Top all-time · #2515
Pamela Fox
Personal blog · blog.pamelafox.orgprogrammingai
Pamela Fox writes pamela fox's blog, a personal blog at blog.pamelafox.org about programming and ai. Since 2010, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 87 times, most often “Technical Interviews Make Me Cry”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Technical Interviews Make Me Cry3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-09-15
- What to look for in a software engineering culture (2013)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-07-24
- Integrating Vision into RAG Applications2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-08
- Server-side HTML vs. JS Widgets vs. Single-Page Web Apps2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-06-03
- A Tale of Two Bootstraps: Lessons Learned in Maintainable CSS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-12-16
What Hacker News says?
I know :( But I think vector DBs and vector search got so hyped that people thought you could switch entirely over to them. Lots of APIs and frameworks also used "vector store" as the shorthand for "retrieval data source", which didn't help. That's why I write blog posts like https://blog.pamelafox.org/2024/06/vector-search-is-not-enou...
Comment linking /2024/06/vector-search-is-not-enough.html
on “Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents”Submitted A visual exploration of vector embeddings as a story · 185 points
HN discussionI’ve also seen that GPTs struggle to admit when they dont know. I wrote up an approach for evaluating that here - http://blog.pamelafox.org/2024/03/evaluating-rag-chat-apps-c... Changing the prompt didn't help, but moving to GPT-4 did help a bit.
Comment linking /2024/03/evaluating-rag-chat-apps-can-your-app.html?m=1
on “Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens”Submitted Technical Interviews Make Me Cry as a story · 127 points
HN discussionthere are actually several variants of keyboards on all devices (not just numeric or alphanumeric). the phone entry keyboard is different, and there are a couple others. it's not just iOS. to make the right one pop up in ios you have to do stuff like pattern=[0-9]*, but that becomes restrictive, too. http://blog.pamelafox.org/2012/05/triggering-numeric-keyboar...
Comment linking /2012/05/triggering-numeric-keyboards-with-html5.html
on “Cleave.js – Format input text content when you are typing”Submitted My experience as a Unit-18 Berkeley Lecturer as a story · 112 points
HN discussionI was the most recent instructor of 61A and just wrote up tips on auditing it: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2022/07/how-to-audit-cs61a.html However, I don't recommend 61A for folks new to programming, it's better as a second course.
Comment linking /2022/07/how-to-audit-cs61a.html
on “CS101: Introduction to Computing Principles”Submitted Server-side HTML vs. JS Widgets vs. Single-Page Web Apps as a story · 84 points
HN discussionHere's an interesting chart I came across recently: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aq_a4WNAMuCEdDd... (via http://blog.pamelafox.org/2011/11/porting-from-jquery-to-zep... )
Comment linking /2011/11/porting-from-jquery-to-zepto.html
on “Stop Paying Your jQuery Tax”Submitted A Tale of Two Bootstraps: Lessons Learned in Maintainable CSS as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI just wrote a blog post on "theming" bootstrap by overriding CSS (as opposed to using Less, since I use SaSS). Might be useful for people interested in customizing their Bootstrap: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2012/02/theming-twitter-bootstrap-...
Comment linking /2012/02/theming-twitter-bootstrap-without-less.html
on “Show HN: Themes for Bootstrap”Submitted Switching from jQuery Mobile to Twitter Bootstrap as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI'm currently reading a set of 10 blogs that revolve around design/branding/user experience, as I want to improve my skills there. I wrote up a post with links to them here: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2011/05/reading-my-way-to-better-d... (And to be meta about it, I based that list of blogs on a previous hackernews thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103578 )
Comment linking /2011/05/reading-my-way-to-better-design.html
on “Ask HN: Apart from Hacker News, what else you read?”Submitted Integrating Vision into RAG Applications as a story · 26 points
HN discussionHow does this compare to llamafile? I recently started experimenting with pointing my openAI web apps at local llamafile and its pretty straightforward: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2024/01/using-llamafile-for-local-... Llamafile doesnt support an OpenAI compatible embedding endpoint yet but I filed an issue and they seem to be interested in adding it.
Comment linking /2024/01/using-llamafile-for-local-dev-for.html?m=1
on “Nitro: A fast, lightweight inference server with OpenAI-Compatible API”Submitted Google Shared Spaces: Why We Made It as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog post on a similar topic, after mentoring several would-be engineers that were curious about finding a good fit after graduating: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2013/07/what-to-look-for-in-softwa... That post also turned into a slide deck: https://speakerdeck.com/pamelafox/engineering-culture I think we cover very similar areas. One of the big red flags for me, personally, is code review (lack thereof). If…
Comment linking /2013/07/what-to-look-for-in-software.html
on “Questions I'm asking in technical interviews”Submitted What I learnt from my 3 days & 2 nights on StartupBus as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIf you are writing tests with pytest, I wrote these blog posts about combining pytest, playwright, and axe-core: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2023/07/automated-accessibility-au... http://blog.pamelafox.org/2023/08/accessibility-snapshot-tes... Great to see Slack using a similar combo!
Comment linking /2023/08/accessibility-snapshot-testing-for.html
on “Automated accessibility testing at Slack”Submitted JavaScript UI Library Design as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThey probably do, but I even recognize the bias in myself. Even having experienced the wrong end of it, I often recognize myself subconsciously defaulting to less respect to another woman in technical matters. Down in her comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2274993 pamelafox linked a blog post she had written about it being good to be a girl in CS, but that post references a previous one she'd written in whi…
Comment linking /2009/10/should-i-defend-my-cred-yes.html
on “The Benefits of Being a Female Software Engineer”Submitted Automated repository maintenance with the GitHub Copilot coding agent as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI actually wrote a post with similar sentiments a while back - "Being a Girl in CS Doesn't Suck": http://blog.pamelafox.org/2009/10/being-girl-in-cs-doesnt-su... As for the casual attire, I think it goes both ways. I'm totally into casual most of the times (to the point of wearing my head-to-toe footed pajamas to work), but then the days when I want to dress up or wear a mini-skirt or whatever, I feel like I'm stand…
Comment linking /2009/10/being-girl-in-cs-doesnt-suck.html
on “The Benefits of Being a Female Software Engineer”Submitted To MCP or Not to MCP? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI’ve got this RAG repo working entirely locally (Ollama/Postgres) but it doesnt RAG on documents like you want. https://github.com/Azure-Samples/rag-postgres-openai-python I’d like to make that version when I have the time, probably just using Llamaindex for the ingestion. My tips for getting SLMs working well for RAG: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2024/08/making-ollama-compatible-r...
Comment linking /2024/08/making-ollama-compatible-rag-app.html?m=1
on “Ask HN: Local RAG with private knowledge base”Submitted Proficient Python: A free interactive online course as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI ended up porting from jQuery to Zepto for my mobile PhoneGap app, where the files are stored locally. Porting to Zepto resulted in performance gains due to the browser taking less time to actually parse the JavaScript. Here's a blog post I wrote with more info and performance comparison: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2011/11/porting-from-jquery-to-zep...
Comment linking /2011/11/porting-from-jquery-to-zepto.html
on “Microjs: an index of javascript micro frameworks”Submitted Teaching Python with GitHub Codespaces as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've always liked take-home projects for 2 reasons: 1) I get extremely anxious during interviews, so I don't perform well in them (to the point of crying sometimes - http://blog.pamelafox.org/2013/09/technical-interviews-make-... ) 2) I like getting to see what it'd be like to do the sort of work that the company would be asking me to do for my job - it's a good taste to see if the company would be a good fit for me…
Comment linking /2013/09/technical-interviews-make-me-cry.html
on “Show HN: Interviews can be stressful – give take-home projects instead”Submitted Making a RAG app work with Ollama models as a story · 3 points
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