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rainy-day

14 karma · joined May 24, 2016

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rainy-day··on Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations
I don't feel like anyone has gotten recommendations right, even though one seemingly obvious approach has not been tried by anyone: allow ratings of favorite works across all media: movies, tv shows, books, music, radio programs, youtube videos. Make a very easy, efficient UI to add ratings. This way you will avoid superficial matches: if I just watched an excellent steampunk cartoon, let's offer a zillion of throwaway crap steampunk. It's not the steampunk part that I liked, it's that it was amazingly done.

If I was a huge fan of books, movies, music, youtube picks of another user, it may be there is a deeper connection of the kind of quality we are both looking for, and so his or her recommendations would be highly relevant.

rainy-day··on How Your Brain Becomes Addicted to Caffeine
I'm very sensitive to caffeine and I have come up with one rock-solid rule that works for me: i can have a cup of coffee or tea but then, on the next day, I have to be caffeine-free, no exceptions, ever. The way I explain it to myself is that my body goes into an unnatural mode of operation on caffeine, the mode that is both productive and creative - and even pleasant, but I need some time to go back to normal state, which takes at least a day.

If I have a low caffeine drink like a lightly brewed green tea, I don't get much of the benefit but still get the downside: I need to completely cut off caffeine for a time.

rainy-day··on Using attrs for everything in Python
As I think others noted, the attr version does alot more: it adds representation and easily adds compare methods as shown in OP.

Aside from that, this is not a fair comparison because attr names can, and mostly should be, longer, and there can be more of them, e.g.:

    class SomeClass(object):
        def __init__(self, myattr1, some_val, a_bool,
                     my_other_attr):
            self.myattr1 = myattr1
            self.some_val = some_val
            self.a_bool = a_bool
            self.my_other_attr = my_other_attr
And of course they'll need to go into __str__ method as well.
rainy-day··on A Guaranteed Income for Every American
Nobody specifically wants to outlaw that. Literally nobody. Laws have to have a tradeoff between being too general and being too specific (and having too many special cases). Being too general means catching too many edge cases where it does more harm than good. Handling too many special cases creates a moral hazard where there's more benefit in finding loopholes or plainly ignoring poorly enforced parts of the laws than honest work.

Anecdotally, I did work as a kid, didn't learn anything useful, did not learn responsibility, a bit of money I didn't really need, and it felt like a waste of time and left a bad taste overall.

I fully believe that in many, possibly most cases, work is beneficial for kids (as long as they're not from poor families in which case there will be too much pressure to overwork, affecting school/homework and taking away whatever little time they have to enjoy childhood).

rainy-day··on Odds are we're living in a simulation, says Elon Musk
How is this theory different from solipsism?
rainy-day··on Paper Processor – What is fetch, decode, and execute?
Cardiac was also implemented in Python: http://www.pythondiary.com/blog/Oct.15,2014/building-cpu-sim...
rainy-day··on For some, meditation has become more curse than cure
I think the confusion here may be between strategic and tactical levels. Strategically, your mind decides that it should move in a certain direction. After that initial decision is made, it finds that obsessive judgement is counter-productive, and so it tries to stop. That doesn't in any way mean that initial decision is void.

Another possible reason is that idea of judgement of good and evil is primal in Western religions while in Eastern traditions, the idea of escape from state of confusion is primal. That's not to say that in the West, confusion is not considered a problem, or that in the East, doing or believing terrible things is ok. In meditation traditions, judgement between good and evil is just the first step, like a compass that points you in the right direction. In three major Western religions, once you make the proper judgement and choose the good side, you are done, finished.

rainy-day··on For some, meditation has become more curse than cure
I would also add that meditation is a bit tricky in the sense that it increases awareness of what's there - and what's there may be good or bad, but increased awareness is a better gift than merely good or bad things. Noticing more things means I'm not as locked in to my obliviousness. It's paradoxial but having a bad meditation is often beneficial.
rainy-day··on For some, meditation has become more curse than cure
In the yoga tradition, meditation is not something you can just sit down and do regularly from the beginning. You are supposed to do asanas to prepare for breath exercises, and breath exercises to allow the mind to concentrate, and then the "meditation skill is unlocked".

The general idea is that sleepiness and sluggishness is a certain outcome of an unhealthy body, as well as anxiety and irritability that are caused by various body aches.

In the worst case, meditation can become a formality, just a checkbox to fill out, a way to spend an indulgent, lethargic half-hour, or the opposite - a constantly distracted, obsessive anxiety (which is perfectly fine and even to be expected at the beginning of a meditation, but not at all times).

That's not to say that meditation is completely off limit: the idea is to do a bit of meditation and breath exercises at first and a lot of asanas, and then gradually increase breath exercises and then concentration; and finally meditation.

But this whole idea that meditation can be counter-productive in some circumstances is not really alien to the Eastern traditions. They are not stupid and they've been doing it for a long time with an empirical, practical approach.