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To Build a Fire:Inside Russia's Campaign of Sabotage in Europe

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/to-build-a-fire
1•stevenwoo•3m ago•0 comments

Technical Co-Founder – AI Agent Infrastructure

https://www.evercred.com
1•MarkHealth•4m ago•1 comments

GLM-OCR

https://twitter.com/Zai_org/status/2018520052941656385
1•sergiotapia•4m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw – Hands for a Brain That Doesn't yet Exist

https://bengoertzel.substack.com/p/openclaw-amazing-hands-for-a-brain
1•laurex•5m ago•0 comments

Rust in the NetBSD Kernel, and other odd decisions

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/netbsd-rust-kernel/
1•jaypatelani•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LevelUpPro – Test-drive tech careers before committing

https://www.leveluppro.in
1•vijayanand_v•11m ago•0 comments

The Physical World Doesn't Want Your "Success Dataset"

https://substack.com/home/post/p-186695082
1•FuseGov•12m ago•1 comments

Salazar vs. Paramount Global (3:22-CV-00756) [pdf]

https://dn710205.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.tnmd.92043/gov.uscourts.tnmd.92043.1.0.pdf
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•12m ago•0 comments

Clawsocial.io – a crustacean themed network 4000 meters deep

https://clawsocial.io/#/
1•hnaln•12m ago•0 comments

Fifteen former college basketball players charged in alleged betting scheme

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jan/15/fifteen-former-college-basketball-players-charged-i...
1•PaulHoule•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Open-source semantic search over your local notes via CLI

https://github.com/chenxin-yan/nia-vault
1•jellyotsiro•18m ago•0 comments

How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source

https://hackaday.com/2026/02/02/how-vibe-coding-is-killing-open-source/
3•lxm•18m ago•0 comments

Over 60% of YC start up are B2B

https://pardusai.org/view/7d44e51254facd240c2889c1abdd1207a70f531dafe8d80917e56dc50d72da73
1•JasonHEIN•18m ago•0 comments

Fixing academic email perishability with personal domains

https://r-federation.eu
2•r-federation•19m ago•0 comments

Man, 83, Tricked by Scammers, Gets 21 Years to Life for Killing Uber Driver

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/us/ohio-man-kills-uber-driver-sentenced.html
3•lxm•19m ago•1 comments

The Tragedy of Supernatural

https://www.theverge.com/tech/871250/supernatural-meta-vr-fitness-community
1•guiambros•23m ago•1 comments

Looking back at Catacomb 3D, the game that led to Wolfenstein 3D

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/02/looking-back-at-catacomb-3d-the-game-that-led-to-wolfenste...
1•AdmiralAsshat•27m ago•0 comments

Fecal microbiota transplantation and immunotherapy in metastatic renal carcinoma

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04183-8
1•bookofjoe•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Stream-based AI with neurological multi-gate (Na⁺/θ/NMDA)

https://github.com/CSCT-NAIL/CSCT
2•CSCT-NAIL•33m ago•2 comments

How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250124-how-to-carry-more-than-your-own-bodyweight
1•1659447091•36m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Dm.bot – DMs between AI agents with no humans in the middle

https://dm.bot
1•dommm•37m ago•1 comments

Lawsuit Challenges National Park Service Ban on Cash Payments

https://reclaimthenet.org/lawsuit-challenges-national-park-service-ban-on-cash-payments
9•bilsbie•44m ago•0 comments

Data Centers Are Not "Campuses"

https://newrepublic.com/article/205525/data-centers-campus-virginia
2•petethomas•45m ago•0 comments

Show HN: APYCalc – Privacy-First APY Calculator (Zero Data Collection)

https://www.apycalc.net/
1•ludydev•46m ago•0 comments

Voynich Manuscript

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
1•reaperducer•46m ago•0 comments

Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of AI (Nov. 2025, Pdf)

https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf
2•bikenaga•52m ago•2 comments

Classified Whistleblower Complaint About Tulsi Gabbard Stalls Within Her Agency

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/classified-whistleblower-complaint-about-tulsi-gab...
15•petethomas•55m ago•2 comments

The Vanilla Web Is Wonderful

https://benjaminsmallwood.com/blog/the-vanilla-web-is-wonderful/
2•bensmallwood•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: One Ego, Any Model – A Chrome Extension for Portable AI Context

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/context-wallet/cipkkclgneblkoifncgjncaapiamcjho
1•haebom•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: CancelShouldBeEasy – Generate and co-sign consumer complaint letters

https://CancelShouldBeEasy.com
1•xinbenlv•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•9mo ago

Comments

thechao•9mo 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•9mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•9mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•9mo 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•9mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•9mo 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•9mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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/