frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

With students scarce, college admissions offices friendlier, less intimidating

https://www.npr.org/2026/11/02/nx-s1-6007855/college-admissions-change-fewer-students
1•toomuchtodo•31s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Open-source, Lightroom Alternative RAW editor made by photographer

https://github.com/Duecki1/CalibRaw
1•duecki•53s ago•0 comments

Trump administration Is Wreaking Havoc on Electoral System Before Midterms

https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-wreaking-havoc-on-the-electoral-system-be...
2•HotGarbage•3m ago•0 comments

BoardUI: A React design system with 103 unique components

https://www.boardui.com
1•luispa•3m ago•0 comments

Anthropic's internal AI use, at retail prices, now exceeds its employee pay

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-internal-ai-use-exceeds-employee-pay-tokens-2026-11
2•entryleveljobsc•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Hacker News Aggregators, Aggregated

https://hackeragain.com/
1•yewenjie•4m ago•0 comments

Looking for a lost 1985 game called Netozelius: The Forbidden Outpost

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1xlwvu7/looking_for_a_lost_1985_game_called_ne...
1•Teever•5m ago•0 comments

Write Like a Human (2020)

https://om.co/2020/07/30/write-like-a-human/
1•microsoftedging•7m ago•0 comments

The Rise of Electrostates Could Redraw the Global Economy

https://time.com/article/2026/10/27/electrostates-global-economy/
1•jonbaer•7m ago•0 comments

PostHog hoglake: Petabyte-scale open table format

https://github.com/PostHog/hoglake
1•tosh•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Go (style) linter for dangling package-level functions

https://github.com/nfx/go-ownfunc
1•nf-x•8m ago•0 comments

The DeepMind learning to play Go from scratch breakthrough for general models?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30063
2•redwood•8m ago•0 comments

US Boy names that became girl names (and vice versa)

https://namedaisy.com/blog/boy-names-that-became-girl-names
1•xoobdev•10m ago•0 comments

MCP Gateways Compared: Bifrost, ContextForge, Obot, Docker and Microsoft

https://medium.com/data-science-collective/5-best-mcp-gateways-in-2026-bifrost-ibm-contextforge-o...
1•sebuzdugan•12m ago•0 comments

A 37KB deterministic embedded C malware classifier with 34ns latency

https://www.secwest.net/realigned/presentations/open-the-box-not-the-weights-a-two-tier-disclosur...
1•Zierax•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Wrapped – your neighborhood's year in complaints

https://311wrapped.com/
2•eltokh7•13m ago•0 comments

European supermarkets targeted in second reported cyberattack

https://www.dw.com/en/european-supermarkets-targeted-in-second-reported-cyberattack/a-79831139
1•begueradj•13m ago•0 comments

Encyclopedia of Invisibility

https://www.encyclopediaofinvisibility.com/
1•leephillips•13m ago•0 comments

HackerHype: HackerTube, but for Hacker* Aggregators

http://epestr.com/hackerhype/
3•epestr•14m ago•3 comments

Melting Wax to Move Microns [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF2R5GGfRHM
1•Teever•14m ago•0 comments

Jailbreaking my car's navigation system just so I can change the time

https://blog.nns.ee/2026/11/02/renault-hack/
2•xx_ns•15m ago•0 comments

Fairness in infectious disease modeling

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-78981-0
2•Anon84•15m ago•0 comments

Remembering a Trolley Titan

https://www.streetcar.org/remembering_a_trolley_titan/
1•tobiasdorge•15m ago•0 comments

The Fruits of AI Drug Abundance: Indigestion in the Near Term

https://lifescivc.com/2026/10/the-fruits-of-ai-drug-abundance-indigestion-in-the-near-term/
1•brandonb•19m ago•0 comments

Claude Opus 5.5 Can Draw Permit-Level Architectural Drawings

https://stephenjgallagher.substack.com/p/ai-can-draw-blueprints-now
4•SteveGallag•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Warsaw in voxels – an interactive 3D map of the city centre

https://p.migdal.pl/warsaw-vibe-voxel/
2•stared•19m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Mind Made Many – Platform to organize your agents into orgs

https://mindmademany.com/
1•esamust•19m ago•0 comments

SuperVote: 15 year retrospective on an app for sharing political endorsements

https://callejas.com/a/supervote/
1•augustocallejas•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The DNA of DOOM – How code structure survives across 44 ports

https://squid-protocol.github.io/gitgalaxy/museum-of-code/doom-dna/
2•joe-esquibel•21m ago•2 comments

How to Drown an Expert

https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/how-to-drown-an-expert-b2a7f35274b8
1•azhenley•21m 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