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Wisconsin Tracks Man Across State Line with Flock Cameras to Arrest Him for Weed

https://gizmodo.com/wisconsin-cops-tracked-a-man-with-flock-cameras-to-arrest-him-for-weed-200079...
3•CGMthrowaway•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Edgepad – tool for configuring edge touchpad gestures on Linux laptops

https://github.com/assembledev/edgepad
1•dev-e•6m ago•0 comments

The 'Furthur' Bus's Long Trip, and Why It's Returning to San Francisco

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/09/us/kesey-furthur-bus-san-francisco.html
1•reaperducer•7m ago•0 comments

The Lost Art of Preparing Your Own Meals

https://julienreszka.com/blog/the-lost-art-of-preparing-your-own-meals/
1•julienreszka•9m ago•0 comments

Node.js 26.7.0

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v26.7.0
1•andrewstetsenko•9m ago•0 comments

$1.4B tower build for Atlassian hybrid workforce

https://itbrief.com.au/story/new-hq-for-hybrid-workforce-atlassian-central-hits-milestone
1•joeyhage•9m ago•0 comments

YouTube is on a major decluttering mission

https://www.fastcompany.com/91580299/youtube-is-on-a-major-decluttering-mission
1•andsoitis•10m ago•0 comments

Is Longevity a $1.2 Quadrillion Opportunity?

https://metatrends.substack.com/p/is-longevity-a-12-quadrillion-opportunity
1•chegra•10m ago•0 comments

We're not done with point clouds

https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/mvt/
1•birdculture•10m ago•0 comments

OpenAI COO Resigns

https://xcancel.com/bradlightcap/status/2087211567012032862
2•iamskeole•10m ago•0 comments

Euclidean affine functions and their application to calendar algorithms

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/spe.3172
1•fanf2•10m ago•0 comments

To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head

https://blog.get-nerve.com/to-be-a-better-programmer-write-little-proofs-in-your-head/
2•orphereus•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Get an email when Dario Amodei (or 230 others) gives an interview

https://recordal.app
1•hooda•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cut LLM turns in MCP interactions by 75%+

https://github.com/Tura-AI/tura
8•turaainet•13m ago•0 comments

.com now accounts for less than 48% of YC portfolio company domains

https://www.orangecrumbs.com/stories/yc-domains
3•oyster143•13m ago•0 comments

4,099 Qubits: The Myth and Reality of Breaking RSA-2048 with Quantum Computers

https://postquantum.com/post-quantum/4099-qubits-rsa/
2•Anon84•14m ago•0 comments

Boundaryguard – detect invisible Unicode/Trojan Source attacks in CI

https://github.com/000wq123/boundaryguard
2•davor1023•15m ago•0 comments

Lightweight, zero-build reactivity library build for MPA's

https://github.com/marsbos/flynt.js
2•harrald•15m ago•0 comments

Procedural Pixel-Art Grass in Rust and WebGPU

https://jarl-game.com/blog/2d-gpu-grass-rendering/
4•credo_dev•21m ago•0 comments

DFlash changes what tokens per second means

https://piszczek.pl/blog/dflash-changes-what-tokens-per-second-means
2•pich•24m ago•0 comments

Nix didn't hang it was evaluating the world

https://www.labcraft.dev/blog/nix-didnt-hang-it-was-evaluating-the-world
4•anandsuresh•26m ago•0 comments

CoreWeave edges past quarterly revenue estimates

https://www.reuters.com/technology/coreweave-edges-past-quarterly-revenue-estimates-2026-08-11/
2•ashurandi•27m ago•0 comments

The FastLanes Unified Transport Layout

https://blog.dave.tf/post/fastlanes-utl/
2•raggi•30m ago•0 comments

Google's Gemini app surges to one billion users

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/googles-gemini-app-surges-to-one-billion-users/
3•speckx•30m ago•0 comments

Becoming physically immune to brute-force attacks (2021)

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/01/12/password-strength/
2•downbad_•32m ago•0 comments

3D Interactive Map of the Silicon Valley

https://www.levels.fyi/atlas
2•zuhayeer•34m ago•1 comments

Bumble gives up on women making the first move

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/bumble-ditches-its-rule-that-kept-men-from-making-the-first-move/
5•BlueBerry2001•35m ago•1 comments

uBlock Origin no longer supporting Facebook

https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about_disgusting_facebook_devs/
3•Cider9986•35m ago•1 comments

My agent hacked my gym

http://web.archive.org/web/20260516025532/https://www.affinda.com/expert-insights/when-my-ai-agen...
2•tmrtsmith•38m ago•1 comments

Previous-Token Prediction Based LLM Near-Exact Prompt Reconstruction

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29378
2•doener•38m 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