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But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1

3Blue1Brown · explainer · Watch on YouTube

Machine learning & deep learningRecreational & visual math

What it is

3Blue1Brown's first chapter on deep learning explains what neurons and layers are and the math underlying a basic neural network, using handwritten digit recognition with visual animations.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN treats it as the standard first stop for learning neural networks, praised for making the math intuitive.

  • 16 people recommended it
  • 14 different months
  • 5 strong recommendations
  • first 2017, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “explains math in very accessible way”

    Accessible math explanations that removed fear of ML

    hal9000xp, 2017-11 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: Best way to get started with AI?”

  2. “the visualisations and explanations of the math/concepts are so amazing”

    Amazing visualisations give intuition for neural networks

    mandliya, 2017-12 · Strong recommendation · in “What was the best CS, SE or Math video you watched in 2017?”

  3. “all his math videos are just ridiculously good quality”

    High quality math explanations, maybe a little basic

    spandexcajun, 2019-05 · Strong recommendation · in “Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)”

  4. “I highly recommend checking out 3blue1brown series on how neural nets, gradient descent, and the dot product”

    Ties together neural nets, gradient descent and dot products

    superkuh, 2023-04 · Strong recommendation · in “State-of-the-art open-source chatbot, Vicuna-13B, just released model weights”

  5. “an excellent introduction that made Andrej's videos understandable”

    Excellent introduction that made Karpathy's videos understandable

    6mian, 2024-04 · Strong recommendation · in “But what is a GPT? Visual intro to Transformers [video]”

  6. “3blue1brown is currently doing a terrific series on how neural networks work”

    Terrific series on how neural networks work

    ocharles, 2017-10 · Recommendation · in “A Neural Network in 11 Lines of Python (2015)”

  7. “here are the first few videos of the series”

    First videos of the 3Blue1Brown neural network series

    nouveaux, 2017-11 · Recommendation · in “What is backpropagation and what is it doing? [video]”

  8. “maybe the 3b1b series on neural networks”

    Quicker, less applied neural network intro

    dahart, 2018-04 · Recommendation · in “Microsoft makes AI training courses available to the public”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: deep learning, 3blue1brown, gradient descent, visualization, machine learning basics

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