Hacker News: dosinga

New comment by dosinga in "Austerity Creates Fascism"

dosinga — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:55:45 +0000

Austerity does not create fascism. The examples in the article are just all wrong. Even if you call Trump and Orban fascists, they did not follow austerity. The reaction to the financial crisis was the largest fiscal and monetary interventions in history. Orban consolidated power by spending and state expansion, not austerity. True austerity in Greece, Spain, Portugal of recent times led to new parties, but those countries are politically doing surprisingly well.

Russian crypto payment system expands into Africa

dosinga — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:24:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/a9de2bb5-7bbf-4d04-9424-25d4b9cda2b6

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47665668

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by dosinga in "Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home"

dosinga — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:29:58 +0000

I ended up using https://eu.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-bot -- just have a finger robot push the button

New comment by dosinga in "EU Inc.: A new harmonised corporate legal regime"

dosinga — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:54:15 +0000

Employers and landlords do that sort of thing all the time. Rent goes up, job descriptions change, return to office is suddenly required. And yeah, you can get a different job or a different home if you don't like it.

New comment by dosinga in "Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid"

dosinga — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:13:00 +0000

> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.

In other words, if you remove the people that earned the least (close to nothing) the overall income per capita goes up? If you exclude the non nobles I am sure the middle ages had a very high GDP too

New comment by dosinga in "Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness"

dosinga — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:41:37 +0000

you can run https://block.github.io/goose/ in headless mode (I work on goose)

What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn't Know, Either

dosinga — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:59:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude-anthropic-doesnt-know-either

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130258

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by dosinga in "Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]"

dosinga — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:41:04 +0000

ah, but you can always just ask the LLM questions about how it works. it's much easier to understand complex code these days than before. and also much easier to not take the time to do it and just race to the next feature

New comment by dosinga in "Who sets the Doomsday Clock?"

dosinga — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 21:50:03 +0000

I have looked but I can't find out if it actually means something. Does 89 seconds before midnight mean we have a 50% chance to survive the next N years somehow?

New comment by dosinga in "Show HN: First Claude Code client for Ollama local models"

dosinga — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:03:17 +0000

this is cool. not sure it is the first claude code style coding agent that runs against Ollama models though. goose, opencode and others have been able to do that a while no?

Wanting to be an astronaut turned me into a Software Engineer

dosinga — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:23:54 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.douwe.com/2026/01/wanting-to-be-astronaut-turned-me-into.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611917

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by dosinga in "Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids"

dosinga — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:18:44 +0000

> Who hasn’t turned in a paper on a broken floppy disk, with the excuse ready that the floppy must have broken when the teacher asks a few days later?

I feel seen

New comment by dosinga in "People who come off slimming jabs regain weight four times faster than dieters"

dosinga — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:27:59 +0000

One thing that seems missing from a lot of these comparisons is the base rate of success for dieting itself.

Most people who “start a diet” never meaningfully lose weight in the first place, or lose a small amount and plateau quickly. The cohort of “dieters who regain weight” is already heavily filtered toward the minority who were unusually successful at dieting to begin with. That selection bias matters a lot when you then compare regain rates.

GLP-1s change that denominator. A much larger fraction of people who start the intervention actually lose substantial weight. So even if regain after stopping is faster conditional on having lost weight, the overall success rate (people who lose and keep off a clinically meaningful amount) may still be higher than dieting alone.

In other words: “people who regain weight after stopping GLP-1s” vs “people who regain weight after dieting” ignores the much larger group of dieters who never lost anything to regain. From a population perspective, that’s a pretty important omission.

New comment by dosinga in "How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAI"

dosinga — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:27:22 +0000

Google-as-the-new-Microsoft feels about right. Windows 1 was a curiosity, 2 was “ok”, and 3.x is where it started to really win. Same story with IE: early versions were a joke, then it became “good enough” + distribution did the rest.

Gemini 3 feels like Google’s “Windows 3 / IE4 moment”: not necessarily everyone’s favorite yet, but finally solid enough that the default placement starts to matter.

If you are the incumbent you don't need to be all that much better. Just good enough and you win by default. We'll all end up with Gemini 6 (IE 6, Windows XP) and then we'll have something to complain about.

New comment by dosinga in "Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy (2016)"

dosinga — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:11:24 +0000

eh, maybe. Sure Google bought Youtube, but the whole making it social came later. Apple spending a lot of time refining them is exactly the point. They did go up in the stack (given that they started out as home computer builder quite a bit). Word first came out for MS DOS, so definitely going up in the stack.

New comment by dosinga in "Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy (2016)"

dosinga — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 20:13:00 +0000

This doesn’t sound very convincing, mostly because the examples don’t really line up with the claim. Apple supposedly struggles “up the stack,” yet many of the best and most-used iPhone apps are built by Apple itself. Google is held up as failing at social, but YouTube is arguably the largest social network in the world. Oracle is described as struggling in apps, yet it’s clearly doing just fine as a massive, profitable enterprise software company. And the IBM example is backwards: IBM didn’t accidentally hand Microsoft the OS layer, it already had its own operating systems. In fact, Microsoft is the clearest counterexample here, it got big by owning the OS and then very successfully moved up the stack to dominate applications with Office.

The High Cost of Tree Testing

dosinga — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:57:18 +0000

Article URL: https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/the-high-cost-of-free-testing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459118

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by dosinga in "The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems"

dosinga — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:54:54 +0000

I don't know. The World Happiness Report relies on one simple question, which is easy to criticise but at least it applies a clear and consistent method. The paper referred to does not. It uses a special US dataset for states and a much smaller global dataset for every other country, then treats the results as if they measure the same thing. This setup almost guarantees that US states look unusually good. The authors present this as evidence, but it mostly reflects differences in survey design rather than real differences in wellbeing. In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.

New comment by dosinga in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"

dosinga — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:47:05 +0000

If there are no free alternatives, yes. 100 USD a month for ChatGPT seems great value

New comment by dosinga in "Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix"

dosinga — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:09:32 +0000

Also: Recency & survival bias. We remember what became the classics from the 90s and also what came out this year and was available on our last flight