Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I wrote an autodiff in C++ and implemented LeNet with it
This project is an automatic differentiation library written in C++ with a LeNet neural network implementation demonstrating its capabilities. It is designed for developers interested in understanding how autodiff… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I wrote an autodiff in C++ and implemented LeNet with it launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Trying to do gradient descent using automatic differentiation over branchy programs? Or to combine them with neural networks for end-to-end training? Then this might be interesting to you. We develped DiscoGrad, a tool for automatic differentiation through C++ programs involving input-dependent control flow (e.g., "if (f(x) < c) { ... }", differentiating wrt. x) and randomness. Our initial motivation was to enable the use of gradient descent with simulations, which often rely heavily on such discrete branching. The latter makes plain autodiff mostly useless, since it can only account for the…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
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 · its alternatives →
- 3
A re-implementation of Karpathy's micrograd in C. Contribute to oraziorillo/microcrad development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
built a tiny pytorch clone in c after going through prof. vijay janapa reddi's mlsys book: mlsysbook.ai/tinytorch/ perfect for learning how ml frameworks work under the hood :)
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
A simple neural network for python autocompletion. Contribute to vpj/python_autocomplete development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
I was fascinated reading through another recent HN submission about a highly efficient implementation of A* in Lisp, which got me thinking about how I could do something similar in Python. However, these kinds of pathfinding algorithms really need complex terrain/mazes with interesting obstructions to showcase what they can do and how they work. So, I started thinking about how I could generate cool and diverse random "mazes" (they aren't really mazes, but I'm not sure what the best term is). I got a bit carried away thinking of lots of different cool ways to generate these mazes, such…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
A web-based application for quick, scalable, and automated hyperparameter tuning and stacked ensembling in Python. - reiinakano/xcessiv
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.
2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · its alternatives →
- 10
I’ve spent the last few months building a deep learning engine completely from scratch in Python (using only math and random). What started as a basic linear algebra calculator project grew into a symbolic tensor system with autodiff, custom matrix ops, attention mechanisms, LayerNorm, GELU, and even a text generation demo trained on the Brown corpus. I'm still an undergrad, so my main goal is to deeply understand how deep learning actually works under the hood - gradients, attention, backpropagation, optimizers - by building it step-by-step with full visibility into everything, and without…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
minimal DL library in C: 24 NAIVE cuda/cpu ops, autodiff engine, python API (ops bindings/layers/models), tensor abstraction, strides, complex indexing (multi-dim slices like numpy), computation-graph visualizer, saving/loading params, primitive garbage collection, autogenerated tests, optimizers, w
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
A minimalist deep learning library written from scratch in Python - sradc/SmallPebble
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Greetings! A 2.5 weekends project to teach myself newer Python features (>= 3.10). Conditions are written as Lambda expressions that annotate parameters and return types, and coexist with type annotations. Symbols to share values between conditions are also supported to a limited extend.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14AM
Hi all, I’m hacking on new features for the ClickHouse native client and wanted the same “just call the model” ergonomics JavaScript and Python now enjoy. It didn’t exist for modern C++, so I wrote one. ai‑sdk‑cpp (Apache‑2.0) gives you: - Unified calls to OpenAI (GPT‑4o) and Anthropic (Claude 3.5) with a single C++20 API. - Streaming, multi‑turn chat, error handling—all std::optional/std::variant, no macros. - Tool calling (function‑calling) so the model can hit real APIs; sync or async, runs in parallel. The tricky bit: C++ still lacks real reflection, so mapping plain functions →…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 15
A lightweight C library for artificial neural networks - attractivechaos/kann
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hello everyone! I've been working on this project for a few months as part of my thesis in Machine Learning. It's meant to be a library that provides an easy-to-use but flexible API to design and train Diffusion Models. I decided to make it because I wanted to quickly prototype a Diffusion Model but there were no good tools to do it with. I think it really can help people prototype their own Diffusion Models a lot faster and only in a few lines of code. The base idea is to have a Model class that takes different modules corresponding to the different aspects of the Diffusion Model process…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
This is a low-level opensource library I developed for my own use and decided to share, as it makes it possible to process large checkpoints of neural networks without renting high-RAM instances, on a regular PC. It replaces torch.load() with a custom function that produces a dictionary that materializes tensors on the fly. Compared to other solutions it doesn't require sharding or re-encoding checkpoints and uses them completely as-is. It is a foundation to make it possible to run inference and compress language models and other large models one layer at a time - in principle, even one…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi HN, I built NOMA (Neural-Oriented Machine Architecture), a systems language where reverse-mode autodiff is a compiler pass (lowered to LLVM IR). My goal is to treat model parameters as explicit, growable memory buffers. Since NOMA compiles to standalone native binaries (no Python runtime), it allows using realloc on weights mid-training. This makes "self-growing" architectures a system primitive rather than a complex framework hack. I just pushed a reproducible benchmark (Self-Growing XOR) to validate the methodology: it compares NOMA against PyTorch and C++, specifically testing how…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19IC
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 · its alternatives →
- 20
I want to share a really dumb, but very practical project I have packaged this summer, to perform operations on strings much faster. I was using Python to work with a multi-terabyte newline-delimited file. Reading, splitting, and shuffling it was a nightmare. So, I wrapped a trivial hardware-friendly heuristic I've been using for the last few years into a CPython library. The part I enjoyed the most is implementing SIMD behavior without SIMD instructions... Using 64-bit words to work at 8-bit granularity. Unlike conventional SIMD, the code would remain the same for ~~almost~~ any hardware.…
2023 · ashvardanian.com · its alternatives →
- 21
A unified interface for optimization algorithms and experiments - hyperactive-project/Hyperactive
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22MI
The release of microgpt by Andrej Karpathy is a foundational moment for AI transparency. In exactly 243 lines of pure, dependency-free Python, Karpathy has implemented the complete GPT algorithm from scratch. As a PhD scholar investigating AI and Blockchain, I see this as the ultimate tool for moving beyond the "black box" narrative of Large Language Models (LLMs). The Architecture of Simplicity Unlike modern frameworks that hide complexity behind optimized CUDA kernels, microgpt exposes the raw mathematical machinery. The code implements: The Autograd Engine: A custom Value class that…
Feb 2026 · its alternatives →
- 23
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 · its alternatives →
- 24LT
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 · its alternatives →
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- Autocomplete Python with Deep Learning alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →