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Tesla's Electric Semi Has Its First Fatal Crash

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/07/01/teslas-electric-semi-has-its-first-fatal-crash/
1•khurs•26s ago•0 comments

Self Hosted NAS Platform

https://github.com/benjaminjaklic/NAS_readme
1•user1256•45s ago•0 comments

Diffflow.com: Visual-Selector

https://diffflow.com/blog/visual-selector/
1•7rin0•51s ago•0 comments

If You Can Write Acceptance Criteria, You Can Write an AI Routing Policy

https://age-of-product.com/ai-routing-policy/
1•swolpers•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ChartsPrintables – printable conversion charts and reference tables

https://chartsprintables.com
1•robot1996•6m ago•0 comments

Harvey AI started with a Reddit thread. Now it's worth $11B

https://freemalta.com/hub/library/they-named-a-11-billion-company-after-harvey-specter-then-they-...
1•ilhaniremyuce•11m ago•0 comments

The New 'Bootstrap' to the American Dream: Deep Cleaning Cars

https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/why-some-workers-are-trading-desks-for-car-detailin...
1•JumpCrisscross•13m ago•0 comments

Europe's new climate in seven charts

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e2j0j87reo
2•saikatsg•14m ago•0 comments

Scientist who cleaned space toilet on work now leading Mars exploration

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz758x04g83o
3•saikatsg•14m ago•0 comments

U.S. Policies Unintentionally Accelerated China's Open AI Ecosystems

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15999
2•hunglee2•23m ago•0 comments

I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain–until I met him

https://cailey.substack.com/p/i-wanted-to-be-anthony-bourdainuntil
2•FinnLobsien•24m ago•1 comments

Comparing Investment Options with Charts – The Basics

https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/compare-charts/
3•ciju•24m ago•0 comments

What Is Linux Swap, and Should You Enable It?

https://blog.lyc8503.net/post/21-swap-setup/
1•uneven9434•28m ago•0 comments

Update: ZerfAI generated 60 Micro SaaS ideas – 14 scored 8/10 or higher

https://www.zerfai.com/
1•awsaqh•35m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Good fast IDE for reading and navigating code in multiple languages

1•akkad33•37m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Self-healing review gate and knowledge base for Claude Code (Beta)

https://verity.md
2•claudiacsf•38m ago•0 comments

"Gauging your humanity This may take some seconds"

https://github.com/unt-libraries/django-altcha-middleware
1•joebig•39m ago•0 comments

"Stop Moralizing AirCon": How Institutions Shift Responsibility onto Individuals

https://jdjayne.substack.com/p/moralizing
1•theanonymousone•43m ago•0 comments

Google: Earthquake early warning system did not work properly in Turkey

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Google-Earthquake-early-warning-system-did-not-work-properly-in-Turk...
2•teleforce•45m ago•0 comments

9 Months of Agentic Development

https://www.benko.app/blog/9-months-of-agentic-development
1•dools•45m ago•0 comments

The 18-Months Deadline

https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-the-18-months-deadline
3•adlrocha•54m ago•1 comments

antiware-JS

https://www.npmjs.com/package/antiware-js?activeTab=readme
1•mohamed-medhat•57m ago•1 comments

Lisper.io

https://lisper.io.
1•rifflax•1h ago•1 comments

Learning Multi-Agent Coordination via Sheaf-ADMM

https://pub.sakana.ai/sheaf-admm/
1•hardmaru•1h ago•0 comments

LongCat-2.0

2•rika321•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: A live badge that proves your SaaS runs on EU infrastructure

https://euroseal.pages.dev
1•robpus•1h ago•0 comments

Job descriptions got longer than CVS receipts

https://www.businessinsider.com/job-descriptions-longer-than-cvs-receipts-ai-2026-7
2•ilreb•1h ago•0 comments

Intuitive Quantum Electrodynamics

https://forwardscattering.org/page/Intuitive%20Quantum%20Electrodynamics
1•Ono-Sendai•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: MM to Inches converter with fractional inch references

https://mm-to-inches.net
1•robot1996•1h ago•0 comments

Concentration of power in AI is a risk, by Andy Konwinski

https://xcancel.com/i/article/2072830533739192560
3•alecco•1h 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