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Intel's new Arizona fab, where the chipmaker's fate hangs in the balance

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/19/intel-aims-to-find-clients-and-catch-tsmc-with-new-chip-fab-in-ar...
1•giuliomagnifico•37s ago•0 comments

OpenAI might train on responses API data

1•kissgyorgy•42s ago•0 comments

(Generational) Shenandoah GC (Low Latency) Support in GraalVM Native Images

https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/12237
1•lichtenberger•2m ago•0 comments

Tips for Buying Servers in 2026

https://blog.rackout.net/buying-servers-2026-tips-surviving-ram-ssd-price-spikes
2•matt-p•10m ago•2 comments

Show HN: SoundlyFM, a minimal radio app for background listening

https://soundlyfm.com/
1•onecookie•12m ago•0 comments

How I Made My Own Apple Watch – In China [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsWTz8NrXOY
1•xbmcuser•13m ago•0 comments

LoongArch Promoted to Being an Official Architecture for Debian 14

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-LoongArch64-Official
2•rbanffy•14m ago•0 comments

Building a Multi- Site Kubernetes Cluster with BGP Anycast

https://kyriakos.papadopoulos.tech/posts/multi-site-kubernetes-bgp/
1•voxadam•15m ago•1 comments

Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks (2015)

https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-some-men-pretend-to-work-80-hour-weeks
2•dvfjsdhgfv•15m ago•1 comments

You Are Not the Code

https://double-dissent.fika.bar/you-are-not-the-code-01KBYRMJG8W0PC853BHAKW5JC4
1•txus•16m ago•0 comments

With Less Regulation, Your Oura Ring Could Do More

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/with-less-regulation-your-oura-ring-could-do-more-af90a76d
1•Bostonian•17m ago•1 comments

Hackers Stole Pornhub Users' Data for Extortion

https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-this-week-hackers-stole-millions-of-pornhub-users-data-...
3•fleahunter•22m ago•0 comments

Deploy your podcast server fed from from YouTube channels

https://github.com/n0vella/yt2podcast
2•n0vella•24m ago•1 comments

This Rocket Engine Wasn't Designed by Humans [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xx1GXjRbMk
1•zeristor•30m ago•1 comments

Y Combinator

https://twitter.com/tsoding/status/2002207228070105287
2•throwaway2027•33m ago•0 comments

Airbus moving critical systems away from AWS, Google, and MS

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1pqucbz/airbus_moving_critical_systems_away_from_aws/
4•taubek•33m ago•0 comments

delete me babeh

1•casenmgreen•37m ago•0 comments

Qntm's Power Tower Toy

https://qntm.org/files/knuth/knuth.html
1•ravenical•39m ago•0 comments

Do You Know What Time It Is? If You're on Mars, Now You Do

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/do-you-know-what-time-it-is-if-youre-on-mars-now-you-do
1•rbanffy•39m ago•0 comments

Building the AI Factory Datacenter

https://www.nextplatform.com/2025/12/18/building-the-ai-factory-datacenter/
1•rbanffy•40m ago•0 comments

Revenge of the Dilettantes

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/revenge-of-the-dilettantes
1•jger15•41m ago•0 comments

Making Contrails Visible: AI Insights into Aviation's Climate Impact Using Sat

https://zenodo.org/records/17534712
1•complex_pi•47m ago•1 comments

Computer Crime in 1980 at DePaul University [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8eh4v7z2Rk
1•SirFatty•50m ago•2 comments

Amstrad PPC 640 cyberdeck gets a Raspberry Pi makeover

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/amstrad-ppc-640-cyberdeck-gets-a-raspberry-pi-makeover/
1•rcarmo•51m ago•0 comments

Generative AI hype distracts us from AI's more important breakthroughs

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1129179/generative-ai-hype-distracts-us-from-ais-more...
1•adrianhoward•52m ago•0 comments

AI-driven RSS feed summarizer

https://github.com/rcarmo/feed-summarizer
1•rcarmo•53m ago•0 comments

The Secret to AI-assisted Coding

https://blog.hermesloom.org/p/the-secret-to-ai-assisted-coding
1•sigalor•53m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Schema Gateway – type‑safe API gateway with schema‑driven validation

https://github.com/AncientiCe/schema-gateway
1•iCeGaming•54m ago•0 comments

From stagnation to sustained growth (Nobel 2025) [pdf]

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2025/10/popular-economicsciences2025-3.pdf
1•vogu66•55m ago•1 comments

Why Software Processes Exist (Hint: Not Why You Think)

https://blog.alash3al.com/why-software-processes-exist-hint-not-why-you-think
2•alash3al•56m ago•2 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•7mo ago

Comments

thechao•7mo 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•7mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•7mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•7mo 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•7mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•7mo 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•7mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•7mo 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_•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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/