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Freeze-Casting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeze-casting
1•soupspaces•39s ago•0 comments

PEP 829 – Package Startup Configuration Files

https://peps.python.org/pep-0829/
1•zahlman•1m ago•1 comments

Connection Machine Joins All to All to Optimize Better

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ising-machine
1•andsoitis•3m ago•0 comments

Reviving a 1996 IRC network from its own original, recovered source code

https://chatnet.gg/
2•casoalb•4m ago•0 comments

We Can't Harden Node.js Against Prototype Pollution

https://adventures.nodeland.dev/archive/no-we-cant-harden-nodejs-against-prototype/
1•Fudgel•9m ago•0 comments

Why Your Dashboard Is Lying to You (and What Works)

https://medium.com/@alanscottencinas/why-your-dashboard-is-lying-to-you-and-what-actually-works-d...
1•encinas88•9m ago•0 comments

Email Encryption

https://computer.rip/2026-07-19-email-encryption.html
2•zdw•11m ago•0 comments

Prompt Bill of Materials (PBOM) – an open standard for agentic workflows

https://github.com/EqoAI/pbom-spec
1•kavia•13m ago•0 comments

Ecological patterns in Pokémon games reflect those observed in the natural world

https://jgeekstudies.org/2026/07/19/ecological-patterns-in-pokemon/
1•zdw•14m ago•0 comments

Forget the model. When it comes to cybersecurity, it's all about the harness

https://cyberscoop.com/ai-cybersecurity-harness-autonomous-hacking/
4•Gaishan•15m ago•0 comments

Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine
2•wertyk•16m ago•0 comments

BeWide AI – I'm building one startup per week on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@bewideai
1•nikitafaesch•17m ago•1 comments

Studying Linux Schedulers, and Why Metrics Matter

https://pradyun.net/blog/metrics_matter.html
1•birdculture•18m ago•0 comments

DistillFeed: RSS reader with AI-ranked items and summaries

https://github.com/ibaaj/distillfeed
1•newolive•20m ago•0 comments

The Unsexy Infrastructure That Wins Drone Wars

https://www.foxandlion.pub/post/the-unsexy-infrastructure-that-wins-drone-wars
2•afdwfe•20m ago•0 comments

CO2 overload in blood suggests toxic atmosphere within 50 years

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5
20•veqq•22m ago•10 comments

How to piss off your Nix friends

https://fzakaria.com/2026/07/18/how-to-piss-off-your-nix-friends
2•ai_critic•25m ago•0 comments

How to Manage Multiple Resumes for Different Career Paths

https://www.roleframe.ai/blog/managing-multiple-resumes
1•larbisahli•26m ago•0 comments

A card game I built as a decision-making benchmark for AI agents

https://play.in2itgame.com/agent-docs
1•intuitionTom•26m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What are your favorite blogs not about AI?

4•azhenley•34m ago•0 comments

Vox Pop – guess what percent of people agree with you

https://voxpop-delta.vercel.app/
1•henrychannel•45m ago•1 comments

A Scorecard for the AI Age

https://openai.com/index/a-scorecard-for-the-ai-age/
2•yruzin•48m ago•0 comments

RDMA in gVisor: A Deep Dive into GPU Networking

https://atoniolo76.github.io/writing/post/rdma-in-gvisor
3•atoniolo76•54m ago•0 comments

Texas Court Orders Adult Site Domain Locked for AV Violations

https://www.xbiz.com/news/299218/texas-court-orders-adult-site-domain-locked-for-av-violations
1•us0r•55m ago•1 comments

Does operational privacy guidance change code generated by Qwen?

https://github.com/broodingGoat/qwen-privacy-codegen-pilot
1•sushaantmujoo•1h ago•0 comments

Northwestern's Phantom Twist spins at 1,500 RPM to evade human vision

https://runtimewire.com/article/northwestern-phantom-twist-drone-1500-rpm-motion-blur
3•ryanmerket•1h ago•0 comments

Continuous Contact (2005)

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004826.html
2•DiscourseFan•1h ago•0 comments

Compiled List of over $1000 in AI/GPU/LLM Credits (100% Free)

https://sairc.vercel.app/resources
2•imranmk•1h ago•0 comments

How Claude can do your shopping

https://andrewacomb.substack.com/p/buying-screws-with-http-402
1•acombandrew•1h ago•0 comments

Majorana: "Microsoft's topological qubit is real"

https://dotient.com/blog/microsoft-majorana-particle
1•localdeclan•1h 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