frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Show HN: Daemon OS – An intelligence layer for infrastructure

https://daemon-os.lebarionellison.workers.dev
1•lellison1•5m ago•0 comments

We are all Product Engineers now

https://seldo.com/posts/we-are-all-product-engineers-now/
3•vinhnx•6m ago•0 comments

The Hardness of 4-to-1 Games with Perfect Completeness

https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2026/179/
1•momeara•6m ago•0 comments

Purely Functional Operating Systems

https://eighty-twenty.org/2022/06/23/henderson-functional-operating-systems-1982
1•vinhnx•6m ago•0 comments

DeepMind's new genome 'atlas' charts effects of all 9B human gene mutations

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02835-4
1•jonbaer•7m ago•0 comments

METR Anthropic Network

https://twitter.com/kevinnbass/status/2099621874279817638
1•andrewljohnson•8m ago•0 comments

One Pass to Parse Them All: Fused Parallel CSV Processing [pdf]

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p3579-ellmann.pdf
1•cpard•8m ago•0 comments

India's Dedicated Freight Corridor's last mile challenge

https://finshots.in/archive/the-dedicated-freight-corridors-last-mile-challenge/
1•vismit2000•20m ago•0 comments

Mouse

https://github.com/mousedev/mouse-harness/tree/main
2•Aeroi•20m ago•0 comments

CrofAI Is an OpenRouter Wrapper

https://kendell.dev/blog/crofaifalse/
1•wut42•22m ago•0 comments

Internet Guestbooks: The Rise, Decline, and Afterlife

https://curiouxify.com/internet-guestbooks/
1•mastazi•22m ago•0 comments

An open-source interactive 3D PC Anatomy explore what's inside a computer

https://pc-anatomy.vercel.app/
1•Zeruxe•22m ago•1 comments

Does Scaling Web-Video Pre-Training Help Real Robots Do Real Work?

https://www.rhoda.ai/research/scaling-web-video-pretraining
2•gmays•23m ago•0 comments

The Physical Agent Harness: a portable interface to persistent agents

https://rashidazarang.com/c/the-physical-agent-harness
2•rashidae•25m ago•0 comments

Air Force secretary acknowledges the US has weapons in space

https://abcnews.com/Politics/air-force-secretary-acknowledges-us-weapons-space/story?id=136437923
2•SanjayMehta•26m ago•0 comments

World AI Cooperation Organization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Artificial_Intelligence_Cooperation_Organization
1•soundworlds•27m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Day week calendar app inspired by the French Revolutionary calendar

https://github.com/OlegIGalkin/tendayweekcalendar
1•cantouch•29m ago•0 comments

US-China AI strategic planning

https://sinocism.com/p/us-china-strategic-ai-dialogue-said
2•neptunetriton•30m ago•0 comments

The harms of short-form video on the brain are starting to show

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/14/zuckerberg-short-form-video-cognitive-harm
2•pizzaiolo•39m ago•0 comments

I worked at Google DeepMind. You should listen to the warnings about AI

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/14/google-deepmind-ai-warnings
4•gibspaulding•39m ago•0 comments

The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer – and How to Do the Job Right

https://www.latent.space/p/forward-deployed-engineer-best-practices
1•yarapavan•41m ago•0 comments

Exploring mathematics with your computer (1993)

https://archive.org/details/exploringmathema0000enge
1•vismit2000•43m ago•0 comments

Why is nobody signing up even though I launched an unlimited plan on my website?

2•petebay•43m ago•2 comments

Efficient capital allocation in media as it relates to catalog IP

https://sidecar-part-ii.danieldeboulay.com
2•deboulaymxf•45m ago•0 comments

National Security Agency launches historic restructuring

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/09/13/national-security-agency-launches-his...
6•punk_ihaq•47m ago•1 comments

OpenAI DevDay 2026

https://devday.openai.com
2•almyk•49m ago•0 comments

Tokenomics: Fable 5.1's reduced cache read makes it cheaper than Opus

https://skids.dev/blog/fable-cache-tokenomics/
3•ryanskidmore•51m ago•0 comments

Data Seeding in .NET

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/modeling/data-seeding
1•Brysonbw•52m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Taxes while living abroad as a US citizen

2•wnolens•52m ago•2 comments

Analysis: Why Rollback Netcode Is Better (2020) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NLe4IpdS1w
1•CharlesW•53m 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