Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

This is an academic research project proposing the Information-Induced Time Dilation hypothesis, which suggests that high information entropy density may cause time dilation alongside mass-energy effects in spacetime.… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

1. 1WI
   What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?free▲629

   Special relativity simulator in which light crawls along at a human speed, so Lorentz contraction, aberration and Doppler shift happen at walking pace.

   Sep 2026 · rivendell.dmitrybrant.com · its alternatives →

2. 2OI
   OpenGL in super slow motion – visualising Z-buffering▲276

   Things orbital and not.

   2016 · orbides.org · its alternatives →

3. 3LN
   Large Numbers Hypothesis Revisited▲64

   I was reviewing Dirac's Large Numbers Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis) and decided to give it a second go, now with measurements of fundamental constants more precise than 100 years ago. And I stumbled upon a value for Hubble's constant that's uncannily close. Here are the full calculations. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1K1qoUFvqZp1fWbpcKJWq63nflgwS0ZHh?usp=sharing Meaningless, or meaningful coincidence?

   2021 · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Speeding up LLM inference 2x times (possibly)▲419

   Here's a project I've been working on for the last few months. It's a new (I think) algorithm, that allows to adjust smoothly - and in real time - how many calculations you'd like to do during inference of an LLM model. It seems that it's possible to do just 20-25% of weight multiplications instead of all of them, and still get good inference results. I implemented it to run on M1/M2/M3 GPU. The mmul approximation itself can be pushed to run 2x fast before the quality of output collapses. The inference speed is just a bit faster than Llama.cpp's, because the rest of implementation…

   2024 · asciinema.org · its alternatives →

5. 5
   Python Simulator of David Deutsch’s “Constructor Theory of Time”▲84

   Hi HN, I turned the freshly published paper “The Constructor Theory of Time” by David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto (arXiv, 13 May 2025) into an executable Python library. What you’ll find • One-to-one translation of the paper’s formalism: Substrates, Attributes, Tasks, Constructors, and task-algebra operators • Possibility / impossibility predicates and counterfactuals encoded exactly as defined • Test suite that mirrors every lemma and example (>95 % coverage, mypy-typed) • Reproductions of key results: time-keeping substrates, irreversibility proofs, quantum branching tasks, and a…

   2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

6. 6
   Spurious Correlation▲59

   Funny reminders that correlation does not imply causation

   2014 · tylervigen.com · its alternatives →

7. 7
   Sup AI▲103

   Hi HN. I'm Ken, a 20-year-old Stanford CS student. I built Sup AI. I started working on this because no single AI model is right all the time, but their errors don’t strongly correlate. In other words, models often make unique mistakes relative to other models. So I run multiple models in parallel and synthesize the outputs by weighting segments based on confidence. Low entropy in the output token probability distributions correlates with accuracy. High entropy is often where hallucinations begin. My dad Scott (AI Research Scientist at TRI) is my research partner on this. He sends me papers…

   Apr 2026 · sup.ai · its alternatives →

8. 8
   I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon▲142

   Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student. This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data). The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including: - The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W. -The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude. - The Communications: A custom lossy compression…

   Nov 2025 · radi8.dev · its alternatives →

9. 9IW
   I was playing with fundamental constants and 13.8 b years popped out▲56

   I was playing around with fundamental constants and out popped 13.8 billion light years. What is going on? the wavelength of an electron mass photon / (2pi) * the charge radius of a proton / the black hole radius of a proton = 13.8 billion light years ((h / (m_e * c * 2pi)) * (h / (m_p * c * pi/2)) / (2G * m_p / c^2)) = 13.8 billion light years…

   2021 · its alternatives →

10. 10
    The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes▲53

    Evolution, Theoretical Physics and Computer Science

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

11. 11ID
    IoT device to warn you of a supernova hours before Earth is destroyed▲145

    2022 · exaluminal.com · its alternatives →

12. 12
    Spurious Correlations▲59

    Correlation does not equal causation

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

13. 13
    An MCP server that gives LLMs temporal awareness and time calculation▲91

    This is an open‑source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives any LLM a sense of the passage of time. Most MCP demos wire LLMs to external data stores. That’s useful, but MCP is also a chance to give models perception — extra senses beyond the prompt text. Six functions (`current_datetime`, `time_difference`, `timestamp_context`, etc.) give Claude&#x2F;GPT real temporal awareness: It can spot pauses, reason about rhythms, and even label a chat’s “three‑act structure”. Runs locally in <60 s (Python) or via a hosted demo. If time works, what else could we surface? - Location &#x2F;…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

14. 14
    Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to▲66

    Information, networks, complexity to understand Economics

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

15. 15NX
    Nevermind XOR – Deep Learning Has an Issue with Sin▲34

    More precisely, even the best neural networks can not be trained to approximate periodic functions using stochastic gradient descent. (empirically, prove me wrong!) Contents Simulating a clock Simplifying the problem Why can’t we train the sin? What to do about it? Simulating a clock The problem tha

    2022 · lostmsu.github.io · its alternatives →

16. 16
    I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours▲37

    I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months (41,301 posts) plus the full comment tree of every launch with 10+ comments, ~100k comment timestamps, all from the Algolia HN API. The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments. For launches that do get traction, half the comments they'll ever get arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26, and the top decile decays on the same clock as everyone else. Vote timestamps aren't public, so comment timing is the attention proxy; caveats are in the post. Everything reproduces from the repo with one command…

    Jul 2026 · jonno.nz · its alternatives →

17. 17
    Analyse Asia 146: Singularity University Labs and The Heretic with Pascal Finette▲54

    Singularity university labs, the heretic & silicon valley

    2016 · content.blubrry.com · its alternatives →

18. 18AW
    A WebGL demo of the Observer Effect▲15

    2014 · qntm.herokuapp.com · its alternatives →

19. 19IB
    I built a website showing the likelihood of the AI bubble to pop▲11

    I built a web page that aggregates data about data center buildup, sovereign fund investments into AI and bottlenecks. The objective is to predict AI race cooldown by looking at a potential decrease of activity involving these elements. The website looks at the quarterly forms from the 5 biggest hyperscalers and adds their CapEx into the mix, calculating a composite index in the end showing how likely it is for the AI race to slow down. Enjoy!

    Jul 2026 · laurentiugabriel.github.io · its alternatives →

20. 20TI
    The Impact of Noise on Recurrent Neural Networks▲21

    Series on reservoir computing, focusing on echo state networks. Covers GPU simulations, addressing variable training lengths and data processing. Analyzes Gaussian noise impact on network performance, with practical demonstrations and theoretical discussions. Relevant for those interested in neural network behavior in noisy environments.

    2023 · ampolloreno.com · its alternatives →

21. 21
    OpenEntropy – 47 hardware entropy sources from your computer's physics▲6

    I built this to study something most security engineers wave off: whether external factors can nudge hardware entropy sources. Here is why. Princeton’s PEAR lab ran RNG work for about 28 years and shut down in February 2007. People in the lab tried to shift random event generator output, and they reported small deviations after tens of millions of events. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pear-lab.com&#x2F; The Global Consciousness Project took a similar idea outside the lab. It has run a distributed network of hardware RNGs since 1998 and looks for correlated deviations around major world events. Most…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

22. 22
    Spanda – Sub-microsecond LLM epistemic uncertainty in Rust▲13

    Zero-cost epistemic uncertainty quantification & hallucination detection for LLMs (90,000x faster than Semantic Entropy) - Adarshent/Spnda

    Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

23. 23
    Zero-power photonic language model–code▲18

    The model uses a 1024-dimensional complex Hilbert space with 32 layers of programmable Mach–Zehnder meshes (Reck architecture) and derives token probabilities directly via the Born rule. Despite using only unitary operations and no attention mechanism, a 1024×32 model achieves coherent TinyStories generation after < 1.8 hours of training on a single consumer GPU. This is Part 1 - the next step is physical implementation with $50 of optics from AliExpress.

    Nov 2025 · zenodo.org · its alternatives →

24. 24
    Fixing optical computing jitter via fluid dynamics in GPU registers▲6

    This is a poc utilizing the Burgers' viscous dissipation term While photons are not fluids, couldn't jitter be interpreted as a fluid-like phenomenon?

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →