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karpathy
char-rnn
Lua2015–2023
karpathy / char-rnn

char-rnn

Multi-layer Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM, GRU, RNN) for character-level language models in Torch

8Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
12.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Multi-layer Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM, GRU, RNN) for character-level language models in Torch

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-09-04 05:44:58 UTC to 2023-12-21 16:24:38 UTC.

01232015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
Procedural generation for midi has been around for a long time - ever with fair more “primitive” archictures that current GPT-types. Even chat-run [0] can be used to generate midi-based classical scores… I can’t find the exact trained model just now. But as you say… those midi generations sound like $hit so getting them arranged properly would be v v useful. [0]https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn
In Show HN: Scott's MusicBox
I thought this would be about something like giving the Hutter Prize [1] a go using character RNNs [2]. Instead, it's a somewhat confused "gentle introduction" to neural nets (which there are plenty of already, of higher quality) and compression is sort of handwavely discussed, not properly with bits and entropy like us information theorists would have it :) [1] http://prize.hutter1.net [2] https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn
In Neural Networks Are Impressively Good at Compression
I produced something similar to this shortly after the release of https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn: http://i.imgur.com/rb0GJvQ.gifv Basically, you create a video, dump the video's frames with ffmpeg, run each frame through the RNN, and stitch them back together. It took me several hours to produce just ten seconds of video. Unfortunately, unless you have a Titan X GPU the max size of each image is quite small (certainly less than 1080p), which may be why the frames in this video are split into four quadrants.
In The Four Painters: A Video Work Created with Deep Learning
https://github.com/facebook/MemNN should be in the language modelling (or Deep Learning) part. I'll give them a pass because it was only released a couple of days ago. The original Word2Vec[1] is missing too. While Gensim and Glove are nice, Word2Vec still outperforms them both in some circumstances. Surely there is a good LTSM language modelling project somewhere too? I can't think of one off the top of my head though. There's some code in Keras[2], but maybe Karpathy's char-RNN would be better[3] because of the documentation. [1] https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/ [2] https://github.com/fchollet/keras/blob/master/examples/lstm_... [3] https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn
In Curated list of speech and natural language processing resources
I haven't looked at the code, but glancing at the results leaves me thinking it might need more work. The output seems to me around the level a Markov chain might produce. Karpathy's RNN code produces much, much better results[1]. I wonder if manually extracting features and training the RNN on that is a mistake? RNN's tend to work well on text because they encode understanding of the parse tree themselves. [1] https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn
In Show HN: Neural network that impersonates writers

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