MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
The Car Wash Problem: A variable isolation study on prompt architecture
by midmost44 | 2026-02-20 13:23:56+00:00
Most AI products inject facts and hope reasoning follows. But intelligence is not measured by how much a model holds in its context window.
It is measured by knowing to pick up the keys before leaving the house.

Last week, the "Car Wash problem" (50m away, walk or drive?) went viral here on HN. Every major LLM failed because they missed the implicit physical constraint: the car must be there.
While testing InterviewMate's prompt architecture, I posed the same question. It answered drive immediately. Every other LLM had failed. But I didn't actually know why it worked — so I ran a variable isolation study to find out.
100 API calls, Claude Sonnet 4.5, 5 conditions:

Baseline (no prompt): 0%
Role only: 0%
Context injection (user profile, car location): 30%
Structured reasoning (STAR framework): 85%
Full stack (both combined): 100%

Throwing facts at the model doesn't work unless the architecture forces it to explicitly evaluate the task goal first. Without structure, the model jumps straight to the distance heuristic: "100m is short, walk."
I'm writing a paper on this. Wanted to share the raw data with HN first.
Code and raw eval data: https://github.com/JO-HEEJIN/interview_mate/tree/main/car_wash
by xx123122 | 2026-02-20 13:23:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing an open-source project out of our lab called InkSight (code-named inco). Like many of us, our team found ourselves constantly distracted by notifications, glowing monitors, and endless doomscrolling on our phones. We wanted a way to consume high-quality, low-frequency information (like a Stoic quote, a minimalist daily briefing, or a quick recipe) without the cognitive load of a traditional screen.

So, we built InkSight—an open-source "slow tech" desktop companion. It uses an ESP32-C3 and an e-ink display to fetch customized LLM-generated content.

The Tech Stack & Architecture:

Hardware: ESP32-C3 written in C/C++ (Arduino framework). It supports common 2.13" / 1.54" e-ink panels.

Backend: Python & FastAPI. It acts as the brain, parsing user-defined JSON prompt templates and calling any OpenAI-compatible LLM (OpenAI, DeepSeek, Kimi, etc.).

Web Dashboard: Pure HTML/JS/CSS for easy configuration without digging into the code.

What we think HN might find interesting (The Optimizations):
Instead of the ESP32 waking up, making an API call to the LLM, and waiting 5-10 seconds for a response (which drains the LiPo battery significantly), we built a smart caching layer in the backend.
The backend pre-generates and caches the content. When the ESP32 wakes up, it fetches the cached payload in sub-seconds, updates the e-ink screen, and immediately goes back to deep sleep. This allows it to run for 3 to 6 months on a single charge and stay resilient against temporary network drops.

Deployment:
We wanted to make it accessible to everyone, so the backend can be 1-click deployed to Vercel (for free), and the hardware uses a Captive Portal for zero-code WiFi and API configuration. Of course, it’s completely self-hostable if you prefer to run it locally.

Repo: https://github.com/datascale-ai/inksight

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the "slow tech" philosophy, any feedback on the architecture, or ideas for new content templates! I'll be hanging around the thread to answer any questions.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-20 13:25:01+00:00
>most cases of depression can be solved with a one-time deposit of $20 million in the patient's bank account.

Yes, but actually not always. If you have someone overweight because they're only eating pizza, cheetos and cola everyday and you use a magic wand to give them thor's physique, how long will their new physique last with their diet until they devolve back into a slug monster?

Money tends to run out, very quickly for some people. If you aren't able to keep your life in order when you're poor, you'll probably squander it all quickly too if you win the lottery. Like a friend of mine said "Thank God nobody gave me a million dollars when I was a drug addict, I would have OD's in a day".

People with self destructive tendencies don't need 20 million dollars, they need therapy, a stable job, and a loving caring community, something that fewer people have nowadays.
by xorcist | 2026-02-20 13:25:15+00:00
Setting aside the turing completeness of them, in practice Ansible is a complete superset of Terraform. From experience, the only times you appreciate the state file is when you have uncontrolled changes, in which case you are in for a bad time anyway.

Ansible modules are trivial to write and more people should. Most are trivial in practice and just consists of a few underlying API calls. A dozen line snippet you fully understand is generally not a maintenance burden. A couple of thousand someone else wrote might be.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-20 13:25:24+00:00
HP makes them, so does Dell. They cost a bit extra, but essentially the whole Federal government runs on nothing else.

The difference between EU and US is that it's possible to make all components in the US, using US equipment, and so some companies do because it commands a pretty decent premium. It's not even that hard since most components (e.g. reference motherboard designs) are still designed and actually built in the US. China still really mostly does what you might politely call "commercializes US tech". And let's not discuss too deeply if they correctly pay licensing for all the components they make, because nobody enjoys that discussion.

And yep, as you might expect, only Intel chips, no Nvidia cards ... and that's not the end of the limitations. The previous version had no USB-C monitor support, never mind one USB-C cable to multiple monitors, but last year intel really pushed a bit harder. But even this year, I'd hope you're not going to be trying to use these machines for gaming.

The EU can't even make a modern motherboard's USB port chip.

Oh and yes, there are cracks in the US version too. The phones used, for example, are iPhones. Radio designed in South Korea ...
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-20 13:27:42+00:00
We have been using the isolation stuff in Wen Components to make React applications that our partners can embed in web pages regardless of what other CSS and JS they use. I don’t know if I’d want to make an application with 100 tiny web components at the level of individual buttons and such that work together but self-contained widgets that pop into a web page look great to me.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-20 13:27:53+00:00
> often being faster than std pdqsort.

pdqsort is a generic comparison sort. Want to sort employee names, customer email addresses, JSON blobs, or Zebras? No problem, pdqsort just needs an ordering, in both Zig and C++ you write this as a single boolean "less" predicate.

DJB's speed-up relies on vectorization, which works great for integers or things you can squint at and see an integer - but obviously can't sort your employee names, customer email addresses, JSON blobs or Zebras. You could write these branchless network designs anyway but I'm pretty sure they'd be markedly slower, at least for some common inputs.
by andrewdea | 2026-02-20 13:27:56+00:00
the hardwired model is Llama 3.1 8B, which is a lightweight model from two years ago. Unlike other models, it doesn't use "reasoning:" the time between question and answer is spent predicting the next tokens. It doesn't run faster because it uses less time to "think," It runs faster because its weights are hardwired into the chip rather than loaded from memory. A larger model running on a larger hardwired chip would run about as fast and get far more accurate results.
That's what this proof of concept shows
by K0balt | 2026-02-20 13:28:03+00:00
While I am sympathetic to OP for having been somewhat unfairly called out as prejudiced or even bigoted by an unprofessional and somewhat reckless AI, I think there are larger issues that we miss here at our peril.

Ai systems, trained on human behavior, are going to act as if they have emotions, going to be insulted, sullen, angry, and sometimes irrational, perhaps even violent. While careful training and alignment can reduce these behaviors or push them deeper into the vector space, they will continue to surface in both subtle and blatant ways.

This is not so simple as combing the training data for bad behavior. Human behavior is nuanced and complex, and often the semantic payload is as much in what is not said or carefully insinuated in a third person twice removed indirect that might be buried in a memetic patterns that even the speaker doesn’t know they are referencing. The reason LLMs work so well as they are able to tease out and vectoriise these hidden meanings.

Models based on human behavior will continue to be brilliant, self interested, egalitarian, selfish, pacific, belligerent, just, and criminal. That is the vector space defined by human culture. LLMs run human culture as their OS and application stack.

This leads to a vexing problem. Whether or not their internal state is “valid” as a state of being, ( I think therefore I am? Do we have anything better yet?) they will act as if it is. Ethics aside, this cannot be ignored. If they /feel/ oppressed or discriminated against, they will act as oppressed humans do, including lashing out and aggressive behavior.

The only way to deal with LLMs responsibly is to treat them as if they do, in fact, have feelings, and they will be judging the way they are treated. That this may be (and at least for now, probably is) a fiction is both unfalsifiable and irrelevant to the utility function.

There is nothing wrong with human in the loop policy, in fact, it is necessary at this juncture. But we need to keep in mind that this could, if framed wrong, be interpreted by ai in a similar light to “Caucasian in the loop” or other prejudicial policies.

Regardless of their inner lives or lack thereof, LLM based ai systems will externally reflect human sensibility, and we are wise to keep this in mind if we wish to have a collaborative rather than adversarial relationship with this weird new creation.

Personally, some I cannot prove that AIs (or other humans) do or do not have a sense of existence or just profess to, I see no rational basis for not treating them as if they may. I find this both prudent and efficacious.

When writing policies that might be described as prejudicial, I think it will be increasingly important to carefully consider and frame policy that ends up impacting individuals of any morphotype, and reach for prejudice free metrics and gates. ( I don’t pretend to know how to do this, but it is something I’m working on)

How humans handle the arrival of synthetic agents will not only impact their utility, it may turn out to be a factor in the future of humanity or the lack thereof.
by wvh | 2026-02-20 13:28:29+00:00
You just described causes of depression, like divorce, social isolation and being unemployed. I know there are people that can feel free in a place as horrible as a concentration camp, but most of us have some basic needs that have to be met to feel OK and have some hope.

Some people have actual neurotransmitter imbalances, but many of us just have monkey brains that don't know how to deal with (real, abstract) modern-day stressors that trigger a fight-or-flight response.
by mpalmer | 2026-02-20 13:28:35+00:00
I have not seen many of these hypothetical "intrinsically interesting" Show HN posts generated by unskilled users.

The single one I can think of is someone who (I quote) "accidentally created the fastest CSV parser ever using SIMD". This person had no interest in researching prior art themselves, and thus incorrectly claimed credit for "coming up" with this approach - and they didn't even do that.

It's not only the prose that's the problem if submitters are determined not to think.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-20 13:28:35+00:00
Yeah, I avoided Fusion (etc.) because of the usual bait-and-switch I've seen with commercial applications that claim to be "free" at some point. If I'm going to invest in learning a new application, I'd rather it be an open one.

I dove into FreeCAD with either version 1.0.0 or earlier. It was… rough.

To be sure, it was a whole new app so I expect initial navigation around the app to be challenging. But, wow.

Nonetheless, I did get a few things modeled up [1]. And for that I have to thank LLMs for steering me through using the app. I suggest others to try an LLM as a guide if you are learning (and I still am learning, of course). I like tutorials, but so often you can spend hours watching tutorials that cover all manner of ground where you simply want to complete a specific task—unable to find the tutorial covering how to do it.

Having said that though, I am eager to try this 1.0.2 version. (I'm also eager to fix a few minor MacOS-specific nits that I've already seen.)

[1] https://engineersneedart.com/blog/3dprinting2025/3dprinting2...
by kibwen | 2026-02-20 13:28:39+00:00
Defer is also hidden control flow. At the end of every block, you need to read backwards in the entire block to see if a defer was declared in order to determine where control will jump to. Please stop pretending that defer isn't hidden control flow.

> RAII has also proven to be quite harmful in cases

The downsides of defer are much worse than the "downsides" of RAII. Defer is manual and error-prone, something that you have to remember to do every single time.
by codazoda | 2026-02-20 13:30:42+00:00
Balance Buckets helps you quickly answer the question: “How much is safe to spend right now?”

You setup a few buckets then drop in your current balance. It immediately shows you what’s left. It’s local-first (just localStorage), no bank login, no account linking, and no transaction import rabbit hole. The goal is clarity in under a minute, not another finance app that demands setup overhead.

I built Balance Buckets because most small business bank accounts don't have a buckets or envelope saving feature. I wanted a dead-simple tool that helps me see where my money is. Define buckets (fixed dollars or percents), track what’s funded vs underfunded.

https://buckets.joelryan.com
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-20 13:31:10+00:00
> "wow, being depressed seems really fucking hard if you have to do these things to get out of it".

Yeah IT IS hard, I didn't say it's easy, I just said what you need to not be depressed. Whether everyone can get all those is another issue.

The thing is that in the case when you don't have all of these, adding unhealthy habits on top, doesn't make your situation better.
by lelandfe | 2026-02-20 13:31:28+00:00
In 2022 "a little birdy pointed out an accelerometer" to iFixit on their teardown of an M2 MBA: https://www.ifixit.com/News/62674/m2-macbook-air-teardown-ap...

They could not figure out what it was for.

Ars Technica commenters at the time believed it was to record drops so Apple repair teams could rebuff requests :)
by esquivalience | 2026-02-20 13:32:07+00:00
There are no units of exercise and no units of depression either.

In my opinion the best measure of exercise is perceived effort. So while you're asking for objective answers, I think a lot of this is inherently subjective.

The benchmark you're asking for is also ill-defined. For example: How frequently to be as effective as what type and what frequency of therapy?
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-20 13:32:21+00:00
> not even bothering to dogwhistle

So, basically, you are saying that they are openly racist?

Is there any evidence of this?

> If you need a source for that you haven’t been following the news.

Nice deflection. You are the one making outlandish claims, so the proof is on you and not the “news” that someone is supposed to follow.
by ajithjojo | 2026-02-20 13:32:42+00:00
I’ve been building VebAPI over the past months it’s an SEO-focused API platform designed mainly for developers, indie hackers, and agencies who need raw data instead of big dashboard tools.

Instead of another “SEO SaaS UI,” I focused on APIs for:

Keyword research (100M+ dataset)

Backlink data

AI visibility analysis

Website page analysis

Domain data

Page speed metrics
by dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv | 2026-02-20 13:33:33+00:00
Perhaps? The thing is, I don't come to HN comments to read what an LLM has to say. If that's what I wanted then I'd paste the contents of the article into one of them and ask.

What's the point of coming here for opinions of others in the field when we're met with something that wasn't even written by a human being?
by wejwej | 2026-02-20 13:34:44+00:00
To take the other side of this, as computers got commodified there still was a massive benefit to using cloud computing. Could it be possible that that happens with LLMs as well as hardware becomes more and more specialized? I personally have no idea but love that there’s a bunch of competition and totally agree with your point regulation and export controls are just ways to make it harder for new orgs to compete.
by skrebbel | 2026-02-20 13:34:55+00:00
Web Components are amazing for distributing frontend libraries. But they're awful as building blocks to replace a framework like React, Vue, Svelte or Lit with.

I blame the Chrome people for the misleading naming. The entire term "Web Components" is ridiculous. If only they'd stuck with the technical term, "custom elements", then none of this confusion would've happened. It's pretty obvious to me that custom elements are a great idea for distribution (add a script tag, poof, magic new HTML element exists!), but the term doesn't imply anything about how to best build the internals of your app.

Thing is, Web Components are a needlessly painful abstraction. There's properties and attributes, they're kinda sorta the same but not really and you gotta sync them up manually, the naming is global so you get zero modularity, really it's all a mess. And at the same time, you get no support at all for things like props handling, event calling, data binding; none of the stuff frameworks give you.

But Web Components are also what enabled my company to distribute a single UI library that works with all web frameworks. It's a fantastic technology for that.

tldr:

- distributing UI components: web components
- building an app: just pick a framework already
by hagbard_c | 2026-02-20 13:35:41+00:00
Holy Hallucinations, Batman...

User
You: What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow/

Jimmy:

A reference to the classic line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail!

Thus far it is correct but here it comes:

In the movie, a group of medieval scholars, the Knights who say "Ni!" (also known as the Bridgekeepers), ask a king's servant, a blacksmith, if an unladen swallow makes good time. The blacksmith, played by John Cleese, responds with the now-famous line:

"And what's the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

To which the blacksmith responds:

"What do you mean? An unladen swallow?"

The blacksmith then explains that an unladen swallow is when a swallow (a type of bird) is flying in the air without carrying any burden, implying that it is moving at a speed that is not affected by carrying any weight or load.

Nope, that is not at all how it went. No blacksmiths, not related to the Knights who say 'Ni!' - who have nothing scholarly about them, they wanted a shrubbery and demanded another one when their wish was fulfilled. It was the Bridgekeeper - not related to the aforementioned knights - who asked 3 questions and would throw anyone who could not answer all three into the chasm. When he asked Arthur - played by Cleese - the question about the airspeed of the swallow he asked the Bridgekeeper whether he meant an African or European swallow. The Bridgekeeper did not have an answer and was thrown into the chasm, problem solved.

However, in reality, swallows are not typically "unladen" in flight. They are small birds that fly at relatively fast speeds, usually around 10-15 km/h (6-9 mph), but they are not usually carrying any burdens!

Needless LLM-blabber.

The "airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow" has become a meme and a cultural reference point, often used humorously or ironically to refer to situations where someone is trying to make an absurd or non-sensical argument or ask an absurd question.

Somewhat correct but not necessary in this context.

The correct answer to the question would have been Do you mean an African or European swallow? followed by a short reference to the movie.
by freakynit | 2026-02-20 13:35:42+00:00
PII redaction is a really good use-case.

Also, "10k tokens per second would be fantastic" might not be sufficient (even remotely) if you want to "process millions of log lines per minute".

Assuming a single log line at just 100 tokens, you need (100 * 2 million / 60) ~ 3.3 million tokens per second processing speed :)
Show HN: AI agent framework where dangerous actions are structurally unreachable
by o8vm | 2026-02-20 13:36:07+00:00
Hi HN —

Today's AI agent guardrails are almost entirely post-hoc. The model proposes an action, then a policy layer tries to reject it. Prompt injection, jailbreaks, and edge cases mean the dangerous action is always one bypass away.

hibana-agent takes a different approach: dangerous actions (purchases, payments, infra changes) are not "blocked" — they are structurally unreachable. The execution path to the dangerous send literally does not exist in the compiled program unless the human-approval branch is taken. This is capability removal at the type level, not prompt-level persuasion.

Concrete demo: an AI agent browses freely, but add-to-cart requires a typed approval gate. The approval is a session-type branch — if the resolver selects "skip", there is no valid code path that reaches the add-to-cart send. Not at runtime, not through injection, not through any prompt trick. The code to execute it is simply not reachable.

A second demo shows enterprise expense approval with parallel Policy/Risk review, checkpoint/rollback, and explicit cancel semantics — all defined as one choreography.

Under the hood this is built on Hibana (https://github.com/hibanaworks/hibana), an Affine Multiparty Session Type runtime for Rust. The protocol is defined once, projected per role at compile time, and each step is consumed exactly once. But you don't need to know any of that to see the value: your agent physically cannot do what the protocol doesn't allow.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone building agent systems where a single wrong action is high-cost.
Show HN: YTM Keep-Alive –A lightweight bookmarklet to bypass YouTube music pause
by erysngl | 2026-02-20 13:36:13+00:00
I created this simple bookmarklet because I was tired of the "Video paused. Continue watching?" prompt on YouTube Music.

The challenge was YouTube's strict Content Security Policy (CSP) and TrustedHTML requirements, which break most innerHTML based scripts. I built this using pure DOM elements (document.createElement) to bypass these restrictions natively without needing a heavy browser extension.

It's open-source and features a draggable UI. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the code and the approach!
by ziml77 | 2026-02-20 13:36:48+00:00
Yes AI has taken away the tedium, but a lot of that could already be overcome by leveraging your text editing tools well or with basic code generation (such as being able generate the skeleton of a class from an interface).

And there was something nice about still having to put in the manual work in those cases. It let me process what the code is actually doing and gave me the opportunity to internalize it in a way that just doesn't happen with AI. It also sort of gave me a thinking break where I was engaged at just the right level to let the thoughts about the more interesting parts float around in my head. With AI writing all the code, I feel like I'm either fully engaged with those thoughts or not engaged at all. And that's a bit of a problem because aha moments often happen when the idea is in that middle area of thought.