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The Mineral Age

https://www.tomhegen.com/product/the-mineral-age
1•smartmic•21s ago•0 comments

GoLand's Profiler Now Works with AI Agents – The JetBrains Blog

https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2026/11/06/we-gave-ai-agents-goland-s-profiler-they-found-the-same-...
1•99lcccss•2m ago•0 comments

Partnering with Hacktron to find vulnerabilities in OpenAI's systems – OpenAI

https://openai.com/index/partnering-with-hacktron/
1•99lcccss•3m ago•0 comments

Chinese Civilization and the Computerization of the World

https://nexa.polito.it/chinese-civilization-and-the-computerization-of-the-world/
1•thenthenthen•3m ago•0 comments

Northstar: A New Booster Engine with More Thrust and Less Mass

https://www.blueorigin.com/news/introducing-northstar-new-booster-engine
1•simonebrunozzi•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Agents infer Lego mechanisms from sources, then animate them

https://github.com/anteloc/ldraw-mecha/tree/v0.5.0
1•antelocnova•3m ago•0 comments

Fox completes its $22B Roku acquisition

https://www.foxcorporation.com/news/corp-press-releases/2026/fox-corporation-completes-acquisitio...
1•rexbee•3m ago•0 comments

The launch market is tough as satellite companies start building rockets

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/ast-spacemobile-is-so-desperate-for-launch-theyre-building-...
1•ryan_j_naughton•3m ago•0 comments

Sshole, the vulnerability that lets hackers SSH into Linux devices

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/11/vulnerability-allows-attackers-to-log-into-some-linux-de...
1•mot2ba•4m ago•0 comments

Fly.io Got Breached

https://fly.io/blog/well-that-wasnt-fun/
1•ushakov•4m ago•0 comments

How to lie with statistics? (Huff,1954)

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5GbfZKqpO63pZuM6RWGO7n
2•realsarm•6m ago•0 comments

Datacenters were on the ballot. US voters rejected them

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/04/datacenters-midterm-elections
2•Betelbuddy•6m ago•0 comments

TSMC Is Reportedly Considering 3D DRAM Production

https://www.techpowerup.com/354547/tsmc-is-reportedly-considering-3d-dram-production
2•kristianp•6m ago•0 comments

<script> alert("hi") </script>

1•z58•7m ago•0 comments

Radio Waves Coming from an Alien Planet May Be a Cosmic First

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/science/space/exoplanet-magnetic-field.html
1•gmays•8m ago•0 comments

As the Japanese Countryside Empties Out, Wildlife Is Disappearing

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/japan-depopulation-biodiversity
3•rdmuser•8m ago•0 comments

Fake security tools on GitHub push backdoors and infostealers

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fake-security-tools-on-github-push-backdoors-and-i...
4•sshah03•11m ago•0 comments

About Loopback Interfaces

2•wuway•11m ago•0 comments

Firecracker VM Escape: PwnEscape Part 2

https://pwn.ai/blog/firecracker-escape
5•SerCe•11m ago•0 comments

Trump Names Stephen Miller His Chief of Staff, Replacing Susie Wiles

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/06/us/trump-miller-wiles-chief-of-staff
8•mikhael•11m ago•0 comments

How I Got Started in Postgres with Magnus Hagander on Talking Postgres podcast

https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/how-i-got-started-in-postgres-with-magnus-hagander
2•clairegiordano•12m ago•0 comments

Sparks of Binary Space Programming

https://sgiannopoulos.github.io/blog/machine-code-programming/
2•sgiannopoulos•13m ago•0 comments

OpenAI bugging suspect Alfozan pleads not guilty

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/06/openai-bugging-alfozan-saudi.html
3•Betelbuddy•13m ago•0 comments

My first and last telegram was from Rebecca West

https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/rebecca-wests-nightingale
6•bryanrasmussen•15m ago•0 comments

ℤ Is Diophantine in ℚ

https://github.com/elliotglazer/diophantine-z-q
5•artninja1988•16m ago•0 comments

The Adult Children Cleaning Up Their Parents' Feeds

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/boomer-parents-screen-time-problem.html
2•gmays•16m ago•0 comments

Activists break into building site of Microsoft datacentre in Amsterdam

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/nov/06/activists-break-into-building-site-of-microsoft-dat...
3•Betelbuddy•16m ago•1 comments

Nodecode

https://nodecode.ai
3•handfuloflight•18m ago•0 comments

Slickdeals.net Is Compromised

7•intenex•18m ago•0 comments

Democrats launching congressional investigations into SpaceXAI, META and Apple

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/11/06/after-courting-trump-corporate-america-faces...
14•pretext•20m 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