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Cloudflare Is Down

https://cloudflare.com/
1•wonderfuly•17s ago•0 comments

Anthropic/Claude AI is down

https://www.anthropic.com/
2•victorbuilds•49s ago•0 comments

Anthropic Interviewer

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-interviewer
1•victorbuilds•2m ago•0 comments

All Shopify websites are down

https://www.shopify.com/
2•kocial•2m ago•0 comments

Is Cloudflare Down Again? Also, DownDetector/Claude.ai/LinkedIn?

2•dfasoro•3m ago•0 comments

Workos Down

https://workos.com/
1•alwynsiby•3m ago•0 comments

NPM Is Down

https://www.npmjs.com/
3•youz•3m ago•0 comments

LinkedIn – 500 Internal Server Error

2•stan_kirdey•3m ago•0 comments

Upgrade now: critical-severity vulnerability in Next/React Server Components

https://vercel.com/changelog/cve-2025-55182
1•timetc•5m ago•0 comments

Cloudflare Down Again – and DownDetector Is Also Down

8•bakigul•7m ago•4 comments

Cloudflare is down

https://www.cloudflare.com/
204•mektrik•9m ago•82 comments

Another Cloudflare Outage?

https://downdetector.com.au/
7•no_creativity_•9m ago•5 comments

The Conversational AI Comparator

https://comparia.beta.gouv.fr/
1•mellosouls•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Zen Enterprise – The World's First Enterprise Ad-Blocker

https://zen.irbis.sh/enterprise
1•anfragment•10m ago•0 comments

Another AI slop story: ChatGPT vs. Human

https://joshua.hu/ai-slop-story-nginx-leaking-dns-chatgpt
1•ingve•11m ago•0 comments

AI Enhancer

https://aienhancer.ai/
1•hazel2000•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The Forge Calculator – Instant results for complex crafting math

https://theforgecalculator.online
1•neotanp•16m ago•0 comments

Starmer's Brexit Strategy: Triangulation or Overreach?

https://rodgercuddington.substack.com/p/starmers-brexit-strategy-triangulation
1•freespirt•16m ago•1 comments

I Accidentally Misinformed an AI

https://pithandpip.com/blog/how-to-teach-an-ai
1•maguay•19m ago•0 comments

We Built Another Object Storage (and Why It's Different)

https://fractalbits.com/blog/why-we-built-another-object-storage/
3•thomas_fa•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: USST – A protocol to reduce LLM context redundancy by 98.5%

https://gist.github.com/maverick069/06d6f6e89947d621b4905765245a220a
2•mgopanna•29m ago•1 comments

Some AI Systems May Be Impossible to Compute

https://spectrum.ieee.org/deep-neural-network
4•tesserato•33m ago•0 comments

How to Find a Date in a Country with over 30M Extra Men

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/opinion/china-dating-men-one-child-policy.html
2•mykowebhn•36m ago•0 comments

VCs deploy 'kingmaking' strategy to crown AI winners in their infancy

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/03/vcs-deploy-kingmaking-strategy-to-crown-ai-winners-in-their-inf...
2•pseudolus•37m ago•0 comments

In comedy of errors, men accused of wiping gov databases turned to an AI tool

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/12/previously-convicted-contractors-wiped-gov...
4•rognjen•41m ago•0 comments

The Library

https://www.relativesanity.com/articles/the-library/
1•lylo•41m ago•0 comments

My favorite Facebook bot designs (2018)

https://blog.fortrabbit.com/favorite-facebook-bot-designs/
1•esher•41m ago•0 comments

18000 Reasons It's So Hard to Build a Chip Factory in America

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/business/tsmc-phoenix-fab.html
3•mykowebhn•41m ago•1 comments

How to Fix Critical Bugs Fast Without Hiring a Developer?

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-fix-critical-bugs-fast-without-hiring-a-developer-XiYlDn...
1•plakhlani2•46m ago•0 comments

Chicago Tribune Sues Perplexity

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/04/chicago-tribune-sues-perplexity/
1•holysoles•49m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•7mo ago

Comments

thechao•7mo 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•7mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•7mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•7mo 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•7mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•7mo 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•7mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•7mo 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_•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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/