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Show HN: I built a hypervisor and client for inference on consumer compute

https://scalattice.com/blog/openai-sdk-scalattice/
1•RomulusHill•3m ago•0 comments

Jedi Knight fansite has been running consistently for almost 30 years

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/conceived-in-a-secure-military-facility-this-jedi-knight-fan...
1•Apocryphon•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Hydra, a local-first trust control plane that routes AI by confidence

https://hydra.uvansa.com/
1•jhaankit373•7m ago•0 comments

Syria's ancient sites face widespread looting and systematic bulldozing

https://phys.org/news/2026-07-syria-ancient-sites-widespread-looting.html
1•mdp2021•11m ago•0 comments

Neuromancer – Official Teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79GPZSQHBk
3•fourampers•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free tool that insults your code but also finds real bugs

https://zlvox.com/tools/roast-my-code
2•mrdisloyal•18m ago•0 comments

Introduction to LLM Inference

https://kraghavan.ca/llm-infrastructure/inference/2026/04/14/re-introduction-to-inference.html
2•kraghavan•27m ago•0 comments

What Love Island tells us about the changing face of dating

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c935q2k6pxqo
2•mmarian•28m ago•0 comments

Kaappi – r7rs scheme written in Zig

https://github.com/kaappi/kaappi
3•s20n•28m ago•0 comments

LLM-as-a-Judge Field Guide

https://kraghavan.ca/llm-infrastructure/evaluation/2026/07/25/llm-as-a-judge-field-guide.html
1•kraghavan•29m ago•0 comments

Only Pay for Human Ad Clicks

https://botaudit.co/
1•techguydiy•29m ago•0 comments

The Myth and the Medal(2015) [pdf]

https://www.ams.org/notices/201501/rnoti-p15.pdf
1•num42•31m ago•0 comments

Maybe we should revisit microkernels

https://notes.hella.cheap/maybe-we-should-revisit-microkernels.html
4•morkin•40m ago•2 comments

Shoppers rewire grocery routines while digesting biggest price jump in 50 years

https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/americans-rewire-grocery-shopping-routines-digesting-biggest-pri...
2•geox•43m ago•0 comments

Thanatos Rising

https://theamericanscholar.org/thanatos-rising/
2•Caiero•45m ago•0 comments

We respond to Yelp leads in 15 seconds. The average business takes 4 hours

https://hirejosie.ai/blog/chatgpt-yelp-ai-lead-response/
1•ayinlaolajide•49m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Protecting your Sites/Services from Unwanted Traffic?

3•prologic•51m ago•0 comments

Registration Open for OS/2 and ArcaOS Warpstock 2026 in San Antonio, Texas, USA

http://www.warpstock.org/staticpages/index.php?page=ws2026-home
2•Lammy•59m ago•0 comments

Calorie Redemption per Mile

https://shub.club/writings/2026/july/calorie-redemption-per-mile/
1•forthwall•1h ago•0 comments

Betlang – A programming language detection model in 50kb

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/betlang/
2•demonthos•1h ago•0 comments

The prestige and status of research fields within mathematics

https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.13244
1•nill0•1h ago•0 comments

You can view a lot of Claude shared conversations via Google

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1v6fiyj/you_can_view_a_lot_of_shared_conversations_via/
4•theanonymousone•1h ago•0 comments

Microsoft responds to LG monitors installing McAfee ads on Windows

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/microsoft-responds-to-lg-monitors-installing-mcafee-ads-o...
5•GavinAnderegg•1h ago•0 comments

Now that Huang believes in open source, looking forward to CUDA open sourcing

https://xcancel.com/Mononofu/status/2080937562739531837
3•theanonymousone•1h ago•0 comments

W4ME Station – a WASM-4 runtime for Java ME phones

https://github.com/mulfyx/w4me-station
7•sqshi•1h ago•0 comments

Codegraph

https://github.com/colbymchenry/codegraph
2•handfuloflight•1h ago•0 comments

Transit advocates mourn Boston transportation planner killed while biking

https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/07/17/louisa-gag-vigil-wu-bike-safety-streets
2•bariumbitmap•1h ago•0 comments

MIT to become hotbed of AI video surveillance

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/mit-to-become-hotbed-of-ai-video-surveillance.html
9•SanjayMehta•1h ago•1 comments

AIs and Humans with Agency by David Mumford

https://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2026/AIs%20with%20Agency.html
1•sxzygz•1h ago•0 comments

Interlock: Proving a secret moved, instead of guessing that it might

https://yashwanthreddymali.com/blog/interlock-exfiltration-at-runtime/
3•yashwxnth•1h 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.
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/

jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem