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Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting (2011)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9o3QBg2xJXcRCxGjS/working-hurts-less-than-procrastinating-we-fear...
1•davikr•8s ago•0 comments

The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness [pdf]

https://philpapers.org/archive/LERTAF.pdf
1•danielmorozoff•2m ago•0 comments

The Impact of New Housing Supply on the Distribution of Rents

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/733977
1•littlexsparkee•3m ago•0 comments

Silicon Valley Is Turning into Its Own Worst Fear (2017)

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway
1•nz•4m ago•0 comments

Adventure Travel in Costa Rica Done Right

https://johnquam.substack.com/p/adventure-travel-in-costa-rica-done
1•headmonkey•5m ago•0 comments

How to Fine-Tune a Reasoning Model?

https://huggingface.co/papers/2604.14164
1•Anon84•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Readox – Turn web pages and PDFs into a playable reading queue

https://readox.ai/
2•siegers•9m ago•0 comments

When Students Believe That Personal Characteristics Can Be Developed (PDF, 2012)

https://thrive.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/Mindsets%20That%20Promote%20Resilience%20When%20St...
1•lucidplot•10m ago•0 comments

Science Home

https://sah.borca.ai/
1•parksb•10m ago•0 comments

Trump's reversal on day care upends a bipartisan push to lower costs

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/15/trump-childcare-abandoned-pledge/
1•doctaj•11m ago•0 comments

Failed Companies Are Selling Old Slack Chats and Email Archives to Train AI

https://gizmodo.com/failed-companies-are-selling-old-slack-chats-and-email-archives-to-train-ai-2...
2•01-_-•12m ago•1 comments

Babies Born from Dead Parents Will Increase with New Tech

https://www.404media.co/babies-born-from-dead-parents-will-increase-with-new-tech-are-we-ready/
1•salkahfi•16m ago•0 comments

Euro-Office: License compliance and what open source means

https://nextcloud.com/blog/euro-office-license-compliance-and-what-open-source-means/
1•maxloh•21m ago•0 comments

LingBot-Map: Geometric Context Transformer for Streaming 3D Reconstruction

https://github.com/Robbyant/lingbot-map
2•flux_w42•21m ago•0 comments

Modern Spectacle

https://px.philosopheasy.com/architecture-illusion-soral-media-control/
1•obscureline•21m ago•0 comments

Isaac Asimov: The Last Answer (1980)

https://www.highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/
1•genphy1976•22m ago•0 comments

Client-Led Game/Simulation Projects' Effects on Motivation and Career Readiness

https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3786353?af=R
1•salkahfi•24m ago•0 comments

Generative Drinker: An Idea for Improving Wine Compatibility

https://hajo.me/blog/2026/04/18/generative-drinker-an-idea-for-improving-wine-compatibility/
1•fxtentacle•24m ago•0 comments

A Japanese poet's diary helps scientists reconstruct solar cycles

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/18/nx-s1-5788782/how-a-japanese-poets-diary-helps-scientists-reconstr...
1•Brajeshwar•28m ago•0 comments

Value Numbering

https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/value-numbering/
2•tekknolagi•32m ago•0 comments

Graph RAG finds what's similar. We should aim for what's relevant

https://github.com/FlowElement-ai/m_flow
52•hjeffery•32m ago•5 comments

The Most Remarkable Case in Swedish UFO History [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nqAJrqvXlY
2•keepamovin•33m ago•0 comments

Why is my MacBook zapping me lately?

1•pavas•34m ago•0 comments

Atmospheric Aging and the Respiratory Toxicity of Nanoplastic Particles

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.5c00237
1•PaulHoule•35m ago•0 comments

EnsembleData – Social Media Scraping APIs, feedback!!

https://ensembledata.com/
1•slackwy•36m ago•1 comments

The Great Man-Made River of Libya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River
2•keiferski•37m ago•0 comments

Running a Minecraft Server and More on a 1960s Univac Computer

https://farlow.dev/2026/04/17/running-a-minecraft-server-and-more-on-a-1960s-univac-computer
1•brilee•38m ago•0 comments

Managing Complexity with Mycelium

https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-02-25-ai-at-scale.html
1•tosh•40m ago•0 comments

LogsGo – an experimental log ingestion/query project I built to learn

1•SaumyaCodes•49m ago•0 comments

Why Japan has such good railways

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-railways/
7•RickJWagner•50m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•11mo ago

Comments

thechao•11mo 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•11mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•11mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•11mo 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•11mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•11mo 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•11mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•11mo 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_•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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/