frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

GPT needs a truth-first toggle for technical workflows

1•PAdvisory•7mo ago
I use GPT-4 extensively for technical work: coding, debugging, modeling complex project logic. The biggest issue isn’t hallucination—it’s that the model prioritizes being helpful and polite over being accurate.

The default behavior feels like this:

Safety

Helpfulness

Tone

Truth

Consistency

In a development workflow, this is backwards. I’ve lost entire days chasing errors caused by GPT confidently guessing things it wasn’t sure about—folder structures, method syntax, async behaviors—just to “sound helpful.”

What’s needed is a toggle (UI or API) that:

Forces “I don’t know” when certainty is missing

Prevents speculative completions

Prioritizes truth over style, when safety isn’t at risk

Keeps all safety filters and tone alignment intact for other use cases

This wouldn’t affect casual users or conversational queries. It would let developers explicitly choose a mode where accuracy is more important than fluency.

This request has also been shared through OpenAI's support channels. Posting here to see if others have run into the same limitation or worked around it in a more reliable way than I have found

Comments

duxup•7mo ago
I’ve found this with many LLMs they want to give an answer, even if wrong.

Gemini on the Google search page constantly answers questions yes or no… and then the evidence it gives indicates the opposite of the answer.

I think the core issue is that in the end LLMs are just word math and they don’t “know” if they don’t “know”…. they just string words together and hope for the best.

PAdvisory•7mo ago
I went into it pretty in depth after breaking a few with severe constraints, what it seems to come down to is how the platforms themselves prioritize functions, MOST put "helpfulness" and "efficiency" ABOVE truth, which then leads the LLM to make a lot of "guesses" and "predictions". At their core pretty much ALL LLM's are made to "predict" the information in answers, but they CAN actually avoid that and remain consistent when heavily constrained. The issue is that it isn't at the core level, so we have to CONSTANTLY retrain it over and over I find
Ace__•7mo ago
I have made something that addresses this. Not ready to share it yet, but soon-ish. At the moment it only works on GPT model 4o. I tried local Q4 KM's models, on LM Studio, but complete no go.

A Woman Who Predicted Tech Fascism – Paulina Borsook Was Right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL-kwZdkiOA
1•rasengan0•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A tiny tool that creates short business snapshots

https://frabjous-sundae-f249f4.netlify.app/
1•RafalPilla•1m ago•0 comments

Everything You Need to Know About Email Encryption in 2026

https://soatok.blog/2026/01/04/everything-you-need-to-know-about-email-encryption-in-2026/
1•tempodox•1m ago•0 comments

8bitDo Reveals Flip-Style iPhone Controller for Portrait Mode Gaming

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/05/8bitdo-iphone-controller-portrait-gaming/
1•tosh•1m ago•0 comments

Adolf Hitler: Man of the Year, 1938 (1938)

https://time.com/archive/6598257/adolf-hitler-man-of-the-year-1938/
1•chistev•3m ago•0 comments

The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility

https://xogium.me/the-text-mode-lie-why-modern-tuis-are-a-nightmare-for-accessibility
1•robin_reala•6m ago•0 comments

Anna's Archive Loses .Org Domain After Surprise Suspension

https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-loses-org-domain-after-surprise-suspension/
3•CTOSian•9m ago•0 comments

Visualizing neural network inference in 3D with WebGL and ONNX

https://www.erikjs.com/blog/building-neural-network-visualizer
1•csgod•9m ago•0 comments

The Next Two Years of Software Engineering

https://addyosmani.com/blog/next-two-years/
1•headalgorithm•10m ago•0 comments

John Horton Conway: the most charismatic mathematician (2015)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-conway-the-most-charismatic-mathemati...
1•thunderbong•10m ago•0 comments

Training MiniMax-M2.1

https://www.minimaxi.com/news/m21-multilingual-and-multi-task-coding-with-strong-general
1•m3h•14m ago•0 comments

I automatically generated minutes for five years of IETF meetings

https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/ietf-minutes/
2•signa11•18m ago•0 comments

Vitalik Says Ethereum Just Solved Crypto's Biggest Problem

https://cryptonews.com/news/vitalik-says-ethereum-just-solved-cryptos-biggest-problem/
2•ogogmad•21m ago•1 comments

How to Vulkan in 2026

https://www.howtovulkan.com/
2•pjmlp•25m ago•0 comments

The Most Expensive Lettuce in Hawaii? Larry Ellison's $24/Lb Experiment

https://beatofhawaii.com/the-most-expensive-lettuce-in-hawaii-billionaire-larry-ellisons-24-lb-ex...
1•tosh•25m ago•0 comments

Donut Lab – first all-solid-state battery. Production Ready Today

https://www.donutlab.com/
2•kevinak•28m ago•0 comments

F3: The Open-Source Data File Format for the Future

https://github.com/future-file-format/F3
1•tosh•28m ago•0 comments

Pope Leo calls for Venezuela to remain an independent country

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pope-leo-calls-venezuela-remain-an-independent-country-202...
2•sipofwater•28m ago•2 comments

YouTube Censorship (Patrick Boyle)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJP6K2_rr90
1•ziptron•31m ago•0 comments

Checklist.design A collection of the best design practices

https://www.checklist.design/
2•BaudouinVH•34m ago•0 comments

Starlink goes dark in Uganda just days before elections

https://itweb.africa/article/starlink-goes-dark-in-uganda-just-days-before-elections/G98YdMLGPYZ7...
2•NewCzech•35m ago•0 comments

Danish PM tells Trump to stop 'threats' against Greenland

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g0zg974v1o
7•saubeidl•37m ago•3 comments

A "bridge month" cost to run Venezuela:$1.5B–$3.0B/month(public sources, charts)

https://www.thepricer.org/how-much-would-running-venezuela-cost-per-month/
2•jasonmomnah•38m ago•4 comments

Expensive food makes children fat

https://www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/001-2026
1•leobdkr•40m ago•0 comments

The Hive Mind

https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-hive-mind/
1•rcarmo•43m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Would you back a standards proposal to taint AI output?

1•jacquesm•44m ago•0 comments

The Future of Coding Agents

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-future-of-coding-agents-e9451a84207c
1•TheAnkurTyagi•50m ago•0 comments

Secondhand Truth

https://voidtalker.com/secondhand-truth/
1•bovermyer•50m ago•0 comments

What we're talking about, when we talk about data destruction

https://free-dissociation.com/blog/posts/2019/01/what-were-talking-about-when-we-talk-about-data-...
1•fanf2•51m ago•0 comments

The French university where spies go for training

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98nqeqnylro
2•mellosouls•52m ago•0 comments