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1•koito17•31s ago•0 comments

Senator proposes to widen US ban on Chinese autos

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/republican-senator-proposes-widen-us-ban-ch...
1•ilamont•3m ago•0 comments

Microeconomics in Public Policy: A Practitioner's View

https://www.pmo.gov.sg/newsroom/essay-by-sm-lee-hsien-loong-microeconomics-in-public-policy-a-pra...
1•lemaitre-ari•3m ago•0 comments

Induced-Fit Retrieval: A 1958 biochemistry concept beats RAG at multi-hop

https://github.com/emil-celestix/celestix-ifr
1•celestix•8m ago•0 comments

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19141
1•haltingproblem•11m ago•0 comments

AI Lessons from the Cockpit: Takeaways from Our Midwest Air Tour with Shirley

https://blog.airplane.team/p/lessons-from-the-cockpit-key-takeaways
1•atlex2•14m ago•2 comments

From Homo Faber to Homo Fictor

https://www.newcartographies.com/p/from-homo-faber-to-homo-fictor
1•wigwamnh•17m ago•0 comments

Analyzing Geekbench 6 under Intel's BOT

https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2026/03/analyzing-geekbench-6-under-intels-bot/
2•hajile•19m ago•0 comments

Anthropic Leak Was Not Related to Bun, Just Developer Error

https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2039168928145109343
2•jbegley•19m ago•0 comments

Gundalf, young IT assistant trolls Hungary's secret service

https://old.reddit.com/r/europeanunion/comments/1s82nn2/this_is_breaking_news_from_orb%C3%A1ns_hu...
2•rbalint•25m ago•0 comments

Retro Rewind: A Boring Video Game I Can't Put Down

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/03/retro-rewind-game-video-store-nostalgia/686634/
1•petethomas•25m ago•0 comments

Aristocracy and Hostage Capital

https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/the-aristocrat-as-hostage
2•barry-cotter•31m ago•0 comments

The age of vertical models is here

https://twitter.com/eoghan/status/2037197696075981124
1•gmays•32m ago•0 comments

Asia's factory activity slows on cost pressure from Iran war

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-economy-asias-factory-activity-slows-cost-pressure-ira...
2•onemoresoop•34m ago•0 comments

Yes, Aliens Are Here (X-Video: Senator Babet Australia)

https://twitter.com/senatorbabet/status/2039123414582243495
1•SilentM68•40m ago•0 comments

Google warns quantum computing may break Bitcoin earlier than thought

https://www.theblock.co/post/395814/google-quantum-computing-earlier
4•ryan_j_naughton•40m ago•0 comments

Julia Minson – How to Disagree Better – Talks at Google [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GigRB6bZ0MI
1•vismit2000•40m ago•0 comments

Oracle is cutting up to 30k employees to pay for AI data centres

https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-layoffs-march-2026
2•yogthos•41m ago•1 comments

What's Cch? Reverse Engineering Claude Code's Request Signing

https://a10k.co/b/reverse-engineering-claude-code-cch.html
1•tcdent•41m ago•0 comments

How to Fingerprint Users

https://paradisefacade.com/blog/2026/3/9/how-to-fingerprint-users
1•winocm•42m ago•0 comments

The state of AI safety in four fake graphs

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g4LMH3c6DysazYbFn/the-state-of-ai-safety-in-four-fake-graphs
1•allenleee•43m ago•0 comments

Speed is only useful if you're going in the right direction

https://matthewboston.com/blog/speed-is-only-useful-if-youre-going-in-the-right-direction/
2•bostonaholic•44m ago•0 comments

glab-overseer: GitLab CI pipelines terminal watcher

https://github.com/arvindell/glab-overseer
2•arvindell•46m ago•2 comments

FFmpeg Is Moving to Rust

https://twitter.com/FFmpeg/status/2039115531744334180
1•codepawl•48m ago•1 comments

Anthropic open sourced Claude Code

https://layer5.io/blog/engineering/the-claude-code-source-leak-512000-lines-a-missing-npmignore-a...
2•miacycle•50m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw: The complete guide to building, training and living with your AI agent

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/openclaw-the-complete-guide-to-building
2•gmays•50m ago•0 comments

The Four Color Theorem with Near-Linear Time Coloring

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24880
1•robinhouston•52m ago•0 comments

The Norwegian Billionaire Who Broke the Iditarod

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/iditarod-billionaire-expedition-class-rokke/
2•petethomas•56m ago•0 comments

Lightning Map

https://map.blitzortung.org/
1•Cider9986•1h ago•2 comments

Apple Will Enable iOS 18 Security Updates for iOS 26-Capable Devices

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-will-push-out-rare-backported-patches-to-protect-ios-18-users-f...
3•tech234a•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•11mo ago

Comments

thechao•11mo 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•11mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•11mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•11mo 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•11mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•11mo 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•11mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•11mo 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_•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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/