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More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/more-half-adults-us-say-they-lack-basic-statistical-under...
40•giuliomagnifico•1h ago•39 comments

Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-and-m5-ultra-for-a-big-leap-in-perform...
1079•interpol_p•18h ago•1024 comments

FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-authorizes-first-wearable-device-continuo...
354•sunnynagra•11h ago•174 comments

Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later – Cliff Stoll [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656058JxTM0
35•zoenolan•4d ago•12 comments

OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/openai-jalapeno-better-than-nvidia
431•bmulholland•16h ago•281 comments

Queryable Executables

https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/24/actually-queryable-executables
115•rguiscard•6h ago•18 comments

New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-new-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/
750•interpol_p•17h ago•492 comments

Secret Cold War IBM Supercomputer Was Built for One Job

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cold-war-codebreaker-nsa-ibm
6•jnord•1h ago•0 comments

Maiao: Gerrit-style code review workflow for GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, others

https://github.com/runetes/maiao
64•zdw•8h ago•34 comments

Black hole singularity is a surface not a point

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21590
225•raattgift•13h ago•167 comments

New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-unveils-a-more-powerful-mac-mini-featuring-the-all-n...
480•runako•17h ago•297 comments

Agentic Context Management: Memory and Cost as Architecture Problems

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21503
25•gdad•4h ago•12 comments

When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python

https://sethmlarson.dev/when-str-lower-is-a-security-vulnerability
99•rbanffy•10h ago•44 comments

C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html
129•Retr0id•11h ago•75 comments

Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1442
816•Banditoz•13h ago•684 comments

Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

https://www.imkylelambert.com/articles/building-a-backyard-office-the-build-and-cost-breakdown
320•surprisetalk•16h ago•209 comments

Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/bomb-fishing-coral-reefs
302•speckx•16h ago•155 comments

Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month

https://nil.wallyjones.com/run-openbsd-on-digitalocean-for-4month/
150•speckx•13h ago•68 comments

Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

https://blog.master.dev/tooltips-need-a-delay-and-then-they-need-to-skip-it/
155•ibobev•14h ago•39 comments

Don't Wordle

https://dontwordle.com/
338•Hbruz0•19h ago•120 comments

Show HN: TeXbrain, a LaTeX editor that runs pdfTeX in the browser via WASM

https://github.com/swimmingbrain/texbrain
76•swimmingbrain•8h ago•16 comments

Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

https://github.com/ThinkOffApp/CarWatch
128•petruspennanen•15h ago•35 comments

Dolly Parton has died

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/25/dolly-parton-country-singer-dead
1404•helsinkiandrew•12h ago•212 comments

Show HN: LatticeDB – Like SQLite but for graph databases

https://github.com/jeffhajewski/latticedb
137•smiths1999•14h ago•37 comments

A brief history of federal lift ticket regulation

https://zakpodmore.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-federal-lift-ticket
58•CGMthrowaway•11h ago•10 comments

My Friend Aaron

https://rorz.io/writing/my-friend-aaron
523•sarreph•14h ago•142 comments

Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/3YMV4MS34KA?pli=1
345•yboris•13h ago•89 comments

Clara (YC P26) is hiring a growth engineer to bring AI doctors to market

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/clara-2/jobs/8snci6k-founding-full-stack-growth-engineer
1•gfavvas•13h ago

Visualizing Binary Files

https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-08-05/0/POSTING-en.html
101•zdw•1d ago•18 comments

Tracking Costco gas prices

https://www.jack.bio/blog/costco-gas-tracking
107•lafond•1d ago•101 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.