Syna – Minimal ML and RL Framework Built from Scratch with NumPy
Hello HN, I built Syna to understand how modern ML frameworks like PyTorch actually work — from the ground up. It’s a minimal, define-by-run (dynamic graph) framework inspired by DeZero, written entirely with NumPy. Unlike most libraries, Syna includes a basic reinforcement learning module right inside the same framework — no separate packages. It’s not about speed or GPUs — it’s about clarity, simplicity, and learning the internals of machine learning. Great for students, educators, and anyone curious about what’s really happening under the hood. GitHub:…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN, I built Syna to understand how modern ML frameworks like PyTorch actually work — from the ground up. It’s a minimal, define-by-run (dynamic graph) framework inspired by DeZero, written entirely with NumPy. Unlike most libraries, Syna includes a basic reinforcement learning module right inside the same framework — no separate packages. It’s not about speed or GPUs — it’s about clarity, simplicity, and learning the internals of machine learning. Great for students, educators, and anyone curious about what’s really happening under the hood. GitHub: https://github.com/sql-hkr/syna I also built a web app that visualizes how neural networks learn in real time — perfect for beginners exploring training dynamics: GitHub: https://github.com/sql-hkr/xor Demo: https://sql-hkr.github.io/xor/ Happy hacking!
Does the same job
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Dear HN, I am Riwaj, the cofounder of dstack.ai (https://github.com/dstackai). A few months ago, we built an online service that allows users to publish data visualizations from Python or R. The idea was to build a tool that did not require additional programming or front-end development for publishing data visualizations. Such a code can be invoked from either Jupyter notebook, RMarkdown, Python, or R scripts. Once the data is pushed, it can be accessed via a browser. Open-sourcing dstack: During our customer discovery phase, we realized that dstack.ai should integrate a lot…
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Hello HN, We are pleased to introduce you graphlearn-for-pytorch (https://github.com/alibaba/graphlearn-for-pytorch), an open-source distributed graph neural network library based on PyTorch and compatible with PyG. Our library is designed to make it easy for developers to build and train large-scale graph models in a distributed environment. With graphlearn-for-pytorch, you can leverage GPUs to accelerate graph sampling and utilize UVA to reduce the overheads of feature collection. Following a scalable design, graphlearn-for-pytorch supports training GNN models on…

- PAPandera – An open source data testing framework for data science and ML2022 · pandera.readthedocs.io · ▲9
Hi HN, I'm excited to share Pandera, an open source framework for data testing, built for data scientists and ML engineers: https://www.union.ai/pandera I’ve been working with data and building models for a decade, and one of the biggest pain points for me is working with low-quality data. I got burned by incorrect data types and unexpected values so many times that I built a Pandera to help you safeguard your pipelines from silent data bugs. You can create schemas for your dataframe-like objects, which can be validated at run-time, in your unit tests via property-based…
- SFSmart Fruit – A Python schema-based machine learning library2018 · ▲44
I've made a small Python library, designed for quick-and-easy prototyping of machine learning models. It's built on top of scikit-learn, to serialize and deserialize data from the forms you're likely to have, to the format used in scikit-learn. https://github.com/madman-bob/Smart-Fruit It's pretty bare-bones at the moment, but I thought I'd see if there was any interest before spending too much time on it. Let me know what you think.
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I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
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Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
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Launched alongside, October 2025
the whole month →

- SA
I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js. Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun. My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to…
AI · Oct 2025 · blog.shashanktomar.com

- ASAutism Simulator▲779
Hey all, I built this. It’s not trying to capture every autistic experience (that’d be impossible). It’s based on my own lived experience as well as that of friends on the spectrum. I'm trying to give people a feel for what masking, decision fatigue, and burnout can look like day-to-day. That’s hard to explain in words, but easier to show through choices and stats. I'm not trying to "define autism". I’ve gotten good feedback here about resilience, meds, and difficulty tuning. I’ll keep tweaking it. If even a few people walk away thinking, "ah, maybe that’s why my coworker struggles in those…
Life & fun · Oct 2025 · autism-simulator.vercel.app
