frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01193
1•jryio•2m ago•0 comments

Britain's Free Speech Crisis and the Bill That Would Fix It

https://reclaimthenet.org/britains-free-speech-crisis-and-the-bill-that-would-fix-it
1•uyzstvqs•2m ago•0 comments

Tech Companies Are Trying to Neuter Colorado's Landmark Right-to-Repair Law

https://www.wired.com/story/tech-companies-are-trying-to-neuter-colorados-landmark-right-to-repai...
1•liz_ifixit•5m ago•0 comments

Don't want to pay for YouTube Premium? Morphe picks up where Revanced left off

https://www.androidauthority.com/morphe-youtube-revanced-3629859/
1•Markoff•5m ago•0 comments

Reddit is moving on from R/all

https://www.theverge.com/tech/906314/reddit-r-all-deprecating
1•efraim•6m ago•0 comments

Iran: Recruitment of child soldiers as young as 12 amounts to a war crime

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/04/iran-recruitment-of-child-soldiers-as-young-as-12-...
1•mhb•6m ago•0 comments

Manuscript: A writing workspace where AI reads but never writes

https://app.manuscript.no/try
1•issaafk•6m ago•0 comments

Revive Prompt: What if the people you lose could still be known and remembered?

https://github.com/Jamessfks/revive-prompt
1•Jamessfks123•7m ago•0 comments

Five Survivors of Spectacular Falls

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22934269
1•thunderbong•7m ago•0 comments

Genesis – Desktop AI with persistent memory, 11 agents. Buy once, own forever

https://genesis.bmbnexus.ai
1•bahabashatwah•9m ago•0 comments

Solana Drift Protocol drained of $285M via fake token and governance hijack

https://anonhaven.com/en/news/drift-protocol-hack-285-million-solana/
3•anonhaven•12m ago•0 comments

A case study in testing with 100 of Claude agents in parallel

https://imbue.com/product/mngr_part_2/
3•thejash•13m ago•0 comments

GitMindPro – Scan any GitHub repo for AI-injected security risks

https://gitmindpro.com
1•DevToday•13m ago•0 comments

Raytheon generalized modular toolchains for Hidden Communication Systems

https://github.com/raytheonbbn/maude-hcs
2•uticus•15m ago•1 comments

Gstack pull request – "no seriously, accept it. it fixes everything"

https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/pull/681
2•Topfi•15m ago•0 comments

Linkhut: A Social Bookmarking Site

https://ln.ht
1•Imustaskforhelp•16m ago•0 comments

Ghostty, but with Vertical tabs, lightweight and native

https://github.com/muxy-app/muxy
1•543310•18m ago•1 comments

iNaturalist

https://www.inaturalist.org/
13•bookofjoe•19m ago•1 comments

AI Governance

https://medium.com/@paul.bernard_80815/the-ai-highground-8a438dfd18c5
1•paulbernard•20m ago•0 comments

Revision Demoscene Festival 3-6 April

https://2026.revision-party.net/
2•thinkingemote•21m ago•0 comments

Half of NASA's pool of active astronauts served in the Middle East

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-04-01/artemis-2-military-involvement-iraq-veterans-21250...
1•ThrowawayGuy1•21m ago•0 comments

Artemis II Looking Back at Earth

https://images.nasa.gov/details/art002e000191
1•DarmokJalad1701•22m ago•0 comments

Getting Claude to QA its own work

https://www.skyvern.com/blog/getting-claude-to-qa-its-own-work/
4•suchintan•22m ago•0 comments

Are web apps really slower than native?

https://atfzl.com/are-web-apps-really-slower-than-native/
2•atfzl•25m ago•0 comments

A Visual Guide to Gemma 4

https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-to-gemma-4
2•mariuz•25m ago•0 comments

Code-review-graphv 2.1.0, 8× fewer tokens for code reviews via structural graph

https://github.com/tirth8205/code-review-graph
1•tirthkanani•27m ago•0 comments

Pharmaceuticals face 100% tariffs in US – unless firms strike a deal

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx29kke01gpo
13•geox•30m ago•9 comments

Ask HN: Cool Websites to Stop Doomscrolling?

2•karakoram•30m ago•2 comments

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither are working'

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/02/artemis_astronauts_microsoft_outlook_broken/
5•Bender•33m ago•1 comments

AI-Generated Interview with One Piece Actor Published by Esquire

https://kotaku.com/one-piece-netflix-live-action-mackenyu-interview-esquire-ai-singapore-2000684648
2•pavel_lishin•33m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•11mo ago

Comments

thechao•11mo 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•11mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•11mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

Oh, ye that sounds impractical. A really big truck engine more or less.

thechao•11mo 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•11mo 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.
jcgrillo•11mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•11mo 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•11mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•11mo 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•11mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•11mo 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_•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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/