MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: TinyFn – 500 deterministic utility APIs for AI agents (via MCP)
by tacoooooooo | 2026-02-05 14:10:16+00:00
Hey HN,

I built TinyFn because LLMs are bad at the boring stuff — counting letters, validating emails, converting units. But they're even worse at things that are literally impossible for them: hashing, regex execution, UUID generation. An LLM will never produce a correct SHA256 hash.

TinyFn is a set of 500+ simple, deterministic utility endpoints that agents can call via MCP or plain REST.

The "strawberry" problem is the cliché example, but in practice the more painful version is agents confidently returning wrong regex matches, botched conversions, or "valid" email addresses that aren't. These are all things that should just be function calls, not LLM guesses.

Technically it's straightforward — each endpoint is a small deterministic function behind a REST API. The MCP layer lets Claude, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible clients discover and call them as tools automatically.

Free tier is 100 requests/month, no credit card needed. Would love feedback on which tool categories are most useful and what's missing.
by another_twist | 2026-02-05 14:10:17+00:00
Literally everything is a UI atop a database. Writing the data models, crafting the right uI and the right flows is non trivial. It requires iteration and that refinement is what customers pay for. The reality with SaaS stocks is they dont make anything critical. eg Take any large consumer tech company and they dont use Klaviyo. These companies build their own stack and one thats intimately connected with the data lake. It works for tech companies since they hve good data and it doesng work for non-tech companies because a good fraction of their data is trash.
by mel_at_gaia | 2026-02-05 14:11:04+00:00
Gaia AI | Fullstack Platform Engineer | Robotic Perception Engineer | Full-Time | Boston

Hi, I’m Mel at Gaia AI (https://www.gaia-ai.eco/).

We’re a small GreenTech startup in Boston building hardware and software in the forestry space.

Role: Full stack / platform engineer working on the web app and mobile app. Our stack includes TypeScript, React, Mongo, AWS, and React-native.

Role: Robotic Perception / Computer Vision / Machine Learning engineer working on a sensor-packed backpack for foresters. Our stack includes LiDAR, Vision, SLAM, and Rust.

Preferred Years of Experience: >= 3

Company Size: 7 people

Company Location: Downtown Boston near South Station

For Fullstack apply here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeXplH__tMz_EIRS4yq...

For Perception apply here: https://forms.gle/t7uwLgo5UgadkzrAA

Feel free to reach out to me with questions: mel at gaia-ai.eco
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-05 14:11:41+00:00
I may not be the best one to answer - I estimated 50% chance by last August. (I'm happy to be wrong.)

A civil war you can flee once the shooting starts. (Probably. Maybe not if you are male and of military age. And the region you're in may close the border for whatever reason.)

A coup is perhaps more likely to close the border, or at least to close it to "people like you" (if the side that doesn't like your kind is in charge). For that, I'd keep a close eye on this election, and up until the new Congress takes office, and maybe just after that. But if anything is going to happen, it will probably be before the new Congress is seated, because it's harder to create a veil of plausible grounds after that.
by rptrainor | 2026-02-05 14:11:52+00:00
For anyone who says you don’t need to look at code to code, I’d encourage you to look at this code: https://github.com/benjaminshoemaker/benshoemaker-us

Or simply look at the Astro blog, which is still showing the default Astro favicon.

I say this not to discourage anyone. Building a blog—or any app—is a huge accomplishment, and you should be proud. In particular, if you’re sharing what you’ve learned and sharing your code publicly, you’re already ahead of the majority of people on this journey.

What I’d encourage you to do is keep doing what you’re doing. The best way to learn to build software is to build software. The more you do, the more you learn.
by Arun2009 | 2026-02-05 14:12:01+00:00
> I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy. It was as if expressing an aesthetic preference weren't an optimal way to spend one's time or money.

Art takes many forms, and not everyone need be interested in the same kind of art.

There's plenty of aesthetic consideration that goes into scientific and technological projects. Consider the huge stack of technologies starting with silicon to massive computing clusters and code-bases with hundreds of millions of lines of code running on them. It's an impressive feat of science and technology, but the many pieces that go into making them also have an austere beauty of their own, often constrained by the need to be actually useful in an unforgiving world.
by some_random | 2026-02-05 14:12:54+00:00
Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
by SeriousM | 2026-02-05 14:13:03+00:00
Interesting to hear that someone also has sdam (I didn't know the term before).
For me it's like knowing about major events but everything older than 3 years is just blurred. Imagine a beach-leveling-net behind a car that just evens out the beach... also I have troubles put events in an chronological order.
The more you know...
by merlindru | 2026-02-05 14:13:06+00:00
Location: Germany
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: anything. Very comfortable with TypeScript, Rust. Zig fan. Web tech: Bun, React, Vue, Svelte 5, Solid, Next, and looooaaaads more. Know some macOS development, but not Swift (rather, Objective-C APIs. Very familiar with Accessibility/AX APIs). Love design and especially interaction design. Can show off some pretty stuff I'm working on right now upon request!
Résumé/CV: Can list experiences in DMs/email. 70% is contractor work and gigs
Email: merlin@merlin.audio

Looking for gigs & contract work mostly.
by stuxnet79 | 2026-02-05 14:13:38+00:00
Sure it has been codified into a "law" but really this is just basic social skills / emotional intelligence which engineers on the spectrum struggle with.

If you've spent any time in a large enough organization you realize quickly that hierarchies form based on status, power and influence & not necessarily technical merit. No it's not "the best person for the job" that rises up and tells you what to do.

Casually solving a problem that required a lot of resources and personnel has big implications in the power dynamics of the org. This is like setting off a nuke. You don't just do this unless you are prepared for the blow back or can easily consolidate attention & influence in the immediate aftermath.

Take a look at OpenAI's corporate politics for an example of how this works in practice. All the key talent that defined the company has left or was forced out and will likely languish in whatever ventures they start next, all because they don't understand how humans operate & how to drive change by aligning incentives.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-05 14:13:40+00:00
Right it's whether your aspirations need to be grounded in reality.

Do you actually need to build strong foundations, or can you just throw away all your work every time and start over from scratch?

What confounds me is why I am on Hacker News having to defend the idea of software architecture being a kind of capital. That's not supposed to make some sort of countercultural revolutionary. Where did everyone go!!
by iamleppert | 2026-02-05 14:13:54+00:00
Why do you need a connection to a database during the meeting? Doesn't it make more sense to record the meeting data to some local state first, and then serialize it to database at the end of the meeting or when a database connection is available? Or better yet, have a lightweight API service that can be scaled horizontally that is responsible for talking to the database and maintains its own pool of connections.

They probably don't even need a database anyway for data that is likely write once, read many. You could store the JSON of the meeting in S3. It's not like people are going back in time and updating meeting records. It's more like a log file and logging systems and data structures should be enough here. You can then take that data and ingest it into a database later, or some kind of search system, vector database etc.

Database connections are designed this way on purpose, it's why connection pools exist. This design is suboptimal.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-05 14:15:23+00:00
Well Switch games aren't really designed for small screens either.

I haven't bought a Steam Deck because I think it's (1) too big (see my sibling comment on console size—to be fair I own a Switch 1 and 2, but the Steam Deck is even bulkier) and (2) too fiddly, this is the thing I've never liked about PC gaming.
by ralferoo | 2026-02-05 14:15:55+00:00
Hehe, just reading that.

> The poster described how she was able to retrieve her car after service just by giving the attendant her last name. Now any normal car owner would be happy about how easy it was to get her car back, but someone with a security mindset immediately thinks: “Can I really get a car just by knowing the last name of someone whose car is being serviced?”

Just a couple of hours ago, I picked my car up from having its obligatory annual vehicle check. I walked past it and went into their office, saying "I'm here to pick up my car". "Which one is it?" "The Golf" "Oh, the $MODEL?" (it was the only Golf in their car park) "Yeah". And then after payment of £30, the keys were handed over without checking of anything, not even a confirmation of my surname. This was a different guy to the one who was in there an hour earlier when I dropped the car off.
by rented_mule | 2026-02-05 14:16:06+00:00
20 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total words in books. Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K total words.

If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.
by belthesar | 2026-02-05 14:16:56+00:00
From a platform risk perspective, each tenant has dedicated resources, so it's their platform to blow up. If a customer with root access blows up their own system, then the resources from the MSP to fix it are billable, and the after-action meetings would likely include a review of whether that access is appropriate, if additional training is needed to prevent those issues in the future (also billable), or if the customer-provider relationship is the right fit. Will the on-call resource be having a bad time fixing someone else's screw up? Yeah, and having been that guy before, I empathize. The business can and should manage this relationship however, so that it doesn't become an undue burden on their support teams. A customer platform that is always getting broken at 4pm on a Friday when an overzealous customer admin is going in and deciding to run arbitrary kubectl commands takes support capacity away from other customers when a major incident happens, regardless of how much you're making in support billing.
by butterisgood | 2026-02-05 14:17:38+00:00
I think this is how IBM is making tons of money on mainframes. A lot of what people are doing with cloud can be done on premises with the right levels of virtualization.

https://intellectia.ai/news/stock/ibm-mainframe-business-ach...

60% YoY growth is pretty excellent for an "outdated" technology.
by bluGill | 2026-02-05 14:18:43+00:00
That wouldn't make any difference. Graphics programmers spend a lot of effort on performance because spending a lot of $$$$ (time) can make an improvement that people care about. For most applications nobody cares enough about speed to pay the $$$ needed to make it fast.

Many application programmers could make things faster - but their boss says good enough, ship it, move to a new feature that is worth far more to me.
by UncleMeat | 2026-02-05 14:18:45+00:00
I am not sure what you want.

The reason why there is more discussion of atrocities committed by europeans is because there is way more course material focused on europeans. There are more courses on the american and french revolutions than the haitian revolution. Even orientalism is a european frame, focusing on how europeans engaged with the near and far east. A course on orientalism is not a course on the middle east. It is a course on europeans.

I do not observe classes on precolumbian american or the islamic golden age shying away from atrocities in their course material. Courses on specific topics rather than time period / region pairings don't tend to shy away from a global frame either.

So you've got a few options.

You could insist that when atrocities come up in courses that focus on europeans that the course contains a "but actually" where it discusses other atrocities to balance things out. This seems odd from a pedagogical standpoint.

You could reduce the number of courses focusing on europeans and increase the number of courses focused elsewhere. But doing this is also considered "woke."

You could deliberately avoid discussion of atrocities committed by europeans in "western civ" style courses. This also doesn't strike me as right.

Could you share what specifically you'd expect to change about history curricula?
by WarmWash | 2026-02-05 14:19:10+00:00
Customers don't want to pay for rolodex + 8000-data-point-visulization + integrated-automatic-contact-form-filling + assisted-real-time-closest-contact-scanning + 15 new-features-months + Annual-UI-rewrites + All-that-amazing-businesses-functionality-for-only-$199/usr/mo.

They want AI to vibecode a rolodex. And just use that. For 30 years if needed. 2000 LOC and a one time $20 cost.

The cancer of SaaS cannot die fast enough.
by IFC_LLC | 2026-02-05 14:19:21+00:00
This is cool. Yet, there are levels of insanity and those depend on your inability to estimate things.

When I'm launching a project it's easier for me to rent $250 worth of compute from AWS. When the project consumes $30k a month, it's easier for me to rent a colocation.

My point is that a good engineer should know how to calculate all the ups and downs here to propose a sound plan to the management. That's the winning thing.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-05 14:19:35+00:00
Before having branch predictors, most CPUs that used any kind of instruction pipelining behaved like a modern CPU where all the branches are predicted as not taken.

Thus on an 80386 or 80486 CPU not taken branches behaved like predicted branches on a modern CPU and taken branches behaved as mispredicted branches on a modern CPU.

The 80386 bug described above was probably caused by some kind of incomplete flushing of some pipeline after a taken branch, which leaved it in a state partially invalid, which could be exposed by a specific sequence of the following instructions.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-05 14:19:41+00:00
What I meant is that most commercial software has a large number of code paths. Because it’s built incrementally, not holistically. This creates complexity and cost.

If you’ve only worked on that kind of software it’s hard to know the alternative which is to aggressively prune code paths and rework your main code.

And open source example is Quake. I rarely come across software whose inherent complexity is more than quake.
by cousin_it | 2026-02-05 14:19:58+00:00
Maybe off topic, but I couldn't help thinking that "we need to show a heart icon" -> "let's use a heart emoji because it's easy" -> "let's use a specific emoji font for consistency across platforms" -> "let's import it from Google Fonts every time" seems like a problematic developer mindset.

A better heuristic is always keep in mind not only developer efficiency, but also program efficiency. I'm not saying optimize everything, but keep program efficiency in mind at least a little bit. In this case, that would've led the developer to download a tiny SVG or PNG and serve it from the app itself. Which would've avoided the problem in the post, and maybe other problems as well.
by rigourlabs | 2026-02-05 14:20:29+00:00
To give you an idea of the HSM logic:

We recently caught a candidate who had perfect syntax for a high-concurrency problem. However, our engine flagged them because they skipped the 'logical state' of addressing a potential race condition in their initial logic flow—something no Senior Engineer would ignore, but a standard LLM often glosses over.

How are you guys currently verifying 'Senior' logic when every candidate has access to GPT-5?
Ask HN: How do teams customize internal AI chatbots per department?
by naudinsh | 2026-02-05 14:21:30+00:00
Most AI chatbots we’ve tried internally behave the same for everyone,
even though engineering, HR, sales, and support need very different answers
and access to different docs.

For teams using AI internally:
Are you customizing behavior or knowledge per department?
Or just living with a one-size-fits-all bot?

Would love to hear what works in practice.
by piker | 2026-02-05 14:21:32+00:00
It goes further than this first order, though. If you're trying to build a business that attracts the types of talent who wants to know the stack up and down, starting with an AWS instance might give you a better shot at funding (and thus a better overall shot), but it's not clear that it gives you a shot a building the business you're aiming for. For the things that "don't make your beer better", sure, but we're talking about training ML models at an ML shop. Here it makes sense for this reason.
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-05 14:22:08+00:00
Ahh Bulverism, with a hint of ad-hominem and a dash no No True Scotsman. I think the most damning indictment here is the seeming inability to make actual arguments and not just cheap shots at people you've never even met.

Please tell me, "Were people excited about high-level languages just programmers who 'couldn't hack it' with assembly? Maybe you are one of those? Were GUI advocates just people who couldn't master the command line?"
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-02-05 14:22:08+00:00
He was wrong up until we found the end of Moore's law. Now that hardware cannot get exponentially faster, we are forced to finally write good code. The kind that isn't afraid to touch bare metal. We don't need another level of abstraction. Abstraction does not help anyone. I would love to point to some good examples but it's still too early for this to be seen globally. Your 1000 container swarm for a calculator app is still state of the art infrastructure.
Show HN: A quiet, local-first space to think (no tasks, no notes)
by maximsaltanov | 2026-02-05 14:22:16+00:00
I built a very small web app for myself as an experiment.

I noticed that most note-taking and productivity tools quietly push me toward structure, tasks, and conclusions. Sometimes I don’t want that - I just want a place to put thoughts I’m not ready to act on.

This is a quiet, local-first space with no accounts, no sync, no tasks, and no goals. Just a canvas where thoughts can exist without pressure.

It’s intentionally minimal and may feel strange or useless to some people - and that’s okay.
I’m mostly curious whether this resonates with anyone else.

Link: https://quietroom.app
by angiolillo | 2026-02-05 14:22:30+00:00
Many years ago I watched someone marched out of the room in handcuffs by military police for plugging a USB thumb drive in the wrong computer.

My current situation isn't anywhere near that strict, and I agree that many security postures are dumb and overbearing, like unnecessarily frequent password rotation. But honestly, preventing employees from sharing company documents with random third parties doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
by Hizonner | 2026-02-05 14:22:52+00:00
Then what, exactly, do you mean by "employment mandates"? You're the one who suggested that.

Nobody "mandates" work to survive right now. But we do have a system where everything is owned by somebody, and ownership tends to concentrate. You can convince people to give you stuff they own (or money, which stands in for stuff) by doing work. The risk is that nobody will need your work, so you won't be able to convince them to give you any stuff, ownership will concentrate even more, and you will end up with nothing.

If Those In Charge require that "owners" continue to give you stuff for work that they don't need, that crude patch still doesn't provide you with any other way to get stuff. Which means you have to keep doing this useless work forever.

It's not about "don't mandate work". It's about fundamental change to the entire system.
by nemomarx | 2026-02-05 14:23:05+00:00
I mean as long as you're not using it yourself you're not at any real risks, right? The ethos seems to be to just try things and not worry about failing or making mistakes. You should free yourself from the anxiety of those a little bit.

Think about the worst thing your project could do, and remind yourself you'd still be okay if that happened in the wild and people would probably forget about it soon anyway.
by whoisthemachine | 2026-02-05 14:23:06+00:00
Lots of good thoughts in here.

> You can ask an AI what 2 * 3 is and for the low price of several seconds of waiting, a few milliliters of water and enough power to watch 5% of a TikTok video on a television, it will tell you.

This might be what many of the companies that host and sell time with an LLM want you to do, however. Go ahead, drive that monster truck one mile to pickup fast food! The more that's consumed, the more money that goes in the pockets of those companies....

> The instincts are for people to get the AI to do work for them, not to learn from the AI how to do the work themselves.

Improviny my own learning is one of the few things I find beneficial with LLMs!
by reg_dunlop | 2026-02-05 14:23:14+00:00
I'm also curious about what a process engineering abstraction layer looks like. Though the final section does hint at it; more integration of more stakeholders closer to the construction of code.

Though I have to push back on the idea of "code as truth". Thinking about all the layers of abstraction and indirection....hasn't data and the database layer typically been the source of truth?

Maybe I'm missing something in this iteration of the industry where code becomes something other than what it's always been: an intermediary between business and data.