aaimnr

There are actually some wholesome mental states that are conducive to concentration. The most notorious are piti (translated as rapture, joy) and sukha (content, pleasure). Listen to this guy, may be useful http://dharmatreasure.org/piti-joy/ (his superb book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0990847705 ).

Meditation, including mindfulness meditation, is such a thing. After a couple of days on a silent mindfulness retreat of constantly watching your mind (watching doesn't mean 'thinking') there's a moment when the thinking stops. It's scary at first, because it's such unusual for us, but with time, when you learn how to trigger it at will, you start to appreciate this amazing relief that comes with it. And by the way, your cognitive functions do not weaken - on the contrary, the mind becomes more efficient. I couldn't put it better, you very rightly associate the constant mind chatter with stress - that's one of the main causes.

It's not the mindfulness itself, but they definitely get it wrong. Your advice to them is really great and it could be taken as the most universal meditation advice ever: "If it's stressful, you're doing it wrong".

As the Buddha said, "there's no such thing as noble suffering".

Thanks, it's on my kindle as well (haven't finished it yet though).

As I see it, Culadasa is better suited both for general audience and for those more scientifically inclined - that's why it seems to be ideal fit for HNers. It also seems to be much more ambitious, systematic work (it's his opus magnum). Probably Shaila's books target more advanced meditators - that's not to say Culadasa is just for beginners.

Thanks, makes sense. It reminds me a story about some companies blindly following Google in introducing mindfulness courses to its employees, in hope of increased productivity. The interesting offshoot was that some of them, having started meditating, realized that the job is crap and they quit the company.

I remember an article about a study in which some psychologists tried to estimate the IQ of the most important scholars, writers and scientist of all time.

As far a I remember Goethe had the second highest score, right after Leibniz.

I agree with your second point, real concentration doesn't require lot of force to sustain, actually it requires much less force than regular mind wandering.

In regard to you first question, he's right - if you're interested look up topic of "Five Mental Hindrances" - when you reach really deep state of concentration (called Jhana) you drop all of these. Which means that if you still feel any strong emotions, you still have some work to do as the mind is not stable.

Stability and calmness of the mind are very important factors of right concentration, however it's not immediately obvious, as the english word 'concentration' has lot of these forceful connotations. That's why there's lot of people criticizing translation Pali term Samadhi as Concentration and suggest using 'unification', 'centeredness' etc instead.

For anyone on HN seriously interested in this topic, I would wholeheartedly recommend the recently published "The Mind Illuminated" book written by Culadasa, professor of neuroscience and a _very_ accomplished meditator. [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0990847705 ]

For all the other commenters asking why Mindfulness and Concentration are used as technical terms - that's because they correspond to Sati and Samadhi - terms in Pali used by the Buddha.

One of the takeaways of the book mentioned above is that concentration is NOT a state of being concentrated on a single object. It's a state of unification of the mind that persists regardless of its current object. The other important information (obvious for any serious meditator) is that, once reached, it DOESN'T require lot of force to sustain. On the contrary - it's a much more energy efficient mode of functioning. That's why in the 4th Jhana (one of the most advanced states of concentration) the breath completely subsides. It wouldn't be possible if it required so much force. BTW it doesn't mean that the oxygen intake stops completely as there's still some absorption caused by the air diffusion in the lungs and through the skin (cutaneous respiration).

Again, I really recommend the book by Culadasa for anyone even remotely interested. It's amazing from theoretical point of view and even more concerning meditation practice.

The dichotomy in the title is false. As the article states: "This observation fits together with studies that show the best way of maintaining mental harmony during mind-wandering is to be able to be aware of the fact that you are doing it." Which means, precisely, that it's a state of mindful watching a stream of thoughts, without exerting any pressure or expectations of the result. With mindfulness you can do everything better, including thinking - the fact that you are aware of it doesn't mean that you overly control or restrain it. You can let the thoughts flow freely when it's useful, you can stop them (with some practice) when it starts to be counter-productive.

It's about the direct perception of impermanence, which in a timescale of a walk in a park is much more striking in nature, where everything is in a constant flux.

This one seems to stand out: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/...

It's sarcasm.

There are many different ways in which 3d printing could save lives, probably in a more sustainable way than just donating to single person in need. Helping kickstarter campaign like this to succeed pushes the whole 3d printing market a little bit further.

Can't believe no one mentioned http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

This official stackexchange site complements stackoverflow for the exact reasons mentioned by OP - it's concerned with more open-ended questions related to high level programming concepts.

Here's the rationale behind it in Jeff Atwood words (stackoverflow co-creator): http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/introducing-programmer...

Maybe there's a reason why it's not mentioned in Wikipedia? Like, eg. it's not founded on any reasonable sources?

Since you mention Wikipedia, are you suggesting all of the below are false as well?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_states

There is another one, more thorough, on coursera: https://www.coursera.org/course/hci , also based partly on Norman's book. Is anyone able to compare them?

Apparently he indeed was evil: "On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. Midgley himself was careful to avoid mentioning to the press that he required nearly a year to recover from the lead poisoning brought on by his demonstration at the press conference."

Actually the name is not Silence but 4' 33" and it's important, because the piece is not really about a silence, but about a various random sounds you start hearing in the audience when an artist is not playing.

The 3d effect doesn't really make sense in this case, since it suggests that all the segments have actually equal width.

The admiration seems to be sarcastic, though...

Another phil major here...

For all interested in the zombies, check out David Chalmers website: http://consc.net/zombies.html

The guy has stated one of the most famous arguments about the consciousness in his book The Conscious Mind.

Ajax craze started with XML. JSON came later.

It's not that the parts responsible for language couldn't be repurposed for something else (although I don't know whether it's true). It's the fact, that more general learning skills cannot substitute dedicated language learning capabilities. It's hard to come up with different hypothesis once you know that children not exposed to language at all for some time (up to 4-6 years, but I don't remember) lose the ability to acquire it forever.

What would you suggest instead? Integrating with airlines directly?

I don't remember any example right now, but lot of system utilities in Windows 7 has such an alternate description in metadata discoverable through Windows start search input. I've found similar behaviour in IOS - I've typed 'pocket' into IOS spotlight to launch PocketCasts app forgetting that it changed name to Casts. The app has been found nevertheless.

Spring Roo does the same through the use of aspect programming (code generation, essentially - it generates the boilerplate behind the scenes).

The critique of GoF presented is superficial. The main difference being GoF's 'how' against Alexander's 'what' doesn't come from GoF's misunderstanding of Alexander's original work. It comes from a different role of architecture of a building versus an architecture of a computer program. It's easier to say about Alexander's pattern that it provides an answer for a 'what' question because the building's architecture is something that people interact with directly with all their senses. Hence a pattern like "159. LIGHT ON TWO SIDES OF EVERY ROOM" ( http://www.patternlanguage.com/apl/aplsample/apl159/apl159.h... ) seems like an end in itself when compared to eg. a iterator pattern, which obviously always will be described merely as a mean to some more general functionality of the application.

The truth is, "LIGHT ON TWO SIDES OF EVERY ROOM" is also a mean - a mean to making a room more bright, pleasant and friendly . If it feels more substantial than an iterator pattern, it's just because we directly interact with an architecture of a building in contrast to the architecture of a software, which is always hidden.

There's nothing wrong with GoF, it just follows from the essential quality of a computer software.

1) Each gmail user is also a GTalk user. It's very convenient to be able to reach people not using any other IMs through the GTalk's web interface.

2) In corporate environment it's sometimes the only option, due to inability to install 3rd party software.

3) There's a huge advantage of GTalk over Skype - Skype is a P2P protocol. If you send a message to an offline contact and disconnect, he will never receive it unless at some point you are both online. It makes sense for VOIP obviously, but for IM that's just ridiculous.

For the same reason there's no server-side history - no way to reach lot of important information after you reinstall the system, break computer etc.