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Resisting Authoritarianism in Today's Classrooms

https://www.laprogressive.com/education-reform/resisting-authoritarianism
1•hkhn•1m ago•0 comments

Radial Hyperbolic Architecture – 37D golden-ratio lattice in Poincaré disk

https://github.com/robertjeffrey1236/Radial-Hyperbolic-Architecture-Prototype
1•Robertjeffrey12•3m ago•0 comments

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny landed 259 PRs in 30 days, all by Opus 4.5

https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2004947522889162834
1•odie5533•7m ago•1 comments

Tesla's Dangerous Doors

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-12-17/tesla-s-dangerous-doors-video
2•xqcgrek2•7m ago•0 comments

Flathub Year in Review

https://flathub.org/en/year-in-review/2025
1•Charmunk•16m ago•0 comments

Face Antispoof ONNX

https://github.com/johnraivenolazo/face-antispoof-onnx
1•handfuloflight•37m ago•0 comments

Video Essays of 2025

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-video-essays-2025
2•vinhnx•42m ago•0 comments

Why are we worried about memory access semantics? Full barriers are enough?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251226-00/?p=111919
1•signa11•42m ago•0 comments

Publishers Clearing House's bankruptcy means winners will no longer get paid

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/16/business/publishers-clearing-house-bankruptcy-winners-lose-prizes
1•petethomas•45m ago•1 comments

The Well Watchers

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2025/12/abandoned-oil-wells-texas-tiktok-hawk-dunlap-sara...
2•toomuchtodo•51m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Can systems function correctly without memory?

1•SpicyG•53m ago•4 comments

The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #40

https://vladkhambir.substack.com/p/the-ios-weekly-brief-issue-40
1•khambir•53m ago•0 comments

Andrej Karpathy: "I've never felt this much behind as a programmer"

https://twitter.com/i/status/2004607146781278521
4•alexcos•59m ago•2 comments

Geographic shapes and flags via simple URLs

https://borderly.dev/
2•zuhayeer•59m ago•0 comments

GitHub Takes Down Rockchip MPP Repository After FFmpeg Copyright Claim

https://linuxiac.com/github-takes-down-rockchip-mpp-repository-after-ffmpeg-copyright-claim/
3•marcodiego•1h ago•0 comments

Lost Years: Expected Number of Years Lost

https://github.com/gojiplus/lost-years
1•neehao•1h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Why does YouTube collect creator demographics?

1•journal•1h ago•0 comments

Make Your iPhone Speak the Time

https://swordandsignals.com/2025/12/27/announce-time-on-demand.html
1•jiannengli•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: tpmjs - npm for ai sdk tools

https://tpmjs.com/
4•thomasfromcdnjs•1h ago•1 comments

Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-dads-fitness-may-be-packaged-and-passed-down-in-sperm-rna-2025...
34•vismit2000•1h ago•3 comments

Change, How Expensive

https://johnocens.com/soothfare/changehowexpensive
2•wonderbar•1h ago•0 comments

Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: Full Disclosure of Airoha Race Vulnerabilities

https://insinuator.net/2025/12/bluetooth-headphone-jacking-full-disclosure-of-airoha-race-vulnera...
2•marvinborner•1h ago•1 comments

2026 macro outlook – views across the street (synthesis 2026 outlook reports)

https://2026macro.vercel.app/
1•OxfordOutlander•1h ago•1 comments

Would You Kill for a Job?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/opinion/no-other-choice-work-unemployment.html
3•mitchbob•1h ago•5 comments

Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

https://www.htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2025/27/
108•soheilpro•1h ago•28 comments

The case of Africa's 'vanishing' carbon deals

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2025/11/26/climate-change/africa-carbon-deals/
2•PaulHoule•2h ago•0 comments

Software ate the world. Federation will eat embeddings

https://www.gnanaguru.com/p/federation-over-embeddings-let-ai
2•gnanagurusrgs•2h ago•1 comments

Nature and Climate Wins in 2025

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251212-seven-quiet-wins-for-climate-and-nature-in-2025
2•kaycebasques•2h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I created a tool to design and create foamcore inserts for boardgames

https://boxinsertdesigner.com/
1•Rabidgremlin•2h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Iris – an AI-powered rental search built specifically for San Francisco

https://www.irisrents.com
2•manan08•2h 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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/