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Fastconstmap: Fast, immutable, compact map from strings to int64 for Python

https://github.com/lemire/fastconstmap
1•mfiguiere•43s ago•0 comments

Terraform AWS Organization Foundation

https://github.com/henriquesgnc/terraform-aws-organization-foundation
1•eriksencosta•44s ago•1 comments

Consciousness Is Not a Binary Thing

https://medium.com/@chuliangyu/consciousness-is-not-a-binary-thing-7a020f93ba99
1•chuliangyu•3m ago•0 comments

Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI's Products in Latest Shake-Up

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-reorg-greg-brockman-product/
1•JumpCrisscross•3m ago•0 comments

OSnews – 21 years and 20k posts later

https://www.osnews.com/story/144962/21-years-and-20000-posts-later/
2•greatquux•9m ago•0 comments

A fork() in the road (2019) [pdf]

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf
1•aragonite•10m ago•0 comments

There is no room: the sphere of automation

https://metastable.org/the-sphere/
1•pbw•10m ago•0 comments

Proteomic signatures of APOE ε4 and APOE ε2 genetic variants and Alzheimer's dis

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-026-01123-0
1•bookofjoe•12m ago•0 comments

DroidDesk: Turns Android Phone into Linux Desktop

https://github.com/orailnoor/DroidDesk
2•Einenlum•13m ago•0 comments

Triad – a dynamic, scriptable window manager for the River Wayland compositor

https://github.com/greenm01/triad
1•smartmic•15m ago•0 comments

Loop Fission and Fusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_fission_and_fusion
1•tosh•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Strava for AI coding – analytics on your Copilot/Claude/Codex usage

https://github.com/microsoft/AI-Engineering-Coach
2•aymenfurter•16m ago•0 comments

Tesla reveals two Robotaxi crashes involving teleoperators

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/15/tesla-reveals-two-robotaxi-crashes-involving-teleoperators/
5•Brajeshwar•18m ago•0 comments

A text based loading/thinking animation exploration

https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tetzlb/agents_are_thinking_a_text_based_thinking/
1•zane__chen•20m ago•0 comments

PyCon US 2026 Typing Summit Recap

https://bernat.tech/posts/pycon-us-2026-typing-summit-recap/
1•rexledesma•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Infinite Swap – Trade a bottle cap up to a house

https://infiniteswap.app/
1•dansquizsoft•21m ago•0 comments

Profunctor Equipment in Haskell

https://bartoszmilewski.com/2026/05/16/profunctor-equipment-in-haskell/
1•g0xA52A2A•22m ago•0 comments

Long Island Rail Road Strike Shuts Down Busiest U.S. Passenger Rail Service

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/nyregion/lirr-strike.html
2•JumpCrisscross•22m ago•0 comments

Custodial vs. non-custodial stablecoin cards: two different systems

https://nethsara.substack.com/p/custodial-vs-non-custodial-stablecoin
2•nethsarask•22m ago•0 comments

MacBook microphone has no dynamic range

https://blog.vasi.li/macbook-microphone-has-no-dynamic-range/
2•vsviridov•23m ago•1 comments

Can Some Tiny Particles Cool the Planet? One Tech Company Says Yes

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/climate/stardust-solutions-geoengineering-cooling-earth.html
1•lxm•25m ago•0 comments

How an Australian Teen Team Is Making Radio Astronomy Affordable for Schools

https://mag.openrockets.com/p/how-an-australian-teen-team-is-making-radio-astronomy-affordable-fo...
3•openrockets•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Agenda Intel MD – schemas and CLI to audit LLM strategic-risk briefs

https://github.com/vassiliylakhonin/agenda-intelligence-md
1•vassilbek•28m ago•0 comments

NeuroAPI – AI for Finance

https://neuroapi.neurobro.ai/docs
1•gromdimon•28m ago•1 comments

Kaiku – Free FM Synthesizer – VST3 – Linux / macOS / Windows

https://github.com/Jakko-KAAMOS/kaiku
1•Jakko-KAAMOS•29m ago•0 comments

AI research papers are getting better, and it's a big problem for scientists

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/930522/ai-research-papers-slop-peer-review-pr...
2•greesil•30m ago•0 comments

What Sudoku Reveals About AI Reasoning Architectures and the Future

https://logicalintelligence.com/blog/energy-based-model-sudoku-demo
1•Topfi•31m ago•0 comments

Tesla Patents New Trim Clip to Reduce Rattles and Vibrations

https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/4122/tesla-patents-new-trim-clip-to-reduce-rattles-and-vibrations
1•busymom0•36m ago•0 comments

B2B Copywriting That Drives Demand

https://draft.dev/learn/b2b-copywriting-drives-demand
2•mooreds•39m ago•0 comments

Mode collapse has a name, and he's selling cancer treatment advice on Amazon

https://danielmay.co.uk/posts/cheap-agents-alumni-shirts-and-elias-thorne/
2•danielrmay•39m 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.
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/