Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 109 posts.

AI & Machine Learning
46

New chips for machine intelligence

This note summarises details of some of the new silicon chips for machine intelligence. Its aim is to distil the most important implementation and architectural details (at least those that are currently available), to highlight the main differences between them. I’m focusing on chips designed for training since they…

52

How to Begin a Novel

Last year for National Novel Writing Month I trained a neural net called torch-rnn on 10,096 unique ways to begin a novel. It came up with some intriguing possibilities, my personal favorite being “I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” But many of its sentences used made-up words, or had such weird…