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Bank of England sees growing risks to financial stability from AI

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bank-england-sees-growing-risks-financial-stability-ai-2...
1•adithyaharish•1m ago•0 comments

Swift Rockies – A retreat-style iOS developer conference in Calgary, July 2026

https://swiftrockies.com
1•swiftrockies•2m ago•0 comments

GhostWire – Resilient P2P Mesh Communication

https://www.ghostwire.cc
1•PHANTOMOJO•3m ago•0 comments

Security you can't justify is a vicious cycle

https://bogomolov.work/blog/posts/security-you-cant-justify-is-a-vicious-cycle/
1•irr123•3m ago•0 comments

In-place functional programming with Koka

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3607840
1•fanf2•4m ago•0 comments

Office Suite for Coding Agents

https://smalldocs.org/
2•andrem•9m ago•0 comments

Volkswagen bans GrapheneOS citing security reasons, continues support Android 10

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/volkswagen-bans-security-focused-grapheneos-cites-security-rea...
1•teleforce•10m ago•0 comments

Lessons Learned Building Shopify Browser and Server Side Tracking

https://blog.adnansiddiqi.me/implementing-browser-and-server-side-tracking-on-shopify-using-gtm-a...
2•pknerd•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built an in-call AI, and the hard part was making it talk less

https://heyalo.ai
2•giu_1•10m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Unlimitedcodex – Flat-Price OpenAI-Compatible GPT/Codex API Access

https://unlimitedcodex.com
1•caqq•14m ago•0 comments

Bast – Go Structured Web Framework for server-side applications

https://github.com/bastion-framework/bast
1•kasimlyee•16m ago•0 comments

Text to CAD for Furniture Designs

https://www.timbr.pro
1•wojciem•16m ago•0 comments

Performance Optimized Statically Typed Python

https://post-py.org/
1•incognito124•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Multi-channel color QR code generator

https://github.com/Astra31415926/QR.G.B.-ART
2•MihailKashkarov•18m ago•1 comments

Golfstream – social network for rich people

https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/golfstream-social-network/id6782670766
3•yaszko•19m ago•1 comments

Grammarly critical hacks and vulnerabilities

2•IDIRIS•21m ago•0 comments

What Is a Load Balancer?

https://hackbotone.com/what-is-a-load-balancer-d4a24d8cf00d
1•hackbotone•25m ago•0 comments

Scientists measured the smallest possible contacts for future computer chips

https://phys.org/news/2026-07-scientists-smallest-contacts-future-chips.html
1•pseudolus•27m ago•0 comments

HTTP/1.1 vs. HTTP/2

https://hackbotone.com/http-1-1-vs-http-2-830f0364a8a4
1•hackbotone•27m ago•0 comments

Calling of an Engineer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_of_an_Engineer
1•thunderbong•28m ago•0 comments

Omni – open-source (Granola, Notion and Wispr Flow all in one)

https://github.com/AlexKapadia/omni
1•alexkapadia1•29m ago•0 comments

AI Giants Are Handing Out Tons of Free Computing Power to Grab Startup Share

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-giants-are-handing-out-tons-of-free-computing-power-to-grab-startu...
1•thm•30m ago•0 comments

Basilisk – a Rust Python type checker at 100% on the typing conformance suite

https://github.com/python/typing/blob/main/conformance/results/results.html
1•cfdevelop•33m ago•0 comments

Bird-Away: Raspberry Pi-powered water-based bird deterrent

https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away
2•sahn44•35m ago•4 comments

Death Becomes Her: China's New Hit Game

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1018715
1•Alien1Being•38m ago•0 comments

PostgreSQL Benchmark: AWS RDS vs. Self-Hosted on Hetzner (2026)

https://hostim.dev/blog/postgres-benchmark-rds-vs-hostim-vs-self-hosted/
3•pv1337•39m ago•0 comments

Proxying inference requests in 6ms with Pingora, Envoy, and Spanner

https://modal.com/blog/serverless-servers
1•birdculture•39m ago•0 comments

Researchers Create Self-Replicating Seedbox in Quest for Decentralized Democracy

https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-create-self-replicating-seedbox-in-quest-for-decentralized-d...
1•rapnie•42m ago•0 comments

Why worms (and microbes) are catching on as a manure pollution solution

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/07/1140142/why-worms-and-microbes-are-catching-on-as-a-m...
1•joozio•44m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Orchestra – Browser automation tool with export plain Playwright

https://www.orchestra-automation.com/
1•oceandoughnut•45m ago•1 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