Idk what the point of research like is. I mean like, duh? I would be surprised if they claimed negative news DIDNT affect mental health struggles.
Instead the far more interesting questions seems to be: in a world where negative news is becoming more common and prevalent, how do we face the reality of the world without destroying our own mental health in the process.
The naive takeaway from this article would be "just stay away from negative news" which is even reinforced by this little plugin they made. But this simply accelerates the fragmentation we have seen in society, for how can you ever have empathy with others if you refuse to appreciate the suffering of anybody but yourself and what immediately affects you?
Maybe instead of sticking our heads in the sand, we should be taking this as a wakeup call that us trying to solve these problems will help not just our planet, but our own mental health and will be necessary to have a healthy populace going into the future.
> how can you ever have empathy with others if you refuse to appreciate the suffering of anybody but yourself and what immediately affects you?
Anecdotally, I have not observed an increase in empathy from people who immerse themselves in negative news about faraway places. There's sometimes an increase in the performance of empathy—you'll see them bemoan the various crises, you'll see them wonder aloud how anyone can go about their lives while ${STUFF} is happening—but I haven't observed an increase in their ability to actually be empathetic to the perspectives and needs of people closer to home.
If anything it's the opposite: the more immersed someone is in tragedies and crises on the other side of the planet, the more aggressive and thoughtless they are in response to hot topics locally. Instead of slowing down and developing empathy for those who disagree with them, they lash out. It's like being immersed in extreme crises they can't control causes them to perceive their local crises as more severe than they actually are and triggers fight or flight, which actually stands in the way of empathy.
Dunbar's Number[1] could potentially be playing a role. When you're already so preoccupied caring about people on the other side of the planet, you literally have no cares left to give around you.
What you are suggesting is that there is a locality dimension here which is interesting and probably points to an important consideration.
Even the follow up insight about agency and that the problem is we feel less able to solve these things is good.
But I think that an over-emphasis on local events makes one less able to understand and deal with the things in their own lives as well. It leads to a sort of purposeful ignorance where we don't want to learn what is going on in the world so we are surprised when the consequences become relevant to us.
If you don't know whats going on in Ukraine, you're going to be confused when your local Ukrainian friend is upset because a family member got killed
> Idk what the point of research like is. I mean like, duh? I would be surprised if they claimed negative news DIDNT affect mental health struggles.
It's still important to repeat and reaffirm studies. External factors are always changing and even if those factors were static, repeated studies strengthen the science.
Okay fine yes. The proper and disciplined answer spoken by someone who appreciates the act of conducting science.
To make the point much more precise. From a philosophical perspective, while reaffirming existing knowledge is good and necessary for the continued advancement of scientific inquiry and the strengthening of knowledge of course, I would rather argue that the scope of the knowledge is too small.
Scientists are so terrified of being accused of going out of bounds of what can easily and reproducibly be quantified, that they end up proving near tautology and it leaves one questioning if this was worth all the time and money for research.
I guess I'm becoming a pragmatist as I age and feel a necessary part of knowledge is application. If scientific knowledge is not being used to improve the world, im not sure if it was worth the time and money.
I know this isn't how universities see it. But I feel that while the authorities on knowledge have become ever-more timid in what they are willing to prove and say, grifters and intellectual charlatans take advantage of the gap and tell people all forms of pseudo-science and dogma which is eaten up by the public because there isn't really an authoritative story to counter many times.
I guess it happens because only small part of world population stay away from negative news. If most population stay away from negative news, I believe the news outlet will change their news tone.
An interesting point. Allot of ink has been spilled around whether or not we are inherently drawn to negative news or if the ecosystems themselves condition us to seek negative news.
You're correct that if negative news was less profitable then they would push less. But that is exactly the problem is that the content itself just seems to attract more eyeballs and even those outlets that want to be better are stuck in the same engagement arms race as all the rest.
I mean most research is trying to figure out things we think are intuitive, but I actually find it somewhat interestingly. It says negative content, not news, so I wonder how this compares to say heavy metal or horror movies where people may use negative offline content in a way that may help process negative emotions.
I’m actually sort of interested in the contrast. I think you’re right, that it is sort of obvious that doomscrolling news is bad for mental health, and it’s a sad change.
The same way humanity has always done it: Get out of your house/apartment and go for a walk. Talk with people actually in and around your life. Touch grass, as the youngsters these days like to say.
Reality is the physical world immediately around you.
Walk that thought through to the end. Because it's become a popular sentiment even on this platform which is interesting. If what you're saying is true, the internet itself is toxic to mental health, and the only sane thing to do is to keep away from it at all costs, as you suggest.
However, we are on a hacker news, an overwhelmingly technical message board. Are we all just modern poison pushers then? Is the very nature of what we do somehow toxic to the flourishing of human life?
I don't think so. I want to see a more critical analysis of what in particular is driving mental health outcomes down. Don't mistake this for me saying there is nothing to do. I was in support of the ban on social media in schools for example. But as modern people who use technology regularly to live our lives, surely atleast we understand it is more nuanced than just "use the computer less"
The beauty and horror of the internet is that we can access all the information; the internet provides us information from everywhere. Meanwhile, there is scientific theory to suggest that our mental capacity to handle information is ultimately finite; for example, Dunbar's Number[1] and the Paradox of Choice[2].
This means unfettered use of the internet can lead to information overload. In addition, because information from the internet most likely concerns things far away[3], you quite literally have no fucks left to give to concerns local and actually relevant to you (see: Dunbar's Number[1]).
The answer is, of course, the same as everything else we consume: In moderation.
Use the internet in moderation. Too much internet is bad for you just like too much water or oxygen is bad for you. Stop doomscrolling through sensation after sensation and running your brain literally dry of mental fuel; instead, get out into your reality and live. Touch grass, because that grass is more relevant to you than whatever the fuck the Sensation Industrial Complex is peddling onto you via the internet.
Kneejerking as you suggest ("keep away at all costs") is, well, kneejerking and doesn't actually look at the problem.
>what in particular is driving mental health outcomes down.
When you subject yourself to an endless onslaught of sensational negative "news", the logical conclusion is you end up depressed and mentally ill. You are what you consume, this includes non-tangibles like information.
This has actually been pointed out since long before even the internet[4], because "journalism" has always preferred sensational hit pieces that pull on viewers/readers' emotional purse strings since they garner more revenue. The internet enabling easier distribution of and access to information simply exacerbated this problem. Good news isn't good business.
[3]: War in Ukraine! Uprising in Syria! Oppression in China! Congress in turmoil! The EV revolution in Scandinavia! Here's what King Charles had for dinner!
The longer I program the more I agree with this take. I have seen too much power and dominance from people who wield it as a cudgel against everyone else in the room who doesn't care enough to double-check the practice.
Put another way, knowledge is knowing best-practices, but wisdom is knowing where and when to apply them. Unfortunately, most building software have only the knowledge and there is too little consideration for the fact that structure is not free, and considerations must be made for when velocity is the primary objective vs safety and adherence to best-practices.
It all comes down to architecture design in the end.
Not only can I corroborate this experience already in my workplace, even in my personal projects I can feel the effect.
The most striking example was I was learning a new language (fennel) and wanted to translate some existing code (Lua) as an initial exercise. It got the first few files fine, and I did feel like a double-checked them to make sure I understood, but only when it failed to make a conversion that worked properly did I realize I hadn't been learning really and still had no idea how to fix the code. I just had to write it by hand to really get it in my head and that 1 hand-written file have me more insight than 10 ai translated ones.
O, it looked better, had better design too because the ai just took the style of the existing file and transposed in whereas I was able to rethink the other files using the strengths of the new language instead
I think Rich Hickeys advice of not breaking people applies here.
The anger from this potential change is that really all you are doing is taking something away that was working, and now people will need to review their code or keep python on a previous version which sucks.
I think that people who propose these kinds of changes don't appreciate the importance of the programming language being at the bottom of the stack so there's really never a good reason to break people even if you think it's nicer as you really can't appreciate how much work you are creating for people.
IMHO, working on a programming language is only for some, just like working on a database is only for some. The first rule should be: "you should never break the language, ever". Just like you should never break the database or kernel behavior.
This is why I like to stick to C, Common Lisp, Clojure, and (to some extent) Java/JVM. I don't know about Clojure's future, but C and Common Lisp have been fine for the last 40 years, and I'm not expecting the least in the upcoming years.
I half agree with this rule. I think that it's fine to break things as long as you make a semantic version change _and_ provide automated tooling for upgrading old code. If you can't build this tool, that is a strong negative signal for both versions of the language.
What I don't like about say, c, is that it has various backward compatible additive dialects like c11 vs c99. I personally don't agree that c11 and c99 are the same language in spite of the backwards compatibility and I think it makes the entire ecosystem worse. At some point there needs to be a successor rather than just piling on to old broken designs. I would prefer a better FFI or other tools to interface with legacy code in the new dialect.
> I half agree with this rule. I think that it's OK to break things as long as you make a semantic version change _and_ provide automated tooling for upgrading old code. If you can't build this tool, that is a strong negative signal for both versions of the language.
I'd be happy to find automated tooling for upgrading old code that actually works. Python 2to3 converter worked on simple code but would fail on anything mildly complex (what would that tell about the Python language then :P).
IMHO, breaking language could makes sense if you have built-in runtime (like golang) or you ship native binaries that depend solely on kernel or libc (C/C++). You build your program and ship it to the clients. But, when you have a runtime like Python, you must also force clients to upgrade it. And the problem with Python is that you can't easily do that because system stuff usually depends on a particular version (yum/dnf, ubuntu services, and so on). And, unlike Java, the Python community only advertises a little about having multiple Python versions installed simultaneously.
> What I don't like about say, c, is that it has various backward compatible additive dialects like c11 vs c99. ... At some point there needs to be a successor rather than just piling on to old broken designs.
This is why people are still using C. There are many successors with varying success (D, C++, Rust, Zig...) and much more added complexity to the language and runtime. Language simplicity, compilation speed, and compiler simplicity - all of that was lost.
One painful one that is still reverberating a bit in some areas is the renaming of "SafeConfigParser" to just "ConfigParser" in the standard library (in 3.12). This caused a whole lot of breaking in some areas because versioneer (a package for determining a package version from git tags) used it (in code that was placed inside your package, and so couldn't be solved by just upgrading versioneer).
Python 3.7.9 (default, Aug 23 2020, 00:57:53)
[Clang 10.0.1 ] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import cgi
>>>
Python 3.13.0 (main, Oct 8 2024, 01:04:00) [Clang 18.1.8 ] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import cgi
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<python-input-0>", line 1, in <module>
import cgi
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'cgi'
As somebody who just did job interviews, tech like this is why the job market has somehow become even worse in the LLM age.
You want to know why people are using AI to read your resume? Because tools like this are clogging job inboxes with hundreds of submissions per day.
Also, don't think this makes you special, we can tell when something is written by AI. Not only do you not look smart, you look like the 100s of the people who thought they could get one over but instead your resumes all read the same and say a whole lot of nothing.
This isn't a criticism of the tool or the people using it. More a rumination on how an already horrible process has someone become so bad that tools like this feel like a good idea to people.
> You want to know why people are using AI to read your resume? Because tools like this are clogging job inboxes with hundreds of submissions per day.
While I sympathize with the sentiment, it's important to note that companies were using algorithms to screen resumes long before LLMs became an option for generating job applications. Job applicants have long been accustomed to trying to guess which keywords to use to make it through HR filters and then submitting the application with only the faintest hope that it will ever be seen by an actual human.
LLM tech allows applicants to play the same game and in the process makes the problem even worse—driving more companies to use algorithmic screening even more aggressively—but applicants did not fire the first shots, they merely responded in kind.
People were most certainly simultaneously using the much dumber predecessors to AI to read gobs of resumes whilst forcing candidates to spend 15 minutes transcribing their resumes into whatever slow web forms years prior not to mention longer yet on automated tests, writing about ourselves, or in one case writing a short story! Turn about is fair play.
From the hiring side: I would like good candidates to use tooling to apply to jobs. Then I’m more likely to get an application from you. But the applicant better apply some quality control to their tooling. It’s a turn-off to get a LinkedIn “I’m excited about your job opening” message where the content isn’t correctly substituted.
However, I think that what is actually happening is that tooling is more often used by more desperate candidates.
When you write tooling, do you mean "please use our HR platform to enter your resume", and then one has to enter for the 123rd time his whole career with every single date ?
If it's that, that's not tooling, that's "if he/she really wants the job, then he'll do it anyway". No thx.
I don't think that candidates should have to do a lot of pointless data-entry to apply. If the candidate has tooling to increase their reach, for a given level of time invested, all the better. I'd rather that they have a minimum of personal investment to get into the top of the hiring funnel. If we start an interview process, then that will require increasing time and energy investment from both sides as it gets closer to hiring (and continuing to ramp up, to a point, post hiring).
it takes me literally half an hour to thoughtfully find and apply to a single job, which has less than a 1% chance of me getting a job. In reality the percentage is probably closer to 0.2%. I'm a software developer with a decade of experience. It's a really shitty job market out there and I don't blame the automation of a task that seems hopeless anyway.
I never really understand this reasoning of "regex is hard to reason about, so we just use an LLM we custom made instead!" I get it's trendy but reasoning about LLMs is impossible for many devs the idea that this makes it more maintainable is pretty hilarious.
Regex’s require you to understand what the obscure-looking patterns do character by character in a pile of text. Then, across different piles of text. Then, juggling different regex’s.
For a LLM, you can just tune it to produce the right output using examples. Your brain doesn’t have to understand the tedious things it’s doing.
This also replaces a boring, tedious job with one (LLM’s) that’s more interesting. Programmers enjoy those opportunities.
In either case you end up with an inscrutable black box into which you pass your html...honestly I'd prefer the black box that runs more efficiently and is intelligible to at least some people (or most, with the help of a big LLM).
That is true. One can also document the regex’s and rules well with examples to help visualize it.
I think development time will be the real winner for LLM’s since building the right set of regex’s takes a long time.
I’m not sure which is faster to iterate on when sites change. The regex’s require the human learning one or more regex’s for sites that broke. Then, how they interact with other sites. The LLM might need to be retrained, maybe just see new examples, or might generalize using previous training. Experiments on this would be interesting.
Well, even building and commenting the regex is something that LLMs can do pretty well these days. I actually did exactly that, in a different domain: wrote a prompt template that included the current (python-wrapped) regex script and some autogenerated test case results, and a request for a new version of the script. Then passed that to sonnet 3.5 in an unattended loop until all the tests passed. It actually worked.
The secret sauce was knowing what sort of program architecture is suited to that process, and knowing what else should go in the code that would help the LLM get it right.
Which is all to say, use the LLM directly to parse the html, or use an LLM to write the regex to parse the html: both work, but the latter is more efficient.
As someone writing a neovim plugin using treesitter thank you! Languages like this help leverage treesitter in more interesting ways whereas current apis are still a bit low-level
I think it's funny how much emotional energy gets invested into any (neo)vim posts. But the energy is mostly people that never learned vim and feel super insecure about it.
I'm not going to make the same mistake of judging this. If you are someone who has always hated vim and never want to touch it, go for it, this might make your day easier on some machine if you can load this repo really quick (although as others have noted you would need to ftp the repo onto a machine over ssh to make this work).
As someone who is a neovim enjoyer, you are allowed to not like (neo)vim, I don't want to hear you bitch about the editor you don't want to use. If you're a vim user who has this bad habit of shaming people for their editor choice, STOP! It gives us all a bad name whenever you judge people just because they don't enjoy the vim life, just like emacs it's closer to a lifestyle than a tool and if people don't want to invest the time they have the right to make that choice.
The world is no longer dominated by vim and it really has become an optional skill for new programmers.
Agreed. I prefer vim as my $EDITOR, but I don't use it for programming. There I prefer JetBrains IDEs mostly. When I'm editing something in a POSIX terminal, vi is guaranteed to be available and is powerful. Knowing how to use vi is useful because it's required by POSIX and thus available on any system you SSH into. That means default settings & no plugins, and maybe not even vim.
After starting the (neo)vim tutorial, all I could think about was if people who "learned" vim never learned how to edit text in a normal text/code editor.
And I don't mean this in an inflammatory way. I mean:
hjkl = Arrow keys
b = Ctrl + Left
w = Ctrl + Right
df<space> = Ctrl + Delete
$d = Shift + End, Delete
dd = Home, Shift + End, Delete
2 = just press the keyboard command twice??
ddp = Alt + Down
ddkP = Alt + Up
The more I read the tutorial the more I felt like... do you not have arrow keys? I mean this literally. Is your keyboard just esc to f12 and there are no arrows or the numpad and it just ends there?
I do understand some good points of vim, like how explicit it is. There are many code editors/IDEs out there and sometimes how they treat Ctrl+Left/Right has subtle differences, e.g. ending the "word" in "-" or "_" or stopping before or after spaces. But most of this stuff is (or at least should be) configurable. But that's about it.
I mean how do you even use the numbers? Who looks at code and says "no, this should be exactly 8 lines below this one." I just Alt + Down until it's right. I'd spend more time trying to write the command right than I'd spend just pressing the keys multiple times.
>I mean how do you even use the numbers? Who looks at code and says "no, this should be exactly 8 lines below this one." I just Alt + Down until it's right. I'd spend more time trying to write the command right than I'd spend just pressing the keys multiple times.
With relative line numbers it's really easy actually. Typing dd7jp takes less effort than pressing alt + down multiple times and I have hard time believing you'd be make this argument if you were comfortable with modal editing.
In fact, none of the alternatives you listed seem attractive if you're accustomed to modal editing. How is Home, Shift + End, Delete a good alternative to dd? So much movement to do a simple operation.
I would highly recommend you giving it an honest try and if it doesn't work, you can always go back to editing the traditional way but once it clicks, "the old" way feels super awkward.
The bindings you mention are useful but unfortunately there are no CUA bindings for things like
dt/ Delete text to the next slash.
di( Delete text inside parentheses.
vi{y Select and copy code inside braces.
]] Jump to the next function.
)) Jump to the next sentence.
These are some of the things that make Vim/Evil stick for many folks once they begin using it in earnest.
This doesn't resonate with me because I grew up with mouse and gesture support and I left for a reason.
Now I guess I need to say this, if you find yourself intimidated or put-off by keyboard-centric workflows THATS FINE. I think the real problem is we assume that keyboard workflows are necessary for mastery, especially when we first start, and so people get all defensive about not jumping into vim/emacs. On the flip side, if you did embrace this way of life and actually do look down on people who don't, stop, you're making it harder for everyone and giving us keyboard warriors a bad name.
I got the bug after years of playing sc2. It gave me an innate sense for how to do a series of actions quickly and mechanically while leaving my mind free to do more strategic thinking. I just can't get enough of this mindset which is why I try to cram it into every app I can.
But I'm having to come to terms with the fact that new generations of programmers don't know how to touch type, let alone adopt emacs or neovim. Hell, people are starting to use chatgpt to just yell at their computer to create code with their damn voice, which would make keyboard-centric workflows akin to writing in cursive, an overly-specialized skill that will be seen as increasingly obsolete as new forms of communication overtake them.
I won't lie, that makes me sad on a level, but it would be unrealistic of me to expect others to go through the same training I did when it simply isn't as relevant to their lives.
Idk who this is for. Unless you really like mechanical keyboards but can't use them either due to other coworkers or a lack of funds, but something like this would make me kinda sad as someone who actually likes mechanical keyboards.
This seems like an app that people who don't like mechanical keyboards wish that people who do like keyboards would use. But that's a laughable sentiment because it fundamentally misunderstands why people use mechanical keyboards.
The apple keyboard is shit, and the lack of sound wasn't the problem. If people in your life use a loud keyboard ask them to get a mechanical keyboard with silent switches, you can make them sound quieter than a laptop.
Instead the far more interesting questions seems to be: in a world where negative news is becoming more common and prevalent, how do we face the reality of the world without destroying our own mental health in the process.
The naive takeaway from this article would be "just stay away from negative news" which is even reinforced by this little plugin they made. But this simply accelerates the fragmentation we have seen in society, for how can you ever have empathy with others if you refuse to appreciate the suffering of anybody but yourself and what immediately affects you?
Maybe instead of sticking our heads in the sand, we should be taking this as a wakeup call that us trying to solve these problems will help not just our planet, but our own mental health and will be necessary to have a healthy populace going into the future.