Neural networks and deep learning

Neural networks and deep learning

Neural Networks and Deep Learning is a free online book. The book will teach you about:

Neural networks, a beautiful biologically-inspired programming paradigm which enables a computer to learn from observational data
Deep learning, a powerful set of techniques for learning in neural networks

Neural networks and deep learning currently provide the best solutions to many problems in image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing. This book will teach you all the core concepts behind neural networks and deep learning.

(Note — there’s an indiegogo campaign to support the writing of this book)

Deep Learning 101

Deep Learning 101

Deep learning has become something of a buzzword in recent years with the explosion of ‘big data’, ‘data science’, and their derivatives mentioned in the media. Justifiably, deep learning approaches have recently blown other state-of-the-art machine learning methods out of the water for standardized problems such as the MNIST handwritten digits dataset. My goal is to give you a layman understanding of what deep learning actually is so you can follow some of my thesis research this year as well as mentally filter out news articles that sensationalize these buzzwords.

Glitched Art: Is Software a Whole New Animal? – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus

Glitched Art: Is Software a Whole New Animal? – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus

The software-as-animal metaphor is useful. Cates and other members of the glitch art community often hunt for coding defects (the eponymous glitches) in the ecosystem of computer programs. These glitches are considered feral or wild until they are captured and domesticated into more stable and repeatable forms: then they’re used to infect or mutate other media.

Programming with Nothing

Programming with Nothing

Ruby is a powerful language, but how much power does it have if you remove all of its datatypes except for Proc and all of its features except for Proc.new and Proc#call? I’ll investigate by building proc-only representations of numbers, booleans, lists and strings, and using them to write an executable program.

Product Management « Rowan Simpson

Product Management « Rowan Simpson

My last job title at Trade Me was ‘Head of Product’.

If you say you are a ‘Software Developer’ or even a ‘Development Manager’, then most people working in technology will know what that means.

But, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a succinct definition of what makes a ‘Product Manager’. In fact, I’m not even sure I’ve heard a succinct definition of a product, in this context.

I thought it might be useful to try and describe, at least as I’ve experienced it, for those who might be interested in this sort of role.