Fresh Hacker News | Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh

▲Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh(github.com)

95 points by hammer32 7 hours ago | 6 comments

▲edwin 3 hours ago

There’s something quietly impressive about getting modern AI ideas to run on old hardware (like OP's project or running LLM inference on Windows 3.1 machines). It’s easy to think all the progress is just bigger GPUs and more compute, but moments like that remind you how much of it is just more clever math and algorithms squeezing signal out of limited resources. Feels closer to the spirit of early computing than the current “throw hardware at it” narrative.

▲wdbm 2 hours ago

There is an absolutely beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa encoded at some point in the digits of pi. If you know the position, it's really easy to plot the image.

But first you have to find that position.

▲hammer32 1 hour ago

Exactly. Working in a constrained environment invites innovation.

▲Unbeliever69 1 hour ago

Now do this on a Casio Watch next :)

▲hyperhello 5 hours ago

Hello, if there are no XCMDs it should work adequately in HyperCard Simulator. I am only on my phone but I took a minute to import it.

https://hcsimulator.com/imports/MacMind---Trained-69E0132C

▲hammer32 4 hours ago

I had no idea your simulator existed. No XCMDs, correct; everything is pure HyperTalk. I just ran a few training steps and they complete in a second or two. Thank you for importing it!

▲hyperhello 4 hours ago

I gotta ask. Your scripts have comments like -- handlers_math.hypertalk.txt at the top. Are you using some kind of build process for a stack?

▲hammer32 3 hours ago

More of a copy-paste process. The scripts are written as .txt files in Nova on my Mac Studio, then pasted one at a time into HyperCard's script editor on the classic Mac. The files are kept separate because SimpleText has a 32 KB text limit.

▲hyperhello 3 hours ago

As an alternative, you might consider letting Hypercard itself open the text files and 'set the script of' as needed.

▲hammer32 2 hours ago

Yup, that would have been easier. It's been decades since I've done anything with HyperCard. I had to re-take the built-in intro course again :)

▲tty456 1 hour ago

Where's the code for the actual HyperCard and building of the .img? I only see the python validator in the repo.

▲hammer32 1 hour ago

The stack is the code. You can view it directly for each button or examine the per-page script. As far as I know there isn't a compiler that lets you write standalone code and turn it into a stack. The stacks are dropped into Disk Copy disk images to preserve their resource forks. Both modern macOS and Git both strip resource forks, so the disk image is the only reliable container for distribution.

▲tty456 44 minutes ago

So a hypercard is compiled machine code of button clicks and key presses? Weird. I guess that could be macro'd somehow

▲hammer32 34 minutes ago

HyperTalk is an interpreted scripting language. The scripts are stored as plain text inside the stack and interpreted at runtime. It's kind of like a Visual Basic form where the UI and the code live in the same file. You can open any script, read it, edit it and immediately run the newly edited script.

▲gcanyon 6 hours ago

It's strange to think how modern concepts are only modern because no one thought of them back then. This feels (to me) like the germ theory being transferred back to the ancient greeks.

▲kdhaskjdhadjk 4 hours ago

I think it's incredible to see the potential that is still locked up in old hardware. For example the 8088 MPH demo. Amazing what he was able to do with an 8088 and CGA. All this time the hardware had that potential, but it took decades to figure out how to unlock it, long after the hardware was considered obsolete. Imagine the sort of things that might be done later down the road with hardware of 0-20 years ago if somebody really dug into it to that level.

▲qingcharles 1 hour ago

8088 MPH demo is revolutionary. I have a plan to try and backport the developments from that demo, plus other optimizations learned in the last 40 years, back into the original 8088 Elite PC version. I had Gemini Pro write a PoC using 8088 assembler to create a CGA flat-poly renderer for the ships, which worked great. Next step is to use Claude to disassemble the original Elite binary so I can figure out where the rendering code lives and try to start patching it.

▲ashleyn 4 hours ago

Retro console homebrew and demoscene are all about this. There's a lot of fun stuff going on in N64 homebrew right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEo0aQkGnU

▲andai 2 hours ago

8088 MPH: this one, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

▲tomcam 4 hours ago

That 8088 MPH demo is a tour de force. Which tells you that the millions of Apple laptops being bricked right now instead of being recycled could have some amazing use if it were possible to wipe them clean and reuse. Sigh.

▲andai 2 hours ago

Well, we've set it up so the survival of employees and their families is tied to old products being bricked.

▲hammer32 6 hours ago

Right? Backprop was published in 1986, a year before HyperCard shipped. Attention is newer, but a small model like this was buildable.

▲ 2 hours ago

▲jeffbee 2 hours ago

People did think of many of these core concepts decades ago, but they did not have the resources to put them into practice.

▲anthk 5 hours ago

Lisp is from 1960's and with s9 you can do even calculus with ease, in an interpreter small enough to fit in two floppies.

On the Greeks, Archimede almost did 'Calculus 0.9'.

▲immanuwell 2 hours ago

The architecture of macmind looks pretty interesting

▲hammer32 1 hour ago

Thank you! The constraints made it interesting. HyperCard doesn't have arrays, so the entire model, weights, activations, gradients, is stored as strings in hidden fields. All of the matrix math is done with "item i of field".

▲DetroitThrow 6 hours ago

This is very cool. Any more demos of inference output?

▲hammer32 4 hours ago

Thanks! The quickest way to try it is the HyperCard Simulator link someone just posted in this thread: https://hcsimulator.com/imports/MacMind---Trained-69E0132C — go to the Inference card, click New Random to fill in 8 digits, then click Permute. The model predicts the bit-reversed permutation of all 8 positions. The pre-trained stack gets all inputs correct.