Top all-time · #1337
Explosion
Company blog · explosion.ai/blogaiprogramming
Explosion is the company blog at explosion.ai, writing about ai and programming. Since 2016, 52 different Hacker News readers have linked it 112 times, most often “Against LLM Maximalism”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Explosion is a software company specializing in developer tools and tailored solutions for Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. We’re the makers of spaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for advanced NLP.
Most-linked posts?
- Against LLM Maximalism6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-05-18
- Healthsea: An end-to-end spaCy pipeline for exploring health supplement effects4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-12-16
- spaCy meets Transformers: Fine-tune BERT, XLNet and GPT-2 (2019)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-10-26
- Compact word vectors with Bloom embeddings4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-04-26
- /blog/sense2vec-with-spacy4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-10-11
- Supervised learning is great – it's data collection that's broken3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-04-02
- SpaCy v2.13 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-03-18
- Building your bot's brain with Node.js and spaCy2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-10-23
- SpaCy PyTorch Transformers2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-08-02
- /about2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-10-02
What Hacker News says?
Hey this is really awesome! Well done. You mentioned transformers and BERT for large NLP models. I've been playing around with this too and it's a really powerful approach. Have you used spacy-transformers? [0] The approach is pretty cool and can be used with BERT, GPT-2/Hugging Face etc. I'm just starting to experiment with GPT-J and thinking of trying this approach also [1]. Anyway, totally awesome project and the…
Comment linking /blog/spacy-transformers
on “Show HN: 40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning”Submitted Prodigy: A new tool for radically efficient machine teaching as a story · 286 points
HN discussion- nl · 2018-04-23
I do ML/NLP, and recently have been doing color related things. I think you are underestimating how useful NLP could be in your application. I tried out one of your test cases, and I did find it useful. However, I think that blending colors based on entity recognition along with your line based system could focus attention on important parts. Have a look at [1] (sorry for the long URL) and imagine the colors blendin…
on “You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts” Submitted SpaCy v3.0 Nightly as a story · 224 points
HN discussionI work in NLP and I would really disagree that NLTK is still an essential player. Some academic courses still teach in it, but I think it's around five years since it has been the best option. I would definitely recommend gensim, but also SpaCy, which is very fast and has a better documented and more extensive API than NLTK. I have nothing to do with SpaCy personally (except being an enthusiastic user) but I recomme…
Comment linking /blog/dead-code-should-be-buried
on “The Best Machine Learning, NLP, and Python Tutorials I’ve Found”Submitted SpaCy v1.0: Deep Learning with custom pipelines and Keras as a story · 142 points
HN discussionBefore chunking, run coreference resolution to get rid of all of your pronouns and replace them with explicit references. You need to be a bit of careful to ensure you chunk both processed and unprocessed versions in the same places but it’s very doable. If you haven’t seen it, there’s a lovely overview of the idea in one of the SpaCy blog posts: https://explosion.ai/blog/coref
Comment linking /blog/coref
on “Don't use cosine similarity carelessly”Submitted Embed, encode, attend, predict: the new deep learning formula for NLP models as a story · 140 points
HN discussionI don't think spaCy will be hurting any time soon. When SyntaxNet was first released last year, Matthew Honnibal had a good writeup [0] of how spaCy vastly outperforms with speed while keeping reasonable accuracy: > On the time-honoured benchmark for this task, Parsey McParseface achieves over 94% accuracy, at around 600 words per second. On the same task, spaCy achieves 92.4%, at around 15,000 words per second. The…
Comment linking /blog/syntaxnet-in-context
on “An Upgrade to SyntaxNet, New Models and a Parsing Competition”Submitted SpaCy v2.2 as a story · 130 points
HN discussionHighly recommend Spacy and the http://explosion.ai blog!
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: How Can I Get into NLP (Natural Language Processing)?”Submitted Building your bot's brain with Node.js and spaCy as a story · 108 points
HN discussionGive Cython a try, you can get huge gains in memory/speed by carefully transitioning from Python to C with it. (Or use it to "write C in Cython"[0]) [0] https://explosion.ai/blog/writing-c-in-cython
Comment linking /blog/writing-c-in-cython
on “The cost of forsaking C”Submitted SpaCy PyTorch Transformers as a story · 106 points
HN discussionThe Reddit comment corpus is an awesome dataset. There's relatively little mark-up to scrub out, low duplication, good metadata, and a variety of topics. We used it to train a syntax-enriched word2vec model. Write up and demo: https://explosion.ai/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy Btw, the above was run on CPU in a couple of days, because spaCy doesn't use GPUs yet. I've applied for a grant from NVidia so I can fix that. If…
Comment linking /blog/sense2vec-with-spacy
on “OpenAI is Using Reddit to Teach An Artificial Intelligence How to Speak”Submitted Spancat: a new approach for span labeling as a story · 73 points
HN discussion- nl · 2022-04-05
A theory with empirical adequecy would require you to do some actual research into language use in humans; all of its features; how it works; various theories of its mechanisms etc. And after a comprehensive, experimental and detailed theoretical work -- show that NLP models even any* of it.* What - specifically - do you mean? There's an entire field adjacent to NLP called Computational Linguistics. Most people in t…
Comment linking /demos/displacy
on “Pathways Language Model (PaLM): Scaling to 540B parameters” Submitted We’ve sold 5% of Explosion – the spaCy Company as a story · 29 points
HN discussionTone down the entitlement and the attitude, and think about what the linked article is exactly. It's a bunch of release notes for the 3.0 version. If I click back to the actual homepage[0], it says: spaCy is a free, open-source library for advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python. It’s designed specifically for production use and helps you build applications that process and “understand” large volumes of…
Comment linking /software
on “SpaCy v3.0 Nightly”Submitted From PDFs to AI-ready structured data: a deep dive as a story · 23 points
HN discussion"spaCy is a free, open-source library for advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python. It’s designed specifically for production use and helps you build applications that process and “understand” large volumes of text. It can be used to build information extraction or natural language understanding systems, or to pre-process text for deep learning." https://explosion.ai/software#spacy
Comment linking /software
on “SpaCy v3.0 Nightly”Submitted SpaCy v2.1 as a story · 19 points
HN discussion> The "butterfly" mechanism offered reduced key travel and keyboard reliability. I couldn't quite tell whether this was a subtle joke or not. I didn't know whether the butterfly design was actually intended to improve reliability or not. Regardless, the effect was actually worse reliability. I decided to get a second opinion from a machine [1] that probably was trained on input from humans. It said that the noun phr…
on “14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack”Submitted Compact word vectors with Bloom embeddings as a story · 7 points
HN discussionMissed this news, thanks! OP if you wish to use spacy try v3. https://explosion.ai/blog/spacy-v3-nightly
Comment linking /blog/spacy-v3-nightly
on “Rethinking Attention with Performers”Submitted Sense2vec reloaded: contextually-keyed word vectors as a story · 7 points
HN discussionEveryone has a different way of approaching. I like video walk-throughs of papers. If you are the same, for the theory bit you may find Yannic Kilcher's videos [0,1] helpful. On implementation side, the best project out there is [2] with good documentation. Also spacy has transformer package [3] (I personally haven't tried it), so maybe it will be easier for you to jump in if you have prior experience with spacy. [0…
Comment linking /blog/spacy-transformers
on “Rethinking Attention with Performers”Submitted Healthsea: An end-to-end spaCy pipeline for exploring health supplement effects as a story · 6 points
HN discussionspaCy makes lots of money. from https://explosion.ai/about "In August 2021, we sold 5% of Explosion to SignalFire for $6 million. Employees are given a stake in Explosion using a virtual share bonus program."
Comment linking /about
on “Advanced NLP with spaCy v3”Submitted Compact word vectors with Bloom embeddings as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
