Hacker News: Liftyee

New comment by Liftyee in "The Mighty Big Array of Finn Jensen LA8YB"

Liftyee — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:18:01 +0000

I love reading about the exploits of radio amateurs. This is some seriously impressive engineering too. It's surprising what one can do with off the shelf components assembled on a human scale (instead of microwave frequencies which need much smaller circuits).

Also, there's a certain beauty in staying close to the physical layer and working the airwaves yourself.

I am the 0.1x developer (if not less)

Liftyee — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:49:04 +0000

Article URL: https://eliyahu.co.uk/posts/0.1x-developer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895356

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by Liftyee in "An iroh powered smart fan"

Liftyee — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:52:00 +0000

While this is neat, it strikes me as the software developer's idea of a "smart fan". The engineer in me says that an actual "smart fan" would be one whose blades are designed to produce maximum airflow with minimum noise (variable pitch? avoiding turbulence?)

New comment by Liftyee in "Show HN: 18 Words"

Liftyee — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:47:49 +0000

This is an odd and interesting effect. I experienced it and English is my first language.

Couldn't figure out "binding" because in the process of permuting the letters it got sounded out as "bin ding" which I immediately rejected as "not a word". It seems like it's intuitive to permute letters but I forget that you have to permute the sound too, otherwise it won't parse as a word.

New comment by Liftyee in "Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper"

Liftyee — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 08:12:49 +0000

Though, the new data centers are not entirely the same. Increasing use of onsite gas turbines to generate power instead of using grid power changes their noise+air pollution profile.

New comment by Liftyee in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

Liftyee — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 08:05:44 +0000

I would hesitate to say the IKEA is worse. Inside the IKEA is a reputable Sensirion all in one sensor module. It's much cheaper and smaller because the CO2 sensor in it is using different (newer) technology that only released a few years ago from Sensirion.

(Upd: the IKEA does have lower accuracy, with ±100 ppm instead of ±30 ppm. From the SEN63C datasheet)

New comment by Liftyee in "County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'"

Liftyee — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:21:45 +0000

Smarter device would just require a little more cost. Current devices can work with no code, just analog electronics.

New comment by Liftyee in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

Liftyee — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 06:52:47 +0000

Far too slow to complete and too many clicks. I'm surprised it's not using a binary search method easy-hard-easy ... Then it could show an in progress metric.

New comment by Liftyee in "How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart"

Liftyee — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 01:31:51 +0000

A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company but in Japan it helped make all these efficient and meticulous changes possible, and avoids issues of privatisation like neglecting maintenance / short term profit maximisation.

New comment by Liftyee in "Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields"

Liftyee — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:49:25 +0000

I read about the clandestine midnight destruction of Meigs Field, Chicago - somehow the first one I happened upon. The mayor had the runway bulldozed in the night so that no one could have time to object. Unbelievable and mildly infuriating story.

Apparently the main motivation was to have a legacy...

New comment by Liftyee in "Want your images back? That'll be $5"

Liftyee — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:52:53 +0000

Regardless of whether this is legal or not, I think this move is subjectively scummy. I know that profit maximisation means going against common ideas of what is "a nice thing to do", but there's a line that's been crossed here between "the business has to support itself" and "trying to exploit and milk our customers".

Honestly, if storage costs were an issue, I would have preferred they delete it with notification than sell hope at a ransom.

Wonder if there any startups that have grown without resorting to these low blow tactics - just the idealised free market of "we provide such a good service that you're willing to pay us our fair price".

New comment by Liftyee in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

Liftyee — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:24:01 +0000

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of the economy is that money is earned when someone creates value. Just "giving people money" without having the corresponding value be created increases demand for valuable things without increasing supply, leading to inflation and the costs of said things going up.

New comment by Liftyee in "Every Frame Perfect"

Liftyee — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:25:27 +0000

I see Kiro's guess and raise you an anecdote. I just turned animations off on my Android device, and instantly it feels faster and more responsive.

Maybe software programs got faster with our faster CPUs but all the animations just made everything feel slow.

New comment by Liftyee in "Only 2.5% of 12,779 tech job listings are entry-level"

Liftyee — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:33:28 +0000

I wonder if there's a tragedy of the commons effect with hiring. No individual company wants to spend to train employees when they can just use the pool of trained employees from other companies.

New comment by Liftyee in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

Liftyee — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:25:24 +0000

Very intriguing. This might be the use for my e5-2430 V2 X2 server that's been lying around. DDR3 is (relatively) cheap now too. Could fit 192GB of RAM in it and play around for much cheaper than a new GPU.

New comment by Liftyee in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

Liftyee — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:40:46 +0000

I haven't used local agentic AI yet for programming projects. Hence, -187 score

The filter for "commands I would run myself" and "commands I would let an agent run" are very different it seems.

New comment by Liftyee in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

Liftyee — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:29:24 +0000

It would be a shame to see Dropbox decline. They're the last big player to maintain a Linux sync client that just works reliably. I've tried to host Nextcloud and tried Syncthing as well, but Dropbox has always worked for when I just want the problem solved without worrying about something going down.

Open to recommendations...

New comment by Liftyee in "A fundamental principle of aeronautical engineering has been overturned"

Liftyee — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:08:09 +0000

Interesting finding, but hardly fundamental. My fluids lectures taught that there's form drag ("pressure drag" in the article) and skin friction drag. The two trade off with each other depending on Reynolds number. Keeping the flow laminar reduces skin friction drag (suggesting smooth skin), but keeping the flow attached for longer (e.g. by inducing turbulence, or injecting air...) reduces form drag (at a cost of increased skin friction due to turbulence).

Reads like they've discovered a neat way to delay flow separation while maintaining laminar flow, but the underlying principles have not changed. "Smooth thing low drag" was never a rule and only works at certain scales.

New comment by Liftyee in "My two-part desk setup (2025)"

Liftyee — Sun, 24 May 2026 13:32:48 +0000

I suspect those people lack the practical skills needed to construct such a table, and the time/motivation to create with their own hands instead of purchasing.

New comment by Liftyee in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"

Liftyee — Sun, 17 May 2026 22:29:04 +0000

I also suspect the modern digital news cycle and potential lawsuits have impacted the levels of risk acceptable. In China, with devastation in living memory, the population are generally willing to take more risks, and there's less of a culture of litigation. Plus, there's always the government who can dampen any viral social media outburst.

Of course, some standards (fire safety) are important. Looser standards are allowable where the customer can make a reasoned judgement of risk.