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Modern Developer Time Tracker

https://github.com/v1truv1us/rune
1•ankitg12•55s ago•0 comments

The Story of Mel (1983)

http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
1•tosh•1m ago•0 comments

Brockman says OAI's compute cost for this year is $50B

https://twitter.com/GerritD/status/2051725302137770067
1•deanylev•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ContextWizard – AI context manager with undo and drag-drop

https://chromewebstore.google.com/
1•hacker2builder•6m ago•0 comments

Not your Weights, Not your Brain

https://mercurialsolo.github.io/posts/not-your-weights-not-your-brain/
1•blenderob•6m ago•0 comments

Building a DSL compiler on top of OpenAPI for UI generation

https://uigen-docs.vercel.app/blog/uigen-compiler-architecture
1•ombedzi•8m ago•0 comments

AI as a Mirror of Cognition: Compression, Prediction, and Semantic Drift [pdf]

https://github.com/therealitydrift/cognitive-drift-institute/blob/main/03_Research_and_Papers/03_...
1•realitydrift•9m ago•0 comments

Japan using game development engines for urban planning and disaster management

https://www.tomshardware.com/virtual-reality/japan-using-game-development-engines-for-urban-plann...
1•giuliomagnifico•10m ago•0 comments

The complexity of vibe coded apps (and why the dismissal is lazy)

https://www.getspectro.app/
1•ddtcx•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Readplace Read-It-Later Chrome Extension – Free the for First 100

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/readplace-—-save-articles/klblengmhlfnmjoagchagfcdbpbo...
1•fagnerbrack•13m ago•0 comments

Picture-in-Picture for any macOS window - Pipiri

https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri/
2•DerCommodore•14m ago•0 comments

Europe Without America

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/05/europe-trump-iran-war-nato/687051/
2•vrganj•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free OSS Contact Form Forwarder

https://www.simplecontactform.org
1•maxibenner•15m ago•0 comments

Negative events in psychotherapy: A narrative review

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12923238/
1•wslh•16m ago•0 comments

A man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/05/the-man-who-blew-up-a-nuclear-power-station-koeberg...
1•Tomte•17m ago•0 comments

Apple keeps challenging its interoperability obligations under the DMA

https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260420-01.en.html
2•Tomte•19m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is writing code by hand still a necessary skill for developers?

2•nerptastic•20m ago•0 comments

We once talked about fake news – now reality itself feels fake

https://www.theguardian.com/media/ng-interactive/2026/may/06/how-to-survive-the-information-crisi...
1•BaudouinVH•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built an app to learn anything I want during my school breaks

https://www.sophros.me
1•macraft•20m ago•0 comments

F-117s Had an Air-to-Air Capability for Anti Soviet Awacs Role (2020)

https://theaviationist.com/2020/06/03/f-117s-had-an-air-to-air-capability-with-secondary-mission-...
1•mpweiher•22m ago•0 comments

GPU-accelerated terminal environment in Zig

https://github.com/semos-labs/attyx
1•begoon•22m ago•0 comments

The Fragmentation Tax

https://abhishekiaex.substack.com/p/the-fragmentation-tax
1•abhishek2580•24m ago•0 comments

Exploring Ruby Algorithms for Fibonacci Numbers

https://www.rorvswild.com/blog/2025/fibonacci-ruby-algorithms
1•thunderbong•25m ago•0 comments

Podman rootless containers and the Copy Fail exploit

https://garrido.io/notes/podman-rootless-containers-copy-fail/
2•birdculture•30m ago•0 comments

Apple Will Pay $250M to Settle Lawsuit over Siri's AI Features

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-will-pay-dollar250-million-to-settle-lawsuit-over-siris-ai-feat...
1•joozio•34m ago•0 comments

Are you addicted to your AI chatbot?

https://science.ubc.ca/news/2026-04/are-you-addicted-your-ai-chatbot-it-might-be-design
3•mikelgan•38m ago•3 comments

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Cloud and Doing the Right Thing

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/designing-data-intensive-applications-book-excerpt
2•onel•40m ago•0 comments

Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10

https://catstret.ch/202605/srss-hipster202510/
2•jandeboevrie•42m ago•0 comments

Composing Claude Code Skills

https://gist.github.com/sriprasanna/ef10fe43ac2de1cd97e638c5c65b430d
1•spk_•45m ago•0 comments

The Android Platform Security Model (2023)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05572
1•surajrmal•46m 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.
jcgrillo•1y ago
A huge steam engine might be the ticket, that'll solve your starting torque problem
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/