MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2026-02-04 19:02:00+00:00
I have no idea what the true casulaties are in Iran but I do know I don't trust a word from any Western media outlet on it, particularly when those same outlets have been silent on Gaza, have pushed Israeli propaganda without question (eg [1]) and are bending over backwards to not report on the links between Jeffrey Epstein and Israel by either saying nothing at all or doing contortions to make it seem like Epstein was a Putin puppet (eg [2]).

So who is Raha Nik-Andish (the author)? I don't really know. It's a pseudonym for someone who reported left Iran for 14 years (to France maybe?) but went back last year. At least they seem to be in Iran. I'm dubious about the calls for the Shah. It could be a proxy for wanting an end to the current regime. That would be fair. But nobody serious wants a return of the Shah, who would be the original Shah's son, Raza Pahlavi, who, for the record, is an Israeli asset [3].

It is a desired goal of US and Israeli foreign policy to collapse the Iranian regime and turn it into a failed state like Somalia.

Israeli agitators are very active in Iran. This isn't a conspiracy. They come right out and say it [3]. Mossad uses a network of Israelis who speak perfect Farsi and exploits Afghan refugees in Iran [4].

This actually reminds me a lot of Cuba. There are a bunch of displaced Cubans who hated Castro. You have to consider the source. Many of them fled because they were allied to Batista. This has become almost comical where, for example, US Senator Ted Cruz hates Castro and communists because Batista forced his family to flee Cuba [6].

So there are a lot of Iranians in diaspora who likewise have ties to the Shah's regime.

And let's not forget why Iran is a fundamentalist Iranian republic: the US toppled Iran's government (largely at the urging of the British) in 1953 after Mosaddegh "nationalized" their own oil. The Shah became a brutal dictator and when it became clear he was finished, the US instead propped up then-exiled Khomenei to win [7] for fear that the Communists would win and Iran would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence.

What followed was a decade of the Iran-Iraq war where the US used another puppet, Saddam Hussein, to foment a war with Iran that cost millions of lives.

And of course we have decades of sanctions, which is basically just starving people and hoping for the best.

But sure, the US really cares about dead Iranian protestors. This is just manufacturing consent for further military action in Iran for US and Israeli strategic interests.

[1]: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-screams-wit...

[2]: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/poland-invest...

[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/7/3/son-of-former-sh...

[4]: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-881733

[5]: https://minutemirror.com.pk/israel-recruited-afghan-refugees...

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I2AdbLDVb0Q

[7]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/10/ayatollah-khom...
by stym06 | 2026-02-04 19:02:01+00:00
Introducing Kepler

An open-source text-to-SQL platform that lets you query data warehouses in plain English. It currently supports ClickHouse.

https://github.com/stym06/kepler

1. Ask a question in natural language
2. Kepler finds relevant tables and recalls past learnings
3. The AI agent generates SQL, executes it read-only, and validates results
4. Results appear with suggested charts when appropriate

It features persistent memory - it learns corrections, schema notes, and patterns across sessions, implemented using Qdrant + Ollama (nomic-embed-text).

Based on a recent research paper published by
OpenAI
https://openai.com/index/inside-our-in-house-data-agent/
by milesskorpen | 2026-02-04 19:02:02+00:00
It's extremely improbable that a random critique of Thiel led to one of the many many many companies he invests in banning this guy. It's not impossible, but - Occam's razor, it's not the simplest assumption.

Your initial post suggested that we should assume that there is a link; now you're backing up to "Thiel takes some blame from bad actions by companies he invests in," which is a much weaker but more defensible claim.
by titzer | 2026-02-04 19:02:09+00:00
In the US one can retire comfortably on $3 million without relying on Social Security. From the downvotes, it's crazy to me that people think a limit of 300 "ordinary people's" retirements is unreasonable.

I really don't think people understand how little difference there is between having $1 billion and $10 billion or even $100 billion. It makes no difference whatsoever to have that much money; they can't enjoy it.
by mhitza | 2026-02-04 19:02:20+00:00
Teens and social media rethoric in my country right now is very close to the "video games cause violence" type of argument.

They always fixate on external things instead of strictly looking at it as internal economic and social shortcomings.

There was a short time, between 2012/2013-2020 when the "kids were alright", though a bit worse in school than previous generations.
by sharifhsn | 2026-02-04 19:02:25+00:00
Speaking as a quant that has followed this story closely for months (and was educated about the yen carry trade in my degree), this narrative is somewhat wrong and also very obviously LLM slop.

It is true that the yen carry trade is currently being unwound and that it has significant implications for nearly all holders of treasuries. But claiming that ALL of the recent volatility is due to this one event is ludicrous. There are some blatant falsities, like saying that gold and silver are historically uncorrelated??? And it’s clear that the author has a bias against the financial establishment (“monopoly money”), coloring the output.

That said, there are legitimately interesting bits here I didn’t know about, like the Japanese institutional liquidation of US treasuries. I would not repeat this information to others without fact checking it, but if accurately described it’s an important space to watch. It’s not surprising that the LLM would get some things right, of course.

One big problem with this article is the clear prompt given to connect x current event to the yen carry trade, like Warsh’s nomination and the Greenland nonsense. This creates a lot of noise. It’s basically the LLM looking for a pattern between these things instead of identifying a structural flow. It might not even be wrong, but it’s horribly biased towards finding a fake pattern, so I would never trust it.

For the tech heads in HN that are excited to see a Justine Tunney post: don’t go crazy. If you’re really interested in learning about the unwinding of the yen carry trade, there’s plenty of information from actual experts to read about, not this slop.
by drakythe | 2026-02-04 19:02:25+00:00
I'm immediately concerned with the note about silver dropping so much. Yes, that happened, and was a historic drop. But it followed a historic run up to its prior price, so the drop is still net positive for even a 1 month period.

I'm not saying the article's thesis is incorrect, but its providing some data without context. I'm always leery of data presented without context.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 19:02:26+00:00
The same thing happens if you are the head cook in a restaurant.

If you are a cook wanting to open a restaurant, you will be delegating, the same thing with AI. If you are fine only doing what your hands can possibly do in the time allotted, go ahead and cook in your kitchen.

But I need to make money to be able to trade for the food I eat.
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-04 19:02:28+00:00
No, its very reliable after consideration for how anxiety works from a physiological perspective and what does to a person's health and how modifies their decisions and behaviors. When all these factors are taken into account anxiety alone may account for most other more directly measured mortality conditions.

The other side of that coin is that anxiety is also most prominently the result of social conditioning as opposed to diagnosed illness. This results in anti-anxiety medications that are vastly over-prescribed for individuals that receive less than ideal benefits.
by ultrarunner | 2026-02-04 19:03:05+00:00
Are we sure it's opposition to enforcement of existing basic immigration rules? What I've seen has been more opposition to unjustifiable detainment, oppression, and killings of American citizens (i.e. murder). The same militarization of immigration policy that has plagued American police in recent decades.

I do think there's a conversation to be had in an effort to bifurcate rote racism from immigration policy, but I don' think we're quite there yet.
by wheelinsupial | 2026-02-04 19:03:07+00:00
It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they simply aren't implementing the basics.

Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other online content providers provide some simple rules for meetings yet people don't even do these.

1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider meetings to fall into one of three broad categories information distribution, problem solving, decision making. Knowing this will allow the meeting to go a lot smoother or even be moved to something like an email and be done with it.

2. Have an agenda for the meeting. Put the agenda in the meeting invite.

3. If there are any pieces of pre-reading or related material to be reviewed, attach it and call it out in the invite. (But it's very difficult to get people to spend the time preparing for a meeting.)

4. Take notes during the meeting and identify any action items and who will do them (preferably with an initial estimate). Review these action items and people responsible in the last couple of minutes of the meeting.

5. Send out the notes and action items.

Why aren't we doing these things? I don't know, but I think if everyone followed these for meetings of 3+ people, we'd probably see better meetings.
by hellohello2 | 2026-02-04 19:03:27+00:00
Well, for multiplication complexity is defined in terms of on the number of digits/bits digits directly. For attention, complexity is defined on terms of the number of input vectors which are all at fixed precision. I don't understand what happens to the method proposed in the paper at higher precision (since I don't understand the paper), but in reality in doesn't matter since there is no value in anything over float16 for machine learning.
by mjburgess | 2026-02-04 19:04:00+00:00
Granting to you for the moment that the issue is with technology -- if instagram is removed, what is it replaced with? Presumably youtube? Or more passive kinds of tech?

Is the issue social media, or mass media? Who knows.

If we don't grant that, then the rise of instagram correlates heavily with everything i've mentioned. I'd suppose if you look at the physical places of social interaction for teenagers, where they'd have to move around and meet people -- these have all disappeared, and extremely, with the rise of instagram.

Removing the gramme hardly brings them back. Maybe, maybe not.
by Epitaque | 2026-02-04 19:04:09+00:00
I wouldn't mind doing my best steelman of the open source AI if he responds (seriously, id try).

Also, your comment is a bit presumptuous. I think society has been way too accepting of relying on services behind an online API, and it usually does not benefit the consumer.

I just think it's really dumb that people argue passionately about open weight LLMs without even mentioning the risks.
by _wire_ | 2026-02-04 19:04:33+00:00
Manned space flight is going nowhere; rockets are a technical dead end due to energy overheads.

There's a reason manned exploration stopped after 10 years: the only place suitable for human life beyond earth must be brought along with the travelers, and the only place close enough to reach this way is just rocks. Even if those rocks happened to be useful as raw materials for vehicles and human habituation in space, where the moon's order of magnitude lower gravity would almost seem liberating for further sojourns, but those rocks are not useful. Mars is no more hospitable nor advantageous than the moon, and an order of magnitude more unapproachable. So physics as we know it keeps us stuck on spaceship earth.

A breakthrough in physics enabling something like the Krell machines to arbitrarily rearrange matter could overcome the universe's indomitable nature. But if we had Krell machines, what would be the human purpose of exploring? Just make everything as you wish right here!

As to humanities (life's) destiny to colonize the far reaches to escape our plight on earth: if we can't it work for us here, where the preconditions and provisions were optimal for us to emerge from sea slime, what's with the hubris of exporting our pathos into the void except to indulge megalomania? In other words, humanity is already an output of a Krell machine known as Sol.

Kubrick and Clarke were truly sages to envision the next step between humanity and the star child as an orbiting Hilton hotel in the form of a Ferris wheel guarded by nuclear bombs which unexpected purpose is to gain access to a black box within which psychedelic schematics pour into humanity to enable us reach the next evolutionary level beyond Teihard de Chardin's noosphere.

But at that point matters are religious not physical.

Well it so happens the situation of humanity is already very suitable for religion.
by Pedro_Ribeiro | 2026-02-04 19:04:42+00:00
Do you honestly not believe it is likely that EU is importing votes?

Also, haven't you seen the general push towards censorship, attempts to ban VPNs, and all the other shenanigans happening in the EU? Do you believe this is disconnected from the legal attempts on Twitter and Telegram?

Is it really a conspiracy theory at this point? Politicians do all kinds of evil shit, but these playbook tactics are where you draw the line?

I'm European and live here, before you say I'm getting these takes on X.
by midtake | 2026-02-04 19:05:24+00:00
You are probably at least 30 years old and you have forgotten how disruptive social media is for young people. We are not talking about a degradation of a high trust society here.

With social media, we are talking about kids doing the bare minimum on homework in order to get back on social media faster. We are talking about large swaths of the population preferring to be entertained by social media then to engage in activities that would promote their success. We are talking about the same symptoms as addiction manifesting in kids because they are exposed to too much social media.

Your litmus test for generational effect is also flawed. Let's assume an inverse test as a mental exercise, where we introduce social media to a young population previously unexposed. Kids who are able to reject the pull of social media will replace the ones who cannot, the numbers will shuffle. After such a test is concluded, you will tell yourself you're right because on a macro-economic scale everything looks the same, but to an individual prone to social media overuse, his or her life will be different (likely worse).

That said, the issues you bring up are more important, and no one seems willing to tackle them. Perhaps a middle ground here is that the problems you listed are masking the problem of social media overuse, but that social media overuse is still a problem. It is not an innocent messenger.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-02-04 19:06:05+00:00
How is ICE enforcing US laws on immigration in a country where those laws and officers have no jurisdiction?

This is a call to kick out a problematic enforcement agency from a country that it has no right being in. There are already collaborative agreements with the RCMP and US law enforcement, including CBP agents stationed in Canada for the purposes of border control. ICE has no reason to be here that is not already handled by CBP or Canadian law enforcement.

The motivation is that we are seeing, with our own eyes, that ICE is shooting people in the streets, and being used beyond their mandate for political purposes. Operating within Canada is a privilege, and the people of Canada are calling for that privilege to be revoked.

You should also read closer. The CBC is not calling for anything. They are reporting on others doing that.
by HNisCIS | 2026-02-04 19:06:50+00:00
Uh, Marx is the one who said "Under no pretext..." but who's keeping score at this point.

Yes, I get that you're trying to express a deeply RWNJ partisan view but as a proud LWNJ I must express that the real world is much more complicated than "commies are nuts yo". Perhaps the issue is rampant authoritarianism?
by thenewnewguy | 2026-02-04 19:06:51+00:00
I would not consider myself an expert on LLMs, at least not compared to the people who actually create them at companies like Anthropic, but I can have a go at a steelman:

LLMs allow hostile actors to do wide-scale damage to society by significantly decreasing the marginal cost and increasing the ease of spreading misinformation, propaganda, and other fake content. While this was already possible before, it required creating large troll farms of real people, semi-specialized skills like photoshop, etc. I personally don't believe that AGI/ASI is possible through LLMs, but if you do that would magnify the potential damage tenfold.

Closed-weight LLMs can be controlled to prevent or at least reduce the harmful actions they are used for. Even if you don't trust Anthropic to do this alone, they are a large company beholden to the law and the government can audit their performance. A criminal or hostile nation state downloading an open weight LLM is not going to care about the law.

This would not be a particularly novel idea - a similar reality is already true of other products and services that can be used to do widespread harm. Google "Invention Secrecy Act".
by mlyle | 2026-02-04 19:07:04+00:00
> I do not believe that you can make an efficient radiation heatsink with metallic foil.

What radiators look like is foil or sheet covering fluid loops to spread the heat, control the color, and add surface area.

In general, radiators are white because there's no reason for them to absorb visible light, and they're not hot enough to radiate visible light. You want them to be reflective in the visible spectrum (and strongly absorptive/emissive in the infrared).

A white surface pointing at the sun can be quite cool in LEO, < -40C.
by bborud | 2026-02-04 19:07:33+00:00
A surprising number of solutions can be realized in ways that don't actually need much of a control plane if you introduce a few design constraints.

But if you do need one, I guess Kubernetes is perhaps the safe bet. Not so much because I think it is better/worse than anything else, but because you can easily find people who know it and it has a big ecosystem around it. I'd probably recommend Kubernetes if I were forced to make a general recommendation.

That being said, this has been something that I've been playing with a bit over the years. I've been exploring both ends of the spectrum. What I realized is that we tend to waste a lot of time on this with very little to show for it in terms of improved service reliability.

On one extreme we built a system that has most of the control plane as a layer in the server application. Then external to that we monitored performance and essentially had one lever: add or remove capacity. The coordination layer in the service figured out what to do with additional resources. Or how to deal with resources disappearing. There was only one binary and the service would configure itself to take on one of several roles as needed. All the way down to all of the roles if you are the last process running. (Almost nobody cares about the ability to scale all the way down, but it is nice when you can demo your entire system on a portable rack of RPis - and then just turn them off one by one without the service going down)

On the other extreme is having a critical look at what you really need and realize that if the worst case means a couple of hours of downtime a couple of times per year, you can make do with very little. Just systemd deb packages and SSH access is sufficient for an awful lot of more forgiving cases.

I also dabbled a bit in running systems by having a smallish piece of Go code remote-manage a bunch of servers running Docker. People tend to laugh about this, but it was easy to set up, it is easy to understand and it took care of everything that the service needed. The kubernetes setup that replaced it has had 4-5 times the amount of downtime. But to be fair, the person who took over the project went a bit overboard and probably wasn't the best qualified to manage kubernetes to begin with.

It seems silly to not take advantage of Docker having an API that works perfectly well. (I'd research Podman if I were to do this again).

I don't understand why more people don't try the simple stuff first when the demands they have to meet easily allow for it.
by lalospace | 2026-02-04 19:07:48+00:00
In my country (Italy) Visione TV had bank account frozen for putting on a webtv a Journalist that lived in DonBass during 2014-2018 period speking about local people killed by Ucranians.The decision came from Massimiliano Coccia, husband of Pina Picierno ( member of the European Parliament), this append also to Frédéric Baldan and a lot of other people every day, so I'dont wonder it its true.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-02-04 19:07:49+00:00
No, I don't agree. What is Israel is doing is WAY past the "disproportionate" conversation. For one, Israel's targets have nothing to do with the people who attacked Israel, other than they come from the same geographical area. It's like saying "bombing Italy is a disproportionate response to Luigi Mangione assassinating someone".

Disproportionate would be if they caught the October 7 terrorists and their collaborators, and instead of arresting them killed them. If that was what happened, I wouldn't be morally against it.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-04 19:08:04+00:00
It could be better, regarding the UWP/WinRT mess including on the related VS tooling, the Webview2 stuff all over the place, and naturaly the missing quality in patches, and the updates that are still a surprise in how long they take, and what they might break.

Ah and the required online accounts now.

Nevertheless, I am fed up of installing Linux on my own, started with Slackware in 2.0, and buying laptops online not really my jam, thus Windows it is, Apple is only on work pool devices.
by kylehotchkiss | 2026-02-04 19:08:05+00:00
Albania (1.7% immigrant), Bosnia (1.1%), Moldova (2.6%), Poland(3.6%), Slovakia(3.6%).

Additionally, I wouldn't consider UK to be "high trust" these days either. I don't blame that on immigration, but economic contraction.

I can't tell if you're serious or just saber rattling. I know better than to engage with this type of stuff on Reddit, but I like to think people in the HN space are more methodical than this.
by panphora | 2026-02-04 19:08:21+00:00
Anger about the 2008 bailout makes sense. Yen carry unwind deserves attention. However, the trading call to action fails on market structure.

Key counterpoints:

- Global FX turnover runs near $9.6T per day (BIS, April 2025). A retail wave of calls will not move USD/JPY in a durable way at that scale.

- /6J options settle on /6J futures. When you buy calls, you mostly push dealer delta hedging into futures, then dealers unwind as exposure changes. No sustained spot yen demand comes from that flow.

- FXY calls track an ETF wrapper, not spot.

- “Widowmaker trade” most often refers to repeated losses from shorting Japanese government bonds, not a long-yen crowd squeeze.