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Anthropic faces Friday deadline in Defense AI clash with Hegseth

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-ai-hegseth-spying-defense.html
2•gslin•5m ago•0 comments

Looking Forward to PGConf India in Bengaluru in March

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/microsoft-at-pgconf-india-2026/4496182
1•clairegiordano•8m ago•0 comments

Canva expands professional creative ecosystem with Cavalry

https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/cavalry/
1•flashblaze•9m ago•0 comments

Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-our-neural-network/
1•jsomers•12m ago•0 comments

Intel Strikes Deal with a Chip Startup Its CEO Invested In

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/technology/intel-sambanova-ceo-lip-bu-tan.html
2•osnium123•15m ago•0 comments

MBC v0.2.0 – AI agent orchestration for Laravel (security hardening)

https://github.com/etazza2025/laravel-mbc
1•undergracelabs•16m ago•1 comments

Learning from Structure: Discord's Entity-Relationship Embeddings

https://discord.com/blog/learning-from-structure-discords-entity-relationship-embeddings
1•throwaway314155•20m ago•0 comments

An Elephant Is Blind Without the Hairs on Its Trunk

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/science/elephant-whiskers.html
1•bookofjoe•20m ago•1 comments

RFC Explorer – Explore over 9000 RFCs

https://rfcexplorer.net/
1•xillb•21m ago•0 comments

We Need to Stop Asking "Is This Better Than That"

https://doppelgangerdev.com/docs/software-isn-t-a-competition-it-s-a-map-of-our-frustrations
1•asernasr•24m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Built a news aggregator that collect AI news around the world

https://vvsearch.com/workspace/news-terminal
1•raugen•28m ago•0 comments

Will artificial snow save the ski industry in the long run, or curse it?

https://theconversation.com/will-artificial-snow-save-the-ski-industry-in-the-long-run-or-curse-i...
1•PaulHoule•29m ago•0 comments

Finding 100 Kernel Bugs Using Agent Swarms

https://ydinkin.substack.com/p/200-kernel-bugs-in-30-days
1•itkeman•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made a 4D version of DOOM

https://hyperhell.itch.io/hyperhell
1•chronolitus•29m ago•0 comments

Tim Cook Warned by CIA That China Could Move on Taiwan by 2027

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/24/tim-cook-warned-by-cia-china-taiwan-2027/
4•mgh2•31m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Declare AI – open standard for AI content disclosure

https://declare-ai.github.io/declare-ai/declare-ai-devteam.html
1•BetterToBest•32m ago•1 comments

Apple Set a European iPhone Sales Record Last Year

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/24/apple-european-iphone-sales-record-2025/
1•mgh2•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Limits – Control layer for AI agents that take real actions

https://limits.dev
7•thesvp•32m ago•0 comments

Build a free job-winning resume and cover letter in minutes

https://resumecv.pro
1•pivlu•35m ago•1 comments

Data center outlook: half of 2026 pipeline may not materialize

https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outlook
1•toomuchtodo•36m ago•0 comments

Western Digital Sold Out All 2026 Hard Drive Production as AI Centers Scramble

https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/02/18/western-digital-sold-out-all-2026-hard-drive-productio...
1•vmg12•37m ago•0 comments

Being a Luddite Is Cool, but Have You Seen the Tapestries New Looms Are Making?

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/being-a-luddite-is-cool-and-all-but-have-you-seen-the-hilario...
2•stmw•41m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Claude Automation Toolkit – 6 Python scripts for AI task automation

https://github.com/indoor47/summarize-docs
1•adamrunboy•42m ago•0 comments

The Weapons of Stargate [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMt6pzC_0dI
2•Kye•46m ago•0 comments

Capybara: A Unified Visual Creation Model

https://github.com/xgen-universe/Capybara
2•modinfo•47m ago•1 comments

secrets

https://github.com/umputun/secrets
1•indigodaddy•48m ago•0 comments

Programming is dead: a letter to junior and mid-level engineers

https://medium.com/@dbounds/programming-is-dead-a-letter-to-junior-and-mid-level-engineers-5b630f...
4•RobSpectre•48m ago•3 comments

Intelligence Yield: Efficiency of Frontier Models on METR Tasks

https://bmdragos.github.io/intelligence-yield/
2•gnopercept•49m ago•1 comments

Show HN: NeoShift BI – Build AI-analyzed data dashboards in minutes

2•DonWono•50m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The Agentic Workflow Engine That Lives Inside Your App

https://stabilize.rodmena.ai
2•rodmena•50m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•9mo ago

Comments

thechao•9mo 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•9mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•9mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•9mo 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•9mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•9mo 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•9mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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/