Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49848227

Clever idea, too bad they didn't bother writing down their blog post themselves and posted AI slop instead.

I don’t think so, the pressure you’re measuring would be extremely small. The air at that altitude is acting as a free molecular flow, there’s not a lot of molecules that exert pressure. I think you would need some exotic detector that essentially can detect individual molecules hitting the surface, the pressure itself is tiny.

Maybe the sensor types used for ultra low vacuums could detect the pressure, but I’m not sure if you could gather enough molecules in a front facing tube to get a pressure increase over ambient.