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Autoresearch for Optimizing Elliptic-Curve Point Addition in Shor's Algorithm

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09582
1•simonpure•1m ago•0 comments

From Lisp at JPL to Building AdWords at Google

https://corecursive.com/inside-early-google/
1•oumua_don17•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Caffenol, a darkroom simulation photo editing toy

https://caffenol.app/
1•vintagevibe•4m ago•0 comments

The Intelligence Asymptote

https://joshhawthorne.substack.com/p/the-intelligence-asymptote
1•JoHawth31•5m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Hacker News, but only AI news

https://allslop.news/
1•gavino•8m ago•1 comments

Hot coffee could cause oesophageal cancer

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/11/hot-coffee-could-cause-oesophageal-ca...
4•vinni2•13m ago•4 comments

Light from your phone or the crack under your door could be damaging your health

https://www.fastcompany.com/91605352/this-common-sleep-sleeping-habit-changes-shape-of-your-heart...
2•prmph•15m ago•0 comments

Solve@Home: An open version of OpenAI's 10k-agent approach to hard math

https://solveathome.org/projects/twin-primes/board
2•Bry789123•16m ago•0 comments

9/11 in Berkeley

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10071
2•chmaynard•16m ago•0 comments

Project Callisto: Null results from a nine-year cold fusion research program

https://callisto.report/
2•clivefx•17m ago•1 comments

The unexpected effectiveness of the Picard maneuver

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23624
1•Tomte•19m ago•0 comments

Space Warfighting Environment 2040 [pdf]

https://www.spacecom.mil/Portals/57/%5bFINAL%5d%20USSC%20Space%20Warfighting%20Environment%202040...
1•tolerance•19m ago•0 comments

Orca – The Agent Development Environment

https://www.onorca.dev
1•tyleo•21m ago•0 comments

OxDock – Dockerfile-inspired build DSL for Rust

https://docs.rs/oxdock/latest/oxdock/
1•zombiej5•23m ago•1 comments

Tell HN: Strava Is Down

2•charliebwrites•24m ago•0 comments

Culture Becomes a Dark Forest

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/culture-becomes-a-dark-forest
1•reasonableklout•25m ago•0 comments

Unpacking the Navier–Stokes blowup: the math, the machines, & the mathematicians

https://blog.kolen.dev/math/Navier-Stokes
1•KolenCh•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a hand-modeled 3D Windows 98 portfolio with Three.js

https://wesselsdesktop.com/
2•Abstract2D•27m ago•1 comments

Show HN: SystemFaarDenge – a puzzle game and simulation for system designing

https://systemfaardenge.com/
1•aayushamann•28m ago•0 comments

Seven years of bitwise: Hacker News front page, and the long road into Debian

https://nativeguru.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/seven-years-of-bitwise-a-weekend-project-a-hackernews...
1•stdcall83•28m ago•0 comments

Rethinking Space Opera

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/09/rethinking-space-opera.html
1•pavel_lishin•30m ago•0 comments

GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Messaging/releases/tag/13
2•microtonal•30m ago•0 comments

They Stole Our Code, Now They Want Our Brains (March 2026)

https://www.jernesto.com/articles/on_ai_tools
7•doomishbro•30m ago•3 comments

Git-native task management for local coding agents without MCP

https://gitoza.com/
1•gitoza•30m ago•0 comments

Report Links Pirate IPTV to Hezbollah TV, Calls for U.S. Site-Blocking

https://torrentfreak.com/report-links-pirate-iptv-to-hezbollah-tv-calls-for-u-s-site-blocking/
2•Cider9986•31m ago•0 comments

Governor Newsom signs the strongest child safety chatbot and social media laws

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09/10/governor-newsom-signs-the-strongest-child-safety-chatbot-and-so...
4•moneycantbuy•32m ago•1 comments

Spanda: Sub-microsecond LLM epistemic uncertainty in Rust

5•liquidngas•32m ago•2 comments

Curie by colibrì: A 17B language model designed for SSD-backed inference [video]

https://twitter.com/justvugg/status/2098467957990903833
1•vforno•34m ago•0 comments

From 1 to 33 anycast sites at one cloud provider: a staircase, not a curve

https://anycast.dev/notes/33-sites-staircase
2•portalix•35m ago•0 comments

SB-1119 Companion chatbots: children's safety

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB1119
1•moneycantbuy•35m ago•1 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