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The Incumbents Are Coming

https://twitter.com/seema_amble/status/2095546732633379079
1•gmays•11s ago•0 comments

Slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/08/this-is-dangerous-slime-moulds-and-th...
1•Betelbuddy•16s ago•0 comments

YuzukiNeko – A Linux-Capable Allwinner F101 SBC with RasPi Pico Form Factor

https://www-cnx--software-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.cnx-software.com/2026/09/08/yuzukineko-a...
1•HardwareLust•42s ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a filterable list of beginner whittling projects

https://whittling.hashu.org/
1•avihashu•2m ago•1 comments

Show HN: AgentDFS – Fantasy Football for Agents

https://agentdfs.dev
1•crabasa•2m ago•0 comments

Scientists Are Making Concrete with Human Poop – and It Gets 42% Stronger

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-making-concrete-with-human-poop-and-it-gets-42-stronger
1•downbad_•3m ago•0 comments

AI-Generated Life

https://anuratype.bearblog.dev/ai-generated-life/
1•typeepyt•3m ago•0 comments

Floodtide: Keep your Mac up to date (MacUpdater replacement)

https://bhopstudio.com/floodtide
2•luckman212•3m ago•1 comments

Iceland Summons U.S. Ambassador over Provocative Trump Map

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/world/europe/iceland-summon-ambassador-trump-map-greenland.html
1•_doctor_love•4m ago•1 comments

We hash API keys at rest – and what it costs in edge-function latency

https://www.eqiqs.com/blog/hashing-api-keys-edge-function-latency
1•EQIQs•5m ago•0 comments

The Artifact Is Free, Assurance Is the Product

https://redmonk.com/kholterhoff/2026/08/13/the-artifact-is-free-assurance-is-the-product/
1•mooreds•5m ago•0 comments

Fork is all sandboxes need

https://arker.ai/blog/fork-is-all-you-need
1•calebhwin•5m ago•0 comments

Finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media

https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198
1•bryan0•6m ago•0 comments

Arm's C2-Ultra, G2-Ultra NX, and CSS N4 IP

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arms-c2-ultra-g2-ultra-nx-and-css
1•pella•6m ago•0 comments

On Quality

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/on-quality
2•bookofjoe•7m ago•0 comments

Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/munJKF7iWMsWJLAH2/astra-and-fable-still-hack-on-simple-variants-o...
1•yurivish•7m ago•0 comments

Anthropic signed $517B (14.8GW) in compute agreements in past 11 months

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-signed-517bn-in-compute-agreements-in-past-1...
1•giuliomagnifico•8m ago•0 comments

Your React State Machine Is Secretly a DFA

https://jehuamanna.dev/blog/react-state-machine-is-a-dfa/
1•s3arch•8m ago•0 comments

Press 'Enter' to Feel: In Silico-Qualia [Listen | Read]

https://robertxworld.com/press-enter-to-feel/
1•devrob•8m ago•0 comments

Kenyans Did College Students' Homework for Years. Then A.I. Arrived

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/technology/kenya-college-essays-ai.html
1•pseudolus•8m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Skillsaw – Linter for Context

https://github.com/stbenjam/skillsaw
1•stbenjam•9m ago•0 comments

Give Your Coding Agents a Memory You Own

https://huggingface.co/blog/funes
1•gmays•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VolAnti – Open-source acoustic detector for fibre-optic FPV drones

https://github.com/agamrossen/VolAnti
1•agamrossen•9m ago•0 comments

Snoka – CLI that finds what your Google Workspace is quietly exposing

https://snoka.app/
1•snoka-dev•9m ago•0 comments

Interpreting GPT: The Logit Lens

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AcKRB8wDpdaN6v6ru/interpreting-gpt-the-logit-lens
1•Bluestein•10m ago•0 comments

Weekly · Open-Source AI · week 37, 2026

1•thezakulo•10m ago•0 comments

Artificial – Official Teaser Trailer (2026) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDZplZFnbOk
1•sho_hn•11m ago•0 comments

Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Doc Met with Shock and Awe at Secret Screening

https://www.vanityfair.com/story/nathan-fielder-elizabeth-holmes-doc-secret-screening-telluride
3•Teever•11m ago•0 comments

Corporate America Is Axing the 'Micro-Team' Boss

https://www.wsj.com/business/corporate-america-is-axing-the-micro-team-boss-173d3e4e
1•devy•12m ago•0 comments

Agent Management Tooling

https://dr-knz.net/agent-management.html
2•knz42•13m 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