frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Show HN: My app just won best iOS Japanese learning tool of 2025 award

https://skerritt.blog/best-japanese-learning-tools-2025-award-show/
1•wahnfrieden•1m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Kiss – code-complexity feedback for LLM coding agents

https://github.com/dsweet99/kiss
1•dspub99•4m ago•0 comments

Playing with Turmites: better than crypto/rand?

https://blog.vrypan.net/2025/12/28/playing-with-turmites-better-than-crypto-rand/
2•vrypan•8m ago•1 comments

Apple retires 25 products, ends iconic iPhone SE era

https://news.az/news/apple-retires-25-products-ends-iconic-iphone-se-era
2•doener•8m ago•0 comments

Curator 'shocked' by Melbourne pitch performance in Ashes

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/sport/582828/curator-shocked-by-melbourne-pitch-performance-in-ashes
2•tigerlily•15m ago•0 comments

ThinkTank, an "idea processor" that launched a religion (of outliners)

https://stonetools.ghost.io/thinktank-dos/
2•ChristopherDrum•22m ago•0 comments

Shields.io Uses the GitHub API

https://shields.io/blog/token-pool
2•angristan•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DeviceGPT – AI-powered Android device monitor with real data

1•teamzlab•23m ago•0 comments

The brain decides what to remember with sequential molecular timers

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-11-brain-reveals-sequentially-molecular-timers.html
1•PaulHoule•28m ago•0 comments

The Question Nobody Asks

https://aliveness.kunnas.com/articles/the-question-nobody-asks
1•ekns•28m ago•0 comments

Multi-Tenant SaaS's Wildcard TLS: An Overview of DNS-01 Challenges

https://www.skeptrune.com/posts/wildcard-tls-for-multi-tenant-systems/
1•skeptrune•30m ago•0 comments

Fast Cvvdp Implementation in C

https://github.com/halidecx/fcvvdp
2•todsacerdoti•32m ago•0 comments

The Sociology of the Crease

https://www.sebs.website/blog/the-sociology-of-the-crease
2•Incerto•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: SecureNow – Security Fixes You Can Apply Today

https://www.securenow.dev
1•pelmenibenni•39m ago•0 comments

How to Complain

https://outerproduct.net/trivial/2024-03-25_complain.html
3•ysangkok•39m ago•1 comments

How to never make a bad decision

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ni9EOFM4-rADFT-cJHKUJUod8408zPk4zE-6IIHB4kU/edit?usp=sharing
1•PhilosophyForAI•43m ago•1 comments

Release age v1.3.0: post-quantum (and more)

https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/releases/tag/v1.3.0
1•birdculture•43m ago•0 comments

CEOs are hugely expensive. Why not automate them?

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2023/05/ceos-salaries-expensive-automate-robots
75•nis0s•45m ago•55 comments

Rethinking Tools in MCP

https://cra.mr/rethinking-the-definition-of-tools-in-mcp/
1•jshchnz•46m ago•0 comments

Spherical Cow

https://lib.rs/crates/spherical-cow
9•Natfan•51m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Golazo – Live soccer updates in your terminal

https://github.com/0xjuanma/golazo
2•rocajuanma•52m ago•0 comments

Slaughtering Competition Problems with Quantifier Elimination

https://grossack.site/2021/12/22/qe-competition.html
6•todsacerdoti•52m ago•0 comments

Airlines call in psychologists to stop passengers risking their lives for bags

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/12/27/airlines-call-psychologists-passengers-risking-li...
2•elsewhen•53m ago•1 comments

62 years in the making: NYC's newest water tunnel nears the finish line

https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2025/11/09/water--dep--tunnels-
24•eatonphil•57m ago•5 comments

Show HN: Upload a song and get a finished music video (no editing, no prompts)

https://musicvideogenerator.app/
2•hexadecimal•1h ago•1 comments

Halifax video game workers form first Ubisoft union in North America

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/ubisoft-forms-first-union-north-america-halifax-9.7028674
3•cf100clunk•1h ago•0 comments

Two strangers. A terrorist bomb. An extraordinary tale of courage

https://bungalow-magazine.com/p/the-bench-2f5e
1•rmason•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Thingo

https://thingoboard.com
1•jryan49•1h ago•0 comments

As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/28/nx-s1-5656190/ai-chips-memory-prices-ram
20•geox•1h ago•9 comments

Boost.MultiIndex Refactored

http://bannalia.blogspot.com/2025/12/boostmultiindex-refactored.html
1•ibobev•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•8mo ago

Comments

thechao•8mo 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•8mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•8mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•8mo 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•8mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•8mo 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•8mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•8mo 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_•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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/