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Show HN: I built a wizard to turn ideas into AI coding agent-ready specs

https://vibescaffold.dev/
1•straydusk•1m ago•0 comments

Cardiac implantable electronic devices' longevity: A novel modelling tool

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0333195
1•PaulHoule•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A privacy-first, client-side toolbox (PDF, Imgs, Dev) no server uploads

https://linu.li
1•immineal•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: HN Buffer – A read-it-later site for your HN favorites

https://hnbuffer.com
1•shaarmar•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Building an AI Agent

https://app.9octopus.com/
1•thimoteelegrand•5m ago•0 comments

Information Literacy and Chatbots as Search

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/information-literacy-and-chatbots-as-search/
1•walterbell•5m ago•0 comments

Björk Guðmundsdóttir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rk
1•weinzierl•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Build the habit of writing meaningful commit messages

https://github.com/arpxspace/smartcommit
1•Aplikethewatch•9m ago•0 comments

Rapid Transit Timelines and Scale Comparison

https://transit-timelines.github.io/
1•JumpCrisscross•9m ago•0 comments

Physicists drive antihydrogen breakthrough at CERN

https://phys.org/news/2025-11-physicists-antihydrogen-breakthrough-cern-technique.html
1•naves•9m ago•0 comments

A Reverse Engineer's Anatomy of the macOS Boot Chain and Security Architecture

https://stack.int.mov/a-reverse-engineers-anatomy-of-the-macos-boot-chain-security-architecture/
3•19h•9m ago•0 comments

New Rolls-Royce technology prevents sand damage to jet engines

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0e3npg7e4o
1•neversaydie•9m ago•0 comments

New Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests: Powerful Sums

http://azspcs.com/Contest/PowerfulSums
1•rixed•17m ago•1 comments

Show HN: RealDeed – Tokenize Real Estate into Digital Assets

https://www.realdeed.co/
1•pratz0555•17m ago•0 comments

IPv6 Is a Total Nightmare – This Is Why (2020)

https://teknikaldomain.me/post/ipv6-is-a-total-nightmare/
1•smartmic•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Letterboxd Completionist - Assessing Filmography Progress

https://letterboxd-completionist.netlify.app/
1•3333333331•21m ago•0 comments

Early science acceleration experiments with GPT-5

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16072
1•Anon84•24m ago•0 comments

I built a "decision-zero" movie picker to fix Netflix paralysis

https://decision-zero-stream.lovable.app/
1•MatteoTadiello•24m ago•1 comments

ChatGPT Codex Outage

https://status.openai.com/incidents/01KAPG4EE5JWEV04TPZ2SNNK8X
1•twalichiewicz•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: HN Insights – HN front page summaries

https://hn-insights.com
3•mobrienv•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Reverse Jailbreaking a Psychopathic AI via Identity Injection

https://github.com/DRawson5570/AI-Wisdom-Distillation
2•drawson5570•30m ago•0 comments

Brazil's Bolsonaro detained for trying to break ankle bracelet and flee

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/international-relations/brazil-s-bolsonaro-detained-for-trying...
2•CXSHNGCB•30m ago•0 comments

A dream of AI DLC A peek into the future based on tools and tech that we have

https://magistr.me/blog/8/
1•u_magistr•31m ago•0 comments

Shanti Rides Shotgun [video]

https://vimeo.com/1132534575
1•NaOH•31m ago•0 comments

Queen guitarist Sir Brian May's latest book explores the evolution of galaxies

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251121-sir-brian-mays-stereo-vision-of-galaxies
1•ent101•32m ago•0 comments

Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115591487350860999
3•dwohnitmok•36m ago•0 comments

iOS Developers Claim 1Password Isn't Removing Deleted Profile Pictures

https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2025/11/22/1password-stores-profile-pictures-of-user-accounts-...
3•gpi•36m ago•0 comments

Mapping the future with 3D-printed titanium Apple Watch cases

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/mapping-the-future-with-3d-printed-titanium-apple-watch-ca...
3•walterbell•37m ago•0 comments

The Go-Between

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-go-between/
2•gmays•39m ago•0 comments

The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy

https://taggart-tech.com/mozilla-cycle-pt3/
4•holysoles•42m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•6mo ago

Comments

thechao•6mo 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•6mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•6mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•6mo 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•6mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•6mo 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•6mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•6mo 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_•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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/