Hacker News: lifty

New comment by lifty in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

lifty — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:20:43 +0000

I didn’t mean to compare them, implying that gas or anything else is better. I’m a big fan of renewables, especially solar, but just wanted to bring this aspect up. It’s confusing to me because I get excited when I see these numbers only to later deflate when I figure out the total generated kWh quantity. It would be great if there would be a “synthetic” calculation which takes into account the estimated generation and smoothing out using batteries, which would also take into account the extra cost of batteries. That would be a more apples to apples comparison both in terms of net generation and cost.

New comment by lifty in "Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools"

lifty — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:52:31 +0000

So everything basically.

New comment by lifty in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

lifty — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:40:51 +0000

Solar capacity is always misleading because it’s intermittent. Capacity of a gas power plant can’t be compared to capacity of a solar power plant, even though it sounds like you are comparing the same thing. Would love to know total kWh generated.

New comment by lifty in "Vulnerability research is cooked"

lifty — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:53:49 +0000

Perhaps a meta evolution, they become experts at writing harnesses and prompts for discovering and patching vulnerabilities in existing code and software. My main interest is, now that we have LLMs, will the software industry move to adopting techniques like formal verification and other perhaps more lax approaches that massively increase the quality of software.

New comment by lifty in "An Interactive Intro to CRDTs (2023)"

lifty — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 07:18:55 +0000

Prolly trees can act as CRDTs if you have a merge function that always merges and doesn’t block.

So my initial comment merely tried to make the point that there is a design space where you’re not stuck with the tradeoff of carrying the full Merkle DAG history just to be able to reconstruct the latest version of your document.

Thanks for the video, will check it out!

New comment by lifty in "An Interactive Intro to CRDTs (2023)"

lifty — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:32:09 +0000

As far as I understand, libraries like Automerge use the Merkle DAG to encode a document as an immutable bundle of state changes aka operation log + the causal ordering which enables conflict free merging between multiple peers. The final document is reconstructed by combining the state transitions. So the Merkle DAG is both the state and the causal relationship between mutations which allows the merge "magic".

Prolly trees allow you to store history independent data which is trivial to sync, diff and merge, regardless of insert order, merge order or originating peer. A Merkle DAG layered on top of prolly trees (event reference prolly tree roots) gives you causality so that peers can agree on a common view of history. So it's very useful because you can check integrity and travel in time, but you can keep as much of it as you want, because it's not necessary for constructing the current state. Prolly trees give you the current state and the easy syncing, diff,merge. So you can truncate the history as needed for your use case.

For a production ready implementation of prolly trees you can check Dolt. For a combination of Merkle DAG (https://github.com/storacha/pail) and prolly trees you can check https://github.com/fireproof-storage/fireproof

New comment by lifty in "Mac external displays for designers and developers, part 2 (2022)"

lifty — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:47:39 +0000

I come from the text angle as well. I stare the whole day at terminals and IDEs.

New comment by lifty in "An Interactive Intro to CRDTs (2023)"

lifty — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:44:01 +0000

Regarding the growing log in CRDTs, it doesn't have to be that way. Most of these popular CRDT libs use Merkle DAG only to build up the log of the changes. But there is a better way, you can combine a Merkle DAG for ordering + prolly trees for storing the actual state of the data. That gives you total ordering, an easy way to prune old data when you choose to, and an easy way to sync. Look into fireproof for how this is combined.

Regarding distributed schemas, I agree, there's a lot of complexity there but it's worth looking into projects like https://www.inkandswitch.com/cambria/ and https://github.com/grafana/thema, which try to solve the problem. It's a young space though. If anyone else knows about similar projects or efforts, please let me know. Very interested in the space.

New comment by lifty in "Mac external displays for designers and developers, part 2 (2022)"

lifty — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:18:04 +0000

It’s clear that even in 2026 most people still don’t get the pixel density (PPI) argument. Or perhaps they get it but they don’t appreciate it. For me, any monitor that is not HIDPI (218 ppi) is a non starter. Maybe my eyesight is better than the average but looking at a non-retina display seems atrocious after having spent time working on a retina display.

New comment by lifty in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

lifty — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:30:10 +0000

So it seems the new Studio Display XDR is the only display on the market that offers:

- 5k resolution at HIDPI (27inch)

- 120hz refresh rate

- TB5 and single cable connectivity.

There are a couple of other HIDPI displays at 5k with 120hz refresh rate but they don't do TB5.

New comment by lifty in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

lifty — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:58:47 +0000

Super disappointed that the base model doesn't get 120hz. I own the old model and it's great, but I will have to look for an alternative 5k display with 120hz refresh rate. There are a few on the market now, and I won't pay 3.5k for 120hz.

New comment by lifty in "Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents"

lifty — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:43:00 +0000

What model do you use it with? And through which API, openrouter? Wondering how you manage cost because it can get quite expensive

I Donut Belive

lifty — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:19:40 +0000

Article URL: https://idonutbelieve.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085596

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by lifty in "Gemini 3 Deep Think"

lifty — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:54:17 +0000

I know, and neither of these options are feasible for me. I can't get the early access and I am not willing to drop $250 in order to just try their new model. By the time I can use it, the other two companies have something similar and I lose my interest in Google's models.

New comment by lifty in "Gemini 3 Deep Think"

lifty — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:45:57 +0000

Too bad we can’t use it. Whenever Google releases something, I can never seem to use it in their coding cli product.

New comment by lifty in "EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity"

lifty — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:45:06 +0000

I agree with your characterisation of what is going on, and at some point, the EU states will have to decide for full fiscal integration or for removing the common currency. You can't have a common currency without a common fiscal union. So we either have to integrate more or desintegrate more, this inbetween we have now is not working very well. Speaking as a European, not sure what is better.

New comment by lifty in "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"

lifty — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:39:27 +0000

Is this open source? I am a happy Storj customer, would love to use it if it's open source.

New comment by lifty in "Towards a secure peer-to-peer app platform for Clan"

lifty — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 18:46:28 +0000

Is clan some kind of p2p server config management framework based on Nix?

New comment by lifty in "Show HN: 100 Million splats, a whole town, rendered in M2 MacBook Air"

lifty — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:23:30 +0000

Why can't they make video games with this tech?

Neural cellular automata: Applications to biology and beyond classical AI

lifty — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:56:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064525001757?dgcid=coauthor

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210538

Points: 1

# Comments: 0