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Show HN: SnapCan – Get AI Photos of You "Anywhere" in the World (iOS)

https://snapcan.app/
1•marsorange•1m ago•0 comments

Tips for Building Better Enterprise GraphRAG Pipelines with Memgraph CTO

https://www.graphgeeks.org/blog/graphrag-pipelines
1•taubek•2m ago•0 comments

Agent Skills Changed How I Work with AI

https://everything.intellectronica.net/p/agent-skills-changed-how-i-work-with
1•intellectronica•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: WatchLLM – Debug AI agents step-by-step with cost attribution

1•Kaadz•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VoGen – A web app for hyper-realistic voice generating and cloning

https://www.vogen.app/
1•leoyixing•4m ago•0 comments

Open-source tool to control drones using natural language

https://github.com/evangelosmeklis/deepdrone
1•twelvechess•4m ago•1 comments

The stress management app that doesn't even pretend things are OK (cartoon)

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2026/jan/16/stress-management-app-stephen-collin...
1•beardyw•4m ago•0 comments

New map reveals landscape beneath Antarctica in unprecedented detail

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9qpx2qqeq7o
1•lifeisstillgood•5m ago•0 comments

Understanding Watchmaking

https://the-naked-watchmaker-masterclass.thinkific.com/courses/understanding-watchmaking-an-intro...
1•ClaudeGustav2•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Proxy MCP server that lazy loads tools to save tokens

https://github.com/mquan/nimble
1•quan•6m ago•0 comments

So You've Decided to Become Dead to the World: On Becoming an Anchoress

https://medievalmarginalia.substack.com/p/so-youve-decided-to-become-dead-to
1•dmazin•12m ago•0 comments

More than 100k people urge MPs to ban social media for under-16s in UK

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/15/people-urge-mps-ban-social-media-under-16s-uk-starmer
1•giuliomagnifico•15m ago•0 comments

Is CAPTCHA still a thing in 2026 (Captcha 3.5)?

1•jarirajari•20m ago•1 comments

Tool Search Now in Claude Code

https://twitter.com/trq212/status/2011523109871108570
1•michaelmior•20m ago•0 comments

How the Base UI team prevents UI regressions at scale

https://argos-ci.com/customers/mui
1•neoziro•21m ago•0 comments

Crane Lowers Rocq Safely into C++ [pdf]

https://bloomberg.github.io/crane/papers/crane-rocqpl26.pdf
2•pjmlp•21m ago•0 comments

VS Code extensions to code with AI that only a few know about

https://diploi.com/blog/exploring-7-lesser-known-ai-coding-extensions
1•javierpresnsr•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free AI Image Upscaler (100% local, private, and free)

https://freeaitoolforthat.com/ai-image-upscaler
2•tamnv•28m ago•2 comments

Wikimédia to Partner with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity

https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/blog/wikipedia-25-enterprise-partners/
1•mrtnmrtn•28m ago•0 comments

Hands-On: Exploit RISC-V CPU Using Return-Oriented Programming

https://www.bogdandeac.com/hands-on-exploit-risc-v-cpu-using-return-oriented-programming/
2•bg2d•31m ago•0 comments

Promoting AI Agents

https://world.hey.com/dhh/promoting-ai-agents-3ee04945
1•kiyanwang•31m ago•0 comments

On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/crisis/crisis.pdf
15•barishnamazov•31m ago•0 comments

The Magic of the Better Software Conference

https://www.rfleury.com/p/the-magic-of-the-better-software
1•kruuuder•32m ago•0 comments

Chrome 145 Adds Experimental Support for Vertical Tabs

https://www.bram.us/2026/01/16/chrome-145-adds-experimental-support-for-vertical-tabs/
2•tobr•32m ago•0 comments

I vibed a CMS with live-preview/users/click-through-edit in an afternoon

https://github.com/mj1618/yolo-cms
2•mj2718•35m ago•1 comments

John von Neumann's MANIAC I (1952)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I
1•widenrun•35m ago•0 comments

Operation Big Buzz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Big_Buzz
1•downboots•35m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

2•ssunboyy•43m ago•0 comments

The Thrill Is Gone: Airbnb and the Crisis of Imagination in Short-Term Rentals

https://skift.com/2026/01/15/the-thrill-is-gone-airbnb-and-the-crisis-of-imagination-in-short-ter...
3•jclampet•48m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Wikitool – CLI for fetching Wikipedia content

2•moeffju•49m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•8mo ago

Comments

thechao•8mo 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•8mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•8mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•8mo 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•8mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•8mo 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•8mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•8mo 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_•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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/