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bstrom

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Not to be pedantic, but a vipassana retreat is a 10-day (though not always strictly 10) retreat. Vipassana is not itself a retreat but a method for seeing the nature of reality.

Planet Elm 11 years ago

Nice! Though, seems odd to me that each entry copies the original article but reformats the text poorly. Would it not be better to simply link to the article itself? As is, much of the code examples aren't formatted. Maybe I'm not understanding the purpose of this.

Not clear to me why the README.md has no images of the design itself or its rationale but rather just some dudes bro'ing out on a patio. My intention is not to sound negative... there are good ideas happening here but the README.md is a poor first impression.

Meditation works for me. I am relatively new to it (few months) but have found what I was looking for simply by understanding that I am not my thoughts, that without them I still exist. I began to understand that thoughts are a lot like weather, or like throwing a rock in a pond. For me, I was able to move from that realization to being able to not get swept up in thoughts. This gives me the clarity that I am assuming is similar to what the author found during his hangover. The point for me is understanding that the mind and its processes are a tool. The ability to choose when to use it is freedom.

Some people may also find this through religion or (my opinion) more directly through spiritual practice outside of the framework of a given religion.

Others may use psychedelics. Medical marijuana has been helpful for me in some instances, but I tend to rely too much on it and as a personal choice now try to limit my use. I can understand how alcohol could lead a person to this but there are many healthier alternatives. I could see a person drinking themselves to death before they find it.

None of the upgrades in ES6/ES7 obviate the need for frameworks. Maybe some libraries are made redundant, but frameworks address more interesting abstractions that a general language probably shouldn't cover anyway. Frameworks seem to adopt more opinions about implementation, and help unite a team over a set of ideas, and enable them to move faster and reason about similar problems in similar ways. Hopefully that team has picked a framework that is also well-suited towards the problem they're solving.

The DOM strikes as being composed of layers of incidental complexity that get in the way of the actual problem you're trying to solve. jQuery, or abstractions like it, allow us to compose more elegant and semantically meaningful solutions to problems. If writing boilerplate is interesting for some reason, be it for performance reasons perhaps, then by all means. I find it a bit tedious and appreciate tools that allow me to focus on the problems at hand, rather than obscure browser differences and internal API implementation inconsistencies.

Lots of blanket statements in this article. He asserts there is a 'proper' order to learning JavaScript but makes no demonstration of that assertion. For me, jQuery was a gateway that hid much of the incidental complexity of working with a byzantine API (the dom). That was incredibly useful. If every beginner started with trying to understand the DOM, they'd probably be scared off (and rightly so).