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Debug your HTTPS/HTTP traffic

https://novawire.dev
1•vewello•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Ls-service – minimal, namespaced, and typed localStorage wrapper

https://github.com/brysonbw/ls-service
1•Brysonbw•2m ago•0 comments

Lab-grown meat was supposed to save the world. What happened?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/nov/05/lab-grown-meat-save-the-world-food-re...
1•tosh•4m ago•0 comments

Venice's lagoon dredging approved: the combined impact was "assessed elsewhere"

https://andreafontana.it/en/venice-vittorio-emanuele-canal-go-ahead.html
1•trikko•4m ago•0 comments

Wix stolen my .com domain

2•wixcom•5m ago•1 comments

How to Make Things, and Why – Stuart Halloway (Clojure/Conj 2026) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yeH1DqK984
2•wofo•5m ago•0 comments

Visualizing Fast Tokens

https://tokens.chengeric.com/
1•eh8•5m ago•1 comments

Many diagnosed with a peanut allergy don't realize they may not have it anymore

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/11/04/many-diagnosed-with-peanut-allergy-dont-realize-...
1•gmays•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: calsdk, one TypeScript API for Google Calendar, Outlook and iCloud

https://github.com/vkpdeveloper/calsdk
2•vkpdeveloper•6m ago•0 comments

Introducing Pangram Image 1.0

https://www.pangram.com/blog/introducing-pangram-image-1-0
2•gmays•10m ago•0 comments

Reverse-engineering Kiro-account-manager: AWS accounts and Claude distillation

https://hansdekker.dev/writing/fraudulent-aws-accounts-claude-distillation/
1•ioshaan•11m ago•1 comments

Wgpu merges support for raytracing pipelines

https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/pull/10144
1•molive•11m ago•0 comments

What does good rogue agent disclosure etiquette look like?

https://www.itbrew.com/stories/what-does-good-rogue-agent-disclosure-etiquette-look-like
1•codyznash•13m ago•0 comments

Consistency Models

https://jepsen.io/consistency/models
1•alihm•13m ago•0 comments

Search engine for Centuries of art, photography, illustration from great museums

https://arkivism.com/
2•akudha•13m ago•1 comments

Dept of Justice probes Nvidia over $13B Hugging Face acquisition

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/dept-of-justice-reportedly-pro...
3•gmays•13m ago•0 comments

Identity in an Advanced Nation

https://dgwbirch.substack.com/p/identity-in-an-advanced-nation
1•mooreds•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Thinker – Trim context and cache knowledge to extend agent usage limits

https://thinker.sh/how-it-works
1•yoavshmariahu•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Keynate – News sites and blogs installed on your own server in minutes

https://www.keynate.com
1•kanhaiya2909•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Umbel – Remote-control agent CLIs over tmux

https://github.com/jahala/umbel
1•jahala•20m ago•0 comments

Building the Software That Lets People Control NYC's Skyline Lights

https://www.stackbuilders.com/case-studies/spireworks/
1•StackBuilders•20m ago•0 comments

Hungary: Communist-era files released, up to 60k former agents revealed

https://www.euronews.com/2026/11/04/hungary-communist-era-files-opened-up-to-60000-former-agents-...
5•rdmuser•22m ago•0 comments

Read Books with Visuals ASAP

https://picta-jet.vercel.app
1•aaron_dutta•22m ago•0 comments

Z Is Diophantine in Q

https://github.com/elliotglazer/diophantine-z-q
1•bananaflag•23m ago•0 comments

New Daily Minigame

https://profiled.today/
1•AhmedForReal•23m ago•0 comments

AI Makes Building Easy. Failing First Is the Hard Part

https://brian.biz/blog/fail-fast-fail-often/
1•BrianWoods•23m ago•0 comments

Is Flying Private Less Safe? How the Rules Differ from Commercial Airlines

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/is-flying-private-less-safe-heres-how-the-rules-differ-from...
2•thm•24m ago•0 comments

NASA Navigation Experiment Shows Promise for Planetary Landings

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/armstrong/nasa-navigation-experiment-shows-promise-fo...
2•titusblair•24m ago•0 comments

GDPx agent benchmark: cost per point for 12 models, and the safety-filter caveat

https://theainewsreport.com/2026-11-05-semianalysis-gdpx-agent-benchmark-cost-per-point-explained...
1•titusblair•25m ago•0 comments

Beyond API Compatibility: Building a Tool to Measure the Blast Radius of Library

https://netflixtechblog.com/beyond-api-compatibility-building-a-tool-to-measure-the-blast-radius-...
1•wanabeunknown•25m 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