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Monoids in Public: Useful monoid structures in programming

https://blog.veritates.love/monoids_in_public.html
1•marvinborner•55s ago•0 comments

Diffflow: Rust and Svelte Web Monitor

https://diffflow.com/
1•7rin0•1m ago•0 comments

"Being Poor," Ten Years on (2015)

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/09/03/being-poor-ten-years-on/
1•chistev•2m ago•1 comments

The Vibe Coding Hangover

https://checkmarx.com/blog/the-vibe-coding-hangover/
1•speckx•3m ago•0 comments

Four tech waves. Six companies. Here's what I'm building next

https://www.tamccann.com/four-tech-waves-six-companies-heres-what-im-building-next/
1•mahirsaid•3m ago•0 comments

Data readiness for agentic AI in financial services

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/14/1137034/data-readiness-for-agentic-ai-in-financial-se...
1•joozio•4m ago•0 comments

Princeton scraps honor code and will supervise exams for first time in 133 years

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/princeton-proctor-exams-ai-b2976111.html
1•madihaa•4m ago•0 comments

Next-gen pumps use film-based technology

https://www.foodprocessing.com.au/content/processing/article/next-gen-pumps-use-film-based-techno...
1•PaulHoule•4m ago•0 comments

Agents Can Reason. They Still Can't Search

https://dipkumar.dev/posts/agents/agent-search-problem/
4•askhn1234_12•5m ago•0 comments

Stop using user passwords for OpenStack automation

https://thobias.org/2026/05/10/openstack_app_credentials.html
1•cavanche•5m ago•0 comments

Steve Jobs Years at NeXT Shaped His Success as Apple CEO

https://spectrum.ieee.org/steve-jobs-next-computer
1•oldnetguy•7m ago•0 comments

US audit regulator weighs deep staff cuts to unit overseeing accounting firms

https://www.ft.com/content/f5c56c66-2896-4ef1-9a6a-49c59e76f23e
1•petethomas•7m ago•0 comments

Solar drone with jumbo jet wingspan broke a flight record–then it crashed

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/solar-drone-with-jumbo-jet-wingspan-broke-a-flight-record...
1•Brajeshwar•7m ago•0 comments

Apple-OpenAI Relationship Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-14/openai-apple-partnership-frays-setting-up-poss...
3•helsinkiandrew•7m ago•0 comments

Why Your AI Can Write a Novel but Still Struggles to Count to Fifty LLMHall

https://beeble.com/en/blog/why-your-ai-can-write-a-novel-but-still-struggles-to-count-to-fifty
1•odysseyk•10m ago•0 comments

Bay Area tech giant Cisco to cut jobs after record revenue

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/cisco-layoffs-bay-area-22257875.php
1•mikhael•10m ago•0 comments

Canada court quashes bid by Alberta separatists for independence referendum

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/14/alberta-separation-referendum-independence-petition...
1•Geekette•10m ago•0 comments

GitHub Copilot App

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-05-14-github-copilot-app-is-now-available-in-technical-preview/
1•hmokiguess•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: nichy – a visualizer for Rust type memory layouts

https://niche.rs/
1•iridis•11m ago•0 comments

Silent Jungles

https://suziepetryk.com/blog/jungles.html
1•tancik•12m ago•0 comments

Erlang/OTP 29.0 Release

https://www.erlang.org/news/188
1•birdculture•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Sun – a Prolog generator for the 2026 solar eclipse

https://github.com/bergholt/triptych
1•kasperbergholt•12m ago•0 comments

Tic Tac Throne – a 3×3 grid game with checkers-class complexity

https://tic-tac-throw.vercel.app/
1•firesofmay•13m ago•0 comments

Nginx Rift Heap-based Buffer Overflow

https://depthfirst.com/nginx-rift
1•planb•14m ago•0 comments

The Sad Wives of AI

https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-sad-wives-of-ai/
1•bryanrasmussen•16m ago•0 comments

Perseverance Snaps a Selfie on Mars

https://nautil.us/perseverance-snaps-a-selfie-on-mars-1280734
2•Brajeshwar•16m ago•0 comments

Three AWS VPS Runs Looked Identical – One Still Failed Under Load

https://webbynode.com/articles/three-aws-vps-runs-looked-identical-one-still-failed-under-load
1•gsgreen•18m ago•0 comments

How I Sandbox My AI Agents

https://blog.fidelramos.net/software/how-i-sandbox-ai-agents
2•fidelramos•19m ago•0 comments

Apple has won a prestigious award for iOS 26's Liquid Glass design

https://9to5mac.com/2026/05/14/apple-has-won-a-prestigious-award-for-ios-26s-liquid-glass-design/
1•danorama•20m ago•1 comments

Vibecoding – A vibecoding tool for HR who still don't get what vibecoding is

1•zhenruyan•21m 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.
jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
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/