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Sourced ranking of the AI infrastructure build-out

https://www.capexindex.com/
2•umangsehgal93•2m ago•0 comments

Loop Library for Engineers

https://signals.forwardfuture.com/loop-library/
1•tylerdane•3m ago•0 comments

Common diet tips about water intake and spicy foods could be dead wrong

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/07/common-diet-tips-about-water-intake-and-spicy-foods-coul...
1•littlexsparkee•4m ago•0 comments

Figma for Email?

https://www.hedwig-ai.com/
1•neshc•5m ago•1 comments

M17 rev B done, rev C next

https://m17project.org/2026/06/16/linht-rev-b-status-what-works-what-broke-and-why-rev-c-is-next/
2•client4•5m ago•0 comments

My C and Assembler 3D Real Time Renderer from 1997

https://ben3d.ca/blog/rendering-real-time-3d-before-gpus
2•bhouston•8m ago•0 comments

Clang: Hardware-Assisted AddressSanitizer Design Documentation

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/HardwareAssistedAddressSanitizerDesign.html
2•signa11•10m ago•0 comments

A Functional Taxonomy of World Models by Fei-Fei Li

https://drfeifei.substack.com/p/a-functional-taxonomy-of-world-models
3•andsoitis•10m ago•0 comments

Goiânia Accident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
2•isagues•12m ago•0 comments

Tyler Cowen: the future belongs to AI maniacs

https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-ai-maniacs-future-economy
2•thoughtpeddler•13m ago•0 comments

Repeal of national park rule could impact drinking water for millions

https://www.courthousenews.com/repeal-of-national-park-rule-could-impact-drinking-water-for-milli...
2•geox•14m ago•0 comments

Things you didn't know about indexes

https://jon.chrt.dev/2026/04/15/things-you-didnt-know-about-indexes.html
2•thunderbong•15m ago•0 comments

Claude Code(Fable) refused my slow down instruction

https://qusaisuwan.github.io/cc-incident/index.html
2•qusaisuwan•17m ago•0 comments

VM Timekeeping: Using the PTP Hardware Clock on KVM

https://www.libertysys.com.au/2024/04/vm-timekeeping-using-the-ptp-hardware-clock-on-kvm/
2•randen•17m ago•0 comments

BigKeyRing – Physical Key Management

https://bigkeyring.com/
2•Kroopo•19m ago•0 comments

Avatoon – React Three Fiber component for audio-synced 3D avatar lip-sync

https://github.com/khaledalam/avatoon
2•KhaledAlam•21m ago•1 comments

A non-partisan map of how Congress votes and who donates

https://anaximander.us
2•Vavnik•22m ago•0 comments

The Birth of Prolog (1996)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/234286.1057820
3•Jtsummers•23m ago•0 comments

The AI Codebase

https://swapnilchauhan.com/blog/the-ai-codebase/
1•swapxstar•24m ago•1 comments

How An Adolescent's Brain Reacts to Faces May Predict Their Social Future

https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/news/how-adolescents-brain-reacts-faces-may-predict-their-social-f...
1•gmays•26m ago•0 comments

PrimeTask – an offline-first workspace with local data and no subscription

https://www.primetask.app
1•vxvaptor•27m ago•0 comments

Using asteroid early orbital data for rapid Mars missions

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576526002456
1•andsoitis•29m ago•0 comments

The Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine unlocks a new frontier beyond AlphaFold

https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/articles/the-isomorphic-labs-drug-design-engine-unlocks-a-new-fron...
2•andsoitis•30m ago•0 comments

The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop (2017)

https://pudding.cool/2017/02/vocabulary/index.html
1•cdrnsf•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on a 16 GB M1 Pro with SSD-streamed MoE

https://github.com/andreaborio/ds4
1•andreaborio•36m ago•0 comments

NASA Taps SpaceX's Starlink to Deliver Artemis III Imagery from Orion

https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/07/16/nasa-taps-spacexs-starlink-to-deliver-artemis-iii-...
4•connicpu•38m ago•0 comments

Maybe dark energy doesn't need to exist after all

https://www.ucdavis.edu/blog/taking-dark-energy-out-equation
2•gumby•39m ago•0 comments

'See the whole world in lichens,' the marvels that grow anywhere

https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/see-the-whole-world-in-lichens-the-marvels-that-...
2•cainxinth•40m ago•0 comments

What a Monopoly importer learned when it tried to make things in the USA

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/12/nx-s1-5887378/monopoly-tariffs-china-manufacturing-made-inusa
3•hhs•41m ago•0 comments

Brazilian scientist propose a "shortcut" to Mars in just 7 months

https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/brazilian-scientist-uses-asteroid-data-and-artificial-intelli...
1•evo_9•42m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•1y ago

Comments

thechao•1y ago
I've always wanted to build (distinct) mechanical computers out of the following kinds of elements:

1. Spur-gear differential; and,

2. Shishi-odoshi.

Both of these are saturating mechanical devices that can be used to build NAND gates; the latter, I think, would be very pleasing, if exceedingly slow.

For the spur-gear differential, you'd need to up-scale the output by a factor of 2 (since the output is half-speed), and use a locking wedge to build a one-way gear out of one of the spur-gear differentials. However, it has the nice property that the logic is made entirely out of a single element: the spur-gear differential.

Similarly, for the shishi-odoshi: you're going to have to do a bit of analysis (drilling a hole in the bottom part of the bamboo ladle), to figure out the in-flow and out-flow to build the basic AND gate, and then balancing out the NOT gate, to build your basic NAND. This is, obviously, very finicky; but, I supposed, that'd be quite a bit of the charm of a Zen computer garden?

hnlmorg•1y ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•1y ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•1y ago
Has any computer been built out of spur-gear differentials? Like maybe some sort of adder circuit, not necessarily a full instruction executing computer. The only uses I could find was what seems to me like the differentials being part of some sort of analogue computer.
thechao•1y ago
Spur gear differentials are naturally adders (with carry!); so, traditionally they've only ever been used for analogue logic. They're overly complicated for digital logic: you need two spur gears to build a single gate (NAND) to perform a single binary operation. If you want any sort of reasonable lash characteristics you're going to need ~60 teeth. At that point, two 60 teeth spur gears give you a 3600-valued adder. That'd take something like 300+ spur gears in binary: it just doesn't make any damn sense.

I think the last time I looked at this, if I used the cast spur gears available I needed a staged approach to "start" the computer and a 1100 hp motor to run it.

rightbyte•1y ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

Oh, ye that sounds impractical. A really big truck engine more or less.

thechao•1y ago
Convincing Mrs. thechao that we needed to drop 80000$ on a blown V8 to build a 4b 3 function calculator didn't workout, BTW.
rightbyte•1y ago
Well I want to be on your side but I think one need to keep the dreams not within grasp but at least in sight.
byronknoll•1y ago
I built some logic gates using water and a 3D printed "seesaw" that tilts to the left or right: https://byronknoll.blogspot.com/2022/06/water-computer.html
thechao•1y ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•1y ago
the shishi-odoshu seems like the more promising avenue. The key question in mechanical computing is never designing gates, its designing power amplifiers.
eccentricwind•1y ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•1y ago
I just smile hearing the term "Millihertz Computer". I'd love it if building and designing mechanical and analog computers grew as a hobby/educational activity as I find them both fascinating and somehow satisfying.

Also, this 1950s Naval Training film explaining the fundamentals of how mechanical fire control computers work to solve complex problems is excellent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

256_•1y ago
I was incredibly surprised to find that this actually is a computer. Normally when you hear about a "computer" constructed in an unusual medium, it turns out to just be a binary adder or an analogue computer. I've learned to expect disappointment.
ryukoposting•1y ago
About 8 years ago I visited TU Chemnitz and they had a lab making similar things to this. It wasn't clear to me what the goal was, but it was very cool nonetheless.
ogogmad•1y ago
Is anyone going to produce a proof-of-concept Analytical Engine?

Will robots (which will hopefully soon be available) be able to do it?

tenthirtyam•1y ago
This brings to mind two stories: Exhalation by Ted Chiang (short story), and the Three Body Problem (specifically the human computer) by Cixin Liu (novel length).

Exhalation really gets me thinking about what it means to be sentient & self-aware. If the neurons in our brains could, even in theory, be simulated by logic gates then, equally in theory, a Turing machine could be sentient. I can even imagine a bunch of rocks being sentient: https://xkcd.com/505/

jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem