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1,208,577 business ideas. Free

https://idealab.ai/
1•pmdlt•1m ago•1 comments

Cities Across the World Sinking from Groundwater Depletion: It Can Be Reversed

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/10/20/cities-across-the-world-are-sinking-because-of-groundwater-d...
1•gumby•1m ago•0 comments

The painter behind Manhattan’s Gilded Age interiors

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-unknown-painter-behind-manhattans-gilded-age-interiors/
2•hoffmannesque•3m ago•0 comments

2,200-Year-Old Fingerprints Reveal Who Built China's Mysterious Terracotta Army

https://www.sciencealert.com/2200-year-old-fingerprints-reveal-who-really-built-chinas-mysterious...
1•gmays•4m ago•0 comments

Anthropic Does Not Understand Why Its Draft Bill Was Unacceptable and Troubling

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-does-not-understand-why
1•7777777phil•4m ago•0 comments

Quantum Phase Memory and Self-Coupled Dynamics

https://www.academia.edu/179316489/Quantum_Phase_Memory_and_Self_Coupled_Dynamics_A_Non_Local_Ret...
1•kisnorbert•4m ago•0 comments

Bee Lining: The Oldtimers' Way to Find Wild Beehives

https://northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/bee-lining-the-oldtimers-way-to-find-wild-beehives
1•gusmally•6m ago•1 comments

Show HN: MultiTrack v1.3 for Mac – insanely easy music making software

https://aquariuscomputer.co/multitrack/
1•akaz333•7m ago•0 comments

SCOTUS couldn't take up a copyright case because four justices have book deals

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/supreme-court-affirms-foreign-rights-ruling-after-lacking-qu...
1•pessimizer•8m ago•0 comments

The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines

https://www.thebeliever.net/the-other-epidemic/
3•gaplong•9m ago•0 comments

I've got 99 problems, but making tofu isn't one

https://gogotofu.vercel.app/
1•DrDizzle•11m ago•1 comments

A script that tests whether your network breaks large uploads to the Claude API

https://github.com/memorykit-maker/claude-net-check
1•memorykit-maker•15m ago•0 comments

You can't be wrong, you can only be better

https://github.com/jrusbatch/compilify/commit/4eac1ff1d4a0fd7b634fe14b8fa02af25ba4365b
1•jrusbatch•18m ago•0 comments

Upcoming Critical PHP Security Release

https://externals.io/message/132883
2•mappu•18m ago•0 comments

Improved Performance and Resource Usage for XFS Checksumming with Linux 7.4

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-XFS-Checksumming
1•Bender•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Lox Language Visualizer Based on Crafting Interpreters

https://www.shivfitzpatrick.com/visualizers/
1•shivfitzpatrick•18m ago•0 comments

17k Lines of New Rust Kernel Code Heading into Linux 7.4

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-Rust
2•Bender•19m ago•0 comments

Synaptics Astra SR200: 400 GOPS Chips Debut (2026)

https://tech-insider.org/synaptics-astra-sr200-coral-npu-wearable-chips-2026/
1•peter_d_sherman•19m ago•0 comments

Andy Burnham launches campaign against 'headphone dodgers' on public transport

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/19/andy-burnham-launches-campaign-against-headphone...
3•cdrnsf•20m ago•0 comments

Reddit owners vs. YouTube reviewers: same 178 products, different verdicts

https://www.bettascore.ai/research/reddit-vs-youtube
1•starwxchen1•20m ago•0 comments

The Obituary Cocktail: The 'deadly' drink that symbolises New Orleans

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261016-the-obituary-cocktail-the-deadly-drink-that-symbolise...
1•rmason•23m ago•1 comments

Manage multiple data sources with Amytis

https://www.amytis.io/blog/manage-multiple-data-sources-with-amytis
1•JohnHammersley•23m ago•0 comments

How We Made Our AI Agents More Reliable by Giving the Router Less to Do

https://engineering.fb.com/2026/10/19/ml-applications/thin-orchestrator-ai-agent-architecture/
1•gmays•23m ago•0 comments

Fleet of AI agents used httpbin to get past their sandbox

https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-10-20-i_built_the_escape_hatch
1•nreece•25m ago•1 comments

TiDB Breached

https://www.pingcap.com/trust-hub/security/security-update-october-2026/
1•dkgs•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Visual cdecl – edit a C declaration as English, code, or a graph

https://github.avestura.dev/visual-cdecl/
1•avestura•26m ago•0 comments

PingCap TiDB Leaks

https://fulcrumsec.vg/pingcap/
4•swyx•28m ago•1 comments

WhatsApp Scheduler – Offline-first, hands-free scheduler for Android

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatsappscheduler.app&hl=en_US
1•netsamabdus•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Melra – pause ambiguous MCP writes instead of blindly retrying

https://github.com/XAGI-Lab/melra
1•dheeraj_s•30m ago•0 comments

Agent Economics: Who Keeps the Ledger of AI Labor?

https://centrail.org/newsletter/agent-economics-who-keeps-the-ledger-of-ai-labor
1•centrail•31m 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