AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I wrote my first neural network
I have been interested in neural nets since the 90's. I've done quite a bit of reading, but never gotten around to writing code. I used Gemini in place of Wikipedia to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. The coolest part of this was learning about dual numbers. You can see in early commits that I did not yet know about auto-diff; I was thinking I'd have to integrate a CAS library or something. Now, I'm off to play with TensorFlow.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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:satellite: Simple and ready-to-use tutorials for TensorFlow - GitHub - instillai/TensorFlow-Course: :satellite: Simple and ready-to-use tutorials for TensorFlow
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 3
100 Vibe Coding▲351Hi HN, I have been making side projects since I was 14, and my team mate (this is his very first side project! Congrats!) designed and implemented the UI. Over time, people kept asking me how they could start coding and turn ideas into reality. So we had an idea. Coding is changing. With AI, the bottleneck is no longer writing every line by hand but knowing how to prompt effectively to reach a working outcome. Our objective is not to make people code better, or even learn to be a proficient software engineer, but just to keep it simple and start building. We want to remove fear and barriers…
2025 · 100vibecoding.com · its alternatives →
- 4AV
Discussions: Hacker News (63 points, 8 comments), Reddit r/programming (312 points, 37 comments) Translations: Arabic, French, Spanish Update: Part 2 is now live: A Visual And Interactive Look at Basic Neural Network Math Motivation I’m not a machine learning expert. I’m a software engineer by train
2016 · jalammar.github.io · its alternatives →
- 5
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 →
- 6IC
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 →
- 7
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8HT
Fun little project, had Gemini 2.5 Pro summarize HN's top 30 each hour, both the stories and comment sections. Pretty impressed with Gemini 2.5. It's probably the first model other than Claude 3.7 Sonnet where I actually find the output readable. I normally use 3.7 Sonnet for coding, but used Gemini for the codegen on this one as well. Was pretty impressed! Using Cursor, it seemed to instruction-follow better than Claude generally does, and remain lucid during very long agent sessions. Thanks for your feedback!
2025 · tinysums.ai · its alternatives →
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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 →
- 10IM
Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!
2024 · saas-quick.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12IM
2017 · neuralnetsforhackers.teachable.com · its alternatives →
- 13
2024 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →
- 14L3
I recently custom prompted 1.5 pro to teach me new words by helping me to make sentences using them - the only way to learn vocab IMO. It's been helpful for my GRE prep, hope you may find it useful as well!
2024 · wordlab.cloud · its alternatives →
- 15WU
hey y'all -- can you please tell us if our job search tool sucks? :D we built it using an investor platform called Harmonic.ai to gather startup data, then contextualize it so that job seekers could find out about the most exciting startups hiring first (like if they just raised, growing headcount fast, have an ex-unicorn founder, etc). pretty sure we're the first platform doing anything like this. anyway, let me know what you think. really excited to launch this thing soon! getting feedback from the hn community first is really fun :)
2022 · joinmaasive.com · its alternatives →
- 16AS
Getting started with neural networks can seem to be a daunting prospect, even if you have some programming experience. The many examples on the Internet dive straight into the mathematics of what the neural network is doing or are full of jargon that can make it a little difficult to understand what
2016 · aimatters.wordpress.com · its alternatives →
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two strange things to do with neural nets. Contribute to howonlee/twostrangethings development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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TensorFlow▲17An Open Source Library for Machine Intelligence (by Google)
2015 · tensorflow.org · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
Jul 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 21
Hi HN! I kept hearing about Lisp and why it was special but didn't have a great place to start. I wanted something self-contained that helped me develop intuition rather than fluency. My hope is this is helpful for casual programmers, professionals from other fields who interact with code, or engineers who haven't had much exposure to interpreters or compilers. Hope this helps anyone else who's curious about getting a sense of Lisp and what makes it special with a limited time investment! Feedback or other cool Lisp things welcome :)
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hey everyone! I've developed Gemini Engineer, an AI-powered CLI tool for software developers, using the Gemini API! This tool aims to assist with project creation, file management, and coding tasks through AI. It's still in development, and I'd love to get feedback from fellow developers like you. Check out the project on GitHub: https://github.com/ozanunal0/gemini-engineer Please give it a try and share your thoughts, suggestions, or any bugs you find. Thanks a bunch!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
From the basics to slightly more interesting applications of Tensorflow - pkmital/tensorflow_tutorials
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24GV
Hey HN, I just updated my project that compares some LLMs. It uses your prompt for all the models and runs at the same time. You can see the results being generated in real-time and decide what's the best for your use case. I'm open to any suggestions and feedback. Thanks!
2024 · geminivsgpt.com · its alternatives →
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