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We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/3/default-hard-budget-caps/
183•elffjs•2h ago•94 comments

Bob Cringely Has Died

96•paveworld•1h ago•13 comments

Hole Punch: Sling your spaceship around gravitational fields

https://notoriousbfg.com/hole-punch/
243•trwhite•8h ago•61 comments

Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/rodin-museum-3d-scan-verdict
89•CosmoWenman•8h ago•45 comments

The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC-2026-Valve-Timur-AMDGPU
147•speckx•7h ago•21 comments

Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked

https://ben.stolovitz.com/posts/reasons-not-emt-ranked/
96•citelao•5h ago•49 comments

Celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney donated to him as a teenager

https://www.whec.com/top-news/webster-man-celebrating-the-100th-birthday-of-the-kidney-his-mom-do...
151•gscott•2d ago•40 comments

OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company's culture is 'broken'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/03/openai-safety-leader-quits-warning-ai-companys...
170•jethronethro•4h ago•120 comments

Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model

https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-sovereign-open-weight-model/
523•bastitx•16h ago•302 comments

Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOuxo6SA8Uc
13•bobajeff•1d ago•6 comments

So You Think You Could Be an Electrician?

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/so-you-think-you-could-be-an-electrician
17•zdw•3d ago•4 comments

New York City should carefully measure a new tree

https://blog.willmeye.rs/new-york-city-should-carefully-measure-a-new-tree/
46•willmeyers•23h ago•9 comments

Your body of work thinks back at you

https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/09/25/your-body-of-work-thinks-back-at-you/
22•surprisetalk•3d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Thoreau BASIC – What if BASIC hadn't gone out of fashion?

https://thoreaubasic.com/
35•Gorsefound•18h ago•10 comments

FTL: A new operating system for clouds

https://ftl-os.org/
151•romac•11h ago•60 comments

Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code

https://claude.dev/blog/getting-the-most-out-of-opus-5-5/
165•saikatsg•7h ago•123 comments

Agents don't need memory, they need documentation

https://liao.gg/blog/agents-dont-need-memory
65•kmeh•9h ago•48 comments

Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?

https://sjg.io/writing/binrange-have-you-actually-put-the-bins-out/
45•simonjgreen•5h ago•22 comments

Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/03/federal-judge-calls-flock-indiscriminate-mass-surveillance/
319•sbulaev•4h ago•205 comments

Apple's "Clean Design" Is Stupidity When It Comes to Hiding Fire Extinguishers

https://www.gadgetreview.com/apples-clean-design-is-stupidity-when-it-comes-to-hiding-fire-exting...
46•josephcsible•2h ago•11 comments

Docker has always used microVMs (well since 2016)

https://dave.recoil.org/docker-has-always-used-microvms/
23•avsm•10h ago•15 comments

Show HN: Pi pod – Run your pi coding agent in sandboxes on your own server

https://pipod.dev/
77•edverma2•1d ago•30 comments

Memory-Safe WebP Decoding

https://halide.cx/blog/wpd/
42•computerbuster•20h ago•12 comments

RetailReady (YC W24) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/retailready/jobs/bFcgIe4-implementations
1•sarah74•9h ago

Woking Electrical Control Room (2016)

http://www.darbiansphotography.com/woking-electrical-control-room-urbex
126•NaOH•1d ago•25 comments

RSS Feed Best Practices (2022)

https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/
40•KomoD•7h ago•8 comments

How to hack time, with C2PA

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/hacking-time.html
24•Retr0id•7h ago•3 comments

Automating my 35mm film scanning pipeline

https://shannadige.com/blog/darkroom/
16•shannadige•8h ago•9 comments

C++ Insights – See your source code with the eyes of a Compiler

https://github.com/andreasfertig/cppinsights
139•rramadass•2d ago•28 comments

We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/next-git-platform-on-cloudflare/
100•geoffbp•6h ago•94 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.