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Comment Re:It doesn't take a genius (Score 2) 113

it's not simple, but neither is it extremely difficult. the factors he cites are important, and sang froid is much more important than technical analysis if you're playing with your own money. however, from one example you can conclude basically nothing.

if just 1,000 people all invested their entire savings in a single double-zero roulette roll, you're almost guaranteed to have a few very lucky winners. does this mean it was a good idea? and is it that unreasonable to think there are about 1,000 similar people who tried exactly what this person did, and failed?

Comment Re:See mom? (Score 2) 113

there really is no baseline here for a meaningful comparison, and some people do just get lucky. there's that old joke about applying to work for N banks and making a different prediction about a fixed set, S, of stocks to each one; if N=2^|S|, you'll sweep one of them, guaranteed.

having a large liquidity pool also simply lets you make high-risk investments that others literally can't. there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but neither should you conclude that individual merit is the driving factor.

the article is a puff-piece. the better question to ask about articles like this is "why are they making a big deal out of it right now?". you sometimes get some interesting and disturbing connections, especially when the correlations unfold in the following few months. it rarely has much to do with the putative content.

Comment Re:Commands lines (Score 1) 250

admittedly, this usage doesn't really show how impressive spotlight is, so read the last sentence as an auxiliary statement, not a conclusion. :)

but, yes, spotlight is by far the best indexing/search tool i've used on any platform.

Comment Re:Commands lines (Score 1) 250

on OS X it's just cmd-space to bring up the spotlight, and then you start typing "terminal" until it auto-completes, which is probably after "ter" (or even "te" unless you use textedit often). spotlight is awesome.

Comment Re:They always told me I was so smart... (Score 1) 243

well, yeah, children are dumb; even, or especially, the smart ones.

however, Livius said "I've still seen very few environments where [intelligence isn't a liability], and all of those only well after childhood."

for a grown adult, this is just pathetic (without mitigating factors, at least). even Spock could occasionally pretend not to be autistic when it was to the advantage of his commission.

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