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Research After AI: Principles for Accelerated Exploration

https://gist.github.com/joelkuiper/d52cc0e5ff06d12c85e492e4295ca890
1•gmays•6m ago•0 comments

Starbucks bets on robots to brew a turnaround in customers

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cew8qzdxnnjo
1•1659447091•7m ago•0 comments

Let your agents find the best products online

https://app.rencom.ai/
1•shadag•7m ago•0 comments

Apple's MacBook Pro DFU port documentation is wrong

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/2/1.html
1•zdw•10m ago•0 comments

Free storage, name filtering – Easel's January 2026 update

https://easel.games/blog/2026-jan-update
1•BSTRhino•11m ago•0 comments

On God and Machine Learning

https://rlafuente.com/posts/2026-2-1-on-god-and-machine-learning
1•andes314•14m ago•0 comments

ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/ice-protester-says-her-global-entry-was-revoked-after...
4•theahura•14m ago•1 comments

Housman's Introductory Lecture

https://worrydream.com/refs/Housman_1892_-_Introductory_Lecture.html
1•coloneltcb•15m ago•0 comments

Converting floats to strings quickly (10x speedup over 30 years)

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/02/01/converting-floats-to-strings-quickly/
1•nnx•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Neural network that uses no floating-point and says "I don't know"

https://github.com/probabilistic-minds-consortium/void-mathematics-fully-finite-coq-verified
1•kwojno•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Nutkin – Save Anything for Later

https://nutkin.io/
1•hassanyassine•20m ago•0 comments

Paper Triage Anomaly

https://zenodo.org/records/18452798
1•KaoruAK•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A deterministic runtime SDK to secure agentic execution without a proxy

https://proxilion.com/
1•hireclay•21m ago•0 comments

Moltbook Has No Autonomous AI Agents – Only Humans Using OpenClaw

https://startupfortune.com/the-internets-latest-lie-moltbook-has-no-autonomous-ai-agents-only-hum...
1•oooyay•21m ago•0 comments

Irish farmers protest against EU-Mercosur trade deal

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/10/thousands-of-irish-farmers-protest-against-eu-merco...
1•PaulHoule•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ContractShield – AI contract analyser for freelancers

https://contractshield-production.up.railway.app
1•Judd_W•28m ago•0 comments

Your field guide to industrial research labs (2014)

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2014/01/your-field-guide-to-industrial-research.html
1•teleforce•31m ago•0 comments

Why do people still talk about AGI?

4•cermicelli•33m ago•2 comments

Orangey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangey
1•areoform•34m ago•0 comments

DRY Is a Context Management Strategy, Not a Code Quality Metric

https://kirilltolmachev.dev/is-dry-dying
1•dysleixc•37m ago•0 comments

Building a Telegram Bot with Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects and Grammy

https://flashblaze.xyz/posts/cloudflare-workers-durable-objects-telegram-bot/
1•flashblaze•37m ago•0 comments

Language Explorer: Google's New Open-Source Linguistic Atlas

https://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2026/01/meet-language-explorer-googles-new-open.html
1•gnabgib•38m ago•0 comments

New Research Connects Heart Attacks to Brain, Nervous and Immune Systems

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/new-research-connects-heart-attacks-to-brain-nervous-and-immune-systems
4•gmays•47m ago•0 comments

EIA: 99%+ of new US capacity in 2026 will be solar, wind and storage

https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/eia-99-of-new-us-capacity-in-2026-will-be-solar-wind-storage/
1•pseudolus•49m ago•1 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
2•in-silico•54m ago•0 comments

Anticipating aging-related mental decline using saliva samples and AI

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-aging-mental-decline-saliva-samples.html
1•pseudolus•57m ago•0 comments

Step 3.5 Flash

https://static.stepfun.com/blog/step-3.5-flash/
2•limoce•57m ago•0 comments

Ideas for marketing a dev centric product (2019)

https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3197
1•mooreds•1h ago•0 comments

DHS AI Surveillance Arsenal Grows as Agency Defies Courts

https://www.techpolicy.press/dhs-ai-surveillance-arsenal-grows-as-agency-defies-courts/
1•mooreds•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI accountability partner helps you meet your goals

https://tractorbe.am/
1•Gillinghammer•1h ago•0 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/