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US states as generative tile mosaics, pick the shape family for land/water/parks

https://us-mosaic-map.netlify.app/
1•heterodoxjedi•56s ago•1 comments

How we are making our own protein data because public stuff sucks

https://idps.substack.com/p/biotechs-ai-revolution-will-be-won
1•ktamiola•1m ago•0 comments

Death by a Thousand Cuts: the AI database failures that clear every gate

https://explainanalyze.com/p/death-by-a-thousand-cuts-the-ai-database-failure-you-cant-restore/
1•rtolkachev•2m ago•0 comments

Prove you're human by winning a claw machine

https://feralui.vercel.app/#/captcha
1•speckx•4m ago•0 comments

Your Sleep Schedule Is a Policy Document

https://julienreszka.com/blog/your-sleep-schedule-is-a-policy-document/
1•julienreszka•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Millrace, a framework for building multi-step governed loops

https://github.com/tim-osterhus/millrace
1•timosterhus•4m ago•0 comments

The Unsung Hero of the Lord of the Rings

https://www.theculturist.io/p/the-unsung-hero-of-the-lord-of-the
2•gmays•4m ago•0 comments

Smart Thinking in the Age of AI

https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2026/06/10/smart-thinking-in-the-age-of-ai/
1•speckx•8m ago•0 comments

What can a neuron compute – bioRxiv

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.08.730984v1.full
1•bilsbie•10m ago•0 comments

MIT engineers find a way to deliver drugs directly to the esophagus

https://news.mit.edu/2026/mit-engineers-find-way-to-deliver-drugs-directly-to-esophagus-0612
1•ilreb•13m ago•0 comments

Gati: Hardware Accelerated DNNs on FPGAs

https://github.com/vicharak-in/Gati
3•hasheddan•16m ago•0 comments

The future of Siri, or: why private inference isn't private enough

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/06/09/apples-siri-ai-or-more-shouting-into-the-void...
2•Cider9986•17m ago•0 comments

China Lures Foreign Patients with Cutting-Edge, Cheap Medical Care

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-06-10/china-s-medical-tourism-boom-draws-foreign-pat...
3•NewCzech•18m ago•0 comments

A Microsoft Surface flaw allowed unprotected devices to be bricked by a packet

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/06/12/microsoft-has-mostly-repaired-a-flaw-in-surface-h...
2•Dotnaught•18m ago•0 comments

The ghost domain problem in DNS, and what we're doing about it

https://ohdear.app/news-and-updates/the-ghost-domain-problem-in-dns-and-what-were-doing-about-it
1•Mojah•18m ago•0 comments

Claude Cowork June double usage promotion

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15400594-claude-cowork-june-2026-usage-promotion
1•dockerd•18m ago•1 comments

Longevity Atlas – every longevity ingredient mapped to its clinical evidence

https://longevity.phycyber.ai/
1•mrjonsonleo•25m ago•1 comments

Show HN: MassCode – A local-first dev workspace, your data is plain Markdown

https://masscode.io/
2•antonreshetov•27m ago•0 comments

Ford CEO's Right to Repair Comment Should Make Every Car Owner Uncomfortable

https://www.thedrive.com/news/ford-ceo-jim-farleys-right-to-repair-comment-should-make-every-car-...
5•RickJWagner•28m ago•2 comments

Weight-loss drugs wipe £780M off Britain's grocery sales

https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/news/weight-loss-drugs-wipe-780m-off-britains-grocery-sales/719985.ar...
1•debo_•30m ago•0 comments

LLM suppliers should offer PR scoped ephemeral keys

1•logged4upvoting•30m ago•0 comments

From AGI to ASI

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12683
1•jandrewrogers•33m ago•0 comments

ITScape (CVE-2026-46316): KVM/ARM64 VM escape

https://www.nofire.ai/blog/ITS-arm64-escape
4•_ananos_•33m ago•1 comments

Factoring "short-sleeve" RSA keys with polynomials

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/06/12/factoring-short-sleeve-rsa-keys-with-polynomials/
2•ledoge•35m ago•0 comments

Ramp Applied AI Solutions

https://ramp.com/blog/introducing-ramp-applied-ai-solutions
2•gmays•35m ago•0 comments

Type Checking in Agentic Workflows – Conner Nilsen – PyCon US 2026 Typing Summit

https://pyrefly.org/blog/type-checking-agentic-workflows/
2•ocamoss•35m ago•0 comments

OPC UA in Pure PHP: Introducing the PHP-Opcua Project

https://www.php-opcua.com/blog/introducing-php-opcua
2•gianfriaur•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: 800x faster Linter and TypeScript-Go toolchain for plugins like typia

https://github.com/samchon/ttsc
2•autobe•39m ago•1 comments

The Greatest Story Ever Told (2017)

https://collabfund.com/blog/the-greatest-story-ever-told/
2•thelastgallon•40m ago•1 comments

Show HN: BeamWeaver – LangChain/DeepAgents-style agents and workflows for Elixir

https://github.com/caudena/beam_weaver
2•caudena•41m 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