frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

People's Choice Award – Wildlife Photographer of the Year

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/peoples-choice
1•Tomte•1m ago•0 comments

RocketMapper Satellite Tracker

https://rocketmapper.com/satellites
1•jonbaer•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Got a tough conversation coming up? This AI app will help you prepare

https://toughconversations.app/
1•ddesposito•2m ago•0 comments

Claude Code gets 'safer' auto mode

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/900201/anthropic-claude-code-auto-mode
1•datadrivenangel•2m ago•0 comments

Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/3/11.html
1•zdw•2m ago•0 comments

China still on track to supplant US as No 1 economy in 10 years

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3347863/china-still-track-supplant-us-worlds-n...
1•mikhael•2m ago•0 comments

IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses

https://www.engadget.com/wearables/ixis-autofocusing-lenses-multifocal-glasses-ces-2026-212608427...
1•andsoitis•4m ago•0 comments

Automatically generate all 3D print files for organizing a drawer

https://geniecrate.com/
1•woktalk•4m ago•0 comments

Shader Development Studio

https://www.shader.se
1•memalign•6m ago•0 comments

Project N.O.M.A.D. Offline Survival Computer Bundles AI, Wikipedia, Khan Academy

https://github.com/Crosstalk-Solutions/project-nomad
2•tagami•7m ago•1 comments

Microsoft Rust Training Books

https://github.com/microsoft/RustTraining
1•serial_dev•7m ago•0 comments

High-performance denoising library for ray tracing

https://www.openimagedenoise.org/
1•teleforce•7m ago•0 comments

Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-github-copilot-interaction-data-usage-p...
2•prefork•7m ago•0 comments

Ball Pit

https://codepen.io/mrdoob_/full/NPRwLZd
3•memalign•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a voice AI that responds like a real woman

1•shalomer•8m ago•0 comments

Model collapse is already happening

https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/model-collapse-is-already-happening-we-just-pretend-it-isnt/
9•zdw•10m ago•5 comments

The OpenAI Safety Bug Bounty Program

https://openai.com/index/safety-bug-bounty/
1•Agreed3750•11m ago•0 comments

Google's TurboQuant offers LLMs up to 6x compression

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/google-says-new-turboquant-compression-can-lower-ai-memory-usa...
2•cwt137•12m ago•0 comments

Pulling the Lever

https://zaferbalkan.com/pulling-the-lever/
1•feldrim•13m ago•1 comments

Crocker's Rules

https://blainsmith.com/articles/crockers-rules/
1•speckx•13m ago•0 comments

At least 40% of Russia's oil export capacity halted, Reuters calculations show

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/least-40-russias-oil-export-capacity-halted-reuters-calcu...
2•doener•15m ago•0 comments

Has banning phones improved performance at Dutch schools?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqxjwvvyl4o
2•tartoran•17m ago•0 comments

JavaFX 26 Today [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3eHldNlHlU
1•java-man•18m ago•0 comments

Instagram and YouTube found liable in landmark social media addiction trial

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/instagram-and-youtube-found-liable-in-landmark-social-media-a...
1•bdcravens•18m ago•0 comments

The LiteLLM Supply Chain Attack and Why Your Secrets Shouldn't Survive Boot

https://blog.crawley.systems/posts/litellm-supply-chain-attack
2•kcmastrpc•18m ago•0 comments

Playra by a 16 Year Old

1•Allenboyy•19m ago•0 comments

Finland moves to allow hosting of nuclear weapons

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/finland-nuclear-weapons/
1•t-3•19m ago•1 comments

Elon Musk Announces ClipX

https://lzon.ca/posts/series/duck/clipx/
1•jpmitchell•19m ago•0 comments

Dialkit

https://joshpuckett.me/dialkit
1•Areibman•23m ago•0 comments

Turn messy Amazon invoice PDFs into usable Excel data

https://amazoninvoicetoexcel.com/
1•bigCourage•24m 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/