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Show HN: EU AI Radar – 60-second self-check for EU AI Act exposure

https://euaiactnews.live/
1•reavid•21s ago•0 comments

The Gamer and the Nihilist: An analysis of Product Hunt, 2014 – 2021 (2022)

https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/
1•thinkingemote•2m ago•0 comments

AuroriaLink

https://github.com/Sebastien-VZN/auroria_link
1•SebSeb83•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Experimenting with perspective-based discussions (city,country,global)

1•civichalls•3m ago•0 comments

Consume fewer tokens and increase efficiency

https://edwardbx.com/articles/token-efficiency/
1•crassus_ed•4m ago•1 comments

Kickstarter's CEO stands by 4-day week remote team, sometimes backfires

https://fortune.com/2026/03/03/kickstarter-ceo-pros-cons-four-day-work-week-sometimes-backfires/
1•iancmceachern•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Move 37 – A strategy game inspired by AlphaGo's Move 37

https://www.movets.site/
1•MUISIK•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Retro – active context curator for coding agents

https://github.com/ImanHashemi/retro
2•imanhashemi•9m ago•0 comments

How OpenClaw Is Rebuilding the Claw Machine Industry with Software

https://clawsifyai.com/
1•V_Shukla•14m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Book Collage Creator

https://inktide.app/collage
1•sd9•14m ago•0 comments

How are we preparing for the Long Web?

https://brennan.day/how-are-we-preparing-for-the-long-web/
1•marbartolome•15m ago•0 comments

Oxyde ORM – a type-safe, Pydantic-centric asynchronous ORM with a Rust core

https://github.com/mr-fatalyst/oxyde
1•0x1997•17m ago•0 comments

The Dangerous Illusion of AI Coding? – Jeremy Howard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHBEQ-Ryo24
1•terrorbilly•24m ago•0 comments

Fooling Go's X.509 Certificate Verification

https://danielmangum.com/posts/fooling-go-x509-certificate-verification/
1•hasheddan•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Finance Sentiment CLI – Reddit/X/Polymarket sentiment from the terminal

https://adanos.org/finance-sentiment-cli
1•Adanos•25m ago•0 comments

Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario

https://chrisclapham.com/blog/nuclear-war-an-llm-scenario
2•huey77•29m ago•0 comments

Al Jazeera investigation: Iran girls' school targeting likely 'deliberate'

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab-girls-school-strike-as-israel-us-den...
1•zahirbmirza•32m ago•1 comments

AI Coding Startup Cursor Hits $2B Annual Sales Rate

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-02/cursor-recurring-revenue-doubles-in-three-mont...
1•arberavdullahu•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Reeyee.ai – AI image style transformer

https://reeyee.ai/
1•jokera•33m ago•0 comments

Setback for the Commission: EU MEPs let Chat Control fail

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Setback-for-the-Commission-EU-MEPs-let-chat-control-fail-11197237.html
4•vrganj•38m ago•0 comments

I Left

https://admin.obsidian-neural.com/
1•innermost47•40m ago•1 comments

Algorithmica – an open-access web book on CS

https://en.algorithmica.org/
1•infelixPuer•45m ago•0 comments

GoForGo Updates – Rustlings Style TUI to Learn Go

https://tech.stonecharioteer.com/posts/2026/goforgo-updates/
2•stonecharioteer•45m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Snowbin – A Mindmap-Based Social Platform Built with Lisp

https://www.snowbin.net/
1•rrepo•45m ago•5 comments

Show HN: PowerVerb – rewrite weak resume bullets with stronger action verbs

https://www.resumeactionverbs.com
1•visiohex•48m ago•0 comments

Show HN: First API for orbital compute scheduling with real physics

https://rotastellar.com/blog/shipping-first-orbital-compute-scheduler/
1•subhadipmitra•49m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Nova – AI terminal that writes, fixes, and ships your code

2•Bridgeye•49m ago•4 comments

Show HN: TerraViz – Real-time flights, earthquakes, ISS on one map

https://www.terraviz.live/
1•cvaambikapur•51m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I no longer monitor my coding agents, my desktop pet does

https://github.com/SwarmPack/SwarmWatch
1•prastik•53m ago•1 comments

DIY YouTuber powers an EV using 500 disposable vapes

https://www.notebookcheck.net/DIY-YouTuber-powers-an-EV-using-500-disposable-vapes.1239016.0.html
2•WM6v•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•10mo ago

Comments

thechao•10mo 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•10mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•10mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•10mo 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•10mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•10mo 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•10mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•10mo 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_•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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/