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Comment by kelp | Hacker News Reader

Back in the 2011-2012 era of Square, Brian would often opine at length about our products, our strategy, etc.

He'd write as if he had some sort of inside information and was a serious authority on the subject.

Anytime he'd make a new post about us, it would make the rounds on internal lists. Usually to the tune of "Oh wow, another Roemmele..." and we'd all read on in amazement at how much he'd just plain made up.

As insiders, we knew his posts were pure speculation, and were rarely even close to the mark about strategy or the technical details of our products.

Since then I cringe a little anytime I see one of this posts show up up. He completely lacked credibility when talking about Square. So I'm not sure why it would be different with Apple.

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Oh wow, I'm glad I'm not the only person who noticed this. I was a Quora top writer early on and I found his work maddening. It was glib, persuasive, confident, and often incredibly wrong. The popularity of content like his was part of what made me eventually quit.

There's a human hack where once you predict/guess/use insider info to get one thing right before hand, you will get some percentage of people who blindly follow you and can explain away any and every incorrect future prediction. I've seen it happen from QAnon all the way to "insiders" "leaking" information on what would happen each week on Survivor.

There's a very old con where you simply send every possible prediction to a different person, and progressively eliminate all the ones that got wrong info, until you have one left who has observed you make a series of impossible predictions.

There's a "card trick" magicians often like to do which is to simply ask the spectator to name a card at random. If they, by pure chance, happen to name the card that the performer already knows is on top of their deck of cards (eg because they peeked at it), then they reveal the card and it looks like they performed an impossible trick. If they named any other card, then the performer simply does another trick (perhaps looping back to the named card later or perhaps simply ignoring it or making a joke). Its a good opener: if it works, it grabs everyone's attention for the remainder of the act and if it fails, nobody will even notice as they get distracted by the actual routines.

Every so often, pure random chance means that they get it right and it looks incredible to the spectators who witness it.

Even better, do this with a card that has a higher likelihood of being chosen by the spectator—the ace of spades, for instance—and you'll see the trick work far more frequently than simple probability would suggest.

His post on Bitcoin from 2013 is pretty funny: https://www.quora.com/q/kyvdkhixnlhvdjdp/There-Are-1-3-Billi...

> If one were to run the numbers of just 2% of the population in China owning some fraction of Bitcoin, this could raise the single Bitcoin price to above $10,000.

I mean ... faulty reasoning or not: Bitcoin is currently at $10,240.

Of course I guessed he didn't believe his own reasoning, as when the article was written in November 2013 Bitcoin was $600 and he could have tenfold and more his own money.

It's also been at $20k. You could basically throw a dart at a wall and hit a price that bitcoin has been at some point. Just a coincidence you read this today.

Not if you hit $30k, $50k, $100k or any of the other prices bitcoin has never been traded for.

On my wall the numbers only go up to the actual values bitcoin has traded at. And $10k today is only half the peak.

Anyway, the point is, it is a coincidence, nothing more.

It might be a coincidence, but it's not the kind of coincidence where you can give a number that sounds like a legit prediction but is sure to be correct at some point in time. Which you seem to have implied in your post.

Had he given a number above $20k he would't have been right at any point in time. And bitcoin might have never hit $10k, which would also left him being wrong.

Which is less than half of the peak value, I don't know what your point is? If we were having this conversation a year ago or a year from today, his guess would have been way off. That's why its a coincidence.

.. not yet. I'm sure it'll hit all of those numbers for at least a few minutes in the future.

What's humorous to an old hacker like me is that these guys live so far inside the sandbox that the only thing they can write about is something like Square (that's some D2A credit card reader that plugs into a jack on old smartphones that have headphone jacks, right? --what "magic") With his UWB aspirations, he is at least aiming in the right direction! His little blurb is enough to make the physicist in us cringe but it's definitely good enough for business people that might hire him to use Apple and Google APIs.

what is kelp?

(just saying hello)

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