Engineering Schizophrenia: Trusting yourself through Byzantine faults
Details
- External ID
- 46580652
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Jan. 11, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 111
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9077733860342556
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN!My name's Robert Escriva. I got my PhD from Cornell's Computer Science department back in 2017. And three years ago I had a psychotic episode that irreversibly shook up my world.Since then I've been applying a skill I learned in grad school---namely, debugging distributed and complex systems---to my own mind.What I've found I've put into a [book (pdf)](https://rescrv.net/engineering-schizophrenia.pdf) on engineering, my particular schizophrenic delusions, and how people who suffer as I once did can find a way through the fog to the other side.This is not a healing memoir; it is a guide and a warning for all those who never stopped to ask, "What happens if my brain begins to fail me?"I am writing because what I've found is not a destination, but a process. It is an ongoing process for me and for people like me. I also believe it is automate-able using the same techniques we apply to machine-based systems.I am looking for others who recognize the stakes of the human mind to engage in discussion on the topic.Happy hacking, Robert
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- —
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- byzantine fault tolerance in systems
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No This is a personal blog post / philosophical essay by a PhD researcher on mental health and distributed systems, not software that can be vibe-coded.
What it would actually take: This is an autobiographical essay/memoir reflecting on psychosis and distributed systems theory, not a buildable software product.
Discussion
19 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Rethinking Madness by Dr. Paris Williams, John Forbes Nash Jr. approach to schizophrenia management
Concerns raised: Early chapters may alienate readers who mistake psychosis depiction for literal belief, Difficulty distinguishing between metaphor, hyperbole, and literal statements creates confusion, Medication avoidance could be misinterpreted as anti-medication advocacy, Book's ambiguous use of linguistic devices obscures intent and message
Feature requests: Clearly label metaphors and linguistic devices with explicit prefacing, Add clarity markers to distinguish illustrative passages from delusional content, Provide .mobi version format availability
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 94 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #13 of 95 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 73 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.