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Alan Kay: Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjntrqhn8pk
3•behoove•5m ago•0 comments

Antarctica is keeping the ocean alive For now

https://signoregalilei.com/2026/09/20/antarctica-is-keeping-the-ocean-alivefor-now/
1•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

Connecting to production: the architecture of remote bindings (2025)

https://blog.cloudflare.com/connecting-to-production-the-architecture-of-remote-bindings/
1•macleos•6m ago•0 comments

Contrastive Language Models: A Fast, Generalizable System One Model

https://github.com/Contrastive-LM/CLM
1•yarapavan•8m ago•0 comments

Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models

https://ollaya.dev/
4•Ardakilic•8m ago•0 comments

Every U.S. Electrical Outlet Explained [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_1wzYQwnts
2•bookofjoe•10m ago•0 comments

The cost of free AI restaurant ads is greater than it seems

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/opinion/ai-restaurant-ads-are-free-but-at-what-cost-40701302/
1•tortilla•10m ago•0 comments

AI applications need better primitives than text generation

https://seldon-ai.com/blog/better-primitives-than-text-generation
2•nlpnerd•12m ago•0 comments

Astronomer watches Starlink satellites sinking to build a 'planetary barometer'

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/09/25/astronomer-watches-starlink-satellites-sinking-to-...
2•whh•12m ago•0 comments

xAI Moves to Buy Out Southaven Residents Who Agree Not to Sue over Plant Noise

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/xai-moves-to-buy-out-southaven-residents-who-agree-not-to-su...
4•tolugenius•13m ago•0 comments

Never fall for a name that's taken

https://namernut.com
2•coreinch•15m ago•0 comments

Ordering Some Breakfast Pi

https://notalwaysright.com/ordering-some-breakfast-pi/424393/
1•dxs•16m ago•0 comments

KosmicKrisp Achieves Vulkan 1.4 Conformance on Apple Silicon

https://www.lunarg.com/kosmickrisp-achieves-vulkan-1-4-conformance-on-apple-silicon/
1•chnoblouch•18m ago•0 comments

How the Fed should measure inflation

https://economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/09/24/how-the-fed-should-measure-inflation
2•andsoitis•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I couldn't deal with another Claude Code tab

https://aidash.dev/
2•grollat•20m ago•1 comments

Self-Play Pretraining with Zero Data

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30063
2•E-Reverance•22m ago•0 comments

A Chinese 'smart sex toys' company fed Russian war tech against Ukraine

https://euobserver.com/239459/how-a-chinese-smart-sex-toys-company-fed-russian-war-tech-against-u...
6•giuliomagnifico•22m ago•1 comments

Meta's Muse appears to use an OpenAI model labeled muse-special

https://mouse.dev/blog/muse-special/
2•Aeroi•24m ago•1 comments

Photon: Building a Retrieval and Ranking Engine from Scratch

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/photon
1•acossta•27m ago•0 comments

Free Bitcoin DCA Calculator

https://mtg-arbitrage-desk.loca.lt/dca-calculator
1•devtoolseller•29m ago•0 comments

Yes, Claude can do Nine Loops

https://www.anthropic.com/research/yes-claude-can-do-nine-loops
10•tzury•30m ago•0 comments

He who does not code, neither shall he eat

https://celphase.com/3mwe774jgrk2p
2•xena•31m ago•0 comments

How Do You Make a Incremental Compiler? (with Julien Verlaguet) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J31LlAUtoos
2•matt_d•31m ago•0 comments

Offensive-forensic-distros-installer-MacBook-air-M1-M2-external-disk-luks Public

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1•ignardpent•31m ago•1 comments

How Trump Is Building a National Citizenship Database to Check Voters

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/politics/what-to-know-citizenship-database.html
4•vinni2•34m ago•0 comments

Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02980-w
2•sbulaev•35m ago•0 comments

Compiling Hono with Perry

https://geastack.com/blog-hono-with-perry
1•arbayi•36m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What vendor you'd switch out if a better option was available?

2•jviotti•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Stop shipping AI slop, Executor makes agents prove it works

https://github.com/Atri10/executor
1•LambdaLogic•37m ago•1 comments

Towards GPU Type Inference

https://winwang.blog/posts/dphm-1
4•winwang•38m 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.