Top all-time · #1033
Austin Z. Henley
Personal blog · austinhenley.com/blog · on HN as azhenleyprogrammingai
Austin Z. Henley's personal blog at austinhenley.com covers programming and ai. Since 2014, 64 different Hacker News readers have linked it 293 times, most often “Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Austin Z. Henley's blog for its challenging-projects lists, posts on progress bars and academic life, and write-ups of his research on programming tools and interfaces.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Called a great, lesser-known blog; challenging-projects lists recommended; information foraging post called helpful.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I work on AI + developer tools and blog my adventures.
Most-linked posts?
- Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)8 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2022-01-06
- Challenging algorithms and data structures every programmer should try5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-12-21
- Stopping at 90%5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-08-01
- Dear researchers: Is AI all you've got?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-02-22
- Learning to Code with and Without AI5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-04-01
- The design space of AI coding tools4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-10-18
- /blog.html4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-02-07
- How I would redesign Copilot Workspace – Austin Z. Henley4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-04-29
- Ad hoc tools for gathering prompt context4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-10-01
- Where are the proactive AI coding tools?4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-05-05
What Hacker News says?
We just published a paper on this topic. I wrote a summary of it, “Learning to code with and without AI”. https://austinhenley.com/blog/learningwithai.html
Comment linking /blog/learningwithai.html
on “I am starting an AI+Education company”Submitted Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019) as a story · 573 points
HN discussionSee my article from January 2023, "Natural language is the lazy user interface". https://austinhenley.com/blog/naturallanguageui.html
Comment linking /blog/naturallanguageui.html
on “Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools”Submitted A project with a single 11,000-line code file as a story · 498 points
HN discussionMy old post is relevant here, “Why I prefer making useless stuff”. Which is very different than working on useless stuff at work! https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html
Comment linking /blog/makinguselessstuff.html
on “Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?”Submitted Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes as a story · 325 points
HN discussionhttps://austinhenley.com/ My personal site including my blog about dev tools, academia, usability, and product design.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted What a $500k grant proposal looks like as a story · 293 points
HN discussionThis might be shocking to some, but when a researcher receiver a federal grant (for example), the university takes a significant cut which they refer to as Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs [1]. The F&A covers the so-called "indirect" costs of conducting research on university facilities: buildings, utilities, admin and accounting, support staff for compliance with federal regulations, etc. Each university h…
Comment linking /blog/grantbudget.html
on “California bans legacy admissions at private universities”Submitted Implementing Cosine in C from Scratch (2020) as a story · 264 points
HN discussionhttps://austinhenley.com/blog/morechallengingprojects.html
Comment linking /blog/morechallengingprojects.html
on “Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)”Submitted My 25-year adventure in AI and ML as a story · 194 points
HN discussionThat is in the sequel! “More challenging projects every programmer should try” https://austinhenley.com/blog/morechallengingprojects.html
Comment linking /blog/morechallengingprojects.html
on “Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)”Submitted Optimizing a bignum library for fun as a story · 145 points
HN discussionI published a paper comparing navigation time with a canvas-based editor (Code Bubbles) vs. traditional tab-based editor (Eclipe) vs. a carousel-based editor (Patchworks, a tool I designed). We found the canvas provided too much freedom. https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf
Comment linking /pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf
on “Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas”Submitted Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city as a story · 115 points
HN discussionEvery word you wrote is true. It's all still true if you replace "DSL" with any project and "Boring Old Language" with the competitor. This is the stopping at 90% problem somebody just posted a link to in another thread. edit: https://austinhenley.com/blog/90percent.html
Comment linking /blog/90percent.html
on “Dada, an experimental new programming language”Submitted Take my app ideas as a story · 112 points
HN discussionA bit of a plug, but for my senior project, my team is working bringing Patchworks (slide 80) to Atom. It's currently not open source (but will be after completion of the project). We are working with an author of the original paper. http://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014VLHCC_Patchworks.pdf
Comment linking /pubs/Henley2014VLHCC_Patchworks.pdf
on “Gallery of programming UIs”Submitted Type inference has usability problems as a story · 80 points
HN discussionI spent nearly a week of my Microsoft internship in 2016 adding support for Source Depot to the automated code reviewer that I was building ( https://austinhenley.com/blog/featurestheywanted.html ) despite having no idea what Source Depot was! Quite a few devs were still using it even then. I wonder if everything has been migrated to git yet.
Comment linking /blog/featurestheywanted.html
on “Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git”Submitted Baby's first type checker as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThey blogged about it here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html
Comment linking /blog/leavingacademia.html
on “Jack Dongarra wins Turing Award”Submitted The pain points of building a copilot as a story · 60 points
HN discussionYeah I think that would be useful and we'll get there! For studies someone else pointed out https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf
Comment linking /pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf
on “Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas”Submitted CodeAid: A classroom deployment of an LLM-based coding assistant as a story · 56 points
HN discussionBeware, canvas-based code editors (like Code Bubbles) have problems. A 1d carousel/ribbon performed better in some initial user studies: https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf
Comment linking /pubs/Henley2014CHI_Patchworks.pdf
on “Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas”Submitted The fastest way to detect a vowel in a string as a story · 48 points
HN discussionEDIT: Paste this hacky snippet into your browser's console to save all of the links into your clipboard: (() => { let result = [...document.querySelectorAll('td a')] .map((link) => link && !link.href.includes('ycombinator') && !link.href.includes('javascript:void') ? link.href : '' ) .filter(Boolean); result = [...new Set(result)]; result.sort(); copy(result.join('\n\n')); })(); Just to help, here's a compiled-list…
Comment linking /blog.html
on “Ask HN: Great Blogs by Programmers”Submitted Learning HTML was too hard so I made a compiler instead as a story · 45 points
HN discussion
