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Urban Birds Are Rising Earlier Because of Traffic Noise (2013)

https://www.audubon.org/news/urban-birds-are-rising-earlier-because-traffic-noise
2•thunderbong•5m ago•0 comments

Technical Founders Misread Adoption

https://avelino.run/technical-founders-misread-adoption-rogers-pix/
1•rafaepta•6m ago•0 comments

WolfTPM TPM 2.0 Library Now Supports PQC Mldsa and Mlkem

https://www.wolfssl.com/wolftpm-add-tpm-2-0-v1-85-pqc-post-quantum-support/
1•aidangarske•10m ago•0 comments

Roger Penrose – Why Intelligence Is Not a Computational Process (2025)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTVN6tFknCg
2•weitzj•13m ago•0 comments

Claude Code Leak: 8100 Takedown Requests and the Birth of Claw-Code

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Claude-Code-Leak-8100-Takedown-Requests-and-the-Birth-of-Claw-Code-1...
2•smartmic•16m ago•0 comments

Professor's bold prediction: AI could help cure all diseases within a decade

https://excitech.media/p/professors-bold-prediction-ai-could
1•sminchev•18m ago•0 comments

One Interface for Everything

https://letsbuildsomething.substack.com/p/one-interface-for-everything
1•iancutzul•18m ago•0 comments

Only Law Can Prevent Extinction

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-can-prevent-extinction
1•lumenwrites•18m ago•0 comments

New portable technology detects GPS spoofing in real time

https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornls-breakthrough-detector-protects-trucking-shipments-gps-deception
1•geox•19m ago•0 comments

My favorite adversarial review prompt

https://blog.fsck.com/2026/05/01/adversarial-review/
2•tie-in•19m ago•0 comments

Steam Controller

https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steamcontroller
1•cl3misch•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tyche: An experimental distributed trading pipeline in Go Java

https://github.com/ItsArnavSh/Tyche
2•itsarnavsh•24m ago•0 comments

QUIC packet rejection in practice – Iroh

https://www.iroh.computer/blog/quic-packet-rejection-in-practice
1•janandonly•30m ago•1 comments

University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up into AI Slop

https://www.404media.co/asu-atomic-ai-modules-arizona-state-university/
3•abdelhousni•33m ago•1 comments

ASU Using AI Tool to Create Courses from Professors' Work Without Their

https://azfreenews.com/2026/05/asu-using-ai-tool-to-create-courses-from-professors-work-without-t...
6•abdelhousni•35m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT crashed my browser when I continued 1k+ conversations

1•Sharedmemory•35m ago•1 comments

Punk, or why I don't stream anymore

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/03/punk-or-why-i-dont-stream.html
2•mefengl•35m ago•1 comments

Make Your Own Microforest

https://ambrook.com/offrange/environment/a-forest-in-your-pocket
2•bookofjoe•36m ago•0 comments

Former Nintendo Executive Says Amazon Once Requested 'Illegal' Price Discounts

https://kotaku.com/reggie-fils-aime-says-nintendo-stopped-selling-to-amazon-after-being-asked-to-...
3•m463•38m ago•0 comments

Simulating Cells Fighting to the Death

https://jamiesimon.io/blog/cell-fight/
2•jamie-simon•43m ago•0 comments

Flock repeatedly flags 76-year old Grandmother for arrest, erroring zero for "O"

https://guessingheadlights.com/colorado-grandma-keeps-getting-pulled-over-because-police-cameras-...
5•chasil•44m ago•0 comments

Neanderthal DNA Implicated in Autism Susceptibility

https://communities.springernature.com/posts/neanderthal-dna-implicated-in-autism-susceptibility
1•janandonly•45m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Decentralized compute network. CLI-first

https://github.com/profullstack/c0mpute
1•buffer_overlord•46m ago•0 comments

HealthFormer: Transformers for irregular electronic health record events [pdf]

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.25.26349262v1.full.pdf
1•brandonb•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I modeled Peru's 1993 Constitution as a Git history

https://github.com/Duvet05/Constitucion-Politica-del-Peru
2•Duvet05•47m ago•0 comments

The Paradox of Medical AI Implementation

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-implementation
1•brandonb•51m ago•0 comments

People who are blind from birth never develop schizophrenia

https://theconversation.com/people-who-are-blind-from-birth-never-develop-schizophrenia-what-this...
6•debo_•52m ago•4 comments

Moving from Node to Bun spikes container CPU and memory usage until it crashes

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/17723
1•emigre•53m ago•0 comments

I vibecoded a game, its making money, heres what I learned

https://gunguesser.com
2•saladvr•53m ago•2 comments

Show HN: A public web artwork made by its visitors

https://fluidart.dev/
1•denieler•54m 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.
jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
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/