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Why do we become mathematicians?

https://maa.org/math-values/why-do-we-become-mathematicians/
1•the-mitr•35s ago•0 comments

Belgium's Latest Pirate Site-Blocking Order Spares DNS Providers

https://torrentfreak.com/belgiums-latest-pirate-site-blocking-order-spares-dns-providers/
1•gslin•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Morph-AI-Era – Turn CSV files into interactive dashboards instantly

https://morph-ai-era.online
1•prajjawal_123•2m ago•0 comments

An Interview with Quincy Larson

https://lijie2000.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-quincy-larson-from
1•TheRealAlex123•4m ago•0 comments

Jean Sibelius Finlandia (1899)

https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/354/finlandia
1•krbaccord94f•14m ago•1 comments

Laughing Gas Can Offer Immediate Relief from Depression, Study Finds

https://www.sciencealert.com/laughing-gas-can-offer-immediate-relief-from-depression-study-finds
1•thunderbong•14m ago•1 comments

Krita – open-source Painting Program

https://krita.org/en/
1•rammy1234•14m ago•0 comments

The Her Talking Phone May Have Arrived–She Speaks Chinese

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bytedance-launches-doubao-real-time-ai-voice-assistant...
1•defvar•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Drop – Self-destructing encrypted messages

https://privsen.com/secret-message
1•privsen•17m ago•1 comments

AI – For Building a Transformer Model

1•Keerthikamathi•25m ago•0 comments

Wiskerwood: Establish a home for your industrious mice

https://hoodedhorse.com/games/whiskerwood/
1•doener•28m ago•0 comments

How to get the launchpad back in macOS 26

https://www.launchie.app
1•nickfthedev•42m ago•0 comments

Doo – 0.2.0 Alpha Release

https://github.com/nynrathod/doolang
1•nynrathod•43m ago•1 comments

'The Fall of Icarus': How the remarkable shot was captured

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/05/science/fall-of-icarus-skydiver-image
1•ashishgupta2209•51m ago•1 comments

Automate GEO tracking by turning the browser into an API

https://twitter.com/rjchint/status/1997408201306931633
1•arjunchint•53m ago•1 comments

Making a Programming Language

https://github.com/Damny12/hopper
1•Damny12•55m ago•0 comments

rsyslog Goes AI First

https://www.rsyslog.com/rsyslog-goes-ai-first-a-new-chapter-begins/
1•pabs3•57m ago•0 comments

DIY 1-pixel compressed-sensing camera with LED source but no moving parts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE9AETSoPHw
1•gsf_emergency_6•1h ago•0 comments

Oscar Live Coding Environment

https://adam.zeloof.xyz/2025/11/07/oscar-live-coding-environment/
1•cristoperb•1h ago•0 comments

I built a free tool that extracts Go code semantically for LLM context

https://vinodhalaharvi.github.io/pure-go-prism/
1•vinodhalaharvi•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: I made an AI tool that applies to jobs via cold email

https://leeflytic.com/digital-market/agentic-jobplier
1•mohamedraheem•1h ago•2 comments

Are sperm banks in Denmark rejecting donors based on their IQ?

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/12/04/are-sperm-banks-in-denmark-rejecting-donors-based-o...
1•TMWNN•1h ago•0 comments

The Mundanity of Excellence

https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-an-ethnographic-report-on-stratification...
1•dvrp•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Monitor downloads and engagement in Figma Community

https://github.com/cyrus-cai/figmatrackjs
1•kii9999•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Geetanjali – RAG-powered ethical guidance from the Bhagavad Gita

https://geetanjaliapp.com
2•vnykmshr•1h ago•0 comments

Retool uses Loop to turn production data into AI roadmap decisions

https://www.braintrust.dev/blog/retool
1•mooreds•1h ago•0 comments

For US Businesses, Tariff Complexity Is "Death by a Thousand Papercuts"

https://www.cato.org/blog/us-businesses-tariff-complexity-death-thousand-papercuts
9•mooreds•1h ago•0 comments

Who has a right to the moon economy? Whoever gets there first

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/12/05/who-has-a-right-to-the-moon-economy-whoever-gets-the...
1•mooreds•1h ago•0 comments

Increasing code performance with LTO [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPGodf5hNoo
1•chii•1h ago•0 comments

US hits out at EU's 'suffocating regulations' after it fines Elon Musk's X

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kejzvw0o
3•begueradj•1h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•7mo ago

Comments

thechao•7mo 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•7mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•7mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•7mo 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•7mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•7mo 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•7mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•7mo 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_•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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/