Off-topic but only today I was thinking of Hegel-related names for a certain business idea. Was wondering who had registered all the domains, well here's one. It would a completely different domain, and also a derivation of the name, so nothing to worry about there. But if I build something in Rust, I'll remember you :)
A bit of an intro/announcement blog post for Hegel ("Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis", [0]) was submitted here ~2 weeks ago [1] and got a fair bit of discussion (106 comments).
On the other hand, I have quite the visceral reaction to the name because of the influence Hegel had on Marx, and subsequent 20th century critical theorists.
Completely agree. It's absolutely awful having software projects squatting on the names of great philosophers and artists. I appreciate that perhaps the author wanted to show their appreciation, but there are plenty of other equally communicative options.
I often gesture towards this phenomenology when religious folk casually attempt to claim "spirit" as some form of belief they hold over me. I honestly don't know if I've developed the position well, it is almost entirely through the lens of continental philosophy absorbing Hegel, but I use it to illustrate that my concept of spirit, as an atheist, may not be a different phenomenological occurrence than that of a religious framing and even shares the quality of a rich historical lineage I can draw from. I could just as easily retreat into untranslated German that sounds poetic or prophetic to the uninitiated, but that would be doing exactly what I'm asking them not to do, leaning on a vocabulary the other person can't engage with without first conceding the ground it's built on. This seems to effectively persuade them to adjust their vocabulary to a register I can actually engage with without needing to hedge for the axiomatic differences we have.
This is a comfortable mode of engagement and it is one I can share with religious folk, but I do find they often refuse this register and I will admit I can't always articulate why I find their refusal frustrating either.
I didn't expect to see Hegel when opening up HN today! Feel free to ask any questions about it. We released hegel-go earlier this week, and plan to release hegel-cpp sometime next week, so look forward to that :)
How exciting! I wrote my own pbt lib for zig (https://github.com/AntoineBalaine/zlowcheck) and it made me sad I couldn't get it nearly close to hypothesis. Looking forward to see this grow!
Any hope for ffi through the c abi?
PSA: On the surface it looks great - but it's something that spawns a Python server (with uv - I think) and does communicate with it during tests. I don't think it's complexity we need to take on on our unit tests.
A saner approach would be to start with a FFI-friendly language and create bindings. I don't think just being able to use an already written framework in Python is worth the trade-off.
In the era of AI codegen, I think property-based testing will and should see greater uptake. Unit tests are too brittle for the grind on it till it works methods of agentic written code.
How does this compare to https://academy.fpblock.com/blog/quickcheck-hedgehog-validit... ? As far as I understand, Validity also has free generators and shrinking for types by having them implement various typeclasses that represent invariants and also has pre-made combinators to test properties with.
This is the first time I hear of property-based testing, and I am intrigued. What is the difference between this and a sufficiently expressive structural type system?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] thread[0]: https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/hegel/
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504094
I often gesture towards this phenomenology when religious folk casually attempt to claim "spirit" as some form of belief they hold over me. I honestly don't know if I've developed the position well, it is almost entirely through the lens of continental philosophy absorbing Hegel, but I use it to illustrate that my concept of spirit, as an atheist, may not be a different phenomenological occurrence than that of a religious framing and even shares the quality of a rich historical lineage I can draw from. I could just as easily retreat into untranslated German that sounds poetic or prophetic to the uninitiated, but that would be doing exactly what I'm asking them not to do, leaning on a vocabulary the other person can't engage with without first conceding the ground it's built on. This seems to effectively persuade them to adjust their vocabulary to a register I can actually engage with without needing to hedge for the axiomatic differences we have.
This is a comfortable mode of engagement and it is one I can share with religious folk, but I do find they often refuse this register and I will admit I can't always articulate why I find their refusal frustrating either.
A saner approach would be to start with a FFI-friendly language and create bindings. I don't think just being able to use an already written framework in Python is worth the trade-off.
Antithesis: the tests pass with 100% coverage
Synthesis: the bug is a feature
This together with bombadil (web version pbt / Hegel / antithesis) for qa is a great advance.
We need more and more solutions like these for Agentic Coding.