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Tmux Floating Panes (v3.7)

https://tmuxcheatsheet.com/p/tmux-floating-panes/
1•mmh0000•55s ago•0 comments

Where Work Experience Can Fail

https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/news/where-work-experience-can-fail
1•rohanm93•3m ago•0 comments

Sick of Herding AI Cats?

https://clowder.sh
1•cat_herder_1•7m ago•0 comments

A rusty smudge: What will happen as the Titanic wreck disintegrates (2024)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240903-the-titanic-why-is-it-disintegrating-and-how-long-wil...
1•thunderbong•10m ago•0 comments

Home Sales in October Plummet to 16-Year Low

https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/home-sales-in-october-plummet-to-16-year-low-16adebc0
1•madihaa•17m ago•0 comments

Keeping video layers in place across aspect ratios

https://blog.breatic.ai/layers-across-aspect-ratios/
1•Ubiquition•18m ago•0 comments

Elon should hire Jensen to run Terafab

1•spottedmarley•19m ago•1 comments

What Are Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs)?

https://www.ossila.com/pages/what-are-metal-organic-frameworks
1•peter_d_sherman•19m ago•1 comments

Searching for exotic scalars at fusion reactors (2025)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12314
1•greesil•21m ago•0 comments

Pax Silica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Silica
1•jonbaer•22m ago•1 comments

Run Cloudflare Workers Anywhere

https://openorange.dev/
1•madars•22m ago•0 comments

Dusk OS Sales Pitch

https://duskos.org/why.html
1•vermilingua•24m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What use are the non-major cryptocurrencies?

1•otohp•27m ago•0 comments

Neuron turns model into conspiracy theorist

https://x.com/StationhouseAI/status/2121393278407123388
1•stationhouse•30m ago•0 comments

MathHelm: A Place to discuss AI-generated papers

https://mathhelm.org/
2•iLuddite•31m ago•0 comments

Israel's VCs see opportunity for challengers in Nvidia's turmoil

https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/13/israels-vcs-see-opportunity-for-challengers-in-nvidias-turmoil/
3•sjdh76•31m ago•0 comments

An open letter to the Nvidia Board of Directors

https://standwithjensen.com/#letter
3•gmays•32m ago•2 comments

Agent Distraction

https://developers.googleblog.com/agent-distraction/
2•pykello•33m ago•0 comments

Faster Scientific Simulations with New FP64 Algorithms in Nvidia cuBLAS

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/faster-scientific-simulations-with-new-fp64-algorithms-in-nvidi...
1•qainsights•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Back endskills – agent skills for safer auth, data and migration code

https://github.com/globalmpc/backendskills
1•bayarkhuu5155•49m ago•0 comments

Cancer society issues updated prostate cancer screening guidelines

https://abcnews.com/GMA/Wellness/cancer-society-issues-specific-prostate-cancer-screening-guideli...
4•gmays•49m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: OpenAI Astra post-launch slump?

1•iJohnDoe•53m ago•2 comments

Obscura is so obscure it is practically unique

https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/obscure-obscura-is-actually-unique/
2•CqtGLRGcukpy•56m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Browserr – An MCP-first browser for AI agents (one Rust binary)

https://browserr.dev
1•Omodaka9375•58m ago•0 comments

MathHelm: A Place to discuss AI-generated papers

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/11/13/introducing-mathhelm-a-place-to-discuss-ai-generated-pa...
2•smilelamp•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Geocode the planet(630M addresses), indexed in 5h on a 9 GB RAM budget

https://github.com/open-geocode-rs/open-geocode
2•abhigyaan•1h ago•0 comments

Martin van den Brink: His contributions in ASML [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEr90oVa758
1•pillars•1h ago•0 comments

App Basics for Firefox OS (2013)

https://web.archive.org/web/20160316133358/https://mozilla.github.io/app-basics-videos/
1•gurjeet•1h ago•0 comments

Quahuru: An original dice strategy board game

https://quahuru.com
1•trecht•1h ago•1 comments

A Financial Timeline of Jensen's Ousting

https://nvidia.cool.computer/
2•warthog•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