Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 2,307 posts.

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Understanding gradient descent

Gradient descent is a standard tool for optimizing complex functions iteratively within a computer program. Its goal is: given some arbitrary function, find a minumum. For some small subset of functions - those that are convex - there's just a single minumum which also happens to be global. For most realistic…