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University celebrates Baby's 65th birthday (2013)

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/university-celebrates-babys-65th-birthday/
1•Bluestein•35s ago•0 comments

The Suicide Crisis in Wyoming

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/suicide-wyoming-mental-health.html
1•mooreds•2m ago•0 comments

The secret nuclear material the US forgot how to make

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
2•historical1234•2m ago•0 comments

AI agents fake identities, target real people in new security incident

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/04/tech/ai-anthropic-openai-security-breach-intl-hnk
2•mooreds•2m ago•0 comments

Parasol Lost

https://actuaries.org.uk/news-and-media-releases/news-articles/2026/jan/14-jan-26-parasol-lost-re...
1•simonebrunozzi•3m ago•0 comments

Slime Without Plugins Using Kitty

https://lee-phillips.org/kittyslime/
2•leephillips•4m ago•0 comments

Manchester Statistical Society was founded in 1833

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/ap12481/manchester-statistical-society
1•Bluestein•5m ago•0 comments

Let Over Lambda is free online to read as pdf

https://letoverlambda.com/lol.pdf
1•artsi0m•5m ago•2 comments

Finland to stop maintaining poles carrying communication lines with Russia

https://meduza.io/en/news/2026/07/29/finland-to-stop-maintaining-poles-carrying-communication-lin...
1•Sami_Lehtinen•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Back end Engineer – Visual guides for system design and cloud infra

https://www.backendengineer.in
1•pvtsparsshh•6m ago•0 comments

Zohran Mamdani's NYC Tech Team Is What DOGE Should Have Been

https://www.wired.com/story/mamdani-assembles-his-nyc-tech-team/
3•gorbachev•7m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Why aren't there more Operating System startups?

1•senor_digimon•7m ago•0 comments

Publishing Schematics Before "Open Source" Was a Word

https://fabscene.medium.com/publishing-schematics-before-open-source-was-a-word-55-years-of-akizu...
1•extralongdivisi•8m ago•0 comments

The Werebull of Camargue

https://cinemasojourns.com/2026/08/07/the-werebull-of-camargue/
1•jjgreen•8m ago•0 comments

The long, tangled, and mostly wrong history of the psychedelic toad

https://longreads.com/2026/08/04/psychedelic-toads-ego-trip-kimon-de-greef/
1•bookofjoe•8m ago•0 comments

Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

https://eco3min.fr/en/us-children-vs-adults-65-and-older/
2•brandonb•9m ago•0 comments

Apple Captures 65% of Global Premium Smartphone Market

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/07/apple-captures-65-percent-of-global-premium-market/
1•tosh•9m ago•0 comments

Gammalsvenskby is a Swedish-speaking city in Ukraine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gammalsvenskby
2•blasssky•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A model router should also provide a MCP gateway

https://github.com/maximhq/bifrost/
1•Swapnoneel•13m ago•0 comments

Finding Bigfoot with Async Generators and TypeScript (2025)

https://guy.dev/2025/04/01/finding-bigfoot-with-async-generators-and-typescript/
1•mooreds•14m ago•0 comments

Can Extreme Morning Sickness Be Cured?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/can-extreme-morning-sickness-be-cured
1•frigidwalnut•14m ago•0 comments

VibeMathed – Math problems solved by AI

https://vibemathed.com
1•mrconter2•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Mermaid flowcharts you don't have to redraw in a diagram editor

https://line9.ai/diagram
2•jumpalongjim•17m ago•0 comments

Scientists Designed a Virtual Alien Lifeform to Hunt for Extraterrestrials

https://www.404media.co/scientists-designed-a-virtual-alien-lifeform-to-hunt-for-extraterrestrials/
2•Brajeshwar•18m ago•0 comments

Social dynamics of AI adoption in parents' educational decisions

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2533193123
2•hn_acker•18m ago•0 comments

What 2026 looks like (2021)

https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like
3•mbeavitt•20m ago•1 comments

Coding agents supercharge Murphy's Law

https://hatchet.run/blog/murphys-law
1•abelanger•21m ago•0 comments

Prompt Caching in Agents

https://earendil.com/posts/prompt-caching/
1•lobo_tuerto•21m ago•0 comments

Builders lack an audience, Creators lack building skills

1•yurimhln•21m ago•0 comments

Neutrinos from Deep Inside Earth Provide a New Picture of the Mantle

https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrinos-from-deep-inside-earth-provide-a-new-picture-of-the-mant...
3•lschueller•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