Hacker News: asnelt

New comment by asnelt in "Show HN: State of the Art of Coding Models, According to Hacker News Commenters"

asnelt — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:25:24 +0000

Can you elaborate on your setup? What harness are you using with Gemma 4 on your 32GB machine?

New comment by asnelt in "2025 ARRL Field Day"

asnelt — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 18:36:05 +0000

I live in a small apartment and do 20m using an attic antenna. Of course, I can't compete with big outdoor antennas. But from Scotland, SSB to mainland Europe and FT8 to the US or the Caribbean is not a problem.

Even if you don't have access to an attic, there are antenna constructions that can work for apartments. Have a look at "ARRL's Small Antennas for Small Spaces" and RSGB's "Stealth Antennas" as starting points.

Alternatively, you could consider a portable solution where you carry a small HF rig and some wire in a backpack. The Yaesu FT-857D is very popular for this as it's small, all bands, all modes and does 100W. If you search for "Yaesu FT-857D backpack" you will find many suggestions. It's not in production anymore but you might find it second hand. For Yaesu, other options include the FT-891 (no VHF/UHF) and the more bulky FT-991A. Icom has the IC-7100, which is also a little more bulky than the FT-857D.

New comment by asnelt in "Need a PRNG? Use a CSPRNG"

asnelt — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 23:50:14 +0000

I agree that it's a bad idea to use non-cryptographic PRNGs as defaults. I think most people are not aware of how easy it is to break them. For fun, I wrote an Android app to break LCGs and Mersenne Twisters: https://github.com/asnelt/derandom

New comment by asnelt in "Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)"

asnelt — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 10:32:36 +0000

I suppose I could be ridiculed too, but there is also my `rrep` utility which still has an `-r` option: https://git.sr.ht/~asnelt/rrep

It's packaged for Debian, Arch and openSUSE: https://repology.org/project/rrep/packages

New comment by asnelt in "Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know"

asnelt — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 13:14:35 +0000

I moved from fastmail to Runbox many years ago. The Runbox service is very reliable and all the servers are outside of the US.

New comment by asnelt in "FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust"

asnelt — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:35:27 +0000

Regarding support on Android, if you are using a custom rom like LineageOS without Google Play Services then it won't work currently. Unfortunately, Google implemented FIDO2 in the play services, not in AOSP: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=997538