Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 250 posts.

AI & Machine Learning
36

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…

40

Generative Models

This post describes four projects that share a common theme of enhancing or using generative models, a branch of unsupervised learning techniques in machine learning. In addition to describing our work, this post will tell you a bit more about generative models: what they are, why they are important, and where they…

51

GPUs for Google Cloud Platform

CPU-based machines in the cloud are terrific for general purpose computing, but certain tasks such as rendering or large-scale simulations are much faster on specialized processors. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) contain hundreds of times as many computational cores as CPUs and are great at accelerating risk…

57

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…