mighty_donkey's comments

Congrats :) Question: do websites even have enough information to train on and create useful results?

Yessss this is really great! I have a bunch of time-series for climate and remote sensing data sources I could use for this

Can you, in full honesty, tell me how much you know about Iran? You (and some others in the comment section) seem to only extrapolate from Iraq, a country with a completely different culture, economy, and sequence of events/trajectory etc.? This is quite concerning to say the very least.

You are aware that you are comparing a situation that arose from a US military invasion (Iraq), with a grass-roots, cross-class and cultural movement that is being supported across the world (Iran)? You are aware that, for the first time, Iranians across Kurdistan, Zahedan, Tehran, Baluchistan are chanting the same slogans under the same values, fighting the same enemy? And yet you speak of "no clear goals" and "very high likelihoods", but it sounds like you are simply ignorant of the situation. The protests are not the result of foreign meddling, but rather the result of millions of Iranians with the agency and awareness to realize their situation is horrendous and existential, and they need to take a stand. Why? Because they are already at war. Having your child hung from a crane in public is war. Having your daughter raped and killed is war. Having your life savings taken from your is war.

I am both an Iranian (with family in Iran) and a "Westerner", and I damn well implore all of my peers to support and amplify the voice of Iranians without feeling bad about whether they are encouraging "societal collapse" (an absurd argument). Supporting Iranians that have made their voices heard, shed blood and tears is not "foreign interference" or "wishing war", it is empathy and camaraderie for your fellow human.

On a final note, the regime is not reformable. This means if me or someone else says "Iranians deserve democracy" or "human rights", this implies that one supports the collapse of the Islamic Republic. Why? Because one can not happen without the other. Ultimately, their fate is in their hands, but it is absolutely idiotic to sit here and gate-keep people from wishing the collapse of a psychopathic, murderous, raping, and looting regime.

I'm not sure why you keep insisting on equating Iran and Iraq? They are different countries, demographics, cultures, political systems, etc...with very different circumstances. The Iraqi National Congress was setup and funded by the CIA (after the invasion of Iraq by US military), with a banking elite as it's figurehead.

The coalition being built in and outside of Iran is an organic, cross-class, cross-cultural network that is the result of years of activism. Within it, you will find figures like Masih Alinejad, a world-renowned journalist and women's rights activist, and Hamed Esmaeillion, a representative for the families of PS752 (the plane that was shot down by the Islamic Regime with 170+ souls on board). To equate this to a CIA-backed coup is not well-founded.

Regime rapes and murders women and children, imprisons thousands, mismanages the economy to the point where millions live in poverty and everyone's life savings are slashed in half , environmental degradation to the point where lakes are drying up, state-sponsored terrorism etc....but hey guys have you "pondered" how bad state collapse would be?

I'm sure you're a great person and not a secret agent (I mean this lol). But anyone who is even slightly following this situation (or has lived through it), will know that the argument you present is the exact kind of propaganda that is used by authoritarian regimes to make people fearful of change. And so yes, I believe I have every right to state that your comment has a close resemblance to State TV

Reza Pahlavi =/= Shah's regime

Also sorry but equating a bottom-up, grassroots revolution with the US invasion of Iraq is a gross misrepresentation of what's actually happening.

Well said...the comment seemed a little shockingly too close to the Islamic Republic's propaganda...

Let's be careful using words like 'hijack'. Reza Pahlavi (i.e. the son of the Shah) has led one of the most consistent and coherent oppositions to the Islamic Regime for the past few decades (has dedicated his life to it), and has clearly stated his only intent is to create a transition/solidarity council to enable an actual, democratic system in Iran.

Over 85% of protestors are in favour of such a council, and 33% of them believe Reza Pahlavi should be the representative of such a council (which places him as the most popular representative by far).

You can read more here (GAMAAN conducts the most rigorous surveys on public attitudes in Iran): https://gamaan.org/2023/02/04/protests_survey/

I love it!

Hey, thanks! The data we connect to is open-source but the ETL and connectors itself (which is the actual service) is not. In the future, there are a few things we'd love to release as open-source packages, but we're just not there yet.

What kind of data/sources do you work with mainly? Would love to learn more

Working on making big geospatial data (from sources like NASA, ECMWF) really easy to work with through a simple API that integrates with common tools in python/R. Would love to help ppl focus on answering really interesting questions (e.g. impacts of climate change, energy load forecasting, food security), without needing to be experts in geospatial data engineering! https://www.pharossoftware.com/

++you guys have good stuff, thanks for your work

Is there a limit on how much I can record? Is this just for quick notes or could i record a 30mins meeting? Thanks and congrats on the launch.

Sure, but HN is a great place to get a filtered list based on expert opinion. I love seeing these threads.

A lot of things you see here could've been 'Googled', but what's the fun in that?

I played with their Jurassic model in their playground - to be honest I was not impressed. I asked for a list of datasets (something I like to do when I'm in a crunch for a research project), and I received what seemed to be a response from Quora. This prompt works very smoothly on OpenAI's davinci model.

But maybe others have had a much better experience.