1
I canceled my book deal
I've always wanted to write a book, and I was close, but not this time.
Austin Henley
I work on AI + developer tools and blog my adventures.
- Popular posts
- 19
- Total points
- 5,115
- HN comments
- 2,592
- Rank
- #212 personal
Visit austinhenley.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2022 – Sep 2026
Software Engineering 11Career & Management 6Life, Learning & Writing 4Math & Algorithms 3Tech Industry & Business 3AI & Machine Learning 3
2
Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)
Challenging projects every programmer should try
3
A project with a single 11,000-line code file
I was responsible for a critical software project written by non-programmers a decade ago.
4
Challenging algorithms and data structures every programmer should try
Bored of algorithms? Here are my recommendations that are exciting, understandable, and sometimes even useful!
5
Stopping at 90%
A common pattern is to stop short of the real finish line for your project. A little evangelism, documentation, and polish can go a long way.
6
Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
I challenged myself to make a tiny subset of Python in C.
7
Natural language is the lazy user interface
A chatbot is the lazy user interface. It puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions.
8
What a $500k grant proposal looks like
A walkthrough of my NSF CAREER proposal.
9
Implementing Cosine in C from Scratch (2020)
How does the math library's trigonometric function work?
10
My first superoptimizer
I heard about these mythical programs that find optimal code through a brute-force search, but I didn't know how they worked. So I made one.
11
My 25-year adventure in AI and ML
This is the 25-year story of how I fell into the field of AI.
12
The future of programming: Research at CHI 2023
Research on programming tools published at CHI 2023.
13
Optimizing a bignum library for fun
Can I make math operations run 100x faster on really, really big numbers?
14
Programming as Play
I often want to program something just for fun without any expectations. But why? Well, a recent scientific paper investigated this idea of programming as play.
15
What does a research grant pay for?
People don't usually share what a research grant pays for, so here are the budgets from mine.
16
Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
Gamification works too well on me. I'll do anything for a high score, to complete a progress bar, or to unlock an achievement.
17
Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city
I made a library that takes GPS coordinates and gives you the state.
18
Take my app ideas
I would rather give away my favorite ideas than to let them go to waste. Please do something with them.
19
Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler (2020)
Make your own BASIC to C compiler in Python.