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Notes on building CRDT-based local-first and end-to-end encrypted applications

https://kerkour.com/crdt-end-to-end-encryption-research-notes
1•Keyb0ardWarri0r•20s ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How to answer career gap in resume?

1•shivajikobardan•34s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Debug Console for Claude Code

https://github.com/eqtylab/agent-console
1•ramoz•2m ago•0 comments

Microsoft Word Is Immortal

https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-the-immortality-of-microsoft-word
2•jpbryan•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Agentic PDF Viewer for Schematics

https://alkali.engineering/designs/viewer
1•edmgood•3m ago•0 comments

New in 2025: Linux Patches Enable PCI Support for the Amiga 4000

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-PCI-Amiga-4000
1•doener•3m ago•0 comments

Celebrating 10 Years of DirectX 12

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/celebrating-10-years-of-directx-12/
2•ksec•4m ago•1 comments

Trump Media to Merge with Fusion Energy Firm in $6B Deal

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/trump-media-tae-technologies-merger-ai-fusion-power-b9ac22a5
1•JumpCrisscross•4m ago•0 comments

Cheese Linked to Lower Dementia Risk in 25-Year Study

https://www.sciencealert.com/cheese-linked-to-lower-dementia-risk-in-25-year-study
1•manidoraisamy•5m ago•0 comments

EXO v1 Release

https://github.com/exo-explore/exo
1•jburgess777•5m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Minimal reasoning determinism stress test (no claims)

https://github.com/seesea500-Hyb/reasoning-determinism-stress-test
1•seesea•6m ago•0 comments

Novel Security Framework for VSCode Extensions: Automated Runtime Sandboxing

https://nhsjs.com/2025/automated-security-framework-for-vs-code-extensions-risk-profiling-policy-...
1•shadow-ninja•6m ago•1 comments

Architecture Docs with Markdown and PlantUML

https://medium.com/@brodocs/diagrams-as-code-and-markdown-combined-4c1a7fc6de12
1•BroTechLead•7m ago•0 comments

Expose your DB as a ChatGPT app

https://supabase.com/blog/building-chatgpt-apps-with-supabase
2•rodriguespn•9m ago•0 comments

Type to Race – a cyberpunk typing game (TypeRacer × Subway Surfers)

https://www.typetorace.com/
4•selcuk•9m ago•1 comments

Sharp Monocular View Synthesis in Less Than a Second

https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp
1•bookofjoe•10m ago•0 comments

What Is Prompt Caching? Best Practices Explained

https://apidog.com/blog/what-is-prompt-caching/
1•walterbell•11m ago•0 comments

Mistral launches OCR 3 – 74% win rate over OCR 2

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3
6•pember•12m ago•0 comments

Rain Evolved Its Distinct Scent–and Why Animals and Humans Love It

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/smell-rain-explained-180974692/
1•keepamovin•13m ago•0 comments

Does swearing make you stronger? Science says yes

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/does-swearing-make-you-stronger-science-says-yes/
1•quapster•13m ago•1 comments

Using TypeScript to Obtain One of the Rarest License Plates

https://www.jack.bio/blog/licenseplate
5•lafond•13m ago•0 comments

Some not-so-bad ads from 80s computer magazines: Christmas edition

https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/christmas-ads/
2•rfarley04•14m ago•1 comments

Ads on the App Store in 2026: Additional opportunities in search results

https://ads.apple.com/app-store/help/ad-placements/0082-search-results
1•ksec•15m ago•0 comments

I built a website security scanner

3•pelmenibenni•17m ago•0 comments

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
24•simonw•21m ago•16 comments

AI's hidden carbon and water footprint

https://vu.nl/en/news/2025/ai-s-hidden-carbon-and-water-footprint
1•belter•24m ago•0 comments

Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2025/12/15/spain-fines-airbnb-65-million-why-the-government-is-cr...
24•robtherobber•24m ago•0 comments

The Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks [pdf]

https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_CVPR_2019/papers/Zhou_On_the_Continuity_of_Rotation_Represe...
1•jackling•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Ada – A governed AI that validates before generating

https://github.com/jaredlewiswechs/ada-newton
1•jared_lewisparc•25m ago•1 comments

Why your Economy class seat is torturing you – possibly on purpose

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/aircraft-flight-economy-seat-uncomfortable/
2•Brajeshwar•25m ago•1 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/