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Billionaire Superyachts in St. Barts for New Year's Eve

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2025/12/16/inside-the-billionaire-superyacht-rush-whos-cru...
1•walterbell•47s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Emergent (I asked Claude to impress me)

https://dwyer.co.za/static/claude.html
1•sixhobbits•1m ago•0 comments

Social Media Posts Predict Unemployment Spikes Two Weeks Early

https://scienceblog.com/social-media-posts-predict-unemployment-spikes-two-weeks-early/
1•geox•2m ago•0 comments

The sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes

https://oaklandside.org/2025/09/30/asap-squatter-removal-oakland/
1•randycupertino•2m ago•0 comments

Flock and Urban Surveillance

https://computer.rip/2025-12-26-Flock-and-Urban-Surveillance.html
1•kelnos•4m ago•0 comments

Soldr, an open-source compact soldering station

https://www.soldr.pro/
1•unwind•5m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What's your dock setup for your work laptop?

1•charliebwrites•5m ago•0 comments

Amtrak: A Year of Records

https://media.amtrak.com/2025/11/amtrak-a-year-of-records/
2•eatonphil•6m ago•0 comments

Zpdf: PDF text extraction in Zig – 8x faster than MuPDF

https://github.com/Lulzx/zpdf
1•lulzx•7m ago•1 comments

The $100M Mistake: Microsoft PhotoDraw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGmXCb-irJ0
1•bane•8m ago•0 comments

Desktop Classic System – Spacial computing hearkening back to classic Mac OS

https://mycophobia.org/dcs/
2•todsacerdoti•10m ago•0 comments

Can a Commodore 1541 Disk Drive Be Used as a General Purpose Computer? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6loDwvG4CP8
2•ok123456•12m ago•0 comments

Newsly – Analyze Polymarket Events

https://newsly.studio
1•popcornisgold•13m ago•0 comments

Growing Reddit Topics

https://freesubstats.com/topics
1•jamboy•13m ago•0 comments

A Modern Recommender Model Architecture

https://cprimozic.net/blog/anime-recommender-model-architecture/
1•Ameo•14m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: My multi-agent financial sentiment architecture

1•CLCKKKKK•16m ago•0 comments

Easily create and view 3D splat files from 2D images with Apple's ML Sharp model

https://github.com/boutell/ml-sharp-ez
2•boutell•16m ago•0 comments

Troy: Turkish Payment Method Alternative

https://www.troyodeme.com/en
2•Fethbita•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Mirror_hash – Hash anything with C++ reflection

https://github.com/FranciscoThiesen/mirror_hash
1•fthiesen•17m ago•0 comments

John Carey obituary: literary critic

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/john-carey-obituary-literary-critic-mxjvmfxml
1•Caiero•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Apache TacticalMesh – Open-source tactical mesh networking for defense

https://github.com/TamTunnel/Apache-TacticalMesh
1•pp10•18m ago•0 comments

Yet, another temple, but now in space

https://orbitaltemple.art/
2•pavoniedson•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Brennerbot.org – Generalizing the scientific methods of Sydney Brenner

https://brennerbot.org
1•eigenvalue•20m ago•0 comments

Common-Mode Chokes PDF (2006)

https://remoteqth.com/img/ZAW-WIKI/cmcc/CommonModeChokesW1HIS.pdf
1•crymer11•21m ago•0 comments

China mandates 50% domestic equipment rule for chipmakers

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-mandates-50-domestic-equipment-rule-chipmakers-sources-...
3•novaRom•22m ago•0 comments

We Fall for Narcissistic Leaders, Starting in Grade School

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/why-we-fall-for-narcissistic-leaders-starting-in-grade...
2•whack•25m ago•0 comments

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Napoleon_of_Notting_Hill
2•tosh•26m ago•0 comments

Some Flexibility with Go's Sumdb

https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/12/29/Some-flexibility-with-Go-s-sumdb
1•woodruffw•27m ago•0 comments

Sustainable 3D printing using rapid-set clay concrete with biobased additives

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42114-025-01456-1
1•PaulHoule•27m ago•0 comments

DnsMesh for Kubernetes Workloads

1•woodprogrammer•27m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•8mo ago

Comments

thechao•8mo 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•8mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•8mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•8mo 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•8mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•8mo 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•8mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•8mo 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_•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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/