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Medicare Will Pay $50k for Your Heart Attack. It Should Pay $100 to Prevent It

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/123553?trw=no
1•brandonb•33s ago•0 comments

Tinycap, a tiny Mac screen recorder that makes PR-sized GIFs and MP4s

https://soleo.github.io/tinycap/
1•soleo•2m ago•0 comments

British intelligence misplaced 1000s of storage devices still can't say how many

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/30/british-intelligence-agency-misplaced-thousands-o...
1•beardyw•2m ago•0 comments

Ghostly Cat's Head Nebula Lurks Within Sight of NASA's Hubble, Webb

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/ghostly-cats-head-nebula-lurks-within-sight-of-nasas-hub...
1•bookofjoe•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Claude Code guards built from my agent's repeated mistakes

https://github.com/hadiux0295/claude-code-mistake-guards
1•hunis•3m ago•1 comments

Krillion

https://krillion.io/
2•thunderbong•4m ago•0 comments

Anthropic Cracking Down on Video Game Rewrites

https://twitter.com/chasmmmmmmmmmmm/status/2116062991686721968
1•jacquesm•5m ago•0 comments

UI like Spiderverse

https://www.dnbls.com/blog/ui-at-12fps
1•unchar1•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Beolis – Manage your coding AI agents

https://beolis.com
2•fabioz•6m ago•0 comments

A Requiem for Bumble

https://residualthoughts.substack.com/p/a-requiem-for-bumble
1•whittle_away•6m ago•0 comments

Northflank PaaS: Security Incident - Disable/rotate all keys

https://status.northflank.com/cmvv0rn5a092f14rutwccodpp
1•scblzn•6m ago•0 comments

Bambu Studio MCP

https://dmontgomery40.github.io/bambu-printer-mcp/
1•malfist•6m ago•0 comments

Legal exploits may emerge at scale

https://www.felixringe.com/
1•nikwen•7m ago•1 comments

Does working less explain Europe's GDP per capita gap with America?

https://philippdubach.com/posts/us-europe-productivity-working-hours/
2•7777777phil•8m ago•0 comments

Gemini Computer Use API

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/computer-use
1•thisisauserid•9m ago•0 comments

Neal Stephenson on AI and What Comes Next [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii-aeW5pHPQ
3•justin66•9m ago•0 comments

Design the interface for functionality not familiarity

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/10/10.html
2•dverlaeckt80•15m ago•0 comments

Autonomous drone chases a person through a forest without GPS, maps, or cloud

https://www.techspot.com/news/114361-watch-autonomous-drone-chase-person-through-forest-without.html
1•pseudalopex•15m ago•1 comments

Do At-Proto Users Know This Is Public?

https://melaniekat.com/blog/public-on-pds/
3•ibobev•16m ago•0 comments

Smart Audio for the Smart Home

https://computer.rip/2021-11-06-smart-audio-for-the-smart-home.html
1•ibobev•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Every Permutation of a Deck of Cards

https://mrrc.cc/52!/
1•mrrccc•17m ago•1 comments

Some Observations on Agent Coordination

https://align.lawyer/resources/agent-coordination
1•sam256•17m ago•1 comments

Mastering CSS Shapes with Border-Shape for Dynamic Designs

https://blog.master.dev/two-circles-one-connection-and-border-shape/
1•ibobev•18m ago•0 comments

VSCode delayed auto-updates don't apply to "trusted" publishers like Microsoft

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_123#_delayed-extension-auto-updates:~:text=Note%3A%20Thi...
2•sensanaty•18m ago•0 comments

Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's code

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/cisco-gives-27-year-old-engineer-unlimited-ai...
2•taubek•19m ago•0 comments

Mr. Robot: Red Wheelbarrow

https://archive.org/details/mrrobotredwheelb0000esma
1•tylerdane•20m ago•1 comments

Is a $100K salary good enough in your state?

https://salary-statistics.netlify.app/us
2•rlatkdrktkd•20m ago•0 comments

AI Panic Rhymes with Mercantilism, AI Payoff Anywhere? Food 4 Agile Thought 568

https://age-of-product.com/food-agile-thought-568-ai-panic/
1•swolpers•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Strim – a Swift/MLX model server for coding agents on Apple Silicon

https://github.com/megasoft1978/strim-engine
1•megasoft78•22m ago•0 comments

Local agent with multivendors, free, you own your context

https://safata.ai/
2•victorzhangeu•23m ago•1 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