Happy Map | Hacker News Reader

Happy Map

pudding.cool

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The story needs a progress indicator. I didn't know if I was almost done, or had another hour to go. So I quit.

Also, there should be an option to just get the story as text.

https://gist.github.com/jaysoffian/f6c156e69029812eb79a2fb2f...

Extracted (by Claude) from https://github.com/the-pudding/happy-map/blob/main/src/data/...

Anyone know what’s the underling map/tile technology used? I’m on my phone and can’t check

I'm fairly certain it uses deck.gl

I am surprised in this age such simple map can’t keep up with scrolling and showing ocean and then draws.

https://github.com/the-pudding/happy-map/

^ this is the answer

I would really, really love it to have some sort of conclusion / interpretation / aggregated data.

The fact that there's no "happiness landmark" for contributing to society or the lives of others (besides friends and family) makes me sad.

No one is answering with things like "I nursed a bird back to health" or "I helped a refugee family settle in"?

edit: There are 15 answers in the bottom-right corner of the "Friends and Social" island which more or less fit this, but still a tiny fraction of the responses

A happy map that makes me sad.

Why?

For me, too many people seem to be happy about things of no consequence at all.

Ate pizza? Made plans to go to a casino? Cut your hair? Come on.

Sometimes it's fine to be content with trivial things. Sometimes that's all you've got. It isn't wrong to be grateful and happy when small things happen for you. A lot of us should practice appreciating it more, in my opinion.

And frankly, the bigger things, the more substantial things; those are fewer and farther between. They're harder to populate a map like this with. They're certainly preferably in some ways, but realistically, it's not the primary stuff of surveys like this.

Reminds me of https://old.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/csn6ci/its...

Haha, speaking of simple pleasures. One of my favourite experiences to have these days is reading these with my son.

Some of my top strips are the ones where Calvin and Susie Derkins are grown up and Calvin is having successive crises about everything she says or does.

I brought a surprise!

Let's hope it's a divorce...

https://i.redd.it/myocdlddt02d1.jpeg

Those also being wonderful parodies of soap opera comics like Rex Morgan is great, especially for Comics Curmudgeon enjoyers: https://joshreads.com

It doesn't look very graphics-intensive, yet runs at about 2FPS on Safari, on my 3.8GHz quad core i5. The site's performance could use an investigation by a software developer.

Sounds like something is off somewhere indeed, because on mobile safari it is running very smoothly for me. Cannot tell the exact FPS, except that it is at least 60 or more.

Runs OK on mobile Edge on an inexpensive 3 year old phone (Android, Galaxy S23 5G).

So yeah, interesting indeed.

Tried it with Firefox running on the same machine and it's fine. Looks like the dev forgot to test with desktop Safari, or my version doesn't support a critical graphics API.

I used it in Safari and it had good FPS, so it may be due to your specific version, or maybe an extension.

Or an autoresearch minimizing render times.

What’s with being a parent is one of 5 qualifiers of a person? My answer would be - happy every day that I didnt have children. I’m curious if there is correlation.

Children/family = least agency, while buying something = most agency? I must be misunderstanding something big time.

You can’t always control what your children or family do. You are in control of what you buy.

I have 3 kids and they are still young and I barely control how they behave :) It will be even more terrible later

You can (and indeed must) control a lot about whether family, especially children, make you happy.

Also many people don't seem to control what they buy.

The makes sense when you look at the responses themselves.

Children/family are mostly containing answers such as "My son visited me on Mother's Day.", which you can't really cause yourself.

Of course you can, you just have to cause it years in advance.

Awesome project!

It looks like the Physical & Active Hobbies sector is populated exclusively by books in the northeast portion and video games in the southwest. It might be a direct swap with the Gaming & Virtual Worlds sector, which contains some physical activity events.

I for one am looking forward to retirement. I am planning on being high all the time, gardening and yelling at children passing by my property. Growing my hair and beard, wearing a bandana and a tie-dyed shirt and paying for my coffee in quarters in a wooden treasure box I carry as a purse. The goal is to liberate the crazy.

All the things you think you would enjoy might not hit the spot at all when you will retire.

Learned that when took 2 years off work.

Yea. Having a purpose and bonding with other people on the way to achieving it are underrated elements of being working age.

If you're not conscious about it in retirement, it's easy to just do nothing, waste away, and find out many years too late. You actually need different ingredients to feel satisfied.

You can still have a purpose and achieve things, just not for the money

I may or may not. But tell us more about what your experience was in that two years I'm curious.

I didn't have a routine/discipline to organize myself to do something meaningful, so it was pursuing hobbies with minimal effort. Afyer a while all the things I enjoyed, because they would help me relax after work felt pointless and I went trough a short depression caused by a breakup which made the meaningless part feel even more real.

Also when you have free time, you burn trough the cash reserves so quickly because of so many thing you can do with money.

I thought that when I'll be older I'll drink more and be happy all the time, but if you are not stressed by anything and in a sad place, alcohol doesn't feel good, just pointless.

These are all things you can do now. Why wait?

I can but doing so will cause instability in my social standing and I cannot risk that while I have others depending on me for stability.

For a 'happy map' there is a bizarrely puritanical deficit of orgasms. EDIT: oh wait I found one about backrubbing. That's nice I guess.

Pudding continue to be awesome. I'm so glad they exist.

It's one of those websites that's an instant click from me. Whatever they make, I know it will be interesting.

There might be a bug with the age filters. I'm seeing some 20s and 60s mixed up.

I had a similar experience with other filters, such as parents and non parents.

Too bad it uses OpenGL so I can't open it. I usually love this website.

zomming enough should make all comments visible

I agree. It would make it easier to get a quick idea.

> But research is showing that social media and smartphones have made us addicted to screens from a young age. It’s taken a toll on how much time we spend together

Agree completely, but it has also lead to widely held pessimistic beliefs like

> But how do we find meaning when the climate is warming, politics is broken, and technology serves profit over people? We can’t think about thriving; we're merely surviving.

I anticipate downvotes, but I seriously suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now for some perspective about long term positive trends, and insights into why we over weigh short term negative news to the detriment of our mental health.

I played with the map a little bit. I think its cool at the first glance. What is missing is how it necessarily applies to me, user? I can understand that probably what makes people truly happy universally is applicable to me. But probably could use some quick guidance. You say it in your description - story, although this moment is buried in longer description of methodology. I also had to figure out on my own that each individual response is example of what can make me happy. Still, I think this map has potential for more cool features base don this data.

This isn't a product.

Filter to your demographic.

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