HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

azhenley

25,168 karma · joined December 4, 2014

Applied science at Microsoft. AI and developer tools. Ex startup, ex professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

http://austinhenley.com

submissionscomments
azhenley··on What I did at Recurse Center
Really? Why? Sounds like an ideal way to spend a sabbatical to me!
azhenley··on Logo Programming
I’d say Lisp, Logo, and Basic as the top 3.

How come no one makes dialects of PHP?? :)

azhenley··on Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?
I do miss the fun, small side projects that used to be in the front page. Artisanal coding they call it now.
azhenley··on Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft
ProgramBench was published recently where agents have to reconstruct a program given just the binary and documentation.

https://programbench.com/

azhenley··on RecurseCenter.return()
I wish sabbaticals from traditional jobs were a thing. Would love to do this!

Can I help open an RC office in Seattle? :)

azhenley··on Playa Phone
I'm not sure why, but my ISP blocked this page and sent a push notification saying, "This device tried to visit a website that may compromise it or contain dangerous content."
azhenley··on Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding
I love this blog. 10/10
azhenley··on Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
I wrote about assessing students in the era of AI from when I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon: https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html
azhenley··on Voxatron
Years ago I had hoped Voxatron and voxel-ish games inspired by it would have taken off more. I wonder why it hasn't saturated the indie game scene more.
azhenley··on Duskers, the scary command line game, is getting a sequel
"command line"
azhenley··on OpenAI Forked Git on GitHub
A lot of folks are building “git for agents”.

Oak, recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48631726

Former GitHub CEO’s new company Entire: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/former-github-ceos-startup-ent...

azhenley··on Half-Baked Product
This is the best article I’ve read this year. There’s so much truth in this.
azhenley··on RRB-Trees: Efficient Immutable Vectors (2012) [pdf]
There was some interesting discussion which data structure to use for Rhombus: https://github.com/racket/rhombus/discussions/221
azhenley··on Rhombus Language 1.0
You can read about Shrubbery, just adding the Rhombus syntax in Racket:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/shrubbery/index.html

azhenley··on (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)
I want to see Dang’s list of fav classics :)
azhenley··on (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)
Writing a Lisp is one of my favorite projects. I try to do it every year or two, taking a different approach each time.
azhenley··on Automating my job away
> This article was not written by AI.

:(

azhenley··on Hacker News but for Independent Blogs
Search doesn’t seem to work.
azhenley··on I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
Are the 14,078 share events from unique users? If not, the usage rate would be even lower (<0.21% of users share but sometimes share multiple times).
azhenley··on I Won't Buy You a Coffee
Blogs are free/cheap to host, not necessarily free/cheap to produce, and they might have a huge impact on the reader. I am happy to support my favorite content creators in a small way.
azhenley··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
My agent checks my session logs to look for things that I should automate. I blogged about how I got there: https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html Maybe I'll share some of the skills.
azhenley··on Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
Good thing I’m actively writing a programming book!

(Reading HN to procrastinate.)

azhenley··on Three constraints before I build anything
We used to call this “concept count”. You usually want to minimize the number of core concepts that make up your product. I’ve also heard it as the “nouns and verbs” of a product.
azhenley··on I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator in my own programming language
I wish there was a writeup about the emulator. I did find the documentation for the language: https://spectre-docs.pages.dev

Over 900 commits and 400k loc to Spectre in less than 3 weeks has me thinking this is all AI.

azhenley··on College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
I spoke with a bunch of profs about how they were assessing students in the age of AI:

https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html

azhenley··on The paper computer
Reminds me of Paper Website from the Tiny Projects series, discussed back in 2021.

https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/paper_website

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550812

azhenley··on A Compiler Writing Journey
It was started 7 years ago.
azhenley··on MonoGame: A .NET framework for making cross-platform games
I was trying to compare the two. At first glance, MonoGame has far more stars and recent commits. Or is it just in maintenance mode?
azhenley··on PL/0
It was a convention to denote a variation or version. Not sure how the trend started though.
azhenley··on Flashpoint Archive – Over 200k web games and animations preserved
A few of my games from 2009 are on here! Very cool.
Page 1 of 34Next →