Top all-time · #7572
James McMurray
Personal blog · jamesmcm.github.io/blogprogrammingsystems
James McMurray's personal blog at jamesmcm.github.io covers programming and systems. Since 2020, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters cite this post, a take-home data engineering test that Claude did well on, as evidence of how AI coding tools handle clean assessments. They point to an off-by-one error it got wrong.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A technical blog about Rust, Linux and other topics.
Most-linked posts?
- Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-27
- My First Clippy Lint2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-28
- An Introduction to Data Oriented Design with Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-11
What Hacker News says?
I find it's good if you can get a really clean context, but on IRL problems with 100k+ lines of code that's extremely hard to manage. It absolutely aced an old take-home test I had though - https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/ But note the problems it got wrong are troubling, especially the off-by-one error the first time as that's the sort of thing a human might not be able to validate easily.
Comment linking /blog/claude-data-engineer/
on “Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI”Submitted An Introduction to Data Oriented Design with Rust as a story · 430 points
HN discussionThis feels a bit too optimistic, in practice it often gets stuck going down a rabbit hole (and burning up your requests / tokens doing it!). Like even when I tested it on a clean assessment (albeit with Cursor in this case) - https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/ - it did very well in agent mode, but the questions it got wrong were worrying because they're the sort of things that a human might not no…
Comment linking /blog/claude-data-engineer/
on “Claude Code feels like magic because it is iterative”Submitted Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS as a story · 362 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity as a story · 296 points
HN discussionSubmitted An Introduction to Data Oriented Design with Rust as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using the Internet Without IPv4 Connectivity (WireGuard and Network Namespaces) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted A practical introduction to Async programming in Rust as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Retrospective of my first useful Rust project as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A practical introduction to async programming in Rust as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted I made an AI Agent take an old Data Engineering test – it scored 92% as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted My First Clippy Lint as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Should I Program? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating a new Clippy lint (Rust) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted An introduction to data oriented design with Rust as a story · 1 points
HN discussion