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Surveillance cameras will be required in all new cars by 2027

https://geekspin.co/surveillance-cameras-will-be-required-in-all-new-cars-by-2027/
1•allgirl•29s ago•1 comments

The System That Turned Paper Charts into Digital Medical Records

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-milestone-digital-medical-records
1•sohkamyung•1m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Good ASX Shares API?

1•prologic•4m ago•0 comments

AI's talent wars have a loyalty problem

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/03/ai-talent-wars-openai-google-meta-anthropic
1•gpi•5m ago•0 comments

Important Null Results in Development Economics

https://voxdev.org/topic/important-null-results-development-economics
1•barry-cotter•6m ago•0 comments

Apple TV+: Prestige Darling, Streaming Loser

https://www.statsignificant.com/p/apple-tv-prestige-darling-streaming
1•speckx•6m ago•0 comments

Deos Forecasting Have Room at the Top?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-forecasting-have-room-at-the
1•fbrusch•6m ago•0 comments

Why Japan Is Losing the AI Race It Helped Create

https://bytepith.com/article/why-japan-losing-ai-race-it-helped-create
1•khanhnguyen8386•7m ago•1 comments

Maine's highest court upholds Sunday hunting ban

https://www.bangordailynews.com/2024/03/28/state/state-police-courts/maine-sunday-hunting-ban-uph...
1•allgirl•8m ago•1 comments

1,150 journeys from books and films mapped on an interactive globe

https://readingmaps.com/
1•airesao•8m ago•0 comments

Dutch defense chief: F-35s can be jailbroken like iPhones

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/18/dutch-defense-chief-f-35s-can-be-jailbroken-like-...
1•abdelhousni•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vultrino – Credential proxy so AI agents never see the keys

https://github.com/FeirAI/vultrino
2•dz-codes•9m ago•0 comments

The U.S. Military Is Missing Six Nuclear Weapons (2021)

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-missing-six-nuclear-weapons-180032
1•downbad_•9m ago•0 comments

The End of the Age of Heroes

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-end-of-the-age-of-heroes
1•pfdietz•10m ago•0 comments

Big Tech's Hidden Debt Problem (Patrik Boyle) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NufJ7g63KSY
1•u1hcw9nx•10m ago•0 comments

Agentxray – an MCP server that finds where your coding agent wasted tokens

https://github.com/mertdotdev/agentxray
1•Mert7nr•10m ago•0 comments

August 12 Solar eclipse map

https://eclipsemap.xyz/#4.24/48.85/4.63
1•speckx•12m ago•0 comments

The Queen's Duck

https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
1•hosteur•12m ago•0 comments

Hiring More Developers Is Often the Wrong Answer [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oig8ZNHUksQ
2•Harish_0089•13m ago•0 comments

The Oslo Report

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Report
2•Bluestein•16m ago•0 comments

We built a realtime system for responsive voice AI in six months

https://openai.com/index/continuous-voice-interaction-with-gpt-live/
2•Sean-Der•17m ago•0 comments

How AI Can Make Design Work Appear Prematurely Resolved

https://commonedge.org/how-ai-can-make-design-work-appear-prematurely-resolved/
2•surprisetalk•17m ago•0 comments

Reverse Engineering Google Slides

https://theopenpresenter.com/blog/reverse-engineering-google-slides/
3•michaelsalim•18m ago•0 comments

Static vs. Dynamic vs. Continuous Batching in LLM Inference

https://machinelearningmastery.com/static-vs-dynamic-vs-continuous-batching-in-llm-inference/
2•eigenBasis•18m ago•0 comments

JSON Is Lying to You

https://blog.gaborkoos.com/posts/2026-08-03-Your-JSON-Is-Lying-to-You/
2•birdculture•18m ago•0 comments

Sharing a persistent browser QA workflow for OpenCode

https://github.com/mdc-git/opencode-playwright-interactive
1•mdc-git•20m ago•0 comments

Travel Chaos Follows E.U.'S New Passport Controls

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/world/europe/eu-passport-control-chaos.html
1•rawgabbit•21m ago•1 comments

Beyond the Final Prompt: How Conversation Context Changes AI Answers

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02556
1•bentannenbaum•23m ago•0 comments

Scaling pain arrives earlier when AI writes the code

https://medium.com/@rotbart/product-scale-fit-in-ai-land-fdcfae083efb
1•rotbart•25m ago•0 comments

Opinionated, Expressive, Mac-Assed: Software That Feels at Home on the Mac

https://thesis.simonlou.com
1•simonlou•25m 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