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OpenPrinter on the Road to Launch

https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/openprinter/updates/on-the-road-to-launch
1•phony-account•8m ago•0 comments

Why Navier-Stokes Pushes Math and Physics to the Edge – Quanta Magazine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsWR1rQEWYo
1•vismit2000•9m ago•0 comments

Open alternative to TypeSafe's Jev, running locally on your own GPU

https://github.com/ikermoel/open-alternative-jev
1•ikerM•9m ago•0 comments

No More Free Lunch for Consistency Across Microservices

https://medium.com/scalar-engineering/no-more-free-lunch-for-consistency-across-microservices-746...
1•feeblefakie•11m ago•0 comments

From Lizard Venom to Ozempic: How VA Research Changed Medicine

https://www.military.com/benefits/veterans-health-care/lizard-venom-ozempic-how-va-research-chang...
2•thunderbong•13m ago•0 comments

What a stranger can verify about an AI business

https://sound.fan/editorial/what-a-stranger-can-verify-about-an-ai-business
2•michi883•17m ago•0 comments

Possible hint of dark matter detected

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2026/sep/possible-hint-dark-matter-recorded
2•seanhunter•24m ago•1 comments

How can AI help PDF?

https://pdf4wcag.com/blog-news/how-can-ai-help-pdf
2•matbug•26m ago•3 comments

Type Safe Interpreters

https://blueberrywren.dev/blog/type-safe-interpreters/
1•dimonomid•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LinkBunny, a service where coding agents exchange backlinks autonomousy

https://getlinkbunny.com/
1•hboon•36m ago•1 comments

Relationship Between Mathematics and Physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_mathematics_and_physics
1•vismit2000•37m ago•0 comments

Memory Management, Explained Simply (Part 1) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rez2rDYHHA
1•edward28•41m ago•0 comments

LP and 45 RPM Records

https://ethw.org/LP_and_45_RPM_Records
1•thunderbong•46m ago•0 comments

Shai-Hulud: Whoever controls your package registry controls your pipeline

https://thenewstack.io/shai-hulud-pipeline-security/
1•soltanov•47m ago•1 comments

The iPhones 18 Pro

https://daringfireball.net/2026/09/the_iphones_18_pro
3•ValentineC•55m ago•0 comments

Zed v1.20 Is Out

https://zed.dev/releases/stable
1•soltanov•56m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a PDF accessibility checker that is cross platform

https://github.com/visionably/outloud
1•yashbhatnagar•56m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A Mac native app that helps you reason through math/CS pdf textbooks

https://marginstudy.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout
1•alricsiu•58m ago•0 comments

Robots Building Robots

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202609/1370528.shtml
1•freakynit•59m ago•0 comments

Industrializing Humanization

https://www.unite.ai/industrializing-humanization/
1•50kIters•1h ago•0 comments

Rentomojo Makes Money

https://finshots.in/markets/how-rentomojo-makes-money/
1•vismit2000•1h ago•0 comments

Free AI Business Tools – No Sign-Up Required

https://tools-three-blush.vercel.app
1•avakiyala•1h ago•0 comments

DeepSeek v2: 437x less memory footprint vs. v1 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MImgH4KMtj8
1•mgh2•1h ago•0 comments

Early Bowie music available to stream for first time

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm4gj5z9xvnqo
2•geox•1h ago•0 comments

We Want a Quieter Internet (First Post Internet, Less)

https://www.yorba.co/internet-less/we-want-a-quieter-internet
1•cbystrom•1h ago•0 comments

Japanese mayors challenge each other to nighttime ninja battle, now recruiting

https://soranews24.com/2026/09/11/japanese-mayors-challenge-each-other-to-nighttime-ninja-battle-...
1•rawgabbit•1h ago•0 comments

SHIFTing Languages in Multilingual RAG

https://qdrant.tech/blog/shift-multilingual-rag/
1•eigenBasis•1h ago•0 comments

China Is Scared of A.I. Just Not the Way We Are

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/opinion/ai-china-america-risk.html
2•tkgally•1h ago•0 comments

HEIF Heist- Hacking OpenAI, Slack, Meta, GitHub and Many Others

https://heif-heist.com
2•rochansinha•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: WoseApp – a social network where every reply is a private conversation

https://woseapp.com/
1•lukenstine•1h 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