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The session you cannot take with you

https://earendil.com/posts/session-portability/
260•apitman•4h ago•53 comments

JEP 401: Value Objects (Preview) merged to OpenJDK master

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/31120
89•mfiguiere•4h ago•32 comments

DeepSeek-V4-Flash Update

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/updates/
182•dnhkng•2h ago•75 comments

Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-30-stacked-pull-requests-are-now-in-public-preview/
628•tomzorz•16h ago•212 comments

Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

https://marbleos.com/demo
41•akbabu•3h ago•21 comments

Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-brings-whole-body-intelligence-to-robots/
551•ai2027•17h ago•438 comments

I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

https://geospatialml.com/posts/reviewing-ai-slop/
181•volumes94•10h ago•78 comments

Where USB Memory Sticks are Born (2013)

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2013/where-usb-memory-sticks-are-born/
45•jacquesm•3d ago•3 comments

Show HN: Gander, an Android file viewer that asks for no permissions at all

https://github.com/mokshablr/gander
33•mokshablr•2h ago•13 comments

The mean means nothing: data visualization to debug a latency problem

https://fzakaria.com/2026/07/27/the-mean-means-nothing
30•fanf2•1d ago•3 comments

Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

https://blog.google/security/chrome-stronger-with-every-update/
8•Garbage•1h ago•2 comments

The Religion of Speed

https://graybeard.ing/the-religion-of-speed/
138•MobiusHorizons•9h ago•69 comments

Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/read-this-before-you-buy-that-tv-streaming-stick/
700•speckx•15h ago•398 comments

Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-solve-a-muon-mystery-now-old-results-dont-add-up-20260729/
213•ibobev•17h ago•129 comments

The AI Aesthetic

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/ai-aesthetic/
298•montroser•9h ago•127 comments

The Economic Benefit of Refactoring

https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/refactoring-economic-benefit.html
233•javaeeeee•17h ago•96 comments

CodePen 2.0

https://chriscoyier.net/2026/07/30/codepen-2-0/
166•robin_reala•14h ago•47 comments

Rune 1.1: adds Python, an Emacs editor, a symbol index and is now free

https://rune.build/blog/rune-1-1-release
80•ernestrc•10h ago•27 comments

Simulating TCP loss and congestion in browser using Go/WASM

https://ccsim.fly.dev
14•dilyevsky•2d ago•0 comments

GCC steering committee announces AI policy

https://lwn.net/Articles/1086041/
286•arto•20h ago•314 comments

"the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

https://twitter.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173
19•telotortium•5h ago•3 comments

Bad Apple but It's Traceroute

https://jssfr.de/2026-07-27-bad-apple-but-traceroute.html
106•jssfr•3d ago•24 comments

Memo-1: A 6502 computer built from scratch, using a Minitel as its terminal

https://github.com/MemoireMorte/Memo-1
74•sciences44•2d ago•10 comments

The American Grilled Cheese Sandwich Essay (2024)

https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich/archive/the-best-american-grilled-cheese-sandwich-e...
47•NaOH•3d ago•35 comments

UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

https://www.uefa.com/news-media/news/02a7-213a92896eb0-54dfbf454e3b-1000--statement-on-behalf-of-...
997•dickfickling•14h ago•535 comments

The lost civic life of movie rental stores

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-lost-civic-life-of-movie-rental-stores/
165•facundo_olano•18h ago•216 comments

Show HN: Distilling DeepSeek into GPT-OSS doesn't transfer censorship. Try it

https://www.ctgt.ai/research/distillation-censorship-transfer
123•cgorlla•14h ago•64 comments

Saber-toothed cats became inbred–and struggled to move–before they went extinct

https://www.science.org/content/article/saber-toothed-cats-became-inbred-and-struggled-move-they-...
50•gmays•11h ago•22 comments

Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

https://openai.com/index/advancing-the-price-performance-frontier-with-gpt-5-6/
570•tedsanders•15h ago•371 comments

Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-is-everyone-trying-to-build-a
192•crescit_eundo•20h ago•239 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.