Top all-time · #11445
John Regehr
Personal blog · john.regehr.org/writingprogrammingsystemsai
John Regehr's personal blog at john.regehr.org covers programming, systems and ai. Since 2009, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “I Fuzzed, and Vibe Fixed, the Vibed C Compiler”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link John Regehr's posts on types versus tests, zero degrees-of-freedom programming for LLMs, LaTeX sentence spacing, a reading-list entry, and fuzzing the Claude C compiler. The comments only cite them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- I Fuzzed, and Vibe Fixed, the Vibed C Compiler2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-02
- Taming LLMs: Using Executable Oracles to Prevent Bad Code2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-26
What Hacker News says?
Types replace entire classes of tests that coverage metrics wouldn't detect [0]. Types are also documentation! They also decrease the degrees of freedom LLMs have to make mistakes [1]. [0] https://kevinmahoney.co.uk/articles/tests-vs-types/ [1] https://john.regehr.org/writing/zero_dof_programming.html
Comment linking /writing/zero_dof_programming.html
on “Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language”Submitted Efficient reading of papers in science and technology as a story · 4 points
HN discussionTeX has reasonable defaults, but it is not all-knowing. A typist who cares about the spacing of his document must memorize TeX's period-spacing rules and carefully annotate the exceptions -- which includes both errors of too much and too little space: http://john.regehr.org/latex/#little
Comment linking /latex/
on “One Space or Two? When did this change?”Submitted Taming LLMs: Using Executable Oracles to Prevent Bad Code as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"The Feeling of Power", by Isaac Asimov. In this story, humans have forgotten how to do basic math, except for one man, who regards it as a hobby. edit: http://john.regehr.org/reading_list/power.html
Comment linking /reading_list/power.html
on “Ask HN: Whats your favorite Sci-Fi short story?”Submitted I Fuzzed, and Vibe Fixed, the Vibed C Compiler as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSomeone actually did fuzz the claude c compiler: https://john.regehr.org/writing/claude_c_compiler.html
Comment linking /writing/claude_c_compiler.html
on “When AI Writes the Software, Who Verifies It?”
