Hacker News: fucalost

New comment by fucalost in "90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet"

fucalost — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:23:37 +0000

This is exceeding the scale of the Tiananmen Square Massacre as far as death toll is concerned*

*According to a leaked diplomatic cable: https://www.axios.com/2018/01/05/declassified-cable-estimate...

New comment by fucalost in "Show HN: FastScheduler – Decorator-first Python task scheduler, async support"

fucalost — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:18:15 +0000

This looks great OP. Do you have anything on the roadmap that you’d be open to receiving PRs for? I noticed there weren’t any issues in the repo and would be keen to lend a hand!

New comment by fucalost in "Show HN: Jsonic – Python JSON serialization that works"

fucalost — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 07:34:45 +0000

Sorry to be a hater, but wouldn’t using Pydantic be better in almost every circumstance here?

New comment by fucalost in "A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure"

fucalost — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:43:16 +0000

It feels so odd (in a good way!) to see people talking about A&A - I recommend them to everyone I know, they’re truly excellent.

New comment by fucalost in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

fucalost — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:31:34 +0000

This! People underestimate the extent to which lawyers are negotiable also. “I’m not paying that” is a surprisingly effective method; they’re often willing to compromise on payment terms, work at-risk subject to a successful outcome, significantly reduce their rates, etc.

New comment by fucalost in "I made a search engine worse than Elasticsearch (2024)"

fucalost — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 18:02:05 +0000

+1 for OpenSearch, especially with UltraWarm nodes

New comment by fucalost in "I made a search engine worse than Elasticsearch (2024)"

fucalost — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 17:59:37 +0000

I actually really like Elasticsearch. It’s very powerful, there’s a healthy ecosystem of tools (increasingly for OpenSearch too), and the query language makes sense to me.

Sure it’s computationally expensive, inefficient even, but for many use-cases it just works.

I’d add that for production deployments, AWS has developed a new instance family that enables OpenSearch data to be stored on S3 [1], bringing significant cost savings.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/latest/develo...

New comment by fucalost in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

fucalost — Fri, 16 May 2025 18:13:16 +0000

For what it’s worth, I recently travelled to the US from the Middle East (into Houston) and was also concerned about this.

My solution was to delete apps I didn’t want to be searched (e.g. WhatsApp) after having made a cloud backup, then enabling airplane mode.

CBP’s website [1] states:

> Prior to beginning a basic or advanced search, CBP Officers will ensure all data and network connections are disabled

And no, I wasn’t searched (thankfully!)

[1] https://www.cbp.gov/travel/cbp-search-authority/border-searc...

New comment by fucalost in "Ask HN: What is the best method for turning a scanned book as a PDF into text?"

fucalost — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 17:59:17 +0000

depending on the length of these texts — and your technical ability — you might want to check out AWS Textract

it would be easy to set up a pipeline like:

> drop pdf in s3 bucket > eventbridge triggers step function > sfn calls textract > output saved to s3 & emailed to you

New comment by fucalost in "Docs as code (2017)"

fucalost — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 21:04:10 +0000

From my limited interactions with document-intensive sectors (i.e. legal), I think they’re sorely lacking something like this.

When the same document is edited by two separate individuals and diverges, it is a nightmare to reconcile the two.

I truly wish (i.) Microsoft Word was a nicer format for VCS, or (ii.) Markdown was more suitable for “formal” legal texts and specifications — probably in that order (!)