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Typing Is Being Replaced by Whispering–and It's Way More Annoying

https://www.wsj.com/tech/typing-is-being-replaced-by-whisperingand-its-way-more-annoying-a804fee7
1•petethomas•1m ago•0 comments

Microsoft's African Data Center Falters on Payment Demands

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-10/microsoft-s-african-data-center-falters-on-pay...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ChatbotX, an open-source alternative to ManyChat

https://github.com/ChatbotXIO/ChatbotX
1•hunterist•1m ago•0 comments

Study Finds iOS Users Have Shorter Relationships as Compared to Android Users

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/hanker-dating-study-finds-ios-185300885.html
1•iamkrazy•2m ago•0 comments

Chris Hohn's hedge fund slashes $8B Microsoft stake in warning over AI

https://www.ft.com/content/ac5d90a9-b010-4529-9616-706420920681
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•3m ago•0 comments

Clone Yourself into Agents

https://lorentz.app/blog-item.html?id=soulify-the-llm
1•baalimago•3m ago•0 comments

Miii – Claude Code-level terminal workflows offline, no API keys

https://www.npmjs.com/package/miii-cli
2•maruakshay•9m ago•0 comments

Social Cognition and Interpersonal Violence

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2519361123
1•neehao•11m ago•0 comments

Pi Slate – A Raspberry Pi5 handheld Linux cyberdeck with 5" 1920×720 touchscreen

https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/05/11/pi-slate-a-raspberry-pi-5-handheld-linux-cyberdeck-with-a...
1•anonymousiam•12m ago•1 comments

Microsoft's African data center falters on payment demands, Bloomberg reports

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/microsofts-african-data-center-falters-payment-demands-bloom...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•13m ago•0 comments

Why You Actually Want Machines Writing the Code for Your Next Flight

https://decodingvibes.com/blog/why-you-actually-want-machines-writing-the-code-for-your-next-flight/
1•altmanaltman•18m ago•0 comments

South Korea Exploring Using Hyundai Robots as Army Numbers Fall

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-11/south-korea-exploring-using-hyundai-robots-as-...
1•petethomas•22m ago•0 comments

Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson's lost years

https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/growling-in-a-corner-samuel-johnsons
1•pepys•24m ago•0 comments

Europe Is Losing Its Best Engineers – Not to Emigration, but to Management

https://andrulis.de/blog/20260429_management.html
1•taubek•26m ago•0 comments

Iran mulls taking control of all 7 cables passing through Strait of Hormuz

https://www.wionews.com/world/iran-to-take-full-control-of-all-7-undersea-internet-cables-passing...
2•jonah•28m ago•0 comments

The Trouble with Narrative History

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-trouble-with-narrative-history/
2•Hooke•29m ago•0 comments

Geography Is Four-Dimensional

https://sive.rs/4d
1•Curiositry•30m ago•0 comments

Visual Generation Unlocks Human-Like Reasoning Through Multimodal World Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19834
2•felineflock•31m ago•0 comments

Blink – AI Assistant

https://blink-oi.vercel.app
1•Pascal1997•32m ago•0 comments

Neural Machine Perception

https://openstrate.com/
1•realitymatrixyz•33m ago•0 comments

A single 10,000 foot reel of digital microfilm: WAR.GOV/UFO

https://hypergrid.systems/war.gov-ufo-viewer/microfilm2?frame=12404&page=12404
1•keepamovin•34m ago•0 comments

The SEC plans to end quarterly reporting

https://keepitquarterly.org/
2•froglop•42m ago•0 comments

I scanned 100 random Supabase projects. 22% leak user data anonymously

https://perufitlife.github.io/supabase-security-skill/blog/scanned-100-supabase-projects.html
1•renzom13•43m ago•0 comments

When GPT 5.5 flags your chat for possible cybersecurity risk–ask it to help you

https://martin.wojtczyk.de/2026/05/11/when-gpt-5-5-flags-your-chat-for-possible-cybersecurity-ris...
1•wojtczyk•47m ago•0 comments

The Vercel breach wasn't just a hack, it was a trust failure

https://www.inc.com/heather-wilde/the-vercel-breach-wasnt-just-a-hack-it-was-a-trust-failure/9133...
2•bobrenze•50m ago•0 comments

The future of work isn't human vs. AI, it's human with AI

https://www.inc.com/heather-wilde/the-future-of-work-isnt-human-vs-ai-its-human-with-ai/91335123
1•bobrenze•51m ago•0 comments

7 lines of code, 3 minutes: Implement a programming language (2010)

https://matt.might.net/articles/implementing-a-programming-language/
6•azhenley•53m ago•0 comments

Microbenchmark-Driven Analytical Performance Modeling Across Modern GPUs

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04178
1•matt_d•1h ago•0 comments

Baidu ERNIE 5.1 just dropped

https://ernie.baidu.com/
2•pretext•1h ago•0 comments

RPCS3 says "learn to code" as it bans AI agents from project

https://www.neowin.net/news/rpcs3-says-learn-to-code-as-it-bans-ai-agents-from-project/
1•bundie•1h 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.
jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
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/