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Digital Simulation of Non-Hermitian Knotted Bands on Quantum Hardware

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26914
1•marysminefnuf•1m ago•0 comments

Kiorg: A neo filemanager with Vim keybind, zoxide-like teleport, and previews

https://github.com/houqp/kiorg
1•houqp•9m ago•0 comments

France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging

https://reclaimthenet.org/france-moves-to-break-encrypted-messaging
2•Cider9986•10m ago•0 comments

Artemis II Photo Timeline

https://artemistimeline.com/
2•surprisetalk•14m ago•1 comments

Mississippi's Air Quality Is Worsening Amid AI Data Center Boom, Report Finds

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippis-air-quality-is-worsening-amid-ai-data-center-bo...
1•gnabgib•15m ago•0 comments

Can memory-hard PoW still meaningfully reduce ASIC/GPU advantage?

https://pastebin.support.one/view/aba95c0b
2•TheBlocksmith•26m ago•1 comments

Drone Swarms Packed into Unassuming Containers Sought by DARPA

https://www.twz.com/news-features/drone-swarms-packed-into-unassuming-containers-sought-by-darpa
2•breve•26m ago•1 comments

Yarbo's promise to fix the robot mower that ran me over

https://www.theverge.com/tech/926989/yarbo-robot-lawn-mower-hack-company-update-security-promise
2•gnabgib•28m ago•0 comments

Getting Arrested in Japan

https://sundaicity.com/blogs/getting-arrested-in-japan
3•bane•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pitch Is Just Rhythm Sped Up [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9bFUocrm70
1•ersinesen•30m ago•0 comments

Matt Pietrek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Pietrek
1•stefan_•30m ago•0 comments

The Death of the Roadmap

https://debarshibasak.github.io/readables/blogs/death-of-roadmap.html
2•debarshri•33m ago•0 comments

Keats, Letters

https://sites.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Tintern07/KeatsLet.htm
1•highfrequency•35m ago•0 comments

Rust but Lisp

https://github.com/ThatXliner/rust-but-lisp
2•thatxliner•38m ago•2 comments

Qwench is a terminal typing game for Linux, Windows, Mac. Built with Crossterm.

https://github.com/BitPusher16/qwench
1•carodgers•38m ago•1 comments

War.gov/UFO/ UFO file download reference repo

https://github.com/dopper/nts-ufos
1•dopper•40m ago•0 comments

London's BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/05/09/londons-bt-tower-to-get-rooftop-swimming-pool/5237337
1•samizdis•41m ago•0 comments

The 90 Day disclosure policy is dead

https://blog.himanshuanand.com/2026/05/the-90-day-disclosure-policy-is-dead/
4•unknownhad•42m ago•0 comments

Blog Post Tells the Time

https://alexsci.com/blog/this-blog-post-tells-the-time/
1•saeedesmaili•45m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free OSS transcription app I made and found it's faster than wispr flow

https://mumbli.app/
3•fireharp•47m ago•0 comments

The Rise of Emotional Surveillance

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/05/worker-surveillance-emotion-ai/687029/
5•iugtmkbdfil834•51m ago•1 comments

Web Server on a Nintendo Wii

http://wii.sjmulder.nl/
1•adunk•52m ago•0 comments

Hugging Face's Clem Delangue: Stop Comparing Engines to Cars

https://www.turingpost.com/p/clem-delangue-hugging-face-ai-builders
1•gmays•53m ago•0 comments

Japan is deploying ultra-cheap cardboard drones built for swarm warfare

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/japan-is-deploying-ultra-cheap-cardboard-drones-built-...
2•_____k•53m ago•1 comments

Geography Is Four-Dimensional

https://sive.rs/4d
1•ColinWright•1h ago•0 comments

Feedback on my local-first AI assistant project?

https://github.com/joshuatic/voxel
1•joshuatic•1h ago•1 comments

Lies, damned lies, and Elastic's benchmarks

https://www.gouthamve.dev/lies-damned-lies-and-elastics-benchmarks/
1•gouthamve•1h ago•0 comments

A hacker ran me over with a robot lawn mower

https://www.theverge.com/tech/925696/yarbo-robot-lawn-mower-hack-remote-control-camera-access-mqtt
2•gnabgib•1h ago•0 comments

Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

https://jacquesmattheij.com/does-it-scale-who-cares/
1•downbad_•1h ago•1 comments

IRGC to generate revenue from undersea internet cables in Strait of Hormu

https://twitter.com/IranIntl_En/status/2053206979330392414
1•us321•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.
jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
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/