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FlowG v0.59.0 with Dark Mode support

https://flowg.cloud/blog/darkmode
1•linkdd•2m ago•0 comments

A 5.3M-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10546-z
2•whicks•6m ago•0 comments

US Military Shahed-136 Kamikaze Drone Clone Getting Hivemind Swarming Capability

https://www.twz.com/air/u-s-militarys-lucas-kamikaze-drone-is-getting-hivemind-swarming-capability
1•prmph•7m ago•1 comments

Big tech apps that make life easy are scamming you

https://restofworld.org/2026/tech-facebook-google-whatsapp-scams/
1•donohoe•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: EzziwebTools – A collection of 30 free tools

https://ezziwebtools.com
1•Ezzymd•7m ago•0 comments

Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/948280/anthropic-claude-fable-invisible-disti...
1•rarisma•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AlfinaAI – AI stock and IPO analysis for retail investors

https://alfina.ai
1•stockanalyst987•10m ago•0 comments

InventorySpread – Newsletter ad slots priced below affiliate revenue

https://inventoryspread.com
1•Northtide•12m ago•1 comments

Active-active fixed our counters but broke everything else

https://useautumn.com/blog/active-active-redis-cache
2•johnyeocx•15m ago•0 comments

Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown

https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
2•mooreds•16m ago•0 comments

Creating Photo Essays About Community: A Guide to Our Where We Are Contest

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/learning/creating-photo-essays-about-community-a-guide-to-our-...
1•tlyleung•16m ago•0 comments

Geopolitics fuel grain market volatility

https://www.kpler.com/blog/geopolitics-fuel-grain-market-volatility
1•mooreds•17m ago•0 comments

A Commons of Software Productive Infrastructure, by and for Capital

https://marewolf.me/posts/draupnir/26/software-productive-infrastructure.html
1•simonmic•17m ago•0 comments

Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week 'botsitting'

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/10/brit-workers-waste-nearly-six-hours-a-week-botsi...
4•theanonymousone•18m ago•1 comments

Parallelogram – catch fine-tuning dataset bugs before training

https://www.parallelogram.dev/
1•thatayotlhe04•18m ago•0 comments

Hedge Funds Are Expanding Desks Designed to Profit from Natural-Catastrophe Risk

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-07/hedge-funds-are-hiring-experts-in-catastrophe-...
2•giuliomagnifico•19m ago•0 comments

Bootstrapping Rust Considered Harmful

https://www.ntecs.de/blog/2026-02-01-bootstrapping-rust-considered-harmful/
1•birdculture•20m ago•0 comments

I procrastinate by building tools to stop me from procrastinating: A sad story

2•thisislorenzov•22m ago•3 comments

Show HN: LoadLore – what if your team's way of working was installable?

https://loadlore.dev
1•whitephoenix•22m ago•0 comments

Merle: Why Even Signal Calls Apple and Google [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3ennD3wKn0
1•smukherjee19•22m ago•0 comments

The Riemann Hypothesis – interactive explanation

https://riemann.adilmoujahid.com
1•lifty•22m ago•0 comments

Shadow AI threat's growth affecting healthtech's growth

https://www.verax.ai/blog/shadow-ai-healthtech-deals
1•jasonchernofsky•23m ago•0 comments

Amazon-owned Ring should pay Americans for scanning their faces, lawsuit says

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/amazon-owned-ring-should-pay-americans-for-scanning-t...
3•anticorporate•23m ago•0 comments

Odin 2026-06 Released

https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/releases/tag/dev-2026-06
1•lerno•25m ago•0 comments

Apple's Passwords App Becomes Agentic

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Apple-s-Passwords-App-Becomes-Agentic-11328901.html
2•Tomte•28m ago•0 comments

Claude Opus is more performant on OpenCode than Claude Code

https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents
4•log101•29m ago•0 comments

The Slack Notifications Flowchart Explained

https://www.magicbell.com/blog/slack-notifications-flowchart
2•ColinWright•30m ago•0 comments

Mac OLM to PST Outlook Converter Software

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n7jk7z3546j?hl=en-US&gl=US
1•tieanderson•31m ago•0 comments

BYD is bringing its 5-min 'Flash' electric car charging to Canada

https://electrek.co/2026/06/10/byd-flash-charging-canada-5-minute-ev-charging-network/
7•breve•32m ago•0 comments

Can $100 ChatGPT and Claude Fable Solve PhD Math? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_sOV7ErX7Q
1•Topfi•33m 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