Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 97 posts.

AI & Machine Learning
2016
11

How to Write a Spelling Corrector

I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex (you can read a little about it here or here ). But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves…

16

Image Kernels explained visually

An image kernel is a small matrix used to apply effects like the ones you might find in Photoshop or Gimp, such as blurring, sharpening, outlining or embossing. They're also used in machine learning for 'feature extraction', a technique for determining the most important portions of an image. In this context the…

21

Open Source Speech Recognition

I’m currently working on the Vaani project at Mozilla, and part of my work on that allows me to do some exploration around the topic of speech recognition and speech assistants. After looking at some of the commercial offerings available, I thought that if we were going to do some kind of add-on API, we’d be best off…

28

Decoding the Thought Vector

Neural networks have the rather uncanny knack for turning meaning into numbers. Data flows from the input to the output, getting pushed through a series of transformations which process the data into increasingly abstruse vectors of representations. These numbers, the activations of the network, carry useful…