MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Geee | 2025-09-25 23:12:03+00:00
There's also the mental state of the world report by Sapien Labs, which tells a different story: https://mentalstateoftheworld.report

I believe this is more accurate, although it's not just happiness. They measure MHQ, i.e. Mind Health Quotient with various mental health related metrics.

I just looked at the report for the first time and it's quite insane how bad young people are feeling globally. Old people seem to be fine on average everywhere. The distributions don't even overlap i.e. the most unwell old people (Ukraine, UK, etc.) are doing better than the most well-being young people (Nigeria, Tanzania) on country average basis.
by g-b-r | 2025-09-25 23:12:05+00:00
Everyone's free to do what he wants, of course, but I'm arguing that there are strong advantages in making good commits.

Ok, good is subjective, I guess, so let's say commits with good descriptions, all the information that could be useful to understand what they do (and where appropriate, why), and a limited and coherent amount of modifications in each; in short, commits that are easy to follow and will provide what you need to know if you come back to them later.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-09-25 23:13:27+00:00
The spirit of the program did not lean in the right direction at all.

It started and ended with malicious intent and demonstration of power. Classic Trump.

The correct spirit is how it was done under Clinton / Gore. Slowly, thoughtfully, carefully, properly planned and delicately executed.

(and this says nothing of party politics or the quality of president that Clinton was, this is only commentary of that particular action as comparison)
by neuronexmachina | 2025-09-25 23:13:39+00:00
* Direct link to 2025 report: https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/

* Rankings: https://data.worldhappiness.report/table

* Data for the US specifically: https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA

The main thing I found interesting was the big jump in "Benevolence" for 2020-2021, presumably related to the pandemic.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-09-25 23:14:34+00:00
There's a Nate Silver article "What explains the liberal-conservative happiness gap?" at https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-explains-the-liberal-conse..., although it seems to equate happiness with mental health.

With that caveat, the conclusion there is that "The liberal-conservative happiness gap persists across all demographics".

Meaning there is no demographic category in which liberals are happier than conservatives — "conservative gays and lesbians report higher happiness than heterosexual liberals".

Lol.
by wilg | 2025-09-25 23:15:01+00:00
Contrary to all the other posters, apparently, I think it's probably a good idea for OpenAI to iterate on various different ways to interact with AI to see what people like. Obviously in theory having an AI that knows a lot about what you're up to give you a morning briefing is potentially useful, it's in like every sci-fi movie: a voice starts talking to you in the morning about what's going on that day.
by Agraillo | 2025-09-25 23:15:05+00:00
I just thought that almost all existing LLMs are already able to do this with the following setup: using an alias "@you may speak now," it should create a prompt like this: "Given the following questions {randomly sampled or all questions the user asked before are inserted here}, start a dialog as a friend/coach who knows something about these interests and may encourage them toward something new or enlightening."
by amscanne | 2025-09-25 23:15:11+00:00
I don't believe that what you're saying is correct at all.

Only 34,344 of the GHM estimate are confirmed identities. The rest of either missing but presumed dead or gross adjustments. They are open about using "media reports to assess deaths in the north of Gaza".

The Lancet study published in January 2025 estimated 70,000 as of October, 2024. This is higher than the GHM estimate, but I can't find anything close to your 200k estimate.

So you may believe in your estimates, but they are many multiples larger than any other credible source that I can find... so it's odd to wave these figures around without any sources, links, etc.
by scythe | 2025-09-25 23:15:22+00:00
I'm moderately amused that as an interventional radiologist, you didn't bother to mention that IRs do actual procedures and don't just WFH. When I was doing my DxMP residency there was a joke among the radiology residents that IRs had slotted into the cushiest field of medicine and then flopped the landing by choosing the only subfield that requires physical work.
by annoyingcyclist | 2025-09-25 23:16:05+00:00
I've been building an app to replace a long-suffering Excel sheet I've used for retirement planning. Started off as a calculator, eventually turned into something like ProjectionLab, though with a focus on what-if scenarios (e.g., how many years can I knock off my working life if I downsize to a smaller house or relocate to another state?) and risk evaluation specifically for early retirement. Not super fancy, but it's already flagged some risks that my spreadsheet didn't, and it's fun to have a codebase that's fully owned/controlled by me.
by izacus | 2025-09-25 23:16:24+00:00
No, I think the enforcement of law is comparable to enforcement of any other law.

The same mechanisms that prevent you from breaking law at home, commiting fraud, hurting people, etc. will be used if this law passes. Nothing more, nothing less.

Technocrat delusions on how you'll fight the government with open source are just that. Delusions. They have a wrench and guns.
by NedF | 2025-09-25 23:16:30+00:00
> Can a model trained on satellite data really find brambles on the ground?

No, as per researcher, "However, it is obvious that most of the generated findings aren’t brambles" and obviously no.

All the model did was think they followed roads, all roads.

If it was oil and gas where people put in effort and their results where checked vs universities where meaningless citations matter and results are never confirmed, it would be more believable.

What they are asking is impossible, increasing the likelihood without silly hacks like it's not in rivers or on top of buildings is an interesting problem but out of scope for academics.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-25 23:16:40+00:00
> Wouldn't a relational database help deal with this?

Sure. It's just a toy example. There are lots of real programs in which you temporarily violate invariants in the course of performing some task, then restore them after. Another example that comes to mind is search tree rotations.

> Unsafe blocks usually contain very low level code, so you can understand what your code does very accurately.

Perhaps at first, but code evolves.
by haglin | 2025-09-25 23:17:02+00:00
Splitting up a PR is a lot of work, especially if you want each commit to compile, but it would be great if you could categorize changes using 5–10 colors and then have checkboxes that you can toggle to hide code corresponding to a color.

What each color means would depend on the PR, but, for instance, yellow = refactoring, brown = test code, blue = drive-by fix, orange = more efficient data structure etc.

The colors and their meanings could be set by either the author or the reviewers. It would be similar to the file checkboxes that exist today, but in this case, it would be per concept, not per file.
by hypeatei | 2025-09-25 23:17:10+00:00
> Obama did far more severe cuts and re-orgs in his second term.

You fail to mention that Obama did this through legislation and actual proposals rather than giving random tech bros and billionaires access to government systems to stop payments on a whim. Did you even read your own links?

> Nobody cared because we weren't in the sensationalist era where one becomes a "nazi" for wanting a smaller government.

This is a strawman. No one is claiming that wanting government efficiency is the equivalent of being a Nazi. Although, there are plenty of other actions from Trump and his ilk that warrant that view.

> Did you know that Obama deported more people than Trump as well? Was he somehow a fascist for respecting the border?

I'm not sure what this has to do with DOGE but I'll bite: Did Obama send people to a foreign labor camp in El Salvador? Did Obama deport international students for the their protest against Israel? Did Obama create a detention facility called Alligator Alcatraz?
by the_gastropod | 2025-09-25 23:17:13+00:00
Are you familiar of the parable of the Monk and the Minister? It goes something like this:

Two close friends grow up and part ways. One becomes a monk, the other one becomes a minister to the king.

Many years later they meet again.

As they catch up, the minister, wearing fancy clothes, pities on the homely monk. Trying to help, he says: "You know, if you could learn to cater to the king you wouldn't have to live on rice and beans."

To which the monk replies: "If you could learn to live on rice and beans you wouldn't have to cater to the king!"
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-09-25 23:17:36+00:00
Surgeons are not exclusive about cutting people open.

First Assists regularly do it, and their backgrounds are as: Surgical techs RNs PAs

I recognize a great value in medical education & experience since that is the primary difference between a surgeon, and a nurse practicioner.

However, for surgeons, they are normally qualified, assessed and evaluated a number of times throughout their career with things like MCAT, then USMLE or COMLEX and then hundreds of surgeries. One of the final ways is through board certification which requires typically, a book of cases, an exam, a large number of surgeries for the specific specialization, sometimes a fellowship, and finally, a defense and sometimes an oral interview.

The first time this matters greatly. But, for busy surgeons that are dual-board certified, should they have to go through the entire process again every 10 years? This is where the accusation of rent-seeking behaviors come in, because previously board certs were considered lifetime. Now, only good for 10 years depending on sanctioning body and they also come with some hefty Continuing Medical Education (CME) requirements too.

The pushback against this has likewise come from Surgeons pushing back saying if we are doing 1000 surgeries a year and are a surgeon in good standing, why do we really need to get re-certified again? This is why doctors are unhappy with Specialty Board Certification Exams, Maintenance of Certification (MOC) exams, State-specific licensing exams, and the requirements around CMEs which some consider excessive.

We see the same thing in IT also, where people regularly let vendor certs stagnate after initial certification.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rand-paul-and-the-certificatio...
by m000 | 2025-09-25 23:17:37+00:00
> It doesn't take a ton of time to reorder your commits, if you had some care for them in the first place.

THANK YOU for saying this. Reading through the discussion, it almost feels that people refuse to put like 3h over a weekend to actually learn git (a tool they use DAILY), and prefer instead to invent arguments why squash merging is so great.

> It doesn't make much sense to place failed attempts in a series of commits (and of their reverts), just go back to the last good commit if something was a dead end (and save the failed attempt in a branch/tag, if you want to keep it around).

I agree that failed attempts are bad to have as code history. If you reasonably split your commits, the commit message has ample space to document them: "Used approach X because... Didn't use approach Y because..."
by tyingq | 2025-09-25 23:18:05+00:00
I think the idea there is that it's less direct. Intel's lack of interest in a 64-bit x86 spawned AMD x64. The failure of Itanium then let that Linux/AMD x64 kill off the workstation market, and the larger RISC/Unix market. Linux on 32 bit X86 or 64 bit RISC alone was making some headway there, but the Linux/x64 combo is what enabled the full kill off.
by jacobgkau | 2025-09-25 23:18:18+00:00
Not sure why you're getting downvoted for asking a question that's simple and prompted by the graph visual. Everyone's so focused on talking about why people are unhappy in general, but why did it drop that much between 2023 and 2024 specifically? If it was politics, I'd have expected the drop to come between 2024 and 2025, unless it was the idea of the election itself that caused it. Any other explanation, and why wouldn't it have been the same in 2022-2023?
by nitwit005 | 2025-09-25 23:18:49+00:00
The reason for that tidiness with some open source projects is because they want to conserve the valuable time of the maintainers, and are willing to expend a lot of time from people wanting changes to do that.

That's not the situation in a normal corporate environment. You want to reduce total time expended (or total cost, at least). It's going to be cheaper to just have a chat with your coworker when a PR is confusing.
by bcrl | 2025-09-25 23:18:52+00:00
Back in the late 1990s I worked on firmware for a dual PRI ISDN card that used an i960, and was quite impressed with its performance. Register windows made interrupts surprisingly performant. The hardest part of that project was fixing a stability issue caused by buggy logic in one of the CPLDs for bus arbitration between the i960, HDLC controllers and the PCI bridge. After fixing every firmware bug I could find, the issue simply had to be hardware. Once I had a few stress tests with the same firmware running on the older ISA version of the board and a borrowed logic probe, it was easy to prove the issue and come up with a fix. It was an OEM board that we were thankfully able to do the product stabilization work ourselves once the vendor realized they weren't going to get it done themselves any time soon.
by gusgus01 | 2025-09-25 23:19:09+00:00
I think only concentrating on those that were shot or injured ignores the impact of being exposed to gun violence, especially during formative years in a situation where it's in the building you're in and results in the death or injury of your friends. Hundreds of thousands of people in the USA have experienced being in a school shooting event.

I also think that it's fair to think about other examples of exposure to violence and not just the Parent's example of weekly school shootings. Speaking of gun violence, I'm not sure I know anyone personally in the USA who haven't been impacted by it, whether that's knowing someone who was hurt, having to lock down at work or home, having to drive a different route home because of an active shooting, or just hearing it and then hearing the sirens. Of course, these are not all equal, but it's interesting to think about.
by jacobolus | 2025-09-25 23:19:24+00:00
I can't disagree with that. I was initially excited (and later pretty disappointed) with Obama, especially with the amount of time he wasted trying to engage with people obviously acting in bad faith, with the way he let himself be pushed around by folks who were aligned against his ideals, and with the extent to which he disengaged after leaving office. Clinton was sadly an even bigger disappointment. I had initially very low expectations of Biden, didn't vote for him in the 2020 primary, and was quite impressed with his actual governing.
by k310 | 2025-09-25 23:19:26+00:00
Some wealthy people have their sexual pleasures, however deranged, in private, arranged by Jeffrey Epstein and the like. Other wealthy people choose to shove their private parts in your face.

And since ANYONE can do it, well, that raises the ante, and the latter have to be very outlandish with their "It's all about me" statements and stunts.

The language you quote is pretty gross.
by andai | 2025-09-25 23:20:06+00:00
I added search to my LLMs years ago with the python DuckDuckGo package.

However I found that Google gives better results, so I switched to that. (I forget exactly but I had to set up something in a Google dev console for that.)

I think the DDG one is unofficial, and the Google one has limits (so it probably wouldn't work well for deep research type stuff).

I mostly just pipe it into LLM apis. I found that "shove the first few Google results into GPT, followed by my question" gave me very good results most of the time.

It of course also works with Ollama, but I don't have a very good GPU, so it gets really slow for me on long contexts.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-09-25 23:20:20+00:00
>Was there a single significant war, rebellion or revolution in the last 100 years where both sides didn't have a gun for every fighter or almost that many guns? I'm not sure, but I doubt it.

Again though, the French like the Americans in Afghanistan, were not defeated on the battlefield. They lost because they got tired of fighting the natives and the war had become politically unpopular.

Howeer, even if I stipulate that the guns are the thing that made the difference it's irrelevant. The Algerians were not legally allowed to own those guns. So the very promise that their right to bear arms is responsible for their victory is unreasonable from the start. They had no such right in Algeria.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-09-25 23:21:41+00:00
The problem is that their high end options kind of suck from a performance/$ perspective. For $200, you can just get a $140 mini pc that will be 10x faster than a Pi and a keyboard to plug into it.

I don't think the lower end pi's are perfected (or anywhere near) either. The actual products are pretty good, but all the peripherals are pretty expensive and make the value a lot worse. A Rhasberry Pi zero only costs $15, but the case and SD cost $5 each, so the most basic config ends up costing way more than it should.

If they wanted to expand their offerings, IMO they should have focused on delivering sensible bundles (e.g. Pi+SD+case+power adapter) that aren't huge markups over the board alone (or maybe making variants custom tailored to specific use cases, e.g. a Pi-zero with emmc storage and insulated so that it doesn't need a case for long term use).
by davidw | 2025-09-25 23:22:52+00:00
If it didn't matter they wouldn't get so upset about you doing it.

Never listen to anyone telling you that your voice doesn't matter.

Like... here's a story about me getting a kind of boring corporate law (related to limited liability companies) changed in Italy. Tons of people rolled their eyes at me and said it'd never happen, but I kept poking away at it, and it did happen:

https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt...

Also, local politics matter a bunch in the US. There is a ton of good you can do in your community with just a handful of people.
by sgammon | 2025-09-25 23:22:58+00:00
with long-running TLS connections this really isn't an issue; turn keepalives on and the connection generally stays hot. grpc over TLS also means features like resumption / TLS ticketing also work.

i used to think this way, and then i tried it, and i have to admit it's pretty good.

think of all the complexity on the other side of running a stable multi-regional database: networking, disk failure, routing, caching. all of that is negated. so yes, there is some latency, but not as much as you think, and honestly, i'd make the trade again in a heartbeat.
by m000 | 2025-09-25 23:23:02+00:00
How it started: "It would be great if you could categorize changes using 5–10 colors and then have checkboxes that you can toggle to hide code corresponding to a color."

How it's going: https://gitmoji.dev/

IMHO, the novelty wears out fast. Especially when your git history starts looking like a Messages thread.
by SMAAART | 2025-09-25 23:23:26+00:00
Very cool. A couple of weeks ago I vibe-coded something similar that works for a while and now it's broken.

Could you please add:

* Search for: past 24h / Past Week / Past month

* Sort by: Newest->Oldest / Oldest->Newest

* Results per page: 20 / 30 / 50 / 100

I'd be so grateful
by csb6 | 2025-09-25 23:23:28+00:00
An LLM isn’t going to provide a high quality translation because it doesn’t understand the context of what the string means in the UI, cultural conventions/writing styles, etc. You might as well run every string through Google Translate. Localization isn’t just a 1-to-1 translation of the text - it requires tailoring for each language that a human translator can do best.
by bobbiechen | 2025-09-25 23:23:28+00:00
Hmm... this smells a lot like "account takeover as a service". I think it works fine for the test user use case, where you basically have a machine identity, but I wouldn't want to use it on a real user's account or my own account because of the risk involved.

I'm biased as we are working on similar problems at Stytch, but I do think OAuth-style scoped consent flows are a better way of handling this: https://stytch.com/blog/connected-apps-consent/ . Otherwise, the blast radius is enormous. Any plans to support OAuth or some other scoped-down permissioning?
by Cheer2171 | 2025-09-25 23:24:11+00:00
What reputation? People who actually know how to develop software or work with LLMs know ollama is a child's tricycle and to run the hell away from what is just a buggy shell around other people's inference engines.

Ollama is beloved by people who know how to write 5 lines of python and bash to do API calls, but can't possibly improve the actual app.
by andai | 2025-09-25 23:24:18+00:00
Have you ever looked at Common Crawl dumps? I did a bit of data mining and holy cow is 99.99% of the web crap. Spam, porn, ads, flame wars, random blogs by angsty teens... I understand it has historical and cultural value — and maybe literary value, in a Douglas Coupland kind of way — but for my purposes, there was very little here that I considered of interest.

Which was very encouraging to me, because it implies that indexing the Actually Important Web Pages might even be possible for a single person on their laptop.

Wikipedia, for comparison, is only ~20GB compressed. (And even most of that is not relevant to my interests, e.g. the Wikipedia articles related to stuff I'd ever ask about are probably ~200MB tops.)
by rtpg | 2025-09-25 23:24:51+00:00
The assumption is that more productive AI + humans leads to cost reductions.

But if everyone involved has a profit motive, you end up cutting at those cost reductions. "We'll save you 100 bucks, so give us 50", done at the AI model level, the AI model repackager, the software suite that the hospital is using, the system integrators that manage the software suite installation for the hospital, the reseller of the integrator's services through some consultancy firm, etc etc.

There are so many layers involved, and each layer is so used to trying to take a slice, and we're talking about a good level of individualization in places that aren't fully public a la NHS, that the "vultures" (so to speak) are all there ready to take their cut.

Maybe anathema to say on this site, but de-agglomeration really seems to have killed just trying to make things better for the love of the game.
by rolph | 2025-09-25 23:25:13+00:00
ad hominem aside: youtube channels are not always what they seem.

it could be like farmed, by the creator, or a bunch of bot followers. its not unheard of to have a bot swarm gaming your channel, to keep it relevant, bcz they use the comments to send stego data to each other.

beyond that, some people have very primative engagement triggers.
by grishka | 2025-09-25 23:25:29+00:00
Sometimes you just can't achieve something with public APIs. Especially on Apple OSes, they love making genuinely useful APIs private for no good reason while heavily using them in their own apps.

Of course, if you use a private API, you're on your own if your app breaks because of it. I myself have done my fair share of using private APIs on Android. Ideally, you should test your app on beta versions of every upcoming major OS release to make sure it doesn't break. Even more ideally, there's a public equivalent starting with some OS version and you only use the private one until that version, then nothing will ever break.