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Automated UK Wills

https://lexifina.com/blog/fully-automated-wills
1•alansaber•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Germany's new sovereign AI model Kolibri

https://tej.as/blog/aleph-alpha-kolibri
1•tejaskumar__•3m ago•0 comments

Look at all the things he's not doing

https://andycroll.com/ruby/look-at-all-the-things-he-is-not-doing/
1•thunderbong•11m ago•0 comments

Futuresearch Evals

https://evals.futuresearch.ai
1•ronfriedhaber•12m ago•0 comments

Half of UK wants to rejoin EU and backing it could drive up Labour vote

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/03/half-want-to-rejoin-eu-and-backing-it-could-drive-u...
5•vrganj•14m ago•0 comments

Yves Meyer's wavelet transforms – The Abel Prize 2017 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fi6TdH9poU
2•joebig•16m ago•0 comments

Terminal Velocity for Claude Code. Session Orchestrator. Live Action

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tfGn3isfZU
1•quazarzero•17m ago•0 comments

A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await

https://mastodon.social/@tonofcrates/117241380083291749
2•rapnie•21m ago•1 comments

Parsing Latin poetry using constraint satisfaction

https://logical.ai/arma/
1•jruohonen•24m ago•0 comments

Leashterm – a new programming language for agents

https://github.com/jessedorrestijn2-bit/leashterm
1•Jessedor•25m ago•1 comments

Factory Planner

https://factoryplanner.net/
2•mcpcpc•25m ago•1 comments

Defensibility in AI Data: Lessons from Ads

https://twitter.com/gokulr/status/2105838034646077890
1•porridgeraisin•25m ago•0 comments

We Investigated Starlink. The Corruption We Found Will Shock You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQYnlg4pO9o
2•tukunjil•26m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Beautiful form back end for AI agents – Nisuform

https://nisuform.com/
1•haneboxx•31m ago•0 comments

Fastify/busboy DoS via oversized multipart boundary

https://github.com/fastify/busboy/security/advisories/GHSA-xjh9-v7x6-24jw
2•joshcsimmons•33m ago•0 comments

Unikernels are unfit for production (2016)

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2016/01/22/unikernels-are-unfit-for-production/
2•mooreds•34m ago•0 comments

"8-pinski" – sierpinski animation and bytebeat in EIGHT bytes x86 code

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=107055
1•HellMood•37m ago•1 comments

An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why

https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-ai-agent-emailed-hundreds-researchers-help-it-t...
10•sbulaev•40m ago•9 comments

Why Do Planes Fly?

https://whyplanesfly.com/
2•sbulaev•42m ago•1 comments

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 [video]

https://dair-institute.org/maiht3k/
1•mooreds•44m ago•0 comments

A democracy unable to learn cannot endure

https://steady.page/en/cognitive-republic/posts/835a766f-3ecf-4358-90f7-8bb35bd246e2
1•smomara•44m ago•0 comments

Martin Fowler and Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZs8J1ZD0CE
1•mooreds•45m ago•0 comments

A document layer for AI agents

https://www.claix.dev
1•gael_dev•45m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT: Personal Knowledgebase with Custom Content Types

https://community.openai.com/t/rfe-personal-knowledgebase-with-custom-content-types/1403061
1•earlybuilder•45m ago•0 comments

Show HN: UOS – an open-source post-quantum web OS in the browser (Angular 19)

https://github.com/uOS-sh/uOS
1•ultimaos•45m ago•0 comments

GitHub's new dashboard experience now the default

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-10-01-new-dashboard-experience-now-the-default/
2•vanyauhalin•48m ago•0 comments

I track privacy services by what happened to them, not a star rating

https://dontkyc.me/
1•thorarganaut•56m ago•0 comments

Brain-inspired imaging system that can 'see' through fog

https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-10-01/fog-imaging
1•giuliomagnifico•1h ago•0 comments

Kolibri Has Landed: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model

https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-sovereign-open-weight-model/
9•bastitx•1h ago•0 comments

A countermeasure for the counter-cognition web

https://www.armanluthra.me/essays/counter-cognition
1•armanluthra26•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