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Show HN: Synergetic-SQR – A 4D rendering engine with bit-exact rotation

https://github.com/johncurley/synergetic-sqr
1•j291920•46s ago•0 comments

The Prompt Injection Problem: A Guide to Defense-in-Depth for AI Agents

https://manveerc.substack.com/p/prompt-injection-defense-architecture-production-ai-agents
1•manveerc•1m ago•0 comments

"OpenClaw, open the front door"

https://jukkan.com/openclaw-open-the-front-door/
1•jukkan•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TinyCard – A minimalistic e-Card site

https://tinycard.app
1•szemy2•1m ago•0 comments

Mapping Physical Header Pins to Logical GPIO Numbers in Code

https://hubble.com/community/guides/mapping-physical-header-pins-to-logical-gpio-numbers/
1•jmarbach•2m ago•0 comments

Build Windows 11 QEMU VM images deterministically with Nix

https://github.com/aleclearmind/nix-windows-in-qemu
1•aleclm•2m ago•0 comments

Apple's upcoming AI smart glasses are starting to sound more exciting

https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/21/apple-ai-smart-glasses-rumors-sounding-more-exciting/
1•gmays•2m ago•0 comments

A 62-byte FLAC file that requests 8.5GB in dr_flac, used by raylib and SDL

https://medium.com/@caplanmaor/integer-overflow-in-dr-flac-cve-2025-14369-2785de317496
2•BambaNugat•5m ago•0 comments

Chemical Weapons: A Summary Report of Characteristics and Effects

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42862
2•joebig•5m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What do I do now that software engineering is dead?

2•eerichmond33•5m ago•0 comments

Can Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Solve Any Computable Task?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12066
2•ryancoleman•6m ago•1 comments

The Last Year of Terraform

https://encore.dev/blog/last-year-of-terraform
2•rzk•6m ago•0 comments

Jane Street Accused of Insider Trading That Helped Collapse Terraform

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/jane-street-accused-of-insider-trading-that-helped-collaps...
5•upmind•9m ago•0 comments

People systematically overlook subtractive changes (2021)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y
1•escapeteam•11m ago•0 comments

Tests Are the New Moat

https://saewitz.com/tests-are-the-new-moat
2•taubek•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a tool that turns Reddit conversations into video scripts

https://scriptmine.ai
1•pwnSh•12m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: Vibe Coding Taxonomy

1•andai•13m ago•0 comments

Designing APIs for AI Agents

https://www.apideck.com/blog/api-design-principles-agentic-era
1•gertjandewilde•13m ago•1 comments

Colorado Lawmakers Push for Age Verification at the Operating System Level

https://www.pcmag.com/news/colorado-lawmakers-push-for-age-verification-at-the-operating-system-l...
4•josephcsible•13m ago•3 comments

Combien de Bises ?

http://combiendebises.free.fr/index.php
1•jjgreen•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Rampart v0.5 – what stops your AI agent from reading your SSH keys?

https://github.com/peg/rampart
1•trevxr•15m ago•0 comments

AI podcast network publishes 11,000 episodes a day. It rips off media outlets

https://indicator.media/p/this-ai-generated-podcast-network-publishes-11-000-episodes-a-day-it-s-...
1•jaredwiener•15m ago•0 comments

My Phone Will Spam You If I Fail to Exercise by 3PM

https://taylor.town/tttl-000
1•surprisetalk•18m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Run untrusted WASM plugins with CPU/mem/network/file budgets

https://github.com/akgitrepos/wasm-plugin-sandbox
1•akgitrepos•19m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Your AI agent logged the mistake. Mine wasn't allowed to make it

https://github.com/agentbouncr/agentbouncr
1•Soenke_Cramme•20m ago•1 comments

Wisp – Full Screen Frameless Browser for iOS

https://getwisp.online/
1•janandonly•21m ago•0 comments

I got my 2nd paying customer by doing one thing: spamming about my app

https://www.founderspace.work
1•VladCovaci•22m ago•1 comments

AI bit barns grow climate emergency by turning up the gas

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/17/ai_datacenters_driving_up_emissions/
8•PaulHoule•24m ago•0 comments

The Agent for Motion Graphics

https://www.freemotion.app/
1•jithin_g•24m ago•1 comments

One Hack Nearly Took Down the Internet (Veritasium) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ
1•sbuttgereit•24m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)

https://www.srimech.com/MHZ5.html
95•gene-h•10mo ago

Comments

thechao•10mo 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•10mo ago
A shishi-odoshi ALU would be amazing to see…and hear too.

I love that idea.

blackhaz•9mo ago
I wanna run my neural net on shishi-odoshi.
rightbyte•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
> a 1100 hp motor to run it

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

thechao•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
byronknoll•9mo 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•9mo ago
Beautiful! Thank you!
QuadmasterXLII•9mo 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•10mo ago
What a gem of a site Thank you for sharing
mrandish•9mo 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_•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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/