shekharshan

You can become aware on your own by accident. In fact a lot of us do that. Remembering to be aware means there is a muscle memory that does automatic mental state check, there is an intention behind this state check.

I would recommend unvarnished Buddhism, not mindfulness in a pill that is being taught by these crazy apps. Buddhism teaches mindfulness in the context of wisdom and morality, not just mindfulness. Moreover the word itself is a horrible translation of the Pali word “Sati” which means “remembering to be aware of the state of your mind”. The key is “remembering to be aware”, not just “awareness”.

To give a more concrete example, we have a single Angular app. The app has two areas, one where the user can search for records using free text while another where the user can create or update records. Our source of truth is a Postgres database where all updates and inserts are sent using a microservice. The data flows from Postgres to Elasticsearch using SQS in AWS. The Angular app then queries Elasticsearch using a different microservice. So essentially our command domain model is separate from our query domain model.

@yes_man, mammals capable of same emotions that humans have, are brought into this world just so that they can be stacked on top of each other in horrid conditions for 1/10th of their natural lifespan in order to be slaughtered and fed to a species that is dying of obesity anyways.

It’s more upsetting to know that over 2.7 million are killed for cosmetics. Humans truly know how to dispense misery on mass scale.

The author highlights not teaching enough mathematical theory behind the various techniques. I have tried Andrew Ng's course on Coursera. It uses Octave from what I remember. After a point the lack of mathematical background started to show up. I have always wondered where can I find course that teaches both the mathematical background as well as the hands-on programming in a balanced way.

Precisely. If I fast for 16 hours it does not do much. As a male in early 40s I have to hit atleast 18-20 hours of fasting to start seeing a difference. I have to restrict sugar intake also during the 4-5 hour eating window.

TL;DR! For me, I can always fall asleep within 5-10 minutes of lying down. However on some nights I wake up EXACTLY between 3-4 hours fully energized as if I had 7-8 hours of sleep. Then going back to sleep becomes a problem. This typically happens if I stay on my laptop after 8 pm and particularly if I spend time coding after 8 pm. I am a morning person.

The more strong your faith the more likely you are to suppress reason with violence, particularly when reason challenges strongly held beliefs.

"Take him to Detroit"!!

To implement file system in userspace or TCP stack in userspace how does the process invoke the device driver? I am sure the Kernel steps in at some point. What system calls would you invoke from userspace TCP stack to access the NIC?

I got my hands on “Computer Systems: A programmer’s perspective” and it brought together hardware, compilers and C programming language in context of Linux. That was it and I was hooked.

As a developer I try to understand issues and the factors/context behind those issues. My take is most developers tend to do that. If you act like that you cannot possibly be conservative or liberal. I have a hard time categorizing myself.

A couple of years ago I was just learning Python and was playing around with matplotlib. Running simulation of a dice roll 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 times started to show how the distribution starts to catch up with the expected 1/6th probability of each face. I was thinking how good it would be to teach young students this way.

Thanks, that is really great. I didn't know about that one.

My organization is a big fan of Liquibase. We execute Liquibase using Jenkins. It has a lot of awesome features such as ability to re-execute some changesets if file has SHA signature has changed. You can also decide to re-run some SQL files on every deployment. For example we run ANALYZE on our Postgres RDBMS at each deployment, just to ensure that as part of deployment the stats is updated for the query planner.

I don't miss pre-2000 days when an admin would bounce the Linux servers and not bother to add a startup script for our JBoss or Tomcat servers in their service startup scripts. Our web servers would disappear for no reason from time to time and we would run around chasing the cause.

Focus on keeping your knowledge current. If you have sound grounding in modern stack from virtualization and up using containers and monitoring, I don't see why you should worry about anything. Always be ready to code and even be ready to get your hands dirty with RDBMS query plan troubleshooting.

Thanks @voisin, this is very helpful.

In my own Sangha (community) of lay people, we have several who observe the 8 daily precepts. Every retreat I have gone to, I have never seen monks eat more than one meal a day.

@zhynn, Buddhists monks eat one meal a day throughout their lives. Even lay Buddhists who maintain 8 precepts do not eat after noon throughout their lives. As a practicing Buddhist I eat during a 4-5 hour window everyday of the year. Why make a big deal about one religion?

I fast regularly and have a 5-6 hour eating window. During that window I just cannot eat more than 1500 calories. If typical caloric reduction can trigger starvation type response in the body, why does it not happen when we reduce calories during fasting?

The conservationists shared a portion of the revenue from the park with the adjacent villages. This helped create a symbiotic relationship between the gorillas and villages.

Not saying that this solution will work with poachers but there is probably a combination of approaches needed to preserve the biodiversity. One national park in India has given legal protection to park rangers if they were to kill to poachers and that has had a dramatic impact on the population of single horned rhinos. In 2015 park rangers shot dead more poachers than poachers killing rhinos for Chinese medicine.

Thank you so much! I have Shaila Katherine’s book “Focused and Fearless” but not completed the reading. She is an amazing teacher.

“All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise and will become separated from me”— Siddhartha Gautama.

As a Buddhist we do “contemplation of death” meditation on a regular basis. It involves imagining our last few hours on our deathbed. It is a wonderful exercise to help put things in context. It makes you behave differently towards people you meet, even strangers.

I couldn't understand this: "Domain is an instance of an operating system (or subsystem in case of container virtualization like OpenVZ and lxc) running on a virtualized machine provided by the hypervisor"

So the domain itself is a virtual machine? What makes it different from other guest virtual machinse?

People will believe fantastic things on faith. When science comes in conflict with their world view they will invoke conspiracy theories and alternate facts. Such is the nature of humankind.

I agree with the principal of it but I am not sure I can find a company that is not using software as a competitive edge to take poach business away from others (smaller companies) or cut costs through automation. The world we live in is seen as a zero-sum game.

TurboTax has drained money from personal accountants. Cloud computing is shifting responsibilities from "IT admins" to developers. Autonomous personal and commercial transport is just waiting to put a large number of people out of work. I am not sure how you can end up in development and not participate in mass misery of non-developers.

The problem stems from the fact that the initial translations of the Pali Canon to western languages comes from German monks who understood Pali well but could not find appropriate words in western languages to capture the semantics. Mindfulness technique was used for at least 2000-3000 years before Buddha. So words used in the Pali canon have an etymology associated with them that cannot be easily captured in western languages.

"Mindfulness" is a best-effort translation of the word "Sati". What the word "Sati" really captures is "REMEMBERING to pay attention to what is happening in the mind at all times". A trained mind develops this automatic memory to constantly check and introspect the current state of the mind. Based on whether the current state is wholesome (leading to happiness) the "Sati" helps refocus the mind on wholesome thoughts (this is right effort of noble 8 fold path). Over time two things happen: you get intimately familiar with the workings of the mind and you know how to "manage" your thoughts without using "will" or "force" to repress the thoughts into the subconscious. This is an exercise in finesse rather than force. The gist of it is that "ignorance of reality" (that there is an "I") is the root cause of suffering in living beings. But to grasp that at the "intuitive" level (and not just intellectual) requires years of training and you start to see the fruits along the way.

I think the author meant to say even developers do not understand the decisions some of the ML algorithms make. Anyone who had to debug ML may partially agree with that.

But this doesn’t mean people don’t understand infrastructure. Fundamentally we are dealing with compute, storage and networking. We just combine them in different ways to come up with solutions optimized for different workloads.