Top all-time · #140
Hillel Wayne
Personal blog · hillelwayne.comprogrammingmathcareer
Hillel Wayne's personal blog at hillelwayne.com covers programming, math and career. Since 2017, 301 different Hacker News readers have linked it 522 times, most often “Are We Really Engineers? (2021)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 15 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Hillel Wayne's posts on whether software engineering is real engineering, formal methods like TLA+, and division by zero, and call them worth reading.
- Recommended for · 15 comments
- Called 'good', 'interesting', 'excellent' and 'outstanding'; also 'worth reading', 'the best answer'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Are We Really Engineers? (2021)34 people · 40 mentions · first linked 2021-07-21
- 1/0 = 016 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2018-08-10
- Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-03-26
- Is Software Engineering Real Engineering?8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-10-04
- There's Always More History8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-12-08
- Performance Matters8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-08-08
- The Hard Part of Learning a Language7 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-04-28
- The Crossover Project7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-07-03
- What We Know We Don't Know7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-08-22
- We Are Not Special (2021)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-10-04
What Hacker News says?
They were definitely influential, but it's way more complicated and probably has as much to do with The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing, which was Microsoft-based. Here's an article that digs into this specific history: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
Comment linking /post/linked-lists/
on “My dad's resume and skills from 1980”Submitted The hunt for the missing data type as a story · 690 points
HN discussionYour comment reminded me of this interesting read, https://hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
Comment linking /post/influential-dead-languages/
on “X”Submitted Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? as a story · 674 points
HN discussion> Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer. Sadly, no, it's not just that. Most my immediate colleagues, for example, don't know of her or her work, either. It's one heck of a field. She had expressed some dismay, in interviews, at being the first woman to win the Turing Award. Not the Turing Award part, of course, the "first woman" part. She was far from being the first deserving candidate who didn't h…
Comment linking /important-women-in-cs/
on “Frances Allen has died”Submitted 1/0 = 0 as a story · 650 points
HN discussionI found Hillel Wayne's series on the topic interesting, where he interviewed people that had worked in both "traditional engineering" and software. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ (first post, later ones linked from the top)
Comment linking /post/are-we-really-engineers/
on “Overly analytical guide to escorting”Submitted Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? as a story · 420 points
HN discussionCover topics around software development, math, programming languages, and academia: http://stuffwithstuff.com/ https://ericlippert.com/ http://thume.ca/archive.html https://medium.com/@mdwdotla https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/posts https://computinged.wordpress.com/ https://blog.acolyer.org/ https://blog.sigplan.org/blog/ https://blog.paranoidcoding.com/ https://blog.regehr.org/ https://eli.thegreenplace.net/ h…
Comment linking /post/
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages as a story · 417 points
HN discussion- https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/ - http://hintjens.com/ - https://idlewords.com/ - https://stevelosh.com/blog/ - https://magnus.therning.org/archive.html
Comment linking /post/
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted In Praise of AutoHotKey as a story · 414 points
HN discussionI have found other good articles on the same topic, by Hillel Wayne author of Practical TLA+ Uncle Bob is ruining software - https://hillelwayne.com/post/10x/ Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets - https://hillelwayne.com/post/uncle-bob/
Comment linking /post/uncle-bob/
on “It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)”Submitted Planner programming blows my mind as a story · 412 points
HN discussionOr just defining the result of division by zero as zero "for safety": https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/ It boggles the mind, truly!
Comment linking /post/divide-by-zero/
on “Turns are better than radians”Submitted Crimes with Python's pattern matching as a story · 406 points
HN discussionTo expand on the "interfaces are not enough" part: Defining an interface on an abstract type only gives you that a implementation exists, not that it is correct , i.e. that the specific implementation for a subtype guarantees the same properties the interface specifies. On top of this, you really want to be alerted to when you expect more of an interface than the interface guarantees - this is what happened in the c…
Comment linking /post/spec-composition/
on “Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem”Submitted Performance Matters as a story · 401 points
HN discussionhttps://www.hillelwayne.com/post/performance-matters/ was a good article that I'm sure came up in HN about two weeks ago that covers this very point. It pays not to be dismissive about peoples' feelings when it comes to software, particularly around speed; they do matter.
Comment linking /post/performance-matters/
on “In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default”Submitted Learn TLA+ as a story · 350 points
HN discussionYes. See eg https://hillelwayne.com/talks/beyond-unit-tests/
Comment linking /talks/beyond-unit-tests/
on “Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]”Submitted Are We Really Engineers? (2021) as a story · 317 points
HN discussion> That's a fairly new term that implies being engineers which we are not. We haven't studied to be engineers, nor have real engineering degrees. We've called ourselves that because we were doing much more than the original job of programmer and felt like we deserved a raise. Uh, speak for yourself. There are countries where being a software engineer does indeed imply that you studied engineering and hold a "real" en…
Comment linking /post/are-we-really-engineers/
on “Vibe engineering”Submitted Formally Specifying UIs (2018) as a story · 307 points
HN discussionIt's not inconsistent. See this article [1] for an explanation. It's the first thing covered in the "Objections" section. [1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/
Comment linking /post/divide-by-zero/
on “1/0 = 0”Submitted Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets as a story · 277 points
HN discussionThat's a good comparison given asserts are specs. If you like asserts, the easiest, high-ROI method of getting into verification is Design-by-Contract. Here's both a way to sell it to your boss and some articles highlighting it: https://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/edu/2ip30/references/design-b... https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/contracts/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/pbt-contracts/ Many of us independently converged…
Comment linking /post/pbt-contracts/
on “Google Is Uncovering Hundreds of Race Conditions Within the Linux Kernel”Submitted Vim tricks as a story · 269 points
HN discussionProbably, the best answer to the "programming is easy" mindset I've read is this article[1] about whether software engineering is actually engineering. Turns out we are engineers, and we're not even that special as far as engineering goes. And it's funny, because the article has nothing to do with whether programming is hard or not. Not idea what Wayne thinks of the matter. [1]: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/cros…
Comment linking /post/crossover-project/we-are-not-special/
on “Programming is hard”Submitted An RNG that runs in your brain as a story · 259 points
HN discussion
