Hacker News: dosinga

New comment by dosinga in "Finland investigate Google over destruction of 250k trees"

dosinga — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:22:41 +0000

even England has 2 billion trees or so though, way less than Finland but 250k trees is still not that much

New comment by dosinga in "Finland investigate Google over destruction of 250k trees"

dosinga — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:19:25 +0000

how is it not? Finland cuts down hundred of millions of trees every year. they grow back, that's how their lumber industry works. Google presumably cut trees that were of a random age, not of harvesting age.

I realize it is seasonal, but the maths still works. distribute all trees in cohorts of three hours age. every three hours they move one up. every three hours there's 250k trees more over the entire range, allowing Finland to cut the mature trees to make paper.

New comment by dosinga in "Finland investigate Google over destruction of 250k trees"

dosinga — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:28:39 +0000

I think this is a case of a misleading headline. Do the 250K trees even enter into this:

> Police said that, based on current information, there have been irregularities and shortcomings in drainage and water management at the data centre project's worksite

250K trees sounds like a lot, but Finland has like 20B trees, so it would take 3 hours for Finland to grow this back

New comment by dosinga in "The First Social Network: In rural Argentina residents send messages w AM radio"

dosinga — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:51:11 +0000

Not "created" I think. There were still inventions, but actively looking for the new new thing in order to create new products is somethign that was introduced with capitalism.

New comment by dosinga in "The Battle to Pass a Billionaire Tax"

dosinga — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 15:33:26 +0000

archive: https://archive.is/aINxG

The Battle to Pass a Billionaire Tax

dosinga — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 15:32:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/10/12/the-battle-to-pass-a-billionaire-tax

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49954781

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by dosinga in "Kolibri Has Landed: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model"

dosinga — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:25:12 +0000

> The second was to rephrase German documents we already had. An LLM rewrites an organic German document in the style of an encyclopedia entry, a Q&A dialogue or a text passage, preserving its content.

"an LLM" -- does that mean they are effectively learning from that LLM the German encyclopedic style? makes me wonder which LLM and how that is really sovereign.

New comment by dosinga in "AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator"

dosinga — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:32:50 +0000

goose has now native support for local models

New comment by dosinga in "AI models ran real businesses: They sent $12,431 in fake invoices, lost $3,200"

dosinga — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:38:18 +0000

Obviously this is just some stunt, but giving AIs or humans three days to make their money back on the Internet sets them up for failure and almost forces them to do dumb things. As they did.

New comment by dosinga in "Show HN: World Sizer – A world map where area reflects population, GDP, and more"

dosinga — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:27:52 +0000

Ugh. The oil production one doesn't seem to work very well. Keeps crunching into itself.

Show HN: World Sizer – A world map where area reflects population, GDP, and more

dosinga — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:21:54 +0000

Article URL: https://douwe.com/projects/worldsizer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49408664

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by dosinga in "Show HN: World Pop – A world map with countries resized by population, 1800–2100"

dosinga — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:50:35 +0000

yeah good point and that probably would have warranted a note. it tries to calculate back what the population was for the countries as they are today. there's some questionable interpolation going on.

I would like the alternative, but that would require having a geojson of all historic borders and their populations. and then you'd still have to make a judgement call on Britain -- yes it ruled India, but should India not still show up as its own thing?

Show HN: World Pop – A world map with countries resized by population, 1800–2100

dosinga — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:08:41 +0000

Article URL: https://douwe.com/projects/gapmover

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323189

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by dosinga in "Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future"

dosinga — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:30:44 +0000

yeah, the future movements don't do a great job avoiding collisions and when they do, they just bounce sometimes.

New comment by dosinga in "Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities"

dosinga — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:26:08 +0000

> If there is anything to learn from the history of science, it is that breakthroughs happen via better or new theory and not by brute-force compute

that might just be an illusion. humanity as a whole applies brute force by just trying all the reasonable new theories until one of us discovers something that works and declares it a breakthrough

New comment by dosinga in "Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future"

dosinga — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:36:03 +0000

there's actually a little [+] button that allows you to add one city

Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future

dosinga — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:30:05 +0000

Article URL: https://douwe.com/projects/tectonic_globe

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231777

Points: 37

# Comments: 10

New comment by dosinga in "The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)"

dosinga — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:24:29 +0000

> outside of the highly specialized embedded-application market, RISC is in retreat

with hindsight it is funny to realize that RISCs come back would start from inside that highly specialized market in the form of ARM.

New comment by dosinga in "The software group Palantir paid just £2M in corporation tax in the UK in 2024"

dosinga — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:08:30 +0000

this is probably an unpopular opinion, but isn't this working as intended:

  * Palantir started in the US as a start up and burned a lot of money building the systems they are running today and that are finally profitable
  * Those systems are used from the UK subsidiary but if a different consultancy would use them, they would be billed accordingly. That's transfer pricing

The article says as much. Before Palantir has to pay taxes in the US, they first work through previous losses which to a large extent are stock options for their employees. Early employees took a risk working there, it paid off, that gets deducted from the profits. Same for other early spending.

New comment by dosinga in "It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism"

dosinga — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:25:03 +0000

People keep saying that the open models are cheaper. Until recently that seemed true because they were smaller. And some of the best smaller models are still open and cheap. But K3 with its 2.7T parameters is never going to be really cheap.