petite

Oh, I'm not arguing the artistic/aesthetic quality here. I was only saying that I do agree with him when he says that he made many decisions in changing the original for what he sees as aesthetically better.

The decisions he made for the painting go down to a level of detail many of us could not comprehend. It's akin to writing an entire operating system, then showing it to someone who uses computers very rarely in their life. That person may think that the operating system is just like all the others they've used, but it's only the people who are coded the thing that can realize how different it truly is.

This guy is amazing. He also was the official artist for the Star Trek: Voyager books.

You can definitely make the best of it, but there still is a BIG difference between being forced to stay in a building for the bulk of your day, and being able to choose what to do with your time.

If I could offer my own experience, I had a similar situation my junior year of highschool. I chose to stay for my senior year. At that point, there was no academic reason for me to stay in school, so I had actually loaded myself up with courses from a particular teacher simply so I could spend more time with him in classes (he was our schools CS teacher, so although I was in classes ranging from AP Comp Sci to Math for Seniors II [low level math], I spent my time being mentored in comp sci). I also spent alot of time in the art room. Otherwise, I had only been in that school district for about 2 years, so I did not have many relationships with any of the other students.

Basically, I think what was positive about my experience was that I was able to spend time with an experienced programmer (he unfortunately left the following year, but he had years of experience building businesses and had a doctorate in CS, so it was pretty awesome). But honestly, if that teacher was not there, it would have been a total waste of my time. Highschool sucked for my social experience, and it was mainly in college that I felt I found my place amongst my peers. Freshman year in college was pretty much that same as highschool regarding the people (and I went to a tiny private tech school), but as I got into the later years, it was definitely easier to find people that I wanted to surround myself with (motivated, smart people). The courses were hit or miss, some were really great, others were a waste of time, but unlike highschool, these courses were usually only for an hour a week. And of course, there's tons of organizations and clubs to join, whether it's with the school or the town the college is in.

So really, if there's something you think you wouldn't want to miss out in a last year in highschool, whether it is building a relationship with someone/some group of people, or taking some particular classes, I'd stay. But if there's nothing there for you, move on. You'll spend the year bored and annoyed that you are wasting 6 hours of the day essentially locked up in a building, when in college, you'll be able to go on to more interesting things in a less restricted setting. Or if you take the year off, you'll have free time to do whatever projects you want to, or go to random places.

Good luck with whatever you decide ;D

I'm in Hoboken, NJ...not too far from NYC.

Yes, I understand absolutely where you are coming from here. I simply am not sure whether there exists something inherently different that allows me to make decisions such as eating lunch vs. creating a painting, or whether it's just a matter of complexity within my own memory, (such as my past experience of painting at noon on a sunny sunday has rewarded me with a good painting, which to me is similar to expressing that idea to a program). But again, this is merely philosophical. I just don't want to throw that idea out simply because we haven't done it yet.

And it's been a pleasant exchange on my end as well :)

To me, that sounds like saying "and then some magic happens" which ultimately creates the end work. Who is to say that the intermediate steps could or could not be reproduced by a program?

By the way, I'm a painter, so I'm not saying that when I do create a work that it was crafted by a set of logical, binary steps that I always follow for each painting. But I can say that my work can be analyzed to see why I did every single step, and none of those are impossible to express to a computer. Aside from my anecdotal experience, this is something that is also easily observable within the visual arts, and the artists that are recognized for defining the field.

Composers aren't born composers either. Through years of practice an individual learns how to manipulate the instrument and over this time period, listens to/plays a wide variety of well known musical compositions. Only then is the individual able to use his knowledge to create something new. It would be similar to loading the program with most compositions from a particular time period, and then having something produced which both sounds different enough to be distinguishable, but similar enough to be pleasant.

But both signal and noise are completely subjective terms to the community. What some people may consider quality posts, others may consider that noise. That's why you need voting that reflects whether the total community considers an article signal or noise.

Perhaps the solution would come somewhere from tweaking the front page display based on votes, or even customizing displays based on past voting practices from users, but I certainly do not believe that condemning the submitter is the solution. If that were followed through, I believe that the only articles that would eventually make it through the submission process come from a community that consistently echoes back the same interests to one another, without ever deviating from the norm.

While the submitter of the story plays a part in bringing the content to the community, the main reason the story makes it to the front page is due to many readers upvoting the story. Taking action against the submitter to me is wrong, because the story would get pushed back if the community hadn't upvoted it in the first place.

I think more that the submission guidelines are a catch-all for obvious stories that the entire community wants to avoid. These are stories that appear on large community sites, regardless of whether the core community has interest in them, and only appear to increase the demographic of the website.

But I don't think Hacker News works the same way. Anyone is allowed to submit a story, and depending on the community interest, the story gets posted to the front page. This ensures that the stories of most interest to the community are most viewable to the community. So the way I understand your criticism, it seems more to be a critique on the entire community (or at least the ones who vote), rather than a critique on the poster not following the rules.

"WhyIsThisOnHN" commented on articles about differing ways to look at literature, a painter who creates photorealistic paintings, a question posed to the HN community (this article), and one on the cause of death in cyclists. None of these articles strike me as something that merely exists to draw in eyeballs, but rather portray the varying interests of a group of highly motivated and intelligent people. Those are the types of articles I come here to read. If I wanted to read about computers and code all day, there are websites for that. If I wanted to read about startups all day, again, there are startup centric sites. I am interested in what people of like mind find interesting, but perhaps do not have the chance to expose myself to due to time constraints, and I think that this is partly responsible for the appeal of HN over other aggregate sites.

note - sorry for the off-topic comment, this is just something that has been on my mind, and possibly exasperated by the WhyIsThisOnHN username

Painting through projections is actually still quite difficult. Remember that what you see on the canvas is a lighted projection, and not true to the original photograph's color. What the projection can be useful for is retaining the proper proportions and locations of a highly detailed photo. The real skill involved here comes from being able to reproduce the color (the way they are shaped / blended) and paint without leaving any evidence of the brush.

Note: I have been painting / drawing for about 18 years and while I thoroughly enjoy the challenges of drawing (finding correct proportions / locations, creating volumous shapes through line), I find the process utterly tedious and boring while working on a painting. The reason I picked the brush up in the first place was to get away from the pencil.