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Introduction to Beaver Triples

https://stoffelmpc.com/stoffel-blog/beaver-triples-tuples
1•badcryptobitch•3m ago•0 comments

What 16 Parallel Claude Agents Built Around Themselves

https://medium.com/@vbcherepanov/what-16-parallel-claude-agents-built-around-themselves-deconstru...
2•vbcherepanov•7m ago•1 comments

Mypy 2.0 Relased

https://mypy-lang.blogspot.com/2026/05/mypy-20-relased.html
2•anishathalye•9m ago•0 comments

The Consolidation of Programming Languages?

https://twitter.com/NirZicherman/status/2053140102549766340
4•tattattaei•10m ago•0 comments

The Hunter-Gatherers Weighing Whether to Join the Modern World

https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/the-hunter-gatherers-weighing-whether-to-join-the-modern-world-0...
2•impish9208•10m ago•1 comments

Managing Postgres traffic spikes at Figma

https://www.figma.com/blog/pgkeeper-building-the-bouncer-we-needed-for-postgres/
3•bddicken•11m ago•0 comments

Learning on the Shop Floor

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/2053121182044451016
1•tosh•12m ago•0 comments

Bartenders at a Cocktail Mecca Propose a New Concoction: A Micro-Union

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/nyregion/attaboy-cocktail-union.html
1•brandonb•14m ago•0 comments

Box Elder County OKs data center project backed by a celebrity investor

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05/04/utah-data-center-final-vote-box/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•17m ago•0 comments

How I Got Into Y Combinator after 14 Years Of Trying

https://nmn.gl/blog/meditations-on-make-something-people-want
2•namanyayg•19m ago•0 comments

Who is Louis Mosley, the man tasked with defending Palantir against its critics?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/09/who-is-louis-mosley-defending-palantir-critics
3•mmarian•19m ago•0 comments

CVE-2026-43284 ("Dirty Frag") Alma Linux

https://almalinux.org/blog/2026-05-07-dirty-frag/
2•guyinblackshirt•22m ago•0 comments

Nvidia confirms GeForce NOW data breach affecting Armenian users

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nvidia-confirms-geforce-now-data-breach-affecting-...
2•Brajeshwar•22m ago•1 comments

Endara – One endpoint for all your MCP servers

https://endara.ai/
3•simonpure•23m ago•0 comments

Adola: Reducing LLM input tokens by 70%

https://adola.app/
5•Jbunga•23m ago•1 comments

Docker images are MB; a full game engine compiles to 35MB WASM

https://bogomolov.work/blog/posts/wasm-vs-docker/
4•theanonymousone•25m ago•0 comments

If you're an iPhone user, you could get $95 from this Apple settlement

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-05-06/if-youre-iphone-user-you-could-get-95-from-this...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•25m ago•0 comments

Canvas outage tied to cyberattack wreaked havoc on colleges' final exam season

https://apnews.com/article/canvas-outage-college-students-exams-grades-209a51692f043a959459dbe37f...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•26m ago•0 comments

The world sends its fast fashion to this Indian city. Its residents pay a price

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/09/india/india-panipat-textile-recycling-intl-hnk-dst
3•koolhead17•27m ago•0 comments

Tesla: End of Line

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/s/KNlOxQ6JYG
2•obilgic•29m ago•0 comments

How are folks affordably self-training in AI?

4•macartain•29m ago•1 comments

CA, NV and AZ announce temporary plan to save water from the Colorado River

https://apnews.com/article/colorado-river-lake-mead-lake-powell-d94d5a36398d2a34be7e2c4d10ef1bf6
1•littlexsparkee•30m ago•0 comments

Agents Manage Other Agents: Four Subagents Patterns in 2026

https://www.philschmid.de/subagent-patterns-2026
2•simonpure•32m ago•0 comments

Structures from synthesis – an interview with Steve Roach

https://www.synthforbreakfast.nl/structures-from-synthesis-an-interview-with-steve-roach/
1•MrJagil•33m ago•0 comments

SubQ: A New LLM with a 12M Token Context That Rivals Claude and ChatGPT

https://felloai.com/subq-llm-review/
2•LV14•33m ago•0 comments

Linux mascot Tux the penguin hits 30 years old

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-mascot-tux-the-penguin-hits-30-years-old-linus-...
1•LorenDB•34m ago•0 comments

Built my own HTML Wiki

https://99helpers.com/tools/ai-html-wiki-generator
1•nickk81•37m ago•1 comments

Reddit pushes web visitors to app

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/05/08/reddit-pushes-web-visitors-to-app/
5•dwedge•37m ago•0 comments

We built agents to automate FDE work

2•faradaystack•38m ago•0 comments

Monument Valley Dev: 'We've Been Too Romantic About Giving People Job Security'

https://kotaku.com/monument-valley-dev-is-pivoting-to-contractors-weve-been-a-little-bit-too-roma...
2•vrganj•40m ago•1 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/