Top all-time · #17329
Brandon Brown
Personal blog · outlace.comaiprogramming
Brandon Brown writes Outlace, a personal blog at outlace.com about ai and programming. Since 2015, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Topological Data Analysis (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-02-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link Brandon Brown's posts on category theory, topological data analysis and reinforcement learning, one with Python code to try. The links are given as follow-ups to other HN threads.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I like to write about science and engineering. Launched 2 years ago.
Most-linked posts?
- Topological Data Analysis (2017)2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-11-16
What Hacker News says?
Fascinating. More on the topological data analysis: http://outlace.com/TDApart1.html
Comment linking /TDApart1.html
on “Category Theory Illustrated: Logic (2021)”Submitted Gradient Descent with Backpropagation as a story · 34 points
HN discussionTo those interested in machine learning, this idea naturally leads to “deep tensor networks” that are neural networks that can operate on and with high order tensors. I wrote a (non-rigorous) blog post about this: http://outlace.com/TensorNets1.html
Comment linking /TensorNets1.html
on “Matrices as Tensor Network Diagrams”Submitted On chain rule, computational graphs, and backpropagation as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI wrote a series of blog posts about persistent homology and topological data analysis for absolute beginners as I was obsessed with it for some time: http://outlace.com/TDApart1.html
Comment linking /TDApart1.html
on “Computational Algebraic Topology, lecture notes [pdf]”Submitted An Accessible Intro to Topological Data Analysis as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIn case anyone is interested in delving deeper, I wrote a detailed series of posts on persistent homology including the fundamental math and getting a working python example: http://outlace.com/TDApart1.html
Comment linking /TDApart1.html
on “Homology”Submitted Topological Data Analysis (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAnother one, with Python code to play with: http://outlace.com/Reinforcement-Learning-Part-3/
Comment linking /Reinforcement-Learning-Part-3/
on “Deep Reinforcement Learning Explained”If you're interested in algebraic topology to do topological data analysis, I wrote a series of blog posts about it that I believe is quite accessible even to those with limited math backgrounds: http://outlace.com/TDApart1.html
Comment linking /TDApart1.html
on “Algebraic Topology for Data Scientists”