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Show HN: Turn regular JavaScript into a neural net

25 points • by chenglou • last Tuesday at 9:32 PM • 10 comments • view on HN

Comments

gregsadetsky • today at 8:17 PM

As far as I understand, this doesn't turn "regular" JavaScript into a NN, it's rather "write your logic in a DSL that creates a neural-net-shaped circuit"

the source code for the OS demo is not "regular" code, it's full of `emiRelu`... https://github.com/chenglou/handwired/blob/main/src/handwire...

The main site & readme seem to overclaim, while the docs say things like "With Handwired you write a numeric program" and "No tool converts existing JavaScript source into a program" - https://github.com/chenglou/handwired/tree/main/docs

happy to be proven wrong, to have misunderstood this, etc.

dvrp • last Tuesday at 9:37 PM

I think for everyone interested in this project checking your OG twitter thread is also somewhat mandatory:

https://x.com/_chenglou/status/2110557373651931267

It took me a bit to wrap my head around what you did.

jahala • today at 9:05 PM

What is stopping Anthropic, Google etc from essentially building models that completely replace the concept of code?

You point a model to an API and get a fully working UI right away. I don’t mean an agent CODED the UI - I mean the model inferred it from its training data and renders it to you “live”

Or the other way around? You serve it a UI- and it acts as the backend etc? State and persistence becomes an issue, but the model could freeze things into deterministic structures (specific parts become -just in time-frozen, for example when data needs to be saved)

Maybe this is old news already- but the consequences are kind of mind blowing

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auraham • today at 8:10 PM

It seems interesting but I am confused. What is the purpose of that landing page? It is not clear since it showcases several (not related) ideas:

- turning js code into something else, arguably high-level code for training neural networks

- a mini OS inside the browser

- a gallery

- document search

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hungryhobbit • today at 9:27 PM

Website is missing the #1 thing I imagine most readers would want to know: why?

seamossfet • today at 8:00 PM

Clever, I wonder what would happen if you did this in reverse? Like, if we froze the weights then added some layers trained on a bunch of weird edge cases then tried to convert those weights back into branches.

QA through entropy lol