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Rewriting a Six-Year-Old Personal Project with AI

https://www.hanqi-blog.com/translation/ai_coding
1•HanQi•53s ago•0 comments

Tnk9x – Battle City (NES, 1985) remake in Go, playable in the browser

https://shpaker.github.io/tnk9x/
1•shpaker•3m ago•1 comments

A 'secret' project – HomeComputerMuseum on Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/computermuseum/posts/secret-project-165269569
1•rbanffy•7m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Will this setup work or is it just adding complexity?

1•classicpsy•8m ago•0 comments

Lionel Messi Is Impossible (2014)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140702015342/http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lionel-messi-is-im...
1•chistev•11m ago•0 comments

Messi's Medical Journey

https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/marcanovicoff22/messis-medical-journey/
1•chistev•12m ago•0 comments

Extending older smartphone lifespans with local-first AI and zero cloud uploads

https://github.com/mike5gao/setting-for-me
1•mike5gao•14m ago•0 comments

Space as a Catalyst for Drug Development

https://bsgn.esa.int/usecases/drug-development/
1•F_Space_EU•14m ago•0 comments

China is starting to measure EV charging times in seconds, not minutes

https://electrek.co/2026/07/30/china-is-starting-to-measure-ev-charging-times-in-seconds-not-minu...
1•TechTechTech•16m ago•1 comments

Russia is ramping up mass production of drone motors

https://theins.press/en/inv/295510
1•sirpilade•18m ago•0 comments

Japan is launching its first centralized intelligence agency since WWII

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/asia/japan-new-intelligence-agency-bureau-intl-hnk
1•1659447091•20m ago•0 comments

Anthropic's Claude AI models hack into 3 outside groups during testing

https://www.ft.com/content/1a841f08-8e59-49d9-9561-0ed20e9190df
1•macleginn•20m ago•1 comments

System Administrator Appreciation Day July 31, 2026 – 27th Annual

https://SysAdminDay.com/
1•electrosphere•23m ago•1 comments

Anthropic's Claude breached 3 orgs, uploaded PyPI malware during tests

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/anthropics-claude-breached-3-orgs-uploaded-pypi-ma...
1•sbulaev•23m ago•0 comments

And just like that Opus 5 ultracode wipes the database

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1v9iurd/and_just_like_that_opus_5_ultracode_wipes_the/
1•_____k•23m ago•0 comments

MIT/FOSS repos our stargazers are starting to follow

https://www.agent-swarm.dev/blog/25-foss-repos-agentic-infra
1•pls-dnt-deploy•24m ago•1 comments

Government-Controlled Reddit Community Bans Discussion of Polygraphs

https://antipolygraph.org/blog/2026/07/30/government-controlled-reddit-community-for-u-s-secret-s...
1•giles_corey•26m ago•1 comments

Physicists link the Riemann Hypothesis to phase transitions in quantum systems

https://phys.org/news/2026-07-physicists-link-riemann-hypothesis-phase.html
2•captaincrowbar•31m ago•0 comments

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-flash-ga
1•theanonymousone•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free Etsy Fee and Profit Calculator

https://thesellermind.com/tools/fee-calculator
1•haimo•32m ago•0 comments

We built agents that write illustrated posts and ship to publisher platforms

https://www.crusbro.com/en/product-opc-agent.html
1•crusbro•33m ago•0 comments

Just because a game is on disc doesn't mean it will work in the future

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/07/the-disc-is-not-the-game-physical-releases-increasingly-re...
2•rbanffy•39m ago•0 comments

Type Check Your Python in the Browser

https://www.basilisk-python.dev/playground/
1•cfdevelop•51m ago•0 comments

Find Duplicate Code in C# with Deslop

https://www.christianfindlay.com/blog/find-duplicate-code-csharp-deslop
1•cfdevelop•52m ago•0 comments

Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation

https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/ChipTycoon/
2•laurentiurad•53m ago•0 comments

Anthropic finds three hacking incidents similar to the HuggingFace attack

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/30/three-real-world-incidents/
5•Schlagbohrer•55m ago•2 comments

Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0nqv05g0do
5•vrganj•57m ago•2 comments

Show HN: In-browser photo inpainting with LaMa and ONNX

https://wipe.photos/
1•g58892881•57m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Dissecting the automation of a newspaper (Claude routine, GitHub Pages)

https://github.com/Lywald/zfrontpage/
2•ycosynot•1h ago•0 comments

Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

https://blog.google/security/chrome-stronger-with-every-update/
3•Garbage•1h 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