MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-19 10:36:31+00:00
Bailey claims two things:

1. Negative impact for foreseeable future.

2. That he has always been carefully neutral, and is suddenly being forced to give his opinion.

If you look at the actual data, which everyone should, it doesn't support claims like these and never has. There is no visible impact of Brexit on the economic figures. UK GDP growth hasn't departed from the other big countries in western Europe, the lines move in sync as they always did:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-us...

You can see COVID, and the 2008 crash, but you can't see Brexit. The same happens if you look more directly at the trade figures, which does show a negative impact for about a month or two just after the new trading rules were implemented, but then immediately goes back to where it was after people figured out the new system. In most graphs you can't even see this transition period unless you zoom in, that's how short it was, and so there's just no impact on economic growth. So it turns out that single market membership had no benefit to the British economy, which is mostly services based and the single market only really tries to standardize trade in goods.

This was not predicted by anyone in the media/economics profession. Academics, British government, central bankers, journalists, IMF, EU ... all of them got this dead wrong. None of them have any credibility left on the matter, yet they never show contrition. Only a handful of Brexit campaigners did correctly predict it and they get given no credit. Paul Krugman made all the usual wrong predictions before the vote, but to his minor credit did admit immediately afterwards that economists were engaged in "motivated reasoning" (i.e. lying).

This is a specific example of a more general problem with the British establishment: they are willing to abuse legacy respect for institutions in order to advance their personal agendas, especially on Europe. Bailey really loves this line about how he has never taken a position. He uses it all the time. That's a good example of the kind of lying civil servants have often engaged in, this pretending to be neutral whilst actually being very biased. In reality he has criticized Brexit in the past, always with the same line about how he never takes a stance whilst simultaneously doing so.

Here he is doing it in May:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2025/may/andrew-baile...

And in November 2024, where he "takes no position" but simultaneously "urges ministers to rebuild relations with the EU".

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/14/bank-of-eng...

He wants to be seen as neutral whilst making claims about economics that he must know aren't true. But he's a BoE lifer and like many civil servants struggles to handle cases when reality departs from academic modeling predictions. Model says leaving EU should have a negative economic impact, no such impact is visible, model must therefore be correct. Nobody should listen to him.
by prisenco | 2025-10-19 10:37:56+00:00
Sure but I'd argue there's a much greater chance of a subscription service having a fair and transparent process because you are the customer versus an ad-supported service because the advertisers are the customer.

And maybe users have a right to not be deleted without cause, despite it being a private platform. Maybe scale means that they have to play by different rules.

But what if the answer is reducing reach so only explicit followers can see what's posted? Do users have a right to being algorithmically boosted? Do they have a right to a wide audience? People who have had their reach reduced on instagram or twitter don't seem content to accept that but I don't see an argument against it.

In a federated system, spam and bots are a huge problem. One way this is handled is a shared blocklist. Something I toyed with was a propagated list like DNS to handle this problem, which would go a long way, but would also mean that being blocked by a highly trusted node could mean being blacklisted by the fediverse. This has already happened in a soft way when Gab was mass defederated. As the fediverse grows, automated tooling is necessary. Even if people have a right to contest being blocked, what's the reasonable mechanism for getting unblocked in a massive federated system?
by dotancohen | 2025-10-19 10:38:02+00:00
The question of bias reduces to bias in factual answers and bias in suggestions - both which come from the same training data. Maybe they shouldn't.

If the model is trained on data that shows e.g. that blacks earn less, then it can factually report on this. But it may also suggest this be the case given an HR role. Every solution that I can think of is fraught with another disadvantage.
by vidarh | 2025-10-19 10:38:18+00:00
Basically. But Ruby has two types of lambdas, one called lambda, and one called proc. Blocks act like the second type.

The difference is that if return is called in the former, you return to the expression after where it is called, while I'm the latter return returns from the scope where it is defined.

This is usually going to feel reasonably intuitive, but can become weird if you e.g. reify a block into a named object and pass it around.

It can be very useful though. E.g. you can pass a block down into a recursive algorithm as a means to do a conditional early exit when a given criteria is met.

Notably you can do this even if a piece of code takes a named argument instead of a block and doesn't anticipate that use and expect you to pass a lambda instead of a process...

In most of the typical uses of a block, most people will just naturally expect the behaviour you see, because the block looks and feels like part of the scope it will return from.
by GreenWatermelon | 2025-10-19 10:38:20+00:00
And it seems there are a bunch of broken stuff that anyone with a lick of CSS skills would notice and fix right away. For example, the first 4 elements of each card (number, title, external link icon, and tag) seem like they should've been in on the same line. The pill-like "Hot" doesn't normally take a whole line by itself...

This os trivially fixed by wrapping them in a flex container. In tailwind that would take 2 seconds.

So we have:

- OP didn't even look at this project before posting it, or...

- they looked and didn't find anything wrong (no eye for quality), or....

- they looked, saw it looked off, but didn't bother to fix it, either due to lack of necessary skill to do that or maybe they didn't want to invoke the agent a second time???

I concur with your conclusion that it seems no human was involved in any step.

Also, evidently, thing doesn't even work given it shows years-old repos that didn't actually get any traction recently. It's AI slop in product form
by hoechst | 2025-10-19 10:39:51+00:00
idk how you would define "no tracking", but this is using vercel insights, a tracking tool.

altought i prefer the default HN interface, i think the ui is generally fine and you did a good job and avoided overengineering.

with a text heavy page like HN, the most important thing is imo to carefully choose a font family and font properties (line-height, letter-spacing, etc.). as is, the default HN does a better job with this but leaves a lot of room for improvement as well.

personally, i'm using a few lines of css to add dark mode to default HN and zoom in to 125% cause the default font-size ist too small for me (an old person).
by metalman | 2025-10-19 10:40:00+00:00
current "design" of motor viehicles has nothing to do with function and saftey, and is bieng driven by sales teams looking for "features" to sell, and sell again through subscriptions, screens that are exclusivly distractions, and the most basic and essential requirements lost like getting in and out, where now it is clear that this is bieng activly interfered with, as it is a major "interactive moment" not to be lost or sqandered without forecing user engagement
by Acen | 2025-10-19 10:40:19+00:00
The main difference between white and pink noise, is white noise has the same level of power across all frequencies. Whilst pink noise has the same level of power across an octave.

There are more frequencies in the high-range, so it naturally sounds considerably higher pitched.

i.e. a C6 on a keyboard sits at around 1Khz (1046.502 to be exact) and a C#6 is 1108.731 KHz (a difference of 62.229 Hz)

While a C3 is 130.8128, and C#3 is 138.5913 (a difference of only 7.7785 Hz).

Then using an entire octave as an example, C3 (130.8128) to C4 (261.6256) = 130.8128 (0Hz up to C3)

vs C6 (1046.502) to C7 (2093.005) = 1046.503 (0hz up to c6 +- 0.001hz)
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-10-19 10:40:41+00:00
In all seriousness, and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but at this point the Chinese do capitalism better than the US:

- Lots of small and mid-sized firms.

- Lots of cutthroat competition with resulting price pressure.

- Virtually all firms are subsidized by direct government investment to some extent, but the government doesn't pick winners.

- Red tape and barriers to entry are generally low, regulation mostly affects larger firms. (The CCP doesn't want companies getting too big for their britches, but there are too many small firms to harass, and the government doesn't want people unemployed.)

- Civil legal liability is anywhere from 10x to 1000x less of an issue. I'm not exaggerating. The courts are fast, decisions are usually reasonable, and "access to justice" costs very little.

In the US you have this scheme where barriers to entry are insanely high thanks to regulatory capture, and the courts are a weapon that large firms use against small ones, almost exclusively, as smaller companies can't afford the costs associated with litigation. This is without even getting into "winners getting picked," which is obviously a problem.
by KronisLV | 2025-10-19 10:41:34+00:00
Oh, that's really cool, the channel seems like it has a lot of other nice videos as well!

I wish there was a video that's so nice about compressors, like in Audacity you have all of these settings and most are also present in OBS and other software:

* Threshold (dB) * Make-up gain (dB) * Knee width (dB) * Ratio * Lookahead (ms) * Attack (ms) * Release (ms)

And I feel like visualizations can really help understanding them better, like: https://codepen.io/animalsnacks/full/VRweeb alongside maybe something that lets you loop an audio sample and see how different it sounds with each change. There obviously already are some videos and discussions and plenty of material out there, but I love a good visualization!
by robenkleene | 2025-10-19 10:42:52+00:00
burnstsushi provides the canonic answer here of course.

But as a quick thought shortcut, I think of `ripgrep` as a search that gives similar semantics to project-wide search in a code editor or IDE. E.g., most editors will inspect a project and already ignore files that usually should be ignored (e.g., third-party dependencies, build artifacts, source control metadata like `.git/`).

Those semantics are also almost always what I want when performing a search from the command line, so `ripgrep` is what I use most of the time.
by zduoduo | 2025-10-19 10:43:19+00:00
ChatGPT 说：

I really liked how this post digs into the accountability gap that exists in so many organizations. It’s not that people don’t care or aren’t trying — it’s that no one feels real ownership for outcomes once responsibilities get spread across layers of management. I’ve seen this happen in agile teams too: endless retros, reports, and syncs, but no one truly driving the result. What resonated most is the idea that accountability shouldn’t come from top-down pressure, but from mutual trust and clarity of purpose. When everyone knows why something matters and can see the impact of their work, accountability becomes natural instead of forced.
by tim333 | 2025-10-19 10:43:31+00:00
I'm not sure it matters much if they are underwhelming except some investors may be down a little, but such is the nature of investing.

I think AGI is coming but more along the lines of what Karpathy was saying "They're cognitively lacking and it's just not working. It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues."

I don't get the Marcus - GPT5 isn't AGI so it's game over type stuff. New technologies take time to develop.
by andy99 | 2025-10-19 10:43:56+00:00
Am I reading this correctly, they are saying people are bad at doing on-the-fly statistical analysis to conclude whether a system is biased?

For example in one case they showed data where sad faces were “mostly” black and asked people if they detect “bias”. Even if you saw more sad black people than white, would you reject the null hypothesis that it’s unbiased?

This unfortunately seems typical of the often very superficial “count the races” work that people claim is bias research.
by sdwolfz | 2025-10-19 10:44:50+00:00
OK, so based on this video, I've turned on EasyEffects, added an Equalizer, set the input source to "Easy Effects Source" in the system settings, started playing pink noise, then tried to adjust the dials until the input looked closer to a horizontal line (it's very chaotic so that is hard to do).

As some sections of the video highlight it ended up needing to dip the mids and boots the lows and highs. This is my end result (so far, I'm probably going to tweak this continuously):

Preamp: -1 db Filter 1: ON PK Fc 27.782795 Hz Gain -3.36 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 2: ON PK Fc 49.40557 Hz Gain 1.09 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 3: ON PK Fc 87.85691 Hz Gain 5.04 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 4: ON PK Fc 156.23413 Hz Gain 6.43 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 5: ON PK Fc 277.82794 Hz Gain 3.76 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 6: ON PK Fc 494.0557 Hz Gain -1.19 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 7: ON PK Fc 878.5691 Hz Gain -5.54 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 8: ON PK Fc 1562.3413 Hz Gain -3.96 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 9: ON PK Fc 2778.2793 Hz Gain -2.97 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 10: ON PK Fc 4940.557 Hz Gain 0.3 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 11: ON PK Fc 8785.69 Hz Gain 4.35 dB Q 1.7848856 Filter 12: ON PK Fc 15623.413 Hz Gain 8.7 dB Q 1.7848856

There's also an Output amp of -2.5dB that does not appear in the export for some reason.

TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 15 - Gen10 - AMD Laptop Speakers.

It does make a positive difference (why don't they teach us this in school? ;) ). Please note I am music illiterate.

EDIT: it looks like changing the input source has no actual effect, just need to make sure the internal microphone's volume is not muted, and have to keep system setting window open while doing this, maybe the microphone is no longer on when the window is closed?. Linux is weird sometimes.
by vidarh | 2025-10-19 10:47:29+00:00
Blocks can force a return in their defining scope. If you pass a block down through multiple methods and then call it, the return will exit the lexical scope the block was defined in, not the method it was ultimately called from.

It usually looks pretty much the same, and so for most intents what you described is "close enough" to get most used of blocks.
by snovv_crash | 2025-10-19 10:48:20+00:00
That would be asking to prove a negative, which isn't reasonable.

Also, the question isn't if the code isn't used, it is that it isn't used simultaneously. Almost all software has many features which aren't used simultaneously. For example, it is unlikely you have all of the different language parsers loaded at the same time, because most projects use only a few.
by amomchilov | 2025-10-19 10:49:00+00:00
Dynamic languages can execute code without type annotations, so you _can_ just dismiss types as redundant metadata. But I don’t think that’s wise. I find types really useful as a human reader of the code.

Whether you write document them or not, types still exist, and you have to think about them.

Dynamic languages make it really hard to answer “what is this thing, and what can I do with it?”. You have to resort through tracing through the callers, to check the union of all possible types that make it to that point. You can’t just check the tests, because there’s no guarantee they accurately reflect all callers. A simple type annotation just gives you the answer directly, no need to play mental interpreter.
by greatgib | 2025-10-19 10:49:55+00:00
It is, because a human would have used "thinking" to create this piece of code. There could be error and mistakes but at least you know there there is a human logic behind and you just have to check for things that can easy mistakes for a human.

With AI, in the current state at least, there is no global logic involved with the whole thing that was created. It is a random set of probabilities that generated a somehow valid code. But there is not a global "view" about it that it makes sense.

So when reviewing, you will basically have to do in your head the same mental process as would have done an original human contributor to check that the whole thing makes sense in the first place.

Worst than that, when reviewing such change, you should imagine that the AI probably generated a few invalid versions on the code and randomly iterated until there is something that passed the "linter" definition of valid code.
Show HN: Free AI Email Newsletter Generator
by ignalex | 2025-10-19 10:51:39+00:00
Hello dear Hackernews Community, I'm Alex and I’m an indiehacker building products as a solo founder for a wide audience. I had been dreaming about this for nearly six months and this is my story: I was a C-level executive at a large IT company, spending years managing people – but people management is far from shipping real value through building products. And now, in just a week, I’ve built a tool that uses AI to create and send high-converting email campaigns – and it works better than I expected. Think Cursor, but for Email Newsletters.

The most impressive part is that I wrote just 80 prompts for this, and I used your native v0 integrations with Supabase, Vercel AI SDK, deployment on Vercel, and Vercel Analytics.

I believe in my idea. It could be a next-gen idea in the email industry, which has been stuck in the 2000s. For context, over 300 billion emails are sent every day worldwide – and still, nothing more exciting than Gmail has come along. This tool is my interpretation of how AI Agents can help people write and send high-converting email campaigns.

All the AI email tools I’ve seen are boring summarization buttons embedded into the Email App interface. But users want not just AI summarization buttons. They want an Agent which helps them write emails, reply to emails. That’s exactly what I’m trying to ship with my project.

I plan to keep my service free for as long as I possibly can.

Let’s see how far this can go.

What my tool can do in this initial release: – AI-powered email generation as plain text or HTML template – CSV recipient import – SMTP/IMAP integration – Real-time email preview – Bulk email sending via Agent – Each chat can operate in the background as an email Agent
by themgt | 2025-10-19 10:52:12+00:00
The open not-secret has been, post-GFC and especially post-COVID, k-shaped recoveries and increasingly k-shaped economy. So it is both the best of times and the worst of times. Neither party has been remotely serious about trying to structurally fix this, which would be immensely painful to those with the most wealth and power and political influence.

We're also now fairly openly in a 21st century "Great Game" if not multipolar Thucydides Trap including ongoing proxy war, so deflationary impulses from the Eurasia to the west in energy, goods and labor have been partially choked off in various ways, leaving the working class with the double whammy of energy/goods/services inflation along with the preexisting asset price inflation.
by hker | 2025-10-19 10:53:26+00:00
> I don't think even the Cultural Revolution or anything else Mao did had much of an effect on Nobel prize-worthy research, simply because there wasn't much to disrupt to begin with.

Count points:

- Intellectuals, academics, and teachers were persecuted, attacked, and killed by the youth (the Red Guards), in all schools and institutions in China.

- Search for “scholars killed during the cultural revolution”, or “list of scholars abnormally died in China during the cultural revolution” (or for a short list in Chinese https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/中华人民共和国被迫害人士列表#科学技术人士). This includes the leader of Two Bombs, One Satellite (nuclear weapon, ICBM, artificial satellite) 赵九章. Besides, those returned from overseas were considered traitors or spies, and just within the Chinese Academy of Sciences (top science institution), there are 229 scholars died due to the Cultural Revolution [1]. This destroyed the environment needed to do great science. Imagine if Yang went back to China in the early 1950s.

[1]: https://blog.wenxuecity.com/myblog/74771/201904/2157.html "文革时中科院131位科学家被打倒 229人遭迫害致死"

> I guess we'll see Chinese scientists winning Nobels at a rate commensurate with other big countries in 20–40 years or so.

Such predictions—Chinese scientists will win more science Nobels—has been made long ago. In 1998, “The Chinese-American Nobel Laureate Chen Ning Yang has also predicted that mainland scientists will win a prize within twenty years – even more than one, if the country’s economic development continues at its current rate.“ [2]

[2]: https://china-us.uoregon.edu/pdf/Minerva-2004.pdf "CHINESE SCIENCE AND THE ‘NOBEL PRIZE COMPLEX’"

But reality shows otherwise, not until scientists and academics are respected in China. During COVID, politics overruled science, resulting in the Zero-COVID policy, which were brought down by widespread protests, not by science (counter evidence to the ineffectiveness of the Zero-COVID policy).

Unless you are implying that you predict a regime change by that time...
by NotCamelCase | 2025-10-19 10:53:54+00:00
I wonder if they had meetings or 'design committees' to find the most optimal shape with respect to the ease of killing prey eventually.

One possibility on origin (totally made up by me) could be that there were large stones lying around already as debris from e.g. earthquakes, celestial events and such and some groups took advantage of this and later people iterated upon it.
by ervine | 2025-10-19 10:54:49+00:00
I mean the use of tailwind in the article is not good. Shows a lack of CSS understanding. Why are they applying `text-base` instead of just setting that on the root element? Why are they setting text color on the <a> tag and then overriding it on the <span> inside?

This person would write bad CSS, let's not put the blame on tailwind.

Also so much repetition instead of pulling each breadcrumb link out into a shared component. I understand it's just demo code for an article, but if all code bases end up like this that you've seen, the issue isn't tailwind.
by julik | 2025-10-19 10:55:55+00:00
...by the passing of which the name of the game will be to find another vehicle for occluding reality and creating optics. Something to replace "bets" with "shaping" and "appetite", for example.

Connecting effort and outcome is hard as orgs get bigger, and a lot (a LOT) of those strategies have to do with optics and the "sponsors" being "on the wave" at the moment (trusted by owners/board). While it is not realistic to say "we do the work until it works and costs be damned" some tools for this are required, and I would say putting out a "bet horizon" of a year or a quarter is setting up some nice political battles in the future.
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-19 10:56:16+00:00
I feel the same way about OOP. When OOP was invented in the 70s and then popularized in C++ it solved real problems of scaling software with critical memory limitations. Now it’s just code style. It’s now excess unnecessary code to provide a familiar architecture that really gets in the way.

I just want to solve my software problems with portable solutions without excess decoration and vanity. My career has shown me the more code decorations a developer requires to deliver an application the more they are concerned about themselves and their own needs as opposed to the software problem/solution.