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The post-Enron auditor reforms are being rolled back

https://www.ft.com/content/2ef0c2fa-9626-4785-94cd-65fbf5be5741
1•JumpCrisscross•1m ago•0 comments

WarpBuild: Fast CI for Humans and Agents

https://www.warpbuild.com
1•handfuloflight•2m ago•0 comments

V2Ray

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2Ray
1•oriettaxx•5m ago•0 comments

Management is forcing us to use AI

2•aksjfveoq•12m ago•0 comments

Wallaby – Postgres CDC Engine for .NET

https://wallabycdc.net/
2•Hawxy•13m ago•0 comments

Open Annihilation – Spent the GDP of a Small Nation Remaking a Classic 90s Game

https://press.coreprime.net/
2•sitsitstay•15m ago•1 comments

Dopamine sites mimic shopping's thrill without paying

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwn741v5rdpxo
1•chr15m•16m ago•0 comments

Neo Geo Pocket

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_Pocket
1•tosh•16m ago•0 comments

A tiny mascot that thinks, Ollama cloud and Kokoro STT now included

https://medium.com/@vektormemory/vektor-v1-9-7-is-live-a-tiny-mascot-that-thinks-ollama-cloud-inf...
1•vektormemory•19m ago•1 comments

What makes Lisp difficult to read?

https://paultm.nl/paren-thesis
1•nsm•20m ago•0 comments

Drilling starts on a seafloor geothermal well off Oregon

https://spectrum.ieee.org/offshore-geothermal-energy
1•geox•20m ago•0 comments

How to Build a Bain-Style Consulting Slides with 10 Decision-Making Frameworks

https://medium.com/@2315610426/how-to-build-a-bain-style-consulting-powerpoint-with-10-decision-m...
1•chenxi030826•23m ago•0 comments

Project Cyan

https://www.lispm.net/projects/cyan/
1•karlgkk•24m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Northstar web browser 1.0.11 released

2•roschdal•26m ago•0 comments

A mysterious organ in the sperm whale's head gives it the power to sink ships

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260923-the-science-behind-moby-dick-the-prized-head-of-the-s...
1•1659447091•27m ago•0 comments

The Cosmic latte is FFF8E7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte
1•_caw•28m ago•1 comments

'Breaking Bad' Became the Best Show of the 21st Century [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55iwZR_xCDQ
1•handfuloflight•33m ago•0 comments

A glimpse into life inside a child prison in France

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/sep/28/i-sleep-with-all-my-clothes-on-to-prot...
1•sandebert•35m ago•0 comments

Flowlight – open-source network visibility for AI agents on macOS

https://flowlight.xinbetween.com/
2•blessdyb•37m ago•1 comments

Fframes – GPU first video vibe coding framework with 5 years histroy

https://fframes.studio/
1•neogoose•38m ago•0 comments

Foundations of Large Language Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09223
1•rramadass•40m ago•1 comments

Turning Failure Postmortems into SRE-Benchmark Problems

https://www.sregym.com/blog/postmortems-to-sre-benchmarks
1•matt_d•43m ago•0 comments

Looking for Things to Do in Bangalore?

https://www.tumblr.com/breakout310/825892924988522496/looking-for-exciting-things-to-do-in-bangalore
1•breakoutescaper•53m ago•0 comments

SpaceX – Starship Flight 14

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
4•duck•56m ago•1 comments

War Bros Didn't Always Rule Silicon Valley

https://www.wired.com/story/war-bros-didnt-always-rule-silicon-valley/
2•sgustard•1h ago•0 comments

Decentralized P2P app with you in the center of a WebTorrent Venn Diagram

https://bubblebased.com/bubbles/global
1•bc3mc2•1h ago•1 comments

Ukraine's new military AI does more than watch the battlefield–it helps commande

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/09/25/ukraines-new-military-ai-does-more-than-watch-the-battlefi...
2•snarky-comments•1h ago•0 comments

Open-source AnyPS5 dumps emulation to run PS5 games natively on PC

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/playstation/open-source-anyps5-dumps-emulation-to-run-pl...
2•sbulaev•1h ago•0 comments

SevenDB: Reactive yet Scalable

https://github.com/sevenDatabase/SevenDB
1•shashanksati11•1h ago•0 comments

World United Blastoff

1•James_Random_Ha•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