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It's much easier to hold computers accountable than to hold humans accountable

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/its-much-easier-to-hold-computers
1•NavinF•2m ago•0 comments

Google Threat Intel Group AI Threat Tracker:Advances in Threat Actor AI Tool Use

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/threat-actor-usage-of-ai-tools
1•RA2lover•19m ago•0 comments

The Robot Swarms Are Coming

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-robot-swarms-are-coming-c7e8425f
1•pretext•20m ago•0 comments

Riding in a Chinese Robotaxi Is Pretty Smooth–That's a Problem for Waymo

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/china-robotaxi-self-driving-waymo-254ce0a1
2•pretext•22m ago•0 comments

Web browser add-on that prevents YouTube's automatic translations

https://github.com/YouG-o/YouTube-No-Translation
1•faust201•25m ago•0 comments

U.S. Export Promotion Executive Order "AI Stack"

https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/dont-overthink-the-ai-stack
1•walterbell•26m ago•0 comments

Making Democracy Work: Fixing and Simplifying Egalitarian Paxos

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02743
1•otrack•27m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What do you hate about hiring?

1•dark7•29m ago•1 comments

Vigilante Lawyers Expose the Rising Tide of A.I. Slop in Court Filings

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/business/lawyers-ai-vigilantes.html
2•pretext•31m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: I know how to build it, now I want to break it

1•indiedev_001•39m ago•0 comments

The hidden trust problem in API formats

https://apichangelog.substack.com/p/the-hidden-trust-problem-in-api-formats
1•bpedro•40m ago•0 comments

Largest spider web hosts two solitary species of spiders

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-largest-spider-web-discovered-in-bizarre-sulfur...
1•mighty_plant•41m ago•0 comments

Blocking AI Notetakers

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1oqzqqg/blocking_ai_notetakers/
4•taubek•43m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Threads Media Downloader

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/threads-media-downloader/hcheccflijdeknphebbpjdipidinacln
1•qwikhost•44m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Do any OLAP databases pass sqllogictest suite?

1•rustic-indian•45m ago•0 comments

Async QUIC and HTTP/3 made easy: Tokio-quiche is now open-source

https://blog.cloudflare.com/async-quic-and-http-3-made-easy-tokio-quiche-is-now-open-source/
1•the_arun•47m ago•0 comments

Promptingpicks

https://promptingpicks.com
1•chrisian12•48m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is everyone only hiring senior developers? And is it because of AI?

7•elcapithanos•51m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Free open-source file scanner (pompelmi)

https://github.com/pompelmi/pompelmi
1•SonoTommy•51m ago•0 comments

What I Learned from the 'New Globalists' of an Optimistic Vietnam

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/world/asia/what-i-learned-from-the-new-globalists-of-an-optimi...
1•mmooss•55m ago•0 comments

Founders/Hiring managers, what do you hate about hiring?

1•dark7•57m ago•0 comments

What nobody tells you about product intuition

https://akkshaya.blog/2025/11/08/what-nobody-tells-you-about-product-intuition/
1•akkshu92•59m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Windows/Linux software that has no real equivalent on macOS?

2•fastily•1h ago•2 comments

Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/denmarks-government-aims-to-ban-access-to-social-medi...
2•methuselah_in•1h ago•1 comments

Best Digital Marketing Course in Prayagraj – Ndmit – Government Approved Insti

https://ndmit.com/digital-marketing-course-in-prayagraj/
1•karan868•1h ago•0 comments

Automatic Apple Watch WiFi sync to be removed in the EU

https://www.wareable.com/apple/apple-watch-wi-fi-syncing-watchos-26-2-european-union
1•aquir•1h ago•0 comments

Ups grounding MD-11 planes following deadly Kentucky crash

https://apnews.com/article/ups-plane-crash-explosion-kentucky-md11-32f96f28019c286031befe6d05bb424f
2•petethomas•1h ago•0 comments

The Invisible Hand of Gerontocracy

https://terminaldrift.substack.com/p/the-invisible-hand-of-gerontocracy
2•boopity2025•1h ago•1 comments

Nested Learning – A new ML paradigm for continual learning

https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-a-new-ml-paradigm-for-continual-learning/
3•badmonster•1h ago•0 comments

A Detailed M&A Journey Selling My Company

https://thefoundersmanual.beehiiv.com/p/my-m-a-journey-selling-classhook
1•adeeb•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•6mo ago

Comments

thechao•6mo 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•6mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•6mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•6mo 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•6mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•6mo 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•6mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•6mo 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_•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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/