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Comment by windsignaling | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting because it shows us how a programmer thinks of a problem vs. how a psychologist or neuroscientist would think of this problem and highlights the lack of "human-ness" in programmer thinking.

I'm no fan of schools forcing STEM students to study boring electives but this is a prime example of why that might be useful.

The entire premise of the post is wrong - average pixel value has nothing to do with how orange the oranges look - it's all about perception.

Here's an example where the same exact color (pixel value) can be perceived as either light or dark depending on the context: http://brainden.com/images/identical-colors-big.jpg

That's what the bag adds - context - but the author hasn't made this connection.

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You saw someone making a bunch of observations, setting up an experiment and trying to use maths/programming to prove an hypothesis they believed to be a sign of "lack of human-ness"?

To me it showed curiosity and ingenuity, sure they might not have studied a certain subject but it is a totally valid approach to an unknown problem. It might actually get people who have similar "silly questions" to run a similar set of experiment and perhaps stumble upon something novel.

You comment showed less human-ness than OP, ironically.

I read the lack of human-ness as locking at the wrong place.

It’s not reality that changed because of red net but our perception of it.

The solution isn’t in the oranges but our brain

Agreed.

While you are correct about color perception, I don't see the link to a 'lack of humanness in programmer thinking'. It's not an inherent trait to software engineers. The entire field of HCI, interaction design and everything around how we deal with digital colors are fully focused on the human experience.

Maybe a reminder that computer science != programming.

Context absolutely affects how we see things.

But so does its colour.

So observing how a red mesh affects that colour is absolutely worth investigating.

See Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color or the recent and more approachable Interacting With Color.

It's not a "programmer" problem. Any competent program I know would never thing of averaging the color of the orange with the color of the non-orabge bag, and expect that to be orange, or representative of how we percieve the orange.

You clearly have some interesting and substantive points to make! but on HN, can you please do this without putting down others or their work?

It's all too easy to come across as supercilious and I'm afraid you crossed the line, no doubt inadvertently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

See also this popular “optical illusion”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion

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