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Discogo – Turn any logo or image into a 3D disco ball

https://discogo.vercel.app
1•nanxiaobei•1m ago•1 comments

'Pro Law Enforcement Bill' Clarity Passed Out of Committee

https://www.therage.co/clarity-act-senate-banking/
1•Cider9986•2m ago•0 comments

The Tech Bros Are Going to Etiquette School

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/slow-ventures-tech-etiquette-class-20feced9
1•Cider9986•2m ago•0 comments

Trump drops IRS lawsuit in exchange for DOJ $1.8B 'weaponization' fund

https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-dismisses-lawsuit-against-irs-court-filing-shows-2026-05-18/
3•TechTechTech•3m ago•0 comments

The Chinese EV standard winning globally is banned in the U.S.

https://restofworld.org/2026/us-china-ev-tech-ban-isolation/
2•speckx•4m ago•0 comments

Actively Hiring at OpenAI

https://openai.com/careers/search/
1•lizzeai•4m ago•0 comments

How Trump's crypto venture and Iran's top exchange use the same crypto networks

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/how-trumps-crypto-venture-irans-top-exchange-tapped-into-s...
1•thisisit•5m ago•0 comments

Nuclear Reactor Simulator

https://dalton-nrs.manchester.ac.uk/
1•debesyla•6m ago•0 comments

X accounts are limited to 50 posts and 200 replies a day unless they pay

https://www.engadget.com/2175771/x-free-accounts-limited-to-50-posts-and-200-replies-a-day/
1•cdrnsf•7m ago•0 comments

Python implementation for text generation using EEG signals from the brain

https://github.com/VanshShah1/Thought2Text
1•jsdjzvdns•7m ago•0 comments

Conditional Rendering over Nil Coalescing

https://blog.eliperkins.com/conditional-rendering-over-nil-coalescing/
1•ingve•8m ago•0 comments

Brilliant Polymaths, and the Advice They Left Behind(2017)

https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/historys-greatest-polymaths-and-the-advice-they-left-behind/
1•rolph•8m ago•0 comments

RWX now supports Codeberg and Forgejo

https://www.rwx.com/blog/codeberg-forgejo-support
1•tagraves•11m ago•0 comments

SIMD-accelerated integer-to-string conversion

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/05/18/simd-accelerated-integer-to-string-conversion/
1•ingve•12m ago•0 comments

PCs That Never Made It, Chapter 20 – Dec Rainbow, TI Professional, Victor 9000 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkQQ2eYXMhE
2•rbanffy•13m ago•1 comments

The tyranny of single page apps

https://blog.bidisaster.party/spas/
2•speckx•14m ago•0 comments

Skills in Web, iOS, and Android

https://x.ai/news/grok-skills
1•surprisetalk•14m ago•0 comments

Crypto industry lobbies to evade AML/CTF rules

https://www.standwithcrypto.org/eu/en/manifesto
4•MASNeo•17m ago•1 comments

PagePulse – AI UX review for your landing page

https://pagepulse.page/en
1•assafshe•18m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk loses lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-sam-altman-elon-musk-jury-trial-verdict-2026-5
2•Cider9986•18m ago•0 comments

Giving operational continuity to coding agents, not everything is about memory

https://aictx.org/
2•santism•19m ago•0 comments

The Mind of a Minotaur: Displaying Picasso's Dark Side

https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-mind-of-a-minotaur/
1•anarbadalov•20m ago•0 comments

Finding Your Voice: A Guide to Technical Communication

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2026/05/18/talking-about-tech.html
1•ColinEberhardt•21m ago•0 comments

GAX – A tool execution protocol to fix MCP token bloat and CLI auth

https://github.com/0sparsh2/GAX
2•0sparsh2•24m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is there a backup / mirror URL for github.com?

1•OhMeadhbh•25m ago•1 comments

DeepSeek V4 Flash: Bringing Frontier AI to the Home

https://blog.jonathanpage.com/
2•jonsoft•26m ago•0 comments

Fixing LLM Writing with Distribution Fine Tuning

https://rosmine.ai/2026/05/18/fixing-llm-writing-with-distribution-fine-tuning/
1•7777777phil•28m ago•0 comments

Near-Earth Asteroid 2026 JH2 close encounter [live stream] [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsPz2nOxDA4
2•wumms•28m ago•0 comments

How to land a Frontier lab job

https://vladfeinberg.com/2026/05/10/how-to-land-a-job-at-a-frontier-lab.html
1•georgehm•29m ago•0 comments

Molten Salt Reactors Move Closer to Reality After Breakthrough at U.S. Lab

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Molten-Salt-Reactors-Move-Closer-to-Reality-After-Brea...
3•ironyman•29m 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.
jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
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/