Top all-time · #8127
Sophia Willows
Personal blog · sophiabits.com/blog · on HN as sophiabitsprogrammingwebdata
Sophia Willows's personal blog at sophiabits.com covers programming, web and data. Since 2022, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-09, and you can follow it by feed.
What Hacker News says?
I’ve especially noticed this with gpt-4o-mini [1], and it’s a big problem. My particular use case involves keeping a running summary of a conversation between a user and the LLM, and 4o-mini has a really bad tendency of inventing details in order to hit the desired summary word limit. I didn’t see this with 4o or earlier models Fwiw my subjective experience has been that non-technical stakeholders tend to be more im…
Comment linking /blog/new-llms-arent-always-better
on “Structured Outputs in the API”Submitted Implicit is better than explicit as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThere’s a French think tank called “The Shift Project” which actually produced a report estimating CO2 impact of data transfer a few years ago [1]! The numbers are obviously very rough; there’s a LOT of factors to consider and which vary from one node to another. But the methodology is quite comprehensive, e.g. they factor in power consumption of the end user’s device while waiting for the data to transfer over the…
Comment linking /blog/the-cost-of-bandwidth
on “Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners”Submitted You just can't be Googling 'Select' as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe other possibility (which is common in startups) is that often the “right way” is different depending on the scale of the system you need to design for. In cases like this you end up with technical debt a year down the line, but at the time the feature was shipped the engineering decisions made were extremely reasonable. I’ve seen a few colleagues jump to writing off all technical debt as being inherently bad, bu…
Comment linking /blog/be-a-tidy-kiwi
on “Garbage collect your technical debt (2021)”Submitted Agentic checkout in ~100 lines of Python as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://sophiabits.com/blog I started a few years ago but only found a good rhythm in the past ~year. I am 75% of the way to my (arbitrary) goal of hitting 100k written words. Lots of posts on architecture, AWS, and performance with a little bit of engineering leadership mixed in. Some recent posts: * https://sophiabits.com/blog/understanding-secrets-manager (did you know Secrets Manager “staging labels” can be used…
Comment linking /feed.rss.xml
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted You can't always retry a 5xx as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think there's a tendency in our industry to forget just how hard it is to get decent at programming. All three of those topics you've listed are big, complicated, and hard to get right. I have coworkers today who struggle to write code that isn't susceptible to race conditions. Before you even get to concurrent programming, there are a thousand other things you need to learn beforehand. Interns / juniors have litt…
Comment linking /blog/the-one-change-id-make-to-se
on “Ask HN: Why do many CS graduates lack foundational knowledge?”Submitted It Takes a Village as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Is GPT-4 cost effective yet? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted RIP CSS `color-mod` function as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Great GraphQL APIs are behavior-oriented as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Software Reliability Happens in Depth as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A deep dive into OpenAI's Structured Outputs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted New LLMs aren't always better as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Conventional Changelogs Suck as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to track your SaaS' carbon footprint on AWS as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Identifying Slow PostgreSQL Queries as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
