Alternatives
Products that do what I wrote my first neural network does
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.
- 1IM
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
- 2IC
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
- 3NN
2020 · github.com
- 4IW
2017 · github.com
- 5HT
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
- 6
- 7IM
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
- 8TB
2017 · github.com
- 9L3
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
- 10TT
2016 · github.com
- 11LI
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
- 12GE
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
- 13IL
Sysadmin is my bread and butter, but I taught myself PHP and have been coding on and off for the past 6 years. I've worked on numerous freelance gigs, but mainly internal apps that I use for my real job. I worked on this project (on and off) for the past year and I'm happy to finally release it to the public. Even if it doesn't succeed, I'm happy that I was able to "scratch an itch" I've had for the past couple of years. I wanted to make something and prove to myself that I can program. I'm not the greatest, but I'm proud of what I've achieved. http://www.ikeepm.com
2011
- 14GV
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
- 15IB
Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.
2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me
- 16IW
Hey HN, I wrote a short book about the fundamental aspects of Clojure. The target audience is programmers with at least minimal experience who want to learn how to express solutions in Clojure (and perhaps in LISP, generally). If the price is a bit too steep for you, send me an email (address in bio), and I'll provide a discount coupon. If you can't afford it all, and believe the material may help you for studying or interview preparations, I can send you a free copy.
2025 · leanpub.com
- 17IV
The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohs6sgmVNYI This video is a prof of concept. I always wanted to see if I could make my Neural Network play tinder for me. So I gather some pictures, created a fake tinder app (so I don't expose real people) and began the training. For this experiment I'm using scrcpy to control my cellphone and pyautogui alongside my neural network. The script is very simple: Get the image, run it trough a neural network, move the mouse to the output (yes or no) and click. There's a lot of hard coded things in my code, but as I said earlier,…
2019
- 18CO
First tutorial to date. Writing your first C program, includes a link at the bottom with a detailed look at printf() as optional reading. I would love some feedback, as I intend writing up a lot of dev articles for people to learn from : www.xanthu.com/first-c-program
2013
- 19WB
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
- 20FT
After six months of work, I am here again presenting Fluent – a tiny lang which is optimized for differentiable & reactive programming. Since I am not Conal Elliot, don't expect a beautiful theoretical unification of FRP and AD from first principles. Rather, a horrific monster that holds together mostly because a lot of duct-tape. The link points to the semi-interactive tour of the language, which will get the job done much better than I could in here. Hope you hate/like it!
Jul 2026 · mlajtos.github.io
- 21CW
Hey HN friends, Just launched my first NoCode web app, maching.ai, built with Bubble. Check it out and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!
2023 · maching.ai
- 22IB
I've been experimenting with ways to increase AI adoption for non-technical people. Basically, all companies are pushing for AI because it's all over the news and they feel left behind but most people have no clue where to start. I think 90% of people (ie non coders) are sufficiently well served by using cowork instead of claude code or something similar. If we can get people from sales, customer support, marketing, etc to collaborate with skills and cowork to form a company brain, I think it's gold. So I think there's opportunity for the community to share skills that work well for 1000s of…
Jun 2026 · claudinho.xyz
- 23IC
For the last few months I have been analysing Peter Lynch’s books on stock picking and doing prompt engineering to check if AI could create useful stock analyses. To my surprise it started making reports that allow me to understand companies much faster with well cited sources. I hope you find it interesting and useful :) Perter Lynch’s books I analyzed: Learn to earn, One up on Wall Street, Beating the street
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 24ND
This is an AI generated TED talk from a system we built at the TED AI hackathon this weekend. It's built on top of ElevenLabs, SDXL and Wordware (https://wordware.ai/). We also have a custom index of over 2 million arXiv papers and 6 million Wikipedia articles. All open source: https://github.com/ashvardanian/extrapolaTED
2023 · youtube.com
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