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US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o
472•defrost•3h ago•445 comments

New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/06/new-mexico-court-meta
428•boplicity•13h ago•253 comments

AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/08/06/amd-acquires-ai-chip-startup-taalas-to-boost-infer...
744•itvision•17h ago•567 comments

U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/july-2026-jobs-report-rcna591138
54•ceejayoz•1h ago•18 comments

Why is Everyone in Tech so sad?

https://www.noemamag.com/why-is-everyone-in-tech-so-sad/
11•RickJWagner•1h ago•1 comments

The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale

https://w.on-t.work/web-deployment-model
17•meetpateltech•28m ago•8 comments

Taste Is All That's Left

https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left
525•tsak•20h ago•389 comments

Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD

https://malisper.me/how-we-made-postgres-hundreds-of-times-faster-the-query-engine/
7•poly2it•2h ago•0 comments

A quine in Piet – a GIF image that prints itself [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMtzhjCzyc
37•surprisetalk•3d ago•2 comments

Scientists discover Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun

https://nso.edu/press-release/nsf-inouye-solar-telescope-enables-major-discovery-of-a-hidden-sola...
266•neversaydie•1d ago•53 comments

Bioengineered chewing gum may offer a way to fight HPV and other microbes

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260803080917.htm
164•Audiophilip•16h ago•46 comments

São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

https://saopaulosecreto.com/en/tiquatira-linear-park-en/
201•rmason•5d ago•87 comments

TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

https://www.typestax.com/
14•jasim•1w ago•5 comments

GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/qcvjkzcs7j74
435•Footkerchief•21h ago•359 comments

Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users

https://openai.com/index/improving-gpt-5-6-sol-in-chatgpt/
265•tedsanders•20h ago•219 comments

Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks

https://provenmetal.com
213•willcarkner•21h ago•150 comments

Welcoming the Nepalese Government to Have I Been Pwned

https://www.troyhunt.com/welcoming-the-nepalese-government-to-have-i-been-pwned/
179•gnabgib•15h ago•27 comments

Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

https://blog.cloudflare.com/kitesurf/
6•m3h•3h ago•2 comments

Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

https://herdr.dev/blog/herdr-is-joining-y-combinator/
239•collinmanderson•18h ago•169 comments

The BBC Tetris Companion

https://www.leadedsolder.com/2026/07/28/bbc-bridge-companion-part-1-overview.html
33•zdw•1w ago•2 comments

Atomic Clocks

https://www.nist.gov/atomic-clocks/how-do-atomic-clocks-work
110•teleforce•6d ago•64 comments

Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs

https://scalex.dev/blog/ai-agent-permissions-stats/
323•Wirbelwind•1d ago•226 comments

Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260731-why-estonians-invite-strangers-into-their-backyards-e...
107•koolhead17•3d ago•42 comments

My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@rygorous/117047697255584965
162•luu•19h ago•287 comments

Mario Meets Pareto

https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto
1083•theanonymousone•1d ago•162 comments

How to Generate a TLSA Record and Fix the 3 1 1 Mismatch

https://dmarcguard.io/blog/tlsa-record-setup/
4•meysamazad•6d ago•0 comments

DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/06/doge-savings-overstated-watchdog-report-01027797
68•ceejayoz•1h ago•37 comments

Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

https://www.sciencealert.com/radical-study-suggests-life-on-earth-arose-from-non-living-matter-twice
8•jnord•59m ago•1 comments

STV: A full-motion video codec for the Atari ST

https://medium.com/@jonas.eschenburg/stv-a-video-codec-for-the-atari-st-6e46355c50e4
77•indyjo•1w ago•10 comments

What is a product?

https://roge.onwrite.app/what-is-a-product
80•rogix•16h ago•54 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.