frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language

https://www.vivienhenz.com/common-lisp
103•misterchocolat•3h ago•129 comments

Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model

https://reflection.ai/blog/introducing-beam
390•Philpax•10h ago•122 comments

Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades

https://www.debugbear.com/blog/example-dot-com-redesign-history
166•jgx0•7h ago•94 comments

Find the flattest route between any two points in SF

https://flattensf.com/
158•ishan0102•8h ago•52 comments

Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates

https://www.vals.ai/blogs/room-temperature-magnetic-semiconductors
289•outlier99•9h ago•192 comments

Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation

https://qlabs.sh/research/dust
148•E-Reverance•9h ago•34 comments

Resurrecting iChat Audio and Video Conferencing

https://blog.pipetogrep.org/2026/09/11/resurrecting-ichat-audio-and-video-conferencing/
22•thepipetogrep•2h ago•5 comments

Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend

https://dbushell.com/2026/10/03/deno-to-node/
119•ibobev•7h ago•54 comments

An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/08/03/an-algorithmic-failure-beneath-the-secret-ballot/
64•leecoursey•2d ago•25 comments

Web Search API

https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-10-02-introducing-web-search-api/
521•tosh•19h ago•237 comments

Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge

https://www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-claude-diary-anthropic-reported-shoot.html
665•emptybits•1d ago•519 comments

Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2018) [pdf]

https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf
170•vinhnx•2d ago•38 comments

Testing 12 different Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors

https://smarthomescene.com/reviews/best-selling-zigbee-temperature-sensors-tested/
82•walrus01•2d ago•27 comments

Show HN: Photoc – Command-line tools for photographers

https://github.com/ahmetomerv/photoc
24•ahmetomer•2d ago•2 comments

ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/chatgpt-is-adding-real-cartoonists-signatures-to-fake-new-yorke...
377•rdmuser•7h ago•270 comments

Ocean the Man Who Listens to Whales

https://blue-continuum.com/the-man-who-listens-to-whales
5•dnetesn•1d ago•1 comments

Global Solar Atlas: summary of solar power potential globally

https://globalsolaratlas.info/
41•stratts•7h ago•19 comments

Show HN: Entombed in a Raycaster

https://www.stelabouras.com/blog/entombed-raycaster/
12•stelabouras•2d ago•1 comments

Samon: Designing a Zen Garden Raking Puzzle

https://gwern.net/doc/design/2026-10-03-gwern-samon.html
38•networked•6h ago•16 comments

DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit

https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda
54•greyface-•1d ago•6 comments

Ephemeral Testing

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/10/05/ephemeral-testing/
48•ibobev•7h ago•13 comments

Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/texas-city-demands-2m-for-public-records-on-flock-usage/
169•01-_-•8h ago•26 comments

Using Theme park rides and smartphones for demonstrating Newtonian mechanics

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6404/aea271
7•bryanrasmussen•2d ago•3 comments

The lamps in my house

https://arslan.io/2026/10/05/the-lamps-in-my-house/
172•farslan•16h ago•79 comments

Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1

https://floreal.tech/blog/2026/making-a-gtk-app-in-haskell-part-1/
147•Vosporos•15h ago•39 comments

Apple and a hacker's future

https://stratechery.com/2026/apple-and-a-hackers-future/
238•maguay•20h ago•208 comments

Qualcomm licenses patents on Huawei’s LogicFolding chip tech

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/qualcomm-licenses-patents-on-huawei-s-logicfol...
186•0xedb•22h ago•123 comments

Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort

https://smyck.net/2026/10/03/holocron-the-backup-of-last-resort/
92•hukl•1d ago•92 comments

High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days

https://www.thedrive.com/news/high-diesel-prices-bankrupted-16-trucking-companies-in-just-30-days
110•speckx•5h ago•88 comments

Linux containers in 500 lines of code (2016)

https://blog.lizzie.io/linux-containers-in-500-loc.html
114•mkornaukhov•16h ago•23 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.