Hacker News: dosinga

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.

Git Issues should be the new PRs

dosinga — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:49:16 +0000

Article URL: https://goose-docs.ai/blog/2026/07/30/issues-are-the-new-prs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159134

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dosinga in "Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns"

dosinga — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:57:58 +0000

I don't know. This reply is AI generated and I really care

New comment by dosinga in "The state of open source AI"

dosinga — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:29:43 +0000

> Mozilla exists because one company tried to own the front door to the web, and an open community rose up to make sure it never could.

I'd say that the front door to the web is pretty much owned by Google and Apple at this point given Firefox current marketshare. And maybe that's enough, maybe a future where a low percentage of open models keep the rest of the system honest but that doesn't seem the argument of this article

Self-improving agents still need humans

dosinga — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:03:07 +0000

Article URL: https://douwe.com/blog/2026/0619/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601993

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Self-Improving Agents Still Need Humans

dosinga — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:45:03 +0000

Article URL: https://goose-docs.ai/blog/2026/06/17/self-improving-agents-need-humans/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48590541

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by dosinga in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

dosinga — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:11:38 +0000

> ...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".

Keynes said that when somebody complained that his theories didn't work in the long run. And the true rebuke is, we're now in the long run and Keynes is dead

New comment by dosinga in "Vibe Coding Is Not Engineering"

dosinga — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:35:46 +0000

second paragraph

> A model can generate a login system in seconds. It will not ask if emails must be unique. That single missing requirement can collapse the system. LLMs cannot see the category of questions that keep software safe.

really? I am assuming here that the author means that the emails used when registering across users need to be unique. even mediocre models will do that for you.

even more to the point though, if you tell an LLM, hey I want to build this system, let's talk about the architecture, it will ask you all the relevant questions. this can really help with the engineering. sure, there's a rubber ducking aspect to it, but even so. telling an LLM to immediately implement an idea does not lead to great engineering. starting to code yourself has the same problem. doing some brainstorming with an LLM (like in the olden days with humans) is where they help with the engineering part.

The End of Free Tokens

dosinga — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:20:19 +0000

Article URL: https://douwe.com/blog/2026/0518/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314877

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by dosinga in "I Miss Terry Pratchett"

dosinga — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:25:37 +0000

What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?