There seems to be some interest here recently on meditation and the beneficial results that are of interest to hackers. Developing the capacity for strong, calm focus and eliminating the detrimental effects of unhelpful mental functions are skills that take practice.
Many of the posts that have been floating around don't give very much substance on the nuts and bolts of how to meditate. Since HN is an erudite crowd of people who don't shy away from detailed topics, a more thorough reference is in order.
This is a 6 part introductory course that should take roughly a month to complete. It is self-paced and costs absolutely nothing. Each week you add on to the foundation you build the week prior. There are 6 lectures covering the topics and practice. Each lecture is a bit over one hour long and has lecture notes to go along with it.
The teacher's name is Gil Fronsdal. He was ordained as a monk and eventually returned to lay life to get his Ph.D in Buddhist studies from Stanford. He is renowned for being exceptionally clear and simple without sacrificing any detail.
If programming is one of the most powerful tools used for hacking computers, then Mindfulness Meditation is one of the most powerful tools for hacking the brain.
I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that makes sense for you.
This brings up the interesting and valuable question of what meditation is and isn't. Buddhist meditation is a skill that concerns itself with two activities. I've provided a link at the end of this reply that you can use to learn Mindfulness (as taught by a monk who is also a Stanford Ph.D in Buddhist Studies).
So what are the activities that comprise meditation?
The first activity is to willfully concentrate the mind in an effort to calm it. This is done by focusing strictly on the sensation of the breath in order to restrict the mind from wandering off. The name of this activity in Pali is called "samatha", which means "calm" or "tranquility".
The second activity is to see the processes by which the mind runs off into orthogonal thought and unhelpful states of mind. Once you see these processes happening, you intervene in them to stop them from happening in order to bring your mind into a strong state of calm awareness. This activity is called "vipassana" in Pali. It means "insight" in English.
Samatha and vipassana are two sides of the same coin. They are a process broken into two supporting functions to achieve the goal. When people are introduced to meditation, they are being introduced to the encompassing practice of samatha-vipassana, otherwise referred to as Mindfulness Meditation.
One of the most thorough and accessible sources of instruction on Mindfulness is Gil Fronsdal. You can find an entire course, along with everything else on this site, for free here:
Going into the wilderness to meditate and attain nirvana. No I'm not joking. I've got a tent ready, I've read the Samyutta Nikaya (Connected Discourses of the Buddha), and I'm going to the Ansel Adams Wilderness near a stream, under a tree or overlooking a cliff.
I grew up in Illinois and live in Los Angeles now, so I miss fireflies badly.
Would you be willing to give up the complexity of the original organism for the function you enjoy? Basically they hover there and emit a soft pulse. To get this functionality we might not need all of the extra crap in firefly anatomy, just a rough approximation.
"All we need" is to create some hovering device (a tiny helicopter) affixed to a tiny LED with an oscillating dimmer. We can make a big one first affixed to a wire and then start miniaturizing it.
If you want to try this out I'm down to help out. I miss fireflies so bad :/ Side note: I know jack shit about robotics but this sounds like a fun way to learn.
If you fall into a positive feedback loop where your mental responses to a particular goal starts to negatively affect your ability to complete it, step back for a moment then chop the goal down into chunks.
With technical books, I get those post-it flags and place a green one at the end of the chapter that I'm reading. In the chapter itself, I place purple flags at intervals of about 20 pages. Now I peg my attention to the amount of pages in those small intervals (rather than staring at some huge tome) and it relieves a huge amount of emotional burden because the goal is more clearly defined and realistic.
I read one of those chunks a day or ever other day. As I read, I highlight all the relevant info in the subsections with two different colors (one for "concepts" and the other for "practical application of the concept").
This method works great for me because going back to read the highlighted area indulges that "fast food" information intake and solidifies my understanding of what I'm reading.
Doing it every other day also takes a lot of load off of the mind. A pot of coffee gets filled drop by drop.
I'm in agreement with you about customers after reading the astute distinction you mentioned to Wheels (prospects vs. converted customers). Once you've curated a stable base of good customers you absolutely must tend to them and that relationship can be very enlightening.
My only issue with your reply to OP was that it seemed unnecessarily sharp in tone ("Go pursue some other passion. Leave the start-ups for those of us who really care") and addressed an effect ("snubbing customers") of his problem rather than trying to untangle the source of the problem itself (being addicted to inertia but lacking grit).
The haughtiness is really unhelpful in gaining insight from a dilemma that many people encounter to various degrees. He's mentioned that this issue is applicable to his endeavors in general, not just startups. People can be involved in business and startups for various reasons, not just a personal sense of ideological purity.
Who could forget FastTracker 2! I was about 13 or 14 when I discovered it. There is something intoxicating about composing with the computer in that way. Granted, there was and are a ton of corny .mod files out there but I feel like mod tracking is where I fell in love with the aesthetics of editors and code.
You are most likely being downvoted for muddling the object(s) of your criticism. The Google navigation app runs on Android but so do other navigation apps. You've made a set error in your logic confusing the subset for the superset.
A fair criticism would be to try different apps, weigh them out and present a measured response based on that analysis or specify that you're criticizing Google's app specifically and constraining the boundaries to that app and not the platform it runs on.
Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (no-gi), surfing and classical/figurative painting. I used to be a street performer and avid skateboarder when I was a teenager.
Interesting that you claim the efforts that have gone into developing Linux are now obsolete yet Chrome OS (which your offer will transcend "obsolete" Linux development) still depends on Linux as does a huge portion of the web.
Human progress is largely evolutionary and incremental. We stand on all that came before us. Facebook brought a new concept of interaction that has a downside many people are against. They address this by creating an alternative, and so goes history.
This plugin really shines in conjunction with your editor's power features. I use Zen Coding with the SublimeText editor's multiple and reflective selections.
Your analogy of meditation being like riding into the woods is great. Its only flaw, however, is in the assertion that both meditation and psychedelic experience arrive at the same mental state. Minus that, likening meditation to progressive, incremental bicycle trips into the forest is accurate and sets a person up wonderfully to begin the discipline.
Psychedelic drugs provide an experience of absorption like a trance. When one is absorbed in such a state, it's the first direct experience of a sense of self that is immaterial (but finite). Buddhist meditation (samadhi or "right concentration" in the Noble Eightfold Path) goes very far beyond that and into very different states of consciousness.
Gil Fronsdal is a Stanford Ph.D who teaches clearly, logically, and in stepwise progression. You can learn here:
If you're interested in empirical studies of samadhi, Dr. James Austin published a book called "Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness" from MIT press.
I hope this helps alleviate your panic and brings you clarity and harmony of mind.