frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Optimizing LLVM's Bump Allocator

https://maskray.me/blog/2026-06-28-optimizing-llvm-bump-allocator
1•jandeboevrie•1m ago•0 comments

Basecoat 1.0

https://github.com/hunvreus/basecoat/releases/tag/1.0.0
1•dabinat•2m ago•0 comments

Trillion-Dollar Borrowing Binge Lifting the Stock Market to Risky Heights

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/the-trillion-dollar-borrowing-binge-lifting-the-stock-market-t...
1•petethomas•6m ago•0 comments

Australia investigating five social media giants for not enforcing ban on kids

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/06/29/australia-investigating-five-social-media-gi...
2•defrost•10m ago•0 comments

Amazon seller reveals shadow bribery market within Amazon

https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/06/24/amazon-seller-reveals-rare-glimpse-of-shadow-bribery-market/
1•Gaishan•10m ago•0 comments

'Superallowed' alpha decay seen for the first time

https://physicsworld.com/a/superallowed-alpha-decay-seen-for-the-first-time/
2•visha1v•12m ago•0 comments

New model of ocean waves sheds light on the spread of microplastic pollution

https://physicsworld.com/a/new-model-of-ocean-waves-sheds-fresh-light-on-the-spread-of-microplast...
2•visha1v•13m ago•0 comments

PCB-QA: Evaluating LLMs over the First PCB Design Question-Answer Dataset

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23704
2•teleforce•21m ago•0 comments

The 1000-mile handshake from Aden to Mangalore

https://drbhaskardasgupta1.substack.com/p/the-1000-mile-handshake
2•trojanalert•21m ago•0 comments

From Prompts to Loops: Building Autonomous Coding Agents

https://animeshgaitonde.medium.com/from-prompts-to-loops-building-autonomous-coding-agents-6135bf...
2•animesh371g•26m ago•0 comments

"Warming Hole" Heat Content Variations Are Caused by Ocean Heat Transport

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025GL118383
5•baxtr•33m ago•0 comments

392-Year-Old Bonsai Tree That Survived the Hiroshima Atomic Blast (2024)

https://www.openculture.com/2024/05/this-392-year-old-bonsai-tree-survived-the-hiroshima-atomic-b...
4•vednig•37m ago•0 comments

'Down from Londoners' Are Transforming England's Seaside Towns

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-26/londoners-escape-to-england-s-seaside-raises-h...
2•petethomas•40m ago•0 comments

We Built Osmium for Scale

https://osmium.chat/blog/how-we-built-osmium-for-scale/
2•ateesdalejr•41m ago•0 comments

Remember SCANTRON? How did that work? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2RvPFvR-CI
3•fortran77•42m ago•0 comments

My New Life with the Palantir Chore Coat

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/palantir-chore-coat/687686/
3•colinprince•42m ago•0 comments

PCB-Bench: Benchmarking LLMs for PCB Placement and Routing (ICLR 2026)

https://github.com/digailab/PCB-Bench
3•teleforce•43m ago•0 comments

Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

https://nonogra.ph/age-verification-is-just-a-precursor-to-attribution-of-speech-06-29-2026
103•arkhiver•44m ago•19 comments

MFM: PINN based Motion Foundation Model

https://huggingface.co/JuSeongvin/pinn
2•urgentINC•48m ago•0 comments

Breaking the Tokenizer Barrier: On-Policy Distillation Across Model Families

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09456
2•Jimmc414•48m ago•0 comments

What Should We Optimize Away?

https://www.autodidacts.io/holistic-optimization/
3•Tomte•50m ago•0 comments

Collider: A meson package manager – A hash proves the bytes, not the source

https://collider.ee/blog/2026-06-28-1500_a_hash_proves_the_bytes_not_the_source/#a-hash-proves-th...
2•mog_dev•52m ago•0 comments

An Open Letter to Pete Buttigieg

https://richprocida.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-pete-buttigieg
2•RichProcida•57m ago•0 comments

SpaceX just landed in 401(k)s due to key index rule changes

https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/spacex-401k-anthropic-openai-ipo-index-fund-rules
4•voxadam•1h ago•0 comments

GraphQL MCP Server and GraphiQL Plugins

https://graphql-mcp.com/
3•robjampar•1h ago•1 comments

OpenAI limits latest ChatGPT product to Trump-approved customers

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/artificial-intelligence/2026/06/26/openai-limits-its-latest-...
5•MadrasTh0rn•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Self hosting a modern LLM stack

https://github.com/raiyanyahya/llmaker
4•sleepynoodle•1h ago•1 comments

Germans are researching their Nazi past as the far right urges them to move on

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/28/europe/germans-nazi-past-far-right-intl
4•Tomte•1h ago•1 comments

How can engineering leaders avoid becoming Bond villains?

https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/26/paging-charity-how-can-engineering-leaders-avoid-becoming-b...
4•backlit4034•1h ago•0 comments

The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FZy1lBNykA
2•locusm•1h 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