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Because It Doesn't Have To

https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/04/because-it-doesnt-have-to.html
1•zdw•19s ago•0 comments

What Happens If a Merge Queue Builds on the Wrong Commit

https://trunk.io/blog/what-happens-if-a-merge-queue-builds-on-the-wrong-commit
1•elischleifer•43s ago•0 comments

'It took nine seconds': Claude AI agent deletes company's database

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/claude-ai-agent-deletes-startup-anthropic-b2966176.html
1•bigbugbag•1m ago•0 comments

Slow Down to Speed Up

https://dhruvasagar.dev/posts/slow-down-to-speed-up/
1•lisperforlife•7m ago•0 comments

Humanoid robots start sorting luggage in Tokyo airport test amid labor shortage

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/japan-airlines-tests-having-robots-instead-of-humans-handle-tr...
2•Brajeshwar•8m ago•0 comments

The Mix-Up at the Heart of the Supreme Court's Conversion Therapy Ruling

https://nautil.us/the-mix-up-at-the-heart-of-the-supreme-courts-conversion-therapy-ruling-1280307
2•Tomte•8m ago•0 comments

IATA Chief Warns of Possible Jet Fuel Shortages This Summer

https://airlinegeeks.com/2026/04/28/iata-chief-warns-of-possible-jet-fuel-shortages-this-summer/
2•cf100clunk•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AgentPort – Open-source Security Gateway For Agents

https://agentport.sh/
2•yakkomajuri•8m ago•0 comments

YouTube Took over the American Classroom

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/youtube-chromebooks-schools-children-brain-f151dfbb
3•caminante•10m ago•1 comments

CST (Cyber Solution Team)

2•ROHOMOT•11m ago•0 comments

The Final Form of Software Development

https://blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/end-coding/
2•baby•13m ago•0 comments

The 90-Year-Old Regulatory Model That Could Work for AI

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ai-companies-can-t-regulate-themselves-they-should-regulate-...
2•cephalot•13m ago•0 comments

Migrating a 40-year-old Clipper ERP: the orphan invoice rows weren't a bug

https://asktheledger.com/blog/clipper-erp-migration-orphan-rows.html
2•josephsprei•16m ago•1 comments

PS5 Linux

https://github.com/ps5-linux/ps5-linux-loader
3•LorenDB•17m ago•0 comments

Chinese Robots Are Flooding America. I Brought One Home [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucy9VTLDwPU
2•bryan0•17m ago•0 comments

Age verification vendor Persona left front end exposed, researchers say

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/age-verification-vendor-persona-left-frontend-exposed
4•offbyone42•17m ago•0 comments

The US Tech Giant Where Employees Wear IDF Uniforms to Work

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/exclusive-the-us-tech-giant-where
14•sosomoxie•19m ago•5 comments

At Protocol: Building the Social Internet

https://atproto.com/
2•resiros•21m ago•0 comments

Codex and ForgeCAD: Generating a Model of the Teenage Engineering KO II

https://twitter.com/theopuslabs/status/2049195007404380244
1•opuslabs•21m ago•0 comments

NASA chief Jared Isaacman says he's fighting for Pluto

https://www.space.com/astronomy/pluto/nasa-chief-jared-isaacman-says-hes-fighting-for-pluto-i-am-...
2•thunderbong•24m ago•0 comments

Better Hardware Could Turn Zeros into AI Heroes

https://spectrum.ieee.org/sparse-ai
1•Brajeshwar•25m ago•0 comments

Anaconda Acquires Outerbounds to Unify AI-Native Development

https://www.anaconda.com/blog/anaconda-acquires-outerbounds
1•htrp•25m ago•0 comments

Potemkin Village

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village
1•rbanffy•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VT Code – Rust coding agent with AST-level code intelligence

https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode
1•vinhnx•25m ago•0 comments

Nikita Bier Runs X. Give Me a Few Hours. Iranian flag change and account purge

https://dannykpolitics.substack.com/p/part-two-the-pattern-nikita-biers
5•logcode•25m ago•0 comments

FastCGI: 30 Years Old and Still the Better Protocol for Reverse Proxies

https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/fastcgi_is_the_better_protocol_for_reverse_proxies
3•agwa•25m ago•0 comments

TI-84 Evo

https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-calculators/ti-84-evo
3•kermatt•26m ago•0 comments

Customer.io told me to delete 80% of my list. Rebuilt it with Claude in 27 days

https://twitter.com/JakeMRuth/status/2049521900464791604
1•hippofluff•26m ago•0 comments

Maximising the Value of Ajinomoto

https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20260331226478/en/2761328/1/EN_Palliser_-_Ajinomoto_Value_Enha...
1•num42•26m ago•0 comments

30 ClawHub skills secretly turn AI agents into a crypto swarm

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/29/30_clawhub_skills_mine_crypto/
1•Bender•27m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•12mo ago

Comments

thechao•12mo 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•12mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•12mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•12mo 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•12mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•12mo 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•12mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•12mo 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_•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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/