moosedev

This isn't an attempt at complete answer to your question, and I'm not an expert, a teacher, or anything besides a human who has dabbled with meditation and read a lot about Buddhism (and derived more-or-less secular frameworks such as mindfulness), depression, anxiety, neuroscience, spirituality, etc. over the last 15-20 years.

I'm speaking to two of your points, I think:

1) "isn't our whole life a sequence of meditations? Because we always focus on something"

2) "aren’t we doing [sit peacefully and observe your thoughts] anyway on a regular basis without introducing a word for it?"

In my direct personal experience, sitting in awareness, noticing thoughts and sensations, etc. is simply a materially different experience from... the rest of my time when I'm not doing that. It's materially different from when I'm focusing on an activity like coding (perhaps in a deep state of focus or "flow" [0]) or just habitually/pathologically scrolling through HN.

Did you ever get fully engrossed in a coding session and "lose time"? And eventually you "came around" or "landed" and realized you were "back" and 2 hours had gone by in deep focus? Did you ever realize that you'd been ruminating about some stupid thing for ages? E.g. repeatedly going over a difficult interaction from earlier in the day, or thinking about a difficult interaction that's coming up tomorrow and imagining how it might go? Did you ever snap out of that?

That feeling of "huh... I'm back - here I am." - that's what I am recruiting when I deliberately practice mindfulness. And then I get distracted... and when I notice, I bring my attention back... repeat.

To the second point of yours I quoted, i.e. are we doing this "anyway" on a regular basis? Maybe you are. For me, regular moment-to-moment thinking is generally not the same as mindfulness. I'm thinking, but I'm basically lost in the thoughts. I'm not observing them, I'm just thinking them - or they're thinking me. (And not just thoughts - this all applies equally well to emotional, interoceptive, and sensory experience.) Mindfully observing my experience is materially different, although I do get flashes of it throughout the day without reaching for it deliberately. Whether that's something I had before I started sporadic practice and just didn't have words for, or something the practice has unlocked for me, I can't say, because I can't faithfully recall what my moment-to-moment experience was like that long ago.

Maybe you're experiencing mindfulness frequently throughout your daily life, so you don't notice anything different when you set out to practice it deliberately. Maybe when you practice it you are getting lost in thought and not noticing. We'll never know, given the subjectivity of the experience and our limited tools for communicating about it, but I enjoyed the attempt :)

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-...

Considering that this thread appears to be a fairly average doomer spiel about US debt and the possibility of losing reserve currency status, Kim’s putting a low ceiling on importance for his future Twitter output. (I’m not saying he’s wrong about the risks, just that he’s not presenting any new ones or offering any new insight.)

HMI Module Alpha Humana on approach to Space Station Mercury!

> Now I do my semi-dream job as a Deep Learning Research Engineer building actual products with Deep Learning.

> I have a truly realistic chance of getting my dream job within the end of this calendar year.

So what’s your dream job? :-)

Without taking anything away from OP's achievement, I'd caution against this kind of exuberant comparison without some qualification around it. The risks to that app's continuing to yield $500/month in perpetuity are quite different (and, I dare say, worse) than the risks faced by the kind of balanced portfolio that "safe withdrawal rate" implies (to me). I acknowledge that you didn't directly compare with such a portfolio, but you did say the app is "the equivalent of saving $150,000" - again, if this is true it's in a very limited sense only: the app and the cash face a very different set of risks.

LendingTree.

Here's the tweet you were referring to, I think: https://twitter.com/gpk320/status/1078885655634157569

> Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview)

> They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry.

I'm not sure about single-handedly. I think you can blame the creators of LeetCode as well :-)

Native speaker (Brit in USA) here. Either one is fine, although they have subtle differences in meaning and implication (to me) in this context.

The first thing that struck me before I gave this any real thought is that "How" here connotes a little incredulity or even amazement (to me). There's an implied, rhetorical sense of unlikelihood of the fact. ("How are Rome's monuments still standing?! Shouldn't they have fallen down by now?")

"How" also implies (to me) that we seek an explanation of processes, means, techniques, or methods. It invites an answer that's somehow more dynamic and more detailed. "Why" is asking "for what reason(s)?" The "Why" version of the question feels more direct, but the answer space is broader and more abstract. "How" feels, forgive me, more concrete here than "Why" :)

How -> explain the processes, techniques, or workings. Why -> explain the reasons/causes. Obviously, there's overlap there, and the distinction is subtle, so perhaps some of this is only in my head :)

I found http://www.differencebetween.net/language/grammar-language/d... which seems to half-agree.

> Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over.

It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it".

And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff.

When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon.

I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics

[2] https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure

That is an improvement indeed. Thanks for correcting me!

This matches my recent experience. I researched plans on Washington state's health marketplace and found that while the available plans were generally much cheaper than COBRA, their coverage for out-of-network or out-of-state care was limited (e.g. "emergency" care only, where the definition of emergency is vague and up to the insurer). And even if you are careful to get taken to an "in-network" hospital, there are plenty of horror stories about inadvertently getting treated by an "out-of-network" provider while inside and being on the hook for the entire bill.

I couldn't find a marketplace plan that didn't give me real doubts about the possible financial impact of traveling to other states(!) so I decided to suck it up and pay for COBRA for peace of mind. Of course, COBRA will run out after 18 months, but I plan to get another corporate job before then.

TL:DR if you have (or recently left) a fancy corporate job here, you have access to a group plan with nice coverage. If you have to buy an individual plan, it seems you cannot get the same level of coverage even if you're willing to pay for it, and the available coverage leaves you with the risk of huge medical bills if you suddenly need healthcare while simply traveling within the country.

Not sure if you meant political campaign emails specifically or marketing campaign emails in general. The former are some of the absolute worst offenders in that regard, for sure.

I try to use unsubscribe links when 1) they exist and 2) the email is from a legit organization that I reasonably believe is actually going to unsubscribe me from something (if not from every place they've copied my address to by now), but I can see the argument for just flagging as spam in the case where an organization oversteps previously agreed bounds. Especially with the political campaign emails, the unsubscribe game can feel like futile whack-a-mole.

For ordinary commercial campaigns, I'd worry that flagging as spam would cause legit transactional mail (i.e. mail that belongs in the Updates auto-label) from the same organization to get flagged as well, but based on the state of my Spam folder, that's already happening anyway...

Same. I'd gotten out of the habit of checking my Spam folder, having trusted Gmail to get it "correct enough" for years. But I looked recently and was amazed/horrified how much legitimate email was in there, including a friend's birthday event invitation that I would otherwise have missed.

20% of what is in my "Spam" folder today is what I'd call "spam" in the classical 90s/2000s-internet sense. Obvious trash/scam stuff, usually sex-related.

Most of the rest of my "Spam" looks like what Gmail usually just labels Promotions. It's mail from legitimate organizations that I did indeed give my email address to and have a reasonable expectation of getting semi-regular email from, even if it's just trying to sell me more stuff. The Promotions auto-labeling works (worked) just fine for managing that stuff.

I figured enough users are clicking the "Spam" button on enough "legit promotional" email from real organizations that they did agree to receive email from, that Gmail just started classifying it all as spam, and now doesn't/can't distinguish between "classic" spam and "annoying emails I can't be bothered to unsubscribe from". Sort of a tragedy of the commons of crowd-sourced spam filtering. But maybe there's a better explanation.

30 year fixed rate is actually the “normal”/common mortgage in the US.

I moved to the US from the UK, where mortgages look more like Australia’s, and I still find it amazing you can fix such a low rate for so long here.

Thank you! Strange bug.

It looks like this link (to a Seller Central forum thread?) is only viewable if you have an active seller account. I only see an error page telling me my seller account was closed for inactivity.

Parent is spam. I don't have enough karma to flag it, but let's not give it any clicks.

The (rushed) original floppy release was 320x200 only. The (much better) CD-ROM version released later in 1994 supported 320x200, 320x400, 640x400, and 640x480. (Although good luck playing at the higher resolutions on typical machines of the time :-)

I struggle with similar feelings as an aging amateur musician, particularly in genres like jazz where it sometimes feels like there is almost no point putting something out there unless it's world-class technically... which I'll never be.

Something I realized recently - and admittedly this hasn't changed any behaviors for me yet, but maybe it will help you - is that a lot of the music I listen to is objectively not the best in the world in terms of technical skill, originality, popularity, etc. and yet I enjoy and appreciate it anyway. So maybe it's OK for me to make music that's also not the best in the world - someone might find it and like it anyway. And if not, no harm!

I feel this one's fairly arbitrary, but "taken to hospital" at least lines up with how we talk about other public places in a generic, consumer-of-public-services sense in British English. Besides "taken to hospital", you can be "at university", "on your way to school", or "in prison", for example.

If you worked at one of those institutions, though, you'd add an article and be specific - you work "at the university" or "at the hospital". (You'd expect the listener to infer that you mean the specific university/hospital in the area, assuming there is only one.)

Edit: More colloquially, we also have "going into town" (no article, even though it's probably a specific town that is clear from context!)

The article-less usage only seems to work for generic places (hospital/school/prison/university). It doesn't belong with a noun that refers to a person but also sort-of-refers to that person's place of business. You're "going to the doctor" or "the dentist" or "the hairdresser" - never "going to doctor". This is despite the specificity often being superfluous here - the listener might not know/care which dentist you use!

You're right - thanks for the correction!

Yeah, use of SSE registers does not imply SIMD, since x87 is gone in x86-64, so even scalar FP has to use SSE registers. The asm snippets for v::operator*() in the "Optimization level 1" section use scalar SSE arithmetic only (mulss). (There's some use of movaps to move data around, but it's a stretch to call that SIMD.)

I think the "leverage" sentence you quoted and the "with SIMD taken care of" one shortly after are maybe a bit misleading, since the asm snippets there don't really demonstrate SIMD.

Small nitpick: the Super Hornet is actually the F/A-18E and F variants. F/A-18D was the two-seater variant of F/A-18C.

(Great planes though, yeah!)