Top all-time · #1281
Vicki Boykis
Personal blog · vickiboykis.comprogrammingaicareer
Vicki Boykis's personal blog at vickiboykis.com covers programming, ai and career. Since 2022, 54 different Hacker News readers have linked it 107 times, most often “What Are Embeddings?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Vicki Boykis's blog for explainers on embeddings and machine learning, including a free book on embeddings, and for essays on software practice and industry culture.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Recommended as free embeddings material and a great blog for ML newcomers; 'How I Learn Machine Learning' called super useful.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
★Vicki Boykis★
Most-linked posts?
- What Are Embeddings?10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2023-06-06
- How I Learn Machine Learning4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-11-13
- Querying 3B Vectors4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-23
- Write code with your Alphabet Radio on4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-12-17
- I Want to See the Claw4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-10-22
- Everything I learned about accidentally running a successful tech conference3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-22
- Naming Things3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-06-29
- How big are our embeddings now and why?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-01
- The cloudy layers of modern-day programming3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-06
- Mechanical Sympathy3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-04-14
What Hacker News says?
Off the top of my head - try to implement techniques that are doable on home hardware like the one described in OP (requires some $$$ investment) and give feedback or contribute to documentation / guides - learn about different techniques and do educational writeups or documentation (like https://vickiboykis.com/2024/02/28/gguf-the-long-way-around/ ) - build a tool / library that wrap academic techinques and expose…
Comment linking /2024/02/28/gguf-the-long-way-around/
on “Fine tune a 70B language model at home”Submitted GGUF, the Long Way Around as a story · 249 points
HN discussionI remember this post[0], here, a while back. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to coding ), for my entire adult life, and I’ve learned (the hard way, of course) that “ship” is always at least a couple of clicks back from “bleeding edge.” I’m in the home stretch of an app that I’ve been developing for the last year and a half, or so. The backend is written in PHP, and the frontend is a “classic” UIKit/Storyboard/MVC app…
Comment linking /2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/
on “Building for the 99% Developers”Submitted Redis is forked as a story · 226 points
HN discussionVicki Boykis wrote a small book about it: https://vickiboykis.com/what_are_embeddings/
Comment linking /what_are_embeddings/
on “LLM Embeddings Explained: A Visual and Intuitive Guide”Submitted 20 Years of YC / HN as a story · 175 points
HN discussion> They are the dark matter of software developers. That reminds me of an article that was linked from here, a couple of years ago, titled “IT Runs On Java 8”[0]. I worked for hardware manufacturers, for most of my career, and can report that it’s even worse. That’s because the company does have an engineering culture, but one with drastically different priorities and processes. Our software shops were expected to ru…
Comment linking /2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/
on “The other kind of staff software engineer”Submitted Retro on Viberary as a story · 170 points
HN discussionReminds me of a story that was linked from here, a few years ago[0]. Places like this, get caught up in “shiny,” and that doesn’t always reflect reality. For example, it is fashionable, hereabout, to throw shade on PHP. I present Exhibit A, the “Fishtank Graph”[1]. We were just discussing something similar, yesterday, in the SwiftUI thread[2]. [0] https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/ [1] https://w3t…
Comment linking /2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/
on “The silent majority in software”Submitted We've been put in the vibe space as a story · 164 points
HN discussionThat is essentially correct. You take an object and "embed" it in a high-dimensional vector space to represent it. For a deep dive, I highly recommend Vicki Boykis's free materials: https://vickiboykis.com/what_are_embeddings/
Comment linking /what_are_embeddings/
on “The Illustrated Word2Vec (2019)”Submitted Some notes on the Stable Diffusion safety filter as a story · 143 points
HN discussionYou might want to check out Automattic (the makers of Wordpress) and their P2 tool - https://vickiboykis.com/2021/07/17/writing-for-distributed-t...
Comment linking /2021/07/17/writing-for-distributed-teams/
on “Ask HN: Help me help my deaf teammate”Submitted How big are our embeddings now and why? as a story · 113 points
HN discussionIT Runs on Java 8 https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/ hn discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19877916
Comment linking /2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/
on “Digitally sign PDF files from your commandline – open-pdf-sign”Submitted Writing for distributed teams (2021) as a story · 83 points
HN discussionArticle was deleted and reposted as '20 Years Of YC' https://vickiboykis.com/2025/03/17/20-years-of-yc/
Comment linking /2025/03/17/20-years-of-yc/
on “20 Years of HN”Submitted Bad code is kudzu as a story · 65 points
HN discussiondon't think she has posted here, but Vicki Boykis blogged about this today: https://vickiboykis.com/2026/06/15/running-local-models-is-g...
Comment linking /2026/06/15/running-local-models-is-good-now/
on “Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?”Submitted How large should your sample size be? as a story · 39 points
HN discussionSince publishing this I've found a few additional resources that are really useful for understanding embeddings at a lower level (my article is deliberately very high level and focuses mainly on their applications). Cohere's Text Embeddings Visually Explained: https://txt.cohere.com/text-embeddings/ The Tensorflow Embedding Projector tool: https://projector.tensorflow.org/ What are embeddings? by Vicki Boykis is wor…
Comment linking /what_are_embeddings/
on “Embeddings: What they are and why they matter”Submitted Don't Worry about LLMs as a story · 33 points
HN discussionThe pull quote in the center is so divine, tells the entire story of where we were vs where we are: > Instead of working on the core of the code and focusing on the performance of a self-contained application, developers are now forced to act as some kind of monstrous manual management layer between hundreds of various APIs, puzzling together whether Flark 2.3.5 on a T5.enormous instance will work with a Kappa funct…
Comment linking /2022/12/05/the-cloudy-layers-of-modern-day-programming/
on “A Faster Horse: Infrastructure was the cloud’s first act. What’s its second?”Submitted How I Search in 2024 as a story · 24 points
HN discussionRelated: Vicki Boykis has a great blog[1], particularly for those trying to get their feet wet in the ML engineering space—I really found "How I Learn Machine Learning"[2] super useful as a template to tackle new ML problems, as someone who is new to the field. [1] https://vickiboykis.com/ [2] https://vickiboykis.com/2022/11/10/how-i-learn-machine-learn...
Comment linking /2022/11/10/how-i-learn-machine-learning/
on “What Are Embeddings?”Submitted Why are we using LLMs as calculators? as a story · 20 points
HN discussionSubmitted We should be more tired than the model as a story · 19 points
HN discussionSubmitted How I search in 2024 as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted How I Learn Machine Learning as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Want to See the Claw as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
