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Cisco open sources toolkit for tracing AI model lineage

https://blogs.cisco.com/ai/model-provenance-kit
1•hsanthan•2m ago•0 comments

Swival: A coding agent for any model

https://swival.dev/
1•handfuloflight•2m ago•0 comments

Uantifying Voter Biases in Online Platforms: An Instrumental Variable Approach

https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.00757
1•smooke•3m ago•0 comments

Steep fertilizer and fuel prices could squeeze US farmers for months to come

https://www.wpr.org/news/steep-fertilizer-fuel-prices-squeeze-us-farmers-months-come
1•_tk_•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vanilla-scroll-sky: CSS-only modern scroll-driven storytelling sections

https://github.com/ulrischa/vanilla-scroll-sky
1•ulrischa•5m ago•0 comments

Migrating from Supabase

https://blog.val.town/blog/migrating-from-supabase/
2•gurjeet•8m ago•1 comments

Do we even need a better GitHub?

https://www.aviator.co/blog/do-we-even-need-a-better-github/
2•tonkkatonka•8m ago•0 comments

Stable Specialization in Rust

https://goldstein.lol/posts/stable-specialization/
1•PaulHoule•8m ago•0 comments

Claude will use all SpaceX Colossus datacenter capacity

https://twitter.com/NVIDIAAI/status/2052082412994383936
3•kristianpaul•10m ago•1 comments

When do we know someone has died

https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/05/when-do-we-know-someone-has-died.html
1•speckx•11m ago•0 comments

Multipath Reliable Connection spec published

https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-mrc-1-0-pdf
1•jabl•12m ago•0 comments

Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16705
1•programd•12m ago•0 comments

Bell Laboratories Record (August 1941) [pdf]

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Bell-Laboratories-Record/40s/Bell-Laboratories-Record-1...
2•zuhayeer•13m ago•0 comments

MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/mits-virtual-violin-offers-luthiers-a-new-design-tool/
2•smushy•13m ago•0 comments

Free and Simple Chess Analysis

https://www.g6chess.com/
1•mantegna•13m ago•1 comments

Supercomputer networking to accelerate large scale AI training

https://openai.com/index/mrc-supercomputer-networking/
1•dataking•14m ago•0 comments

xAI will be dissolved as a separate company

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2052105373621121284
1•break_the_bank•15m ago•0 comments

Learning Advanced JavaScript (2008)

https://johnresig.com/apps/learn/
1•downbad_•17m ago•1 comments

Gypsy Woman Hardware Live Jam (2023) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SSXALxZ3Hs
1•elvis70•18m ago•0 comments

Mainframe modernization is no longer optional for the AI-driven enterprise

https://thenewstack.io/open-mainframe-enterprise-modernization/
2•rbanffy•19m ago•0 comments

Let's Get EFF to Accept Monero Donations

https://monerocoalition.org/lets-get-eff-to-accept-monero-donations/
4•Cider9986•20m ago•0 comments

You can make more money buying MTG cards than the lottery

https://meadow.cafe/blog/0073-you-can-make-more-money-buying-mtg-cards-than-the-lottery/
2•speckx•23m ago•0 comments

Go-joker – a much faster Clojure interpreter written in Go and WASM

https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/go-joker/
6•rcarmo•24m ago•0 comments

ZAYA1-8B: Frontier intelligence density, trained on AMD

https://www.zyphra.com/post/zaya1-8b
3•mseri•25m ago•0 comments

Shadow – find which prompt change broke your AI agent

https://github.com/manav8498/Shadow
2•manav8498•25m ago•0 comments

Upcoming El Niño: The World Is About to Get a Preview of Life in 2035

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/opinion/el-nino-climate.html
5•puttycat•28m ago•0 comments

Planting Trees and Dreaming of Software

https://jerodsanto.net/2026/05/planting-trees-software-dreams/
1•herbertl•28m ago•0 comments

Hackers Hate AI Slop More Than You Do

https://www.wired.com/story/cybercriminals-are-complaining-about-ai-slop-flooding-their-forums/
9•aledevv•30m ago•1 comments

An aggregate of payment usage data released by businesses that accept Monero

https://monerostats.org/
1•Cider9986•30m ago•0 comments

A Fundamental FX Factor Model

https://dm13450.github.io/2026/04/19/A-Fundamental-FX-Factor-Model.md.html
1•dm13450•30m 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/