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Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free

https://gultsch.de/posts/breaking-up-with-google-play/
352•ezst•4h ago•136 comments

Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story

https://lexontech.org/fifteen-years-later-the-apple-cards-origin-story
179•ksec•6h ago•25 comments

Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/10/plunging-test-scores-are-a-slow-moving-catastrophe
8•vinni2•16m ago•2 comments

Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

https://swarmtraces.org/
592•specked-citrus•18h ago•377 comments

Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers – Castle Game Engine

https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal
44•birdculture•2d ago•19 comments

We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/24/were-gonna-need-a-lot-more-mathematicians/
241•srcreigh•12h ago•337 comments

Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia

https://blog.priyan.in/2026/09/analyzing-frontier-model-progress-with.html
12•msephton•18h ago•4 comments

Reflections on 1,000 Days of Math

https://gmays.com/reflections-on-1000-days-of-math/
14•gmays•3d ago•4 comments

Plan mode is dead

https://www.aymannadeem.com/artificial/intelligence,/developer/tools/2026/09/24/plan-mode-is-dead...
439•jmvldz•1d ago•401 comments

Floci: Locally emulating any cloud service

https://floci.io
92•theanonymousone•7h ago•15 comments

Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models

https://ollaya.dev/
526•Ardakilic•21h ago•128 comments

Is your Postgres migration safe or not safe?

https://safenotsafe.dev/
87•vira28•8h ago•27 comments

A single function Jev-like wrapper for LLMs, including vision models

http://allanrbo.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-jev-like-wrapper-for-llms-including.html
111•allanrbo•11h ago•30 comments

16GB iPod Nano 3G Upgrade

https://tuckerosman.com/projects/16gb-ipod-nano
84•Ivoah•2d ago•9 comments

Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red

https://jev-pokemon.vercel.app/
229•pancomplex•1d ago•93 comments

Parsing Expression Grammar vs. Regexes: Building Org Parser in Lisp, Export HTML

https://jointhefreeworld.org/blog/articles/lisps/parsing-expression-grammar-lisp-org-convert-to-h...
58•jjba23•2d ago•10 comments

Earth is tearing apart beneath the Pacific Northwest

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260924231343.htm
21•emot•1h ago•7 comments

What even is an OS now?

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-now/
245•fratellobigio•18h ago•355 comments

Calculating atmospheric drag on satellites for a Cubesat [pdf]

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1124870
21•walrus01•2d ago•7 comments

PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock

https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
3•Qision•1d ago•3 comments

Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

187•mlaux•20h ago•188 comments

Understanding the Impact of LLM Watermarking on AI Agent Behavior

https://www.lasso.security/blog/the-provenance-tax-understanding-the-impact-of-llm-watermarking-o...
54•nisosguy•2h ago•53 comments

Gravity seems holographic. What does that mean for reality?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/gravity-seems-holographic-what-does-that-mean-for-reality-20260925/
249•ibobev•1d ago•192 comments

ASML currently sells no chipmaking machines in Europe, executive says

https://nltimes.nl/2026/09/22/asml-currently-sells-chipmaking-machines-europe-executive-says
96•doener•2d ago•99 comments

The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bizarre-murky-history-of-soviet-born-tetris/
74•EA-3167•1d ago•16 comments

Scientists build most accurate atomic clock

https://phys.org/news/2026-09-scientists-world-accurate-atomic-clock.html
40•wglb•2d ago•20 comments

Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-liable-deceiving-users-cambridge-analytica/
322•pseudolus•14h ago•85 comments

The Copilot+ PC brand is dead

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/the-copilot-pc-brand-is-dead-microsoft-and-pc...
64•bj-rn•5h ago•35 comments

New Satellite Engine Could Use Earth's Atmosphere to Stay in Orbit Indefinitely

https://scitechdaily.com/new-satellite-engine-could-use-earths-atmosphere-as-fuel-to-stay-in-orbi...
3•GordonS•30m ago•0 comments

One Month Without AI

https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html
140•saibotk•5h ago•147 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.