Hacker News Reader

radeeyateon OpenCode has a security breach last that impacted 1.4% of console users

I'm a big fan of Crush: https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush

It's all BYOK but the also have Hyper (https://hyper.charm.land/) which is their hosted inference of OSS models.

radeeyateon Show HN: We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it

That was really our main concern. Being our first launch, we didn't want to risk it and wanted to wait until we were more comfortable with the process until taking that step.

radeeyateon Show HN: We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it

I have my license, and I noted about this in the post. I experimented with the U4B for tracking and found it not to be reliable enough. For the future, I'm planning on using the 70 cm ham band for LoRa.

radeeyateon Show HN: We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it

I think another point I hadn't included was the flexibility I had with prototyping different boxes. The hardware was changing all the time, and being able to just 3d print another revision was very convenient.

If I did something like that with styrofoam, it probably would have gotten pretty expensive. The precision you get from printing was also a plus, as there needed to be slots for cameras, antennas, and circuit board mounting holes.

radeeyateon Show HN: We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it

Yep, the radio link runs LoRa on the 33 cm band (915 MHz)

radeeyateon Show HN: We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it

I found that surprising too! This probably isn't a completely accurate number, as the sensor is black and likely experienced some heating from the sun. Something also worth noting is that different layers of the atmosphere experience different temperatures www.noaa.gov/jetstream/atmosphere/layers-of-atmosphere

radeeyateon Show HN: We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it

Images are all in order, but some have missing packets.

The problem with SSTV is the power required. From some looking it seems that transmitting would need at least 5 watts. This wouldn't be feasible running on the balloon, as it was powered by Energizer Ultimate Lithium batteries.

radeeyateon Designing and assembling my first PCB

I can vouch for OSH Park. Wonderful company, nice people, and really good quality boards. Pads lift so much easier on the cheap Chinese boards that I think it alone makes it worth it to choose local manufacturers. The price is a bit steep for bigger boards but if you're working on a project that they are interested in, they provided financial support every so often. I've gotten a few boards sponsored by them!

radeeyateon Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

This is another writeup from quite a while of someone else doing it with ffmpeg and imagemagick. It goes over a lot of details on how it was done. A better writeup than this one in my opinion! I also think the end result is much more readable, but it is missing the static text in the background.

https://oliveratkinson.net/static-captcha/

radeeyateon Segmented type appreciation corner (2018)

I've been looking for something exactly like this, actually! I'm making a hardware device that is a habit tracker, and the screen will be a few 7 segment displays. Being able to simulate the displays like this is very nice. Also very cool that it displays whatever you type in!

radeeyateon Your AI Slop Bores Me

I'm not the original author of this (hence why it's not a Show HN). However, it allows you to ask a question or image prompt, and someone else gets to answer or draw your prompt. When answering for others, you receive credits which allow asking more questions.

radeeyateon High-Altitude Adventure with a DIY Pico Balloon

If you are wanting to send images, there are already some cool ways to do that: either SSTV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television) or Wenet, which sends them at a much higher speed: https://github.com/projecthorus/wenet.

radeeyateon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://radi8.dev

I don't update it often but I have a blog post with a project. I hope to do more blogging this year, and add more to it.

radeeyateon Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

I've been working on some electronics stuff more recently, and I designed custom PCBs which read the voltage and internal resistance of the 12V NiMH batteries used by robots in FIRST Tech Challenge. It's not always easy to know how charged or healthy the batteries are for a match, or when it's time to get rid of them. They're pretty small and are easy to assemble. Rather that having a screen (which would take precious flash and pins on the ATTiny412), it just uses a WS2812B RGB LED.

I wrote the firmware in Arduino, which was a great learning experience because I typically work with CircuitPython or Go, where I'm less constrained.

radeeyateon Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

For the past year, I've been learning a lot more about electronics, and in particular, designing PCBs, getting them manufactured, and assembled. I've come a long way from where I started, making little LED flashers shaped like trees for Christmas last year (everyone has to start somewhere!) where I'm now making small products with some of the super cheap ATTiny chips and writing code for them.

I really want to get more into microcontrollers, and design some more technical projects. I've been wanting to make a portable point-and-shoot camera for a couple years, though I've never been knowledgeable in that area to do it very well. Though, I'm finally getting to that point.

On a non-electronic-designing front, I'd love to learn more about networking and radios. I'm working on my homelab right now, and just got a nice switch to connect some free 15-year-old office PCs I also have. I'd love to get into AREDN, which is a 802.11 mesh network that can run on amateur radio frequencies.

I also want to write more about my projects on my website (https://radi8.dev,) where hopefully I can share what I work on more often than I currently do.

radeeyateon Show HN: I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon

Image data and telemetry were sent in different messages, so it wasn't too much of a bottleneck. The images were about ~100 bytes while the telemetry was roughly 40.

radeeyateon Show HN: I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon

Thank you for the kind words! The fluorescence was originally meant to be measured with an AS7273 spectrometer (unfortunately bought a different one, still worked fine though), and measuring ~680 nm. Certainly not a great setup but it worked fine. Light was ambient through acrylic, and I found out far too late that UV blocking effects. Despite that, I feel like the data is still somewhat valid, maybe. I did do some testing with it back on earth, though I can't remember how it correlated.

The data I have is here: https://github.com/radeeyate/StratoSpore/blob/main/software/... - just be warned that the altitude data still isn't the exact same as it was while in the air (GPS not working so I had to take it from someone else).

radeeyateon The Death of Arduino?

I first got into Raspberry Pi Picos, but I've also been experimenting with Esp32's and some of the nRF chips. I mostly do CircuitPython on them but Arduino is a supported platform on those I believe.

radeeyateon I launched a payload as a teen to the stratosphere to measure algae fluorescence

Hi HN!

I'm Andrew, and I'm a high school student who participated in Hack Club's Apex program, which funded 30 students to built high altitude balloon (HAB) payloads.

My project, StratoSpore, was an attempt to use algae fluorescence as a biological sensor for detecting changes in altitude and stratospheric conditions.

This challenge involved a full electronics and software design cycle: - I designed PCBs based on Raspberry Pi Picos for sensor logging (AS7264 spectral sensor, temps, etc) and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for data processing - Implementing a highly lossy, custom compression algorith to compress 1080p images down to 18x10 pixels for sending of LoRA (915 Mhz) along with shoving a bunch of telemetry into 45 bytes. - Unfortunately, the payload couldn't be recovered as it is stuck in a dense forest. I also had some GPS problems and had to splice some data.

This was a huge step outside my comfort zone and taught me about hardware design, logistics, and compression.

I'd love to hear and thoughts or technical critiques on the design of software. If you have any questions, I'd love to answer them. Code/hardware is on GitHub (https://github.com/radeeyate/stratospore), and I hope you enjoy the blog post!

radeeyateon Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time

And here I am in the US paying $50+/mo for CenturyLink to give me 20Mb down and 0.5Mb up.

radeeyateon An Update on TinyKVM

KVM (as in the switch) was termed in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch

radeeyateon ChatGPT agent System Card [pdf]

This is where model cards came from, as far as I know: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03993

radeeyateon DNS traffic spiked as Musk–Trump clash boosted Truth Social (+268%) and X (+20%)

What was meant is that Elon owns Twitter, while Trump owns Truth Social. These platforms are their "personal diaries."

radeeyateon Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools

All System Prompts from Anthropic models are public information, released by Anthropic themselves: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts. I'm unsure (I just skimmed through) to what the differences between this and the publicly released ones are, so they're might be some differences.

radeeyateon I use zip bombs to protect my server

Interestingly enough, it loads in about 5 seconds on my Pixel 6a.

radeeyateon AT&T Email-to-Text Gateway Service Ending June 17

ntfy is also a great option, FOSS, and you can host your own server

radeeyateon Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

We'll be using one of Adafruit's LoRa Bonnets mainly for easy of use because all you have to do it connect the headers! https://www.adafruit.com/product/4074

radeeyateon Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

Me and a friend of mine are designing a HAB (high altitude balloon) payload meant to go on Hack Club's Apex: https://apex.hackclub.com. It's designed to measure how altitude, temperature, and much more affect photosynthesis, and in turn, chlorophyll fluorescence in algae. We learned a while back that when you shine blue light on chlorophyll, it fluoresces red, and it's really quite a cool phenomena. We're designing custom PCBs for powering and processing data, and even. It'll all go to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which will beam data back to earth over 915Mhz LoRa when it's 100k feet in the sky.

radeeyateon Firefox 136 Desktop gets Vertical Tabs

I don't really care about the vertical tabs, I'm here for the video decoding finally being enabled for AMD GPUs on Linux. While I usually don't have troubles with video playback, it's nice to know it'll be more stable in the future.

radeeyateon I let ChatGPT's new 'agent' manage my life. It spent $31 on a dozen eggs

https://archive.ph/G9bKQ