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SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit

https://www.sparkfun.com/official-response
1•yaleman•53s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Index-free full-text search that's fast enough for practical use

https://www.dateisuche.de/en/
1•Michael_Houben•1m ago•0 comments

EPA makes it harder for states, tribes to block pipelines

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14012026/epa-proposal-streamlines-oil-gas-infrastructure-appro...
1•voxadam•2m ago•0 comments

Intel's AMX-BF16: Over 4x the Performance at 69% the Power

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-oidn-amx-fp16
1•speckx•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Turn raw outage timelines into professional incident postmortems

1•ededft•3m ago•0 comments

Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code

https://christopherkrapu.com/blog/2026/ocr-textbooks-modal-deepseek/
1•ckrapu•3m ago•0 comments

Bad Vibes: Comparing the Secure Coding Capabilities of Popular Coding Agents

https://blog.tenzai.com/bad-vibes-comparing-the-secure-coding-capabilities-of-popular-coding-agents/
1•oridavid•4m ago•0 comments

How to install Linux From Scratch [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh_u2xALubE
1•nmariusp•4m ago•0 comments

'Havana Syndrome' Device Could Finally Solve Mystery

https://www.newsweek.com/havana-syndrome-device-finally-solved-mystery-report-11349658
1•buellerbueller•4m ago•1 comments

Why Europe Is Rediscovering the Virtues of Cash

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fecon.st%2F4jN28sA%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZ...
1•ripe•5m ago•0 comments

A Brief Deep-Dive into Attacking and Defending Kubernetes

https://heilancoos.github.io/research/2025/12/16/kubernetes.html
1•hacb•5m ago•0 comments

The Internet After YouTube

https://ariadnavigo.xyz/posts/the-internet-after-youtube/
1•8organicbits•5m ago•0 comments

Reprompt: Single-Click Microsoft Copilot Data Exfil

https://www.varonis.com/blog/reprompt
1•rsobers•5m ago•0 comments

Former U.S. Navy Sailor Sentenced to 200 Months for Spying for China

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-us-navy-sailor-sentenced-200-months-spying-china
1•DustinEchoes•5m ago•0 comments

Apache DataFusion SQL Query Engine

https://github.com/apache/datafusion
1•tosh•6m ago•0 comments

Roborock Saros Rover [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuyBti4YC-Y
1•surprisetalk•7m ago•1 comments

Stagehand Conflates Judgment and Execution Like Many Agent Frameworks

https://softwarefordays.com/post/software-is-mostly-all-you-need/
1•jbmilgrom•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Spec – A language-agnostic IR for LLM agents (live demo)

https://github.com/mronus/spec
1•mronus•10m ago•1 comments

Unlocking Front End Success: My Ultimate MCP List

https://naurislinde.dev/blog/unlocking-frontend-success-my-ultimate-mcp-list-for-aspiring-developers
1•sref•10m ago•0 comments

Silver Hits Record Above $90 as Precious Metals Rally Powers On

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gold-rises-toward-record-us-004845550.html
1•Noaidi•12m ago•0 comments

EuroBoxx – European Softare Alternatives

https://euroboxx.eu/
1•Trackboxx•15m ago•1 comments

Show HN: LogiCart – Agentic shopping using Generative UI (A2UI pattern)

https://logicart.ai
1•ahmedm24•15m ago•1 comments

Show HN: llms.py OSS ChatGPT CLI and Web UI with Tool Calling, RAG, Extensions

https://llmspy.org
1•mythz•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A minimal example of why reactive systems oscillate

1•SpicyG•17m ago•0 comments

The Obscure Bank Collapse That Sent Iran into a Tailspin

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/bank-collapse-iran-protests-83f6b681
2•JumpCrisscross•18m ago•0 comments

Mathematical Puzzles [pdf]

https://math.dartmouth.edu/news-resources/electronic/puzzlebook/book/book.pdf
1•mhb•19m ago•0 comments

What came first: the CNAME or the A record?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cname-a-record-order-dns-standards/
5•sorcix•21m ago•0 comments

$250K+ XSS in Meta Conversion API Leading to Zero-Click Account Takeover

https://ysamm.com/uncategorized/2025/01/13/capig-xss.html
1•phwd•22m ago•0 comments

The biggest obstacle for engineer productivity in 2026

https://strategizeyourcareer.com/p/this-ai-problem-is-the-biggest-risk-for-software-engineers-in-...
1•emreb•23m ago•0 comments

Sakana AI Agent Wins AtCoder Heuristic Contest (First AI to Place First)

https://sakana.ai/ahc058/
1•simonpure•23m 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/