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Ask HN: What's one thing that interested you this week?

1•subdomain•21s ago•0 comments

BreakPoint: Local-first CI gate for LLM output changes (cost, PII, drift)

https://github.com/cholmess/breakpoint-ai
1•cholmess21•3m ago•1 comments

Amazon dethrones Walmart as the world's biggest company by sales

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/19/nx-s1-5719173/amazon-walmart-biggest-company-by-sales
1•geox•4m ago•0 comments

Tube passengers targeted in 'smishing' scam, court told

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg4gkzw971go
1•edward•8m ago•0 comments

Your Android phone has a desktop mode you're probably not using

https://www.makeuseof.com/android-phone-has-desktop-mode-youre-probably-not-using/
1•teleforce•14m ago•0 comments

Democratizing cryptographic silicon verification with Infra-Red imaging (2024)

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/iris-infra-red-in-situ-project-updates/
2•transpute•14m ago•0 comments

Symplex Protocol – semantic intent vectors for AI agent communication (Go, v0.1)

https://github.com/olserra/symplex
1•olserra•15m ago•1 comments

The Rise of Invisible Unemployment in Tech: 2026 Will Be the Year It Changes

https://www.saastr.com/the-rise-of-invisible-unemployment-in-tech-2026-will-be-the-year-when-ever...
1•bentobean•17m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How do you monitor and retry failed webhooks in production?

1•GoatPerfect•18m ago•1 comments

Write Perfect Emails in Seconds

3•vinayofc•18m ago•0 comments

The New Mexico cave expanding our search for alien life

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260130-how-deep-caves-are-transforming-our-search-for-extrat...
1•marc__1•18m ago•0 comments

Functionalized Coatings as Biohybrid UV-Sensors

https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/admi.202500125
1•PaulHoule•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: PrivateOS: An AI agent that runs on your phone

https://private-os.vercel.app
1•pruthvi77•19m ago•1 comments

CipherDrop

https://www.cipherdrop.app/
1•shablulman•20m ago•0 comments

Announcing Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-oracle-solaris-11-4-sru90
3•pjmlp•21m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: My startup failed. How do I get back?

2•kflywheel•21m ago•0 comments

MacBook Tilt Sim Toy – One-Shot Experiment

https://github.com/NSEvent/tilt-sim-experiment
1•thekevintang•24m ago•0 comments

The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]

https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf
1•tosh•26m ago•0 comments

Automated PR risk scoring with LLMs

https://github.com/KinanNasri/PRScope
1•KinanNasri•27m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Tapedeck – A 4-track cassette recorder in your terminal, built in Rust

https://github.com/manthan787/tapedeck
2•EmTekker•28m ago•1 comments

Mining metrics from unstructured logs (2022)

https://coroot.com/blog/engineering/mining-metrics-from-unstructured-logs/
1•hhthrowaway1230•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: 149/year landing page and hosting and domain for small businesses

1•laci27•29m ago•0 comments

Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7188
2•suddenlybananas•29m ago•0 comments

Postmortem: Clerk System Outage (February 19, 2026)

https://clerk.com/blog/2026-02-19-system-outage-postmortem
1•hisamafahri•31m ago•0 comments

Agent-First Software Development Lifecycle

https://github.com/podviaznikov/sdlc-bridge/blob/main/AGENT-FIRST-SDLC.md
4•podviaznikov•32m ago•2 comments

Gauss's Weekday Algorithm, Visualized

https://lukasmetzner.github.io/blog/gauss-weekday.html
1•lukasmetzner•32m ago•0 comments

One man's trail of alleged abuse through SF's private club scene

https://sfstandard.com/2026/02/13/mickey-gerold-amador-clubs-investigation/
2•randycupertino•33m ago•1 comments

Colorado Democrats suggest age verification on OS level

https://twitter.com/LundukeJournal/status/2025313056352600341
2•miohtama•34m ago•0 comments

End of Productivity Theater

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/end-of-productivity-theater.html
4•zdw•35m ago•0 comments

The future of AI is uncertain even for Anthropic and OpenAI

https://www.albertplaya.com/posts/future-of-ai-uncertain-anthropic-openai/
2•albertplaya•37m ago•1 comments
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/