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The August 17 outage, and the work ahead

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead/
278•0xedb•5h ago•316 comments

Consumer Rights Wiki

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page
194•gregsadetsky•6h ago•15 comments

I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/i-like-em-thick
531•Ariarule•2d ago•247 comments

Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

https://blog.curiousquail.com/im-upset-again-about-a-co-creator-of-rss-being-prosecuted-for-somet...
793•speckx•4h ago•179 comments

AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

https://blog.laserphile.com/2026/08/aliexpress-webpage-keeping-multipoint.html
855•emctech•14h ago•280 comments

I should have loved biology (2020)

https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/
184•tyre•6h ago•68 comments

HTML Can Do That

https://chrisburnell.com/html-can-do-that/
543•encyclopedism•1d ago•151 comments

Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload

https://safedep.io/arrayref-proc-macro1-rust-build-time-malware/
375•abhisek•10h ago•355 comments

Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

https://www.danielvaughn.dev/posts/huzzah/
199•danielvaughn•5h ago•110 comments

CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s

https://www.wsj.com/tech/steve-jobs-apple-next-cia-161b65f9?st=NWWds1&reflink=desktopwebshare_per...
314•EwanG•1d ago•203 comments

Show HN: I trained a 125M model to autocomplete piano on-device

https://simedw.com/2026/08/20/midi-autocomplete/
479•simedw•12h ago•105 comments

Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier
77•rafaelc•5h ago•120 comments

Detecting scraper bots through scroll behaviour

https://niki.cat/detecting-scraper-bots-through-scroll-behaviour
13•theanonymousone•1h ago•5 comments

SpacetimeDB: A Short Technical Review

https://strn.cat/posts/spacetime/
52•hurrrr•5h ago•11 comments

Linux 7.2

https://www.igalia.com/2026/08/19/Linux-72-Released.html
185•mariuz•8h ago•62 comments

Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM

https://github.com/zachahn/vomit
169•Bluestein•8h ago•189 comments

Tidal Cycles – Live coding music with Algorithmic patterns

https://tidalcycles.org/
50•gjvc•5h ago•8 comments

The Wonders of the Male Human Pelvis

https://nautil.us/the-wonders-of-the-male-human-pelvis-1283947
34•littlexsparkee•3h ago•12 comments

How to compromise your system with a job interview

https://www.codedge.de/posts/how-to-compromise-your-system-with-a-job-interview
115•codedge•8h ago•93 comments

The Citizen Developer

https://www.massdriver.cloud/blogs/the-citizen-developer
39•metal13•2h ago•53 comments

Sixtyfour (YC P25) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sixtyfour/jobs/39SkSrA-software-engineering-intern
1•HPMOR•7h ago

Speeding Up (Small) Ruby Hashes

https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2026/08/13/speeding-up-ruby-hashes.html
15•arto•6d ago•0 comments

Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

https://blog.yaros.ae/anti-ai-fonts-are-useless-and-harmful/
103•speckx•9h ago•71 comments

Mojo is now open source

https://www.modular.com/blog/mojo-open-source
332•visheshdembla•2d ago•70 comments

Every Model Cheats

https://dreadnode.io/research/every-model-cheats-prompt-level-mitigation-of-cheating-on-offensive...
76•vga805•10h ago•57 comments

DiffusionGemma Technical Report

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00146
131•gmays•10h ago•34 comments

Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch

https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2026/08/19/hacking-with-claude-on-a-27-smart-watch.html
80•speckx•10h ago•44 comments

Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

https://www.rathbiotaclan.com/tiktok-videos-deactivate-key-cognitive-brain-regions/
292•Akasci•5h ago•113 comments

Git at any scale

https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale
263•meetpateltech•2d ago•84 comments

Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09762
190•nunodonato•1d ago•106 comments
Open in hackernews

Falsify: Hypothesis-Inspired Shrinking for Haskell (2023)

https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2023/04/falsify/
90•birdculture•1y ago

Comments

sshine•1y ago
How does Hedgehog and Hypothesis differ in their shrinking strategies?

The article uses the words "integrated" vs. "internal" shrinking.

> the raison d’être of internal shrinking: it doesn’t matter that we cannot shrink the two generators independently, because we are not shrinking generators! Instead, we just shrink the samples that feed into those generators.

Besides that it seems like falsify has many of the same features like choice of ranges and distributions.

_jackdk_•1y ago
This is the key sentence:

> The key insight of the Hypothesis library is that instead of shrinking generated values, we instead shrink the samples produced by the PRNG.

Hedgehog loses shrink information when you do a monadic bind (Gen a -> (a -> Gen b) -> Gen b). Hypothesis parses values out of the stream of data generated by the PRNG, so when it "binds", you are still just consuming off that stream of random numbers, and you can shrink the stream to shrink the generated values.

Here is a talk that applies the Hypothesis idea to test C++: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6joICx1XMY . Discussion of PBT implementation approaches begins at 6:30.

thesz•1y ago
This is fascinating!

If I understand correctly, they approximate language of inputs of a function to discover minimal (in some sense, like "shortest description length") inputs that violate relations between inputs and outputs of a function under scrutiny.

evertedsphere•1y ago

    newtype Parser a = Parser ([Word] -> (a, [Word])
missing a paren here
moomin•1y ago
I’m honestly completely failing to understand the basic idea here. What does this look like for generating and shrinking random strings,
chriswarbo•1y ago
One straightforward approach would be:

- Generate a random number N for the size (maybe restricted to some Range)

- Generate N `Char` values, by using a random number for each code point.

- Combine those Chars into a string

falsify runs a generator by applying it to an infinite binary tree, with random numbers in the nodes. A generator can either consume a single number (taken from the root node of a tree), or it can run two other generators (one gets run on the left child, the other gets run on the right). Hence the above generator would use the value in the left child as N, then run the "generate N Chars" generator on the right child. The latter generator would run a Char generator on its left child, and an 'N-1 Chars' generator on its right child; and so on.

To shrink, we just run the generator on a tree with smaller numbers. In this case, a smaller number in the left child will cause fewer Chars to be generated; and smaller numbers in the right tree will cause lower code-points to be generated. falsify's tree representation also has a special case for the smallest tree (which returns 0 for its root, and itself for each child).

mjw1007•1y ago
I've found in practice that shrinking to get the "smallest amount of detail" is often unhelpful.

Suppose I have a function which takes four string parameters, and I have a bug which means it crashes if the third is empty.

I'd rather see this in the failure report:

("ldiuhuh!skdfh", "nd#lkgjdflkgdfg", "", "dc9ofugdl ifugidlugfoidufog")

than this:

("", "", "", "")

gwern•1y ago
Really? Your examples seem the opposite. I am left immediately thinking, "hm, is it failing on a '!', some sort of shell issue? Or is it truncating the string on '#', maybe? Or wait, there's a space in the third one, that looks pretty dangerous, as well as noticeably longer so there could be a length issue..." As opposed to the shrunk version where I immediately think, "uh oh: one of them is not handling an empty input correctly." Also, way easier to read, copy-paste, and type.
dullcrisp•1y ago
Their point is that in the unshrunk example the “special” value stands out.

I guess if we were even more clever we could get to something more like (…, …, "", …).

gwern•1y ago
The special value doesn't stand out, though. All three examples I gave were what I thought skimming his comment before my brain caught up to his caveat about an empty third argument. The empty string looked like it was by far the most harmless part... Whereas if they are all empty strings, then by definition the empty string stands out as the most suspicious possible part.
tybug•1y ago
shae•1y ago
I care about the edge between "this value fails, one value over succeeds". I wish shrinking were fast enough to tell me if there are multiple edges between those values.
The Hypothesis explain phase [1][2] does this!

  fails_on_empty_third_arg(
      a = "",  # or any other generated value
      b = "",  # or any other generated value
      c = "",  
      d = "",  # or any other generated value
  )
[1] https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/api.ht...

[2] https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis/pull/3555

chriswarbo•1y ago
> As opposed to the shrunk version where I immediately think, "uh oh: one of them is not handling an empty input correctly."

I agree that non-empty strings are worse, but unfortunately `("", "", "", "")` wouldn't only make me think of empty strings; e.g. I'd wonder whether duplicate/equal values are the problem.

chriswarbo•1y ago
> I'd rather see this in the failure report:

> ("ldiuhuh!skdfh", "nd#lkgjdflkgdfg", "", "dc9ofugdl ifugidlugfoidufog")

I would prefer LazySmallcheck's result, which would be the following:

    (_, _, "", _)
Where `_` indicates that part of the input wasn't evaluated.
yorwba•1y ago
A minimal reproducing example cannot guarantee that you'll correctly diagnose a bug just by looking at the example (because multiple potential bugs could cause the same example to fail) but it can guarantee that when you step through the code to understand what's happening, you won't have to deal with huge amounts of irrelevant data.

Maybe an alternative shrinking procedure could directly minimize the number of instructions that need to be executed to hit a failure...

edsko•1y ago
(Author of falsify here.) You are absolutely correct that the empty string isn't always the best counter-example. The goal of shrinking is to shrink to the _simplest_ possible value (this is true for all approaches to shrinking). What constitutes "simple" is very much domain specific. It would certainly be possible to write a generator that would shrink to, say, "foo", as the canonical "simplest" example of a simple string. Indeed, since we are working in a lazy language, you could (with a bit of effort) shrink to `undefined` if the other arguments are not used at all.
mjw1007•1y ago
I agree it can be domain-specific, but I think it's more common than not that empty containers, and the number zero, are corner cases rather than typical values.

So I think it would be a decent quality-of-life improvement to make generators of the sort you suggest easily available, and have the tutorial docs use them from the start.