopping support?

Click in the search box, type a query, and at the bottom of the suggestions dropdown you'll see that Amazon is one of the search engines supported out-of- the-box. I actually use this fairly regularly.

      > What if Microsoft cuts a deal to build in Bing support?

Just like Amazon, Bing is already supported out-of-the-box, as is Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Twitter, and Wikipedia. Mozilla has regional partnerships where they get paid to install such search engines, so you'll get Baidu as your default in China and Yandex as your default in Russia. These even vary per platform: in the US, Google is the default on Ubuntu, and Yahoo is the default on Windows. If Yahoo collapses within the next few years, I fully expect Microsoft to begin paying Mozilla to make Bing the default on Windows.

These default search engines are how Mozilla makes 95% of its income (donations are basically a drop in the bucket, and because of tax laws they aren't allowed to use donation funds to finance Firefox development anyway). Mozilla sees this as a problem and has been actively looking for ways to diversify its revenue streams in the past years (go read any of their past financial statements to see them explicitly categorize their over-reliance on search engine revenue as a potential threat to the company), which has led to things like FirefoxOS (in the hope that telecoms would toss some cash Mozilla's way) and the "suggested sites" on the New Tab page. This why I find it extremely unlikely that someone "cut a deal", because Mozilla would _want_ people to know that they're succeeding at the task of finding alternate revenue streams.

<comment><USER39> > Years ago Facebook Messenger was actually built into Firefox. I remember > using it myself, but have no idea what's become of that effort since then.

Yes, I remember. Another example of CADT-style development.

> Users demanding Netflix support is literally the reason why Mozilla was > strongarmed into adding support for EME, despite trying to hold out against > it for so long.

EME is about more than just Netflix, though, and I was referring to site- specific support, just like the Pocket support only works with Pocket. As I wrote on the mozilla-governance list, what should have been done instead is to define and implement a save-for-later API (which could be built-in to the Firefox Places/bookmarks/etc API), which Pocket could then add support for on its end, and then users could choose to sync with a save-for-later API provider.

> Click in the search box, type a query, and at the bottom of the suggestions > dropdown you'll see that Amazon is one of the search engines supported out- > of-the-box. I actually use this fairly regularly.

Yes, I know how the search engines work, thanks; I've been using Firefox since at least Phoenix 0.6. Again, that is not the same thing. The search engine API is a standard that is used by many web sites to let their site-specific engines get added to the list. In contrast, the Pocket support _only works with Pocket_. An analogy would be if Mozilla added an Amazon-only sidebar that integrated Amazon.com logins and shopping lists and order status, etc. They aren't doing that, so they shouldn't have done it with Pocket, either.

> This why I find it extremely unlikely that someone "cut a deal", because > Mozilla would want people to know that they're succeeding at the task of > finding alternate revenue streams.

Now that is an interesting point, and thanks for sharing that. However, I'm still skeptical, because, again, we still have not heard an actual explanation for why Pocket was added, other than vague "it helps people save stuff, and people want to save stuff [even though they could already do that]."

There must have been some kind of inside deal. If not, what other explanation is there? Mozilla added Pocket support suddenly, without any community input, going against established Mozilla policy regarding features being in addons. Mozilla has shown a pattern of _removing_ features and leaving the community to reimplement them in addons, yet here it does the opposite, and for a proprietary service! And it has ignored repeated requests for an explanation of the real reason.

So some kind of secret, inside deal is the only answer I can see. If it wasn't for money, it must have been for something. If you are in fact right that they would want people to know about a deal for money, then what does that suggest? Why would it need to be kept secret? What is going on here?

Whatever the real story, the way they are handling it undermines trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Just gave it a 10 seconds and decided this is not for me. Very first thing I enabled (Tabcenter) made Firefox completely unusable to a point where I couldn't even disable the feature or uninstall the plugin. Thankfully these pieces are named nicely in ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/extensions and thus can be removed manually.

Of course to even to read this advice after fucking up you need to know about firefox's -P startup option.</comment>


Z-point energy: Biggest discovery of science - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/z-point-energy-biggest-discovery-of-science

<comment><USER2> My copious viewings of Stargate SG-1 lead me to suspect that harnessing zero- point energy may be more difficult than they let on.

<comment><USER3> Yes. Not like you can just nip to the Pegasus galaxy and nick a ZPM...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Bollocks"

peer reviewed demonstration or piss off.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Gods themselves...</comment>


Piano Flow - <AUTHOR> https://sunebear.github.io/Piano-Flow/ <comment><USER2> Beautiful project inspiring enough for me to get my hands dirty to learn some music. Thanks.</comment>


NSA Director and Chief Deputy to Depart the Agency - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/16/us-usa-nsa-transition-idUSBRE99F12W20131016

<comment><USER2> Hopefully they'll kick Clapper out soon, too (unless they actually intend to act on that lying to Congress felony he committed, repeatedly, over the past few months).</comment>


S3sync – Tool belt for managing your S3 buckets - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/clarete/s3sync I started contributing to s3sync before hearing about the official amazon s3 tool written in python. However, after testing the official tool for a couple minutes, I decided to spend more time working on s3sync and here's the result.<p>Thanks to Michael Grosser for his support and patches! <comment><USER2> How does this compare to the existing s3cmd [1] tool? One issue I've had with s3cmd is it tends to use a lot of memory when syncing two large buckets. I'd love to see a tool that was faster / more memory efficient than s3cmd. Would be awesome to see some benchmarks and feature comparison in the README!

[1] [http://s3tools.org/s3cmd](http://s3tools.org/s3cmd)

<comment><AUTHOR> So, basically, the main difference is the language they're implemented in. I started working on s3sync cause I found its code easier to read and I really needed to practice my ruby skills.

Although s3cmd is older and has more features, s3sync was designed to grow stable and well tested. I'm definitely planning to write benchmarks to s3sync and improve its performance as much as I can.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. Does this support IAM Roles?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not currently! Please feel free to open a ticket about that! Thank you! :)

<comment><USER3> Ok here you go.

[https://github.com/clarete/s3sync/issues/15](https://github.com/clarete/s3sync/issues/15)

Wish I could help, but I don't know ruby :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A tool that could do parallel downloads of small files would be a winner. We have a lot of small files and use s3cmd. It downloads one at a time. You can finagle it with some xargs magic, but it would be nice to have it built in.

<comment><USER5> Totally expecting to see someone build this in go in a couple weeks to do exactly that sort of thing. :)

Wish I had the time, I just realized it would be a fun project to learn Go with.

<comment><USER6> You could just modify s3cmd to use threads during uploads? Problem is IO bound so the Gil isn't an issue and you wouldn't have to go through the trouble of implementing s3's auth header.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is handy and extends S3's use case by making two-way sync straightforward. My long-term storage is in Amazon Glacier; I wonder how much effort it would take to extend this and make a straightforward process to pull the data from Glacier, sync with S3 and then push back to Glacier.

</comment><comment><USER8> What does this provide that isn't already provided by the official AWS CLI?

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/index.htm...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for asking! I definitely tried this guy before putting more effort on s3sync. Unfortunately their cli experience is really poor and its error report didn't help me understand why synchronizing my stuff with s3 was not working.

In the end of the day, I had an unreadable file inside of the directory that I was trying to back up. I found that out using `--debug` option of the official client, but I couldn't actually continue copying the files cause of that error.

When I tried with s3sync, as I expected, it just yielded a warning about the single file I had with problems and kept working until my backup was done!

Sorry for the wall of text, I just think it's funny cause this exact question came to my mind a couple days ago and that's how I answered my self! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have you tried jets3t? ([http://www.jets3t.org/](http://www.jets3t.org/)) It's got pretty comprehensive tools for managing S3 and has been rock solid for me so far.

</comment><comment><USER10> You should check out this suite of S3 cmd line tools too - [https://github.com/aboisvert/s3cp](https://github.com/aboisvert/s3cp)

</comment><comment><USER11> What are the pros and cons of using s3sync versus s3cmd?

<comment><AUTHOR> First things that come to my mind:

s3cmd: * might be considered more robust and battle tested as people already commented here; * is written in python, so if you have a python environment running, you might be more comfortable with it;

s3sync * Smaller codebase, might be easier to keep things simpler and well tested, achieving the same stability with less time/effort; * Error reporting. One of my main reasons to keep working on s3sync was its better error reporting. I just go crazy when something wrong happens and I don't know why. * It's in ruby, if you have a ruby environment and you don't want to add any python dependencies, you might choose it

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> s3cmd is battle tested and hasn't had any memory issues for me. (100 buckets, ~40GB each bucket)</comment>


XKCD: Time - Time Lapse of the entire day's 95 panels - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.aubronwood.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice. Exactly what I was looking for.

The forum comments about how people weren't able to break the system by fast forwarding time were great. I love how Randall beat the internets :).</comment>


The Death of the Specification - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/14/rip-spec/

<comment><USER2> TL;DR version - the relative popularity of technology gizmos doesn't correllate well with their specifications.

Somebody rolled out from under a rock that they ahd been in since 2000 and woke up apparently. The history was that with x86 flavored personal computers, there was a 15 year period between 1985 and 2000 where you could take two machines, compare the specs of the ram/processor/video and come up with a 'good, better, best' scale. This made it easy for technology journalists, they could get a press release for the new HP or Toshiba or Alienware PC and say "this is better than last years/competitor X's/etc model." Easy sauce. But eventually PCs and laptops got to be good enough so that most people didn't care, it just worked, and having more features was better, or having better features. So the 'specs' or the details of how the manufacturer did, was less important.

Why Techcrunch's editors didn't figure this out, oh, 5 or 6 years ago, is anyone's guess.

Now it would be great if they would internalize this newfound understanding and stop pumping up OMGWTFBBQ we have PS3 graphics on an ARM chip! Type headlines and instead focus on the people and companies who are using the capabilities of this embarassment of riches to provide new and interesting products. They do some of that of course but so far, for me at least, its not nearly enough relative to this 'specs are dead' stuff.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. You can't put out an article like this while spewing our countless reviews talking about how one camera is so many megapixels better than this other camera.

<comment><USER4> I don't know, I think specs still work fine for cameras. Not the megapixel number but the resolution of what it actually picks up. Also noise levels and shutter speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> News flash: Consumer Reports is not a cheerleader for the top selling products. They are an organization concerned over what you get in actual fact for your money.

Consumer Reports is read by people who want to know all of the quality issues and hard facts about a product before making a purchasing decision. Such consumers always have, and always will be, a small market segment.

This "credibility rant" reads like a sycophant lamenting those who don't heap lavish praise upon the popular kids.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the author ever said that Consumer Reports _should_ be a cheerleader for top-selling products. Rather, the author says that Consumer Reports doesn't seem to have much influence over what sells. It sounds to me like you agree with the author.

<comment><USER5> CR has plenty of influence over what sells to its target market. If this weren't so, it would be impossible for them to turn a profit. The author is claiming that CR is irrelevant and out of touch, and "demonstrates" his point using a market that CR doesn't even cater to.

You might as well argue that Techcrunch is irrelevant because it doesn't cover the latest in housing and furniture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Based on the headline, I thought this would be about how software engineering is now most often done in a scattershot--sorry, agile--manner, without documents that first detail customer requirements, then product specifications, and so on.*

By the way, my somewhat sarcastic, somewhat serious rule of thumb is to avoid specs when doing software in-house that I direct and to insist on specs when contracting out work.

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model>

<comment><USER8> Curious what you mean with "avoid specs", how do you know what to build?

<comment><USER9> How do you know what to write in the spec?

<comment><USER6> Clearly the answer is to have a spec for the spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is a bad thing that companies can charge monopoly prices.

It is a good thing that companies write good software.

Some specs are important. People care about storage space, screen quality, device responsiveness and battery life.

Some companies have escaped the competitive hardware market with differentiated software (or other things). So while 32GB micro SD cards cost $30, some others can charge $100 for 32GB of flash storage.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=32gb+micro+sd&tbm=shop...](http://www.google.com/search?q=32gb+micro+sd&tbm=shop&hl=en&aq=1s&oq=32+GB+)

[http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipod/family/ipod_...](http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipod/family/ipod_touch/select)

In an area of specification that people definitely care about, some companies can charge a 300% premium.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a good article, but the spec has been dead since the release of the first iPhone. (Maybe earlier, but that was when everyone talked about it.) Apple showed that users don't really care about spec unless everything else looks the same. When all consumers have are rows and rows of identical-looking computers, they pick the one with the highest numbers. When they have a single piece of hardware, with no specs at all, but which behaves intuitively and does what they need, the spec doesn't matter.

Everything the article says follows from that.

<comment><USER11> The first iphone? The first _ipod_ was famously panned [1] on specs and then was a huge success.

[1] [http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases- ip...](http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just another way for MG to place Apple on a pedestal.

Look, it does make sense that when my mother goes to buy a computer, she can be confident in knowing what she's getting, without having to understand gigabytes, megahertz and cores. I get that.

But the first thing I did after clicking on the link to buy my Macbook Air? Spec'd it out the way I wanted. It's not transparent, and people like "specs". i7, 256 GB HD. It's the same reason I know the fuel mileage, tire size and horsepower of my car.

How can anyone take this guy seriously when he says things like:

 _"My MacBook Air doesn't have the specs of a brand new HP PC laptop — but it still feels faster."_

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a less well thought version of Marc Andreessen's _Software eats the World_ essay[1]. For devices like phones and tablets the platform (aka software+services) matters a lot more than the hardware.

Sure, there are a few exceptions: gaming requires specific hardware, the connected fitness market likes Ant+, Bluetooth 3.0 or dongles, etc. But the general case is that the software matters, not the hardware.

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Another way to look at this is that raw specs don't matter because it's _execution_ and _quality_ that matter. Every Apple product I've ever owned has cost 2x as much as the "equally spec'd" rival, but Apple products last longer and work better because they're better designed and made to a higher quality. I've had the same Macbook for 2+ years and it's still working great, while the EEEPC netbook is slower, full of bloatware and has had it's AC adapter plug fail.

</comment><comment><USER15> On the one hand, I agree that the experience of using something is all that matters, and only a handful of specs (like storage capacity) actually mean anything.

On the other, I'm kinda not looking forward to the upcoming glut of Kindle Fire owners spouting off about what goobers iPad owners are, because they got the same thing (as far as they're concerned) for less than half the money.</comment>


5M Google Accounts Hacked, Leaked on Russian Bitcoin Forum - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/3318853/google-user-logins-bitcoin/

<comment><USER2> No Google Account has been hacked. They're just aggregated leaks from random compromised websites.

If you don't re-use passwords, no action needs to be taken.

</comment><comment><USER3> better coverage: [http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/09/cleaning- up...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/09/cleaning-up-after- password-dumps.html)

(slate also has better coverage if you still need the clickbait headline[1])

[1] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/09/10/gmail_pas...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/09/10/gmail_password_hack_russian_bitcoin_forum_leaks_credentials_but_most_google.html)

<comment><USER4> From your first link, this seems worth calling out specifically: _" We found that less than 2% of the username and password combinations might have worked, and our automated anti-hijacking systems would have blocked many of those login attempts. We've protected the affected accounts and have required those users to reset their passwords."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any word on what site(s) were hacked leading to this leak? I don't reuse _any_ passwords so I'm not very concerned, but I'm the kind of person who just likes to be sure</comment>


How The New York Times Graphics Department Uses R - <AUTHOR> http://www.r-bloggers.com/amanda-cox-on-how-the-new-york-times-graphics-department-uses-r/

<comment><USER2> This was a great talk, not so much technically on doing things with R, but on methodology. The gist is that she learned R to quickly obtain and interpret data, and then to "sketch" visualizations before they make the big investment in producing a production version.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you had any old Gmail addresses hijacked? - <AUTHOR> Recently, I tried to login to one of my older gmail accounts and discovered that the password had been changed very recently. Since these were old accounts I had not used in years, they did not have 2FA enabled. However, they did have very strong randomly generated 20+ char passwords with uppercase/lowercase/numbers/symbols. These passwords were stored on a password bank that was not compromised, and I don't even know these passwords by memory. I'm not the type to fall for phishing scams and I try to keep my systems secure, but I had not even used those passwords in over a year, so there is no possibility that I somehow exposed them sometime in the past month.
The recovery email for these accounts was NOT hijacked. He simply changed the passwords and recovery email and then he subsequently enabled 2FA himself.
However, these old emails were set to automatically forward to one of my new addresses and the hijacker forgot to disable that feature. What I've found is he started to use one of the emails for his own "business". Apparently he makes a living procuring YouTube, Gmail and Twitter handles for people. Judging from these emails, he is quite successful at doing so for YouTube / Gmail handles where 2FA is not enabled.
I realize that enabling 2FA is a must these days, but I find it troubling that this character seems to be able to hijack these accounts so easily. Especially when those accounts are inactive and without the use of phishing or a keylogger. Anyone have any clue how this is possible?
Also a PSA: If you haven't enabled 2FA on any old accounts you might care about, go do that now. <comment><USER2> One of my old Gmail addresses was hijacked by Google. They wouldn't let me in and I have neither a phone number nor a recovery email associated with it. The password is not changed, it's just the Google's notion of "security." And they wouldn't let you opt out of it when creating a new account.</comment>


The Global Price Tag for 100 Percent Renewable Energy: $73T - <AUTHOR> https://e360.yale.edu/digest/the-global-price-tag-for-100-percent-renewable-energy-73-trillion <comment><USER2> > In the U.S., reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 will require an > investment of $7.8 trillion. It will involve building 288,000 new 5-megawatt > (MW) wind turbines and 16,000 100-MW solar farms...

I know it's a contentious topic, but what would the equivalent cost be to do just do this with nuclear as France did in the 80s?

Very back of the napkin says we'd be talking something in the vicinity of 500 new reactors at $5b a piece. That's only $2.5 trillion so a third the price.</comment>