Top all-time · #4448
Andrey Kurenkov
Personal blog · andreykurenkov.com/writing · on HN as andreykaiwriting
Andrey Kurenkov's personal blog at andreykurenkov.com covers ai and writing. Since 2016, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 73 times, most often “A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
A four-part blog series on the history of neural networks and deep learning, with references to the key publications. Commenters cite it as a clear history of how deep learning came about.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2016-01-04
- A 'Brief' History of Game AI3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-04-19
- A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning (2015)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-05
- Effective Teamwork: a one page guide2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-05-01
- KerasJS3D interactive deep learning demos2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-21
- Lessons Learned the Hard Way in Grad School (So Far)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-17
- A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning, Part 4 (2015)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-09
What Hacker News says?
Cool idea! http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/ Nowdays I largely write high-effort polished stuff about AI or life, with the occasional small fun thing thrown in. Not sure if it counts, but I also run https://www.skynettoday.com/ which is a blog where many actual human beings with appropriate education/experience write polished articles to combat AI misinformation/hype in the media and more broadly get across wha…
Comment linking /writing/
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning as a story · 245 points
HN discussionI think one thing this essay misses is that schools enable and encourage having one's own projects. Some examples from my experience: - In third year of high school I joined the FIRST robotics club, and it was a pretty transformative experience. Doing such a big project for the first time, which I could not have possibly tried on my own, was amazing. And of course it improved my social skills, my communication skill…
Comment linking /projects/major_projects/KerasJS3D/
on “A Project of One’s Own”Submitted Organizing My Emails with a Neural Net as a story · 147 points
HN discussionThis four-part series explains it well: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-neu...
Comment linking /writing/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning/
on “AlphaGo Beats Lee Sedol in Final Game”Submitted A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning, Part 4 (2015) as a story · 145 points
HN discussionAssuming you're asking specifically about the history of DL/ML, I can recommend this (4-part) blog series: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/ai/a-brief-history-of-... . It includes references for the relevant publications that identify problems (e.g., exploding gradients) and their solutions.
Comment linking /writing/ai/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning/
on “A week-long programming retreat”Submitted A 'Brief' History of Game AI Up to AlphaGo as a story · 71 points
HN discussionAs someone who has survived some really bad episodes of depression, a lot of the content of this resonates with me and seems like useful advice. I think "My inability to find anything relatable made things worse." is very true, there is very little out there of people sharing their recovery stories, so props to author for writing this! That being said, the dismissive use of 'Happy Pills' is a bit problematic IMO, fo…
Comment linking /writing/life/things-everyone-should-know-about-depression/
on “Surviving Depression”Submitted Lessons learned the hard way in grad school (so far) as a story · 49 points
HN discussionIt depends on how you publish - on medium the face is hidden, but if you have a personal blog it's easy to make your face and name up front (eg my own https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/life/lessons-learned-... ).
Comment linking /writing/life/lessons-learned-from-failures/
on “Writing is networking for introverts”Submitted A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning (2015) as a story · 47 points
HN discussionGreat writeup about how deep learning came to be: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-neu... (posted here a few months ago).
Comment linking /writing/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning/
on “The Difference Between AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning”Submitted Show HN: ObjectCropBot – Interactively Crop Objects from Photos with AI as a story · 33 points
HN discussioncs702, this deck started as a short talk so I didn't have time to acknowledge all the great work leading up to the Google YouTube experiment. Your list is good, and I'd add Rosenblatt for the first perceptron, Rumelhart & McClelland for applying techniques to perception, Werbos for backpropogation, Fukushima for convolutional networks, and so many more. I found these helpful while researching the history: http://www…
Comment linking /writing/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning/
on “AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning: A Primer [video]”Submitted The Sickness That Is Depression as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI took the Data Analyst nanodegree, paid entirely by my company as you say. I don't think it's really worth it as the classes are pretty shallow and undemanding, but after a year of doing it I did get a lot of exposure to different languages/technologies and the opportunity to do several cool projects (here's an example http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/visualizing-imdb-data-... ). So I think for expanding your…
Comment linking /writing/visualizing-imdb-data-with-d3/
on “Udacity the new ITT Tech?”Submitted The Sickness That Is Depression as a story · 13 points
HN discussionQuite neat! Some constructive feedback - I think in addition to mouse controls, having keyboard 'spaceship' flying around is pretty important. I would also try to add model interprability tools (SmoothGrad) as an option, and perhaps contact some of those researchers to see how this can best be used for model understanding (I would guess visualizing grad flows / weights is more interesting than just layers). PS I act…
Comment linking /projects/major_projects/KerasJS3D/
on “Show HN: TensorSpace.js – Neural network 3D visualization framework”Submitted Effective Teamwork – A One Page Guide as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFor those curious, I wrote a similar little post: https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/project/what-brief-ha... Don't think I mentioned it in there, but this was also through a 'consider re-submitting' email (though I've had a couple more on front page without that process since). That post was a ton of work (like 6 weeks straight) so it was nice to get the bump and get it more visibility. To this day that post ge…
Comment linking /writing/project/what-brief-hacker-news-fame-looks-like/
on “Getting Featured on Hacker News”Submitted The Sickness That Is Depression as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOh man, cool to see this on front page of HN again. For convenience, here is the first part where its best to start: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-neu... One of these days I'll finally get around to making a PDF version that's a bit more convenient to save for lengthy reading and not just a series of blog posts...
Comment linking /writing/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning/
on “A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning, Part 4 (2015)”Submitted A Brief History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning, Part 1 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThese are all precisely the right questions to ask about this, I think. My take is that the approaches of AlphaGo are more applicable to other problems than DeepBlue, but not by much. Rigid rules make tree search and reinforcement learning easily applicable to Go, but not so much for many real life problems. I made a small diagram to illustrate this point ( http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/images/2016-4-15-a-br…
Comment linking /writing/a-brief-history-of-game-ai
on “DarkForest: Deep learning engine for playing Go from Facebook research”Submitted Things Everyone Should Know About Depression as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDeep learning may have become the flavor of the season now, but ironically its pioneers like LeCun and Hinton too faced similar problems when they tried to publish [1]. [1]: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-neu...
Comment linking /writing/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning-part-4/
on “Computer Vision Research: The deep “depression””Submitted My Failures as a Grad Student at the Stanford AI Lab, and Lessons Learned as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGood list! As a PhD student and therefore AI researcher for a few years now, a lot of this rings true. Though 100 lessons is too much and some of these are obvious/minor, i'd distill it down to the main ones. Here's my 2 cents on the topic from a thing I wrote last year ('Lessons Learned the Hard Way in Grad School (so far)'): https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/life/lessons-learned-...
Comment linking /writing/life/lessons-learned-from-failures/
on “Lessons from a year of AI research”Submitted The Sickness That Is Depression as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
