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Show HN: Kafma – a desktop Kafka GUI client for debugging

https://kafma.app/
1•KafmaKarma•1m ago•0 comments

Chronicle used ~210M tokens of my ChatGPT quota in 70 days before I found it

https://machblink.com/chronicle
1•hankwangtw•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Skywarden – Smart astrophotography planning companion

https://skywarden.app/en
1•adfr•2m ago•0 comments

Blast Radius (every fix has a blast radius)

https://blastradius.dpdns.org/
1•codebyaditya•2m ago•0 comments

Knowledge Graph Engine for Codebases

1•Shourya_55•2m ago•0 comments

The Message from Deep Space

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4080030/The_Message_from_Deep_Space/
1•empath75•2m ago•1 comments

Using AI to modernize or migrate code

https://www.kdab.com/using-ai-to-modernize-or-migrate-code/
1•dalvrosa•2m ago•0 comments

Hamelabbin Building Homelab [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzLqmaHguI0
1•dalvrosa•2m ago•0 comments

Optilise is a new style BI consultant and softwaredeveloper

https://www.optilise.com/
1•welsenesbros•2m ago•1 comments

OAuth 2.1 for a personal MCP server: what three months in production changed

https://aliasunder.dev/posts/oauth-2-1-for-a-personal-mcp-server/
1•aliascity•3m ago•0 comments

What Is Your LLM Judge Measuring?

https://www.searchplex.net/blog/llm-judge-search-relevance
1•splxai•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Authorizer – open-source auth for enterprise apps and agents

https://github.com/authorizerdev/authorizer
1•lakhansamani93•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cupertino – MCP servers for the Apple apps on your Mac

https://cupertino.mgcrea.io/
1•olouv•5m ago•0 comments

Is There I/O After Death? What Happens to Io_uring When a Process Dies

https://medium.com/ydbtech/is-there-i-o-after-death-what-happens-to-io-uring-when-a-process-dies-...
1•eivanov89•5m ago•1 comments

A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for

https://hausresearch.com/reports/perplexity-citation-audit/
1•jakobgreenfeld•6m ago•0 comments

My practical approach to surfing the web safely

https://molily.de/safe-websurfing/
1•ethanhawksley•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: tagger – a self-hosted webui for audio file tagging

https://github.com/rnhinson/tagger
1•farthest•7m ago•0 comments

Dyson CameraJet: The only toothbrush with a camera and a jet

https://www.dyson.com/discover/news/latest/introducing-camerajet
1•mgh2•7m ago•1 comments

Poisson Disk Sampling

https://stripeacross.com/posts/poisson-disk-sampling/
2•vismit2000•7m ago•0 comments

Who pays when an AI agent causes damage: the contracts, the policies and the gap

https://tokenstead.ai/guides/ai-agent-liability-insurance-gap-2026
1•cdnsteve•8m ago•0 comments

Cash or Comfort? How LLMs Value Your Inconvenience

https://cacm.acm.org/research/cash-or-comfort-how-llms-value-your-inconvenience/
1•yarapavan•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Streamtop, a terminal HLS, DASH and IPTV stream monitor

https://github.com/Jorji49/streamtop
2•kayraak•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CleanMyMedia – organize decades of photos, with local face recognition

https://cleanmymedia.com
1•ed-cmm•11m ago•0 comments

Witcher 3's DLC Won't Include Russian Voice Acting

https://www.thegamer.com/the-witcher-3-songs-of-the-past-no-russian-dubbing/
3•stared•11m ago•1 comments

Six curl CVEs after OpenAI and Anthropic came back with zero

https://aisle.com/blog/aisle-discovered-six-curl-cves-after-openai-and-anthropic-found-zero
1•goobreee•12m ago•0 comments

Do You Think You're Fucking Clever?

https://horkan.com/2026/08/25/do-you-think-youre-fucking-clever
1•speckx•12m ago•0 comments

Norway considers ban on camera-enabled wearable 'pervert glasses'

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/norway-considers-ban-on-camera-enabled-wearable-pervert-glasses/
1•Liriel•12m ago•0 comments

Let's Build Intuition for Watermarking

https://www.willett.io/posts/watermarking/
2•pickledish•13m ago•0 comments

Balloon Balance

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2026/08/24/balloon-balance/
1•surprisetalk•13m ago•0 comments

That Fake on Facebook? No, Ofcom Won't Help You Get Them to Take It Down

https://replyresearch.com/that-fake-on-facebook-no-ofcom-wont-help-you-get-them-to-take-it-down/
1•replyresearch•14m ago•0 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