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Book Review: The Way of Effortless Mindfulness

Amazon link. This book introduces the nondual way of meditation, which is quite different from the popular mindfulness meditation method. With mindfulness meditation, it takes years of daily practices to be awakening. The promise of effortless meditation is that through some powerful glimpses, the practitioner can experience awake awareness right away. These practices are usually quite short (most are just several minutes) but the effects are often immediate. There are over 40 glimpses in this whole book, some are quite similar to others. One problem that I experienced while going through these glimpses is that many of them are question-based. Rather than guiding the practitioner with concrete instructions, the author tends to ask a lot of questions in these glimpses. And often the answers are not obvious, especially as a new practitioner. As a result, by the end of a glimpse, I'm not sure if I "got it". Another problem is that the author likes to use a lot of adjectives to describe awareness, which sometimes can be annoying. I've never seen this style of teaching instructions in other kinds of meditations. Loch Kelly's teaching style was also complained about by other practitioners such as those on the Waking Up app. Indeed, if you are totally new to effortless meditation and listen to his meditation lessons directly, you may not understand what he's talking about. It gets better after reading his book. ...

December 3, 2025 · Walden Cui

Book Review: The Mom Test

Do not build anything without validation. And do not do any validation before reading this book. This is an extremely important book for aspiring founders. Rob Fitzpatrick shows every ins and outs of the process of validation in this little book. Some aspects of the validation process are quite counter-intuitive. For example, you may hear the potential customer you are interviewing saying something like "I'll sure buy your product once it's ready" and gleefully consider this as a very positive signal, while in reality, this does not mean anything. There are a lot of examples where a founder got this kind of "positive signals" and then spent six months confidently building, only to find that even the original "promised" potential customer wouldn't pay. ...

November 28, 2025 · Walden Cui

Stale Reference

In dynamic web applications (like those using HTMX, Hotwire, Turbo or React), there is this classic "stale reference" issue. As a quick example, consider the following javascript code that finds an element after receiving an event, and then deletes that element after 5 seconds. document.addEventListener("elementSwapped", () => { const timestampElements = document.querySelectorAll('[id^="el-last-saved-"]'); timestampElements.forEach(timestampElement => { if (!timestampElement.dataset.clearPending) { timestampElement.dataset.clearPending = 'true'; setTimeout(() => { timestampElement.remove(); }, 5000); }; }); }); While the logic is sound, the element reference el captured in setTimeout is likely becoming outdated before the 5 seconds are up. ...

November 24, 2025 · Walden Cui

Mindfulness Research

Deliberate mindfulness has two main styles of practice: shamatha, translated as "calm abiding" and vipassana, translated as "insight meditation". It is now accepted in the field of mindfulness research to refer to calm abiding as focused attention (FA) and the insight meditation practice as open monitoring (OM). Recently, a third type of mindfulness, nondual awareness (NDA), has been included in mindfulness research studies. Here are three descriptions that might be helpful to understand the difference in these three stages of mindfulness. Focused attention (FA) is like looking down from a tower to the river of your breath. Open monitoring (OM) is like looking from an open sky to thoughts, feelings, and sensations as separate objects, like clouds and birds, coming and going. Nondual awareness (NDA) is like being the entire ocean of awareness that is also arising as the unique wave of your body while feeling an interconnected flow with everything. ...

November 13, 2025 · Walden Cui

Lower Level Abstractions For Web Developers

You should know your layer well, but you should also know one layer below it a little bit, and you definitely need to know the shape of the layer that’s beneath that. – Godbolt’s rule by Corecursive Edit: Later on I realized it's the same Goldbolt who created a compiler explorer. Full stack web developers are sitting upon layers of abstractions and can often get lost due to the lack of understanding of the layers below. Understanding these "layers below" is what separates a developer who uses a framework from a developer who understands how web applications work. ...

November 9, 2025 · Walden Cui

Simplicity vs complexity

Two articles about software design pop up on HN: Do the simplest thing that could possibly work Cognitive load is what matters Design is about dealing with complexity. You start with a problem and then you want to solve the problem. There can be numerous ways but often the best way is the simplest way. Now in a craft like software design, it's usually not that easy to be simple and often it requires years of experience for one to reach that point. But sticking to the fundamentals and avoiding shiny techniques can go a long way: ...

August 30, 2025 · Walden Cui

Python Design Patterns

After going through https://python-patterns.guide/, I decide to use some simple, contrived Python programs to get familiar with several Python-compatible patterns. In this article, I'll show four design patterns that are fully compatible with Python and very easy to use: the observer pattern, the strategy pattern, the decorator pattern and the flyweight pattern. The observer pattern The observer pattern is a behavioral design pattern where an object, known as the subject, maintains a list of its dependents, called observers, and notifies them automatically of any state changes. ...

August 29, 2025 · Walden Cui

Curse of knowledge

There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself. ...

September 4, 2024 · Walden Cui

The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

1 First worship the Immortal gods, as they are established and ordained by the Law. 2 Reverence the Oath, and next the Heroes, full of goodness and light. 3 Honour likewise the Terrestrial Daemons by rendering them the worship lawfully due to them. 4 Honour likewise your parents, and those most nearly related to you. 5 Of all the rest of mankind, make him your friend who distinguishes himself by his virtue. ...

July 1, 2024 · Walden Cui

Postgresql15 Django Setup

How to setup databases for your application and testing? Database creation CREATE DATABASE mydb; CREATE DATABASE test_mydb; CREATE USER me WITH PASSWORD 'password'; -- Connect to mydb \connect mydb; -- AWS quirks GRANT me TO POSTGRES; -- Create a schema with me as owner CREATE SCHEMA my_schema AUTHORIZATION me; -- Create an extension CREATE EXTENSION postgis SCHEMA my_schema; -- Connect to test_mydb \connect test_mydb; -- Create a schema with me as owner CREATE SCHEMA test_schema AUTHORIZATION me; -- Create an extension CREATE EXTENSION postgis SCHEMA test_schema; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE my_db TO me; -- Settings recommended by Django doc ALTER ROLE me SET client_encoding TO 'utf8'; ALTER ROLE me SET default_transaction_isolation TO 'read committed'; ALTER ROLE me SET timezone TO 'UTC'; The DATABASE_URL will be DATABASE_URL='postgresql://me:password@myHost:myPort/mydb?options=–search_path%3Dmy_schema,test_schema' ...

April 10, 2024 · Walden Cui