Top all-time · #1955
Matt Mazur
Personal blog · mattmazur.com · on HN as matt1programmingstartups
Matt Mazur's personal blog at mattmazur.com covers programming and startups. Since 2008, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 118 times, most often “A step by step backpropagation example (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-01-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- A step by step backpropagation example (2015)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2016-12-14
- A Step by Step Backpropagation Example4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-07-15
- Six Months of HackerNews Front Page Data 4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-03-07
- Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed in Iraq4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-01-04
- Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed to Iraq (2016)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-04
- Feb Review: Life Tracking, Major jMockups Updates. Preceden’s Best Month Yet 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-07
- Startup Blogs To Make You a Better Entrepreneur2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-19
What Hacker News says?
At the time of the acquisition the site made money in two ways: 1. Affiliate sales: when you click on a domain and register it through GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc, I get a % of the purchase price. 2. Premium accounts: Lean Domain Search only showed the top 150 results for free. You could pay $79 once for two months of access or $199/year for access to all 5,000 results. Each was bringing in around $1,000-$1,500/month wi…
Comment linking /2015/07/03/lean-domain-search-at-3%C2%BD/
on “Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed in Iraq”Submitted Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed in Iraq as a story · 508 points
HN discussionI knew I recognized that name somewhere. Matt had a bunch of really interesting articles a while back about building poker bots to play online. http://mattmazur.com/category/poker-bot/ Didn't know that he was active duty in the military at the time, though...
Comment linking /category/poker-bot/
on “Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed in Iraq”Submitted A step by step backpropagation example (2015) as a story · 129 points
HN discussionFor anyone trying to learn backpropagation but having trouble with math, I can't recommend Matt Mazur's "Step by Step" guide [0] enough. What is great is that he is using real numbers so that one can check implementation for correctness. [0] https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagat...
Comment linking /2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
on “Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction”Submitted I Eliminated the Free Plan from my Web App for a Month: Here’s What Happened. as a story · 123 points
HN discussionHey Jerod. I own the domain HNTrends.com, which I used for a similar project about two years back [1][2]. If you plan on keeping this project up, I'd be happy to transfer the domain name over to you. Shoot me an email: matt@leandesigns.com. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810112 [2] http://www.mattmazur.com/category/hntrends/
Comment linking /category/hntrends/
on “Show HN: HN Trends - like Google Trends, but for Hacker News”Submitted Six Lessons Learned from Domain Pigeon’s First Six Weeks as a story · 122 points
HN discussionI recently spent some time learning how backpropagation works and wound up putting together this step by step tutorial that you might find helpful: http://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagati...
Comment linking /2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
on “A Neural Network in 11 Lines of Python”Submitted Lessons learned from a failed poker software business as a story · 103 points
HN discussionHe was Magus on aol https://mattmazur.com/2010/06/26/adrian-lamo-aol-files-profi...
Comment linking /2010/06/26/adrian-lamo-aol-files-profile/
on “Adrian Lamo has died”Submitted The Wrong Way to Get Noticed by YC as a story · 90 points
HN discussionMatt Mazur maintains an archive of aol-files.com, which has a lot of old AOL content: https://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/
Comment linking /projects/aol-files-com/
on “History of AOL Warez”Submitted Memoirs of a Poker Bot Developer as a story · 84 points
HN discussionWhy can't you model each neuron as an individual object with a unique UID in code? I am fortunate enough to have a friend that's fairly accomplished in ML and a really nice guy. He spent a video chat + code session with me where he helped me build an NN from scratch in Typescript, we replicated the network in the paper here: https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagat... Here's the Codesandbox link,…
Comment linking /2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
on “ Researchers unveil a pruning algorithm to shrink deep learning models”Submitted Six Months of HackerNews Front Page Data as a story · 80 points
HN discussionLooking at headers: Last-Modified: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 18:53:31 GMT Still, looks good, if a bit dated. For me, these two tutorials were the ones that helped me understand NN the most: - http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/ - https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagat...
Comment linking /2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
on “A Basic Introduction to Neural Networks (2007)”Submitted Startup Blogs To Make You a Better Entrepreneur as a story · 77 points
HN discussionI'm one step ahead of you: Yesterday I made a public commitment to launch jMockups, a web-based mockup tool I've been working on for several months, by Nov 3rd: http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/10/a-public-commitment-to-laun... Now back to work.
Comment linking /2010/10/a-public-commitment-to-launch-jmockups/
on “Lets make November "Launch an App Month", who's with me?”Submitted A Step by Step Backpropagation Example as a story · 64 points
HN discussionVery cool. My matches using the default settings: pg, swombat, mahmud, wheels, SwellJoe, edw519, mattmaroon, gojomo, davidw, mixmax, unalone, tptacek Did you get permission to scrape the data? (I tried once without asking with mediocre results: http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/08/the-wrong-way-to-get-notice... )
Comment linking /2008/08/the-wrong-way-to-get-noticed-by-yc/
on “Similar Hacker News Users”Submitted Lean Domain Search: Two Weeks After the HackerNews Launch as a story · 45 points
HN discussionThis tutorial explained to me at the exact level of detail: https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagat... It was detailed enough for me to do all the calculations in an excel workbook, 1 complete cycle (forward, backward, and forward with the learned weights) https://1drv.ms/x/s!Ar06sKFtc9d7goR5WQLo-RkB0XvWAA Which allowed me to play with the name and factors to understand better how they impact th…
Comment linking /2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
on “Build a Neural Network”Submitted Experimenting with a Neural Network-based Poker Bot as a story · 39 points
HN discussionI had a really good time adapting Karpatny's blog post to python myself but it didn't give me sufficient understanding so i continued with [1], then [2] and finally deciphering [3]. [1] https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagat... [2] http://peterroelants.github.io/posts/neural_network_implemen... [3] https://iamtrask.github.io/2015/07/12/basic-python-network/
Comment linking /2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
on “A friendly Introduction to Backpropagation in Python”Submitted Lean Domain Search Passes 50K Searches One Month After Its HackerNews Launch as a story · 35 points
HN discussionI recently saw a blog post where someone wrote about the feedback they received and they weren't happy. The same person then revised their questions and tried a more task oriented approach and they were much happier. http://www.i-proving.ca/space/David+Jones/blog/2010-01-27_1?... Then again, Feedback Army is just a usability testing tool. The right one for the job. I think it's best when a breadth of ideas are neede…
Comment linking /2010/02/reflections-on-precedens-hackernews-launch/
on “The $5 Guerrilla User Test”Submitted An Amazing JavaScript Port of HNTrends.com Using Raphael JS as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI spent some time last year learning about the math behind neural networks and summarized it in this step by step post that you might find helpful [1]. The post has been on HackerNews in the past and is the top Google result for "backpropagation". [1] http://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagati...
Comment linking /2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
on “Neural Networks and Deep Learning: An Introduction”Submitted Building a Shortstacking Poker Bot - A Visual History as a story · 17 points
HN discussion
