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Dcli: Declarative Package Management for Arch Linux (Inspired by NixOS)

https://gitlab.com/theblackdon/dcli
1•signa11•1m ago•0 comments

The new rules of the road for agentic commerce

https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/stories/2026/agentic-commerce-rules-of-the-road....
1•saikatsg•3m ago•0 comments

Copilot SDK in Technical Preview

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/184872
1•edent•3m ago•0 comments

Google is ending full-web search for niche search engines

https://programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com/
6•01jonny01•5m ago•2 comments

Voice Layer for AI Agents Built with Rust, Pluggable to All Agentic Frameworks

https://github.com/SaynaAI/sayna
1•tigranbs•6m ago•0 comments

Raiden Warned About AI Censorship [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
1•DeathArrow•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Thalo – A "programming" language for structured knowledge

https://github.com/rejot-dev/thalo
2•WilcoKruijer•14m ago•0 comments

From Tomorrow Back to Yesterday: A Tale of Two Web Architectures – Yang [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W6Lr1hRgXo
1•adityaathalye•14m ago•0 comments

The State of Modern AI Text to Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users

https://stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html
1•tuukkao•19m ago•0 comments

Apple is burying the Time Capsule, but how to replace it?

https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/01/apple-is-burying-the-time-capsule-but-how-to-replace-it/
2•tosh•21m ago•0 comments

What time you should arrive at cinema to avoid adverts

https://news.sky.com/story/what-time-you-should-actually-arrive-at-cinema-to-avoid-adverts-13149863
1•austinallegro•21m ago•0 comments

Subject of Unique Interest: Mary Freeman Heuston Lewis and William Dean Howells

https://commonplace.online/article/a-subject-of-unique-interest/
1•bryanrasmussen•22m ago•1 comments

DeepSeek's mHC: Stabilizing Training Divergence from 3,000x to 1.6x

2•Research_Brief•23m ago•0 comments

How to Think About Self-Attention Intuitively

https://www.henrydashwood.com/posts/attention-intuition
1•HenryDashwood•25m ago•0 comments

Nvidia PersonaPlex: natural conversation AI

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/personaplex/
1•ricardobeat•27m ago•0 comments

Doing Gigabit Ethernet over My British Phone Wires

https://thehftguy.com/2026/01/22/doing-gigabit-ethernet-over-my-british-phone-wires/
2•user5994461•30m ago•0 comments

Microservices Architecture Fails Due to Poor Product Topology

https://www.hyperact.co.uk/blog/product-topology
1•birdculture•30m ago•0 comments

Tried Qwen3-TTS Open source to clone my voice and created a video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LU9nmnR0cs
1•naveen-zerocool•36m ago•0 comments

Why are there so many CPU bugs nowadays

https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/115939583202357863
7•riffraff•37m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Do You Prefer Cursor over Codex or Claude Code? Why?

3•halamadrid•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: SpiraCSS – CSS architecture where tooling and AI handle the rules

https://spiracss.jp/
1•zetsubo•38m ago•0 comments

Can You Run Recursion on Ideas?

2•codenighter•38m ago•1 comments

Picking up the missing pieces of Apple's Creator Studio

https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/01/whats-the-real-value-in-creator-studio/
1•tosh•39m ago•0 comments

Replacing Protobuf with Rust to go 5 times faster

https://pgdog.dev/blog/replace-protobuf-with-rust
3•whiteros_e•40m ago•0 comments

Section 230 Didn't Fail Rand Paul. He Just Doesn't Like the Remedy That Worked

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/22/section-230-didnt-fail-rand-paul-he-just-doesnt-like-the-reme...
2•beardyw•42m ago•0 comments

Adep

https://adep-france.fr/
1•compado•43m ago•0 comments

Howard Lutnick heckled at Davos dinner as Christine Lagarde walks out

https://www.ft.com/content/e2ae0417-6146-4428-96db-0484a6b024d1
1•saubeidl•44m ago•1 comments

AI-exposed jobs deteriorated before ChatGPT

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02554
1•dandelionv1bes•47m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: Alibaba Sucks

1•burnt-resistor•47m ago•1 comments

A Microsoft engineer reveals how Windows 95's 'secret' fast restart worked

https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-engineer-reveals-how-windows-95s-secret-fast-restart-wor...
1•daniel_iversen•48m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•8mo ago

Comments

thechao•8mo 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•8mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•8mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•8mo 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•8mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•8mo 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•8mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•8mo 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_•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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/