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What changed in MSVC's implementation of std:string from the 2022 copy of RE4B?

1•cstyler•1m ago•0 comments

Anthropic Filed the Most Alarming Risk Disclosure in IPO History

https://www.disruptionbanking.com/2026/10/05/anthropic-filed-the-most-alarming-risk-disclosure-in...
1•bmcdresson•2m ago•0 comments

Lazy Websites

https://thejollyteapot.com/2026/10/04/lazy-websites/
1•speckx•2m ago•0 comments

Man caught with 300 tortoises and 77 parrots bound for Malta at Sicilian port

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/05/man-caught-with-tortoises-parrots-bound-malta-sicil...
1•bookofjoe•2m ago•0 comments

Walden [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPRKPmvYsHw
1•focused_morning•4m ago•1 comments

Pop-up ad allegedly delaying fatal heart attack call sparks China debate

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3367793/pop-ad-accused-delaying-l...
2•surprisetalk•5m ago•0 comments

Red, Green, Remove: Outside-In Tests for Coding Agents

https://www.imaurer.com/writing/red-green-remove-outside-in-tests/
2•imaurer•5m ago•0 comments

"I'm Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry"

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/embarrassed-by-tech/
2•Brajeshwar•6m ago•0 comments

Coral Reef-Like Rock Layers on Mars Reveal Ancient Climate Secrets

https://nautil.us/coral-reef-like-rock-layers-on-mars-reveal-ancient-climate-secrets-1285515
1•Brajeshwar•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Jurl – curl that reads the page for you

https://jurl.dev/
2•rayoplateado•7m ago•1 comments

Explaining Hall-effect, TMR, and other new types of "mechanical" switches

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/the-hows-and-whys-of-non-mechanical-mechanical-keyboard-s...
1•Brajeshwar•7m ago•0 comments

What on Earth are you dooming about?

https://world.hey.com/dhh/what-on-earth-are-you-dooming-about-386cc1da
1•tosh•8m ago•0 comments

Ada Lovelace answered the big questions about AI

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/05/opinion/ada-lovelace-ai.html
1•ripe•11m ago•0 comments

Nvidia's $20B licensing deal with Groq faces lawsuit from jilted engineers

https://www.ft.com/content/93ee425d-9ac7-4543-8cc9-fef2e0670787
2•JumpCrisscross•12m ago•0 comments

AI-Ready Data: 4 Foundations for More Reliable Enterprise AI

https://devnavigator.com/2026/10/05/ai-ready-data-foundations/
1•thescienceguy93•12m ago•0 comments

TaxCalcBench: Can AI file your taxes?

https://taxcalcbench.ai/
1•michaelrbock•13m ago•0 comments

One of the reasons learning Arabic is so hard (صعب)

https://claude.ai/artifact/3siWSWUruHevarmRMZ5pHr
2•tzury•13m ago•0 comments

Mollie Pay by Bank

https://www.mollie.com/gb/payments/payment-methods/pay-by-bank
2•TechTechTech•15m ago•0 comments

MusicBrainz Picard 3.0

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/changelog/
2•pluc•16m ago•0 comments

How fast is Python 3.15?

https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/how-fast-is-python-3-15
2•ibobev•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: GoodStanding, free diagnostic for nonprofits auto-revoked by the IRS

https://goodstanding.thecompound.tech
1•kyisaiah47•16m ago•0 comments

Destroying all of humanity is hard work, even for a superintelligence

https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2026/10/destroying-all-of-humanity-is-hard-work.html
1•ibobev•17m ago•0 comments

Counting Elements in CSS: Using Sibling-Count and Hacks

https://blog.master.dev/transferring-sibling-count-to-a-parent-element/
1•ibobev•17m ago•0 comments

Building a Faster (Rust-Based) Python Driver for ScyllaDB

https://www.scylladb.com/2026/09/28/building-a-faster-rust-based-python-driver/
1•tzach•18m ago•0 comments

Om Malik, Last Humanist

https://logranmar.substack.com/p/om-malik-last-humanist
2•speckx•20m ago•0 comments

I turned Facebook into a video game

https://domdefense.com
1•skellertor•21m ago•1 comments

Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1

https://floreal.tech/blog/2026/making-a-gtk-app-in-haskell-part-1/
3•Vosporos•22m ago•0 comments

Cloudflare Web Search API

https://developers.cloudflare.com/web-search/
1•gregzeng95•22m ago•1 comments

Machine Identity Attestation and Auth for Bare Metal and Virtualised Systems

https://infisical.com/blog/machine-identity-attestation-bare-metal
1•FinnLobsien•22m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Which Distro with Nividia GPU?

2•tietjens•23m ago•2 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