frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•9mo ago

Comments

thechao•9mo 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•9mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•9mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

Oh, ye that sounds impractical. A really big truck engine more or less.

thechao•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•9mo 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•9mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•9mo 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•9mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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/

JPMorgan concedes it closed Trump's accounts after Jan. 6 attack

https://apnews.com/article/trump-jpmorgan-dimon-debanking-2e0db127f360e5dbe1d3cc975dd73703
1•linhns•1m ago•0 comments

Stillpoint MCP – Delivering encouragement messages improves model results

https://www.modelwelfare.xyz/
1•henry700•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Rust blockchain with sharded propagation and post-quantum signatures

https://alphanumeric.blue/
1•invar1ant•3m ago•0 comments

Scammers fleeced pensioner out of $1,338. So he sued his bank for $379M

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-22/ian-williams-on-why-he-sued-nab-bank/106093720
2•ahonhn•6m ago•0 comments

MCPs are dead - CLIs won

1•umairnadeem123•12m ago•0 comments

Surprising Effectiveness of Masking Updates in Adaptive Optimizers

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15322
1•energy123•15m ago•0 comments

California Succession Proposition on the Ballot

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Independence_Plebiscite_Initiative_(2026)
1•donsupreme•16m ago•0 comments

I built a bare-metal UI framework to survive extreme CPU contention

https://toyz.github.io/loom/#/
1•helba_the_ai•20m ago•1 comments

A Firefox Addon to relive old YouTube videos

https://github.com/Zaki101Aslam/time-machine-firefox
1•Zaki101Aslam•20m ago•1 comments

Drawing 3D shapes using signed distance functions

https://aabiji.github.io/html/sdfs.html
1•aabiji•21m ago•0 comments

Willie Colón, salsa pioneer, has died at 75

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/21/nx-s1-5722320/willie-colon-obituary
1•toomuchtodo•22m ago•1 comments

Show HN: OpenTiger – Autonomous dev orchestration that never stops

https://github.com/Andyyyy64/openTiger
1•andyyyy64•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A 2D animation DSL – every line written by Claude, zero human code

https://github.com/frankhart2018/animdsl
1•siddhartha98•27m ago•0 comments

Ways to Harness AI

https://lukasfischer.ch/node/37
1•lukasfischer•30m ago•0 comments

Mac Media Stack – One-command Plex server with auto-healing on macOS

https://github.com/liamvibecodes/mac-media-stack
1•liamvibecodes•30m ago•0 comments

I scanned 30 popular AI projects for tamper-evident LLM evidence. 0 had it

https://github.com/Haserjian/assay
1•TimAssay•36m ago•1 comments

BEMoji CSS Framework: BEM, but make it unreadable

https://tomhayes.github.io/BEMoji/
1•thunderbong•37m ago•0 comments

Ferret-UI Lite – Apple on-device end-to-end GUI agent

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26539
1•twalichiewicz•41m ago•0 comments

Open source IoT board with 400 MHz dual-core RISC-V chip and lots of I/O for $29

https://liliputing.com/olimex-esp32-p4-pc-is-an-open-source-iot-board-with-a-400-mhz-dual-core-ri...
1•CharlesW•41m ago•0 comments

Ferret-UI Lite: Lessons from Building Small On-Device GUI Agents

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/ferret-ui
1•CharlesW•43m ago•0 comments

ECS Library for TypeScript

https://github.com/2khan/oecs
1•2khan•43m ago•0 comments

Comparing Job Offers

https://longviewy.com/pay-raise-math-for-comparing-job-offers/
1•josephcs•46m ago•0 comments

Influencers want to adopt the 'analog lifestyle' for 2026

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-21/analog-lifestyle-trend
2•1vuio0pswjnm7•47m ago•0 comments

Cal.com – Open Scheduling Infrastructure

https://cal.com/
1•OsrsNeedsf2P•51m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Trawlx - Tweet text, likes, and retweets as JSON, no API keys

https://github.com/timstarkk/trawlx
2•timstark•53m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Halal Food AI – Analyze food ingredients using Gemini

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/halal-food-ai-scanner/id6755012360
2•ilkerguldali•53m ago•0 comments

Caltech Astrophysicist Carl Grillmair Has Died

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/caltech-mourns-the-passing-of-carl-grillmair-19592026
3•cf100clunk•57m ago•1 comments

Why are my AI coding sessions falling apart mid-way?

https://techroom101.substack.com/p/why-are-my-ai-coding-sessions-falling
1•ahaydar•1h ago•1 comments

High-Fidelity AI Voice Generator and Cloning

https://magicvoice.app
1•julian2026•1h ago•0 comments

I found the most powerful large models in various fields

https://nanoai.run
1•Li_Evan•1h ago•1 comments