frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Trump Throws His Support Behind Flock Cameras: 'I Like Them'

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trump-throws-his-support-behind-flock-cameras-i-like-them/
1•valeg•1m ago•0 comments

The biggest dinosaurs couldn't sit on their eggs

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/titanosaur-eggs-9.7336841
1•BiraIgnacio•2m ago•0 comments

OpenAI and Anthropic Hit the Brakes

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/13/ai-labs-regulation-safety
1•kooi•4m ago•1 comments

AI Coding Dictionary

https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary
1•dnw•6m ago•0 comments

The Coming War on General Computation

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation
2•gregsadetsky•7m ago•0 comments

X.com busts Chinese bot farm, incl accounts making claims about AI data centers

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/policy/x-busts-200-000-strong-chinese-bot-farm-includi...
1•throwaway2037•7m ago•0 comments

Carterfone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone
3•gregsadetsky•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Spikeforge

https://spikeforge.net/
1•a0174•12m ago•0 comments

Can an R/C Car Hit 100k Scale Miles? Self Driving Edition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjQ59b9OKyg
1•jdalgetty•13m ago•0 comments

Robots protest rampant AI in Poland

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-robots-protest-rampant-ai-poland.html
1•jareklupinski•15m ago•0 comments

Math in the Movies – Sneakers (1998)

https://theworld.com/~reinhold/math/sneakers.adleman.html
1•walterbell•16m ago•0 comments

How the Eminem Show Made Me a Hip-Hop Fan

https://medium.com/theentertainmentbreakdown/how-the-eminem-show-made-me-a-hip-hop-fan-5e9a7e1838e7
1•raynchad•17m ago•0 comments

Why Society Tears Down Its Heroes

https://medium.com/theentertainmentbreakdown/on-the-demolition-of-heroes-aec8912d8c11
2•raynchad•17m ago•0 comments

Recursive Synthetic Improvement

https://twitter.com/zafstojano/status/2097689256961466486
1•gmays•19m ago•0 comments

Agent security starts before the first prompt

https://fewshotacademy.com/blog/secure-the-tools-around-your-agent
1•mangatgoyal•20m ago•0 comments

Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9204544/
1•andsoitis•21m ago•0 comments

X nuked my premium account out of nowhere

1•proc0•22m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How is AI actively a threat to humanity if it's only online?

3•CM30•25m ago•1 comments

Mental Time Travel

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/379/1913/20230406/109563/Measuring-episodic-memor...
1•andsoitis•25m ago•0 comments

Former CIA official found with $40M in gold bars reaches tentative plea deal

https://apnews.com/article/gold-bars-cia-official-virginia-7be1def515c9aa99326eab39cd8ff589
1•Jimmc414•28m ago•1 comments

I think Effect-TS is a strong fit for AI agent development

https://effect.website/
1•anshsingh020404•28m ago•0 comments

Dynamics in Mesoscopic Systems

https://www.ds.mpg.de/meso/en
1•andsoitis•29m ago•0 comments

Ask ChatGPT or Gemini the same "best X" twice, ~1/3 of the answer changes

https://github.com/jjoseph18/ai-recommendation-consistency
1•EpsilonJ•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: <15MB Local-first Interactive LaTeX Scratchpad in the Browser

https://telox.dev/app/scratchpad/
1•eigenblake•32m ago•0 comments

Thank you for your contribution to the model

https://dustycloud.org/blog/thank-you-for-your-contribution-to-the-model/
2•HotGarbage•32m ago•0 comments

Footnote – Xkcd (2016)

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Footnote
1•corvad•36m ago•0 comments

Three Body Orbits – 3,915 periodic three-body orbits, visualized

https://www.threebodyorbits.com/
2•thunderbong•38m ago•0 comments

The US is replacing every official latitude, longitude and height it publishes

https://spacedaily.com/s-the-united-states-is-replacing-every-official-latitude-longitude-and-hei...
3•ggm•39m ago•0 comments

Rat and Mouse Gazette: Nursing Care (1996)

https://www.rmca.org/Articles/nurse.htm
2•joebig•40m ago•0 comments

AI hypervigilance is now an omnipresent cognitive load for your users

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ai-hypervigilance-is-now-an-omnipresent-cognitive-load-for-yo...
1•cdrnsf•40m 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