[meowface]

This sounds quite incredibe. In fact, very incredible, considering you just registered that account and this is your only post. But I believe you may be telling the truth.

Do you think the same could be applied for other disciplines, like programming and computer science?

[poke53281]

Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. The conservatism of some of my clients -- and the fairly public role I sometimes must play -- is such that I'd rather not have my former illegal exploits broadcast quite yet. Hopefully you can understand!

In answer to your question: yes, I very much believe that it can be applied to programming and computer science -- and in fact already has been. Much of the early development of those disciplines was directly influenced by psychedelics.[1] I personally haven't tried to apply psychedelics to programming/CS in the same explicit way as I did for math, but I've found that the general visualisation skills developed over about a decade of fairly steady experimentation -- tripping about 3-4 times per year -- have been invaluable in solving constraints problems, visualising codeflow, etc. But one could argue, in that case, that I might have developed the same skills without psychedelics, since it was a slow development over many years. Whereas in the case of the "mathematics trip", the cognitive change literally happened overnight.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

[moonlighter]

Love the choice of your dummy account name!

I immediately remembered it from the C64 days. Used in a FOR loop, poke 53281,x would create some marvelous color loops.... almost psychedelic ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tar8kV39P2E

[poke53281]

Nailed it! ;-)

[dan_bk]

> Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name.

Are you aware of browser/device fingerprinting? [0] Technology (i.e. we) has/have killed privacy (unless you take extreme steps to protect it).

[0] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

[poke53281]

Oh yes, I'm aware of that stuff. If somebody reasonably competent wanted to resolve my real name from this dummy account, I have no doubt that they'd be able to do it. My concern, however, is not that malign people reading Hacker News will try to discover who poke53281 really is (surely I'm not that interesting); rather, it's that I don't want clients Googling for my real name to easily turn up accounts of my drug-taking exploits. It is probably still possible to start with my real name and find this account, but that would be a vastly harder task -- a much smaller needle in a much larger haystack -- and again I can't actually imagine anybody being sufficiently motivated to do so.

[oafitupa]

Then saying your exact karma wasn't a great idea, was it.

[m-photonic]

I wouldn't assume that's his actual karma score.

[jayherdabell]

Or she or he wanted to stay anonymous/safe while admitting to the use of psychedelics. If you believe, then why do you doubt?

[meowface]

Creating a throwaway is perfectly reasonable for disclosing something like this. I just remain skeptical of all sorts of claims like these.

But I am leaning towards his telling the truth.