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Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove

https://www.seangoedecke.com/text-ai-watermarks/
1•ingve•40s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Scalable AI Management Platform

https://github.com/metadist/synaplan/
1•metaralf•4m ago•0 comments

The gauge broke: devs felt 20% faster with AI, measured 19% slower

https://intrepidkarthi.com/writing/the-gauge-broke/
1•intrepidkarthi•5m ago•0 comments

BioShocking AI: "Gaming" the AI Browser and Escaping Its Guardrails

https://layerxsecurity.com/blog/bioshocking-ai-gaming-the-ai-browser-and-escaping-its-guardrails/
1•croes•6m ago•0 comments

Horsewood (2 July 2026) We Tried It My Honest ReviewS

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/healthcare/articles/horsewood-urgent-report-2026-horse-19110038...
2•Gafyhanu•9m ago•0 comments

Seattle Just Had an Earthquake

2•tobinfekkes•13m ago•0 comments

Feds Might Flip the Script on Right to Repair Vehicle Emissions Systems

https://www.thedrive.com/news/feds-might-flip-the-script-on-right-to-repair-vehicle-emissions-sys...
2•josephcsible•20m ago•0 comments

Likelihood, and Maximum Likelihood, in Statistics

https://bactra.org/notebooks/likelihood.html
2•Tomte•23m ago•0 comments

Fable 5 is insanely good

2•vuphanse•23m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Who's Hiring Remote Contractors? (July 2026)

2•akashwadhwani35•23m ago•0 comments

Typst: Designing for Incrementality (Laurenz Mädje at RustWeek) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWWVhbyOWWE
3•felixhummel•24m ago•0 comments

Rasa Intelligence: AI diagnostic engine-gives one business verdict in 90 seconds

https://tech-rasa.com
2•Deepti251•27m ago•0 comments

My Story of 3D Realms / Apogee Part I (2020)

https://joesiegler.blog/2020/11/my-story-of-apogee-3dr/
1•Michelangelo11•28m ago•0 comments

NoUI()

https://www.swiftjectivec.com/noui/
2•ingve•31m ago•0 comments

OpenAgents makes Sonnet 5, Fable 5 and other agents collaborate in one thread

https://openagents.org/workspace
2•gshg12•35m ago•1 comments

The Socialist Wave Reaches the Heartland

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/colorado-democrats-socialists-melat-kiros-michael-bennet-99ad5a66
2•doener•35m ago•2 comments

PyCanopy: A spatial query layer for Polars, competitive with DuckDB, SedonaDB

https://github.com/pranav-walimbe/PyCanopy
1•pranav1077•35m ago•1 comments

The Complete Homemade Juggling Beanbag Guide

https://www.joshuaclifton.com/juggle/
1•mrauha•36m ago•1 comments

Show HN: LinkedIn Focus Chrome Extension

https://yvetter438.github.io/LinkedInFeedBlockerWebsite/
1•ywv•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: What GPTBot sees before your React app hydrates

https://botscore.io/blog/what-gptbot-sees-before-hydration/
1•_tool•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Designing a factory-safety agent (model reasons, code routes)

https://github.com/HumphreySun98/safety-commander-agent
1•humphreysun98•42m ago•0 comments

Section 194J of Income Tax Act: Meaning, Rules and Examples – SMFG India Credit

https://www.smfgindiacredit.com/knowledge-center/section-194j-of-income-tax-act.aspx
1•saumyaraut11•43m ago•0 comments

Black Pepper Won Europe from a Tastier Pepper (2016)

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/long-pepper-better-than-black-pepper
1•downbad_•44m ago•0 comments

Google's exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat

https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/googles-exponential-path-to-climate-wrecking-digital-bloat/
1•jalev•45m ago•0 comments

LongCat 2.0: The first trillion-parameter model trained on Chinese-made GPUs

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-meituan-says-new-ai-model-trained-domestic-chips-2026-...
1•linzhangrun•46m ago•0 comments

Limine: Modern, secure, portable, multiprotocol bootloader and boot manager

https://github.com/Limine-Bootloader/Limine
2•noteness•51m ago•0 comments

Cotal: Agentic Coordination Layer

https://cotal.ai
1•handfuloflight•53m ago•0 comments

CSS Logical Properties Converter

https://cssawwwards.com/frontend-toolkit/css-logical-properties
1•cssawwwards•55m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I wrote a Rust book ending with a Redis clone

https://shankhan3.gumroad.com/l/dnwmtp
2•zeeshanali0094•55m ago•0 comments

The Three Projections of Doctor Futamura

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/05/three-projections-of-doctor-futamura.html
1•tristenharr•55m 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