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The Demise of the Flynn Effect

https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect
1•smnthermes•58s ago•0 comments

100 Lost Species

https://www.100lostspecies.com/
1•ChrisArchitect•4m ago•0 comments

Smarter AI Code Reviews for GitLab Mrs: ThinkReview's Alternative to GitLab Duo

https://thinkreview.dev/
1•jkshenawy22•8m ago•1 comments

Claude Code on the Web

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-code-on-the-web
4•adocomplete•9m ago•1 comments

Peanut Allergies Have Plummeted in Children

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/well/peanut-allergy-drop.html
2•JumpCrisscross•12m ago•0 comments

Musk's $1T Tesla pay plan draws some protest ahead of likely approval

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/musks-1-trillion-pay-plan-doesnt-force-him-to-keep-fo...
1•duxup•12m ago•0 comments

American Airlines Subsidiary Envoy Air Hit by Oracle Hack

https://www.securityweek.com/american-airlines-subsidiary-envoy-air-hit-by-oracle-hack/
1•Bender•15m ago•0 comments

An Unexpected Benefit from Quitting Coffee – 10 Months In

https://hamy.xyz/blog/2025-10_unexpected-benefit-quitting-coffee
2•speckx•15m ago•0 comments

SIM Farm Dismantled in Europe, Seven Arrested

https://www.securityweek.com/sim-farm-dismantled-in-europe-seven-arrested/
3•Bender•16m ago•0 comments

The Cost of AI in Software Engineering

https://substack.com/@thecodetherapy/p-176667869
2•mgzme•16m ago•1 comments

Characterizing Fractured Zones in Urban Karst Geology Using Leaky Surface Waves

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JB031477
2•PaulHoule•17m ago•0 comments

Doomsday Church Renovating Popular Yellowstone Hot Springs

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2025/10/19/how-a-doomsday-church-is-resurrecting-yellowstones-boilin...
1•Bender•18m ago•0 comments

China's generative AI user base doubles to 515M (36.5%) in 6 months

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3329667/chinas-generative-ai-user-base-doubles-515-...
2•giuliomagnifico•18m ago•0 comments

Stop-Think-AutoRegress: Language Modeling with Latent Diffusion Planning

https://openreview.net/forum?id=c05qIG1Z2B#discussion
2•blurbleblurble•21m ago•1 comments

Topic-based journaling instead of daily notes

https://www.ssp.sh/brain/how-i-write-daily-notes-differently/
1•articsputnik•21m ago•0 comments

Smart Glasses Are Forcing Wearables to Get Weird

https://gizmodo.com/smart-glasses-are-forcing-wearables-to-get-very-weird-2000674309
3•fcpguru•22m ago•0 comments

Supabase us-east-1 down

https://status.supabase.com
2•JonanJ•23m ago•0 comments

London Became a Global Hub for Phone Theft. Now We Know Why

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/world/europe/london-police-phone-theft-china-gang.html
2•throwaway31131•24m ago•0 comments

x86-64 Playground – An online assembly editor and GDB-like debugger

https://x64.halb.it/
2•modinfo•26m ago•0 comments

The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside

https://ideaspace.ystrickler.com/p/the-internet-is-dying-on-the-outside
4•herbertl•27m ago•0 comments

Work Fast but Towards What

https://quarter--mile.com/work-fast-but-towards-what
2•herbertl•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I Spent $300 Learning That Replit Has SSH Support

2•vcast•27m ago•0 comments

One AWS failure took down the internet Monday morning – what went wrong

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/one-aws-failure-took-down-the-internet-monday-mo...
1•CrankyBear•28m ago•0 comments

Ireland plans to make a $1,500 a month basic income for artists permanent

https://www.businessinsider.com/ireland-basic-income-artists-permanent-2025-10
3•nanfinitum•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ContextKey – Use a hotkey to query LLM using any text or file

https://github.com/siggalucci13/ContextKey
3•siggalucci•28m ago•1 comments

Quick notes from vibe-coding a comic website

https://blog.dileeplearning.com/p/quick-notes-from-vibe-coding-a-comic
2•FromTheArchives•32m ago•0 comments

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X vs. 9950X3D on Windows 11 and Ubuntu Linux

https://www.phoronix.com/review/windows-linux-amd-9950x-9950x3d
4•rbanffy•33m ago•1 comments

Diamond Thermal Conductivity: A New Era in Chip Cooling

https://spectrum.ieee.org/diamond-thermal-conductivity
2•rbanffy•33m ago•1 comments

Blackwell Rises from Phoenix Fab

https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/10/17/blackwell-rises-from-phoenix-fab/
2•rbanffy•34m ago•0 comments

UK Think Tank: Documents Show Russia Is Helping China Prepare to Seize Taiwan

https://www.rferl.org/a/china-russia-taiwan-invasion-rusi-danylyuk-putin-xi-/33545169.html
6•consumer451•35m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•5mo ago

Comments

thechao•5mo 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•5mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•5mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•5mo 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•5mo 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•5mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•5mo 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•5mo 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•5mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•5mo 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•5mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•5mo 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•5mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•5mo 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_•5mo 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•5mo 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•5mo 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•5mo 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/