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Zero Trace AI – private AI chat with nothing to subpoena

https://zerotraceai.org
1•OrPrivacyGuy•1m ago•0 comments

I have open-sourced gojaja, a CLI for local multi-agent collaboration

1•zpwsmile•4m ago•0 comments

US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers

https://noyb.eu/en/us-supreme-court-just-blew-eu-us-data-transfers
3•tomwas54•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vaghenu, a meter aware sloka-to-chant, TTS for Sanskrit

1•init0•6m ago•0 comments

Popping the GPU Bubble

https://moondream.ai/blog/popping-the-gpu-bubble
1•radq•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: No ads and noise from any page, get a clean AI reformat in one click

https://code.intellios.ai/cwsum/
1•coolwulf•8m ago•0 comments

Ferrari's marketing boss quits after troubled EV debut

https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/06/25/ferraris-marketing-boss-quits-after-troubled-ev-debu...
2•iancmceachern•9m ago•0 comments

A Berkeley AI professor makes provocative argument for decelerating AI research

https://www.fastcompany.com/91564629/a-berkeley-ai-professor-makes-a-provocative-argument-for-dec...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•11m ago•0 comments

The Body It Asked For – AI, hardware, and the long way back to atoms

https://saqiba.substack.com/p/the-body-it-asked-for
1•saqibanajam•11m ago•0 comments

Hollow-core fiber trial pushes 51.3 TB/s over 128mi with out signal regeneration

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/chinas-hollow-core-fiber-trial-pushes-51-3-tb-s-over-128-...
2•giuliomagnifico•12m ago•0 comments

Nimetic – Zero-JS Single Page Applications

https://yottadb.com/nimetic-zero-js-single-page-applications-with-nim-datastar-and-yottadb/
1•archargelod•13m ago•0 comments

Qwen3.5 2B burns all the output tokens while thinking

2•adithyaharish•14m ago•0 comments

Story about Crazy Frog [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K063gZvP5JU
2•modinfo•16m ago•1 comments

ILockBox: Offline Private Photo Vault and Video Locker

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ilockbox-photo-vault-locker/id1064360258
1•nitingohel•17m ago•0 comments

The bats working the pollinator night shift

https://www.batcon.org/a-world-tour-of-bat-pollination/
1•gscott•20m ago•0 comments

The end of the AArch64 desktop experiment

https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2026/06/26/the-end-of-the-aarch64-desktop-experiment/
3•signa11•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CI/Lock – signed evidence of what your CI ran

https://cilock.dev/
1•colek42•32m ago•0 comments

Why she have no nuance for AI [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDHJXDhkgUM
3•modinfo•41m ago•0 comments

An Explosion of AI Slop Is Pushing People Offline and Back into the Real World

https://www.inc.com/chris-morris/an-explosion-of-ai-slop-is-pushing-people-offline-and-back-into-...
4•1vuio0pswjnm7•47m ago•0 comments

Why Does the U.S. Still Own This Tiny Chunk of Washington Land Stuck to Canada?

https://pugetpress.com/2026/06/29/why-point-roberts-wa-isnt-part-of-canada/
4•naturalmovement•47m ago•0 comments

As a dev how do I avoid exposing IP through coding assistants?

1•dd-sharma•48m ago•1 comments

MarketNow

https://marketnow.site
1•eddyflores•50m ago•1 comments

Linux Network Performance Parameters

https://github.com/leandromoreira/linux-network-performance-parameters
1•grajmanu•52m ago•0 comments

Lawrence M. Krauss -A Universe from Nothing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwzbU0bGOdc
1•grajmanu•53m ago•0 comments

Australia's competition regulator sues Amazon over Prime subscription terms

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/australias-competition-regulator-takes-amazon-to-court-over-alleg...
4•1vuio0pswjnm7•55m ago•0 comments

AI Specialists Ready to Transform Your Workflow

https://github.com/msitarzewski/agency-agents
2•grajmanu•59m ago•0 comments

AI Data Centers Have Been Great for the Steel Industry, Now a Power Crisis Looms

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/ai-data-centers-power-competition-steel-48a17dbd
3•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

Can Architecture Ever Save Us from Sickness?

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/can-architecture-ever-save-us-from-sickness/
3•the-mitr•1h ago•1 comments

ICE Tracks Down Woman to Force Her to Delete Instagram Post

https://newrepublic.com/post/212340/ice-poll-worker-election-delete-instagram-post
14•HotGarbage•1h ago•1 comments

Tracking (and predicting) the World Cup in a circle

https://www.saj.ad/2026/wc
2•dajas•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