Hacker News Reader

fasoutoon DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests

Of course no, and that can disincentivize creating more content. You can copy anything and rehash it for next to nothing

fasoutoon Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

I'm working on a new type of calculator with natural language, similar to Soulver but for the web, in multiple languages and with AI mode

https://ottercalc.com/

It has the ability to generate a small notebook from a problem description using AI (still has a lot of room to improve), but the calculation uses a deterministic engine.

Right now I'm working on collaboration.

fasoutoon My Little AI Factory

"I’ve also learned that many people don’t use English to interact with agents"

WTF... that's weird. English is not my first language but I still ask every question in English. Does the LLM write code comments in other languages then?

fasoutoon LinkedIn CringeBot 3000

I created a similar tool a year ago -> https://infiniteutils.com/internet/linkedin-post-generator

fasoutoon Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

I'm building a source code analyzer with AI. It's a TUI that you poin at a local codebase and it generates Mermaid diagrams.

While I was doing it I needed to render those diagrams as ASCII and I was surprised there's no Python library for Mermaid to ASCII. So I wrote one: https://github.com/fasouto/termaid (https://termaid.com/)

fasoutoon Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for a two-sided marketplace?

Honestly, I don't know. We did it for all our country (Spain) and we found the same problem as you. Feel free to reach out if you have any question, email in my profile

fasoutoon Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for a two-sided marketplace?

I tried to do the same in 2015 (blablacar for packages, startup name was tomandgo) and we couldn't solve that problem, it is genuinely hard.

I think in our case the main problem was incentives, we were suggesting low prices for the people sending packages but we forgot that the drivers need an incentive to drop it.

Best of luck!

fasoutoon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

I released an open source library to remove metadata from images: https://github.com/fasouto/picscrub

Was more complex than I thought. Still missing support for some RAW formats and had to fix some bugs

I also created a website to showcase how it works -> https://picscrub.com/

fasoutoon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://fabiosouto.me/

Right now it sucks but I'm creating the new version. Writing always take more time than I anticipate...

fasoutoon The Influentists: AI hype without proof

The article nails the pattern but I think it's fundamnetally an incentives problem.

We're drowning in tweets, posts, news... (way more than anyone can reasonably consume). So what rises to the top? The most dramatic, attention-grabbing claims. "I built in 1 hour what took a team months" gets 10k retweets. "I used AI to speed up a well-scoped prototype after weeks of architectural thinking" gets...crickets

Social platforms are optimized for engagement, not accuracy. The clarification thread will always get a fraction of the reach of the original hype. And the people posting know this.

The frustrating part is there's no easy fix. Calling it out (like this article does) get almost no attention. And the nuanced followup never catches up with the viral tweet.

fasoutoon Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

Not affiliate marketers are thieves

fasoutoon Show HN: Sinkzone DNS – Forwarder that blocks everything except your allowlist

Interesting approach... Initially I thought it was bit overkill but I found myself picking my phone when I have a site blocked on my laptop.

Happen more than I'm willing to admit, so I guess I will give a try

fasoutoon Why does Switzerland have so many bunkers?

This is a bit random, but when I was an intern at CERN I spent a summer living in an old civil defense bunker near Geneva.

Short-term accommodation was notoriously expensive for students back then (probably even worse now), and I didn't hesitate when they offered me this unconventional housing opportunity.

The bunker had a decontamination zone, air filtering system, massive concrete doors, a large communal kitchen, and numerous small bunk beds. It was adequate for short-term use, but we encountered two main issues:

- It's remarkably easy to lose track of time without natural light cues

- Even with the air filering system wet clothes wouldn't dry properly inside

fasoutoon Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

Unless is your main residence, then you can just call the police and the squatters will be evicted, no need to go to court.

fasoutoon Tokyo’s trash-collecting samurai takes a fun approach to cleanup

I have a small farm on the outskirts of the city where nobody lives. When I'm there I usually pick up other people's rubbish and it gets on my nerves to see that the next week it's full of shit again.

Thanks for sharing your perspective, I think I'm going to look at it differently from now on.

fasoutoon Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

Built a fun side project to learn Vue, https://wheelcarnival.com/ a place to create and share roulette wheels.

I'm not working on it but somehow it still has some traction, it averages 20k users/month (mostly teachers). Unfortunately my day job it's very time-consuming and I never find time to create a better version.

fasoutoon Audiobooks on Spotify

I am a paying customer and for some reason they show me an popup ad every time I open the app...

It's extremely annoying.

fasoutoon 90% of Black Friday deals were the same price or cheaper six months before

But if they think so why do they have this clause that won't allow CCC competitors?

fasoutoon 90% of Black Friday deals were the same price or cheaper six months before

They do money by adding their affiliate code to the links.

However the Amazon Affiliate TOS [0] say:

(y) Unless otherwise agreed by Amazon, your Site must not have price tracking and/or price alerting functionality.

I see many sites with this functionality. I don't know if they all got approved by Amazon or they are not enforcing this clause.

[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies...

fasoutoon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://wheelcarnival.com/ has been on my TODO list for almost a year.

I created it to learn Vue, initially I used Gridsome but then I decide to use Nuxt. I also moved it from Netlify to Firebase to add storing+auth, so people can create custom wheels.

It's getting a decent amount of visits so it will be wise to finish it, but it's not fun anymore and my day job takes a lot of energy.

fasoutoon Ask HN: Reporting domain name registrars for abuse inaction?

I am in a similar situation, a couple of domains are copying our site and the domain registar https://www.cscglobal.com/ it's not doing anything to solve the situation.

They even have an abuse email domainabuse@cscglobal.com but they never reply (not even an automatic reply)

After contacted them via customer support email on their site, they say that they have scalated the case to their legal team but that I have low priority since I'm not a customer.

What I did is filling this form https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/r... but I don't know if this will change anything.

fasoutoon Decision fatigue

Nice site! I really liked the tournament-style visualization with divs. Just a heads up, your /about page is throwing a 404

fasoutoon Decision fatigue

Unfotunately not yet, I was thinking to save them to localstorage but I didn't had much time lately to work on this.

It's the first item on the TODO list anyway.

fasoutoon Decision fatigue

I noticed that I have a "decision-quota" that I can spend every day, and sometimes I spend a lot of this energy on trivial tasks.

So I created a small tool a while ago to learn Vue and to help me with this: https://roulettecarnival.com/ , it's not close to be finished but it kinda works. I also use it with my team to make trivial decisions more fun.

fasoutoon Mondragon Corporation

There's another interesting (but way smaller) cooperative in Spain: Igalia https://www.igalia.com/

They work in open source projects and are big contributors to Chromium/blink, WebKit, V8, Vulkan, etc...

fasoutoon Ask HN: How to commit properly when starting out a project?

I like to commit small parts of code separately, but to be honest when you are starting a project and you are working alone I don't think is that important.

fasoutoon Show HN: Analysis of 2018 Hacker News “Who Is Hiring” Job Posts

I've found that "scala" and "excel" are ranked exceptionally high.

I don't know but maybe the author it's looking simply for "excel" and "scala" in the text without taking in account surrounding space. So:

  - "scala" would match "scalable" and "scalability"
  - "excel" would match "excellent"

fasoutoon Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

>>> No sun except a few weeks a year

Please, get your facts straight. This is ridiculously inaccurate

fasoutoon Show HN: Whiteboardfree – Developer Jobs at Companies That Don't Whiteboard

+1 to this.

Even better, I would love a site that classifies job offers/companies by:

  - Has an onboarding process for new hires
  - Has quiet working conditions / open office
  - Has clear requirements
  - Salary range
  - Allows remote working
  - Type of interview and time to get a response

fasoutoon How Netflix works: the stuff that happens when you hit Play

Correct me if I'm wrong but the data center picture looks very similar to the CERN computing center inside CERN installations in Meyrin.