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Pinning down a hardware bug in Intel 13th/14th gen CPUs

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/05/21/oodle-2-9-14-and-intel-13th-14th-gen-cpus/
1•fanf2•16s ago•0 comments

GLM-5.2: Built for Long-Horizon Tasks

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2
1•meetpateltech•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Ito – Code reviews that run code

https://www.ito.ai
1•evanmarshall•1m ago•0 comments

Oxford Digital News Report 2026

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026
1•thm•2m ago•0 comments

How to Demolish a Bridge

https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/6/16/how-to-demolish-a-bridge
1•crescit_eundo•3m ago•0 comments

Publishers Sue WeLib for Copyright Infringement

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/100652-publishers-sue-pira...
1•ilamont•3m ago•0 comments

The Google / Xreal Aura XR glasses are now available to preorder

https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/950597/xreal-google-aura-xr-glasses-deposit-scheme
1•MehrdadKhnzd•4m ago•0 comments

Ipcrawl: A living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

https://ipcrawl.com
1•arm32•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made Oregon Trail for founders (paste your company URL)

https://foundertrail.vercel.app/
1•jgvandehey•4m ago•1 comments

Piu

1•mostafaabdrabu•5m ago•0 comments

Microsoft Clarity Is Down?

https://clarity.microsoft.com/
1•rkj93•5m ago•0 comments

Jami – Feature Drop: Shared Services

https://jami.net/shared-services/
1•kevincox•5m ago•0 comments

FBI disrupted alleged terror plot targeting White House UFC event [video][5 min]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCLN9psHjxY
1•Bender•5m ago•0 comments

Simdjson: Parsing gigabytes of JSON per second

https://github.com/simdjson/simdjson
1•saikatsg•8m ago•0 comments

A satellite just learned to find things on its own – here's what that means

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/15/a-satellite-just-learned-to-find-things-on-its-own-heres-what-t...
1•speckx•8m ago•0 comments

Microsoft turns to Amazon for help with GitHub's AI-driven capacity issues

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-amazon-ai-cloud-capacity-2026-6
1•otterley•8m ago•0 comments

Third SAIR competition: inverse Galois challenge

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/06/16/third-sair-competition-inverse-galois-challenge/
1•jjgreen•9m ago•0 comments

At first, it does sound crazy: meet the scientists trying to refreeze the Arctic

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/16/arctic-sea-ice-rethickening-climate-geoengine...
1•robaato•11m ago•0 comments

Claude: Elevated errors across many models

https://status.claude.com/incidents/xmhsglsz3h3w
36•forks•11m ago•7 comments

Logical Ways to Track AI Agent Lineage and State in Code Development

https://davenporter.substack.com/p/how-to-track-ai-agent-lineage-and
1•davenportjw•11m ago•0 comments

Making things: interview series on creativity

https://digitalseams.com/blog/making-things-interview-series
1•bobbiechen•15m ago•0 comments

How to Use an Nvidia EGPU with Your Mac for Local AI in 2026

https://www.compute-market.com/blog/nvidia-egpu-mac-local-ai-setup-2026
2•falava•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VulnFeed – 9 security tools your AI agent can call (MCP server)

https://vulnfeed.novadyne.ai/
1•ngburke•16m ago•1 comments

They made a Pokemon TCG AI Battle Challenge with a $290k prize pool

https://www.shanethegamer.com/esports-news/pokemon-tcg-ai-battle-challenge/
1•misbloss•16m ago•0 comments

The octopus architecture for AI agents

https://blog.goodman.dev/blog/octopus-agent-architecture/
2•joshbetz•17m ago•0 comments

Russian warship 'fires warning shot at a British yacht in English Channel'

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15904823/Russian-warship-fires-warning-shot-yacht-English-...
2•Bender•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built an AI that calls you, interviews you and publishes your content

https://heybono.ai/sms
1•zinxor•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Skill Atlas – Local, visual IDE for Agentic Skills (BYOK, no back end)

https://github.com/revanthpobala/skill-atlas
1•revanth1108•18m ago•0 comments

German court holds Google liable for fake AI answers

https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-fake-ai-answers/a-77527661
2•sergdigon•22m ago•0 comments

Using OxCaml to implement type-safe reference counting between OCaml and Python

https://blog.janestreet.com/oxcaml-typesafe-reference-counting-python/
1•pjmlp•22m 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