Top all-time · #3605
Denny Britz
Personal blog · wildml.comaiprogramming
Denny Britz writes Denny's Blog, a personal blog at wildml.com about ai and programming. Since 2015, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 57 times, most often “Implementing a Neural Network from Scratch – An Introduction”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-22, 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 Denny Britz's wildml.com for practical neural network and deep learning tutorials, including a from-scratch neural network series, NLP writing and a deep learning glossary.
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.
Denny's Blog
Most-linked posts?
- Implementing a Neural Network from Scratch – An Introduction5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-09-04
- Deep Learning for Chatbots, Part 1 – Introduction4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-04-07
- Learning to Trade with Reinforcement Learning3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-02-11
- Deep Learning Glossary3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-01-24
- Implementing a CNN for Text Classification in Tensorflow3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-12-11
- Recurrent Neural Networks Tutorial, Part 2 – Implementing a RNN in Python2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-30
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-25
- Deep Learning newsletter with hand-curated stories, code and research papers2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-01-14
- AI and Deep Learning in 2017 – A Year in Review2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-12-31
- RNN Tutorial, Part 3 – Backpropagation Through Time and Vanishing Gradients2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-10-08
What Hacker News says?
It might look something like attention detailed in Show, Attend, Tell: http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03044 Which attempts to visualize machine areas of attention that look like: http://www.wildml.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot...
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-30-at-1.42.58-PM-1024x762.png
on “AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5”Submitted Learning Reinforcement Learning, with Code, Exercises, and Solutions as a story · 305 points
HN discussionOn the new age tech, these may help: https://hadoopweekly.com/ http://www.wildml.com/newsletter/ https://thomaswdinsmore.com/ http://www.dbms2.com/
Comment linking /newsletter/
on “Ask HN: What are some good technology blogs to follow?”Submitted AI and Deep Learning in 2017 – A Year in Review as a story · 188 points
HN discussionI have a pile of links for getting started with DL in my comment history you can use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10676455 What really helped advance my understanding from zero to knowledgeable novice was rewriting some existing code line by line (using expanded variable names and comments), and thinking about each line and what it does as you go. It's the software development equivalent of Hunter S. Thomps…
Comment linking /2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-from-scratch/
on “Facebook AI Research Team Open Source DeepMask and SharpMask”Submitted RNNs in TensorFlow: Practical Guide and Undocumented Features as a story · 178 points
HN discussionProbably because the author followed this blog: http://www.wildml.com/2015/12/implementing-a-cnn-for-text-cl... That blog used a 2d cnn because tensorflow didn't have a 1d version at the time of writing, so he just created a dummy 2nd dimension of length 1 and called it a day.
Comment linking /2015/12/implementing-a-cnn-for-text-classification-in-tensorflow/
on “What Kagglers Are Using for Text Classification”Submitted Hype or Not? Some Perspective on OpenAI’s DotA 2 Bot as a story · 170 points
HN discussionYou may wish to coordinate a bit with this?: http://www.wildml.com/deep-learning-glossary/ I came across that glossary a few days ago when looking to solve an RNN problem with a deadline. You may be pleased to know I think I may have solved it by switching to Keras, and this post actually helped unsticking me from a smaller problem too. Thanks, and congratulations on version 1.0!
Comment linking /deep-learning-glossary/
on “Keras 1.0 – Python deep learning framework”Submitted Recurrent Neural Networks Tutorial, Part 1: Introduction as a story · 121 points
HN discussionShameless plug, but I am curating a Deep Learning / Artificial Intelligence newsletter: http://www.wildml.com/newsletter/
Comment linking /newsletter/
on “Ask HN: Best curated newsletters?”Submitted Implementing a Neural Network from Scratch – An Introduction as a story · 117 points
HN discussionIf you want to know more about RNNs in general, I can't recommend watching the videos/reading the notes from this course enough: http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html If you want something more basic to get your head around NNs, I recommend Denny Britz's "Neural Networks from Scratch": http://www.wildml.com/2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-... I created a gist with a heavily commented version of his code: ht…
Comment linking /2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-from-scratch/
on “Anyone Can Learn to Code an LSTM-RNN (Part 1: RNN)”Submitted Deep Learning Glossary as a story · 106 points
HN discussionThere are two ways to consider this question, hacking as in "Mr. Robot" or hacking as in writing code for the joy of creation and discovery. Given the reference to 'writing software for corporations' I'll consider it the latter. It is profoundly important for engineers to periodically rekindle their sense of wonder if they wish to stay relevant and it sounds like what you are asking, if so that is super awesome. Unf…
Comment linking /2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-from-scratch/
on “Tell HN: WarGames (1983) is mind-blowing”Submitted Attention and Memory in Deep Learning and NLP as a story · 97 points
HN discussionEncoder-Decoder models are a very common technique in sequence-to-sequence models for deep learning. These models have had very big wins lately in NLP tasks such as translation, POS tagging, dialogue generation, etc. The Tensorflow documentation has an okay writeup about seq2seq models: https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/seq2seq The author of the library also has a small blurb about it on his blog: http://www.wild…
Comment linking /deep-learning-glossary/
on “Show HN: A general-purpose encoder-decoder framework for Tensorflow”Submitted Implementing a CNN for Text Classification in Tensorflow as a story · 92 points
HN discussionAgh, I remember there was this little thing that let you interactively play with neuron width and add and remove nodes, but I can't find it. Here's what else is in my bookmarks, aka what I've seen go past on here over the past few months that seemed approachably interesting: http://www.wildml.com/2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-... - a getting-started guide you can follow along with in IPython https://codeword…
Comment linking /2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-from-scratch/
on “Ask HN: What one thing do you want to learn or achieve in 2016?”Submitted Recurrent Neural Networks Tutorial, Part 2 – Implementing a RNN in Python as a story · 12 points
HN discussionYou're right that JS is pretty ill-suited for implementing production-level Deep Learning architectures that operate on a lot of data, I think it's still well suited for explaining the concepts in a clear way. A lot of the models have intuitive (and visual) interpretations, something that can be nicely visualized with JS. As for Karpathy's implementation, you're right, he chose JS for that reason. His library is mea…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Want to contribute in Open source implementation of research papers”Submitted Deep Learning for Chatbots, Part 1 – Introduction as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThe below resources are the ones I used when I started to learn about DL/NNs. Some of them are focused specifically on certain applications, but I found them helpful, too. Basic NNs: http://www.wildml.com/2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-... (a whole series, all worth reading) https://gist.github.com/sthware/c47824c116e6a61a56d9 (my code based on the above) http://iamtrask.github.io/2015/07/27/python-network-pa…
Comment linking /2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-from-scratch/
on “Ask HN: Where to begin learning about Neural Nets”Submitted Recurrent Neural Network Tutorial, Part 4 – Implementing a GRU/LSTM in Python as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI'd suggest searching for and reading blog posts of people who are studying deep learning. Academic papers are very pretentious, they are the tools for scholars to declare victories. They are not the best materials to understand. http://www.wildml.com/ https://medium.com/mlreview https://distill.pub/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: How to read deep learning/machine learning papers?”Submitted Learning to Trade with Reinforcement Learning as a story · 7 points
HN discussionthis focuses on NLP http://www.wildml.com this is also great http://colah.github.io
Comment linking /
on “Ask: Your Favorite Machine Learning Blog?”Submitted Deep Learning Glossary as a story · 7 points
HN discussionhttp://distill.pub http://www.wildml.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are the best informed AI blogs/ bloggers?”Submitted RNN Tutorial, Part 3 – Backpropagation Through Time and Vanishing Gradients as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
