frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Metadata requests no longer tracked in PyPI download counts

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2026-08-31-download-counts/
1•miketheman•42s ago•0 comments

Electricity-free miniaturized solid state cooling

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/08/28/german-japanese-researchers-invent-electricity-fre...
1•Gaishan•45s ago•0 comments

Ink & Switch: Introducing Patchwork-26 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UxGijnuXEs
1•spiralganglion•1m ago•0 comments

Bank of America bans working remotely 2 days in a row

https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/corporate-wellness/bank-of-america-bans-working-remotely...
1•randycupertino•1m ago•0 comments

AI Job Scout and Rate Matcher

https://github.com/Deviad/job-hunter
1•Deviad•3m ago•0 comments

How plane-tracking live streams are made [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbjHrD2hJp4
1•toomuchtodo•9m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Who is using coding agents for memory optimization?

1•henningpeters•10m ago•0 comments

A unified platform for dexterous manipulation research

https://projectsuperdex.com/
1•hheikinh•10m ago•0 comments

100-Year Human Aging Study

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07563777
2•arbayi•11m ago•0 comments

Irc.com

https://irc.com/
1•gregsadetsky•11m ago•0 comments

Poll: Did you know polls exist as a native HN feature?

1•NickNaraghi•11m ago•1 comments

18 month survey of unsecured Ollama servers and an unsolved mystery

https://day50.dev/woahllama/
4•kristopolous•13m ago•0 comments

Free Android app that integrates WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal

https://github.com/fulalas/unichat
1•porteux•14m ago•0 comments

Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple and Fast

https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
1•pcfwik•16m ago•0 comments

Run local embedder for 0.24% of the OpenAI price

https://dzen.dev/blog/local-dzen-embedding-for-rag/
1•xenator•18m ago•0 comments

Parole Decision-Making: Myths and Realities

https://www.canada.ca/en/parole-board/corporate/publications-and-forms/parole-decision-making-myt...
1•gregsadetsky•19m ago•0 comments

Four Ways to Shake

https://chris.eidhof.nl/post/four-ways-to-shake/
1•frizlab•19m ago•0 comments

Absurdist Meaning in the Deconstruction of Software

https://hristijanstojkoski.substack.com/p/absurdist-meaning-in-the-deconstruction
2•stojkoskih•22m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Whats your SWE career plan B?

3•conqrr•25m ago•3 comments

New cardiovascular drug reduces oxidized phospholipids

https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2026/08/29/08/48/mon-jacc-lipids-esc-2026
3•brandonb•28m ago•1 comments

The Anatomy of a Cyberattack: If a Company Were a Human Body

https://medium.com/@MAXKLID/the-anatomy-of-a-cyberattack-if-a-company-were-a-human-body-771a806817d7
1•testiam•31m ago•0 comments

Open Source Budget App for Personal and Business

https://github.com/aroesec/loot
1•kulbertinov1•34m ago•1 comments

Tell HN: On AI, Quality, and Accountability

2•qwrfglkjk•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Libraries.ink – a home for the books you own

https://libraries.ink
1•samcgraw•35m ago•1 comments

Google Maps Now Shows 'Lake America' in US, Not 'Lake Ontario'

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/google-maps-will-show-lake-america-us-not-lake-ontario-2026-08-30/
7•tartoran•36m ago•4 comments

The Rise of Software Factories

https://hraness.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-software-factories
3•benzguo•39m ago•0 comments

CO2 – Extending C with Rust interop features

https://github.com/hkalbasi/co2
1•hkalbasi•41m ago•0 comments

PG-Strom: An extension that leverages GPU and NVMe for PostgreSQL

https://en.heterodb.com/product
2•b-man•42m ago•0 comments

The Hugging Face attack surprised me – by Ajeya Cotra

https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised
1•lifeisstillgood•44m ago•0 comments

Russia's Return to G20

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/europeans-bristle-russias-return-g20-2026-08-31/
3•TechTechTech•44m 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.