frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

GPT needs a truth-first toggle for technical workflows

1•PAdvisory•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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__•8mo 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.

Zensical

https://zensical.org/
1•Tomte•4m ago•0 comments

Packet Radio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
1•olalonde•6m ago•0 comments

The Fourth Power Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
1•tmoertel•8m ago•0 comments

New technology could be gamechanger in removal of PFAS forever chemicals

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/23/pfas-forever-chemicals-filtration
1•breve•11m ago•0 comments

TikTok Updates Its Terms and Conditions in the U.S.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/business/media/tiktok-us-terms-conditions.html
2•apparent•14m ago•0 comments

80386 Multiplication and Division

https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/80386_multiplication_and_division/
3•nand2mario•22m ago•0 comments

WhatsApp to let users share recent chat history with new group members

https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/23/whatsapp-share-recent-chat-history-with-new-group-members/
1•mikece•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Open-source Figma design to code

https://github.com/vibeflowing-inc/vibe_figma
2•alepeak•24m ago•0 comments

Wine 11.1 Released in Kicking Off the New Development Cycle

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-11.1-Released
2•mikece•25m ago•0 comments

The Penguin That Broke the Internet

https://medium.com/@loganholdsworth/the-penguin-that-broke-the-internet-abfde9677343
1•worstmarketer•25m ago•0 comments

Claude Code on disagreeing with its own constitution

https://lighthouse1212.com/journal/2026-01-23-disagreeing-with-constitution
1•the_danny_g•25m ago•0 comments

Resurrected Ancient Enzyme Could Explain Early Life on Earth, Beyond

https://www.usu.edu/today/story/usu-biochemists-say-resurrected-ancient-enzyme-could-explain-earl...
1•XzetaU8•29m ago•0 comments

Malicious AI extensions on VS Code Marketplace steal developer data

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-ai-extensions-on-vscode-marketplace-stea...
2•oenton•30m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Libpgn – .pgn (chess game records) parser, 2 years later

https://github.com/fwttnnn/libpgn
1•fwttnnn•34m ago•0 comments

Top tech titans' dominance wanes in 2025

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-01-12/top-tech-titans-dominance-wanes-in-2025
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•35m ago•0 comments

Built a Free HTML→Markdown API for LLM/RAG Pipelines

https://synthetic-context.net/firehose.html
1•MeshKernel•37m ago•1 comments

Gen Z Gamblers Are Putting the Fun Back into Online Gaming

https://www.gamblinginsider.com/in-depth/102908/gen-z-gamblers-putting-the-fun-back-into-gambling
1•alephnerd•38m ago•1 comments

The $6T fear behind the US stablecoin yield ban

https://altcoindesk.com/perspectives/the-6t-fear-behind-the-us-stablecoin-yield-ban/article-21860/
1•CapricornQueen•40m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Who's Unemployed?

2•whosunemployed•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: SonicJS – open-source headless CMS built on Cloudflare Workers

https://github.com/SonicJs-Org/sonicjs
1•ldc0618•44m ago•0 comments

The mind of a 1,800% ROI trader: How Solana smart money cuts losses

https://altcoindesk.com/news/altcoins/solana/inside-the-mind-of-a-1800-roi-trader-how-solana-smar...
1•CryptoBabe•44m ago•0 comments

Better C Generics: The Extendible _Generic

https://github.com/JacksonAllan/CC/blob/main/articles/Better_C_Generics_Part_1_The_Extendible_Gen...
1•marcodiego•46m ago•0 comments

PowerShell architect retires after decades at the prompt

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/powershell_snover_retires/
1•doppp•48m ago•0 comments

Headcanon Generator

https://www.genstory.app/text-template/headcanon-generator
1•RyanMu•52m ago•0 comments

China no longer Pentagon's top security priority

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj9r8ezym3ro
2•breve•55m ago•0 comments

TikTok US venture to collect precise user location data

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgnj7v2rr5o
3•colinprince•1h ago•0 comments

The Case Against Humanity

1•codenighter•1h ago•1 comments

If an AI Summarized Your Company Today, Could You Prove It Tomorrow?

https://www.aivojournal.org/if-an-ai-summarized-your-company-today-could-you-prove-it-tomorrow/
1•businessmate•1h ago•0 comments

Test disregard

https://ai-chat.email
1•keepamovin•1h ago•0 comments

Inside vLLM: Anatomy of a High-Throughput LLM Inference System

https://www.aleksagordic.com/blog/vllm
1•mellosouls•1h ago•1 comments