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Peace? (1814) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH1oYhTigyA
2•JumpCrisscross•27m ago•0 comments

OpenAI Fires an Employee for Prediction Market Insider Trading

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-fires-employee-insider-trading-polymarket-kalshi/
4•bookofjoe•27m ago•1 comments

How do you repair the crown damaged by the Louvre thieves? I asked an expert

https://anthonyamore.substack.com/p/10-questions-with-an-art-conservator
3•anthonyamore•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: RTS with known stars and exoplanets can now be played in the browser

https://stardustexile.com
2•apseren•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MemoryKit – Persistent memory layer for AI agents URL

https://github.com/0j/memorykit
1•memorykit•34m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Will AI tools enable mass intelligence gathering?

2•Brysonbw•34m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Paster – A keyboard-first clipboard manager for Vim users

https://pasterapp.com
1•luanderock•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CarbonLint – Open-source real-time energy&carbon profiler for software

https://nishal21.github.io/CarbonLint/
2•nishalk•37m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Why aren't we using "semantic tokenizers"/codebooks for text?

1•gavinray•37m ago•0 comments

Yet another catalogue of fast matrix multiplication algorithms

https://fmm.univ-lille.fr/
1•bmc7505•37m ago•0 comments

Everything Changes, and Nothing Changes

https://btao.org/posts/2026-02-28-everything-changes-nothing-changes/
2•todsacerdoti•38m ago•0 comments

I don't pay for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude – I stick to my self-h

https://www.xda-developers.com/i-stick-to-my-self-hosted-llms-instead-of-chatgpt/
1•teembeet•38m ago•0 comments

Analysis of the US and EU's Approach to AI in the Context of Human Rights

https://mervevarli.com/ai-us-eu-analysis/
2•gyokhan•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AdaptGauge – I found that adding few-shot examples can make LLMs worse

https://github.com/ShuntaroOkuma/adapt-gauge-core
1•shuntaro-okuma•39m ago•0 comments

I Fixed This EMT 250 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi6nTxA1bHU
1•cbzbc•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Concryptor – Multi-gigabyte/s file encryption via io_uring and Rayon

https://github.com/FrogSnot/Concryptor
1•FrogSnot•39m ago•0 comments

The state of AI bias benchmarks

https://somaxsoma.substack.com/p/the-state-of-ai-bias-benchmarks
2•somaxsoma•41m ago•0 comments

The Life Cycle of Money

https://doap.metal.bohyen.space/blog/post/complete-life-cycle-of-money/
2•nanacnote•41m ago•0 comments

Are self-driving cars safer than public transit?

https://thenextmile.substack.com/p/are-self-driving-cars-safer-than
2•nkoren•43m ago•1 comments

Writing Crystalized Thinking at Amazon. Is AI Muddying It?

https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/writing-crystalized-thinking-at-amazon
2•herbertl•43m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Now I Get It – Translate scientific papers into interactive webpages

https://nowigetit.us
2•jbdamask•44m ago•0 comments

Why AI bots will never replace human code review

https://codereview.withmartian.com/
2•TheAnkurTyagi•46m ago•0 comments

Customer Update on Simplenote

https://forums.simplenote.com/forums/topic/customer-update-on-simplenote/?view=all
2•0in•47m ago•0 comments

Timeline: Anthropic, OpenAI, and U.S. Government

https://anthropic-timeline.vercel.app
4•vldszn•48m ago•1 comments

Limitations on Safe, Trusted, Artificial General Intelligence

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21654
1•cs702•48m ago•0 comments

We Built a Compliant AI Companion Platform

2•aiangels_24•48m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Uback 0.7 – A universal bridge between backup sources and destinations

https://github.com/sloonz/uback
1•slooonz•50m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Reclaim Flowers – A 2D physics-based "Digital Altar" protocol

https://github.com/voice-of-japan/Virtual-Protest-Protocol/blob/main/README.md
2•sakanakana00•56m ago•1 comments

I customized every key on a giant keyboard [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=293HWHd_Jlc
2•bookofjoe•57m ago•0 comments

Full Interview: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Pentagon Feud [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPTNHrq_4LU
5•Topfi•57m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•10mo ago

Comments

thechao•10mo 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•10mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•10mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•10mo 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•10mo 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.
jcgrillo•10mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•10mo 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•10mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•10mo 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•10mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•10mo 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_•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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/