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Show HN: Minimalistic roguelike game about hiking in Clojure

https://github.com/postboy/roguehike
1•postboy•2m ago•0 comments

New method Binance and Crypto Drainer, +$70k a week

1•jambini•2m ago•0 comments

Bloomington, Indiana Bans Artificial Intelligence: Ordinance 2026-29 Explained

https://explainx.ai/blog/bloomington-indiana-superintelligence-ban-ordinance-2026-29-2026
2•extraextra•3m ago•0 comments

Starship Flight 15 on 11/13 plans to catch both booster and ship

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-15
2•spikels•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vynyo – AI creative studio for hairstyle, image and video

https://vynyo.com
1•zhoouweiyuan51•4m ago•0 comments

The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford

https://ftrain.com/aboard-the-web-is-more-than-enough
1•edward•5m ago•0 comments

Stanford Paper Could Make Nvidia's Memory Chips Unnecessary [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv5_PH2uPVI
1•da02•5m ago•0 comments

Smart Soil Sensors Tested and Compared

https://smarthomescene.com/reviews/smart-soil-sensors-tested/
1•kiselio•6m ago•0 comments

Correctness of Automatic Differentiation via Diffeologies and Categorical Gluing

https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02209
1•measurablefunc•7m ago•0 comments

Threat of air strikes: US looks to bolster base infrastructure with 3D printing

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2026/11/04/under-threat-of-air-strikes-us-looks-to-bolster-bas...
1•everybodyknows•7m ago•0 comments

NCM: Next-Concept Modeling: Fast, Parallel Coarse-to-Fine Text Generation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14162
2•based2•12m ago•0 comments

Systemd Loves Rust

https://amutable.com/blog/systemd-loves-rust
2•birdculture•14m ago•0 comments

Optimizing Reference Deletions in Git

https://nayak.im/posts/optimizing-reference-deletion/
2•nayak•16m ago•0 comments

How I Fight AI Brain Fry

https://sergeykuhne.com/blog/fighting-ai-brain-fry
2•kyunez•16m ago•0 comments

PDP-8/E Restoration Log

https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipment/dec-pdp-8e/pdp-8e-restoration-log
3•andrewstuart•22m ago•0 comments

Quotes and Dashes for Typography Novices

https://arturdryomov.dev/posts/typography-marks/
2•ming13•23m ago•0 comments

Fishermen find Royal Caribbean cruise ship employee in water 20 miles off coast

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/newport-beach-fishermen-find-man-treading-water-royal-car...
4•tosh•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tab-league – archive Chrome tabs locally so closing them feels safe

https://github.com/Shann5/tab-league
1•shanni_hacks•26m ago•0 comments

AI detection trap: When machines put human creativity on trial

https://www.newindianexpress.com/explainers/2026/Nov/06/ai-detection-trap-when-machines-put-human...
1•paulpauper•28m ago•0 comments

The Costs of Federal Permitting [pdf]

https://nicholasbagley.com/assets/papers/costs-of-federal-permitting.pdf
1•paulpauper•32m ago•0 comments

Buying Computers at Costco

https://jlellis.net/blog/why-i-buy-my-computers-at-costco/
2•succinct_ideas•32m ago•1 comments

Pork Roll vs. Taylor Ham?

https://primitivepines.com/pork-roll-vs-taylor-ham/
1•paulpauper•32m ago•0 comments

Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Without DMARC

https://mailroute.net/blog/outlook-rejecting-email-without-dmarc
19•xmddmx•33m ago•9 comments

When the Kubernetes API went silent: A three-layer networking mystery

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/the-three-layer-gke-network-mystery
2•miladibra•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Models Engineering Index

https://git-aarvin.github.io/mei/
1•hn-aarvin•39m ago•1 comments

Titanic insurance document could fetch £50k

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmgel4wzydg8o
2•tosh•39m ago•0 comments

Etsy changes terms to train AI on your creations, while blocking you doing it [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrlLUUdqDJI
2•fortran77•39m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Can I do a Show HN for a closed source tool I built?

2•Nexus_2077•40m ago•0 comments

My Local Coding Agent

https://hdembinski.github.io/posts/coding_agent.html
1•olq_plo•41m ago•0 comments

Ask HN- Will AI agents behave differently in a swarm?

https://world.emergence.ai/
1•sharkyy•42m ago•1 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