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Ask HN: Strongman Argument for Trump?

1•bbiab•23s ago•0 comments

Ripped off by Google? Places API

1•texuf•1m ago•0 comments

OpenAI is now selling 6x more codex for 10x the price

https://developers.openai.com/codex/pricing/
1•Szpadel•1m ago•1 comments

Eternal September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
1•_vaporwave_•2m ago•0 comments

New Model Fails to Explain Near-Death Experiences, Scientists Say

https://news.med.virginia.edu/research/new-model-fails-to-explain-near-death-experiences-scientis...
1•XzetaU8•3m ago•0 comments

Yori, I made a CLI tool that compiles natural language into C++ binaries

https://github.com/alonsovm44/yori
1•alonsovm•9m ago•1 comments

All horses are the same color

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_horses_are_the_same_color
1•icwtyjj•12m ago•0 comments

Curl: We stop the bug-bounty end of Jan 2026

https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/20312
2•Fiveplus•13m ago•0 comments

Growth / Decline of various mobile app SDKs

https://appgoblin.info/reports/mobile-apps-growth-sdks-2025
1•ddxv•20m ago•1 comments

Grok and the A.I. Porn Problem

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/grok-and-the-ai-porn-problem
1•fortran77•21m ago•1 comments

How to Debug Your Life

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-to-debug-your-life/
1•zdw•21m ago•0 comments

China's Zhipu Unveils New AI Model Trained on Huawei's Chips

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-14/china-s-zhipu-unveils-new-ai-model-trained-on-...
2•antman•23m ago•0 comments

Rare images of Europe's 'ghost cat' [wildcat]

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260112-rare-images-of-europes-ghost-cat
2•7402•24m ago•0 comments

Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete

https://kibbler.dev/blog/turn-your-codebase-into-a-knowledge-base
5•kewun•27m ago•8 comments

Two Indian students won a $200k settlement with US university

https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/a-lunch-of-palak-paneer-and-how-two-indian-student...
1•akbarnama•29m ago•0 comments

Temporal Patterns

https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/timeNarrative.html
1•vulcan01•30m ago•0 comments

As birthrates tumble, progressives say the left needs to offer ideas, solutions

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/12/nx-s1-5637424/birthrate-population-babies
2•andsoitis•31m ago•0 comments

Tesla to stop selling FSD package, moves to subscription-only: why a big move

https://electrek.co/2026/01/14/tesla-tsla-stop-selling-full-self-driving-package-subscription-only/
1•FabHK•35m ago•0 comments

Viking Solar Navigation Modernized (DIY)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ERqAqwQ1wo
1•gsf_emergency_6•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Calculator to compare Startup offers vs. Big Tech comp

https://shouldijoinastartup.com
1•febtiger•39m ago•0 comments

Supernatural VR will no longer get new content or features

https://www.uploadvr.com/supernatural-coaches-face-same-fate-as-oculus-home-echo-arena/
1•guiambros•41m ago•1 comments

Handy – free open source speech-to-text app

https://github.com/cjpais/Handy
2•tin7in•42m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How to predict nums of output tokens?

1•ssslvky1•44m ago•1 comments

Mistral Vibe – Minimal CLI Coding Agent

https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe
1•tin7in•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B on 100 films for probabilistic story graphs

https://cinegraphs.ai/
1•graphpilled•50m ago•0 comments

Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice

https://kyutai.org/blog/2026-01-13-pocket-tts
3•pain_perdu•51m ago•0 comments

Conductor: Context-driven development for Gemini CLI

https://developers.googleblog.com/conductor-introducing-context-driven-development-for-gemini-cli/
1•geoffbp•54m ago•0 comments

Just the Browser

https://justthebrowser.com/
1•vinhnx•55m ago•1 comments

Claude Code Tool Search Tool

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-use/tool-search-tool
1•tin7in•56m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Headroom – Reversible context compression for LLMs(~60% cost reduction)

https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom
1•chopratejas•59m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•8mo ago

Comments

thechao•8mo 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•8mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•8mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•8mo 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•8mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•8mo 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•8mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•8mo 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_•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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/