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What I Learned Building 8 Tbps of CDN

https://elijah.com.au/writing/built-8tbps-cdn/
1•ghuntley•24s ago•0 comments

Money is only a problem to those who don't have it

https://www.alkemix.art/p/the-gathering-storm
1•vinyasi•58s ago•0 comments

Pgrls: Static Analyzer for Postgres Row-Level Security

https://github.com/pgrls/pgrls
1•dmitrymaranik•59s ago•0 comments

Decline in heavy-duty tools correlates with megaherbivore disappearance

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379126000818
1•wslh•2m ago•0 comments

Repeated Header in a Next.js page using iframe and bbpress

https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/0trtbjg6ukyudwntawqv.png
1•Thompson_Li•3m ago•1 comments

Google Declaring War on the Web

https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/
2•cdrnsf•4m ago•0 comments

Replacing NZ public servants with AI could come with hidden costs, critics warn

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/595847/replacing-public-servants-with-ai-could-come-with-hid...
3•billybuckwheat•5m ago•0 comments

Non-Mendelian inheritance of DNA methylation patterns in mice

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-026-02604-z
2•bookofjoe•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CPU-only transcription for YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram videos

https://github.com/kouhxp/yapsnap
3•mrkn1•9m ago•0 comments

Politics in the Age of NGOs as Arms of State Censorship

https://twitter.com/arctotherium42/status/2039127319202156745
2•barry-cotter•10m ago•0 comments

The Scale, the Plan, and the People

https://nooneshappy.com/article/the-scale-the-plan-and-the-people/
2•diebillionaires•12m ago•0 comments

America Turned Against AI According to the Poll Data: A Very Big Compilation

https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/how-america-turned-against-ai-according
4•gHeadphone•14m ago•0 comments

K3_AI: Run command on SpacemiT K3's AI cores

https://github.com/brucehoult/k3_ai/tree/main
2•hasheddan•15m ago•0 comments

Ascetic Computing

https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing
2•birdculture•16m ago•0 comments

My two-part desk setup

https://arslan.io/2025/11/18/my-two-part-desk-setup/
2•James72689•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Lessons from building a SIMA2 style agent in Roblox

https://www.frisson-labs.com/what-if-we-made-sima2-from-temu
2•ymaws•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Migo Games (Mac / iOS) – multiplayer mini games backed by elixir

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/migo-games/id6758592333
2•calflegal•18m ago•0 comments

Read Meta's Layoff Email to Employees

https://www.businessinsider.com/read-meta-layoff-email-employees-2026-5
3•metadat•18m ago•0 comments

SportsBookISH – Compare Kalshi event-contract odds vs. US sportsbooks

https://sportsbookish.com
2•kennyhyder•21m ago•1 comments

Claude.ai Pro plan quotas too small for deep research

https://www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/05/20/ClaudeAI-Pro-Plan-Gives-Single-Deep-Research.html
2•datadrivenangel•22m ago•0 comments

Anthropic will be scaling up on GB200 capacity in SpaceX Colossus 2

https://twitter.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
3•Rover222•23m ago•1 comments

GitHub's take on age assurance for developers

https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/why-age-assurance-laws-matter-for-deve...
2•hanifbbz•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Runo – Scraping API that returns typed JSON, not raw HTML

https://scrapewithruno.com/?version=2.0
2•barebearcountry•25m ago•0 comments

PopuLoRA: Co-Evolving LLM Populations for Reasoning Self- Play

https://vmax.ai/team/populora-co-evolving-llm-populations-for-reasoning-self-play
11•AMavorParker•26m ago•1 comments

The SpaceX IPO filing has arrived

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/the-spacex-ipo-filing-has-arrived/
3•doener•26m ago•2 comments

AI Didn't Invent Slop – It Scaled It

https://nadathurx.com/ai-slop-what-about-human-slop/
2•sjimdickens•27m ago•0 comments

Company wants to do the carbon footprint offset thing, but for AI usage

https://tokenoffset.com
2•jakehandy•30m ago•0 comments

Quantum computing is reaching its make-or-break moment

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-computing-is-reaching-its-make-or-break-moment/
3•digital55•31m ago•0 comments

Linus Torvalds admits he has a 'love-hate relationship with AI'

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-has-a-love-hate-relationship-with-ai/
6•CrankyBear•33m ago•0 comments

GPU Memory Math for LLMs: Formula That Tells You What Fits on Your GPU

https://theahmadosman.substack.com/p/gpu-memory-math-for-llms-2026-edition
7•XMasterrrr•35m 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.
jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
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/