Alternatives
Products that do what Beating Hinton et al.'s capsule net with fewer params and less training does
Hello HN, I recently posted a work-in-progress paper, along with code necessary for replicating all its results, at: https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing Among other things, the code in this repo outperforms Hinton et al.'s recent state-of-the-art result in visual recognition[0] while requiring fewer parameters and an order-of-magnitude fewer training epochs. Most of the original research we do at work tends to be either proprietary in nature or tightly coupled to internal code, so we cannot share it with the world. In this case, however, I was able to remove all…
- 1L3
I spent a lot of time and money on this rather big side project of mine that attempts to replicate the mechanistic interpretability research on proprietary LLMs that was quite popular this year and produced great research papers by Anthropic [1], OpenAI [2] and Deepmind [3]. I am quite proud of this project and since I consider myself the target audience for HackerNews did I think that maybe some of you would appreciate this open research replication as well. Happy to answer any questions or face any feedback. Cheers [1]…
2024 · github.com
- 2HI
I found that duplicating a specific block of 7 middle layers in Qwen2-72B, without modifying any weights, improved performance across all Open LLM Leaderboard benchmarks and took #1. As of 2026, the top 4 models on that leaderboard are still descendants. The weird finding: single-layer duplication does nothing. Too few layers, nothing. Too many, it gets worse. Only circuit-sized blocks of ~7 layers work. This suggests pretraining carves out discrete functional circuits in the layer stack that only work when preserved whole. The whole thing was developed on 2x RTX 4090s in my basement. I'm…
Mar 2026 · dnhkng.github.io
- 3IC
I spent the past week implementing a 1 Layer Neural Net and training it on MNIST within the visual scripting language provided by scratch.mit.edu. It was tedious, but ultimately not too difficult. The code runs incredibly slowly, so much so that 64 samples of MNIST takes 5+ hours to train on my machine. There were a lot of little mini challenges that were fun to overcome (implementing softmax was very tricky). If you're interested, I encourage you to try and improve on it! More details in the linked blog post.
2024 · bell-boy.github.io
- 4IC
A friend and I wrote a book on how to build and train Deep Learning models in Go. We wanted it to be a useful reference for deep learning basics for Go programmers. Deep Learning is slowly seeping into everything we use every day and we thought it would be great if more people could do it in Go. The book is available here and on Amazon as well. https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/hands-deep-learning-go We would appreciate any feedback and we're always looking to improve.
2019
- 5IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com
- 6W1
Hey HackerNews, I built this project over the last few weeks as a palette cleanser from a failed game launch. I wanted to learn a bit about AI/Neural-Networks and naively thought I could build a tiny maze-solving AI in a weekend with a 100% solve rate. Well - I couldn't, but I got pretty close. 14 Bytes total model size, and a 96.5% solve rate on unseen mazes. Trained across 46 phases experimenting with different ideas to improve the model (better performance, smaller size). Its quite fun to watch the model attempt to solve the maze, when they fail its usually due to getting stuck in a…
Jul 2026 · con-dog.github.io
- 7NN
Hi HN. Peter here. As a machine learning engineer, I mostly think in terms of feature vectors, embeddings, and matrices. One of the most useful byproducts of deep neural networks is embeddings because they allow us to represent high-dimensional data in terms of lower-dimensional latent vectors. These feature vectors can be used for downstream applications like similarly search, recommendation systems and near duplicate detection. As an ML engineer, I was frustrated by the lack of a datastore in which vectors are first-class citizens. As a result, most ML engineers, including myself, end up…
2021
- 8TN
Hi guys, I’m excited to share an update on ReproModel, an open-source toolbox designed to streamline the testing and reproduction of machine learning models. I, like many of you, have really struggled with benchmarking and comparing models, from missing code, to opaque experiment parameters slowing the process. I decided to take matters into my own hands, and created a mini-toolbox in my free time to streamline the process. The goal is to reduce the time and effort spent on replicating experiments, enabling researchers to focus on innovation rather than setup. Knowing this task is not an…
2024 · github.com
- 9MA
I made this tool to get some better intuition on how neural networks/backpropagation worked, but I'm really unsure what to do with it now, so I've put it up on github, and I wrote a little primer on backprop and neural networks to showcase it. Really curious to hear any thoughts you might have, or anything I got wrong in the write up!
2024 · github.com
- 10LT
I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on for over a year, which I believe will fundamentally change our approach to language models. We’ve designed a new architecture, which replaces the hidden state of an RNN with a machine learning model. This model compresses context through actual gradient descent on input tokens. We call our method “Test-Time-Training layers.” TTT layers directly replace attention, and unlock linear complexity architectures with expressive memory, allowing us to train LLMs with millions (someday billions) of tokens in context. Our instantiations, TTT-Linear…
2024
- 11GHGraphical HN▲12
http://ghn.cloudapp.net/ If you can, try right-clicking on an image. This page started off as a random collection of stuff I wanted to try out (spinning up an Azure linux VM included) where I gave myself "1 hour per feature" to learn new stuff. Shell scripts, command-line webkit-based png rendering, pcntl_fork, piwik... Fun stuff. I know, yet another view of HN, no biggie. I welcome all feedback and questions!
2013
- 12RI
Hi HN, Can old dogs learn new tricks? We've been running clippingmagic.com since we launched it here on hn in May 2013 [0]. It was originally based on a purely "classical" algorithm, but since then Deep Learning has taken over the field, leaving us with the simple choice to adapt or die. Most of our old competitors shut down. The new competition is "a bunch of kids". We're two 40+ year olds with young kids, mortgages, and a 15 year investment in classical image processing algorithms rendered largely obsolete by Deep Learning. Fun times. So it's been challenging, interesting, humbling &…
2022 · pixian.ai
- 13AS
We explored a novel method to gauge the significance of tokens in prompts given to large language models, without needing direct model access. Essentially, we just did an ablation study on the prompt using cosine similarity of the embeddings as the measure. We got surprisingly promising results when comparing this really simple approach to integrated gradients. Curious to hear thoughts from the community!
2023 · heatmap.demos.watchful.io
- 14WB
Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com
- 15
Minimal, readable LLM post-training experiments on one 8GB GPU. Measures forgetting, seed variance, and RL emergence. - pochenai/nano-llm-posttraining
Aug 2026 · github.com
- 16IE
Hey HN, when building ML systems for industrial AI, we have learned that data inspection is critical during the ML development process. We are also big fans of the Hugging Face ecosystem. That is why we built an integration to our data exploration tool Spotlight that allows you to interactively explore Hugging Face datasets with one line of code. Spotlight lets you leverage model results such as predictions and embeddings to gain a deeper understanding in data segments and model failure modes. Currently, many many NLP, CV, Audio and multimodal datasets are supported both locally and on the…
2023 · huggingface.co
- 17IB
Hello everyone, I doubt this would be relevant to the kind of person who uses HN, but I thought I could share for some feedback. I built this site because there is a whole world of people who believe in new age spirituality and I am very much one of them. It is a site where you get the users gender their goals and their images and use AI and psychology to generate images of them in the process of achieving their goals. I am so deeply struggling with how to get this highly on Google. I don't even know if that is important anymore. What are your suggestions with distribution and getting in…
2025 · visionboardsai.com
- 18IS
Read an article yesterday about the H.264 codec increasing their licensing fee by an astronomical amount. And as always, my first shot was how hard could it be to try and build a codec which could be that efficient. I've personally been on a drive to improve my ability to one-shot complex features, products, or make even surgical changes. It's been a few months since I've been doing that, and honestly, results have been great for both work and work/life balance. This was a fun experiment. It burned through tokens, but it helped me identify some more improvements I could make to my…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 19IM
I’m 15 and self-taught. I'm learning ML from scratch because I want to really understand how things work. I’m not into frameworks. I prefer math, logic, and C++. I implemented a basic MLP that supports different activation and loss functions. It was trained via mini-batch gradient descent. I wrote it from scratch, using no external libraries except Eigen (for linear algebra). I learned how a Neural Network learns (all the math) -- how the forward pass works, and how learning via backpropagation works. How to convert all that math into code. I’ll write a blog soon explaining how MLPs work in…
2025 · github.com
- 20AT
We kept shipping “simple” LLM features that were fluent-but-wrong. After too many postmortems we wrote down the failure patterns and added a small reasoning layer in front of the model. It’s model-agnostic, sits beside your existing stack, and you can implement it from a single PDF (MIT). What’s inside the PDF A problem map of 16 failure modes we kept hitting in real systems (OCR/layout drift, table-to-question mismatches, embedding≠meaning, pre-deploy collapse, etc.). Four lightweight gates you can add today: Knowledge-boundary canaries (empty/adversarial/known-fact probes).…
2025 · github.com
- 21AA
Hi guys, For a few months now I've been working on a web GUI to build, visualise, train and share deep neural models. It's currently reaching a state where opening it for Beta release make sense. Currently the tool support: - Fully connected and Convolutional architecture - Cloud and local, saving / loading of models - Edit / delete layers - Visualise Convolutional layers filters - Freeze / Unfreeze layers - More datasets: Fashion MNIST, QuickDraw(10 and 30) The editor can be found here: https://aifiddle.io. Your feedback, ideas, suggestions are greatly useful, so…
2019
- 22WT
I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…
Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com
- 23OS
Hello HN, I’ve been building AI agents lately and ran into a common "Context Bloat" problem. When an agent has 20+ skills, stuffing every system prompt, reference doc, and tool definition into a single request quickly hits token limits and degrades model performance (the "lost in the middle" problem). To solve this, I built OpenSkills, an open-source SDK that implements a Progressive Disclosure Architecture for agent skills. The Core Concept: Instead of loading everything upfront, OpenSkills splits a skill into three layers: Layer 1 (Metadata): Light-weight tags and triggers (always loaded…
Jan 2026
- 24LR
I just noticed it takes literally ~5 minutes to train millions parameters on slow CPU...but before you call Yudkowsky that "it's over", an important note: the main bottleneck is the corpus size, params are just 'cleverness' but given limited info it's powerless. Anyway, here is the project: https://github.com/bggb7781-collab/lrnnsmdds/tree/main couple of notes: 1. single C file, no dependencies. Below are literally all the "dependencies", not even custom header (copy paste from the top of the single c file): #define _POSIX_C_SOURCE 200809L #include #include…
Apr 2026 · raw.githubusercontent.com
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