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Visor – a QR code that's also a live pay-per-call API

https://acp-x402-scriptmasterlabs.onrender.com/vc
1•scriptmaster•1m ago•0 comments

What My Tattoo Artist Taught Me About Life After 50

https://restlessurban.com/feature/what-my-tattoo-artist-taught-me/
1•moonlighter•2m ago•0 comments

Rabies in Cape fur seals highlights an unprecedented shift in rabies ecology

https://www.woah.org/en/rabies-detected-in-cape-fur-seals-highlights-an-unprecedented-shift-in-ra...
1•bushwart•2m ago•0 comments

Running models on RISC-V with IREE

https://iree.dev/community/blog/2026-07-23-running-models-on-risc-v-with-iree/
1•simonpure•4m ago•0 comments

A Critical Approach of ChatGPT's Impact on Everyday Life

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-31732-2_9
1•geox•10m ago•0 comments

Optimal NYC Neighborhood Locator

https://www.jean.land/nyc-apts
1•imustachyou•11m ago•0 comments

FlowG: Turning Your Logs into Metrics

https://flowg.cloud/blog/logs-into-metrics
1•linkdd•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Play Tetris in the terminal (solo and pvp)

https://github.com/backnotprop/tuitetris
2•ramoz•12m ago•0 comments

New x86 CPUID Entry For "EVOLUTIONARY"

https://sandpile.org/x86/cpuid.htm#leaf_0000_0000h
1•ruik•13m ago•0 comments

Hypotheses

https://hypotheses.org/
2•jruohonen•14m ago•0 comments

Interviews with key Python developers from the first 25 years

https://gvanrossum.github.io/interviews/index.html
2•tosh•19m ago•0 comments

Devs to Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and friends Make security and privacy default

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/08/devs-to-anthropic-openai-cursor-and-friends-make...
1•Bender•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Rollcall – Simulated Film Development on iPhone with Shared Rolls

https://rollcall.nicksavarese.com/
1•nickooo•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AURcade – A tiny self-hosted Git service using cgit and SSH

https://github.com/skorotkiewicz/aurcade
1•modinfo•23m ago•0 comments

Keeping Master Green at Scale

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3302424.3303970
2•handfuloflight•25m ago•0 comments

Do the scoring rules decide the winner? 211,080 predictions re-scored five ways

https://beteamapp.com/research/prediction-league-scoring-systems/
1•beteam555•28m ago•0 comments

Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow native recompilation with mods

https://github.com/bryanthaboi/gen1recomp
1•satvikpendem•30m ago•1 comments

Flock CEO Tailed by PI to Ensure No Crimes or Cheating on Wife

https://ipvm.com/reports/priv-invest-flock-ceo
3•jhonovich•32m ago•0 comments

AI Is on Its Last Legs [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdsoe_OsnHw
1•Bender•33m ago•0 comments

Hims and Hers sent user health data to social media giants bombshell FTC lawsuit

https://nypost.com/2026/07/29/business/hims-hers-sent-users-health-data-to-social-media-giants-de...
4•randycupertino•34m ago•1 comments

Barry's Economics: The Science of the Immigration Grift [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OWqzhwsWXM
1•kklisura•35m ago•0 comments

Jorge – minimal site generator with Markdown and org-mode support

https://github.com/facundoolano/jorge
1•facundo_olano•36m ago•0 comments

Large-Scale Code Refactoring with AI

https://swiftace.org/posts/large-scale-code-refactoring-with-ai
1•aakashns•36m ago•0 comments

Can you make ChatGPT follow instructions?

https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/can-you-make-chatgpt-follow-instructions
1•paulpauper•37m ago•0 comments

Towards a Liberatory Technology, Murray Bookchin (1965)

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-bookchin-towards-a-liberatory-technology
1•mxmilkiib•38m ago•0 comments

The Seam Is the Label

https://vuvko.net/blog/patched-objects/
1•vuvko•39m ago•0 comments

AI Workers Ask U.S. Government for Tools to Slow AI Before a Crisis

https://www.ainews.com/p/ai-workers-us-government-tools-slow-ai-before-crisis
1•ashurandi•40m ago•0 comments

Fibonacci Recursion Drone Synthesizer

https://github.com/wraithsys/fibonacci-synth
2•wraithsys•43m ago•0 comments

What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rgXQuG8KXtxugSG6H/what-i-did-in-the-hedonium-shockwave-by-emma-ag...
2•paulpauper•45m ago•0 comments

5% public sample of provenanced OT/ICS security training datasets

https://huggingface.co/datasets/Lateos/Defensive-LLM
2•leochong•46m 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