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Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

antithesis.com

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Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#11

Post by AndrewKemendo »

hugeBirb wrote: post #4

Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.

Eh… it’s always worth keeping in mind the time period and what was going on with the tooling for mathematics and science at the time.

Statistics wasn’t really quite mature enough to be applied to let’s say political economy a.k.a. economics which is what Hegel was working in.

JB Say (1) was the leading mind in statistics at the time but wasn’t as popular in political circles (Notably Proudhon used Says work as epistemology versus Hegel and Marx)

I’ve been in serious philosophy courses where they take the dialectic literally and it is the epistemological source of reasoning so it’s not gone

This is especially true in how marx expanded into dialectical materialism - he got stuck on the process as the right epistemological approach, and marxists still love the dialectic and Hegelian roots (zizek is the biggest one here).

The dialectic eventually fell due to robust numerical methods and is a degenerate version version of the sampling Markov Process which is really the best in class for epistemological grounding.

Someone posted this here years ago and I always thought it was a good visual: https://observablehq.com/@mikaelau/complete-system-of-philos...

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#12

Post by AndrewKemendo »

jjgreen wrote: post #6
hugeBirb wrote: post #4

Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.

"Not that it matters ...", What? Of course it matters! I only come to HN for extended arguments on the meaning of the Dialectic.

I gave you one in a sibling ;)

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#13

Post by DRMacIver »

dfabulich wrote: post #9
DRMacIver wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased: Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him." Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?" Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news." Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?" Will: "No, probably not." (Wh…

If that's not motivation enough for you to rename it, well, TypeScript already has a static type checker called Hegel. https://hegel.js.org/ (It's a stronger type system than TypeScript.)

We looked at it and given that the repo was archived nearly two years ago decided it wasn't a problem.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#14

Post by tybug »

pron wrote: post #8

> property-based testing is going to be a huge part of how we make AI-agent-based software development not go terribly. There's no doubt, I think, testing will remain important and possibly become more important with more AI use, and so better testing is helpful, PBT included. But the problem remains verifying that the tests actually test what they're supposed to. Mutation tests can allow agents to get good coverage…

I actually think there's another angle here where PBT helps, which wasn't explored in the blog post.

That angle is legibility. How do you know your AI-written slop software is doing the right thing? One would normally read all the code. Bad news: that's not much less labor intensive as not using AI at all.

But, if one has comprehensive property-based tests, they can instead read only the property-based tests to convince themselves the software is doing the right thing.

By analogy: one doesn't need to see the machine-checked proof to know the claim is correct. One only needs to check the theorem statement is saying the right thing.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#15

Post by rdevilla »

This is the first time in my HN membership where I was excited to read about the dialectic, only to be disappointed upon finding out the article is about Rust.

PBT is for sure the future - which is apparently now? 10 years ago when I was talking about QuickCheck [0] all the JS and Ruby programmers in my city just looked at me like I had two heads.

[0] https://github.com/ryandv/chesskell/blob/master/test/Test/Ch...

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#16

Post by 1-more »

wwilson wrote: post #7
DRMacIver wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased: Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him." Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?" Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news." Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?" Will: "No, probably not." (Wh…

If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments." One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.

A sort of broadening of Cunningham's Law (the fastest way to get an answer online is not by posting the question, but by posting the wrong answer—very true in my experience). If there's no issue of fact at hand, then you end up getting some engagement about the intentional malapropism/misattribution/mistake/whatever and then the forum rules tend to herd participants back to discussing the matter at hand: your company.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#17

Post by DRMacIver »

anentropic wrote: post #10
DRMacIver wrote: post #2

Post author here btw, happy to take questions, whether they're about Hegel in particular, property-based testing in general, or some variant on "WTF do you mean you wrote rust bindings to a python library?"

TBH reading the first few words of that section I was definitely expecting it to continue "so we used Claude to rewrite Hypothesis in Rust..." so that was quite a surprise!

It's on the agenda! We definitely want to rewrite the Hegel core server in rust, but not as much as we wanted to get it working well first.

My personal hope is that we can port most of the Hypothesis test suite to hegel-rust, then point Claude at all the relevant code and tell it to write us a hegel-core in rust with that as its test harness. Liam thinks this isn't going to work, I think it's like... 90% likely to get us close enough to working that we can carry it over the finish line. It's not a small project though. There are a lot of fiddly bits in Hypothesis, and the last time I tried to get Claude to port it to Rust the result was better than I expected but still not good enough to use.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#18

Post by pron »

tybug wrote: post #14
pron wrote: post #8

> property-based testing is going to be a huge part of how we make AI-agent-based software development not go terribly. There's no doubt, I think, testing will remain important and possibly become more important with more AI use, and so better testing is helpful, PBT included. But the problem remains verifying that the tests actually test what they're supposed to. Mutation tests can allow agents to get good coverage…

I actually think there's another angle here where PBT helps, which wasn't explored in the blog post. That angle is legibility . How do you know your AI-written slop software is doing the right thing? One would normally read all the code. Bad news: that's not much less labor intensive as not using AI at all. But, if one has comprehensive property-based tests, they can instead read only the property-based tests to conv…

Right, I said that property based tests are easier to read, and that's good. But people still have to actually read them. Also, because they still work best at the "unit" level, to understand them, the people reading them need to know how all the units are connected (e.g. a single person cannot review even PBTs required for 10KLOC per day [1]).

My point isn't so much about PBT, but about how we don't yet know just how much agents help write real software (and how to get the most help from them).

[1]: I'm only using that number because Garry Tan, CEO of YC, claimed to generate 10K lines of text per day that he believes to be working code and developers working with AI agents know they can't be.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#19

Post by DRMacIver »

pron wrote: post #8

> property-based testing is going to be a huge part of how we make AI-agent-based software development not go terribly. There's no doubt, I think, testing will remain important and possibly become more important with more AI use, and so better testing is helpful, PBT included. But the problem remains verifying that the tests actually test what they're supposed to. Mutation tests can allow agents to get good coverage…

> But the problem remains verifying that the tests actually test what they're supposed to.

Definitely. It's a lot harder to fake this with PBT than with example-based testing, but you can still write bad property-based tests and agents are pretty good at doing so.

I have generally found that agents with property-based tests are much better at not lying to themselves about it than agents with just example-based testing, but I still spend a lot of time yelling at Claude.

> So "a huge part" - possibly, but there are other huge parts still missing.

No argument here. We're not claiming to solve agentic coding. We're just testing people doing testing things, and we think that good testing tools are extra important in an agentic world.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#20

Post by sigbottle »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #11
hugeBirb wrote: post #4

Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.

Eh… it’s always worth keeping in mind the time period and what was going on with the tooling for mathematics and science at the time. Statistics wasn’t really quite mature enough to be applied to let’s say political economy a.k.a. economics which is what Hegel was working in. JB Say (1) was the leading mind in statistics at the time but wasn’t as popular in political circles (Notably Proudhon used Says work as episte…

I thought the dialectic was just a proof methodology, and especially the modern political angles you might year from say a Youtube video essay on Hegel, was because of a very careful narrative from some french dude (and I guess Marx with his dialectical materialism). I mean, I agree with many perspectives from 20th century continental philosophy, but it has to be agreed that they refactored Hegel for their own purposes, no?
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