alexRohde

Just want to say, from the front page your site looks pretty cool, but I didn't actually get to try the tool because your tool, unlike animatron would require typing before getting to play around with it. If animatron had required an account first there's a 0% chance I would have spent the 25 minutes I did playing around with it.

I just have to say I tried this out for about 20 minutes (not an artsy guy really) and found it amazing. Very intuitive, clean, fast, and seems entirely free. Highly recommend.

I think you're missing the point. This article is not titled "How a busy place helped me solve my problem." No, the title fundamentally justifying being not talkative (which I'm not sure really needs justifying: everybody can feel out of place at a party of strangers who work in a completely different industry).

What gets me is this piece comes across as very defensive. Why deride the man missing his elevator when he's on his phone (maybe he's not in the moment because he too is working on a problem) ? Why deride a hoodie at an office party? Why deride Dan for having a different social pattern than you ("Talks too much") especially when it's in line with his career?

I believe the author misses the point consistently in many ways.

Paragraph 2 - Straw man argument. People's resentment for authority has nothing to do with democracy, it's about all the false positives we consistently see ("experts" who are trusted to say make healthcare.gov but are not experts, economists who cannot predict anything about our economy).

He then argues that trusting "experts" is phased out in favor of google and wikipedia. He claims this is bad because "doctors, whatever their errors, seem to do better with most illnesses than faith healers or your Aunt Ginny and her special chicken gut poultice." another straw man argument. Wikipedia will not promote faith healing, it will lead you to the same and maybe newer medical journal articles than your doctor has read. Somehow he argues, trusting Wikipedia and google is, "Fundamentally, ... a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western civilization itself."

Then he goes on to cite a litany of false-negatives, cases when people don't trust current experts and presumably are wrong. Okay. But he hasn't really done anything here. Because he hasn't answered all the false positives (false "experts").

The real question here is how to differentiate between an expert and a non-expert. When is it a case of hubris and group think among an elitist circle of self-proclaimed experts, and when is it true?

Unfortunately this piece provides no advancement to this question, other that pointing out one more false positive, the author.

I cannot believe this got on the front page. Structured exception handling is crucial for atomicity and building robust systems.

Nothing about catch requires the program to continue executing as though no exception ever happened, many catches can be fatal but handle emergency cleanup.