Alternatives
Products that do what Penny-1.7B Irish Penny Journal style transfer does
Yesterday, in the bygone hour of the weekend, I undertook a most singular and fascinating endeavor, wherein I delved deep into the recesses of my mind, and, with a fervent zeal, breathed life into a most remarkable creation. I embarked upon the quest, with the singular object of fashioning an artificial construct, one imbued with the verdant essence of the Irish Penny Journal, an ancient and venerable tome that holds within its pages the whispered tales of a bygone era. In my haste, I set forth to construct a dataset, a repository of those fleeting moments, these ephemeral sentences, which…
- 1IB
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 2IM
I built this project as a way to learn more about NLP by applying it to something weird and unsolved. The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th-century book written in an unknown script. No one’s been able to translate it, and many think it’s a hoax, a cipher, or a constructed language. I wasn’t trying to decode it — I just wanted to see: does it behave like a structured language? I stripped a handful of common suffix-like endings (aiin, dy, etc.) to isolate what looked like root forms. I know that’s a strong assumption — I call it out directly in the repo — but it helped clarify the clustering. From…
2025 · github.com
- 3TD
This is a character-level language diffusion model for text generation. The model is a modified version of Nanochat's GPT implementation and is trained on Tiny Shakespeare! It is only 10.7 million parameters, so you can try it out locally.
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 4DA
2025 · github.com
- 5WF
We have a dataset of 3,095 standardized AI responses across 43 prompts. From each response, we extract a 32-dimension stylometric fingerprint (lexical richness, sentence structure, punctuation habits, formatting patterns, discourse markers). Some findings: - 9 clone clusters (>90% cosine similarity on z-normalized feature vectors) - Mistral Large 2 and Large 3 2512 score 84.8% on a composite metric combining 5 independent signals - Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite writes 78% like Claude 3 Opus. Costs 185x less - Meta has the strongest provider "house style" (37.5x distinctiveness ratio) - "Satirical…
Apr 2026 · rival.tips
- 6

- 7NA
Numscript is a simple, declarative language that helps you model financial transactions. You can do quite a few things with it, such as modeling: * Payments involving vouchers and a user's prepaid balance * Complex funds destination scenario where the customer gets cash back * Configurable user credit balance spending transactions The main idea is to take the pain out of describing of a system dealing with money movements should behave in traditional languages such as JS/TS/Go/Ruby etc, landing an expressive way to model these movements of value. It is voluntarily broad in…
2024 · playground.numscript.org
- 8
- 9IM
Hey HN, I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool. It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me. The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know. Cheers!
2025 · muffinman.io
- 10AI
Hello HN! In a recent "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread, I mentioned I was working on OCRing a large book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971614 The post generated some interest so I thought I would keep HN posted. The book is Saint-Simon’s Memoirs -- an invaluable historical account of the French court under Louis XIV, full of wit, sharp observations, and of incredible literary value. I'm OCRing the edition of reference made between 1879-1930, that contains a lot of comments and footnotes: 45 volumes, ~27,000 pages. Here's a link to a blog post that describes…
2024 · blog.medusis.com
- 11CA
I built Chonkie because I was tired of rewriting chunking code for RAG applications. Existing libraries were either too bloated (80MB+) or too basic, with no middle ground. Core features: - 21MB default install vs 80-171MB alternatives - 33x faster token chunking than popular alternatives - Supports multiple chunking strategies: token, word, sentence, and semantic - Works with all major tokenizers (transformers, tokenizers, tiktoken) - Zero external dependencies for basic functionality Technical optimizations: - Uses tiktoken with multi-threading for faster tokenization - Implements…
2024 · github.com
- 12LW
Some technical context on what we ran into building this. MCP tools don't really work for financial data at scale. One tool call for five years of daily prices dumps tens of thousands of tokens into the context window. And data vendors pack dozens of tools into a single MCP server, schemas alone can eat 50k+ tokens before the agent does anything useful. So we auto-generate typed Python modules from the MCP schemas at workspace init and upload them into the sandbox. The agent just imports them like a normal library. Only a one-line summary per server stays in the prompt. We have around 80…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 13CA
TLDR: I’ve made a transformer model and a wrapper library that segments text into meaningful semantic chunks. The current text splitting approaches rely on heuristics (although one can use neural embedder to group semantically related sentences). I propose a fully neural approach to semantic chunking. I took the base distilbert model and trained it on a bookcorpus to split concatenated text paragraphs into original paragraphs. Basically it’s a token classification task. Model fine-tuning took day and a half on a 2x1080ti. The library could be used as a text splitter module in a RAG system or…
2025 · github.com
- 14AC
I authored and developed an interactive children's book about entrepreneurship and money management. The journey started with Twinery, the open-source tool for making interactive fiction, discovered right here on HN. The tool kindled memories of reading CYOA style books when I was a kid, and I thought the format would be awesome for writing a story my kids could follow along, incorporating play money to learn about transactions as they occurred in the story. Twinery is a fantastic tool, and I used it to layout the story map. I really wanted to write the content of the story in Emacs and Org…
2025 · tendollaradventure.com
- 15

Hi HN. I built 1667 for my own fiction work and now use it each day. This probably has a limited audience. Maybe an audience of one... Why a terminal interface for story writing? I'm a dev. I like to use terminals for a lot of stuff. Most WebUIs feel off to me. That's the only reason. One thing that bothers me about writing in existing tools is that they don't fit the way I write. The mental model of my story is a tree. I try many takes usually continue with just one, but sometimes I want to try an alternate route and see where this goes. And that can branch again in many places. See what…
20d ago · 1667.ai
- 16CA
TLDR: I’m expanding the family of text-splitting Chonky models with new multilingual model. You can learn more about this neural approach in a previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652968 Since the release of the first distilbert-based model I’ve released two more models based on a ModernBERT. All these models were pre-trained and fine-tuned primary on English texts. But recently mmBERT(https://huggingface.co/blog/mmbert) has been released. This model pre-trained on massive dataset that contains 1833 languages. So I had an idea of…
Oct 2025 · huggingface.co
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- 18PA
I've been working for a while on trying to curate a game that has the emergence of procedurally generated computer games but that can be played with only pen and paper. Here I present the best version I've been able to come up with that is simple and emergent. I've really enjoyed being able to engage with this sort of game while not feeling like my brain in rotting. I recon my numeracy improves while playing it.
Jun 2026 · jameshylands.co.uk
- 19EL
Hey HN! I'd love to get some people to mess around with a little side project I built to teach myself DSPy! I've been a big fan of reading fiction + webnovels for a while now, and have always been curious about two things: how can LLMs iteratively learn to write better based on reader feedback, and which LLMs are actually best at creative writing (research benchmarks are cool, but don't necessarily translate to real-world usage). That's exactly why I built narrator.sh! The platform takes in a user input for a novel idea, then generates serialized fiction chapter-by-chapter by using DSPy to…
2025 · narrator.sh
- 20BT
Built an auditable AI (Bible) translation pipeline: Hebrew/Greek source packets -> verse JSON with notes rolling up to chapters, books, and testaments. Final texts compiled with metrics (TTR, n-grams). This is the first full-text example as far as I know (Gen Z bible doesn't count). There are hallucinations and issues, but the overall quality surprised me. LLMs have a lot of promise translating and rendering 'accessible' more ancient texts. The technology has a lot of benefit for the faithful, that I think is only beginning to be explored.
Jan 2026 · biblexica.com
- 21BA
Writing is hard, and it's tempting to just let AI do the whole thing So I built an Obsidian plugin that keeps AI in its place Highlight a sentence, get some options, pick the one you like Sharpens your writing instead of automating it
Jun 2026 · rephrasethis.co
- 22TI
Hey Hacker News, Myself and another nomad have been working on this for a few years. It's a travel blog that aims to make it easier to write (and read) by limiting you to one photo and 350 characters per day. The first part was easy (making it work for us), the second part took a lot longer (adding all the polish to make it usable). Mostly it's a passion project borne out of lack of alternatives. If we were going to monetise it would probably be by adding a feature to turn posts (trots) into postcards, and make a small markup over a printing API like lob.com. Probably not a huge market, but…
2015
- 23HT
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
- 24LI
2018 · languagemodels.io
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