DealForge autonomously sources, scores, and writes investment memos on venture deals. Stop manually hunting.

1,180+ deals tracked  ·  22 AI investment memos  ·  Updated daily

← Back to leaderboard

MacMind

Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh

26 AI Score
Show_hn Added Apr 16, 2026

Details

Total Funding
$0
Last Round
$0

About

I trained a transformer in HyperCard. 1,216 parameters. 1989 Macintosh. And yes, it took a while.<p>MacMind is a complete transformer neural network, embeddings, positional encoding, self-attention, backpropagation, and gradient descent, implemented entirely in HyperTalk, the scripting language Apple shipped with HyperCard in 1987. Every line of code is readable inside HyperCard&#x27;s script editor. Option-click any button and read the actual math.<p>The task: learn the bit-reversal permutation, the opening step of the Fast Fourier Transform. The model has no formula to follow. It discovers the positional pattern purely through attention and repeated trial and error. By training step 193, it was oscillating between 50%, 75%, and 100% accuracy on successive steps, settling into convergence like a ball rolling into a bowl.<p>The whole &quot;intelligence&quot; is 1,216 numbers stored in hidden fields in a HyperCard stack. Save the file, quit, reopen: the trained model is still there, still correct. It runs on anything from System 7 through Mac OS 9.<p>As a former physics student, and the FFT is an old friend, it sits at the heart of signal processing, quantum mechanics, and wave analysis. I built this because we&#x27;re at a moment where AI affects all of us but most of us don&#x27;t understand what it actually does. Backpropagation and attention are math, not magic. And math doesn&#x27;t care whether it&#x27;s running on a TPU cluster or a 68030 from 1989.<p>The repo has a pre-trained stack (step 1,000), a blank stack you can train yourself, and a Python&#x2F;NumPy reference implementation that validates the math.

AI Score Reasoning

MacMind is a brilliant technical demonstration and educational proof-of-concept, but it is a hobbyist project rather than a commercial enterprise. While the creator shows exceptional mastery of AI fundamentals by implementing a transformer in a legacy environment, there is no viable market, scalability, or business model to support a venture investment.

Source

Show_hn — View original →