Top all-time · #6916
Dan Stroot
Personal blog · danstroot.com/postsaicareerbusiness
Dan Stroot's personal blog at danstroot.com covers ai, career and business. Since 2014, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “Hammer Factories”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite Dan Stroot's 2018 'Hammer Factories' post, a mirror of Joel Spolsky's essay on general-purpose tool-building factories, when joking about factory-factory patterns in software design threads.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Technology leader, builder, and eternal optimist. Writing about leadership, engineering, and the future of technology.
Most-linked posts?
- Hammer Factories7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-07-28
- /2018/10/03/hammer-factories/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-07
What Hacker News says?
This was covered over a year ago: https://danstroot.com/2017/03/19/the-man-least-likely-to-suc...
Comment linking /2017/03/19/the-man-least-likely-to-succeed-in-politics/
on “Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation”Submitted AI Agents Need Good Management Too as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou don't need a "general hammer" - they are old fashioned - you need a "general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory": https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
Comment linking /posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
on “Reasoning models reason well, until they don't”Submitted Show HN: AI Manifesto as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAnything in CS can be generalized to its purest, most theoretical forms. The question is how usable is it and how much work does it take to get anything done. See - https://danstroot.com/2018/10/03/hammer-factories/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20120427101911/http://jacksonfis... Bazel, for example, is tailored to the needs of reproducible builds and meets its audience where it is at, on the command line. People wa…
Comment linking /2018/10/03/hammer-factories/
on “Modern CI is too complex and misdirected”Submitted It's Time to Rethink the Offshore Development Model as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSo, the stereotype (mostly negative ;P) of "fully idiomatic Java" involves using factories (themselves managed by factory factories via dependency injection through factory factory factories... see "the hammer factory" post mirrored at https://danstroot.com/2018/10/03/hammer-factories/ or, to a lesser extent, Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom... for mor…
Comment linking /2018/10/03/hammer-factories/
on “Can I get some reasons to use Java instead of Kotlin?”Submitted Hammer Factories as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWorse, don’t be a “meat shield” either! https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2026-04-16-ai-meat-shields
Comment linking /posts/2026-04-16-ai-meat-shields
on “Don't be a meat proxy”Submitted Hammer Factories as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes, but what about the Factory Factory Pattern? https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
Comment linking /posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
on “Nobody has built a software factory”Submitted Making Software Last Forever as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://www.danstroot.com .
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted ChatGPT-4 is More Creative than You as a story · 1 points
HN discussionReminds me of Joel Spolsky's Hammer Factory (original is sadly no longer available): https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
Comment linking /posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
on “You have ruined JavaScript (2014)”Submitted Free to Believe Anything as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThor's Law: As the length of a thread about software design increases, the probability of someone mentioning a "general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory" approaches one. Including the act of quoting Thor's Law. ——— https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
Comment linking /posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
on “IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI News”Submitted Facebook Saves a Billion Dollars via Open Compute Designs as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> A competent Java programmer is not slower than a competent Python programmer. Time to market won't suffer. A fast horse is not slower than a fast car. Languages and ecosystems shape how people think. For example, you will find that Java and Python programmers have very different values and principles. Given same options, they will make extremely different choices. Clearly this is going to have at least some effect…
Comment linking /posts/2018-10-03-hammer-factories
on “Why Picnic Picked Java”https://www.danstroot.com/ Mainly technology leadership topics. Cheers!
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”
