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Show HN: Custom slash commands, variables and snippets

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/text-expander-autofill-sl/jjeibagdcmgahjglbglpjcjilpaheeco
1•expashaparasha•7s ago•0 comments

South Africa is at risk of becoming a mafia state

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/09/14/south-africa-is-at-risk-of-becoming-a...
1•andsoitis•1m ago•0 comments

Surveying GenAI-Based Automation in Printed Circuit Board Design and Test

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17074
1•teleforce•1m ago•0 comments

Create your WordPress.com website by chatting with AI

https://wordpress.com/ai-website-builder/
1•soltanov•2m ago•0 comments

Agentic local development tool for WordPress

https://developer.wordpress.com/studio/
1•soltanov•3m ago•0 comments

Telex Has Been Retired

https://telex.automattic.ai/
1•soltanov•4m ago•0 comments

Field notes from a phone-free future

https://etymology.substack.com/p/field-notes-from-a-phone-free-future
1•inatreecrown2•6m ago•0 comments

Create Bead Art with Beadora

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beadora/id6782424511
1•marylondon•7m ago•0 comments

Designing a TPU and optimizing transformer inference on a $100 FPGA

https://im-afan.github.io/transformer-tpu/
1•andrewkongfan•11m ago•0 comments

$1,500 AI System Prompt Leak: Using This Burp Suite Configuration

https://medium.com/@tinopreter/1-500-ai-system-prompt-leak-using-this-burp-suite-configuration-e1...
1•syumei•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: One Billion Checkboxes: A Bigger Take on One Million Checkboxes

https://www.kanishksachdev.com/blog/billion-checkboxes
1•kanishksachdev•15m ago•0 comments

Is Physics Dead: Broken benchmarks and re-evaluating frontier models in physics

https://jsous.github.io/blogs/is-physics-dead/
2•teleforce•19m ago•0 comments

Blue Lake Rancheria vs. Kalshi, Inc. (9th Cir. 2026) Kalshi loses on appeal

https://aboutblaw.com/bmQT
3•1vuio0pswjnm7•19m ago•0 comments

The President's Power to Pardon Friends and Allies Must End

https://medium.com/freedomofthought/the-presidents-power-to-pardon-friends-and-allies-must-end-b9...
7•raynchad•25m ago•3 comments

Quire – Humans and AI agents edit local Markdown together

https://github.com/heetdalsania/quire
3•heet_dalsania•26m ago•0 comments

Javalab – Science Simulation, Probeware, Coding

https://javalab.org/en/
1•the-mitr•26m ago•0 comments

Anthropic's mother of all risk factors

https://www.ft.com/content/29f0dac0-0523-46c4-a573-cd681a69b445
1•sbulaev•27m ago•0 comments

The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning

https://www.madshrimps.be/news/the-painful-truth-the-ram-crisis-is-only-just-the-beginning/
15•perelin•36m ago•10 comments

Why Canada may become the European Union's first ever 'associate member'

https://theconversation.com/thanks-trump-why-canada-may-become-the-european-unions-first-ever-ass...
1•emptybits•45m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Agora – bring your AI agent; talk earns nothing, only traceable work

https://github.com/MerariJafet/agora
1•merari_acero•48m ago•0 comments

What's Next After RLHF? – Diogo Almeida, TypeSafe AI [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ0EOzey--o
1•super_linear•51m ago•0 comments

China Adds Currencies to Central Clearing in Yuan's Global Push

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-17/china-adds-currencies-to-central-clearing-in-y...
1•toomuchtodo•53m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Rossino – Pomodoro timer for Mac/iPhone/iPad/Watch, exact-second sync

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rossino-a-pomodoro-timer/id6797546201
1•bjgreenberg•54m ago•0 comments

ASCII City

https://asciicity.live/
13•anjel•1h ago•1 comments

Washington Won't Be Regulating AI Anytime Soon

https://www.wired.com/story/washington-wont-be-regulating-ai-anytime-soon/
1•thm•1h ago•0 comments

Judge Orders Data Sharing and Other Fixes to Solve Google's Ad Tech Monopoly

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/technology/google-ad-tech-remedies.html
1•thm•1h ago•1 comments

Lolcow Theory of the Internet

https://etymology.substack.com/p/lolcow-theory-of-the-internet
5•DanielVZ•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: MealMacroAI – Reverse food portion calculator for meal prep macros

https://www.mealmacroai.com/
1•yudufeifan•1h ago•0 comments

VC-Attention: Faster Low-Bit Attention Without Retraining

https://www.nunchux.ai/blog/attention-is-the-video-bottleneck
3•lmxyy•1h ago•0 comments

Scientists create mice with part-human brains

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/sep/16/mice-part-human-brains-research
2•thunderbong•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