azhenley

I shared a toy superoptimizer I made a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36117950

It was a really fun project!

Really? Why? Sounds like an ideal way to spend a sabbatical to me!

I’d say Lisp, Logo, and Basic as the top 3.

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

I do miss the fun, small side projects that used to be in the front page. Artisanal coding they call it now.

ProgramBench was published recently where agents have to reconstruct a program given just the binary and documentation.

https://programbench.com/

I wish sabbaticals from traditional jobs were a thing. Would love to do this!

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

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."

I love this blog. 10/10

I wrote about assessing students in the era of AI from when I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon: https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html

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.

"command line"

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...

This is the best article I’ve read this year. There’s so much truth in this.

There was some interesting discussion which data structure to use for Rhombus: https://github.com/racket/rhombus/discussions/221

You can read about Shrubbery, just adding the Rhombus syntax in Racket:

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

I want to see Dang’s list of fav classics :)

Writing a Lisp is one of my favorite projects. I try to do it every year or two, taking a different approach each time.

> This article was not written by AI.

:(

Search doesn’t seem to work.

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).

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.

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.

Good thing I’m actively writing a programming book!

(Reading HN to procrastinate.)

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.

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.

I spoke with a bunch of profs about how they were assessing students in the age of AI:

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

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

It was started 7 years ago.

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?

It was a convention to denote a variation or version. Not sure how the trend started though.