aneth

> Occam's razor says that we should give more credence to the simpler theory, not the more commonsensical one

Yes, and I find Occam's razor itself to be common sense, which is what my point was. If a theory seems to reflect more closely observable reality, I would bias my investigations toward that theory over one the projects something non-sensical.

> I hope you don't also go around telling biologists that its absurd that we're descended from Apes, or astronomers that its absurd that the Earth goes around the sun...

Evolution and Earth's orbit are explanations for observable reality. They do not lead us to conclude outlandish things that are conveniently not observable.

I am not saying Boltzmann was necessarily wrong, only that common sense should direct us to look for what we are missing, and for theories that direct us toward more sensible scenarios. Sure Boltzmann, could be right. I find the Bible more compelling, and Bolzmann's theory doesn't seem to preclude them both being correct.

Yes, and such strange happenstance that all the human brains we've found so far have been in humans. We must be incredibly lucky to have picked this universe at odds of 1 in infinity where no human brains are suffering bodiless in space.

If a theory implies an absurd outcome, I think it is a reasonable heuristic to question the theory and it's assumptions. I am not saying absurd implications indicate the theory is flawed, only that they should cause one to suspect so and perhaps find a theory that explains reality with less broadly absurd implications.

The Bible as historical non-fiction is most certainly absurd, no implications about that. Not saying so out of sensitivity to those who believe otherwise does reason a disservice, just as not calling out Bolzmann because I don't want to offend him. If this makes anyone unwelcome, they should avoid places where their fragile ego might be challenged by rational conclusions. In a place like hacker news, I see no reason to let sensistivity toward faith restrict my speech any more than sensitivity toward programming language choice. Invite me for dinner and I will respect your religious and any other beliefs. Have a scientific debate in a web forum with me, and I will speak without concern for challenging you. It's not a personal attack to say the Bible is absurd - it's the truth.

If your assumption is infinite time and complete entropy, yes it's correct. It's also why some level of common sense (e.g. Occam's razor) should be applied before such silliness is seriously proposed. I don't think Boltzmann assumes infinite time and entropy, just enough for the completely random emergence of sentient life that thinks (perhaps falsely) that it lives in a universe populated by similar beings who created iPads from dirt and water.

Does it seem more reasonable that there is infinite time and every possible state of matter and history exists at some point, or that we simply haven't figured out the balancing forces of entropy and order?

Infinity is an interesting thought experiment, but it so thoroughly ridiculous that it should cause us to question our assumptions, not believe in absurdity conclusions based on faith in mathematics and unproven postulates that got us there.

We might as well believe the Bible is true. Not only is it less absurd, but given the infinite theory, there must exist a universe where it is true, and this could be it (unless it is truly contradictory and impossible even with infinite states of the universe, which we have no reason to believe.)

You may be able to increase your expected value by choosing numbers that are less popular. It would be interesting to research the psychology behind number selection and choose combinations less likely to have a multi-payoff outcome.

What's more likely: nearly infinite sentient universes complete with false memories of human experiences emerging from entropic chaos, or that we don't quite understand the nature of entropy?

The Boltzmann theory is one of those thought experiments that should draw into question it's assumptions out of the pure absurdity of its logical conclusions rather than be taken seriously itself.

I would love to see that list of JP Morgan entities.

True, and a good reason not to implement this solution.

One interesting observation from the comments:

On a Mac, shift with caps-lock on doesn't toggle to lower-case, so they would need to store a fourth version for this to work.

OPERATI@NGERONIMO

Overall it's a clever UX hack, though I worry they came to it by observing invalid password attempts which seems slightly outside of appropriate, although it doesn't particularly bother me in this case.

Or invisibility!

I've tried to use Bing as my default search engine in moments of frustration but always go back to Google. The main reason is UI. Bing has too much fancy JavaScript that slows it down and confuses me ever so slightly, and the information is a little harder to scan, perhaps because of familiarity with Google.

Seems like a reasonable solution.

My first statement was certainly true in the previous generation of browsers, including IE 7. I'm not sure about more modern browsers. What basis do you have for disagreeing?

Refer to:

http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/innerhtml.html

Perhaps like some template engine, but not like any I know of.

This is pretty, but unfortunately the only performant way to generate dom elements in javascript is with HTML. HTML parsing is orders of magnitude faster in most browsers.

How about a library like this to generate a string of HTML instead of dom elements?

I certainly don't think it's anyone's place to judge something as a "ripoff" versus "inspired." That is in the heart of the creator. And I think it's ridiculous to judge something on such an extreme binary scale - as either a soul-less copy or an inspired innovation.

Look at Android - it's a "ripoff" of iPhone, and copied much of the design and function. Except it's entirely different. It has created a new, more open and more dangerous ecosystem for applications. It has made iPhone-like functionality available to different markets and fulfilled different requirements. It has lighted the fire of competition under Apple.

While it may annoy you to have "copies" out there, I can guarantee you there was a reason those copies were developed. Nobody spends their hours reproducing existing functionally without some idea of how they will be better in product or distribution, regardless of their ultimate success. They may have been inspired by your work, but almost certainly they saw a need for something better in some way.

Isn't PadMapper just a ripoff of http://www.housingmaps.com/, which was the first of its kind?

I developed http://www.cribq.com because at the time, both PadMapper (if it existed, can't remember - according to domain records padmapper.com was registered after CribQ launched) and HousingMaps were too simplistic and behind on listings to use. HousingMaps had no organizational tools - so I suppose PadMapper "ripped" that idea off of me? (CribQ website is not actively developed anymore, but the iPhone app is quite popular.)

Seriously, why does this accusation come up every time someone launches a site with housing listings on a map? Even if the site is similar, there is no shame in "ripping off" ideas - you will always do something different and hopefully better or useful in some way. If you manage to copy an idea and survive, you've either done a better job marketing or a better job building a product for some segment. Either way, we all win.

Developing a site that is an improvement, different take, or even a copy of another is not a ripoff. Is AirBNB a ripoff of VRBO? Is Google a ripoff of AltaVista? Is Gmail a ripoff of HotMail? Is TechStars a ripoff of YC? Facebook a ripoff of Friendster? You may not agree with their tactics in some cases, but generally the founders/creators have a vision that differs from the site they "ripped off" and have a reason for creating their own version. And would somebody PLEASE rip off Craigslist and win?

Copy away. Or as Steve Jobs says, "good artists copy, great artists steal."

On the contrary, I think there's a problem with a world where this can't happen. If it could not, there would not be incentives for shoot-for-the-moon ideas. There would not be the freedom to benefit from providing value to society. Grand innovation would be stifled in favor of "lifestyle" careers and businesses. While there is nothing wrong with most people taking smaller amounts of easy money for long term work (i.e. salary,) we all benefit from others who take large risks to improve our lives.

Further, much of that $78M will be recycled through the economy, some of it re-invested in the hopes of making similar returns.

The idea that because some prosper, others suffer, is a consequence of one of the most dangerous human emotions: jealousy. I agree that institutions should promote long term distribution of wealth through taxation and incentives. However windfalls for big thinkers and executers are extraordinary incentives for big thinking and executing, from which we all benefit.

Either that or programmers will have to play catch up and become fully literate.

"We price our domains at 25% of their market value."

Don't we all sell liquid commodities at 25% of market value? You know, because we like our customers and we don't like money? Can you feel the credibility chasm expand with that statement?

Much of this article is a reasonable point of view, but statements like this are a sure way to put my purchase clicker on the defensive.

My understanding was that this was to avoid issuing more founders shares. I was wrong. It is indeed a powers grab.

This seems a massive overstatement of the powers of the TSA. They pat you down for weapons before getting on a plane. While it may not be justified or to your agreement, I just don't see how this undermines fundamental freedoms in the US and sets us up for tyranny. I worry about court hearing free forfeitures and surveillance. The TSA pat downs of children? Don't give a shit. Fight a battle worth fighting. Body scans at airport entrances are not part of an inevitable road to tyranny.

While I disagree with a large number of TSA policies, I have found TSA officers to be thoroughly professional and nearly always courteous. The anti-TSA bandwagon on HN seems to be the product of people who don't travel much basing their opinions on a few rants or CNN coverage, or perhaps just general anti-authority bitterness.

I've flown at least once a month for 10 years, domestically and internationally, and almost never have a negative experience with TSA personel. While I hate taking off my shoes, turning off my phone, and find the liquid rules particularly ridiculous, I have found that TSA agents have more than met my expectations of professionalism in implementing policies over which they have no control.

Millions of people travel every day. A few bad encounters can be expected. Don't be an asshole and tear down the employees of the TSA because of a few anecdotal occurrences. In doing so, you are just as bad as an ignorant talking head on Fox News. Think and put yourself in others shoes before you rant.

It's not a power grab so much as maintaining their current power. Without this provision, the stock split would result in the founders' voting power being cut in half, in which case they would of course elect not to split the stock.

If I misunderstand, please correct me. As I see it, instead of splitting 10x voting stock held by the founders, they are issuing non-voting stock to everyone.

I'm curious to know how they will differentiate between voting and non-voting common shares in the stock market - it seems one is worth at least marginally more than the other.

The phrase “Don’t test standard Active Record association” jumped out at me, since I’ve discovered a major bug in the most basic function of Active Record associations in 3.0.x.

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5744

That said, I generally agree with DHH that many developers write too many of the wrong kinds of tests and this can make products brittle.

I share his disdain for Cucumber and rspec. I prefer clarity over syntactic sugar and non-programmer readability.

How would you test, say, payment processing, in any sane way, without mocking?

How do you test failure handling code when the failure can not be reproduced in a known way by the current code base?

I agree these tools are often overused, however they do have their roles.

Life is filled with simple, easy, cheap, popular paths that lead to ruin. PHPs initial simplicity does not make it a good choice.

Looking for happiness? Heroine "just works".

Hungry and poor? Eating McDonald's three meals a day is cheap and easy.

I think you're supposed to exploit the vulnerability in relatively innocuous but deeply disturbing ways, get banned, then complain about how you only meant well, then be lauded on Hacker News as a martyr who should have been embraced by the hacked company.

Hmm. While thought provoking, this should be identified some in some way as fictional.

Anyhow, even in theory, complying with the policy for a moment would be unethical.

> If you could measure them perfectly, there would be a loss

Again, how do you know?

Below someone says diet follows the laws of thermodynamics. That's hogwash. While our bodies certainly follow all laws of physics, that has nothing to do with diet.

We are perfectly capable of expelling unconsumed dietary energy.