I went to a mid-level UC school but maybe could have

6 min readDec 5, 2020

The Ritual of Personal Reflection. Did you do your best today? What could you have done better? When did you feel happy? Always make some time to answer these basic but important questions.And we have been doing so with gusto. Bitcoiners, through the mechanism of novel technology, seek to restore a monetary arrangement of the past. Bitcoin is new technology designed to pursue baroque ideas. It hearkens back to the era of sound money, in particular the harmonious period from 1880 to 1914 when the international order was largely united on a gold standard and free trade flourished. In the minds of bitcoiners, we sit at an epochal turning point. With any luck, future historians will speak of the bitcoinist restoration, which reversed the losses suffered in the fiat interregnum of 1971–2020. I call it an interregnum because a fully fiat standard is a historical anomaly rather than the default. In this manner, Bitcoin can be understood as revanchist or restorative. We are reclaiming lost territory, discarded ideas, and lost time.The Ritual of Congruent Character. Always follow your principles. Write them down, be aware of them, and stick to them no matter what. Don’t compromise on what’s most important to you. Never.Martin Luther sought to reform the Church, to return it to a truer, earlier state. Aside from presenting us with a rubric and then a first implementation of a system, Satoshi was not as forthcoming. The Bitcoin whitepaper is probably one of the most semantically dense documents in history. Not a word is wasted. Satoshi was famously terse on forum posts, only sparingly opining on the political and economic objectives of the system. The blanks have been left to us to fill in.If you want to overcome most programming obstacles, you need practice. Even so, you can be stuck for hours or days at times, unable to figure out how to fix an issue with your program. This struggle is normal. It is part of learning to code. Just make sure you set aside a good bloc of coding time at least a few days a week, ideally in a routine, and eliminate distractions. Even with a designated course instructor, you will probably face this type of struggle and you should first extensively try the methods described above. It is important to get efficient at searching for the issue yourself, even if this feels painful and cumbersome at first.

Python also offers standard tools, such as pdb, to debug — which means fix — your code using a similar approach. Another exercise, with the answer given at the end of this post, is to find the documentation of pdb. Using these types of print and debug commands will give you a fine-scale view of how your program is working. Once you have fixed your program’s issues, removing the lines of code used for debugging is one step in cleaning up your code.

It’s virtually impossible to set foot in an ancient cathedral today, a thousand years old, without contemplating the sheer human effort expended to place every last stone and every last pane of colored glass. It’s a monument to and a digest of the embodied work sunk into those ancient stones.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.

What is that you need with it comes to emotional fulfillment? What do you need from your career or your environment in order to feel like you are able to provide for yourself? Do for yourself. Get what you want on your own. Dig deep and find ways to meet your own needs, and stop looking for other people you can depend on to do it.
The Ritual of Physicality. Move, get up, do some exercise. It doesn’t take a marathon to get your blood flowing. A few push ups, jumping jacks, or a quick run go a long way.
The program may also not give an explicit error, but may still not be behaving how you want. You need to think about the problem line of code by line of code, to pinpoint the specific commands you will need to change. One of the first programming commands you will learn is how to print out lines of text onto your screen. Add these commands to the program, after each line or so, to verify the lines of code in your program are running the correct number of times.

Later in the yogi’s story, the sumo collapses. He reawakens to the smell of some beautiful, yellow roses in the garden. These roses represent another virtue: selflessly serving others. This ancient Chinese proverb captures it:

Are you seeking a relationship with the expectation of someone else carrying the burden of your life for you? Do you think they will do all the heavy lifting while you take a passenger seat? Unfortunately, this is not how life works. No one wants to provide for someone who is capable of providing for themselves — especially when that person expects it with little gratitude. If you want a relationship that lasts, become a pro at meeting your own needs.
In Python, you may also be creating something called a variable. A variable is a value stored in a specific location in memory and given a name. When you refer to the name of the variable, you can access its value. Variables are very important in most programs for storing and sharing information. And as you run the program, you can specify how the variable’s value changes. When you test your program by printing out the line of code, you can include the value of the variable to double-check that this value has changed to what you want.
Taking a self-paced online course definitely requires an extra dose of personal discipline. From time to time, you may well need someone else to give you that extra pair of eyes or even that extra bit of accountability. And sometimes, coding is actually lonely. If you need more human interaction than this post describes, there are still many ways to get it.

The Ritual of Live Nourishment. The sages eat a vegetarian diet. Only fresh food. Again, nutrition is personal, figure out what you need — but fresh is usually better processed, and the right balance of fruit, veggies, and protein matters.

When your code does not work, another tip is to read the error messages you receive. Part of your error message should be common to a variety of other error messages, and part should be a distinct phrase. Take the part that is distinct and copy/paste it into a search engine. You might want to put it in quotes, to search for the consecutive phrase rather than the non-consecutive words. This will hone your search down to web pages where your specific error, and its fix, is discussed. Sometimes these web pages do not have a fix but have clues you can also search for. Tracing the clues is part of learning how to code.

The Ritual of Early Awakening. The sages suggest six hours of sleep and waking at sunrise. Everyone is different, so figure out how much you need for yourself, but being up at dawn is definitely powerful.

I went to a mid-level UC school but maybe could have

Written by David Partho

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