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Super Micro Co-Founder Charged in Plot to Send AI Tech to China

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-19/three-charged-by-us-with-plot-to-illegally-sen...
1•amrrs•2m ago•1 comments

US Tech Execs charged with smuggling Nvidia chips to China

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/us-tech-execs-smuggled-nvidia-chips-to-china-prosecutors-say.html
1•randycupertino•4m ago•1 comments

How to Make Sense of AI

https://commoncog.com/how-to-make-sense-of-ai/
1•gmays•8m ago•0 comments

Pentagon Seeks $200B to Fund Iran War

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/world/middleeast/pentagon-200-billion-iran-war-funding-hegseth...
4•mizzao•8m ago•1 comments

Apache CMS Retrospective

https://iconoclasts.blog/joe/apache-cms
1•joesuf4•11m ago•0 comments

Google Working on Native Gemini AI App for Mac

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/19/google-native-gemini-mac-app/
1•Sir_Twist•11m ago•0 comments

In Mexico, Bread Is the Heart of Daily Life

https://cooking.nytimes.com/article/mexico-bread
1•bookofjoe•13m ago•1 comments

Show HN: ContextD – OCRs your screen activity, use it in AI agents via local API

https://github.com/thesophiaxu/contextd
1•thesophiaxu•15m ago•0 comments

Free daily-updated US tariff data in JSON,Section301,active exclusions

https://github.com/dutybirdio/us-tariff-data
2•dutybird•17m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Can we make up/downvotes/flags visible on Hacker News Archives (delayed)

2•gpt5•22m ago•0 comments

Drugwars for the TI-82/83/83 Calculators

https://gist.github.com/mattmanning/1002653/b7a1e88479a10eaae3bd5298b8b2c86e16fb4404
1•robotnikman•22m ago•0 comments

Claude Code: Channels

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels
42•jasonjmcghee•26m ago•14 comments

A cheetah coat, a failed startup and lessons learned

https://ashleycwoods.substack.com/p/a-cheetah-coat-a-failed-startup-and
1•rmason•27m ago•1 comments

Show HN: CRT Retro Effect on any website

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/crt-retro-effect/ocgalokkpfhiiibikhlagdjjgkkclped
1•maaydin•29m ago•1 comments

The Cult of Costco

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/costco-is-an-american-achievement/685411/
3•ViktorRay•31m ago•0 comments

What to Know About the Push to Display the Ten Commandments in Classes

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/ten-commandments-schools-states.html
2•JumpCrisscross•33m ago•0 comments

Prism MCP – Session Memory and 94% Context Reduction for AI Agents

https://github.com/dcostenco/prism-mcp
2•dcostenco•35m ago•0 comments

OpenAI Plans Launch of Desktop 'Superapp' to Refocus, Simplify User Experience

https://www.wsj.com/tech/openai-plans-launch-of-desktop-superapp-to-refocus-simplify-user-experie...
2•JumpCrisscross•35m ago•1 comments

Cool Claude Code Proficiency Badge

https://github.com/Z-M-Huang/cc-proficiency
2•zh_code•38m ago•0 comments

How are Iranian drones getting their guidance?

3•dottenad•39m ago•0 comments

I Had Too Many Issues Using OpenClaw, So I Made My Own Agent

https://zarkones.itch.io/justabot
1•ZARKONES•40m ago•2 comments

Tesla Has Its First Semi-Truck and It's a Hit with Truckers

https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/truckers-tesla-fans-semi-b0a66e6e
2•JumpCrisscross•42m ago•0 comments

The Odds of Me Being Mauled by a Bear This Weekend Keep Going Up on Kalshi

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-odds-of-me-being-mauled-by-a-bear-this-weekend-keep-going...
3•sharkweek•44m ago•0 comments

Powering the agents: Workers AI now runs large models, starting with Kimi K2.5

https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-ai-large-models/
2•zenoware•46m ago•0 comments

Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years

https://omar.yt/posts/wayland-set-the-linux-desktop-back-by-10-years
27•omarroth•47m ago•4 comments

Justice Department seizes several websites it says spread terrorist propaganda

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/politics/justice-department-seizes-websites-spread-terrorist-propa...
7•montroser•47m ago•0 comments

Why Many Business Software Systems Fail Before Development Even Starts

https://medium.com/@rdxtbl/why-many-business-software-systems-fail-before-development-even-starts...
2•alkas•49m ago•1 comments

Next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/19/micron_q2_2026/
4•hedora•51m ago•2 comments

Show HN: PayGate – File paywall for freelancers (pay before download)

https://getpaygate.com/
1•kejneki•54m ago•0 comments

Branded Notion and Coda PDF Exports

https://notioncodapdf.app/
1•prtnm•56m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•10mo ago

Comments

thechao•10mo 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•10mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•10mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•10mo 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•10mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•10mo 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•10mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•10mo 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_•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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/