Hacker News Reader

jjwisemanon Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance

Maybe not "rely" on, but some definitely use public ADS-B aggregator sites.

jjwisemanon Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance

(Of course if you were spoofing ADS-B RF signals you wouldn't necessarily need to be anywhere near the spoofed locations. Just like with GPS spoofing.)

jjwisemanon Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance

As other commenters noted, this is almost certainly not RF spoofing, just sending bad data to an aggregator (ADS-B Exchange) over the internet.

This instance of spoofing is notable for being the first that I know of that wasn't primitive vector art or text, but a raster image!

In that area of Florida multiple receivers would have picked up actual ADS-B broadcasts. ADS-B aggregators do have various anti-spoofing measures, but they're not impossible to circumvent.

The only case of actual RF spoofing of aircraft transponder signals that I know of was actually done by the U.S. Secret Service, which interfered with passenger jet collision alert systems (TCAS) by apparently broadcasting bogus signals near Ronald Reagan National Airport (KDCA): https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/aviation-flights-whi...

jjwisemanon Project SkyWatch (a.k.a. Wescam at Home)

This is a fun project that combines a cheap PTZ camera + OpenCV, Kalman filtering, PID control, and digital stabilization to not just snap photos of aircraft flying past, but do rock solid, pixel-level tracking as long as they're in sight.

And it can be combined with a source of ADS-B data so it knows what it's looking at, displaying the info on the OSD.

jjwisemanon Iran has now been offline for 96 hours

They do seem to be jamming GPS around Tehran at least, as seen on GPSJAM. https://bsky.app/profile/lemonodor.bsky.social/post/3mcak43p...

jjwisemanon Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

If they were doing that, that would be a criminal conspiracy, not terrorism. Authoritarians often like to call ordinary criminals, political opponents, and dissenters terrorists to delegitimize them and justify harsher behavior against them. I assume that's what Garrett Langley was trying to do when he called them a "terroristic organization".

Luckily for DeFlock they're not doing anything "terroristic" or even criminal.

jjwisemanon Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

The CEO of Flock, Garrett Langley, called Deflock a terrorist group. It's unhinged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZGrDz7PU

jjwisemanon The gruesome new data on tech jobs

I made a chart of the number of jobs posted to HN "Who is hiring?" posts (using data from hnhiring.com): https://bsky.app/profile/lemonodor.bsky.social/post/3m4t2b66...

It correlates pretty well with the line showing technology jobs over time in the article at hiringlab.org: https://www.hiringlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/sector_...

The main difference seems to be that the number of jobs posted to HN has dropped significantly lower, well below the low point of 2020. It's really pretty dismal, which seems to have started around the middle of 2022. Maybe the types of jobs that get posted to HN are doing even worse than "technology" in general.

jjwisemanon LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs

They're not usually doing surveillance on people, they're mostly used as a quick way to get eyes overhead when something else is happening--foot pursuit, high speed pursuit, just about anything really where an aerial perspective might be helpful. They can fly anywhere in LA pretty quickly.

jjwisemanon LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs

In 2003, "Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn, along with Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Police Chiefs’ Association and the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners sent a letter Feb. 26 to news directors of television stations asking them to consider reducing the amount of police car chase coverage they broadcast."

  Officials asserted in their letter that live continuous coverage
  causes dangerous police chases to be looked upon as entertainment,
  and encourages suspects to flee in pursuit of instant fame.

  “Dangerous suspects are acquiring instant celebrity status when they
  recklessly evade police over our streets and highways. This form of
  notoriety is life threatening and should not occur,” said Los Angeles
  County Sheriff Lee Baca in the press release.

  "There have been instances where drivers look out windows and wave. Many
  [suspects] have made it abundantly clear that they’re enjoying the whole
  thing,” said Julie Wong, director of communications for the mayor’s
  office.

jjwisemanon We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

  Docker/TypeS
  cript Node

jjwisemanon UPS plane crashes near Louisville airport

In today's NTSB briefing they said as far as they know the aircraft was not delayed and there was not maintenance work done immediately before the flight. https://www.youtube.com/live/Rw6CtQJckzE?si=9Q98BLIVDJbfZ1QV...

jjwisemanon State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

Oh wow, I haven't thought of COMMO in decades.

jjwisemanon United MAX Hit by Falling Object at 36,000 Feet

It seems like the article has been updated: "Sources told AVweb Sunday that the focus of the investigation is on a weather balloon payload." This is far more likely than a meteor.

jjwisemanon ADS-B Exposed

Back when this first launched, I said it was like writing webgl shaders for ADS-B with SQL.

And I made a custom GPT that could translate natural language queries to Clickhouse's query language: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-GfJuwxZFt-ads-b-exposed-expert

jjwisemanon ADS-B Exposed

It's good to be careful. A popular ADS-B network used to distribute a raspberry pi image that let the maintainers ssh into your machine whenever they wanted.

jjwisemanon Action was the best 8-bit programming language

Same here. I knew BASIC very well and had done some 6502 assembly, but the COMAL disk I picked up somewhere for the C64 was my first exposure to structured programming, and it definitely expanded my young mind.

jjwisemanon What we find in the sewers

I talked to a woman who worked for the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power (LADWP) at a party once and she told me about some of the things they find in the sewers. The ones I remember are tampons, a dead horse, and money.

jjwisemanon Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

It seems like this post has been removed from the front page of HN. I think it was in the #1 spot 15 minutes ago.

jjwisemanon Should the web platform adopt XSLT 3.0?

In the 90s I created a site with XSLT that rendered to HTML. I was tempted by its promises, but in practice I found it hard to use, hard to debug, complicated and extremely verbose. I was glad when I gave it up.

jjwisemanon Epson MX-80 Fonts

I have pleasant memories of using SpeedScript on my C64 to write several papers in high school. What an amazing piece of software: a word processor in 5 KB.

jjwisemanon Search all text in New York City

This is a super cool project. But it would be 10x cooler if they had generated CLIP or some other embeddings for the images, so you could search for text but also do semantic vector search like "people fighting", "cats and dogs, "red tesla", "clown", "child playing with dog", etc.

jjwisemanon Search all text in New York City

The creator gave a talk that has more details on how it was done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfODe92DzLU

IIRC he found a way to download streetview images without paying, and used the OCR built-in to macOS (which is really good).

jjwisemanon The 1090 Megahertz Riddle: A Guide to Decoding Mode S and ADS-B Signals

Great book that I reference all the time.

(The title is actually "The 1090 Megahertz Riddle".)

jjwisemanon Grok 4 Launch [video]

One was a gesture made by the anti-immigrant, antisemitic Musk, who pushes false stories of white genocide and is responsible for the deaths of thousands of non-white children (by dismantling most of USAID), who supports far-right political parties and leaders, who urged Germans not to be ashamed of their country's history, who created an AI bot that is not just antisemitic but calls itself MechaHitler.

The other, different gesture was made by a relatively liberal, progressive Democrat.

jjwisemanon Grok 4

I think that's because GitHub is trying to load the dozens of awful comments on the commit by people with usernames like waifuconnoisseur lamenting the loss of the politically incorrect, Hitler-loving grok. For what it's worth, they unfortunately load for me in Safari but it takes ~10 seconds.

jjwisemanon ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral

Did you know there are currently many large police agencies that use unencrypted radios and they don't usually have any issues with it?

jjwisemanon ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral

Because law enforcement officers have so much more power than an average citizen, they must be held to much higher standards and have even more accountability. Law enforcement radio should be unencrypted, there should be public databases of officers for facial recognition, and their vehicles and persons should be publicly trackable. The same techniques they use to surveil the citizenry should be applied to them.

https://icespy.org is a site where you can do facial recognition on ICE employees.

jjwisemanon First thoughts on o3 pro

I doubt I could reliably solve Towers of Hanoi in my head for more than 3 or 4 discs.

jjwisemanon Claude 4

Please add GPT o3.