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The Stochastically K Shaped Job Market

https://www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/06/05/the-stochastically-k-shaped-engineering-job-market.html
1•datadrivenangel•7m ago•0 comments

Silicon Valley's Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side (2018)

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-valley-secretive-orgiastic-inner-sanctum
1•mgh2•7m ago•0 comments

Getting silly with C, part and((int*)1)[-1]

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/getting-silly-with-c-part-and-int1
1•surprisetalk•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Backup Your Perplexity Research to Markdown and Obsidian

https://chatgpt2notion.com/products/perplexity-to-obsidian/
1•chatgpt2notion•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Zedra – Mobile control plane for AI coding agents

1•tanlethanh•21m ago•0 comments

Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

2•Ekami•21m ago•6 comments

Definitive guide for creating skill.md for your tools

https://docsalot.dev/blog/what-is-skill-md
1•fazkan•27m ago•0 comments

Agent-ML-skills – Teach Codex/Claude/Cursor to stop making ML mistakes

https://github.com/param087/agent-ml-skills
1•param087•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Apple Contacts MCP – Local AI Access to macOS Contacts

https://github.com/lu-wo/apple-contacts-mcp
1•luwo•32m ago•0 comments

Trump Signals Interest in US Owning Stakes in Top AI Labs

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-05/us-exploring-government-partnerships-with-ai-f...
3•grassfedgeek•39m ago•2 comments

A better go file/text sharing service with single binary, inspired by microbin

https://github.com/zaaack/go-bin
1•zaaack•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The Deterministic Core Architecture for AI-Augmented Applications

https://brandonbellsystems.com/deterministic-core/
1•Brandon_Bell•46m ago•0 comments

Something is jamming GPS over Europe. Here's what we found (Veritasium) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
3•kordlessagain•52m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Lite Agent redefines what an AI agent is

https://liteagent.cloud
2•cheikhshift•53m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Declank – Remove AI Watermarks from Images

https://declank.skeptrune.com/
1•skeptrune•57m ago•0 comments

Bernie Sanders: A.I. Is a Public Resource. You Should Own Half of It

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/opinion/artificial-intelligence-bernie-sanders.html
6•ankitr•1h ago•2 comments

SAT-Physical Thermodynamic Framework: treating constraints as a thermal system

https://github.com/alikamp/SAT_HARDNESS_P-NP
1•kauai1•1h ago•0 comments

Tinker Cookbook

https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab/tinker-cookbook
2•dima1830•1h ago•0 comments

Why sophrosyne, an ancient Greek virtue, matters more than ever in the age of AI

https://theconversation.com/why-sophrosyne-an-ancient-greek-virtue-matters-more-than-ever-in-the-...
2•1659447091•1h ago•0 comments

Rethinking the Value of Generated Tests for LLM Software Engineering Agents

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07900
1•zuzululu•1h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Will your company be doing "LeetCode" interviews a year from now?

2•locusofself•1h ago•5 comments

Show HN: Incremental SfM pipeline that reconstructs 3D point clouds from images

https://github.com/egeozgul/Incremental-3D-Reconstruction-SfM/tree/main
1•egeozgul•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: ABC Classic 100 Rankings visualised

https://classic100.gotski.workers.dev/
16•gotski•1h ago•11 comments

Some concerns about Ladybird's bylaws

https://tuananh.net/2026/06/06/ladybird-bylaws/
3•tuananh•1h ago•3 comments

Alzheimer's patient gets back speech, bladder control and memory in drug trial

https://nypost.com/2026/06/04/health/alzheimers-patient-recovers-speech-continence-and-memory-wit...
7•virgildotcodes•1h ago•2 comments

Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute capacity

https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/2062975800488394777
7•bear_with_me•1h ago•2 comments

Protein overabundance is driven by growth robustness

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz9623
1•PaulHoule•1h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Questions about HN and life questions

2•mwhite•1h ago•0 comments

Unlocking Non-Uniform KV Cache for Efficient Multi-Turn LLM Serving

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06302
1•johnbarron•1h ago•0 comments

Astrocytic Contributions to Cognition Across Rodent Models of Brain Dysfunction

https://www.mdpi.com/2218-273X/16/5/662
1•PaulHoule•1h 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.
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/

jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem