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Show HN: AlertChecker – get emailed when a plain-English statement comes true

https://alertchecker.com
1•alertchecker•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: PyScrappy, self-healing web scraping selectors plus an MCP server

https://github.com/mldsveda/PyScrappy
1•vedaant00•2m ago•0 comments

Everything You Need to Know About 2-5 Horn Voicings

https://www.toshiclinchproductions.com/2-5-horn-voicings
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How Diplomats See the World

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/how-diplomats-see-the-world
1•sebg•5m ago•0 comments

Google's Favicon API

https://gist.github.com/iuzn/bbd4df2823bd69643a8553d6967f68eb
2•thecopy•10m ago•0 comments

What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?

https://littlelearner-ll.github.io/
7•porridgeraisin•11m ago•0 comments

A century after Goscinny, Asterix remains a witty guide to resisting authority

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2•thunderbong•15m ago•0 comments

Growth of CVEs fixed in Postgres looks exponential

https://twitter.com/samokhvalov/status/2088870235705319924
1•samokhvalov•19m ago•0 comments

A Third World Embedded Engineer Responds to RISC-V They Should Have Known Better

https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/
1•fork-bomber•20m ago•0 comments

I'm 15 building the place where ambitious people find the people build with

https://www.linkupbuild.com/
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A portable, sensitive, low power, analog Geiger counter

https://ludens.cl/Electron/geiger2/geiger2.html
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AI Agents have a half-life

https://construct.computer/blog/agent-task-half-life/
2•ankushKun•36m ago•0 comments

DOJ deploys tactic to strip naturalized Americans of citizenship [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZDq3e0wYgc
3•mgh2•39m ago•0 comments

Connecting my Illumos box to a Japanese ISP

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2•mskalski•40m ago•0 comments

An Anecdote Against Slop Artifacts

https://www.markusde.ca/pages/noslop.html
1•DamonHD•41m ago•0 comments

Is this the end of human code review?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12440
1•bonjourjoel•44m ago•3 comments

Cloning could be used to save species–or make human "organ sacks"

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Show HN: See what your Linux machine measured at boot (through TPM eventlog)

https://jiankun.lu/eventlog-parser/
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Two years as prime minister in a hit new game – then my cabinet deserted me

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq56pzqy6jvo
2•zeristor•52m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Laptop is the last place your secrets are still in plaintext

https://github.com/jitpass/jit
28•bukershok•54m ago•20 comments

Why Aging May Be a Program, Not a Breakdown

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Beancount in Rust

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AI Stock Research Assistant · Streamlit

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The Cell: Inside North Korea's Remote Worker Command Center

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Show HN: An Universal Linux Application Uninstaller

https://github.com/swadhinbiswas/veet
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A leaked Composio key returned live Gmail, GitHub and CircleCI tokens

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A Jupyter kernel for C++ running in the Web browser (2025)

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How to Overcome Your Brain's Fixation on Bad Things (2020)

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_overcome_your_brains_fixation_on_bad_things
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Big tech meets Milton Friedman

https://www.semafor.com/article/08/11/2026/big-tech-meets-milton-friedman
2•andsoitis•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Ask HN: LLM is useless without explicit prompt

4•revskill•1y ago
After months playing with LLM models, here's my observation:

- LLM is basically useless without explicit intent in your prompt.

- LLM failed to correct itself. If it generated bullshits, it's an inifinite loop of generating more bullshits.

The question is, without explicit prompt, could LLM leverage all the best practices to provide maintainable code without me instruct it at least ?

Comments

ben_w•1y ago
Your expectations are way too high.

> - LLM is basically useless without explicit intent in your prompt.

You can say the same about every dev I've worked with, including myself. This is literally why humans have meetings rather than all of us diving in to whatever we're self-motivated to do.

What does differ is time-scales of the feedback loop with the management:

Humans meetings are daily to weekly.

According to recent research*, the state-of-the-art models are only 50% accurate at tasks that would take a human expert an hour, or 80% accurate at tasks that would take a human expert 10 minutes.

Even if the currently observed trend of increasing time horizons holds, we're 21 months from having an AI where every other daily standup is "ugh, no, you got it wrong", and just over 5 years from them being able to manage a 2-week sprint with an 80% chance of success (in the absence of continuous feedback).

Even that isn't really enough for them to properly "leverage all the best practices to provide maintainable code", as archiecture and maintainability are longer horizon tasks than 2-week sprints.

* https://youtu.be/evSFeqTZdqs?si=QIzIjB6hotJ0FgHm

revskill•1y ago
It's not as high as you think.

LLM failed at the most basic things related to maintainable code. Its code is basicaly a hackery mess without any structure at all.

It's my expectation is that, at least, some kind of maintainable code is generated from what's it's learnt.

ben_w•1y ago
Given your expectation:

> It's my expectation is that, at least, some kind of maintainable code is generated from what's it's learnt.

And your observation:

> LLM failed at the most basic things related to maintainable code. Its code is basicaly a hackery mess without any structure at all.

QED, *your expectations* are way too high.

They can't do that yet.