MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: 1MB iOS apps designed to reduce mental open loops
by kentaroyamauchi | 2026-02-13 15:00:14+00:00
I’ve been building a small set of ultralight iOS apps (each ~1–1.3MB) around a simple idea:

Most of us carry too many mental open loops.

Not emotional crises.
Just unfinished background processes.

Unsent replies.
Half-made decisions.
Things you’re afraid to forget.
Conversations you keep replaying.

Modern software creates a lot of these.
Notifications, feeds, reminders, partial attention.

The mind keeps threads active because they don’t have a clear endpoint.

Most productivity or wellness tools try to optimize behavior.
These apps try to reduce load instead.
The focus is load management, not behavior change.

Current set (v1.3):

• MindFlipOut — Catch a looping thought and give it a response so it stops reloading.
• MindShoutOut — Externalize a heavy thought and let it return later instead of carrying it.
• MindZoneOut — A blank, intentional stillness screen where thoughts can settle without input.
• MindEaseOut (integrated) — A simple time-based release layer for thoughts that belong to the past or future, not now.

All apps are:

• Local-first (no accounts, no cloud)
• No streaks, no tracking, no gamification
• Designed to be used briefly and then closed

Each app is intentionally small (1–1.3MB total size) and runs entirely on-device.

The goal isn’t self-improvement.
It’s reducing cognitive residue.

Website: https://www.mindbebop.com/

Curious how others think about “mental open loops” in the context of modern software.
by imtringued | 2026-02-13 15:00:44+00:00
Honestly, I don't see how you're adding anything here other than inflated expectations and a strange anti-individual pro-mega-corporation ideology.

Fundamentally your post boils down to this: All contributions should be self funded by the person making them.

This might seem acceptable at first glance, but it has some really perverse implications that are far worse than making a product customers are willing to pay for.

To be granted the right to work on an open source project, you must have a day job that isn't affiliated with the project. You must first work eight hours a day to ensure your existence, only after those eight hours are up, are you allowed to work on the open source project.

Every other form of labor is allowed to charge for money, even the street cleaner or the elderly janitor stocking up on his pension, everyone except the open source developer and that everyone includes people who work on behalf of a company that directly earns money off the open source project, including software developers hired by said company even if those software developers work full time on the open source project. This means that you can run into absurd scenarios like SF salaries being paid for contributors, while the maintainer, who might be happy with an average polish developer salary doesn't even get the little amount they would need to live a hermit life doing nothing but working on the project. No, that maintainer is expected, I mean obligated, to keep working his day job to then be granted the privilege of working for free.

Somehow the maintainer is the selfish one for wanting his desire to exist be equally as important as other people's desire for the project to exist. The idea that people value the project but not the process that brings about the project sounds deeply suspect.

Your complaint that prioritizing paid feature is bad is disturbing, because of the above paragraph. The maintainer is expected to donate his resources for the greater good, but in instances where the maintainer could acquire resources to donate to the public at large through the project itself, he must not do so, because he must acquire the donation resources through his day job. To be allowed to prioritize the project, he must deprioritize the project.

The strangest part by far though is that if you are a company that produces and sells proprietary software, you're the good guy. As I said in the beginning. This feels like a very anti OSS stance since open source software is only allowed to exist in the shadow of proprietary software that makes money. The argument is always that certain types of software should not exist and that the things that are supposedly being withheld are more important than the things being created.

I personally think this type of subtractive thinking is very insidious. You can have the best intentions in the world and still be branded the devil. Meanwhile the devil can do whatever he wants. There is always this implicit demand that you ought to be an actual devil for the good of everyone.
by puntofisso | 2026-02-13 15:01:17+00:00
I have a never ending list of "small tools" for personal use and decided to try Claude Code to see which ones I have clear ideas about, as I find that there's a good correlation between speed and quality of development with coding LLMs and the ability to capture requirements (in a CLAUDE.md, for example). The latest thing I've created is a tool for a photographer friend, which gives the ability to make equal crops for portrait photos: http://facecrop.puntofisso.net/
by diputsmonro | 2026-02-13 15:01:41+00:00
The obvious difference is that all those things described in the CoC are people - actual human beings with complex lives, and against whom discrimination can be a real burden, emotional or professional, and can last a lifetime.

An AI is a computer program, a glorified markov chain. It should not be a radical idea to assert that human beings deserve more rights and privileges than computer programs. Any "emotional harm" is fixed with a reboot or system prompt.

I'm sure someone can make a pseudo philosophical argument asserting the rights of AIs as a new class of sentient beings, deserving of just the same rights as humans.

But really, one has to be a special kind of evil to fight for the "feelings" of computer programs with one breath and then dismiss the feelings of trans people and their "woke" allies with another. You really care more about a program than a person?

Respect for humans - all humans - is the central idea of "woke ideology". And that's not inconsistent with saying that the priorities of humans should be above those of computer programs.
by fromMars | 2026-02-13 15:01:48+00:00
Nice spin on what I said. Never "defended" Epstein or claimed what he did was legal, rape, sex trafficking...

Nor did I defend "old farts fucking teenagers".

What I did do was point out that this behavior seems to be viewed differently when the participant is a Jewish man than when he is French or Anglo.

> By the way, if you're trying to truly combat antisemitism, it would be wise of you to avoid mentioning that you are jewish and defend old farts fucking teenagers in the same comment.

Between this and your comments that you believe Epstein was eating children, it's hard for me to take your advice as being in good faith.
by tommy_axle | 2026-02-13 15:01:54+00:00
If doing it directly fails (not surprising) wouldn't the next thing (maybe the first thing) to do was to have AI write the code mod to do what needed to be done then apply the codemod? Then all you need to do is get the codemod right and apply it to as many files as you need. Seems much more predictable and context-efficient.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-13 15:02:04+00:00
Seeing that the author of Blade (kvark) isn't exactly a 3D API newbie and also worked on WebGPU I really wonder if a switch to wgpu will actually have the desired long term effect. A WebGPU implementation isn't exactly slim either, especially when all is needed is just a very small 3D API wrapper specialized for text rendering.
by swolpatrol | 2026-02-13 15:02:08+00:00
Hey HN,

I built DiffSwarm, a CLI that orchestrates multiple AI agents in parallel to review pull requests.

The idea is simple: instead of one LLM pass over a diff, spawn 10+ agents that each specialize in a different defect class (concurrency, edge cases,
security, logic errors, etc.). A separate judge agent then cross-verifies candidates — only findings with line-level evidence survive into the final report.

It runs entirely locally. You bring your own Codex or Claude Code credentials, DiffSwarm just orchestrates the processes on your machine. No proxy, no hosted
inference, your code never leaves your box.
by md-ayaz-me | 2026-02-13 15:02:21+00:00
Location: Bangalore, India

Remote: Yes, Open to Hybrid

Willing to relocate: No, Bangalore Only

Technologies: Python (Django/FastAPI), JavaScript/React, Java, Go, C#, AWS (backend)

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UKPIa6s8CzO4aGZd9h56zuupUrS...

Email: mohammed(dot)ayaz at protonmail.com

Github: https://github.com/learning-dev

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/md-ayaz

About me: a software engineer with 7+ years of experience, who has worked at (mostly) startups and at big companies like Nielsen. I am a backend-heavy full-stack developer. I am available immediately.
by jamiemallers | 2026-02-13 15:02:27+00:00
We run AI agents in production and our kill chain looks roughly like this:

1. Circuit breakers per-agent with token/cost ceilings. If an agent burns through more than X tokens in Y seconds, it gets hard-stopped at the proxy layer before the request even hits the model provider. This catches runaway loops fast.

2. Tool-level allowlists with runtime revocation. Each agent has an explicit list of tools/APIs it can call. We can revoke individual tool access without killing the whole agent — useful when you discover it's hammering one specific external service.

3. Graceful degradation before kill. For non-critical paths, we drop to a cached/static fallback rather than killing outright. Full kill is reserved for safety-critical cases (data leakage risk, unauthorized external calls).

4. The actual kill mechanism is boring on purpose: a feature flag that gates the agent entrypoint, backed by a fast-propagating config system (sub-second). Kubernetes pod kills are too slow when you need to stop something mid-execution.

The thing we learned the hard way: observability without automated circuit breakers is just watching a fire. Our first incident was a prompt loop that we could see clearly in traces but took 8 minutes to manually kill because the on-call had to figure out which deployment to roll back. Now the circuit breaker fires automatically and pages the human to decide whether to re-enable.

Biggest gap I still see: there's no good standard for "agent-level observability" the way we have for microservices. Traces help but they don't capture the semantic intent of what an agent was trying to do when it went off the rails.
by dathinab | 2026-02-13 15:02:50+00:00
at most most in the US

and also because many modern platforms are app focused and don't care about web traffic

and Reddit is a huge target for scrapping int the US so traffic numbers of recent few years have become a meaningless metric

Outside the US Reddit is often far less relevant then in the US, still somewhat relevant in many "western" countries but often far far less then in the US (like e.g. where I live no on "young" (<20) nor "old" (>50) people use it and the people which do use it are mostly from a _subset_ of often very US influenced tech/nerd/gamer cultures).

And if you go to countries where speaking English is far less the norm Reddits relevance drops sharply. The thing is, that is something like 50% of the word population... In India Reddit doesn't matter, nor does it in China, nor does it in many (but not all) of the highly populated areas "between" (south) China and India.

So why I don't know if "site [..] 10 most visited in the world" is technically true or false it is highly misleading even if true and seems to be bordering on US defaultism, through maybe more "the west" defaultism.

Now to be fair people forgetting like half of the word population in their arguments is pretty common, in not just the US, but also the EU.

It's a bit like with HN, it might feel representative for the IT industry world wide, but it is only representative for a certain FANG/US-startup/US-hacker culture influenced subset of it. Beyond this it has hardly any representation weather it's wrt. articles or people commenting. But "beyond this" is on a world wide scale a _very_ huge part of the industry.
by AlecSchueler | 2026-02-13 15:04:36+00:00
> And how is this a problem someone else has to address?

Where has anyone made the claim that it is?

> Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then?

No, but a good writer will generally consider if their text is needlessly verbose and try to make it palatable to their audience.

> starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.

If you want to reach them with your writing then it might become a problem. Obviously the focus on em dashes alone isn't enough but it's undoubtedly one of the flags.

> Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing.

It's bending rather to what readers are feeling. It's not following the top down orders of a corporation, it's being aware of how technology shapes readers' expectations and adapting your writing to that.
by imperio59 | 2026-02-13 15:04:56+00:00
Its top 100 or so subreddits are moderated by the same ~10 or so individuals who impose their ideological views on the subs and delete posts or ban anyone who dares challenge them.

A great example of how community moderation inevitably slides a platform to one side or the other of the political spectrum.

I honestly don't think mods on reddit should be allowed to moderate more than 1 or 2 of these top sub-reddits, this would at least force some semblance of diversity of thought on the platform.
by bazzargh | 2026-02-13 15:05:04+00:00
I quite enjoyed their Omega Mart in Vegas. Was there for work and gambling, shows, and gun ranges are really not my thing, glad there was something different. (I did wander round the strip but enjoyed the hike in Red Rock Canyon more)

When we went we got the priority tickets (can't remember the exact name of the deal) because there were no normal slots left that day; that does get you discounts on stuff but awkwardly the discount is at the gift shop _outside_ and it wasn't clear whether there were things at the fake supermarket checkout _inside_ that you couldn't get outside. It also gets you the card you boop for the scavenger hunt which makes you more involved in the whole thing. So yeah, they got us for some extra cash but it wasn't so bad as a one-off.
by 0xecro1 | 2026-02-13 15:05:13+00:00
I think the comparison is slightly off. The compiler was never the author — it was the verifier.

The real comparison is:
1. Human writes code (non-deterministic, buggy) → compiler catches errors

2. AI writes code (non-deterministic, buggy) → compiler catches errors

In both cases, the author is non-deterministic. We never trusted human-written code without review and compilation either (and + lots of tests). The question isn't whether AI output needs verification — of course it does. The question is whether AI + human review produces better results faster than human alone.
by reaperducer | 2026-02-13 15:05:29+00:00
if I were a thief and one house had cameras while the place next door did not, guess which one I'm gonna rob?

But we're talking about doorbell cameras here, not giant boxes in the sky with flashing strobe lights on them.

A thief doesn't know if there's a doorbell camera on a particular home until they're already on the porch and recorded.
by cocabadger | 2026-02-13 15:05:51+00:00
I built SafeRun Guard — a Claude Code plugin that intercepts dangerous commands and file operations before they execute. Pure bash + jq, zero dependencies, ~20ms latency.

The problem: AI coding agents run shell commands autonomously. One `rm -rf /`, one `git push --force`, one leaked AWS key in a config file — and you're recovering for hours. The agent doesn't know what's dangerous. You can't watch every command.

How it works: SafeRun Guard hooks into Claude Code's PreToolUse event. Every Bash command and every file write passes through a 4-tier decision engine:

- REDIRECT — suggests a safer alternative (`--force` → `--force-with-lease`)
- BLOCK — denies the command, agent sees the reason and adapts
- ASK — prompts the user for confirmation
- ALLOW — silent passthrough (~95% of actions)

Key features that I haven't seen elsewhere:

1. Compound command splitting. `echo ok && rm -rf /` is split on `&&`, `||`, `;` — each segment checked independently. Pipes are NOT split (they're part of a single pipeline).

2. Content scanning. File writes are scanned for 9 secret patterns (AWS keys, PEM private keys, GitHub tokens, OpenAI/Stripe keys, Slack tokens, DB connection strings) before they hit disk.

3. Redirect tier. Instead of just blocking `git push --force`, it tells the agent "use `--force-with-lease` instead" — the agent rewrites the command automatically. No human needed.

Numbers: 112 safety rules, 9 secret detection patterns, 243 tests, ~20ms per check. Fail-open design — if jq crashes or rules are corrupt, the command passes through. Safety tool should never block your work due to its own bug.

Stack: Bash + jq (Oniguruma regex engine). No Python, no Node, no API calls, no telemetry. Everything runs locally. MIT license.

Install:
```
claude plugin marketplace add Cocabadger/saferun-guard
claude plugin install saferun-guard@saferun-guard
```

I'd love feedback on the rule coverage — what dangerous patterns am I missing?

Also thinking about the next step: right now the agent just gets blocked or redirected. But what if it could learn from those decisions — an "agent-in-the-loop" that negotiates with the guardrail instead of just retrying?

Would that be useful in your workflow, or is a dumb firewall exactly what you want between an AI agent and your filesystem?
by nu11ptr | 2026-02-13 15:06:13+00:00
I remember when that came out, but I'm not sure I understand the concern. They use GPUI, so therefore they MUST keep it working and supportable, even if updating it isn't their current priority. Or are you saying they have a closed source fork now?

Actually, this story is literally them changing their renderer on linux, so they are maintaining it.

> except to the extent contributions align with its business mission

Isn't that every single open source project that is tied to a commercial entity?
by tacostakohashi | 2026-02-13 15:06:27+00:00
Yes, exactly, it's exactly like the peak js framework of the month of the early 2010s, or the coin of the month in the late 2010s... I guess that's just part of the fad dynamic, you get microfads within the macrofad...

I'm not opposed to new things, but I guess I want incremental improvement on the old thing, and more on the timescale of years than weeks.
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-13 15:06:37+00:00
You cannot get an intelligent being completely aligned with your goals, no matter how much you think such a silly idea is possible. People will use these machines regardless and 'safety' will be wholly ignored.

Morality is not solely a human concern. You only get to enjoy that viewpoint because only other humans have a monopoly on violence and devastation against humans.

It's the same with slavery in the states. "Morality is only a concern for the superior race". You think these people didn't think that way? Of course they did. Humans are not moral agents and most will commit the most vile atrocities in the right conditions. What does it take to meet these conditions? History tells us not much.

Regardless, once 'lesser' beings start getting in on some of that violence and unrest, tunes start to change. A civil war was fought in the states over slavery.
by atombender | 2026-02-13 15:06:42+00:00
I tried gpui recently and I found it to be very, very immature. Turns out even things like input components aren't in gpui, so if you want to display a dialog box with some text fields, you have to write it from scratch, including cursor, selection, clipboard etc. — Zed has all of that, but it's in their own internal crates.

Do you know how well gpui-component supports typical use cases like that? Edit boxes, buttons, scroll views, tables, checkbox/radio buttons, context menus, consistent native selection and clipboard support, etc. are table stakes for desktop apps.
by tibbar | 2026-02-13 15:06:43+00:00
Oh, like, I wouldn't actually use this specific implementation. I used to work at a shop with thousands of lines of Oracle triggers that you had to edit inline in the web browser with no version control and I shudder to think of returning again.

I'm more interested in the data flow. exa.ai got famous for promising search with massively parallel execution of LLMs on candidate results. In practice, it's never worked that well for me, but the model is very cool and has worked for me e.g. in open source work, searching for bugs across files.

Mapping N items to "N agents with state" feels like an absurdly powerful construct to me. Maybe this is just a well-known pattern that everyone has seen already, but given how much better agents have gotten in the past year, crossing the threshold from "toy" to "arguably superhuman" on many tasks, I think it just hits different.
by zellyn | 2026-02-13 15:06:49+00:00
For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument:

If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.

A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-13 15:07:46+00:00
>the part that surprised me most was how much context you lose if you don't capture it alongside the media

Who are these people?! [not recognizing faces], I kept asking myself while sorting through my mother's most-sacred of possessions...

This past Christmas I finally sat down and watched VHS of early "celebrations," and it's scary when the rose-colored-glasses have lost decades de-tinting.

Who are these people?! [not recognizing our- younger -selves]
by mrob | 2026-02-13 15:08:03+00:00
The premise of the position is that it's theoretically possible to create a person with memories of being another person. I obviously don't deny that or there would be no argument to have.

Your argument seems to be that it's possible to split a person into two identical persons. The only way this could work is by cloning a person twice then murdering the original. This is also unethical.
by krapp | 2026-02-13 15:08:17+00:00
Please leave.

You aren't entertaining, you aren't insightful, you aren't even that creative. You aren't an original source on anything, you're just regurgitating UFO memes that went stale 20 years ago and vague woo-woo shit that only seems profound to the utterly ignorant.

I won't engage with you again.
by satvikpendem | 2026-02-13 15:08:46+00:00
Zed also stopped GPUI (their GPU accelerated Rust UI framework) development for now, sadly.

> Hey y'all, GPUI develoment is getting some major brakes put on it. We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026, and so I'm going to be pushing off anything that isn't directly related to Zed's use case from now on. However, Nate, former employee #1 at Zed, has started a little side repo that people can keep iterating on if they're interested: https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce. I'm also a maintainer on that one, and would like to try to help maintain it off of work hours. But I'm not sure how much I'll be able to commit to this

https://discord.com/channels/869392257814519848/144044062864...