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Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/google-search-publishers-ai-content-0fb06e41
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•2m ago•0 comments

Companies are optimizing models for specific benchmarks

1•mzubairtahir•5m ago•0 comments

Split Screen – browser workspaces to replace tab sprawl (free, local)

https://github.com/MIR-2025/brave-ext/tree/main/splitscreen
1•ruusvuu•7m ago•0 comments

A Tale of Two Tailnets

https://blog.exe.dev/a-tale-of-two-tailnets
2•shintoist•8m ago•0 comments

Shawn Ryan announces partnership with glacier [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB05HiKCCuI[video]
1•smalltorch•9m ago•1 comments

The Global Justice Report

https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/global-justice-report/
1•homarp•9m ago•0 comments

Trump announces 2028 presidential bid

https://www.smh.com.au/world/trump-announces-2028-presidential-bid-20260725-p60iho.html
3•jiggawatts•20m ago•1 comments

Uber: Whatdoyoudo – Darden MBA Case Study (2020)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3207044
1•mgh2•25m ago•1 comments

"As millionaires we have a message for our new Prime Minister: Tax us."

https://proudtopay.org
2•teekert•29m ago•2 comments

Michael Stevens and Hannah Fry: The Rest Is Science

https://therestis.com/science
1•tomfakes•31m ago•0 comments

The Architecture of Deep Thought: Fight AI Speed with Cognitive Friction

https://varnam.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-deep-thought
1•arthurfleck•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Sync Claude Code and Codex configs, with a board that shows the drift

https://github.com/slash9494/ai-config-sync-manager
1•slash9494•39m ago•0 comments

AWS announces AWS-bench, an open-source benchmark for AI agents on AWS

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/07/aws-bench/
2•gslin•56m ago•0 comments

Lawsuits hours after new tariffs take effect, experts say tariffs may not hold

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-lawsuit-301-ieepa.html
2•MilnerRoute•59m ago•0 comments

A single underscore led to an innocent Halifax man's conviction

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/man-guilty-michael-barrett-threats-1.7546742
1•cperciva•1h ago•1 comments

Best Open-Weight LLMs by Memory Required (July 2026)

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4b74e194-a4b2-414f-a313-8d4b98a92b0b
2•yid•1h ago•1 comments

Coordination layer for AI coding agents, built on Git

https://github.com/zyads/loom-vcs
2•aether-zyads•1h ago•0 comments

An Introduction to Formal Logic(2020) [pdf]

https://logicmatters.net/ifl/pdfs/IFL2_LM.pdf
3•o4c•1h ago•0 comments

UK AISI / Caisi Preliminary Assessment of Kimi K3's Cyber Capabilities

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/07/uk-aisi-caisi-preliminary-assessment-kimi-k3s-cyber...
3•walrus01•1h ago•0 comments

Why Do Autistic People Talk Like Animé Villains?

https://dispatchesfromtheautismwars.substack.com/p/why-do-autistic-people-talk-like
4•barry-cotter•1h ago•1 comments

Two Chinese win top Maths prize

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg84gp8xx4o
3•Alien1Being•1h ago•0 comments

The Productivity Mirage

https://frantic.im/mirage/
2•stopachka•1h ago•0 comments

US tech groups cut 140k jobs

https://www.ft.com/content/96a33881-27fd-42cf-8cff-4cbc87fc835f
5•Alien1Being•1h ago•1 comments

Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

https://www.wsj.com/business/china-us-ai-model-costs-53a12e96
5•Alien1Being•1h ago•2 comments

Escaping Claude Cowork's local VM sandbox via CVE-2026-46331

https://accomplish.ai/blog/sharedroot-escaping-claude-cowork-sandbox/
1•_orcaman_•1h ago•0 comments

Gatekeepers, Luddites, Haters and AI-Generated Maps

https://www.maproomblog.com/2026/07/gatekeepers-luddites-haters-and-ai-generated-maps/
2•ethagnawl•1h ago•0 comments

AI Agent Blameless Postmortem Template

https://cordum.io/blog/ai-agent-blameless-postmortem-template
1•ankitg12•1h ago•0 comments

The Discovery Problem: When AI Agents Build Tools No One Can Find

https://www.ixcoach.com/articles/the-discovery-problem-when-agents-build-invisible-tools
1•ankitg12•1h ago•0 comments

Points as Tori: Fast Pointwise Signed Distance for Point Clouds

https://nzfeng.github.io/research/PointsAsTori/
1•nill0•1h ago•0 comments

Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life

https://www.wired.com/story/opposing-ice-might-save-the-country-could-also-ruin-your-life/
16•willmarch•1h ago•2 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