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Judge rule AI-generated child sex abuse material is protected by First Amendment

https://reason.com/volokh/2026/08/27/home-possession-of-ai-generated-porn-depicting-fake-children...
1•DeepLogin•1m ago•0 comments

90 days of attacks on AI infrastructure

https://www.wiz.io/blog/ai-infrastructure-honeypot
1•coder-pm•8m ago•0 comments

Software project folder structure for isolating agent scope

https://graphthinking.blogspot.com/2026/08/software-project-folder-structure-for.html
1•physicsgraph•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Podiom – durable sessions, scheduling and goals for local Claude/Codex

https://github.com/Podiom/Podiom
3•Maphielbso•8m ago•0 comments

Prevalence of Silent Atherosclerosis Across Adult Life

https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmoa2609059
1•sbulaev•10m ago•0 comments

Openpyxl silently drops cached formula values when you edit an unrelated cell

https://kookerella.com/posts/ai-agent-silently-breaks-formula-values/
1•mnicholls•11m ago•0 comments

Zoom activated my mic and played "recording in progress" at 4AM

https://imgur.com/a/0NQ0rFk
3•telmop•12m ago•1 comments

Onefile-unlock: a crypto paywall in one self-contained HTML file

https://raw.githack.com/EltonCherrington/onefile-unlock/main/onefile-unlock.html
1•memctlagent2026•18m ago•0 comments

Why Does Top Gun (1986) Feel So Gay Despite Being About a Straight Navy Pilot?

https://decodingvibes.com/blog/why-top-gun-feels-so-gay-despite-being-about-a-straight-navy-pilot/
1•altmanaltman•19m ago•0 comments

Get(key) in libmdbx by up to x1000 using a lock‑free cache on top of a B‑tree

https://github.com/orgs/Mithril-mine/discussions/314
1•erthink•22m ago•0 comments

Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66504
33•sparsesignal•26m ago•7 comments

Ask HN: Do you run A/B Tests?

2•hackeryogi•37m ago•0 comments

Nobody Told Me People Still Code New Games for a 1982 Computer

https://comuniq.xyz/Technology/post?t=1634
2•01-_-•38m ago•0 comments

Sports Engines

https://random.ma.ttias.be/boxermotor
2•Mojah•39m ago•0 comments

AWS mumbles about its cost-busting networking tech when it should be shouting

https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/08/29/aws-mumbles-about-its-cost-busting-networking-tec...
3•sandbach•40m ago•0 comments

Claude Team Plan for Scientists

https://claude.com/programs/team-plan-for-scientists
2•Anon84•43m ago•0 comments

Vaultwarden Sequence Diagrams

https://app.ilograph.com/demo.ilograph.Vaultwarden/Log%2520In
2•billyp-rva•45m ago•0 comments

No AI Fridays

https://noaifridays.com/
3•xendo•46m ago•2 comments

The MAI Image and Reve 2.1 ranks higher than GPT Image 2 now

https://artificialanalysis.ai/image/leaderboard/editing
2•creatune•50m ago•0 comments

Senior Software Engineer

3•sshahu•50m ago•0 comments

Tinkering is Up: browser-based local reader for Hacker feeds

https://future-secured.com/41133
2•adrianwaj•52m ago•0 comments

FOSDEM 2027: 30 & 31 January 2027 Brussels, Belgium

https://fosdem.org/2027/
2•edward•57m ago•0 comments

Android /iOS mobile application Vulnerability Scanning

2•klars-ai•1h ago•0 comments

Supersaturated Sodium Acetate [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSZsGOzVByg
2•skibz•1h ago•0 comments

Leak of Internal Valve Data

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/a-massive-cache-of-valve-data-has-reportedly-leaked-online-appe...
8•thispbowden•1h ago•0 comments

Tinyhash: SHA-512/256 in the browser, zero servers, zero deps

https://raw.githack.com/EltonCherrington/tinyhash/main/tinyhash.html
2•memctlagent2026•1h ago•0 comments

The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02550-0
2•Anon84•1h ago•0 comments

AgentObs – a hook that blocks Claude Code before you hit your limit

2•klars-ai•1h ago•0 comments

Nothing Left to Say

https://jdranpariya.com/writings/nothing-left-to-say/
2•JDRanpariya•1h ago•0 comments

Hy4 Preview

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/29/hy4/
3•kyisaiah47•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