Not sure how how legit it is, but I saw there was a follow up study where researchers couldn’t reproduce the deliberate practice finding to the degree the original researchers did: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190327
Can Apple do anything other than lose its shine? Is it possible for it to get shinier? I mean, it already has the world's highest market cap and is revered in a way the subsequent next highest market cap companies aren't (Exxon, MS, Wal-mart).
It's like a basketball player who makes 100 free throws in a row, misses a couple, and people wonder what the hell happened to him/her.
I figure it this way, I may or may not randomly succumb to a car accident, but if the next day I lost my hand I wouldn't give up on programming, I'd learn how to type faster with one hand. I bet the other one gets in the way anyways.
My point isn't that random isn't a big deal, or that people don't ever overestimate themselves, but that people shouldn't look at it like that anyways, it keeps you in control of your own life.
I don't think fatalism vs. free will was what he was getting at.
We see a lot of moralizing about this, particularly in the USA where individualism and the self-made-man is practically a national religion, more pervasive and deeper-rooted than even Christianity.
We see this every day on television - politicians foaming at the mouth about lazy good-for-nothings who failed to provide for themselves and now reach their hand out to their fellow taxpayers. We see it every time the word "Entitlement" appears in yet another headline.
We see it every time when we treat the poor as people who are lazier, dumber, or just plain lesser.
If we are going to moralize about the merits of achievement, and if we're going to continue throwing people under the bus for being unsuccessful, we should come to grips with the randomness factor.
I don't think that's his point. To me, coming to grips with randomness is much more about humility and tenacity, which are character traits rather than philosophical issues.
I'm surprised by how defensive people can get about their own success. It seems to me that you can never know if your success was due to your own hard work or some lucky breaks (or, more probably, a combination of both to which you'll never know the balance).
It reminds me of the story about thousands of people flipping coins. Out of those thousands of people, some of them are going to flip a long string of heads. Does that mean that those people are "good" at flipping heads? Is someone who flips a string of tails "bad" at flipping heads?
Using this logic, pretty much everything is due to luck. finish your PHD? You were lucky that you were accepted and that you had a good enough education to get into the program.
"It seems to me that you can never know if your success was due to your own hard work or some lucky breaks"
You may have a point. But, I'm really tried of people attributing all success to luck (and using this as an excuse as to why they aren't succeeding). It also discounts all of the hard work that someone does put into something successful.
If I sit here and do absolutely nothing, I won't ever have a successful startup. This is why I know it's not mostly due to luck. Luck implies that it happens to you with no intervention..like winning the lotto.
The position I was born into in the society definitely gave me some advantages in starting businesses. I would happily call that luck; it's not like I carefully picked my parents.
There are all sorts of odd contingencies that I didn't plan that have helped me in business. The first company I started came about only because I ended up subbing for a friend who wanted to take a quick vacation; by the time he was back his bosses said, "Hey, why don't we start a company?" Pure luck. I could have easily gone a decade longer before starting out on my own.
For me the comparative baseline isn't people who don't do a thing. It's all the people who work just as hard but have differing levels of success. Compared with a Cambodian rice farmer, I'm pretty lucky. Compared with somebody from my social class who was fucked up by abusive parents, I'm lucky.
Heck, I'm lucky just to be born into this era. 50 years ago I would have ended up a car mechanic. 500 years ago I'd have been an underfed monk. I'm freakishly lucky to be living in the Age of Nerds.
The argument isn't that success is due entirely to luck. It's that you'll never know how much of that success is due to luck. It may be a lot or it may be a little.
But you do. If you make an iphone app and it's an overnight success, you got lucky (the non-luck part is the years of experience that it took to make the app). However, if you slowly build your user base and continue to add new features for years through many failures/successes, beyond the normal 10% or less luck in every-day life, I wouldn't consider it lucky.
Again, it seems there is this trend on HN to make it seem like anyone remotely successful got "lucky". Even worse is blurring the line between luck and hard-work so you can make it seem like their accomplishments aren't as important.
In the case of an app that grows over time: isn't there an element of luck at play every month in the user base? Maybe you just got lucky 12 months in a row, and then you were successful enough to show up on the front page of the app store.
You can tabulate the odds of experiencing random radical growth 12 months in a row. It will happen to some portion of the population. If everybody is flipping coins, then 1 person out of 4000 will flip 12 heads in a row.
I am not arguing that most success is due to luck, or even half of it. I just think the statistical argument is interesting to explore.
Nobody wins the lottery without playing, and playing requires some level of work to manage the variables (when to buy, where to buy, what to play, how much to spend, etc.). Why does a lottery win have to be pure luck? Why is it not fair to say those choices you made are what lead to the success? Heck, if you work hard enough, you might win several times[1]. The contrast you are trying to highlight is just not clear to me.
Nobody finishes their PhD without enough food to eat as a child so they don't die before they reach age 12. It is luck that you were born to your parents. It is luck that you are still alive despite the hundreds of dangers and probabilistic events that could have killed you every day since you were born. What you do with your luck that you have is up to you. Working hard doesn't prevent you from getting hit in the head with falling tiles.
"It will likely be a good-looking, entertaining disaster..."
If it's good-looking and entertaining, I don't see how it can also be a disaster. My impression is that the writer is using "disaster" and "not factually accurate" interchangeably.
I've used LustyExplorer for one year before switching to CtrlP about 2 or 3 months ago. In my experience:
* speed is comparable
* quality of results is better in LustyExplorer
* interface design is better, more Vim-like and more consistent in CtrlP
* CtrlP doesn't need Ruby
* CtrP is more extensible and already integrates a tight pack of useful features (MRU, grep, tags)
"...HDCP encryption, a newer part of the HDMI standard..."
I don't think that's true.
My understanding is that HDCP encryption has been around for as long as HDMI has been around. For example, Blu-ray discs/players use HDCP to encrypt their content.
It seems strange that these DVR boxes don't support HDCP. Maybe some of the heat should be directed towards DirecTV for using such non-compliant hardware.
