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Ask HN: How to get funding for your product?

1•logotype•52s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Solved hiring by deleting the hiring step; your crew almost ready

https://www.crewrok.com/
1•rokontech•4m ago•0 comments

On the world’s coldest stage, a military musician plays with a plastic horn

https://apnews.com/article/antarctica-navy-musician-scott-base-new-zealand-d7a9f6eb2c0bbe769a5087...
1•mooreds•6m ago•0 comments

The Wandering Inn

https://wanderinginn.com/2017/03/03/rw1-00/
1•ptsneves•7m ago•0 comments

How to fix the internet: break the oligarchy

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2025/11/how-to-fix-the-internet-break-...
1•robtherobber•9m ago•0 comments

Testing shows Apple N1 Wi-Fi chip improves on older Broadcom chips in every way

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/testing-shows-apple-n1-wi-fi-chip-improves-on-older-broad...
1•signa11•12m ago•0 comments

So I'm in the Epstein Files: Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNLdyWPAz18
1•Teever•14m ago•0 comments

Act-1: A Robot Foundation Model Trained on Zero Robot Data

https://www.sunday.ai/journal/no-robot-data
1•Anon84•14m ago•0 comments

Templated Static Content

https://judi.systems/sprouts/manual/05-templated-static-content
1•hsn915•17m ago•0 comments

Lessons Learned from UK "AV Day"

https://avpassociation.com/thought-leadership/lessons-learned-from-uk-av-day/
1•mooreds•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Awesome J2ME

https://github.com/hstsethi/awesome-j2me
3•catstor•21m ago•1 comments

Inaccurate news.YCombinator.com/item?id=7509122

https://trellis.law/case/24fl001767/carol-reiley-vs-andrew-ng
1•salkahfi•24m ago•0 comments

Dutch media warn of growing influence of global tech giants

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/11/dutch-media-warn-of-growing-influence-of-global-tech-giants/
2•HelloUsername•26m ago•0 comments

Internet Archive Down

https://web.archive.org/sry
2•danielfalbo•26m ago•1 comments

Spanish government approves decree to remove 'Francoist symbols and vestiges'

https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/11/20/spanish-government-approves-decree-to-begin-removal-o...
1•petethomas•26m ago•0 comments

Compile-time Tailwind CSS for React Native with zero runtime overhead

https://github.com/mgcrea/react-native-tailwind
1•olouv•31m ago•0 comments

Humans Are Evolving in Front of Our Eyes on the Tibetan Plateau

https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-are-evolving-in-front-of-our-eyes-on-the-tibetan-plateau
3•DrierCycle•31m ago•1 comments

China's "intelligent mines" are getting rid of truck drivers and diesel fuel

https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/p/chinas-intelligent-mines-are-getting
2•signa11•35m ago•0 comments

We don't use Cloudflare, yet Prisma depends on it so the outage broke our infra

https://ariana.dev/blog/cloudflare-outage-lessons
2•AnicetN•36m ago•1 comments

Rore: A GPU-Accelerated UI Framework in Rust (No DOM, No Webview)

https://github.com/davlatov-tech/Rore
2•Davlatov•40m ago•2 comments

In the A.I. Race, Chinese Talent Still Drives American Research

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/technology/ai-research-chinese-talent.html
1•signa11•40m ago•0 comments

Supercomputer simulates quantum chip in unprecedented detail

https://phys.org/news/2025-11-supercomputer-simulates-quantum-chip-unprecedented.html
1•iamtech•42m ago•0 comments

Paladin Press

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paladin_Press
1•hentrep•45m ago•0 comments

Put a little Pixie in your cluster

https://bitfieldconsulting.com/posts/little-pixie
1•mu0n•48m ago•0 comments

Firebase vs. Supabase vs. Appwrite: We Built the Same App Three Times

https://simpletechguides.com/comparisons/firebase-vs-supabase-vs-appwrite/
1•ritzaco•48m ago•0 comments

Post-American Blues

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/post-american-blues
1•robtherobber•49m ago•0 comments

Minimizing Variable Scope in Go: New Blog Post and Static Analyzer Tool

https://old.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1p201d9/
1•eik•49m ago•1 comments

ConnectApp.inc – Where True Digital Connection Begins

1•tobinews•50m ago•1 comments

Border Patrol is monitoring drivers and detaining those with suspicious patterns

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveillance-drivers-ice-trump-9f5d05469ce8c...
3•LordGrey•51m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Arka – an MCP gateway that makes MCP adoption possible

1•ayushshivani•54m 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/