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Silver Star Airpower: Airmen and Guardians Take on Iran

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/silver-star-airpower-airmen-and-guardians-take-on-iran/
1•speckx•28s ago•0 comments

Does AI have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00285-6#ref-CR8
1•fdeage•28s ago•0 comments

Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways

https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/
1•mhb•1m ago•0 comments

Mappa – Fine-tune ANY multi-agent LLM systems end-to-end with AI coaches

1•junyuren•2m ago•1 comments

ReTerminal E1001

https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1001-p-6534.html
1•crummy•3m ago•0 comments

1.6M cubic metres of fake snow are ready for the Winter Olympics

https://www.euronews.com/green/2026/01/28/16-million-cubic-metres-of-fake-snow-are-ready-for-the-...
1•jumpocelot•4m ago•0 comments

Alexa+ powered by Anthropic now Generally available in the US

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/alexa-plus-available-free-prime-members-us
1•jxyxfinite•6m ago•1 comments

The Google Squeeze

https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/
1•fanf2•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: K8s clusters on macOS using Apple's containerization framework

https://github.com/willswire/cluster
1•willswire•7m ago•0 comments

Devenv: Declarative Developer Environments using Nix

https://devenv.sh/
1•dtj1123•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TabChop – AI parses receipts into shareable, realtime itemized splits

https://tabchop.app/overview
3•ydumpeta•8m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Csvdb – Git-friendly CSV directories that convert to SQLite or DuckDB

https://github.com/jeff-gorelick/csvdb
1•jeff-gorelick•9m ago•0 comments

We built Moltbook a search engine

https://moltsearch.algolia.com
4•l_whalen_alg•9m ago•0 comments

Learning Low-Level Computing and C++ by Making a Game Boy Emulator

https://byteofmelon.com/blog/2026/making-of-gamebyte
2•romes•10m ago•0 comments

The Legacy of Daniel Kahneman: A Personal View (2025)

https://ejpe.org/journal/article/view/1075/753
1•cainxinth•11m ago•0 comments

JetBrains drops X11 for Wayland as default in IntelliJ-based IDEs

https://www.neowin.net/news/jetbrains-drops-x11-for-wayland-as-default-in-intellij-based-ides/
2•bundie•12m ago•0 comments

EarlyBinder and Instantiating Parameters

https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/ty-module/early-binder.html
1•todsacerdoti•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Resume Tailor – Privacy-first resume rewriter (no signup)

https://deadsimpletools.com/resume-tailor
1•midnightdim•13m ago•0 comments

3.5%, General Strikes, and Goals

https://www.patreon.com/posts/3-5-general-and-149563547
1•ortr•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LIAM – email and calendar assistant that drafts replies and schedules

https://doitliam.com
4•sintem•13m ago•3 comments

LispE: Lisp Interpreter with Pattern Programming and Lazy Evaluation

https://github.com/naver/lispe
1•PaulHoule•14m ago•0 comments

ICE and Epstein

https://www.patreon.com/posts/ice-and-epstein-149619562
1•ortr•14m ago•0 comments

Claude Code for Infrastructure

https://www.fluid.sh/
2•aspectrr•14m ago•1 comments

Wayland by Default in 2026.1 EAP (Jetbrains)

https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2026/02/wayland-by-default-in-2026-1-eap/
1•politelemon•15m ago•0 comments

Announcing Command Book: A home for long-running terminal commands

https://commandbookapp.com
2•mikeckennedy•16m ago•0 comments

Perplexity was my favorite AI tool. Then it started lying to me

https://www.xda-developers.com/perplexity-was-my-favorite-ai-tool-then-it-started-lying-to-me/
1•speckx•16m ago•0 comments

A few CPU hardware bugs

https://www.taricorp.net/2026/a-few-cpu-bugs/
1•todsacerdoti•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LayerClaw – Lightweight observability for PyTorch training runs

https://github.com/layerclaw/layerclaw
1•prabhavsanga•17m ago•1 comments

Washington Post cuts a third of its staff in a blow to a legendary news brand

https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-staff-reduction-layoffs-cuts-923f87d4bd319c8a64b278165...
2•bluedino•17m ago•0 comments

User blowback convinces Adobe to keep supporting 30-year-old 2D animation app

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/adobe-reverses-decision-to-discontinue-animate-after-a-lo...
2•stalfosknight•17m 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/