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Women sue the men who used their Instagram feeds to create AI porn influencers

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-porn-lawsuit-arizona/
1•Bender•33s ago•0 comments

Minnesota passes ban on fake AI nudes; app makers risk $500K fines

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/minnesota-set-to-be-first-state-to-ban-nudification-a...
1•Bender•1m ago•0 comments

WolfCOSE vs. the Field: The Smallest, Most Complete COSE Implementation

https://aidangarske.github.io/wolfCOSE/blog/wolfcose-vs-the-field/
1•aidangarske•1m ago•1 comments

Fredis: A simple in-memory Redis compatible server in Rust

https://gitlab.com/foscogab/fredis
1•gfosco•4m ago•1 comments

AI as Infrastructure

https://cunderwood.dev/2026/05/01/ai-as-infrastructure/
2•speckx•5m ago•0 comments

How to speed up clinical trials (Works in Progress Podcast)

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-speed-up-clinical-trials/id1819488714?i=1000763007270
1•marojejian•6m ago•1 comments

Top AI companies agree to work with Pentagon on secret data

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/05/01/pentagon-ai-deals-microsoft-amazon-google-cl...
1•geox•6m ago•0 comments

Musk Warns of Killer AI, While He and Silicon Valley Cash in on AI That Kills

https://theintercept.com/2026/05/01/elon-musk-openai-lawsuit-trial/
2•cdrnsf•7m ago•0 comments

The California Government Is Coming for Your E-Bikes

https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/30/e-bike-regulation-license-plates-laws-dmv/
2•m463•7m ago•0 comments

Using "underdrawings" for accurate text and numbers

https://samcollins.blog/underdrawings/
2•samcollins•9m ago•1 comments

Claude Code can now /perceive

https://github.com/machinepulse-ai/world2agent
2•WayLonWen•9m ago•0 comments

An Interview with Josh Fisher – Inventing VLIW, Multiflow, Itanium [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF8ohzWmuzI
1•dataviz1000•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Blotter, a live map of police radio activity

https://blotter.fm
1•s_e__a___n•12m ago•1 comments

Andrej Karpathy's Sequoia talk, I agree with most but not this

https://twitter.com/xing101/status/2050271353983598630
3•xingwu•14m ago•2 comments

Show HN: BeautyShot – easy macOS promo screenshots

https://bendansby.com/apps/beautyshot/
1•webwielder2•14m ago•0 comments

Farrell vs. LinkedIn Corporation 4:26-CV-02953-KAW (ND Cal Apr 6, 2026) [pdf]

https://ia601503.us.archive.org/33/items/gov.uscourts.cand.467271/gov.uscourts.cand.467271.1.0.pdf
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•14m ago•0 comments

LLM-eval-kit: Distributed LLM evaluation framework (v0.3.0)

https://github.com/benmeryem-tech/llm-eval-kit
1•benmeryem_ai•16m ago•0 comments

Achi RPC: An RPC library for workers on the web and node JavaScript

https://www.npmjs.com/package/achi-rpc
1•stiles11•18m ago•0 comments

"I suck" -theprimeagen [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-ZvAw_VNk4
1•eamag•18m ago•0 comments

Ganglion: Hostile-network reachability for robot fleets, built on libp2p

https://github.com/TafyLabs/ganglion
1•karma0•20m ago•1 comments

Y Combinator alum Skio sells for $105M cash, only raised $8M, founder says

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/30/y-combinator-alum-skio-sells-for-105m-cash-only-raised-8m-found...
3•Brajeshwar•22m ago•0 comments

TypeKro: Write TypeScript. Deploy Kubernetes

https://typekro.run
2•ManWith2Plans•24m ago•0 comments

Pentagon reaches agreements with top AI companies, but not Anthropic

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/pentagon-reaches-agreements-with-leading-ai-comp...
2•mikhael•27m ago•0 comments

It's Possible to Learn in Our Sleep. Should We?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/its-possible-to-learn-in-our-sleep-should-we
2•XzetaU8•29m ago•1 comments

Decoding a decade of rising global light pollution

https://www.darkskyconsulting.com/blog/decoding-a-decade-of-rising-global-light-pollution
2•DamonHD•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CyberChef Payment Cryptography Extensions

https://www.jacobmarks.com/2026/04/cyberchef-payment-cryptography.html
1•J8K357R•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI CAD Harness

https://fusion.adam.new/install
2•zachdive•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: My Private GitHub on Postgres

https://github.com/calebwin/gitgres
8•calebhwin•36m ago•2 comments

Artemis II Fault Tolerance

https://alearningaday.blog/2026/05/01/artemis-ii-fault-tolerance/
2•speckx•37m ago•0 comments

MetaModel – AI builds structured, formula-driven apps from plain English

https://www.metamodel.app
1•joegra•37m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•1y ago

Comments

thechao•12mo 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•12mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•12mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

Oh, ye that sounds impractical. A really big truck engine more or less.

thechao•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•12mo 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•12mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•12mo 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•12mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•12mo 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_•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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/