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A Tour of Magit's Status Interface

https://heiwiper.com/posts/magit-status-tour/
1•birdculture•3m ago•0 comments

BanProof – AI that scans TikTok Shop videos for violation points before you post

https://banproof.io/
1•Pratham3690•3m ago•0 comments

Credentio: Open-Source C++ Library for C2PA Content Credentials from Google

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-credentio-open-source-c-library-for-c2pa-content-cr...
1•vinayakborkar•4m ago•0 comments

Silver Lake in talks to buy Workday, sources say

https://www.reuters.com/world/silver-lake-talks-buy-workday-sources-say-2026-08-13/
1•healsdata•5m ago•0 comments

Jason Steffen's Home Page

https://www.physics.unlv.edu/~jsteffen/airplanes.html
1•thunderbong•7m ago•0 comments

Dividend Puzzle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend_puzzle
1•rzk•17m ago•0 comments

A 23-year-old founder built Radiant World into a $12B-a-year trading giant

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/a-23-year-old-founder-built-radiant-world-into-a-12-billi...
1•petethomas•17m ago•0 comments

Enabling the next iteration of the borrow checker on nightly

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/08/04/enabling-polonius-alpha-on-nightly/
1•weinzierl•21m ago•0 comments

Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/16/stripe-will-reportedly-acquire-ai-gateway-startup-openrouter-fo...
9•sbulaev•26m ago•2 comments

What Early Internet Hackers Understood That We Forgot [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHeMsXDyw2A
1•pierrephpguru•26m ago•0 comments

Agents Aren't Software

https://runta.com/blog/agents-arent-software/
2•jinqueeny•27m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Slick – I built a search engine where you control the ranking

https://slicksearchhq.com/
1•nox21125•30m ago•0 comments

The billionaire threatening to upend Wall Street

https://www.ft.com/content/cf87b6cd-f940-4b09-b072-7da36faa183f
1•petethomas•33m ago•0 comments

Single-User Inference Card

https://markohaberl.substack.com/p/single-user-inference-card
1•mhaberl•38m ago•1 comments

SINR: Signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-interference-plus-noise_ratio
2•teleforce•39m ago•0 comments

AI Slop Is Real

https://aichatspot.online/what-is-ai-slop-and-does-it-really-ruin-youtube/
1•coinpress•40m ago•0 comments

Anthropic CEO says the way for AI to win over the public is to cure cancer

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-ai-public-opinion-cure-cancer-2026-8
9•wertyk•42m ago•11 comments

Show HN: Punyecs – A puny ECS library based on class attributes and querying

https://github.com/Modular-Game-Components/punyecs
1•thyrgle•43m ago•0 comments

Frontier models, transparency and trust; a new golden age in research for some?

https://scholarlyfutures.substack.com/p/frontier-models-transparency-and
2•JohnHammersley•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TKeeper – OSS machine identities without a single point of compromise

https://tkeeper.org
1•_qnt•54m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ChatGPT and Claude export viewer that runs locally in the browser

https://www.vinaa.ai/tools/ai-chat-history-browser/
1•sujee•55m ago•0 comments

Ukraine Finds Nvidia AI Chip in New Russian Missile, HUR Says

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/82225
7•osivertsson•1h ago•1 comments

Nobody Knows Anything

https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/nobody-knows-anything
2•gtirloni•1h ago•0 comments

Off-Sprey

https://offsprey.com/
1•voidmain0001•1h ago•1 comments

Apologia for the Old Ball

https://ponnekanti.net/oldball/
1•reasonableklout•1h ago•0 comments

Smarter – open-source, declarative AI authoring platform (Django, K8s-inspired)

https://github.com/smarter-sh/smarter
1•lpm0073•1h ago•0 comments

Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information – Whales

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/17/sperm-whales-in-19th-century-shared-ship-atta...
4•bilsbie•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: I Turned Apple Calendar into Tetris

https://github.com/EvanZhouDev/calendar-tetris
2•EvanZhouDev•1h ago•0 comments

Ghosts of the Past and Devils of the Present

https://thenewcuriosityshop.substack.com/p/ghosts-of-the-past-and-devils-of
1•benbreen•1h ago•0 comments

Legbar – live AI agent sessions beside GitHub CI, in one terminal

https://github.com/gmhoward9289-ops/legbar
3•gmhoward9289•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