Colin Morris
colinmorris.github.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Colin Morris writes about data and language experiments, including lyric visualizations, Wikipedia oddities, and neural networks that generate text and names.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for its thorough, funny writeups on generative models and for the least-viewed Wikipedia article hunt.
19HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
16stories submitted
870story points
4 months agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Show HN: Visualize song lyrics using self-similarity matrices4 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Compound pejoratives on Reddit3 people · 426 points · first shared 2022 · 141 comments on HN
- 3In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia3 people · 219 points · first shared 2022 · 68 comments on HN
- 4The size of things: an ngram experiment (2017)2 people · 34 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
- 5Finding bad flamingo drawings with recurrent neural networks2 people · 33 points · first shared 2017 · 4 comments on HN
- 6Show HN: Visualize word-by-word probabilities given by a neural language model2 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 7Show HN: Neural network trained to generate GitHub repository names1 people · 145 points · first shared 2016 · 49 comments on HN
- 8Dreaming of names with RBMs1 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 9In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia1 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Zoo1 people · first shared 2016
- 11Which discourse marker1 people · first shared 2023
- 12Kicksville.png1 people · first shared 2016
What HN people wrote when they linked it
nl · 2016-10-20
What you want is a language model. This will give you the probability on a word by word basis.
Something like [1] is pretty much state-of-the-art. It's worth noting that the kind of writing you are doing change the probability significantly. [2] shows this quite well.
[1] https://colinmorris.github.io/lm-sentences/#/billion_words
[2] https://colinmorris.github.io/lm-sentences/#/brown_romance
thirdhaf · 2016-08-02
This is a pretty thorough description of generation, not just the classification problem that is the usual introduction to machine learning.
I just loved the map of the generated place names [1] the illustrations are hilarious.
[1] http://colinmorris.github.io/assets/rbm/kicksville.png
ChrisArchitect · 2026-07-06
Reminded me of least viewed pages on wikipedia collections or neglected articles...
See:
In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
https://colinmorris.github.io/blog/unpopular-wiki-articles
(Some discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524943, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955600)
atombender · 2023-09-25
Fun to see the Aubrey-Maturin series mentioned here; that was indeed the first thing I thought of.
Killick's use of "which" always struck me as odd. I'm not entirely sure if it's the same grammatic construct as the one in the article. Here [1] is a discussion about it. The top answer argues it's just a meaningless discourse marker. It was also covered in Mark Liberman's Language Log [2].
Apparently the conjunctive "which" is increasing in usage as a discourse marker [3].
[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/245363/what-is-the-name-of…
[2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000118.html
[3] http://colinmorris.github.io/blog/which-discourse-marker
wcedmisten · 2022-07-02
If you're looking to do more analysis on this data, it would be cool to see a correlation matrix for different articles of clothing in different categories. E.g. looking at how frequently you wear certain tops/bottoms together, or bottoms/shoes.
https://www.displayr.com/what-is-a-correlation-matrix/
Another example of this chart I saw recently was examining compound curse words on reddit:
https://colinmorris.github.io/blog/compound-curse-words#the-matrix-of-…
halfeatenscone · 2017-03-15
I'm not sure how easy it is to grok these by playing with them. If you're confused, the "About" section has some explanation of how the matrices are constructed and how to interpret them: https://colinmorris.github.io/SongSim/#/about
Also, in case it's not clear, you can press the "+" button next to the song dropdown to open a textarea where you can paste arbitrary lyrics.
wxs · 2016-08-02
I really like your Hidden Unit Zoo here http://colinmorris.github.io/rbm/zoo/ as a window into what this thing is actually "thinking" about. The "top matches" for a given hidden unit are pretty helpful.