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After 34 years, Linux community has a contingency plan to replace Linus Torvalds

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-kernel-community-draws-up-contingency-plan-to-r...
1•smurda•3m ago•0 comments

The Questions That Survive Every Answer

https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/the-questions-that-survive-every
1•light_triad•3m ago•0 comments

DECwindows Motif

https://products.vmssoftware.com/decwindowsmotif
1•doener•4m ago•0 comments

Isolation and Permissiveness of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB

https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/engineering/formal-methods-beyond-correctness-isolation-perm...
1•todsacerdoti•5m ago•0 comments

Silicon Empires: The Political Economy of AI with Nick Srnicek

https://thedigradio.com/podcast/silicon-empires-w-nick-srnicek/
1•hirpslop•9m ago•0 comments

The Shape of Reasoning: Topological Analysis of Large Language Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20665
2•oldfuture•10m ago•0 comments

Craft Agents: Work with most powerful agents in the world, with the UX they dese

https://agents.craft.do
1•nateroling•10m ago•1 comments

SnapSafe: Just added encrypted video to my FOSS secure camera app

https://snapsafe.org/
1•Wavesonics•11m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Figma MCP is read-only,so I built a pilot MCP by code execution

https://github.com/youware-labs/figma-pilot
1•marv1nnnnn•11m ago•0 comments

Wordle but Roguelike

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4157850/Randels_Quest/
1•lafferty•12m ago•0 comments

LLMs and Executive Function

https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/claude-code-and-executive-function/
1•walterbell•14m ago•0 comments

Managing Through Reorganizations

https://nemethgergely.com/blog/managing-through-reorganizations
1•gergelyke•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free Facebook Video Downloader with Original Audio Quality

https://facebookvideodownload.com
1•yaoluxing•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI-Generated Trading View strategies with no lock in

https://staunch.ai/
1•irasigman•17m ago•0 comments

Removing the Gemini watermark: from OpenCV to LaMa to millisecond algorithm

https://geminiwatermarkcleaner.com/changelog.html
1•heftykoo•18m ago•2 comments

Flapping Airplanes is a frontier data efficiency lab

https://flappingairplanes.com/
2•thedataexchange•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Intent-Aware RAG – Moving from Vector Matching to 5W1H Accounting

https://github.com/nickhuang99/Intent-Aware-RAG
1•nickhuang99•19m ago•0 comments

Meta's crawler made 11M requests to my site in 30 days

https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1qpqapj/metas_crawler_made_11_million_requests_to_my_site/
2•speckx•21m ago•0 comments

It's Time to Start Tooting Your Own Horn at Work

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/its-time-to-start-tooting-your-own-horn-at-work-7838f92a
2•petethomas•21m ago•0 comments

Tesla to Stop Production of Models S and X

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-tsla-q4-earnings-report-2025-191b2aab
2•fortran77•24m ago•3 comments

C# and TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMqx8NNT4xY
1•gnabgib•34m ago•0 comments

Pablo's galaxy ran out of fuel as black hole choked off supplies

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-death-thousand-pablo-galaxy-ran.html
1•PaulHoule•36m ago•0 comments

I built an AI tool to generate clothing designs

https://aiclothes.ai/
2•Pluviobyte•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Schema-first codegen for SQL, Rust, Go, Python and TS (single binary)

https://github.com/hlop3z/astroladb
1•hlop3z•40m ago•1 comments

MSX is a standardized home computer architecture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
2•doener•42m ago•0 comments

I made a website that has unlimited memory for chat GPT and Claude coding

https://www.thetoolswebsite.com/
2•DylanWain•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Eure – TOML-like data notation with arbitrary nesting and tagged unions

https://github.com/Hihaheho/eure
1•ryo33_hirayama•48m ago•0 comments

New iPhone failures on Telstra network compound Triple Zero crisis

https://www.afr.com/companies/telecommunications/new-iphone-failures-on-telstra-network-compound-...
2•KnuthIsGod•49m ago•0 comments

Property-based testing for web UIs

https://github.com/antithesishq/bombadil
1•lwhsiao•54m ago•0 comments

Virginia Oliver, Maine 'Lobster Lady' who fished for nearly a century, has died

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/28/maine-lobster-lady-dies-aged-105
5•NaOH•57m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•9mo ago

Comments

thechao•9mo 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•9mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•9mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•9mo 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•9mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•9mo 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•9mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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/