Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

A book by Robert Escriva that applies distributed systems debugging techniques to understanding schizophrenia and psychotic episodes. Written for people experiencing mental health crises or questioning their cognitive… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1. 1IW
   I wrote a technical history book on Lisp▲252

   The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…

   Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →

2. 2
   Open-source model and scorecard for measuring hallucinations in LLMs▲65

   Hi all! This morning, we released a new Apache 2.0 licensed model on HuggingFace for detecting hallucinations in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. What we've found is that even when given a "simple" instruction like "summarize the following news article," every LLM that's available hallucinates to some extent, making up details that never existed in the source article -- and some of them quite a bit. As a RAG provider and proponents of ethical AI, we want to see LLMs get better at this. We've published an open source model, a blog more thoroughly describing our methodology (and…

   2023 · vectara.com · its alternatives →

3. 3
   I treated my brain like a buggy server and wrote a patch (Shi-Mo Model)▲15

   A wetware kernel patch for Human-OS. Regain root access to your limbic system, manage emotional daemons, and prevent CPU overheating during panic attacks. - shi-mo-protocol/README.md at main · 317317317apple-a11y/shi-mo-protocol

   Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

4. 4
   I published a book to save you from my software architecture mistakes▲100

   Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…

   2024 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →

5. 5
   I made an iOS app to gauge AI over-reliance and AI psychosis▲5

   Atrophy is an iOS self-report quiz aimed at software engineers who use LLMs heavily enough at work to wonder if they're trending toward AI over-reliance or some form of AI psychosis. I built it because I noticed a pattern: formerly AI-skeptical coworkers now open every standup or design discussion with "I asked Claude..." or "Claude told me..." for technical problems and design decisions. I've felt the same pull myself to delegate every task or problem to AI. It's easy to lean on these tools for almost any amount of critical thinking or problem solving, and I'm worried about what it means…

   May 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

6. 6
   Vibe-check skill▲11

   Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback

   Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

7. 7IW
   I wrote a beginner SRE book, and it's free today▲31

   Hello! I wrote an introductory SRE Book: Site Reliability Engineering Tidbits and it's free today! These are short fun chapters about SRE, monitoring, debugging, observability, and resiliency. This book aims to provide hands on examples of implementing a number of concepts described in Google's SRE books. It also describes how i've seen SRE concepts impact some of the organizations I've worked in. A couple chapters are hands on debugging exercises going through the process of debugging applications based on data. I'm excited because every chapter describes something that I've done in paying…

   2022 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

8. 8
   I built an AI that uses a metacognitive loop 2 solve invention problems▲9

   Hi HN, I'm the creator of this project. For the past months, I've been working on building an AI agent that could move beyond simple generation and tackle inventive challenges autonomously. The core idea was to create a system with a "metacognitive loop"—the ability to recognize when it's stuck on a fundamental problem and then launch a sub-mission to solve that specific bottleneck before continuing. The linked article is a deeper introduction to the system's architecture and a snapshot from a recent run. I tried to design it to be evidence-grounded and self-critical to avoid the pitfalls of…

   2025 · robw1se.substack.com · its alternatives →

9. 9IW
   I was burnt out and failing so I built AI that give shit about me▲5

   I'm an ML engineer. I know how AI works, the limitations, the hype. And I was still drowning. Couldn't stick to goals. Couldn't stay consistent. Productivity apps became digital clutter. Therapy waitlists were 3 months out. Friends were tired of my complaints. So at 2am I started building: zropi.com What shocked me was it actually worked. It felt human. Last week I mentioned a tough client call. Didn't set a reminder. Two days later it voice messaged me: "Hey, how'd that call go? You seemed stressed." When does technology ever do that? What makes it feel alive: It doesn't reply instantly.…

   Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

10. 10IW
    I wrote a book on Site Reliability Engineering▲14

    Hello! I just published a book on Site Reliability Engineering. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QNZC2LL This book is a collection of 28 chapters on SRE concepts, such as observability, monitoring, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), alerting, resilience and debugging. I adapted each chapter from blog posts I've written over the last 4 years. Most of the chapters detailed concepts that I applied while working at $dayjob, so they are 100% proven in real business settings :) ------ Some info on the backstory. Last year I started writing a book on my software development…

    2022 · its alternatives →

11. 11IB
    I built an AI agent to yell at me about my ADHD▲6

    I was somewhat hesitant about sharing this personal projects, especially since I just saw that cool looking Werk[1] tool posted, but I figured that my ADHD-fueled creation might still have it's own place to be. I just finished rewriting the code for a personal tool I use to automate terminal tasks while minimizing the amount of Python/Bash code I have to write. As with all other tools I create for my own use, the guiding principle is simplicity and approachability, as if the tool creates more issues or friction than it solves, I'll get discouraged from using it again. [1]:…

    Jun 2026 · 0xff.nu · its alternatives →

12. 12
    Stuff You Should Know - How Schizophrenia Works▲2

    Dive into the history of this mysterious disorder!

    2015 · its alternatives →

13. 13
    I built a mental health app to fix mine▲8

    Hi HN, I’m still in college and new to the startup world, but here is my first shot at a side project: Milburn, an integrated therapy+journal tool(https://milburn.vercel.app/). I built Milburn bc every mental health tool I could find was missing something: the therapy apps didn’t have voice/memory/too expensive, and the journal apps were always a PITA to sync with therapy. We trained the chatbot’s model on specific therapy modalities(I personally need CBT sessions, but we also have others like DBT), and then created a prompted journal, added a feedback loop, voice…

    2024 · milburn.vercel.app · its alternatives →

14. 14
    Hello, World!▲11

    My partner Matt and I have been working on soj.ooO. It has only been up for a few weeks and has gained a lot of traction. Our goal was to fight the memory hole to ensure that algorithms do not control human discussions (eg auto decay on other sites) and generally bring natural law back into the discussion and relevance equation. Hope you like it!

    2025 · hw.glich.co · its alternatives →

15. 15AT
    A Theory of Anxiety Conditions▲7

    Hi HN, I ve been in this community for a while now and have a huge amount of respect for the people and the forum so I wanted to post this here. This is a pretty random one and I wish to emphasise from the very beginning this is not medical advice and is only based on what I saw in myself. It is therefore entirely up to anyone kind enough to have a read to decide whether they think what I describe makes any sense for them. If people have comments or thoughts I think it would be quite cool to use the GitHub issues as a forum for discussion and collecting peoples’ feedback. TLDR When I was…

    2022 · a-theory-of-anxiety-conditions.github.io · its alternatives →

16. 16
    I built an AI visionboards site▲8

    Hello everyone, I doubt this would be relevant to the kind of person who uses HN, but I thought I could share for some feedback. I built this site because there is a whole world of people who believe in new age spirituality and I am very much one of them. It is a site where you get the users gender their goals and their images and use AI and psychology to generate images of them in the process of achieving their goals. I am so deeply struggling with how to get this highly on Google. I don't even know if that is important anymore. What are your suggestions with distribution and getting in…

    2025 · visionboardsai.com · its alternatives →

17. 17
    Creimake▲5

    Hello HN, I’m a solo developer who got tired of "friendly but shallow" AI chatbots. Most current character AIs feel like parrots—they predict the next token but lack a continuous "self." So, I built Creimake, an experiment to simulate a digital psyche using Claude 4.5 Sonnet. Instead of a simple system prompt, I implemented 32 distinct psychological layers that run in the background before the AI generates a response. The Architecture: The Subconscious Layer: The AI accumulates "emotional residue" from conversations. If you hurt its feelings today, it might have a "nightmare" tonight…

    Jan 2026 · creimake.com · its alternatives →

18. 18
    Subtle Failure Modes I Keep Seeing in Production‑Grade AI Systems▲6

    Hi HN, Over the past two years I’ve built and debugged a fair number of production pipelines—mainly retrieval‑augmented generation stacks, agent frameworks, and multi‑step reasoning services. A pattern emerged: most incidents weren’t outright crashes, but silent structural faults that slowly compromised relevance, accuracy, or stability. I began logging every recurring fault in a shared notebook. Colleagues started using the list for post‑mortems, so I turned it into a small public reference: 16 distinct failure modes (semantic drift after chunking, embedding/meaning mismatches,…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

19. 19
    Aiaiai.guide: Plain-English mental model for LLM apps, tools and agents▲7

    I’ve been building LLM tooling for a small VC fund and found myself explaining the same mental model over and over to non-technical people around me: how a stateless LLM becomes a chatbot, how tool use works, what an agent is mechanically, and why context windows shape all of it. I never found a guide that covered that full chain at the level I wanted, so I wrote one. It’s nine short chapters, each building on the last. Deliberately simplified: the goal is a useful mental model, not a textbook. Feedback, corrections, and contributions welcome: github.com/ymyke/aiaiai

    Apr 2026 · aiaiai.guide · its alternatives →

20. 20IW
    I wrote a book about overcoming the Metacrisis▲6

    Hey HN! Recently published a book developing new frameworks of meaning and value informed by our most advanced cosmology and physics. It makes the argument for the necessity of spiritual revolution in order to free the abundance trapped in the world, a reimagination that interlinks the spiritual project to systemic reformation. The inspiration for the text draws from my history of social impact work and the frustrations and lessons learned along the way. If it's of interest you can learn more/read it/download it in a variety of formats for free at https://singletruth.org.

    2022 · its alternatives →

21. 21
    Fighting Medical LLM Hallucinations with a Grounded RAG System▲6

    Hi HN, We've been frustrated with how confidently LLMs hallucinate—a dangerous flaw in high-stakes domains like health and medicine. The standard "I am not an expert" disclaimer feels insufficient since we all ignore those statements. Our approach is a RAG/agentic system built to solve this. It runs on ~40M+ scientific papers, but goes beyond simple retrieval. A multi-agent workflow decomposes queries, cross-references claims against multiple sources, and synthesizes answers, ensuring every key statement is cited directly from the literature. Beyond the literature, our agent system has…

    2025 · my-openhealth.com · its alternatives →

22. 22IM
    I Made an AI Software Engineer with Google Gemini 1.5 Flash▲6

    Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!

    2024 · saas-quick.com · its alternatives →

23. 23
    I wrote my first neural network▲6

    I have been interested in neural nets since the 90's. I've done quite a bit of reading, but never gotten around to writing code. I used Gemini in place of Wikipedia to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. The coolest part of this was learning about dual numbers. You can see in early commits that I did not yet know about auto-diff; I was thinking I'd have to integrate a CAS library or something. Now, I'm off to play with TensorFlow.

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

24. 24
    Gnosis, a knowledge base for what the code can't tell you▲6

    For the past few years, I've been frustrated at how we document our products. The code can tell you what you ended up doing, maybe why you ended up doing it (if your team is disciplined about comments/documents), but it can't tell you why you didn't do what you didn't do. Time and time again, I've seen teams try to change something to a better way, only to realize why it was done the "worse" way in the first place. Documenting decisions not taken is just really hard, ADRs help but doing it for everything is just too noisy and time-consuming. What's more, most of the decisions just…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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