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Fast ride, higher bill: Why shared e-mopeds may widen suburban transport costs

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-fast-higher-bill-mopeds-widen.html
1•PaulHoule•49s ago•0 comments

Altman on AI energy: it also takes 20 years of eating food to train a human

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1rb2pzf/sam_altman_people_talk_about_how_much_energ...
1•puttycat•2m ago•0 comments

40 Years of Zelda

https://www.polygon.com/zelda-40th-anniversary/
1•throw0101c•3m ago•0 comments

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs (including HN users)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800
1•salkahfi•3m ago•0 comments

Open-AutoGLM: Zhipu AI Open-Sources a Framework for Autonomous Phone Agents

https://theagenttimes.com/articles/open-autoglm-23k-stars-the-phone-agent-framework-from-chinas-a...
1•Ross00781•4m ago•0 comments

Cromemco C-10 Personal Computer – By John Paul Wohlscheid

https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/cromemco-c-10-personal-computer
1•rbanffy•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FounderSDR – AI cold email outreach for B2B SaaS founders ($299/mo)

https://founder-sdr.surge.sh
2•AISDR•5m ago•0 comments

We searched 852K Epstein docs for pizza, ice cream and every food code word

https://twitter.com/EpsteinSecrets/status/2025400741360234503
2•epsteinsecrets•5m ago•0 comments

A monthly dump of the 15,000 most-downloaded packages from PyPI

https://hugovk.github.io/top-pypi-packages/
2•gjvc•6m ago•0 comments

The right time: Leaving Automattic

https://nickdiego.com/the-right-time
2•taubek•6m ago•0 comments

Facing a mental health crisis, NJ school pulls beloved novel from English class

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/20/nx-s1-5708741/junot-diaz-oscar-wao-mental-health-book-bans
2•randycupertino•7m ago•0 comments

SEC Says Probe Involving AppLovin 'Still Active and Ongoing'

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-20/sec-says-probe-involving-applovin-is-still-act...
2•1vuio0pswjnm7•10m ago•0 comments

Never leave the home row to navigate tmux panes

https://raine.dev/blog/tmux-navigate-panes-home-row/
2•rane•12m ago•0 comments

Privacy first image converted / copressor

https://twitter.com/_juliushere/status/2025613479248310443
2•gintokinx•14m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What breaks when you run AI agents unsupervised?

1•marvin_nora•14m ago•1 comments

Nvidia's Stock Is So Stuck Even Blowout Earnings May Not Lift It

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-22/nvidia-s-stock-is-so-stuck-even-blowout-earnin...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•14m ago•1 comments

How AI Is Accelerating Life-Saving Discovery

https://gladstone.org/index.php/news/how-ai-accelerating-life-saving-discovery
1•giuliomagnifico•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Stopping Claude Code from wasting 50K tokens/turn in agent spawns

https://github.com/jungjaehoon-lifegamez/MAMA/pull/43
1•jungjaehoon•17m ago•0 comments

How to cut back on your social media addiction

https://nypost.com/2026/02/21/tech/heres-how-to-cut-back-on-your-social-media-addiction/
2•1vuio0pswjnm7•17m ago•0 comments

Should I add this acknowledgement/shoutout by xAI/Grok to my resume?

2•aehsan4004•20m ago•0 comments

Awesome Claws

https://github.com/machinae/awesome-claws
2•il•20m ago•1 comments

The Limits of AI

https://hughhowey.com/the-limits-of-ai/
1•hentrep•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I quit MyNetDiary after 3 years of popups and built a calorie tracker

https://calories.today/app.html
2•davemuz•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Droneski, an FPV drone ski camera simulator

https://github.com/imjasonh/droneski
2•ImJasonH•25m ago•1 comments

AI System – Is It Your "Cognitive Exoskeleton" or Simply Your Super-Fast Intern?

3•kokhanserhii•25m ago•0 comments

Claws don't need to be complicated

https://justin.abrah.ms/blog/2026-02-21-claws-don-t-need-to-be-complicated.html
1•abrahms•26m ago•0 comments

Amazon, Meta, Alphabet report plunging tax bills thanks to AI and tax changes

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-meta-and-alphabet-report-plunging-tax-bills-thanks-to-ai-in...
2•epistasis•27m ago•1 comments

Scientists discover new dinosaur species deep in the Sahara Desert

https://abcnews.com/International/scientists-discover-new-dinosaur-species-deep-sahara-desert/sto...
1•Brajeshwar•27m ago•0 comments

Internet Archive X Gray Area: Trillionth Webpage Net.Art Commissions

https://blog.archive.org/internet-archive-x-gray-area-trillionth-webpage-net-art-commissions/
1•Brajeshwar•27m ago•0 comments

Goodweb

https://l5.lraot.top/
1•TrendSpotterPro•30m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•9mo ago

Comments

thechao•9mo 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•9mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•9mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•9mo 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•9mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•9mo 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•9mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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/