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Stop calling the Super Productionizer a 'baby blender' – Frank Elavsky

https://www.frank.computer/blog/2025/06/baby-blender.html
1•cratermoon•45s ago•0 comments

Engineers use information theory to solve NYT puzzle with 99% success rate

https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/6327/s-m-a-r-t-these-researchers-used-math-to-crack-wordle
1•hhs•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TLA+ Process Studio

https://tlaplus-process-studio.com/?example=meeting-lifecycle
2•uptodatenews•5m ago•0 comments

Pre-2022 Books

https://notes.lorenzogravina.com/musings/pre-2022-books
2•trms•7m ago•0 comments

I can haz smoller NixOS ISOs?

https://natkr.com/2026-06-19-nixos-but-smol/
2•birdculture•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Maccha – Cross Agent Brain for Antigravity, Claude Code, OpenCode etc.

https://github.com/KarelTestSpecial/real-agent-setup
2•kareldecherf•12m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Onsight: pay a local to photograph any spot in San Francisco, on demand

https://onsight.photo/san-francisco
1•pro_methe5•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cruit – Get Hired directly from your coding agent

https://cruit.dev
1•nwang783•16m ago•0 comments

Trump DOJ Outlines Dubious Path to Force People into Psychiatric Institutions

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/06/trump-doj-memo-olmstead-psychiatric-disabilities-ins...
3•hn_acker•18m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Save, an API that turns any URL into clean Markdown for LLMs

https://www.savemarkdown.co/api/
1•jswallez•19m ago•0 comments

Nvidia Vera CPU Performance Compares to the Ampere Altra Max

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampere-altra-nvidia-vera
1•rbanffy•19m ago•0 comments

Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(26)00339-9
1•croes•21m ago•0 comments

The Early Days: The History of Interactive Computing

https://obsolescence.dev/interactive-computing-history.html
2•rbanffy•21m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Are You Depressed?

1•chistev•25m ago•1 comments

Admin ditches plan to close critical ocean monitoring system after backlash

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/18/climate/trump-administration-reverses-decision-ocean-monitoring-sy...
2•gnabgib•25m ago•0 comments

Running a 35B MoE model on a 2017 AMD RX 580 8GB via Vulkan (no ROCm/CUDA)

https://github.com/aivisionslab-studios/rx580-local-ai-guide
1•aivisionslab•27m ago•0 comments

Tesla allegedly in autopilot mode crashes into Texas house, woman killed

https://abcnews.com/US/tesla-allegedly-autopilot-mode-crashes-texas-house-woman/story?id=134062374
15•malshe•29m ago•1 comments

I'm Making a Real-Life Zombie Game – 8 Months Later [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ulWua0cuc
1•mmarian•30m ago•0 comments

Bluffbench is near saturation: LLMs can interpret counterintuitive plots

https://opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-06-19_ai-newsletter/
1•ionychal•33m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VLMs Can Respond Twice as Fast Without Losing Quality

https://github.com/sergey-automation/TurboPrefill-VLM-Validation
1•trykhlieb•34m ago•0 comments

Building and hosting a website in under three minutes

https://mattsayar.com/building-and-hosting-a-website-in-less-than-3-minutes/
1•MattSayar•34m ago•0 comments

FIFA World Cup 2026: 45 Cameras Will Capture Every Moment of the Action

https://vimegs.com/fifa-world-cup-2026-an-incredible-45-cameras-will-capture-the-electrifying-atm...
1•LukasMarek•35m ago•0 comments

Atlantic investigation reveals millions of songs used for AI music training

https://www.engadget.com/2194804/investigation-by-the-atlantic-reveals-many-millions-of-songs-use...
2•gnabgib•36m ago•0 comments

Playdate Became a Cult Classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXJI7qz4svo
1•coolwulf•37m ago•1 comments

TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/tiktok-shows-3x-more-ai-slop-than-youtube-report-finds/579521/
3•gnabgib•38m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MailNuke – Inbox Clutter, Annihilated

https://www.mailnuke.ai/
1•nrice_biz•38m ago•0 comments

Objective reasons to prefer Linux to Windows (2014)

https://github.com/nbeaver/why-linux-is-better
1•downbad_•43m ago•0 comments

Never coded before, now shipping websites to clients via single prompt

1•bobthebob•47m ago•0 comments

How do people in the US describe customer service in 2026?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/20/guardian-readers-consumer-battles
1•dredmorbius•47m ago•0 comments

'Toy Story 2' – A Classic Movie Nearly Destroyed by a Single Line of Code

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/toy-story-5-saved-pixar-78e29161
5•bookofjoe•49m ago•4 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