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Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/21/selfdestructing_external_ssd/
1•beardyw•3m ago•0 comments

Open Source Village

https://opensourcevillage.org/
1•me_bx•4m ago•0 comments

Australia's High Court Chief Justice says judges have become "human filters"

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/nov/21/judges-have-become-human-filters-as-ai-in-australian-...
1•ubutler•5m ago•0 comments

Inside Korea's Extreme Labor System [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjjhrwVYPE8
1•rendall•7m ago•0 comments

Structural Inducements for Hallucination in Large Language Models

https://zenodo.org/records/17655375
1•taubek•18m ago•0 comments

Enshittification of Arduino Begins? Qualcomm Starts Clamping Down

https://itsfoss.com/news/enshittification-of-arduino-begins/
4•Teknoman117•31m ago•0 comments

Cara berbicara dengan AirAsia Indonesia

1•Sebarserbi•32m ago•4 comments

Can you take an ox to Oxford?

https://alexwlchan.net/2025/ox-in-oxford/
1•surprisetalk•33m ago•0 comments

All warfare is information warfare

https://shakeddown.substack.com/p/all-warfare-is-information-warfare
2•surprisetalk•33m ago•0 comments

The 45-year period when America got things done [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9xdvOATny0
1•surprisetalk•33m ago•0 comments

Claude for PHP Developers

https://codewithphp.com/series/claude-php-developers/
1•dalemhurley•37m ago•1 comments

Callspark now let's you call any US number for $0.02 per minute

http://x.com/callsparkapp
1•ahmaliic•38m ago•0 comments

Navy Salvage Ship Trying to Fish Super Hornet and Seahawk Out of South China Sea

https://www.twz.com/sea/navy-salvage-ship-trying-to-fish-crashed-super-hornet-and-seahawk-out-of-...
2•breve•39m ago•0 comments

Meta is building an AI-powered morning brief in push to compete with ChatGPT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/11/21/meta-ai-powered-daily-brief/
1•pretext•42m ago•0 comments

Code Intel: Multi-agent LLM and AST analysis for Python codebases (Python only)

https://github.com/Oussamcsc/codebase-intelligence
1•ousamzing•44m ago•1 comments

AI 2027 doomsday scenario is been postponed

https://twitter.com/DKokotajlo/status/1991564542103662729
1•nsoonhui•45m ago•1 comments

Code Sandbox Tech Behind Manus and Claude Agent Skills

https://www.dataleadsfuture.com/exclusive-reveal-code-sandbox-tech-behind-manus-and-claude-agent-...
1•juanviera23•53m ago•0 comments

ShowHN: RepoScout – A multi-platform Git repo search tool in Rust

1•shreeshjha•57m ago•0 comments

Set Theory with Types

https://lawrencecpaulson.github.io//2025/11/21/Typed_Set_Theory.html
3•baruchel•1h ago•0 comments

OpenAI Demo'd Fixing Issue #2472 Live. It's Still Open

https://blog.tymscar.com/posts/openaiunmergeddemo/
1•baobun•1h ago•0 comments

Why are late night conversations better?

https://www.humaninvariant.com/blog/conversations
1•humaninvariant•1h ago•0 comments

The CIA's mission to sabotage Afghanistan's opium

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/12/cia-afghanistan-heroin-poppy-seeds/
2•EvgeniyZh•1h ago•0 comments

Being Chronically Offline Is the New Cool [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm0gb4wDKCE
1•inatreecrown2•1h ago•0 comments

Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code

https://github.com/hexagonal-sun/moss
3•hexagonal-sun•1h ago•1 comments

Amex Architecture

2•nemsj•1h ago•0 comments

L2M: Claude Code but for legacy code modernization

https://github.com/astrio-ai/l2m
1•NolanLwin•1h ago•0 comments

Musk's xAI in advanced talks to raise $15B at $230B valuation

https://www.reuters.com/business/musks-xai-advanced-talks-raise-15-billion-lifting-valuation-230-...
1•iamtech•1h ago•0 comments

Traveling with the iPad Pro, 10 Years On

https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/11/traveling-with-the-ipad-pro-10-years-on/
2•tosh•1h ago•0 comments

Memory chips could be the next bottleneck for AI (2024)

https://economist.com/business/2024/10/24/memory-chips-could-be-the-next-bottleneck-for-ai
2•runeks•1h ago•1 comments

Project Sapphire (1995)

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0895sapphire/
3•thunderbong•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•6mo ago

Comments

thechao•6mo 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•6mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•6mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•6mo 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•6mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•6mo 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•6mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•6mo 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_•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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/