Comment by titzer
16 days ago
It just sucks to put in a ton of work into something and then show it off to people but the first reaction is someone comes out of the woodwork to loudly crow that it "misses the mark" and is somehow crap.
It's a completely avoidable experience when the community has a more generally positive attitude. All it takes is a little different phrasing of exactly the same feedback, but with a positive emotional and encouraging tone.
For example, instead of writing:
> Nice visuals, but misses the mark. Neural networks transform vector spaces, and collect points into bins. This visualization shows the structure of the computation. This is akin to displaying a Matrix vector multiplication in Wx + b notation, except W,x,and b have more exciting displays.
> It completely misses the mark on what it means to 'weight' (linearly transform), bias (affine transform) and then non-linearly transform (i.e, 'collect') points into bins
Here's more or less the same comment but with a completely different attitude:
> Oh wow, that's cool! That must have been a ton of work to put together. That got me thinking as to how it's akin to Matrix vector multiplication in Wx + b notation, except W,x,and b have more exciting displays.
> An idea I am wondering about but don't know how to solve is what it means to 'weight' (linearly transform), bias (affine transform) and then non-linearly transform (i.e, 'collect') points into bins.
> Here's some other links that are related and cool: ...
> Cheers, nice work!
Let's not crap on people's work so readily. After all, we have no idea about who the author is. Maybe it's a teenager or a university student and this was their first project. It's really a jarring and demoralizing experience to have your first visualization immediately crapped on.
When it comes to most in person interactions I approximately agree with you. But on HN brutal honesty seems to be the norm and at least personally I appreciate it for that.
A large part of the problem is a cultural mismatch I think. People have a tendency to interpret even entirely valid criticism as negativity. One of the nice things about a more analytical environment (ex STEM research labs IRL, HN on the net) is that you don't need to worry about that so much. The expectation is that things will be critiqued - that this is a good thing that helps further personal growth and intellectual endeavors more generally.
I'll grant the original comment could have been worded a bit more gently without losing the intended meaning. That said, the alternate example you gave there changes the meaning, sounds rather sycophantic, and honestly reads like corpo-posi-speak or LLM prose to me.
Regarding the original criticism. Notice that the title implies this to be an illustration of how a network does what it does. And the visualization flows through internal to output cells. Yet a number of key concepts aren't explained at all. Vaguely analogous to throwing up some ASM on a PPT slide and remarking "so you see, that's how it works". There's a matmul there, but _why_? What's the _point_ of an activation function? Unless I missed something the visualization doesn't even mention nonlinearity despite it being an essential property.