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Comment by ukyrgf | Hacker News Reader

He is saying his "luck" skill is maxed out, so he is +10 while others could be having a real -10 of it.

maybe he sucks up all the available luck in the area, a kind of luck vampire, and everyone else dies because out of luck!

I'd write the story but evidently we are already background in it.

There’s already a Donald Duck story like that. Some guy comes to Duckville, and Gladstone Gander is completely terrified of him because.

Yeah, that's addressed in the fine article as well:

  > For years, he was an abalone diver on the West Coast in
  > an area with great white sharks that have a history of
  > attacking divers; he lost some friends to the predators.

The whale seems to have survived. So there's that.

In a large group of people, by chance alone we should expect some to be lucky multiple times.

I guess that's life in a quasi-infinite expanse.

Not that everything needs to be made into a film, but i could see maybe a B movie with the title "The Luck Vampire" be mildly (or wildly) successful.

And the actor can only be one person :)

It's called Intacto actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intacto

I’ve liked the interpretation that high luck isn’t necessarily good. It just means highly improbable events happen to you more likely...

Teela Brown from Ringworld. She was the result of a selective breeding program intended to create the luckiest human alive... but it turned out the _real_ lucky ones were all the "failures" who did _not_ get recruited for an impossibly dangerous mission.

Luck seems to me to be a zero sum game, so if someone is lucky, someone else must be unlucky. It's like a new character on What We Do In The Shadows as a luck vampire.

The theme of the movie "Unbreakable" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_(film)

Perhaps instead luck is a field or fabric permeating or moving through spacetime with concentrated areas of entropy or improbabilities that some people can naturally sense of are drawn towards

Luck is only zero sum if you are playing zero sum games. If your are engaged in mutualistic games, everyone can be lucky together.

As I recall (spoiler), that was speculation by one of the other characters after they crashed on Ringworld, later reversed because Teela met the love of her life due to the crash. The real take away was that Teela's luck was in no way transferable to the rest of the party; it only looked out for Teela.

I thought she was an interesting idea but after thinking more about it - don’t every human alive meet that definition?

That mirrors Orwell's thought when he survived a shot in the neck during the Spanish civil war - everyone kept telling him how lucky he was, but he couldn't help but think it would have been luckier to not have been shot at all!

Thank you! I was wracking my brain just now, trying to remember where I read this.

Does a machine exist that can determine whether any arbitrary fisherman from Boston in a computational ocean is "eatable" in polynomial time?

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