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The Design of Signalsmith Stretch (Pitch-Shifting Algorithm)

https://signalsmith-audio.co.uk/writing/2023/stretch-design/
1•epestr•2m ago•0 comments

India's outsourced software industry grows 9.5 percent to reach $239B

https://www.theregister.com/channel/2026/09/24/indias-outsourced-software-industry-grows-95-perce...
1•ent101•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Quartermaster – see your real asset allocation across all accounts

https://realallocation.com
1•olympusperspect•3m ago•0 comments

Meta debuts 'Charm' device to use new AI assistant Muse on the go

https://financialpost.com/technology/meta-debuts-muse-charm-device
2•hmokiguess•5m ago•0 comments

Visualization of all roads within any city

https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads
2•bookofjoe•5m ago•0 comments

Things That Are Good to Do

https://www.quarter--mile.com/Things-That-Are-Good-to-Do
2•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

Meta VR Glasses, a New Era for Virtual Reality

https://www.meta.com/blog/meta-vr-glasses-announcement-meta-connect/
4•htk•8m ago•0 comments

AI labs' job-loss plans won't say what the public gets

https://beigebook.xyz/posts/preparedness-theater/
3•anothermathbozo•8m ago•0 comments

Without watermarking, nobody will write, and nobody will read

https://twitter.com/SamuelFitouss10/status/2099490852221473003
2•mathieu4v•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Clueless: how I made a scalable freeform crossword generator

https://clueless.crossword.is/blog/development-history
2•informades•11m ago•1 comments

AI could make more companies worth hacking, Anthropic report suggests

https://fortune.com/2026/09/24/ai-could-make-more-companies-worth-hacking-anthropic-report-suggests/
1•Brajeshwar•11m ago•0 comments

The Hi-Res Audio Scam: What's on the Disc?

https://losslessextract.com/hi-res-audio-scam/
1•packslash•11m ago•0 comments

Some thoughts on HTML's proposed previewsrc attribute

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/some-thoughts-on-htmls-proposed-previewsrc-attribute/
1•Brajeshwar•11m ago•0 comments

Space-going mirrors could offer daylight on demand

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/23/space-going-mirrors-could-offer-dayli...
1•Brajeshwar•12m ago•0 comments

What to Ask A.I. Leaders

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/opinion/congress-ai-sam-altman.html
2•sonabinu•12m ago•1 comments

Learn about Google's Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-research/google-project-suncatch...
1•xnx•13m ago•0 comments

WalShadow: Replicating Postgres from Physical WAL

https://thebuild.com/blog/the-shadow-knows/
1•nightshade999•15m ago•0 comments

Bad bot traffic is growing 9 times faster than human web traffic

https://www.fastcompany.com/91611155/bad-bot-traffic-is-growing-9-times-faster-than-human-web-tra...
2•ent101•15m ago•1 comments

Our EU AI Act compliance engine has zero LLM calls, and CI blocks adding any

https://opencomplai.com/blog/no-llm-in-compliance-decisions
3•ythouma•16m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Secure and Private Decentralized Messaging over Git and WebRTC

https://glitr.io/docs/technical/roadmap/
2•Screen8774•16m ago•0 comments

Hard Stop: Out-of-band kernel preemption for rogue AI agents

https://github.com/joseluispino/hardstop
1•joseluispino•16m ago•0 comments

In Defence of the Solitary Practitioner and Self-Initiation

https://forbiddentexts.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-the-solitary-practitioner
1•PaulHoule•16m ago•0 comments

Flock, Axon dodge Senate hearing after invite from Chair Josh Hawley

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/flock-axon-senate-hearing-josh-hawley.html
2•mooreds•17m ago•0 comments

Apple Charging Guide

https://randsinrepose.com/archives/apple-charging-guide/
1•mooreds•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ComfyUI Extension for OpenRouter Models

https://github.com/stefanionescu/comfyui-openrouter
1•dr__stoney•18m ago•1 comments

Meta made a Tamagotchi-like wearable for its Muse AI agent

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/23/meta-made-a-tamagotchi-like-wearable-for-its-muse-ai-agent/
1•wslh•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Kana – A terminal agent where the human stays in the loop

https://github.com/longyijdos/kana
1•longyijdos•19m ago•0 comments

I judged my mum for using AI, until I caught myself doing worse

https://www.0xsid.com/blog/intellectual-fitness
2•ssiddharth•19m ago•0 comments

Bugpocalypse, or reporting bugs in an AI age

https://www.qemu.org/2026/09/23/bugs/
1•stsquad•21m ago•1 comments

Scan for Good: Wiz and DeepMind use AI to help protect critical infrastructure

https://www.wiz.io/blog/scan-for-good-critical-ai-exposures
2•galnagli•21m 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