I recently started meditating, using the method in "Mindfulness in Plain English". So far, I've been able to meditate for between 1 to 3 hours at a time, every day. I do feel quite a bit of calm afterwards and during the deep parts of the meditation, and have also experienced some occasional hallucinations (like a feeling of intense bliss, like my arms are floating, like my chest is a hundred feet from my head) when I am deep in meditation. Also, I've found that when I need to do some chore in my daily life, if I start focusing on my breath, it helps me to not feel so bored or resentful.
I am looking forward to hopefully being able to enter deep states of calm more readily and spontaneously as my meditation practice deepens. However, the effects I describe above are somehow not enough for me. I am a seeker, and naturally curious. I want to find out what (if anything) lies beyond our ordinary perception of the world. Is what we normally take to be the "real world" (or "objective reality", "external reality", etc) actually an illusion like Buddhism and Hinduism claim? If so, can the techniques of Buddhist or Hindu meditation really reveal the "true reality" beyond the illusion of the ordinary world? I would like to find out.
Today, I found an interesting article[1], which argues that the kind of meditation taught in "Mindfulness in Plain English" (which is the kind most people today think of when they think of the word "meditation"), while "it has obvious benefits [such as health and calm]... does not lead to liberation from suffering".[2] This is because, the author argues, this type of meditation practice tries to avoid painful experiences (by focusing back on the breath), and therefore leads to "the attachment to aversion to suffering".
The type of meditation the author advocates is quite different. I encourage you to read the article for details, but essentially it seems to consist in observing whatever happens in your mind without trying to control it, without trying to avoid it, curiously and observantly following wherever it leads.
This method of meditating sounds interesting, and I look forward to trying it in the future.
I am also interested in finding and trying other methods of meditation. I know there are lots of them, from focusing on the breath, to focusing between the eyebrows (the so-called "third eye"), to focusing on various external objects such as candle flames, mandalas[5], or even corpses. Some forms of meditations utilize mantras[6] or other techniques for maintaining focus.
One other type of meditation that I did try briefly was kinhin[7], or walking meditation, which is described in some detail in "The Three Pillars of Zen" (a book I highly recommend, though with a grain of salt, as it seems to have a bit of a bias towards a particular tradition of Zen). It was quite interesting, and may be a good way to start and end a sitting or zazen[8] form of meditation.
[2] - The author uses the term "suffering", probably referring to the Buddhist concept of dukkha[3], which is often translated as "suffering" (and is the first of the so-called Four Noble Truths[4], as in "life is suffering"), but may be better translated as "dissatisfaction" or the "problematic" aspects of life.
Loneliness. We don't have meaningful social connections anymore like our parents or their parents geeration had. We are so scattered, that I am unsure how many of my friends are actually friends and how many are just professional contacts. Everytime I switch job, almost 70% of my friends suddenly fall out of contact. Heck, I don't even know the people who live in next apartments both left, right, up and down on the same building. Socializing with my friends mean, setting up an appointment weeks ahead to see if we can align on a free-slot and this often involves all of us commuting to somewhere and disbanding by 22:00 hours because family, work next morning, chores to do, doctor appointment and other human things.
Interestingly, in this rat race, a lot of people suddenly inherited significant wealth and managed to use those wisely to have enough return to maintain a minimal lifestyle without working a primary 9-5. Some of us also achieved significant wealth by our early youth that we can afford to chase our hobbies for long time without worrying about the rents and bills and other responsibilities. Add social network to this, and these people cumulatively pursue things like world travelling, elaborate vacations, own businesses, YOLO etc.. , an endless stream of "other people doing YOLO" while us being worried what did I achieve so far?
So, yeah, we feel lonely, go to social sites(which is appearently the whole "internet" to non tech-savvy groups) to see how others are having it good. Then suddenly we realize we wasted a lot of time on watching others having fun and decide that, we need to get better hobbies and stop this. But the loneliness never goes away as hobbies are extra toppings when we have a complete social life, so we are again pulled back to the cesspool, because at least there we can get some connection in forms of comment, likes and we can post our opinions as well or get into hours of comment-wars(which counts as social connection too).
I love to see the cultural differences between korea/japan and the West on the matter of artificial stuff. Whereas in the West people would try to hide fakeness as much as possible, people in the far East have a much more candid view of it.
In the West we do understand and like artificiality, but we really want to contain it to the realm of fiction. When some artificiality spills out in the “real” world we raise red flags: “tssk, this temple is not authentic, it burned down 80 years ago and they rebuilt it from scratch”
In the East, there is a deep philosophical difference that I would like to understand better - if anyone can point to any reference on that matter? It’s like people have understood that fiction and artificiality are part of our lives, cause people embellish things all the time, and we humans are happy when we believe in things. So instead of being suspicious, they let themselves invaded by artificiality, not unlike the way Western people create emotional connection with novel characters, but in real world situations.
And I mean why not? In the West, we get cartoon character-based advertising, we get actor-based advertising. How is AI-based influencer (that doesn’t hide the fact that it’s artificial) is any different? If Tony the Kellogg’s tiger had an instagram account, we’d find it totally normal. Here is the same, except that we just jumped over the uncanny valley.
There is a lot to talk about on the subject and doesn’t fit in a hn comment :-)
This article isn’t terrible, but it does illustrate the pitfalls of writing about a field (philosophy) without being intimately familiar with it. Specifically, because you assume that [your culture’s version of] a thing is a universal one.
Philosophy is a good example, because even “Western Philosophy” has so many fringe and irregular thinkers (Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc.) that trying to nail down how a “philosopher” thinks into one definition is impossible.
Deleuze, for example, basically saw philosophy as the creation of concepts. Many people find his ideas confusing or at least unclear. His method was definitely not as described as in the link. Yet I think he’s easily the most interesting philosopher of the last half century and someone whom technologists should read more about.
Having said all that, if you’re looking for the clarity of thought mentioned in the link, what you want is analytic philosophy. This is a specific “approach” obsessed with conceptual clarity.
I'd really recommend this video. I had seen it years ago and just came back to it. It's about changing your architecture, one of the effects of that being changing how you need/use mock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJtef410XaM&t
Former Uber engineer/EM here: I worked on the Rider app.
The “there are only a few screens” is not true. The app works in 60+ countries, with features shipped in the app that often for a country, and - in rare cases - a city.
The app has thousands of scenarios. It speaks to good design that each user thinks the user is there to support their 5 use cases, not showing all the other use cases (that are often regional or just not relevant to the type if user - like business traveler use cases).
Uber builds and experiments with custom features all the time. An experimental screen built for London, UK would be part of the app. Multiply this by the 40-50 product teams building various features and experiments outside the core flows you are talking about (which core flows are slightly different per region as well).
I worked on payments, and this is what screens and components are in the Uber app:
- Credit cards (yes, this is only a a few screens)
- Apple Pay / Google Pay on respective platforms
- PayPal (SDK)
- Venmo (SDK)
- PayTM (15+ screens)
- Special screens for India credit cards and 2FA, EU credit cards and SCA, Brazil combo cards and custom logic
- Cash (several touch points)
- AMEX rewards and other credit card rewards (several screens)
- Uber credits & top-ups (several screens)
- UPI SDK (India)
- We used to have Campus Cards (10 screens), Airtel Money (5), Alipay (a few more), Google Wallet (a few) and I other payment methods I forget about. All with native screens. Still with me? This was just payments. The part where most people assume “oh, it’s just a credit card screen”. Or people in India assume “oh it’s just UPI and PayTM”. Or people in Mexico “oh, it’s just cash”. And so on.
Then you have other features that have their own business logic and similar depths behind the scenes when you need to make them work for 60 countries:
- Airport pickup (lots of specific rules per region)
- Scheduled rides
- Commmuter card functionality
- Product types (there are SO many of these with special UI, from disabled vehicles, vans, mass transport in a few regions etc)
- Uber for Business (LOTS of touchpoints)
- On-trip experience business logic
- Pickup special cases
- Safety toolkit (have you seen it? Very neat features!)
- Receipts
- Custom fraud features for certain regions
- Customer support flows
- Regional business logic: growth features for the like of India, Brazil and other regions.
- Uber Eats touchpoints
- Uber Family
- Jump / Lime integrations (you can get bikes / scooters through the app)
- Transit functionality (seen it?)
- A bunch of others I won’t know about.
Much of the app “bloat” has to do with how business logic and screens need to be bundled in the binary, even if they are for another region. E.g. the UPI and PayTM SDKs were part of the app, despite only being used for India. Uber Transit was in a city or two when it launched, but it also shipped worldwide.
And then you have the binary size bloat with Swift that OP takes about.
The way I see it is, there's no benefit to you if your involvement with a guru is to follow, support, admire, and believe. If that's all you do, then the benefit only goes to the guru. On the other hand, if you believe that any benefit will come through building your own understanding through work, thought, and experience, and they influence you to do this work, then you will benefit, and it hardly matters if they personally have any great insights or not.
There are gurus who encourage the first kind of involvement at the expense of their students, but different people can take different things from the same teacher. Some people are strongly predisposed towards one or the other forms of involvement. Some people want to just sit and listen, and they'll get little benefit whether they're listening to a saint or a fraud.
As for intellect, when someone is presented to you as a guru, all or nearly all of their specific insights are going to be well-worn, recycled cliches. A guru is more of a coach than an intellectual. An intellectual's job is to say new things, or old things in new ways. A coach's job is to say what you need to hear even if it's been said a hundred million times before.
For some reason we get this all mixed up when it comes to "spirituality," and we believe everything hinges on the quality of the ideas. Instead, imagine your kid's soccer team is being coached by the great soccer manager Carlo Ancelotti. Imagine that they spend every practice sitting on the ground and listening to him lecture them on technique and tactics (not that he would make this mistake.) Meanwhile, the other teams are coached by parents who know nothing about soccer, who run their teams through dribbling and passing drills they looked up on the internet, followed by some chaotic scrimmaging. Your kid's team is not going to win a single game, even though they have a "true intellect" for a coach, and the other teams are coached by frauds.
Peter Norvig here. I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problems, and had the libraries I needed to integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and elsewhere on the net.
I think Lisp still has an edge for larger projects and for applications where the speed of the compiled code is important. But Python has the edge (with a large number of students) when the main goal is communication, not programming per se.
In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice.
A few years ago I got testicular cancer. The information about the disease came in pieces: first all I knew was that there was a lump; then came the ultrasound, the CT scan, then biopsy of the testicle, then a second surgery to sample lymph nodes to which the cancer might have spread. At every step I would obsessively query my doctors for conditional probabilities: given what we'd just found out, what were the chances of dying? Of relapse? Of chemo? Of sterility? I was always incredibly frustrated at how vague their responses would be - they'd say, e.g. "we don't like to give probabilities because you just never know what will happen!". And I would think, "That's exactly the point of a probability! Please just tell me a number!"
One doctor eventually showed me a paper on outcomes for the lymph node surgery I had, with a relapse rate curve going out five years so. I found this incredibly helpful for managing my emotions because it let me track my progress in a very precise way: every monthly checkup that would go by uneventfully, I knew exactly what my chance of relapse had dropped to. The goal was to get to zero. More importantly, having actual numbers gave me something on which I could focus my optimism. It's so much worse to hear "you might become sterile" than "there's a 5% chance of becoming sterile". With the 5% number in mind, I'd do things like imagine myself in a room full of 20 people and think "wow, it would be incredibly unlikely to be randomly chosen from this group". Having spent a lot of time in a cancer hospital now -- around people who were much worse off than I was -- I believe that almost everyone has incredible reserves of optimism. I think it's better when the hopeful possibility is concretely defined - it makes it easier to imagine a path forward while you're stuck waiting for more information.
Mine is obviously a completely different situation from the terminal cancer described by the author, where the question isn't, "when will I be free of this cancer", but rather "when will I die from it". Testicular cancer is very treatable, and I never faced a significant chance of death. I'm sure I would have been in a much different psychological state if I had.
Also, PSA: testicular cancer is REALLY common for young males (if you're male you have a 1 in 500 chance of getting it between 20 and 34). Given HN user demographics, there are almost certainly some of you reading this who've gotten it already, or who will. You can save yourself a ton of trouble if you do a self-examination every once in a while. That's actually how I found out, and is a big reason that I avoided chemotherapy.
I read it in my last year of college. It was a page turner, and helped me think about whether I wanted to do a PhD.
[0] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g8mc1lniyf26opxtrqgna/pguo-Ph...