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Terence Tao Responds to the OpenAI Math Drop

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395269325940185
156•ent101•1h ago•79 comments

Claude Haiku 5.5

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5
807•sfkgtbor•12h ago•392 comments

Living off-grid: Hundred Rabbits

https://100r.ca/site/home.html
135•Muhammad523•2d ago•27 comments

A 100x faster* alternative to homebrew

https://github.com/zerobrewhq/zerobrew
51•cachebag•3h ago•29 comments

Margaret Hamilton has died

https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007
1214•muglug•9h ago•133 comments

How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn't

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-did-rosalind-franklin-miss-helix-her-iconic-dna-image...
137•pavel_lishin•2d ago•52 comments

'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth

https://www.404media.co/oldest-living-land-animal-jonathan-the-tortoise/
125•gumby•10h ago•50 comments

Cleo (Mathematician)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleo_(mathematician)
114•djoldman•1d ago•16 comments

The 15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished

https://shahidhussain.com/writing/search-for-salvage/
31•shahidhussain•3d ago•10 comments

GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone

https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-for-everyone/
581•joshuawright11•12h ago•298 comments

Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/jpeg-xl-in-chrome
531•AshleysBrain•19h ago•352 comments

Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app

https://bigwords.page/
451•SpeakingOfBrad•14h ago•130 comments

In Vienna and Beijing, the first (thorium) nuclear clocks begin to tick

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/science/first-nuclear-clocks-thorium-229.html
75•gumby•12h ago•11 comments

Analog Computer Simulator in the Browser

https://pavel-krivanek.github.io/The-Analog-Thing-Simulator/public/
5•adamnemecek•2d ago•1 comments

Docker Agent

https://github.com/docker/docker-agent
213•saikatsg•12h ago•100 comments

A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU

https://carette.xyz/posts/minimal_swift_kernel_on_qemu/
58•surprisetalk•1d ago•10 comments

Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits

https://debasishg.github.io/blog/push-ifs-up-fors-down/
136•speckx•11h ago•64 comments

ENIAC Programmers (2011)

https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/eniac.html
11•adunk•2d ago•0 comments

Sharing AI progress in mathematics

https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/
1272•OfficialTurkey•1d ago•1436 comments

Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages

https://ascii.rest/
336•turrini•15h ago•60 comments

Navier–Stokes Lost in Translation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144
288•nill0•15h ago•176 comments

How machines learned precision

https://glinscott.github.io/how-machines-learned-precision/
140•glinscott•1d ago•60 comments

A new write and space optimized storage engine for MySQL is here

https://tidesdb.com/articles/tidesdb-now-available-for-mysql/
54•alexpadula•2d ago•21 comments

House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/26612080.house-15m-underground-tunnels-sale-300k/
190•librasteve•17h ago•175 comments

Brownian Motion

https://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2026/04/22/brownian-motion/
55•signa11•1d ago•8 comments

If somebody tries to hot-patch an already-hot-patched function

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20261005-00/?p=112755/
55•ibobev•1d ago•25 comments

Anti-patterns in software blogging

https://refactoringenglish.com/blog/anti-patterns-software-blogging/
255•ilreb•17h ago•133 comments

Wood Tape (2004)

http://gamesbyemail.com/WoodTape/Default.htm
180•NaOH•2d ago•27 comments

Google Playground: Create and play custom games

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/playground-experimental-gaming-platform/
139•acossta•18h ago•212 comments

Why were Victorian elites so effective?

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-seven-vices-of-highly-effective-victorians/
135•karakoram•15h ago•211 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.