353 karma · joined May 22, 2023
Topinambour would have been available in the middle ages. Confusion with potato by the modern reader is understandable, as a topinambour does look similar to a potato, and some German dialects (e.g. Swiss dialects) name potatoes "Erdapfel".
Types can act as good documentation and as a safeguard for stupid mistakes. But the worst bugs are due to logic mistakes, wrong assumptions or non-foreseen corner cases. Here, either types do not help, or designing the type system is so difficult it is not worth the effort, and makes many future changes more difficult.
In my previous company we used Scala (with and without Spark) for everything, and this setup pretty much allows you both extremes. There was always a middle ground to be found, where types were expressive enough that they were useful, but not too much that they came in the way.
Feels relevant to me. You can apply for a janitor job in a lot of places, so it cannot hurt to ask whether there is a reason to choose this particular one. As other said, just saying "I need a job and this fits my profile" should be an acceptable option.
Let's not pretend that question is what will make or break the interview. I always see it more as an ice breaker to get the discussion started.
One can see that in the JVM world with java vs scala: people attracted to scala tend to like "cute" DSL, java people tend to be more careful with shiny new features. (This is an oversimplification, of course)
Specifically for dplyr: it looks cute and tends to be easier to use in a REPL setting (you can build your pipeline step by step by running your command, looking at the output, get the command from history, add a step, run again; and at the end you get a single line to copy paste in your script). But if you want to wrap it in a function, it tends to create issues.
Also note that generally, traditional Buddhism tends to see building virtue in everyday life as a necessary prerequisite for meditation. You can be a lay Buddhist by being virtuous but not meditating, but not the other way around. A lot of people in our western culture tend to approach it the other way, with meditation as the defining practice and virtue as a secondary thought. I remember hearing of a meditation teacher who loved to start meditation retreats by saying something like "most of you would probably benefit more from hosting a family of refugees, rather than coming to a silent retreat", which would upset quite a few participants. If you want to ground this in meditation, practices such as "loving kindness" meditation are very helpful, and can help overcome/avoid a dark night.
There are also other more "modern" "traditions" (if you can call something that is at most a few decades old a tradition) that can help deepening insight into emptiness _while_ also increasing a sense of wonder and respect for the world, rather than falling into nihilism. I am in particular thinking in Rob Burbea's "Soulmaking Dhamma". To summarize it, he proposes that, given the insight that there is no reality without a "way of looking" (his way to summarize emptiness), it is not only OK to embrace a way of looking, but we have flexibility in doing so - and switching between such ways of looking in this way helps deepen insight into emptiness, rather than lead to delusion.
This does not make immune to feelings of confusion and grief, but can help work with them. Also note I am by no way a spiritual teacher, and what helped me might not help you.
As far as I know both Pāli and Sanskrit are artificially created languages, by merging various Indian dialects of the time, for the purpose of communicating spiritual/religious teachings across ethnic boundaries.
A central concept in Buddhism is actually "emptiness", or the absence of inherent existence of all phenomena. It is sometimes used in Mahayana teachings as "the way things really are", but as I said, this is subtle and confusing, because "the way things really are" is that they do not have independent existence. I would not venture interpreting those strands of teaching too much, as I am not famliar enough with them.
I heard those arguments from various sources, mostly from Thanissaro Bikkhu and Rob Burbea. They are both westerners, formed in the Theravada tradition and scholars of the Pali canon (able to read it in the original language), which I think actually makes them particularly well suited to identify points that might be misinterpreted from a western reader.
Or, alternatively, you can consciously switch how you see it. A hand. Me. A bunch of molecules. Remnants of an old supernova. The results of millions of years of evolution. The tool with which you can communicate the depth of your love to your child by gently stroking them. Just actively changing the "name" you give it will change the way you perceive it, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite radically.
If you are interested in this kind of things, I would recommend the teachings or Rob Burbea. His whole works are built around exploring this topic.
I absolutely agree that there is a lot of parallels with Buddhist descriptions of "co-dependent arising", but there are also important differences. Buddhism is focused on suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. It is a practical path, and everything that is not related to this path is out of its scope.
But I would disagree that eastern philosophy explores this "much richly". The article cites Kant and Husserl in the second paragraph. And the whole idea of seeing "things as they really are" was imported to Buddhist thought by western thinkers[1]. This idea is present in currents of the 3 Abrahamic traditions, in great part through the influence of neo-platonism from the 3rd century onward.
This kind of concept is present in mysticism in all 3 Abrahamic traditions, though in a different language.
As a Buddhist practitioner turned mystically inclined Christian, I would argue that there are lots of facets to look at this, from a wide array of traditions, and all have their place and value. One of the hardest things to do is not to immediately dismiss them by analogy with waht we already think we know, e.g. "oh yeah that's just good ol' teaching of the emptiness of all phenomena, I know that!", without rejecting what one learned until now either. What is beyond word can be described in countless ways, and each of them can help shed a new light and reveal holes in ones current understanding of "reality", if you let it do its work.
[1] you could argue that it is part of some Mahayana traditions, but the way they describe it is so foreign that if you do not engage with it for years, theoretically and practically, you will understand it through a "romantic" lense.
But in the specific german case, the code is not even that secret. This is a formal document with a very specific structure, and very standardized phrases. There is even specific software to generate the text out of performance ratings. Basically something like this:
- John was overal engaged: he is a lazy bastard
- John was engaged: he is OK
- john was very engaged: he is good
- john was always very and thoroughly engaged: he is very good
Still, I could imagine that the new testament is more easily memorized by getting "involved" in the story. I have this impression mostly by comparing with the pali canon (the oldest set of sacred buddhist scripture): buddhist pali texts (with a few exceptions, such as the dhammapada) are very technical and contain very little in terms of "story", and their structure contains much more repetition and structured lists than the bible. So much so that all written versions I know of abridge the repetitions, as it would otherwise be extremely boring to read. That biblical texts (or more poetic pali texts) did not have to resort to this makes me think that the meaning and emotional involvement with the text indeed helps in memorizing it.
I have no idea if your pastor had this kind of practice, but from the article, if he did, it might have helped him memorize the texts. And the memorization, in turn, moght help focusing more and more on the meaning, rather than the words.
Also note that, as far as I know, all texts in the bible (except maybe some parts of the new testament, I am not sure) were transmitted orally for periods ranging from decades to centuries before being written down, and are structured in a way that helps memorization.
We tend to think of memorization as unnecessary if we have unlimited access to the text, but this discussion actually makes me wonder whether memorization might be a powerful way to "unlock" the hidden meaning of some texts.
In Germany, where I work, it is usual at the end of employement to ask for a letter of recommendation ("Zeugnis") that lists the tasks performed, and how good the employee was. It is an important document, as it will typcally be required when applying for jobs. Obviously, no employee would accept a document explicitly stating "this guy is a lazy bastard, do not hire him", so there is a "Zeugnissprache", a "secret code" to disguise this information as praise. One part of this code is that a missing period in the last sentence means "please ignore everything said here, this guy is horrible".
How do I know? I let a lawyer check my Zeugnis after my last employment, and (I assume out of lack of care, as all my performance reviews were positive) the last sentence was missing the period.
Now, this does not say anything about the Waymo incident. In that case, the car performed an illegal maneuver, which cannot be blamed on other street users.
There is another cause, more pernicious, which is that in the absence of a big effect, "a significant effect of X on Y was found" sells better than "no large effect was found", because there is a bias towards reporting positive effects in the litterature. In my field, it is actually usual for people to take big surveys, iterate dozens of statistical models with any kind of interactions, and only report one where some interesting parameters end up being significant, and derive policy recommendations based on this. Which is a recipe for non reproducible results.
I also had one colleague who was brilliant and had strong opinions about the product, which were expensive and demanding, and was affected by a lay off wave. I think him being original, not "focusing on the core product", and a strong character had something to do with it, so of course it happens.
If you try it, you will likely be surprised by how mich usually gets thrown away.
I also have no problems with "laypeople" not being aware of the research and having only a half-informed opinion. Even experts cannot be familiar with everything. This is actually something I love about HN, that people with general curiosity come to discuss about topics they are not always experts in.
My problem is that, before boldly stating that everyone in the field is wrong, he does not seem to have taken the time to get familiar with what they actually say. But he can write, and _sounds_ informed. I consider this a dangerous combination.
I do not think anyone serious ever said "no more roads should be built". But no one builds roads just for the sake of it: one builds roads, in very broad terms, to the benefit of society and the economy. What transportation planning research is about is pretty much to try to understand (i) what is actually of benefit to society, as far as the transportation infrastructure is concerned, and (ii) how to actually achieve it. And to be honest, no one really agrees on either point.
I did transportation research, and taught it at the masters level, for more than 10 years. His "arguments" against the concept of induced demand are pretty much part of the basic understanding of everyone in the field. There is none of the epiphanies of the author that are not part of a basic transportation planning class.
"Induced demand" is tightly linked with urban sprawl, which the author seems to have just discovered. The critique of induced demand is pretty much centered on the fact that urban sprawl is widely considered as bad, which the author does not seem to even aknowledge. I could write an answer long as a book, but this would be giving this article too much weight.
Do yourself a favor and just ignore this.
I would concede that the wording is not great, but this is unfortunately often the case with concepts that develop over decades.
But I have absolutely no knowledge about the event, so if anyone has a more informed opinion, I would be very interested.
https://youtu.be/dEZ-AantPaY?si=9n6SdBYowo1HoXuD
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oerlikon_-_%27Gleis_9%2...
Also, it manages to make me want more, even though the premise is as corny as can be. If I ever write a novel, I will definitely have a closer look at this method.
At least this is the way I did it years ago when I thought it would be fancy to have my contact data as a QR Code on my visit card.
With the subjective experience as an emergent property, things such as a society, a country, an economy could become conscious, in the sense of having a _subjective_ experience of their own existence as entities separate from the rest of the world. If we accept the "consciousness as an emergent property", we _have_ to accept that possibility. Which, to me, is not less wild or unlikely than, say, the "theory" of a field of consciousness "received" or "captured" by physical systems with certain properties, the same way a radio can receive radio programs. There are additional reasons to want to consider alternative explanations, but going into them would rrquire much more space - if interested, I would point to the report of the Galileo Commission.
So it does not change anything to physics, really: materialism is pretty much the best methodology to unpack the laws of physics: whatever you observe, see if you can find more elementary physical processes that explain it.
I am just a bit irritated by bold statements which assume that we know for certain that consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes. We do not, and the reason why this is such an accepted fact is more sociological than scientific - Newton and others decided to focus solely on physical processes as a methodological tool, and over centuries, the undeniable success of the approach in making discoveries _and_ building practical tools gave it an ontological status it did not have initially (Newton was for instance a very convinced Christian). Which makes me keen to remind that, because in the current scientific culture it is shameful to even ask the question.
I feel sarcasm in your last paragraph, but it feels rather dishonest, in the sense that you voluntarily use rather crude and ridiculous formulations, as if it was the only alternative. But there is some arrogance in thinking that we, smart as we are, finally got the final answer about one of the hardest questions in philosophy and metaphysics. Materialism is not proven: it is a basic methodological assumption of modern science - meaning that we do not have the tools to either prove or disprove it. Newton, Gödel and lots of other renowed scientists are knowed to have opposed materialism. Let's accept that the question is open.
On this topic, I always recommend reading the report of the Galileo Commission, which is a manifesto by a wide range of scientists and philosophers to reduce the stigma associated with even questioning this fundamental dogma.
On the positive side, no comment of mine ever generated that much engagement!