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Show HN: Game Boy on the Beam – A DMG Emulator in Pure Elixir

https://gb-dmg.live/
1•douglascorrea•57s ago•0 comments

Introduction to ScreamTracker 3.21 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPK7s8aC3kg
1•andsoitis•7m ago•0 comments

Equities surpass real estate as top US wealth driver for first time since WW2

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/equities-surpass-real-estate-top-us-wealth-driver-first-...
1•littlexsparkee•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Discord-delete – Bulk-delete Discord messages from your data export

https://github.com/DatCodeMania/discord-delete
1•DatCodeMania•8m ago•1 comments

iFacts Exposes 21,000 Sensitive Files of South African Citizens

https://write-ups.security-chu.com/2026/07/iFacts-Exposes-21000-Sensitive-Files-of-South-African-...
1•news_rt•10m ago•0 comments

Doom Using Regular Expressions

https://4rh1t3ct0r7.github.io/doom-regex/
1•Buildstarted•10m ago•0 comments

Ponytail Skill for Claude Code: Does It Cut Tokens

https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/07/ponytail-skill-claude-tested/
2•ankitg12•11m ago•1 comments

Sam Altman says people don't want an AI to act as CEO

https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-ceo-humans-work-future-2026-7
2•vrganj•13m ago•1 comments

OpenAI's rogue agent compromised a customer at a second tech firm

https://www.reuters.com/business/openais-rogue-agent-compromised-an-account-second-tech-firm-sour...
2•juunge•14m ago•0 comments

Advanced Codeowners Patterns to Kill Review Fatigue

https://gitdash.dev/blog/advanced-codeowners-patterns-review-automation
1•ankitg12•15m ago•0 comments

The Noonday Devil

https://porticoquarterly.com/book/the-noonday-devil/
1•lermontov•15m ago•0 comments

Tinycast – a tiny, native macOS launcher

https://abue-ammar.github.io/tinycast/
1•xiaoape•15m ago•0 comments

ICE Arrests Surge at Airports arresting spouses of American tech workers

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/ice-arrests-airports-visa-overstay.html
2•Alien1Being•15m ago•0 comments

eBay agreed to pay $50M to couple sent cockroaches, bloody pig mask

https://www.clickondetroit.com/business/2026/07/28/ebays-agreed-to-pay-nearly-50-million-to-coupl...
1•Alien1Being•19m ago•0 comments

Headroom cut 39% of my tokens and raised my Claude bill

https://brandonbarker.me/writing/headroom-fewer-tokens-bigger-bill
3•ProjectBarks•20m ago•0 comments

Claude Mythos Preview Finds Vulnerability in Weakened Form of AES

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/politics/anthropic-ai-encryption-security-aes.html
1•theCricketer•20m ago•0 comments

AT1C is an open protocol for cryptographically verifiable human authorisation

https://github.com/at1c-protocol/at1c-protocol-official/blob/main/docs/README.md
1•1obituary•22m ago•0 comments

VJamm 2 Coldcut set rundown [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II_2KKYlEMQ
1•gregsadetsky•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Self-hosted AI gateway – MCP, budget, PII, smart router, fallback

https://github.com/ilter-ai/ilter
1•ykocaman•25m ago•0 comments

Three big AI trends collide

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/09/ai-trends-fable-5-sol-grok-china-us
2•gmargari•29m ago•0 comments

Commentary on N Guilty Men

https://medium.com/luminasticity/commentary-on-n-guilty-men-fc47d9dd0674
1•bryanrasmussen•34m ago•0 comments

The Cost of China's Free A.I

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/opinion/ai-china-us-free-models.html
1•kuboble•35m ago•0 comments

Spacesphere Live

https://spacesphere.sygnito.com/en
1•SYGNITO•36m ago•0 comments

Ran Moonshot's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 on a GPU-less mini-PC

https://github.com/ferrumox/rabbit
1•manuelslemos•39m ago•0 comments

AIs Don't Take Showers

https://chipx86.blog/2026/07/26/ais-dont-take-showers/
2•bw86•40m ago•1 comments

Proofchain – verify any database's history without trusting the operator

https://github.com/cipherxsniper/proofchain
2•cipherxsniper•41m ago•0 comments

Mapping CVEs to Mitre ATT&CK Techniques

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25572
3•adulau•51m ago•1 comments

Folding Paper Globes

https://foldingglobes.com/globes
2•dango2506•52m ago•0 comments

U of T mathematician Jacob Tsimerman awarded prestigious Fields Medal

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/nobel-prize-mathematics-u-t-mathematician-jacob-tsimerman-awarded-pr...
1•gregsadetsky•53m ago•0 comments

Chemical recycling plants closing in EU and US

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/chemical-recycling-plants-closing-in-eu-and-us/4023904.article
2•latexr•58m 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